The Bitter Road to Freedom: The Human Cost of Allied Victory in World War II Europe (7 page)

the friendly ones were off-putting because of their filth: Blunt was stunned to find a family of Norman farmers dwelling in a home with a dirt floor, no plumbing, no electricity, and a pit in the ground for a toilet. “I had never been in such a barren home and I felt a slight twinge of sympathy,” he wrote later.
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Civilians were also distanced from liberating soldiers by their vulner- ability. From June 6 onwards, at least 100,000 Calva- dosiens fled their homes and flowed along the roads and dirt tracks of the countryside, seeking safety from the fighting. To the liberating soldiers, this only dimin- ished them: they looked “dispirited” and “frightful.” Wrote Sergeant Greenwood of these refugees, “some had prams containing all their worldly goods: others had wheelbarrows. Two very old ladies were being wheeled in these things. Three tiny babies and a few children included.…Some of them had been trekking for three weeks.”
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Soldiers felt pity but also disgust for this wretched refuse of war.

Soldiers and civilians, in short, had little use for one another, except as sources of exchange: soldiers con- stantly sought to barter soap, cigarettes, or tinned bul- ly beef for eggs, butter, poultry, potatoes, or fresh meat. But bartering was certainly not the only way to secure desirable French luxuries. The theft and looting of Nor- man households and farmsteads by liberating soldiers began on June 6 and never stopped during the entire summer. David Kenyon Webster, who parachuted into Normandy on D-Day with the U.S. 101st Airborne Divi- sion, recalled stealing a fifth of Hennessy cognac from

a farmhouse within hours of landing.
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In Colombières, a town just a few miles from the landing beaches that was liberated on D-Day, one woman recalled that her house was thoroughly looted by Canadians. “It was an onslaught throughout the village,” she recalled. “ With wheelbarrows and trucks, the men stole, pillaged, sacked everything, and as the Germans had aban- doned everything there were large stocks. There were disputes about who got what. They snatched clothing, boots, provisions, even money from our strong box. My father was unable to stop them. The furniture disap- peared; they even stole my sewing machine.” This went on for a number of days, and had a predictable effect: the enthusiasm [for the liberators] is diminishing, the soldiers are looting, breaking everything and going into houses everywhere on the pretext of looking for Germans. A soldier who came into our rooms while we were eating searched the rooms, and my gold watch was stolen.

The locks on the cupboards were all broken, the doors busted open, the closets emptied and underclothes stolen, all the contents thrown on the floor, the towels stolen. And all the time, they drink our Calvados and Champagne, which they haven’t tasted since the start of the war.
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On August 8, to the south of Caen, Major A. J. Forrest saw the 7th Battalion of the Green Howards infantry regiment looting and ransacking a farmhouse, sawing up furniture for firewood and feasting on every living creature in the place, from hens to rabbits, ducks and even pigeons. “A disgraceful business,” he thought. “ Three hundred Germans, apparently, had lived here- abouts and respected the owner’s property, livestock and goods. How would he, on his return, react to this outrage except to curse his liberators?”
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In fact, this sort of behavior continued right on through 1945, in Belgium, Holland, and Germany; looting and theft were constant features of the liberated landscape.

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Within days of the massacre in the Falaise pocket, U.S. and British divisions were moving rapidly east, across the Seine river and toward Paris; on August 25, they, along with the French 2nd Armored Division under the command of the dazzling lieutenant general Philippe Leclerc, entered Paris. In a mere two weeks more they would be on the Belgian border. At this point in the grand narrative of the Liberation of Europe, historical works normally shift their focus and follow the Allied armies into the grateful, delirious capital city and down the Champs-Elysées. And why not? The arrival in Paris signaled a new phase of the war: Paris, symbol of civili- zation and romance, had been freed unharmed, and its people gave the weary American, British, and French soldiers an unforgettable welcome. The same warmth met the liberators across northern France right up to the Belgian border, where the fighting had been light or had passed by altogether, and where the infantry was at last riding in trucks, moving forty miles a day and more. Here, at last, liberation began to look and feel the way it was always supposed to be: flowers, girls, crowds, cheers. “ The battalion stopped at the village of La Fertie [La Ferté, to the east of Paris],” recalled A. G. Herbert. “ We now felt at last that we had left Normandy and were meeting the real French people for the first time. Unlike the people of Normandy, these folk made us feel welcome, and it seemed worth fighting for their

freedom.” Major G. Ritchie reveled in the change from Normandy: “I have never before been treated as these French peasants are treating us, and it is a rather amaz- ing sensation and rather brings a lump to one’s throat. Everyone without exception waves to you, flowers are thrown into the vehicles, and I remember particularly the sight of one oldish man standing at his gate with his family waving his arms and shouting ‘merci! merci!’ At every little cottage I have stayed, when the inhabit- ants have been there, they have produced everything of the best, wine, cider, etc., and given it away liberally to the troops. This appears to be the true spirit of France.” Major Edward Elliot vividly recalled the rapturous wel- come:

