JUST OVER SIXTY KILOMETRES from Toulon, in the larger and strategically still more important city of Marseille—Toulon was a military harbour, Marseille a commercial one—a parallel battle was playing out. Marseille contained not one port but two: the small Old Port, a rectangular harbour around which the city’s Old Town was built, and the massive, modern harbour to the northwest of it. The newer harbour stretches north up the coast, whereas the Old Port cuts inland just below it. The city possesses slightly less impressive natural barriers than Toulon: hills to the southeast and a mountain chain to the north-northeast shelter it, and two ancient forts guarded the approach to the Old Port.
Marseille’s military defences, by contrast, were just as impressive as those in Toulon: roadblocks and antitank mines outside the city, large numbers of coastal batteries, minefields and antisubmarine nets around the islands, and extensive defences at the harbour itself.1 In addition, blockships and empty hospital ships rested in the harbour, waiting to be sunk.2 Some ten to twelve thousand troops formed the 244th Infantry Division, along with four to five thousand naval gunners and riflemen.3 German artillery was superior to the French—150 to 200 cannons capable of firing 75 mm to 200 mm shells.4 Reports on the troops’ ages conflict, with different sources claiming they were both disproportionately young and disproportionately old (perhaps they were both).5 The Allies were prepared for a long battle; planners assumed that it would take forty-five days to occupy Marseille.6
The defences were divided into a strong inner ring and a less thoroughly defended outer ring that traced the circle formed by mountains and hills around the city.7 Outer defences were concentrated around the large settlement of Aubagne, some twenty kilometres inland east of the city, and at the castle of Saint-Marcel, guarding the route directly north toward Aixen-Provence; multiple antitank obstacles blocked routes into Marseille.8 These defences nonetheless had four disadvantages. First, although the mountainous terrain around Marseille formed a natural defence, there were multiple entry points to the east, north, and southeast of the city, meaning that defences were spread over a forty-kilometre area.9 A concentrated Allied attack at any one point would enjoy numerical superiority.10 Second, the great distances between defence points prevented the rapid transfer of units between them. Third, with the exception of Aubagne, to the east of the city, the defence points had weak artillery support.11 Finally, as everywhere else at this point in the war, the Germans could call on little if any air power.12
The defence of Marseille was assigned to General Hans Schäfer, a highly respected veteran of Operation Barbarossa, who had the 244th Infantry Division under his command from August 14. The division was made up of Volksdeutschen, ethnic Germans from Eastern Europe, and many were older. They had, however, experience on the eastern front, which gave them battle-worthiness that, in their commander’s eyes, cancelled out the disadvantages of age and nationality.13 Morale was high, and the troops were physically fit and well fed. As another indication of fragmented structures, the commander of Marseille, Oberst Haustein, was under Schäfer’s command, but the navy was not.14 Schäfer had two related orders. First, the army and the navy were under orders to destroy the harbour if it could not be defended.15 Second, “the defensive zone of Marseille was to be held to the last man and last cartridge.”16
To prepare the defence of the city, Schäfer ordered his 244th Infantry Division to withdraw on the night of August 18–19 from positions between Cassis and Bandol (east of Marseille) toward outer defences of the city, with orders to check the French advance toward Marseille.17 Destroying their guns, the troops moved into outer Marseille. As they did, Kapitän zur See Stoss, the harbour commander, reported that he had completed preparations for the demolition of the great harbour and the Old Port.18 The harbour basin was to be poisoned (although sources are unclear as to how this would have been accomplished), all entrances blocked by the scuttling of ships, and all quays, sheds, cranes, and other installations blown up.19 It would take, Stoss reported, four to six days to do so. By this point, according to Schäfer’s (possibly self-serving) account, the great transport bridge had already been destroyed by an overeager demolition team.20 On August 20, French authorities appealed directly to Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop, begging him to prevent the harbour’s destruction.21 He ignored the appeal, and another order to destroy the port went out. The navy signalled its agreement.22
As the 244th Infantry Division concentrated itself in the city for the final battle, many citizens of Marseille joined the fight. Armed ad hoc groups took to the streets, fired on any Germans they encountered, and had effective control of the streets at night.23 The FFI in Marseille proved to be a more effective fighting force than in Paris, and they possessed an asset as important as skill: the capacity to instill fear. The FFI spooked Schäfer by turning the streets of the city into a guerrilla battleground, thus making easy movement between defensive positions impossible.24 Marseille became a chain of defended islands, with the strongest concentration of troops located at the harbour.
