Is Paris Burning? by Collins Larry & Lapierre Dominique

Author:Collins, Larry & Lapierre, Dominique [Collins, Larry & Lapierre, Dominique]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Non Fiction, History, World War II, Paris
Publisher: Renaissance Literary & Talent in collaboration with the Author
Published: 2013-01-30T08:00:00+00:00

21

For Paris, there was no twenty-four-hour respite. Then fighting resumed after dawn in growing intensity all across the city. Shortly after eight, four tanks of the ingenious SS Standartenführer appeared again outside the Police Commissariat of Raymond Sarran, the law student who, the day before, had told the colonel, "You no longer give orders here." This time the Standartenführer's tankers had left behind their human shields. In two hours of furious combat they drove Sarran and his men from the building. Before scampering across the neighborhood rooftops, Sarran's men exacted a price. One of them, at the cost of his life, bolted out to a German tank and smashed a Molotov cocktail against its ventilator, leaving it a flaming wreck.

In the Seventeenth Arrondissement where the lone and silent tank of the Resistance had made its appearance the day before, the Germans shelled apart a group of apartment houses, an apparent reply to their mute rival. On the Left Bank, the FFI were now the masters of the crooked little alleyways from the Seine to the boulevard Saint-Germain. No Germans dared to move into those twisting streets too narrow for a tank. At the "Carrefour de la Mort," at the intersection of the boulevards Saint-Germain and Saint-Michel, excited French student gunners piled up a line of flaming German trucks. From one they took a dozen prisoners and a heavy machine gun which they quickly mounted on their neatly terraced barricade. At the Gare de Lyon, a truckload of German soldiers, caught in an ambush, retreated to a café. The dozen patrons inside started to laugh at their plight. The Germans shot them all. The courtyard of the Prefecture of Police was a junk pile of captured German vehicles, the white letters "FFI" painted over their blistered surfaces.

The small group of men around Alexandre Parodi had no time to savor the dramatic success of Operation Prise du Pouvoir the day before. Just as they had planned, they had the afternoon before held a full-fledged meeting of the government of Charles de Gaulle in the office of the Prime Minister. Yvon Morandat's fiancée Claire had faithfully taken the minutes of the extraordinary session. Then, sober and dignified as any press secretary of the Third Republic announcing a new ministerial crisis, she read those notes to the reporters of Paris's newspapers gathered outside. Now, while their foes remained concentrated on the problem of waging their insurrection, Parodi's men began to move into the key government ministries still left unoccupied. Yvon Morandat, who had the day before occupied the Prime Minister's residence, was demoted. This time he was assigned a simple ministry, the Ministry of the Interior.

At the Hôtel de Ville, the huge Renaissance city hall of Paris that had been occupied forty-eight hours earlier, Parodi's rivals had begun to create a citadel of their own, a counterweight to the Gaullist bastion that was the Prefecture of Police. It, too, was taken under attack by Choltitz's men. While André Tollet, the man who had forced

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.