Brave Genius Read online

  The time is fast approaching when the people of this country will be judged not by their intentions but by their actions, and by the actions to which their words have committed them. That alone is just …

  The Resistance is telling you that we are at a stage where every word counts, where every word is a commitment, especially when those words ratify the execution of our brothers, insult our courage, and deliver the flesh of France herself to the most implacable of enemies …

  The Resistance is telling you that you have no government on French soil and you don’t need one … We don’t need Vichy to settle our score with shame … We need men of courage …

  Frenchmen, the French Resistance is issuing the only appeal you need to hear. The war has become total. But a single struggle remains. The flower of the nation is preparing to sacrifice itself … Anyone who isn’t with us is against us. From this moment on there are only two parties in France: the France that has always been and those who shall soon be annihilated for having attempted to annihilate it.

  The Resistance also needed women of courage, and Camus had a candidate for a new courier for the Combat staff—Maria Casarès. Her experience in the Spanish Civil War and her action during the police control had demonstrated her courage. And the stagecraft of street meetings and pseudonyms was perhaps a natural role for someone with such superb acting talent; those skills were then on display at the Théâtre des Mathurins in the first run of Camus’s play Le Malentendu. Camus set up a meeting to introduce Jacqueline Bernard to Casarès near the theater on the evening of July 11.

  Bernard, however, did not show.

  Earlier that day, she had gone to meet with someone who turned out to be an informant. The Gestapo was waiting for her, and took her to one of their headquarters on the rue de la Pompe. The Germans discovered her address book, in which telephone numbers were written in a very simple code. Paris phone numbers were comprised of three letters, followed by four numbers; in Bernard’s code, one just subtracted three from each of the first two numbers and added three to the last two numbers. One of those numbers was Camus’s office number at Gallimard. Bernard looked for a way to warn the organization that she had been arrested and that everyone was in danger because of the informant. She told the Gestapo that she would deliver a letter to one of her contacts to set up a meeting of the staff. The Gestapo went along and allowed Bernard to go into the building alone, where she whispered a warning to her contact, who in turn spread the word.

  Camus had to leave town quickly. He went to Janine and Pierre Gallimard’s apartment, while Pierre and his cousin Michel bicycled over to Camus’s apartment to retrieve his belongings. Camus and the three Gallimards then fled Paris together on bicycles, pedaling some fifty-five miles to a dilapidated house in Verdelot that was owned by a Gallimard editor. Jacqueline Bernard was eventually deported to Ravensbrück concentration camp.

  HOMECOMING

  Roosevelt had promised de Gaulle that one major French unit would be sent into northern France in the course of the invasion. That was to be the 2nd Armored Division, or “Deuxième Division Blindée,” also known as the DB. After the successful Tunisian campaign in North Africa, Colonel Leclerc’s force was combined in August 1943 with various other French units that had been fighting in Africa to form the DB, which was to be patterned after a typical US Army armored division. In Morocco, it was outfitted with new American tanks and equipment and then sent to England in April and May for further training. After almost two months in Hull, the order came for the DB to move south to Southampton. The next destination for the division after the British seaport would be France.

  Among the more than 16,000 excited troops of the DB was one twenty-four-year-old, battle-tested medical officer, François Jacob. His four-year odyssey had taken him first to England, where he was one of the first few to join de Gaulle’s Free French, and hoped to become an artillery gunner but was assigned to the medical corps on account of his limited training. He then went to French Equatorial Africa—Senegal, the French Congo, Gabon, the French Congo again, Cameroon, and Chad before seeing combat in Leclerc’s campaign through Libya and Tunisia, and then being sent back to England. His battalion reached the marshaling area in the American camp outside Southampton on July 29 and spent the night in tents. Roger Dreyfus was not with the DB; Jacob’s close friend had been killed two years earlier in Chad.

  After more than four years of “exile, anguish, solitude, fighting, despair,” and of hoping for and dreaming of this moment, Jacob could barely believe the time had finally arrived. The next day, July 30, his 2nd Medical Company was one of the last units in the division to board its flat-bottomed landing craft. Piloted by a large, sodden, red-bearded British seaman, the craft made its way into the harbor to join the great number of boats that were crossing back and forth to the Normandy bridgehead. The boats entered the English Channel under the cover of darkness.