And that harbour was very much under threat. On August 20, the German consul general, Freiherr Edgar von Spiegel, phoned Schäfer. Spiegel urged the commander to spare the harbour, as it was the “nerve centre” of the city.25 Schäfer refused on military grounds but offered two concessions.26 First, he delayed the start of demolition work for sixteen hours. Doing so would give Spiegel enough time to ask OKW to cancel the demolition order. Spiegel never got a reply, but the delay would be decisive. Second, Schäfer asked Stoss (the harbour commander) to spare the Old Port. This decision, in turn, spared the road that ringed the edge of the port, which would have been lost in the planned destruction. The road was one of the busiest in Marseille.
What would happen to the harbour itself partly depended on French designs. Under de Lattre’s original orders, General Jean de Goislard de Monsabert, the mustachioed and kind-looking commander of the Third Algerian Infantry Division, was to move into the city’s suburbs and hold them.27 The bulk of French forces would move north, and Marseille, and the FFI within it, would be left to the Germans.28 De Monsabert, however, forced de Lattre’s hand. Going around his superior, he told a colonel serving under him: “If you see an opportunity [to capture the city], seize it. I can assure you that, by the day after tomorrow, I’ll be drinking a pastis in Marseille.”29
On the evening of August 20, the assault on the outskirts of Marseille began. That night, the Seventh Algerian Infantry Regiment (7e régiment de tirailleurs algériens), with tanks from the First Division and two Moroccan battalions (tabors), reached the approaches to Aubagne.30 On de Monsabert’s orders, they launched an attack on artillery batteries and an infantry battalion the next morning.31 “Aubagne,” reported the defending commander, “is afire.”32 The Germans put up serious resistance, and the first assault failed.33 Then all communication went dead, and surrender rumours filtered back to Schäfer. “It is hard to make out,” he wrote after the war, “what really happened at Aubagne! It seems scarcely conceivable that, in the face of [German] antitank weapons … a tank assault could have such a quick and thoroughgoing success!”34
What in fact happened at Aubagne was a skilful French reaction to the initial German rebuff. De Monsabert ordered in Moroccan reinforcements, and they steadily wore down German opposition. Pushing aside antitank obstacles, they attacked the defending Germans with bayonets, knives, and hand grenades.35 One battalion seized six pieces of artillery. Seeing nothing but death awaiting his young recruits, the commanding German colonel surrendered on the evening of August 22. “How,” he asked somewhat petulantly, “can you expect my poor young boys to measure up to your hardened and agile African troops?”36
When Schäfer got no word from Aubagne, he ordered a battalion to Camp de Carpiagne, in the mountains, about one kilometre southwest of Aubagne, to counterattack. The battalion was never heard from after it moved out; its commander most likely surrendered.37 By the end of the twenty-second, the road to Marseille was open.
