UNTIL IT HAPPENS, liberation feels impossibly distant, even to those who hope for it most. The final days of the Occupation in Saint-Brieuc were a time of terror and of waiting. Everyone knew that the Allies might land any day, but no one knew exactly when or where. In the meantime, the desperate Vichy government sent out its militia squads to terrorize the Resistance. As they felt themselves losing the war, the Germans stepped up their requisitions of Frenchmen to forced labor camps; executed hostages; and arrested and deported Resistance fighters and Jews at a great pace—among them Guilloux’s dear friend, the poet Max Jacob. Paradoxically, as liberation approached, conditions became worse for the French, and the accumulated weight of four years of occupation felt heavier than ever.
Nor did the prospect of liberation come without its own anxiety. Guilloux worried that the Allied landing might take place on the Brittany coast at Saint-Laurent, where his aged mother was living. There would surely be huge civilian casualties after the liberators landed. A bomb aimed at the Nazi seawall or at an ammunition depot might just as easily hit a home. Meanwhile, Hitler had given orders to his commanders that the ports of Brittany were to be considered fortresses, to be defended to the death. In the spring of 1944, the Germans ordered anyone living on the coasts who was older than sixty to evacuate. Louis Guilloux’s mother left Saint-Laurent and moved in with Guilloux’s sister in Ablis. A month later, tired of waiting, she returned home.
Throughout northern France, reports filed by the local prefects to the central administration described an anxiety about the landing that was nothing short of a “psychosis.” A much-hoped-for landing on March 15, 1944, never materialized; a local intelligence report quipped: “We are constantly waiting for the landing and it isn’t coming.” By now, Allied planes were flying from England to northern France on regular bombing missions, hoping to inflict damage on German munitions, transport vehicles, and troops. French civilian casualties were an inevitable by-product of these bombings. French intelligence reports describe flashes of anger on the part of French civilians after the Allied bombings, anger that subsided only when the French realized that the Allied bombers had casualties of their own.
Finally, on June 6, 1944, the Allies launched their ships across the Channel. “Operation Overlord” was under way. On that “longest day,” in Cornelius Ryan’s mythical phrase, there were nearly 10,000 casualties on Omaha, Utah, Juno, and Gold Beaches, where 130,000 men braved land mines and a storm of bullets from the Germans stationed high on the bluffs above them.
We often think about those soldiers, but we forget the French, whose strange privilege on June 6 was to welcome a brutal assault on their own country. One of the most poignant scenes in the movie The Longest Day is the speech given by Adm. Robert Jaujard aboard the Free French cruiser Montcalm, which crossed the Channel with the USS Arizona to cover the men on Omaha Beach. Jaujard is supposed to have addressed his men on a loudspeaker as the assault began: “It is a terrible and monstrous thing to have to fire on our homeland, but I am asking you to do it today.”
For Americans, D-Day marks the liberation of France. But for anyone who took part in the operation, and for any French civilian who remembers life in northern France during the summer of 1944, June 6 was only the beginning of a war to expel the Nazis that raged on for several months, and the unleashing of a process that would be bloody and painful.
Between June 6, 1944, when the Allies landed in Normandy, and August 18, when the Nazi siege at Brest finally ended, the people of Brittany were pawns in a ferocious battle. In the Breton countryside there was an atmosphere of civil war, as the Vichy milice attacked the underground Resistance maquis who were fighting the Nazis in the countryside and the forests. Among the German troops at large in the countryside were Russian collaborators who had joined the German army in the eleventh hour, hoping for better treatment from the losing Nazis than from their own army. They were known for their violent behavior among civilians. Pillage, rape, and terror were commonplace.
Back in Normandy, immediately following the landing, the Americans were having trouble breaking through the Nazi lines. The news reports were bad, describing the Army’s tanks blocked by the massive and muddy hedgerows that enclose fields in that part of the country. They were under constant attack by the Germans, and there was much bloodshed among soldiers and civilians. By July 7, the towns of Caen, Lisieux, Vire, Coutances, Saint-Lô, Flers, and Condé-sur-Noireau were, in the words of the historian Hilary Footitt, “virtually reduced to dust” by Allied bombs. Throughout the countryside, the stench of dead cattle was intolerable.