  In the middle of the night, Jacob awoke and realized that the boat had stopped. It was bobbing gently in the waves; the pilot of the boat was nowhere to be seen. He hoped that no enemy plane would pick this moment to fly over. Jacob could hardly bear the waiting, knowing that somewhere out in the darkness lay the coast of France. After a couple of hours, the pilot reappeared, scanned the foggy horizon with a telescope, and started up the motors. Jacob soon saw boats appear, and then the dark line of the coast.

  “The soil of France!” he thought. Less than a mile away lay the land of his childhood in the form of the sand dunes of Utah Beach. More waiting as hundreds of ships offloaded. Then, finally, on August 1, Jacob and his unit stepped ashore among the blackened bunkers, wrecked landing craft, destroyed vehicles, and the bustling makeshift port the Americans had built.

  Leclerc tried to capture the emotion of his troops that day in a broadcast that went out over the BBC:

  People of France, the long-awaited hour is here. We are setting foot once again on our country’s soil.

  Four years ago we left France, responding to General de Gaulle’s appeal, abandoning our families, determined not to lay down our arms before victory.

  We return now at the side of our Allies and at the head of French troops after having maintained our struggle, despite Vichy’s surrender.

  It is difficult to express the emotions of our officers, noncommissioned officers, and soldiers at such a moment. These men come from everywhere. Some joined de Gaulle at the start, they fought in Chad, Libya, Tunisia, they saved our national honor. Others of us rallied as soon as the link with North Africa allowed. Still others have joined us recently from other divisions that have since disappeared.

  We want to first fight the Boche, the cursed enemy. This time we have the arms and we are going to use them. Next, we want to find the good French people who for years have been leading the battle within the country that we have been leading outside of it.

  A salute to those who have already taken up arms. Yes, we constitute the same army.

  Finally, we want to see French grandeur restored tomorrow and we grasp the energy and patriotism that this task will require.

  All of the country ought to be devoted to that cause. France standing upright, help us, help our Allies in order to shorten this battle for her liberation, on the soil of our Homeland.

  It would take a few days to organize and re-form the division. In the meantime, as his unit moved into Normandy, Jacob was thrilled to see the familiar sights of the Norman farms and hedgerows, to smell the summer hay, and to be handed a glass of fresh cider. All along the route, now marked by signs in English that replaced the German placards, he saw the remnants of battle—ruined and smoldering buildings, incinerated tanks and trucks with corpses still lying inside, and columns of German prisoners. As the DB passed through villages, it often took a while for the onlookers to realize their identity and to notice the Cross of Lorraine on their vehicles, to which they reacted with jubilation. It was an intoxicating journey, a mixture of pure joy and the still-seething desire to fight, sprinkled with the occasi
onal rumor of snipers and the ever-present danger of land mines.

  Despite the widespread destruction, the Allies had gained significantly less ground than they had planned or hoped over the first eight weeks after the invasion. Caen was not taken until July 9 by British and Canadian forces, a month behind schedule, and those armies remained bottled up in the Cotentin Peninsula by stubborn German defenses. American forces managed to take Cherbourg by June 26 but were bogged down in the bocage (thicket) until the last days of July, when they broke out to the southwest through Avranches in Operation Cobra, opening the door to Brittany and the deeper interior of France.

  Patton’s 3rd Army, which did not become officially operational until August 1 and to which the DB was attached, was tasked with exploiting that breakout. Leclerc’s principal mission was to lead the first troops into Paris, but Patton told him that he thought the Germans might soon surrender, and that if he wanted to get into the fight, he might want to start right away, instead of waiting to liberate Paris. Leclerc seized the offer, and Patton assigned the DB to XV Corps, one of his four battle formations, which was commanded by Gen. Wade Haislip. Elements of the DB caught up to Haislip’s units on August 6, south of Avranches. Leclerc established his command post on the seventh at Sainte-James.