That same evening, other units were on the verge of entering Marseille as well. On August 21, before Aubagne fell, de Monsabert had ordered the Second and Third Battalions of the Seventh Algerian Infantry Regiment to launch two assaults from the north.38 Rather than attacking a defensive position at the inner defence right at Saint-Marcel, on a major artery, they pushed their way through the northerly mountain range, climbing cliffs as great as seven hundred metres high, and then came down through La Valentine and Les Olives.39 At the latter, they thoroughly surprised German forces; some one hundred of them were shirtless and enjoying the southern French sunshine.40 The French now occupied Aubagne to the east and all the suburbs north of the city.41
That city seemed increasingly like a war zone. Inspired by events unfolding in Paris, FFI forces had taken to the streets on the nineteenth. They ambushed German supplies and sprayed the streets with bullets from buildings above them. They fired at a German navy ambulance and entirely encircled the navy hospital in the south of the city; doctors appearing at windows were greeted with gunfire.42 At the same time, “civilians” (most likely FFI fighters) stormed the main post office with hand grenades, ordering the telephone operators out. The operators hung on while the Germans fired flak guns over the FFI, dispersing most of them.43
On the morning of August 23, French forces moving directly into Marseille were met—as so often in newly liberated areas of France—with cheers, flowers, and kisses. Then the battle took a more unconventional turn. Captain Jean Croisa, a priest from Lorraine who saw war as a just crusade against Nazism but who remained horrified by the unnecessary bloodshed, was guiding the Seventh Algerian Infantry Regiment down La Canebière, a grand boulevard leading to the Old Port.44 As they moved toward the port, shells landed around them; the Germans had opened fire from the Saint-Jean and Saint-Nicolas forts that guarded the northern and southern exits to the sea.45 Then, dodging cannon fire, cars approached Croisa’s men. They were from the liberation committee—the Communist-dominated French resistance. After speaking, the French commander either agreed to or suggested a bluff: they would pretend that the liberation committee had taken the German consul general hostage at the Prefecture. With bullets flying about them, Croisa had Spiegel brought to him. With the French commander in the room, Croisa called Schäfer and persuaded him to meet the French. Schäfer agreed, “in order to spare the civilian population.”46 Schäfer agreed to meet at 16:00.47
To Schäfer’s surprise, Croisa brought de Monsabert himself behind German lines to meet Schäfer. This in itself was unusual and is evidence of the degree to which the battle for Marseille was nothing like from the fight-to-the-death struggle demanded by Hitler. In postwar reports, both Croisa and Schäfer claimed that the other side asked for an armistice.48 What they did agree on is that Schäfer raged against the insurgents in the city.49 The Germans, the general argued, could not recognize them as a military force, and through their actions, Marseille had become a combat area and a legitimate target for shelling.50 From a legal point of view, Schäfer was right, but de Monsabert was also right on the more important issue: the battle was going to end in a French victory. The only question was when.
De Monsabert left abruptly (and unmolested—this was still a gentlemen’s battle), and the attacks continued.51 On August 24, de Monsabert gave the order to take the hill leading up to the Notre Dame de la Garde cathedral, an imposing structure built on a fort and rising above the city with a massive gilded statue of the Virgin Mary on its steeple. French forces, coming under heavy German fire, at first made little progress.52 But then, a young Roman Catholic civilian, Pierre Chaix-Bryan, took them to an apartment, through which they could access a narrow corridor leading to a little-known staircase that would lead them safely to the cathedral. Moroccan troops scurried up the steps.53 At the cathedral, they found the monsignor, some Franciscans, and seventy-four German soldiers who, fearing the civilian population, had sought and received sanctuary.54
The port was now surrounded, and elsewhere units were surrendering. On August 25, at Peypin, some twenty-five kilometres north of the Old Port, French forces surrounded a battalion guarding the entrance to the mountain passes. After several calls for ammunition went unanswered, Schäfer received what he regarded as a “surprising” message from the Peypin battalion: “Assemble with remaining forces for our last counterattack.” Having fired this off, the commander at Peypin most likely surrendered and marched his troops into captivity. The same evening, the so-called southern sector around Saint-Tropez came under intense mortar fire. The commander attempted a breakout, which failed. He radioed Schäfer for permission to surrender; all communication then ended.55
The harbour, meanwhile, remained very much under threat. Earlier that day, mortar and machine-gun fire raked the area, killing among others the harbour commander, Kapitän zur See Stoss. It came from the direction of the cathedral. Stoss’s company sent repeated requests to Schäfer to open up an artillery barrage on French positions at Notre Dame. Schäfer refused, as it would have obliterated the cathedral.56 In his account, Schäfer wrote to de Monsabert in protest the next morning. “I take the liberty of informing you that the German cps [companies] located in the vicinity of the cathedral of Notre Dame of Marseille, had been subject[ed] to repeated mortar and MG fire from the church. Up until now, I have rejected all [artillery requests] to shell the structure. However, should this fire continue, I shall be forced, much to my regret, to hold you responsible for the fate of Marseille’s sacred shrine.”57 Still in Schäfer’s version of events, de Monsabert wrote back immediately. He thanked Schäfer for sparing the cathedral and urged him not to revoke the order. His division, he continued, had not occupied the cathedral and had nothing to do with the fire coming from it.58 This could only mean that the French resistance had occupied the church, and the French army had no control over it.
