Is Paris Burning?

Is Paris Burning? by Larry Collins, 1929-2005 & Dominique Lapierre, 1931– Published: 1965 Simon & Schuster J J J J J I I I I I Table of Contents ▓ PART I … The Menace. One … thru … Twenty-Six ▓ PART II … The Struggle. One … thru … Forty-Six ▓ PART III … The Deliverance. One … thru … Nineteen Sources Table of Comparative Military Ranks Acknowledgements J J J J J I I I I I Is Paris Burning? —Adolf Hitler August 25, 1944 Geh. Kommandosache Chefsache Nur durch Offizier KR Blitz O.B. West Ia Okdo d. H. Gr. B. Ia A.O.K. 1 Pz. A.O.K. 5 A.O.K. 15 The defense of the Paris bridgehead is of capital importance from both a military and political standpoint. The loss of the city would lead to the loss of the entire coastal plain north of the Seine and would deprive us of our rocket- launching sites for the long-distance war against England. In all history, the loss of Paris has inevitably brought with it the loss of all France. The Führer therefore categorically reaffirms his order: Paris must at all costs be defended by locking the city inside a strong position. He reminds the Commander in Chief of the West that reinforcements have been designated for this purpose. In the city itself, the most energetic tactics, such as the razing of entire city blocks, the public execution of ringleaders, the forced evacuation of any quarter of the city which appears menacing, must be used to smash the first signs of an uprising; this is the only way to prevent such movements from spreading. The destruction of the city's Seine bridges will be prepared. Paris must not fall into the hands of the enemy, or, if it does, he must find there nothing but a field of ruins. O.K.W./W.F.St./Op. (H) Nr. 772989/44 23.8.44 11.00 Uhr PART I The Menace. One He was never late. Each evening when the German arrived with his old Mauser, his frayed leather binocular case and his dinner pail, the inhabitants of the village of May-en-Multien knew it was six o'clock. As he walked across the cobbled town square, the first notes of the evening Angelus invariably rang out from the Romanesque belfry of the little twelfth-century church of Notre-Dame-de- l'Assomption looking down on May-en-Multien's gray slate roofs from its perch on a ridge over the River Ourcq, 37 miles northeast of Paris. The German, a graying Luftwaffe sergeant, always marched straight toward that peaceful sound. At the door of the church, he tugged off his cloth cap and walked inside. With a slow step, he climbed up the narrow, circular staircase to the top of the belfry. There at its summit were a table, a gas burner, and a chair requisitioned from the church below. Carefully laid out on the table were a German General Staff map, a notebook, a calendar, and a gray-green field telephone. The belfry of Notre-Dame-de-l'Assomption was a Luftwaffe observation post. Here, with his binoculars, the German could survey the whole region. From the spires of the cathedral of Meaux to the south, to the medieval stone walls of the Château de la Ferté-Milon in the north, his gaze swept over 13 miles past a graceful arc of the Marne River, the terra-cotta walls of the town of Lizy-sur-Ourcq and back, finally, to the poplar-studded banks of the Ourcq dropping away below his eyes. In a few hours, night would fall over that peaceful scene spread out under the sergeant's binoculars. Scanning the horizon, peering into the shadows around him, he would then begin another night's vigil, his fifty-eighth since the invasion. In the first light of dawn, he would pick up his field telephone and report to Luftwaffe regional headquarters in Soissons. Since the last full moon, twelve days earlier, the sergeant's reports had invariably been the same: "Nothing to report for my sector." The German knew the Allies always made their parachute drops to the French Resistance in the light of a full moon. The moon would not be full again, the calendar on his table showed him, for sixteen more nights, not until the evening of August 18. Nothing, the German was sure, would happen that night in this tiny pocket of occupied France entrusted to his care. That night of August 2, 1944, the sergeant felt certain that he could doze in safety on the shaky table before him. The German was wrong. While he slept, two miles away in a wet field of shocked wheat, two men and a woman staked themselves out into the triangular pattern that marked a Resistance drop zone. Each clutched a flashlight wrapped in a tin sleeve. Pointed overhead, these