The people of Brittany waited for the Americans to arrive on their western peninsula. Although the U.S. Army’s ultimate goal was to move east, to cross the Rhine into Germany, its leaders were also determined to move west to Brittany. This westward turn was motivated by two factors: the Allies needed to secure the ports of Brittany so that they could bring in supplies for the march toward Germany. And they needed to expel the Nazis as far west as Brest; otherwise, they were vulnerable to an attack from behind.
Bombing raids punctuated the month of June; soon there was no more electricity and no more gas; curfew was set at 9 P.M. Guilloux never knew if the sounds of grenades and gunfire he was hearing were those of the Resistance or the milice.
On June 14, Guilloux noted that forty-one Resistance fighters from his region had been condemned to death by a German military tribunal and executed. On June 26, he received an official paper ordering him to work on the roads for the German occupiers. A medical visit furnished him with an immediate exemption: he was weak and seriously underweight. He was not alone; the calorie count for the average city dweller in France, after four years of insufficient food, was half what it had been before the start of the war.
By July, Guilloux was describing his physical and mental state in desperate terms: “the least effort is costly; I often have trouble dragging myself from one place to the next; I go to bed tired; I wake up tired. Work is going badly, this work that is endless and will never end.” “Work” meant his work as a writer, but he might also have been referring to the difficult work of liberation.
Finally, in August, the German retreat began. As they fled Saint-Brieuc on August 3 and 4, the departing occupiers destroyed everything they could—their own papers and files, the town’s supplies of food and weapons. They burned Guilloux’s own lycée, which they had been using as an ammunition depot.
Where did the Germans go? One U.S. veteran of the northern France campaign described an odd situation. A retreating German battalion crossed paths with his advancing American battalion, and two traffic patrols, German and American, found themselves face to face. It was a lighthearted memory of a conflict that took 200,000 German lives in Normandy alone. Other German soldiers were arrested by the liberating armies and herded to Allied POW camps in convoys of flat-bottom trucks.
The U.S. Army was a vast moving operation, fanning across the entire length of the Brittany peninsula in less than a month, bringing armored divisions, infantry divisions, and administrative units to every town and village, occupying the same châteaux and administrative buildings that the Nazis had left only days before. The Army’s rear guard was composed of administrative support organizations, including Civil Affairs, in charge of relations with French civilians, and a Judge Advocate Unit, in charge of legal matters. The Army needed the help of men like Guilloux, for the encounter of American troops and French locals was a fragile event, on the individual as well as the political level. Boys who had never before left the United States, fatigued and disoriented, longing for relief from war, were coming into daily contact with natives whose language and customs were strange to them. The goodwill of French civilians was central to American strategy, and if the Americans were perceived as occupiers, rather than liberators, the battle was lost.
As early as 1943, Civil Affairs prepared Zone Handbooks for each region the Allied Army would enter, to guide British and American officers in their dealings with the local populations. They made clear the cultural gap Guilloux was expected to fill.
The typical Breton presents the following marked characteristics:
—the Breton is introspective. He is not a Latin, and lacks Latin gaiety. He is quiet, even taciturn—something of an introvert. In his country, “la joie elle-même y est un peu triste.” But sometimes, at feasts or on holidays, he breaks out violently into an extreme merriment. He is apt to be querulous when in his cups.
—He dislikes foreigners. Although hospitable by force of long tradition, he is fundamentally hostile to foreigners. He does not like Englishmen, but he hates the occupying Germans to such an extent that he will welcome the English in their capacity of allies.
In a formula that would come back to haunt the Army, the handbook propagated the perennial cliché of the easy native woman:
One should not pay much attention to the lapses of Breton women with the Germans—the race is naturally erotic.
As they arrived in the Côtes-du-Nord, a special Information Bulletin alerted U.S. officers not to make insulting comments about housing and hygiene in the French countryside. In Brittany, they were warned, they were likely to find man and beast dwelling side by side on many farms.