De Monsabert offered another version of events: that he told Schäfer that the fire was coming from near the cathedral but not from it, that men were only entering it for prayer and mass, and that Schäfer should “draw the logical consequences and accord to a basilica venerated around the world the respect it deserves.”59 In any case, the machine-gun and mortar fire continued, forcing the evacuation of the company from the harbour and the isolation and capture of an anti-artillery battalion and its commander.60 Despite this, Schäfer declined to shell the cathedral.61
Elsewhere, the end was drawing near. In the north of the city, the battery at Merlan capitulated following a bombardment. Croisa, once again playing the role of diplomat, urged the Germans to see the futility of continued struggle. When they did, the first soldier who emerged from the battery, shaking with fear and extremely thirsty, asked Croisa for something to drink. The captain provided it to him and to all the other men. “The poor things,” Croisa commented with striking generosity.62 The Germans, in turn, handed out cigarettes to French soldiers and civilians.
In the northern section of the city, Haustein continued a pointless battle against French forces along the mountain range at Saint-Antoine. On August 26, the French tore through the defensive position there, isolated a heavy battery, and engaged the Germans in a stubborn, close-combat battle.63 The Germans sustained heavy casualties, and Haustein repeatedly had to request temporary ceasefires to collect the wounded.64 The French regimental commander chivalrously granted them, but his efforts to convince Haustein of the pointlessness of continued struggle failed until the twenty-seventh.65 Then, with his forces virtually annihilated, Haustein gave up.
So did everyone else. On the twenty-sixth, twelve hundred Germans at a garrison in the Parc Borély, south of the Old Port, with or without permission, had surrendered. The next day, Toulon fell, which opened the possibility for transferring thousands of Allied troops to Marseille. Multiple German positions in Marseille surrendered.66
Schäfer was now increasingly isolated. At the harbour, light 37 mm anti-aircraft gun companies guarded its outer breakwaters.67 Tank troops stood at the main harbour road that Schäfer had refused to destroy. Some four hundred naval personnel crowded into underground shelters; eighty were wounded. Smoke from the battle drifted into the dank tunnels, choking the men. Mortar fire rained down on the eastern sections of the defences from positions at nearby factories.68 Schäfer had lost contact with battalions at Chaine and Saint-Cyr, between Marseille and Toulon, and Haustein was surrendering the remnants of his units. At Cap Janet, in the northern section of the great harbour at Marseille, an anti-aircraft battery had suffered substantial damage from shelling, which in turn had caused the local civilian population to flee into a railroad tunnel.69 In an odd turn of events, German personnel took up responsibility for feeding them, maintaining order, and protecting them from French shells and artillery.70 Smoke from the latter, however, filled these tunnels as well, and the Germans struggled to avoid a panic. Surveying this rapidly deteriorating situation, Schäfer concluded that a continued struggle would only lead to thousands of casualties. Ignoring Hitler’s order to fight to the finish, he decided on the evening of August 27 to surrender.71 He wrote to de Monsabert, making veiled reference to his commanders’ often unilateral decision to surrender. “The situation confronting my forces has changed entirely since our August 23 conversation. The majority of positions have surrendered after an honourable resistance. In light of the superior forces engaged against us, the continuation of the struggle will have no result beyond the total annihilation of the forces remaining under my command. I therefore request for this evening, at 21:30, an armistice that will allow the agreement of honourable surrender conditions for the morning of August 28. In the absence of such agreement, we will fight to the last man.”72
De Monsabert led the negotiations at 8:00 the next day. The most pressing matter was the de-mining of the harbour.73 With Harbour Commander Stoss dead, however, the chain of command had broken down. Schäfer disavowed responsibility, as did both the next in command after Stoss. Stoss, it seems, had planned all demolitions himself and destroyed all documentation.74 Demolitions continued that morning until they were stopped definitively at noon. From then, German engineers began removing all mines and explosives while German troops guarded arms depots until they could be handed over to the French. Not unusually in such situations, pockets of resistance continued fighting until Schäfer ordered them to stop.75
