Americans in Paris: Life and Death under Nazi Occupation 1940–44. Charles Glass
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that she was too young. Undeterred, Polly applied to the American-Scandinavian Field Hospital and was accepted for medical work in Finland. ‘About that time,’ she wrote, ‘stories of Finland’s gallant resistance were flooding New York.’ Stalin’s Red Army, allied with Hitler, was invading its neutral neighbour, and the Finns fought hard to defend their independence. ‘Finno-hysteria broke out in New York, like a violent rash on a baby’s face … “My deah! you simply MUST come to my little ‘do’ for the Finns”.’ The American-Scandinavian Field Hospital’s trustees, no doubt recognizing determination when they met it, made her their Assistant Secretary. Polly set sail for Norway in March 1940, one of ‘twenty-eight wild Americans’ including Hubert Fauntleroy Julian, ‘the Black Eagle of Harlem, a negro who claimed he was going to teach the Finns how to fly’. When her ship docked in Norway, the Germans invaded the country – the first stage of an operation leading to the Nazi conquest of Denmark, Holland, Luxembourg, Belgium and France. She escaped to Sweden, Russia and Switzerland. By the time she caught a train over the border to France, it was a German-occupied country.
‘At each station,’ Polly wrote, ‘a huge pile of twisted and rusting metal was dumped beside the tracks. Old bedsteads, pipes, etc. – all intended to make guns for the defence of France.’ On one of the many buses she took through the ravaged countryside after her train broke down, she overheard a disheartened French soldier moan, ‘Hell, we’ll be just as well off under German rule as under our own.’ That was too much for Polly Peabody.
I turned on him like a she-wolf. The discussion grew louder and louder, and pretty soon everyone had joined in on my side. Nobody suspected that I wasn’t French until I made my fatal mistake:
‘I, an American, am more patriotically inclined towards your country than you are …’ I shrieked, in a fit of impatience. There was a silence followed by an explosion. This time the positions were reversed. Everyone attacked me.
‘An American! … if you are patriotic about France as all that, then why didn’t you send us some guns instead of a lot of cotton-wool and pills?’
The bus dropped her in Clermont Ferrand, the industrial centre of the French midlands. The government had left only hours before. ‘“Where is everybody?” I asked, like the ostrich peering over the rumps of other ostriches whose heads were in the sand. But I couldn’t find out where the Government had gone to, although everybody seemed pretty sure they had gone somewhere.’ In the government’s wake, the Germans arrived.
The people were greatly impressed with the behaviour of the Nazi soldiers. They even bordered on enthusiasm. They had visualized the enemy as monsters who raped little girls and chopped off the ears of little boys and hung them on their belts. They were gratefully surprised when this did not happen; but they did not stop to think that had the enemy been ordered to turn all the inhabitants of
France into sausage meat, they would have carried out their orders with just as much efficiency.
Polly Peabody was unaware that German soldiers who committed rape or pillage were subject to court martial and execution, a precaution the Wehrmacht had not taken in Poland. The Franco-German Armistice, signed at Compiègne on 22 June, carved France into four zones: the northern coast around Calais, administered from Belgium as a ‘forbidden’ area; Alsace and Lorraine, incorporated as provinces of the German Reich from which citizens of French origin were expelled; the bulk of France around Paris and down to Bordeaux, officially occupied territory; and the south, free of direct occupation by German troops. Because Clermont Ferrand fell south of the main line of demarcation between the ‘Occupied’ and ‘Free’ zones, the Germans withdrew from the city. Polly then noticed that ‘the Mayor had not waited until the last Nazi tank was out of sight before he ordered the French flag to be hoisted in the public square. Around it the townspeople quickly gathered and sang the Marseillaise with unrestrained emotion.’