  ON AUGUST 8, the order came to head east in the direction of Le Mans as part of a new offensive to try to encircle the Germans. Days earlier, Hitler had ordered a large counterattack toward Avranches in order to sever the Allied line into Brittany, but the attack, launched on August 7, was doomed by insufficient forces. Instead, the German offensive merely left major divisions of the German 7th Army stalled deep in Allied territory. General Bradley, Patton’s immediate superior, saw a unique chance to encircle the Germans; he told a visitor that he had “an opportunity that comes to a commander not more than once in a century. We’re about to destroy an entire hostile army and go all the way from here to the German border.” Bradley’s idea was to enclose the Germans in a giant pincer action with Patton’s and Haislip’s units in the south forming the lower jaw and Canadian forces in the north forming the upper jaw.

  On the night of the eighth, Jacob’s 2nd Medical Company prepared to move out with other units from their encampment south of Avranches. The camouflage was removed from the equipment, and the vehicles were organized into a column. Before they could get under way, however, at around two o’clock in the morning, Jacob heard the characteristic drone of German bombers. The motors grew louder and then explosions erupted in a nearby field. Jacob and his comrades dove out of their truck for a roadside ditch. Bombs whistled down from the sky, more explosions wracked the area around the column, and a car burst into flames. Jacob remained pressed to the ground until the planes had passed.

  He then heard the cries of the wounded. There were many men lying on the ground. Jacob went over to tend to one soldier lying near a car. It was Lt. Lucien Benillouz, who had joined the Free French the year before in Tunisia. He and Jacob had become good friends in England after they discovered that they had been courting the same woman. Jacob saw a bloodstain spreading from Benillouz’s side, so he tore open his jacket and shirt and applied a bandage. He and another medic tried to lift his friend onto a stretcher, but Benillouz screamed out in pain.

  Just then, Jacob heard the sound of German Stukas approaching again. As the drone grew louder, Benillouz tried to get up but could not. Jacob looked around for cover; there was a ditch less than thirty feet away, but the lieutenant could not be moved. Benillouz grabbed Jacob’s hand and said, “Don’t leave me.”

  Jacob looked once more at the ditch, then snuggled up against Benillouz as the bombs came whistling down again. He held still, trying to shelter his friend while at the same time making himself as small as possible. As the earth shook and dirt flew in all directions, Jacob felt a violent jolt along his right side. He held still another moment, not wanting to know what had just happened. More than fifty shell fragments had pierced his body, bursting his elbow and breaking his thigh. He saw blood coming from his elbow and tried to raise his arm; it hung limp. A massive wave of pain washed over him, and he passed out.

  Jacob, Benillouz, and several other seriously wounded members of the unit were rushed by ambulance to the 104th Evacuation Hospital south of Pontaubault. As Jacob drifted in and out of consciousness, Lieutenant Benillouz passed away.

  When Jacob woke up, he found himself encased in two casts, one around his chest and right arm, another around his right leg and pelvis. Only one week after the landing in Normandy and two hundred miles short of Paris, Jacob’s war was over.

  CHAPTER 16

  LES JOURS DE GLOIRE

  A people that wants to live does not wait for its freedom to be delivered to it.

  —ALBERT CAMUS, Combat, August 23, 1944

  IN ORDER TO ENCIRCLE THE GERMANS, SPEED WAS OF THE ESSENCE. The Allies had to close the trap before too many German units could escape to the east. However, moving large formations quickly caused them to become spread out, and their long lines of defense to become thin and vulnerable. As the Allies took Alençon and moved toward Argentan, Haislip and Bradley worried that the Germans still had many divisions in the area and were preparing a counterpunch against the extended Allied lines. Bradley ordered Haislip and Patton, who had freed units to protect Haislip’s left flank, to halt short of Argentan and to consolidate their positions on August 13.

  Patton was furious. There remained only a twenty-five-mile gap between the two Allied pincers, between his positions south of Argentan and the Canadians north of Falaise. Patton urged Bradley to let him surge ahead and close that gap. Bradley refused. Patton was sure that was a huge mistake, for as he noted proudly in his diary that day, his 3rd Army had “advanced farther and faster than any Army in the history of war.”