When the French entered the harbour, it was peppered with mines, and the great transport bridge had been destroyed. Some seventy-five sunken ships and much destroyed equipment blocked the port. Fully forty-one out of forty-two wrecking cranes had been destroyed.76 Photos taken at the time show a catalogue of destruction along the quays and breakwaters, littered with great hunks of smashed concrete and twisted metal.77 Like so much else in the last year of the war, the harbour was in part the victim of the failure of July 20. The admiral responsible for the French southern coast had been open to French appeals to spare the port, but he killed himself in Aix-en-Provence after it emerged that Hitler had survived.78
Despite the extent of destruction, the harbour was in better shape than that of Cherbourg, to say nothing of the one in Brest. Marseille’s Old Port and the road over which supplies would be transported remained fully intact. In the great port, unexploded mines would delay the use of its port but posed no physical danger if properly defused. The glass was half full. General Schäfer is owed qualified credit for this relatively satisfactory state of affairs, as is Consul General Spiegel for urging him on. Schäfer spared the Old Port and the road leading from it into the city; he delayed demolition by a crucial sixteen hours; and he refused to sacrifice hundreds, if not thousands, of men so that demolition could be completed (Generalleutnant Karl-Wilhelm von Schlieben made such a sacrifice at Cherbourg). The rapid French advance also played a decisive role here: had de Monsabert’s forces not advanced so quickly into the city, Stoss could have continued with the destruction of the port. An indication of Schäfer’s willingness to continue a battle he was losing is given by his August 23 refusal of an armistice, even if we accept his claim that he was more concerned with securing the retreat of Army Group G up the Rhône valley. As so often in the last months of the war, commanders lower down the chain of command may have aided the French advance: at least one French commander wondered why the Germans failed to exploit their numerical superiority with a determined defence of the city.79
Finally, something is owed to a corruptible Austrian who saved a giant floating crane, the Goliath.80 The director of technical services of the Marseille Chamber of Commerce came to see him with 200,000 francs in coins and pleaded with him to save the crane. Claiming it needed repairs, the Austrian arranged for it to be towed out of the harbour. Shortly after Marseille’s capture, the crane was busy unloading 700 American vehicles.81
It is clear that Schäfer was no Hofacker or Stülpnagel—he was not eager to open an entire front to hasten an end to the war. Nonetheless, given the situation as it was, Schäfer refused to sacrifice more men than necessary to a lost battle. In doing so, he marched the majority of his forces—fully eleven thousand of the original force of thirteen thousand—into captivity. The French forces, for their part, behaved very decently, and de Monsabert later justly described the battle as “humane.”82 The great harbour, though damaged, was, thanks to Schäfer’s delay, not completely destroyed and far easier to repair than ports in northern France. And above all, he took the crucial decision to spare the city’s Old Port. His concern was more for the survival of the city than the supplying of the Allies, but the outcome was the same. The Allies had a key port—indeed, the key port at this point in the war—in their hands. Whereas Brest (though its weak connections to the hinterland made it a dubious port anyway) was beyond repair and Cherbourg could not be used until October, Marseille was receiving substantial shipments by early September. From then until March 1945, the southern French ports offloaded the largest tonnage of Allied supplies.83 In October and November, southern ports supplied 40 percent of the western armies’ supplies.84 The vast majority of these supplies was offloaded at Marseille; at the end of October, the Americans handed Toulon back to the French for the landing of civilian supplies, and only small craft landed at the ports of Saint-Raphaël, Sainte-Maxime, and Saint-Tropez.85 The Allied success in their armed struggle against the German military would have been unthinkable without the great harbour of Marseille.
