Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, August 25, 1994 TAG: 9408260011
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-10 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Hearst Newspapers
DATELINE: PARIS LENGTH: Medium
France is marking the anniversary with elaborate ceremonies today and Friday. The commemoration aims at reiterating the myth that French resistance fighters single-handedly drove out the Germans, ending four years of occupation.
The romantic legend of ordinary Parisians confronting German tanks and machine guns and, after six days of fierce street fighting, overwhelming their demoralized foes became an essential ingredient of postwar French politics. It remains so today.
The assertion that Paris ``liberated itself'' - first made by wartime French leader Charles de Gaulle - allowed the French to minimize in their own minds their debt to the United States and Britain for freeing them from the Germans.
Above all, the saga of French heroism helped to play down the humiliating memory that during most of World War II, the puppet regime, installed in Vichy, and much of the population here meekly collaborated with France's Nazi conquerors.
Most historians agree that the lightly armed and outnumbered Paris resistance was on the verge of being crushed by the 20,000 German troops still occupying Paris when the allied supreme commander, Gen. Dwight Eisenhower, came to the rescue.
In a bow to French sensibilities, he ordered the Free French 2nd Armored Division - the only sizable French unit fighting on the western front - to spearhead an assault on the capital. French troops, with American units backing them up, entered Paris on Aug. 25, 1944, and immediately accepted the Germans' surrender.
But as the newly accessible Russian files make clear, a behind-the-scenes political struggle was already under way between de Gaulle and France's then-powerful Communist Party that might have turned liberated Paris into a scene of civil war.
De Gaulle, whose position as the head of a post-liberation government was far from assured, feared a communist-led insurrection in the capital aimed at setting up a regime controlled by Moscow. So he urged Eisenhower to change plans and take the city. Originally, Ike had intended to bypass Paris because it lacked strategic significance.
French historian Jean-Marie Morland, who has studied documents in the Russian wartime archives, says that de Gaulle's alarm was well founded. The communists dominated the largest, best-disciplined and most heavily-armed resistance groups.
by CNB