Eighty Years Ago This Week

  Paris was liberated by the French 2nd Armoured Division commanded by General Leclerc. The uprising by the resistance had created the risk that the Germans would suppress it by military force as they had done the Warsaw rising. Leclerc disobeyed orders to bypass the city. The German commander Choltitz disobeyed Hitler's orders to fight to the last and surrendered himself and the city. General de Gaulle arrived and installed himself in the War Ministry, which he had left as a junior minister in 1940. He set the seal on his leadership of post-Vichy France with a radio broadcast, a victory parade on the Champs Elysee which culminated in laying a wreath on the tomb of the unknown soldier and attendance at mass in Notre Dame. He behaved as a head of state. His speech made almost no mention of the contribution of other allied armies to freeing France. As the Red Army crossed the frontier into Romania  King Michael overthrew the pro-Axis government and replaced it with one that imme...

    Under the orders of the Communist Henry Rol-Tanguy, who had placed himself at the head  of the resistance in the Paris region a rising was proclaimed against the German occupiers as the Allied armies approached the city. The police and other government services had already gone on strike and this broadened into a general strike. Barricades were erected and sporadic fighting broke out with German forces, although there was no full scale battle. The Swedish consul brokered a short-lived truce under which the Germans did not attack buildings occupied by resisters, who agreed not to attack Germans retreating from the city Marshal Petain and Pierre Laval had (separately) been attempting to position themselves to negotiate with the invading allies. How much of this was known to the Germans is unclear but they had no intention of letting Petain play any role other than their puppet. He was detained in Vichy and - under the threat that the town would be bombed if he refused -...

  The German forces in Normandy were in full retreat following the US success in the west and the Anglo-Canadian success around Caen. Their forces were hemmed into a narrow pocket south of Falaise where they were subjected to constant air attacks, most famously by RAF Typhoons firing rockets. These destroyed around one third of German motor transport and led to many more vehicles being abandoned.   US forces landed in the south of France in Operation Dragoon. At first it had been intended to take place simultaneously with the Normandy landings but shortage of landing craft made this impossible. The British would have preferred an operation aimed at northern Italy as a stepping stone for an attack on the Balkans, but Roosevelt insisted on Dragoon. The Germans had only weak forces to oppose the landings and a simultaneous rising by the French Resistance. The  US completed the conquest of the Marianas when the last significant Japanese resistance on Guam, the largest i...

  Churchill delivered an optimistic survey of the war situation to the House of Commons. He claimed that he did not wish to raise false hopes but "No longer felt bound to deny" that victory would perhaps come soon. He gave a bullish picture of the allies' position in every theatre of the war. He allowed himself a eulogy of the British Churchill tank design, albeit describing it with a double irony as the most "thick-skinned weapon in Europe.......the Churchill can be or defensive or offensive as circumstances may require. "  The Times not merely echoed Churchill's premature view, but lapsed into full hubris. It depicted the British and Canadian breakout from the eastern front of the Normandy bridgehead as a precursor of the offensive launched 26 years before at Arras. Described by General Ludendorff as "the black day of the German army" this opened the Hundred Days campaign which led directly to the defeat of Germany. The Polish Home Army resistan...