The longstanding and, in some cases, continuing controversy over Operation Dragoon is curious in the light of this statistic.86 National rivalries might have played a role here; the postwar British literature has been notably more critical of Dragoon than the American.87 There might also be a visceral tendency to sympathize with a figure as sympathetic as Winston Churchill, although writers would do well to realize that the great man’s mastery of the big picture—German intentions in the 1930s, Soviet intentions in the 1940s, the importance of the United States throughout—was tempered by some serious weaknesses in his thinking: a desire to micromanage strategy, an obsession with military diversions, and a capacity for erratic reversals of opinion on matters of immense geopolitical importance. Whatever the reasons, the basic facts speak for themselves: in insisting on an invasion of southern France, the Americans destroyed half a German army, allowing only the battered remnants to reform on the edge of the Reich, and they captured not one port but two. This last point would prove to be of crucial importance in supporting their next move: the invasion of Germany itself.
Notes
1. Pierre Guiral, Libération de Marseille (Paris: Hachette Littérature, 1974), 80–1.
2. Naval Headlines 1139, August 16, 1944, UKNA, HW 1/3184.
3. Guiral, Libération de Marseille, 81.
4. Ibid.
5. Guiral, 81, says they were young; Hans Schäfer, “244 Infantry Division Marseille, 19–28 August 1944,” n.d. [likely 1947], USAMHI, A 884, 10, says they were old.
6. Clarke and Smith, Riviera to the Rhine, 203.
7. Schäfer, “244 Infantry Division Marseille,” 5.
8. Ibid., Guiral, Libération de Marseille, 84.
9. Schäfer, “244 Infantry Division Marseille,” 13.
10. Hans Schäfer, “The German Defence of Marseille,” August 1944, USAMHI, B 420, 8.
11. Ibid., 9.
12. Guiral, Libération de Marseille, 81.
13. Schäfer, “244 Infantry Division Marseille,” 10.
14. Ibid., 2.
15. Besprechungen, Erwägungen, Entschlüsse, August 15, 1944, BArch RH 19 IX/87, 240.
16. Schäfer, “244 Infantry Division Marseille,” 9. Emphasis in the original.
17. Ibid., 15.
18. Ibid., 20.
19. Ibid.
20. Ibid.
21. Naval Headlines 1146, August 23, 1944, UKNA, HW 1/3184.
22. Proc 6911 PKA, August 21, 1944, UKNA, HW 1/3181: “Strong indications that demolition of Marseilles port installations ordered.”
23. Schäfer, “244 Infantry Division Marseille,” 21.
24. See Schäfer’s comments on the “80,000” rebels in the city. Ibid., 14. This was a vast exaggeration; the figure was closer to a paltry 500. Zaloga, Operation Dragoon, 63.
25. Ibid., 23–4. Spiegel made further attempts. See Guiral, Libération de Marseille, 102. Schäfer claims that Spiegel was a hostage at this point. Guiral, who researched the matter at length, concludes that he only pretended to have been taken hostage and did so three days later, on the August 23. I have followed Guiral’s chronology (see below).