shrouded flashlights could send out a thin pillar of light visible only from above. The trio waited. Shortly after midnight they heard the sound they were waiting for. It was the low drone of the throttled-down motors of a Halifax bomber sweeping softly over the valley of the Ourcq. They switched on their lights. Staring down into the blacked-out river valley, the pilot of the plane above sighted their blinking triangle. He pressed a button on the panel before him. In the fuselage of his bomber a glowing light switched from red to green. As it did, a man grasped the sides of the plane's open hatch and flung himself into the night. As he drifted silently home to French soil, young medical student Alain Perpezat could feel at his waist the tug of a money belt containing five million francs. But it was not to deliver that impressive sum that he had plummeted into this dark August night. Fitted into the sole of Alain Perpezat's left shoe was a gossamer-thin strip of silk. It contained eighteen blocks of coded figures. So important and so urgent did his superiors in London consider the message stamped on it that, against all their rules, they had sent Alain Perpezat plunging into this moonless night to deliver it. Perpezat did not know what was in the message he carried. All he knew was that he was to deliver it as quickly as possible to the head of the British Intelligence Service in France, whose code name was "Jade Amicol." His headquarters were in Paris. It was seven o'clock the next morning when Perpezat shook off the last slivers of hay from the haystack in which he had hidden for the night. To get to Paris, the young medical student chose the quickest means open to him. He decided to hitchhike. The first truck that rolled past him on France's Route 3 stopped. It belonged to the Luftwaffe. Four helmeted German soldiers hanging to the wooden slats of its open van stared down at him. Perpezat watched the door of the truck open. The driver beckoned to him. It seemed to Perpezat at that instant that his bulky money belt weighed a hundred pounds. The German studied him. "Nach Paris?" he said. Perpezat nodded and numbly slid onto the warm seat beside him. Then the German shifted gears, and, from the cab of the Luftwaffe truck, the young agent with his message for the head of British intelligence for France watched the road to Paris begin to slide past. Kneeling in the cool shadows of their chapel, the nine sisters of the order of the Passion of our Blessed Lord were reciting their third rosary of the day when the three long and one short rings jabbed through the stillness of their convent. Immediately two of them got up, blessed themselves, and left. To Sister Jean, the mother superior, and Sister Jean-Marie Vianney, her assistant, three long and one short rings of the old doorbell of their convent at 127 rue de la Santé meant "an important visit." For four years the Gestapo had searched desperately for a man this convent concealed. There, behind the sitting room of this scabrous old building built at the juncture of a vacant lot and the high stone walls of the insane asylum of Sainte- Anne, was the headquarters of "Jade Amicol," the head of British intelligence for occupied France. Protected by these old stones and the tranquil courage of a handful of nuns, his headquarters had survived all the Gestapo's relentless hunts. (1-4) Sister Jean opened the judas window cut into the convent's heavy oak door, and saw outside the face of a young man. "My name is Alain," he said. "I have a message for the colonel." Sister Jean unbolted the door and stepped out onto the doorstep herself to make sure the young man was alone and that he had not been followed. Then she beckoned him inside. In the sitting room, under an austere portrait of the unknown Lazarite priest who had founded the order of the Passion of our Blessed Lord, Alain Perpezat took off his left shoe. With a knife Sister Jean handed him, Perpezat pried apart its sole and slipped out the scrap of silk for which he had just risked his life. He handed it to the balding giant with blue eyes sitting in the armchair next to him. Colonel Claude Ollivier—"Jade Amicol"—glanced at the black letters stamped on it, and asked Sister Jean to bring him the grid with which he decoded his messages. It was printed on a razor-thin handkerchief made of a digestible fabric that would dissolve on his tongue in seconds if he had to swallow it.

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