Liberation of Paris
Paris was liberated on 25 August 1944 by a French armoured division that the Americans had originally intended to bypass the city altogether. Eisenhower's plan was to encircle Paris and drive east, on the reasoning that street fighting would cost lives and that feeding a city of several million would consume 4,000 tonnes of supplies a day at a moment when the armies were outrunning their fuel. The Resistance forced the question. Railway workers, police and postal staff struck in mid-August, the police occupied their own prefecture on the 19th, and barricades went up across the city under a communist-led FFI leadership that had every reason to rise before the Allies arrived. De Gaulle, who had the same reason in reverse, pressed Eisenhower hard, and Leclerc's 2nd Armoured Division was released with the American 4th Infantry behind it. Hitler had ordered the city held to the last and its bridges and monuments demolished. The garrison commander Dietrich von Choltitz did not carry it out and surrendered on the 25th, and whether that was principle, calculation or the impossibility of doing it has been argued ever since. Leclerc's advance guard reached the Hôtel de Ville the previous night with a company of Spanish republican exiles in the leading half-tracks. De Gaulle walked down the Champs-Élysées the next day. The division had been made deliberately all-white for the entry, at Allied request, with African troops transferred out. Some 1,500 Resistance fighters and civilians died. De Gaulle's insistence that a French division take the city was political and was correct. A France liberated by its own troops with a government already in place could not be administered by the Allies as occupied territory, which had been the plan on paper until that week.
- Year: 1944 CE
- Category: Military
