France

The Maginot Line Will Save Us (Literary Digest, 1938)

The Maginot Line will permit calm French mobilization, experts say, in the event of a crisis. It may be noted, from a study of these forts on a map, that the chief point of concentration is approximately opposite the reoccupied Rhine zone. The Paris newspaper, Le Soir, says that no army can break down the Maginot Line.


Click here to read an article about French confidence in the Maginot Line.

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Vichy Government Flees Paris (The Stars and Stripes, 1944)

Published in the Stars & Stripes issue marked August 19, 1944 (the official date of the Paris liberation) was the attached notice concerning the hasty disappearance of the Nazi-collaborators who lorded over the French during the occupation:

Laval, Darnand and other Vichyites fled from Paris to Metz, according to a United Press report quoting a French resistance leader who reached the British front from Paris. The whereabouts of Marshal Petain were not known.

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The Liberation of Paris (Yank Magazine, 1944)

Two Yank Magazine reporters rode into Paris behind the first tank of the Second French Armored Division, following the story of the city’s liberation in their recently liberated German jeep. Here is a picture of Paris and the reaction of Parisians to their first breath of free air in four years.

As they caught site of the American flag on our car, people crowded around and almost smothered us with kisses…


Click here to read about the fall of Paris…

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Paris After the Liberation (Yank Magazine, 1944)

The capital of France, as of September 1944, is not the same nervous, triumphant paradise city that it was when the Allies first made their entry.

The welcome has died down. When you enter the town, today, whether on foot or in a car, everyone is glad to see you, but there are no more mob scenes of riotous greeting exploding around each jeep. Shows are opening again, and the people are beginning to breathe easier…On the other side, Parisians appear as a very grateful but proud and self-reliant population.

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Paris Cheered When Berlin Fell (Yank Magazine, 1945)

An eyewitness account of all the excitement that was V.E. Day in Paris:

On the Champs Elysees they were singing ‘It’s a Long Wat to Tipperary,’ and it was a long way even the few blocks from Fouquet’s restaurant to the Arc de Triomphe if you tried to walk up the Champs on V-E Day in Paris. From one side of the broad and beautiful avenue to the other, all the way to the obelisk in the Place de la Concorde to the Arc de Triomphe in the Place de l’Etoile, there was hardly any place to breathe and no place at all to move. That was the way it was in the Place l’Opera and the Place de la Republique and all the other famous spots and in a lot of obscure little side streets that nobody but Parisians know.

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The Streets of Paris When Japan Quit (Yank Magazine, 1945)

An eyewitness account of VJ day as it was celebrated in Paris:

The GIs had managed to keep their VJ spirit bottled up through most of the phony rumors, but when the real thing was announced the cork popped with a vengeance. A spontaneous parade, including jeeps and trucks and WACs and GIs and officers and nurses and enlisted me, snaked from the Red Cross Club at Rainbow Corner down to the Place de l’Opera and back…


Click here to read about the fall of Paris…

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Remembering The Occupation (Tricolor Magazine, 1945)

Shortly after the German exit from Paris, French writer and philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre (1905 – 1980) put pen to paper in an effort to help explain what the citizens of that city were feeling throughout the German occupation of Paris:

At first the site of them made us ill; then, little by little, we forgot to notice them, for they had become an institution. What put the finishing touches to their harmlessness was their ignorance of our language. A hundred times I’ve seen Parisians in cafes express themselves freely about politics two steps away from a blank looking German soldier with a lemonade glass in front of him. They seemed more like furniture than like men.


Click here to read about the fall of Paris…

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With the French as Their Army Collapsed (American Legion Weekly, 1940)

Attached is an article by the noted war correspondent Frederick Palmer (1873 – 1958) who observed the French and British as they attempted to hold-off the Nazi juggernaut of 1940. In this article, Palmer referred a great deal to walking this same ground with the American Army during the 1914 – 1918 war just twenty-one years earlier; he found the French to be confident of a decisive victory. The column is complemented by this 1940 article which reported on the wonders of Blitzkrieg and the fall of France.


Click here to read the observations of U.S. Army lieutenant Louis L’Amour concerning 1946 Paris.

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