Following the new Pétain government to Vichy, Polly chanced upon a French officer in the lobby of the Hôtel des Ambassadeurs. He had been military attaché in Norway, where they had met two months before. He offered to help her find lodgings, and he introduced her to the dapper Senator Gaston Henry-Haye. Senator Henry-Haye and the officer took Polly out to see ‘all the Vichy celebrities’ at the fashionable Restaurant Coq d’Or. ‘Stepping into the street, whom should I see emerging from a long black limousine, but Ambassador Bullitt? He looked so dashing and neat, just like the hero in the million-dollar picture, compared with all those who ogled him.’ Polly settled into ‘a questionable, small hotel’, which charged her twenty francs a night for a room shared with three other people. She remembered, ‘During the first few days in Vichy, I witnessed some of the saddest and most amazing pages of French history.’
Aldebert and Clara de Chambrun, after three weeks of privation at the Polignacs’ austere castle near Le Puy, were back in Vichy for their usual summer vacation. In their absence, the town had transformed itself from a bourgeois resort for rich hypochondriacs into the temporary capital of France. Vichy’s resident population of 50,000, while used to providing rooms for 40,000 summer visitors, was hosting almost 100,000 refugees, civil servants, soldiers, diplomats, legislators and journalists. All of them were clamouring for places to sleep, wash and eat. Polly Peabody observed ‘a French duchess – who for eight nights slept sitting bolt upright in an armchair, because she could not find a room’. Aldebert and Clara had, thanks to a longstanding arrangement with the Hôtel du Parc, their own room. But government officials found themselves running ministries from hotel bathrooms, receiving ambassadors in garrets and sleeping in corridors.
The American Embassy made its ambassadorial residence in a luxurious summer house, Villa Les Adrets at 56 rue Thermal, that it leased from Florence Jay Gould and her husband, Frank. The chancellery was in a doctor’s house, the Villa Ica, nearby. Most of the diplomats moved into the fortuitously named Hôtel des Ambassadeurs. Clara’s already low opinion of American diplomacy sank further because of what she saw as Counsellor Robert Murphy and his staff’s hostility to Maréchal Pétain and Pierre Laval. She wrote, ‘They made up their minds first on what tack they had best embark, avoided any information which might be calculated to bring new light on the subject in hand, and were particularly careful not to get mixed up with other than leftist politicians with whom their sympathies obviously lay.’
Ambassador Bullitt had left Paris on 30 June with Carmel Offie, his longtime secretary who had served with him in Moscow, as well as Commander Roscoe Hillenkoetter and Robert Murphy. Riding in their chauffeured convoy were Bullitt’s Chantilly neighbours, the Gilroys. Frances Gilroy was an American friend from Bullitt’s home town, Philadelphia. Her British husband, Dudley, was a thoroughbred trainer. Bullitt caught up with the government in Clermont Ferrand and lodged in the comfortable Hôtel de Charlannes in the mountains nearby at La Bourboule. By the time he contacted the government again in Vichy, Clara wrote, Bullitt ‘seemed to have lost many of his illusions concerning the Popular Front [the leftist coalition that won the last pre-war parliamentary elections, in 1936], and missed no opportunity of getting in closer touch with Pierre Laval, whose feelings toward him were very friendly’. She reserved particular animosity for Third Secretaries Douglas MacArthur, nephew of his namesake, General MacArthur, and H. Freeman Matthews – both of whom believed Laval was too accommodating to Germany. The Americans tended to see Laval as Vichy’s villain, although Pétain and most of the new Vichy establishment curried favour with the German occupier as much as Laval did. The British were also critical of Laval, but they were forced to withdraw their diplomats when Pétain broke relations with Britain in July. The diplomatic rupture resulted from a British ultimatum to French warships in the Algerian naval base of Mers-el-Kébir to surrender on 3 July. When the French commanders refused, the Royal Navy sank their ships and killed 1,267 French seamen to avoid the possibility of the ships falling into German hands. Pétain not only cut relations with Britain, he ordered an aerial bombardment of Gibraltar. The United States and about forty other countries kept embassies in Vichy – to the fury of Britain.
On the hot and sunny morning of 9 July, Clara and Aldebert watched the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate convene in the theatre of the Vichy Casino. Other fashionable, well-dressed women joined Clara in the gallery to witness the death of the Third Republic. By 395 votes to three, the lower house abolished the