26. Schäfer, “244 Infantry Division Marseille,” 24.
27. Guiral, Libération de Marseille, 84, 90.
28. Ibid., 90.
29. Quoted ibid.
30. Ibid., 85
31. Ibid.
32. Schäfer, “244 Infantry Division Marseille,” 24.
33. Guiral, Libération de Marseille, 85.
34. Schäfer, “244 Infantry Division Marseille,” 25.
35. Guiral, Libération de Marseille, 85.
36. Quoted ibid.
37. Schäfer, “244 Infantry Division Marseille,” 25–6.
38. Guiral, Libération de Marseille, 90.
39. Ibid.; Schäfer, “244 Infantry Division Marseille,” 27.
40. Guiral, Libération de Marseille, 90.
41. Ibid.
42. Schäfer, “244 Infantry Division Marseille,” 26.
43. Ibid.
44. Guiral, Libération de Marseille, 91–2.
45. Story from ibid.
46. Ibid., 92.
47. Ibid.
48. For the French version, see ibid. For the German, see Schäfer, “244 Infantry Division Marseille,” 27–8.
49. Schäfer, “244 Infantry Division Marseille,” 28; Guiral, Libération de Marseille, 92.
50. Schäfer, “244 Infantry Division Marseille,” 28.
51. Ibid.
52. Guiral, Libération de Marseille, 94.
53. Ibid., 95.
54. Ibid.
55. Schäfer, “244 Infantry Division Marseille,” 29.
56. Ibid., 33.
57. Ibid. Emphasis in the original.
58. Ibid.
59. Quoted in Guiral, Libération de Marseille, 96.
60. It is unclear from Schäfer’s account where the battalion was located.
61. Schäfer, “244 Infantry Division Marseille,” 33.
62. Guiral, Libération de Marseille, 96.
63. Schäfer, “244 Infantry Division Marseille,” 30–1.
64. Ibid., 31.
65. Ibid., 31–2.
66. Guiral, Libération de Marseille, 97.
67. Description of harbour defences from Schäfer, “244 Infantry Division Marseille,” 32. “AA guns” in the document.
68. Ibid.
69. Still intact and visible on Google Earth just northeast of the position “Cap Janet, Marseille.”
70. Schäfer, “244 Infantry Division Marseille,” 35.
71. Ibid., 36; Guiral, Libération de Marseille, 97.
72. Quoted in Guiral, Libération de Marseille, 98.
73. Schäfer, “244 Infantry Division Marseille,” 36.
74. Ibid.; Guiral, Libération de Marseille, 98.
75. Guiral, Libération de Marseille, 99.
76. Ibid., 102.
77. Archives historiques de la Chambre de Commerce et d’Industrie Marseille-Provence (CCIMP) photo collection, 966 A/14, photos nos. 1048–69, September 1944.
78. Guiral, Libération de Marseille, 102.
79. Captain Jean Croisa. Guiral, Libération de Marseille, 83.
80. Story from ibid., 102–3.
81. The Marseille Chamber of Commerce has photos of the crane unloading equipment in early 1945. CCIMP photo collection, 966 A/14, photos nos. 1036–7, March 1945.
82. Guiral, Libération de Marseille, 104.
83. Roland G. Ruppenthal, The U.S. Army in World War II: The European Theater of Operations, vol. 2: Logistical Support of the Armies: September 1944–May 1945 (Washington: Office of the Chief of Military History, 1959), 124.
84. Ibid.
85. Ibid., 121–3.
86. The standard criticism of Dragoon is that it diverted great human and material resources from the more important battle in northern France to little effect, given Army Group G’s withdrawal. Thus a recent review concludes, “Dragoon clearly had no discernable impact on the fighting in Normandy.” Anthony Tucker-Jones, Operation Dragoon: The Liberation of Southern France 1944 (Barnsley, UK: Pen & Sword, 2009), 174. For a detailed examination of Dragoon’s impact, see ibid., chapter 12.
87. Weinberg, World at Arms, 761.