  Leclerc, too, was getting impatient. Since well before his arrival in France, Paris was constantly on his mind. Halted along with the others of Haislip’s divisions, he asked Haislip on August 14 when his forces would be released for the liberation mission. Haislip brushed him off.

  In the meantime, the irrepressible Patton had come up with an alternate plan. Instead of closing the circle at Falaise, he proposed to Bradley that he take a couple of divisions from Argentan and race east toward the Seine to cut off more retreating Germans—a “long encirclement.” Bradley gave his OK to Patton’s audacious plan. Leclerc, however, objected, as the DB was not one of the divisions to be sent east. On the fifteenth, he went to see Patton in person. He told Patton that if he was not allowed to advance on Paris, he would resign. Patton, using his best French, told Leclerc that he “would not have [his] division commanders tell [him] where they would fight.”

  Leclerc appealed to Bradley as well, but got nowhere. He was stuck at Argentan. The “Falaise Gap” would not be closed for another week.

  The liberation of Paris was much more than a diplomatic problem. The city of more than three million posed potentially enormous difficulties that could bog down the Allied armies as they raced toward Germany. There was the risk of becoming entangled in house-to-house fighting. There were the logistical challenges of supplying fuel, food, and medical supplies to the population, when the armies’ own supply lines were already stretched very thin. And there was also the possibility of having to level the city to extricate the Germans. Eisenhower, who prided himself on putting military considerations above politics, had decided that the Allies would go around Paris and deal with the capital once the Germans had been weakened.

  People in Paris, however, had other ideas.

  “CHACUN SON BOCHE”

  On Saturday, August 19, Geneviève Noufflard was riding her bicycle along the boulevard de la Tour Maubourg near Les Invalides, on her way back from a meeting with her liaison agent. The day was sure to be another in a string of hot, clear summer days in Paris. The atmosphere within the capital, however, had changed almost overnight. There were no police to be seen anywhere. The day before, the entire Parisian police force had gone on strike.
Posters had appeared on walls in the name of de Gaulle calling for the mobilization of all eligible Parisians, men and women, to join the FFI or the Milice Patriotique (patriotic militia); from unions calling for a general strike; and from Henri Rol-Tanguy, the commander of the FFI for the greater Paris region, urging citizens not only to join the FFI, but to:

  Gather yourselves by household, by neighborhood, knock out the Boches so as to snatch their weapons, liberate Greater Paris, the cradle of France.

  Avenge your martyred sons and brothers

  Avenge the heroes who have fallen for the independence and liberty of the Country.

  Hasten, by your action, the end of the war.

  Have as a watchword: “CHACUN SON BOCHE” [to each his own German]

  No quarter to the murderers, onward so that

  VIVE LA FRANCE!

  The city had no or little electricity, no gas, no Métro, and no buses, and it was still full of Germans. The resistants were not content to wait for the Allies; they were taking matters into their own hands. That morning, the striking police had taken over the Prefecture of Police Building on the Île de la Cité opposite Notre-Dame and unfurled the French tricolor from its mast—the first time that the flag had been flown over the capital in four years. The bold seizure surprised not only the Germans but Rol-Tanguy as well.

  The insurrection had started.

  A bicyclist going the other way called out to Noufflard as he passed her, “That way is dangerous,” but it was too late. She had turned onto the avenue de Tourville, only a short distance from her home, but had to stop as a column of German trucks sped by. They were loaded with armed soldiers, their guns pointed at the civilians with their fingers on the triggers. They squeezed off several rounds in the air to clear pedestrians from their path. Just as Noufflard decided that the place was too dangerous, one truck ran over a woman pushing her bicycle. The driver sped on without stopping. As passersby stopped to help, another truck with a machine gun mounted over the cab came to a screeching halt in front of the helpless crowd. Noufflard watched as the machine-gunner, with an extremely tense and spiteful expression on his face, pointed his weapon at the unconscious woman. An officer quickly intervened before the gunner fired, and the woman was carried away.