Wherever we stopped crowds ran forward to shake our hands and clamor for autographs. Fruit and flowers were thrown into jeeps and carriers as we drove past dense and enthusiastic people; in return we threw out cigarettes and sweets onto the pavements where they were immediately seized upon by an arguing swarm of townsfolk. The windows and shops were bedecked with colors and flags and patriotic slogans hung across the main street of every town and hamlet…. This was Victory indeed. Now for the first time we understood why the British Western Expeditionary Force had been renamed the British Army of Liberation! At first, it

had sounded a little cynical to us, toiling and fighting amongst the frigid Normans who only half seemed to appreciate our presence among them. Now we under- stood full; it was as if a veil draping the inner soul of France and hiding her true visage had suddenly been lifted to reveal a shining and cheerful countenance; a menace which had hung over her life for four long wea- ry years was gone—gone they hoped for ever.
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N

ORMANDY ’S COUNTENANCE, HOWEVER,

could not have been described as cheerful or shining during and after the summer of 1944.

An initial assessment of Caen found that, in this city that had once housed 60,000 people, there was habita- tion left for a mere 8,000 and that returning refugees would have to be evacuated again. Meanwhile, the area between Tilly, Falaise, Argentan, and Vire had only one- fifth of its previous houses left standing. As one somber report by a British official put it on August 30, “there will be no greater war problem in the whole of France than exists in Calvados at the moment.”
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About 125,000 people in this department alone were designated sin- istrés, or war victims; of those, 76,000 had lost every- thing they owned, including their homes. By the end of August, over one thousand civilians had been hurt or killed by stepping on buried mines. Allied military au- thorities set up temporary refugee camps to try to limit

civilian movement in the wartorn areas, but refugees avoided them, only desiring to be allowed to return to their towns and assess the scale of the damage. They did so “regardless of whether their homes still existed, of the danger of booby traps, and of the availability of food.”

Normandy, a region of ancient traditions and habits, had not changed much in the previous century; yet in the summer of 1944, two million foreign soldiers laid waste to its once-placid precincts. Caen and Lisieux and Vire and Falaise were permanently altered; the fa- miliar markings of an ancient countryside—the church spires, the schoolhouses and civic halls, the roads, the trees, the parks and the extensive farmland—all had been ground into dust, and were literally unrecogniz- able. One survey of the damage to the cultural heritage of Lower Normandy connected the loss of these famil- iar buildings with a loss of communal orientation, as if some sort of cultural compass had been knocked off course: “ The church spires which sprang from the midst of our gray houses and rose straight up to the heavens, like prayers rising from the dried lips of our ancient ancestors, have disappeared by the dozens.” A “return to normal” in such circumstances was quite ob- viously impossible, for large parts of Normandy could never be recovered.
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The task that French and American authorities set themselves was to restore order as quickly as possible. The Anglo-American military authorities had made the restoration of political order a principal aim of the lib- eration, and it had occupied a good deal of the preinva- sion planning. An entire military echelon was created and labeled G-5, or Civil Affairs; within each division, Civil Affairs officers were tasked with the work of im- posing order: that is, finding reliable local political authorities; identifying police forces and empowering them to keep order; enrolling men into labor brigades to clear roads and port facilities; and militarizing all local transportation, fuel, food, and medical supplies. Even the official history of the British Civil Affairs effort noted that this treatment seemed quite similar to Ger- man behavior during the occupation.
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The French did not warm immediately to such robust foreign political intrusion, even at this time of desper- ate need. Planning for Civil Affairs in France was ham- pered by the extreme touchiness of the Free French leader, General Charles de Gaulle. In fact, a formal agreement between de Gaulle’s provisional govern- ment and General Eisenhower’s Supreme Headquar- ters was not signed until late August 1944—almost three months after the invasion of France. This docu- ment settled the large political questions of sovereignty

and control of liberated territory: the French agreed to do nothing to inhibit the powers of the Supreme Com- mander to prosecute the war on French soil, while the Allied armies agreed to restore French political control over liberated territory promptly and to cede political control to French authorities.
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If de Gaulle’s Free French had worried that the Anglo- American military forces sought to gain a permanent political control in France, they were soon put at ease by the practical work that Civil Affairs officers under- took. British units set up command posts in Ouistre- ham and in Bayeux with little difficulty, and began to grapple with the basic problems of food distribution, rationing, and the search for fuel to get water pumps going again. The Civil Affairs detachments in Bayeux tried to sort out refugees, arranged for hospitals to ac- cept civilian casualties, and directed emergency medi- cal supplies from the beachheads to the clinics where they were needed. Within three weeks of the landings, the Civil Affairs units had arranged for the publication of the Renaissance du Bessin—France’s first postlib- eration newspaper, written by Allied publicity staff. American units of Civil Affairs, some of whom dropped into Normandy with the 82nd Airborne, followed simi- lar procedures in Sainte-Mère-Eglise and other towns on the Cotentin peninsula. Not the least urgent of their