COLONEL GRIFFITH, HIS DRIVER, WILLIAM L. DUGAN, AND LIEUtenant Colonel Melville I. Stark together left the Courville-sur-Eure CP to meet up with the Seventh Armored Division and confirm that orders had been communicated and would be carried out by General Thompson’s armored battalion.
The three men drove toward Chartres from the southwest, and Griffith could see over his left shoulder the Perche forest receding behind them. While Dugan guided the jeep, Griffith could see over the wind-shield to the right the beginning of the low Beauce region spreading south and east from Chartres. The Beauce is a 1.5-million-acre area that changes from rolling hills into flat, rich farmland, comprising the granary of France, reminiscent of the wheat fields that had been rapidly created from cattle ranches in predustbowl North Texas when Griff was a boy.
As they approached, the two towers of the cathedral dominated the wheat fields from a surprising distance. From Griffith’s vantage point, getting larger and larger upon their approach, the towers of Chartres Cathedral were the most imposing structure in the area, just as they must have seemed to approaching pilgrims in the Middle Ages.
On most days, the cathedral towers are visible from more than fifteen miles away, and from their perch they provide a clear view of positions of troops and equipment in the wheat fields. In addition, the Chartres airfield was run by the Luftwaffe during the occupation, supporting night-bombardment units that engaged in operations over England, a commando unit capable of dropping parachutists, a day-interceptor unit operating against US Eighth Army Air Force daylight bombing raids, and a night interceptor unit operating against Royal Air Force night-bombing attacks. Also important in Chartres were an antiair-craft flak-training school and an operational flak unit. The city was also economically important as a market town, with industrial flour milling, brewing, distilling, and ironworking; leather, perfume, and dye manufacturing; and studios producing world-famous stained glass.
By coincidence, on the afternoon of August 15, the German army sector headquarters conducted a planning meeting in Chartres with the commander, General Kurt von der Chevallerie, who had just arrived. At issue was how newly arriving units might reinforce the defenses west of the Seine in general and the defenses of Chartres in particular.
Hitler had ordered that his 48th Division from northern France and the 338th Division from southern France arrive in Chartres to defend against the Allied advance. This meeting occurred at the time the Seventh US Armored Division was approaching. The Seventh encountered three thousand German troops, including the flak battalion and scattered antitank strong points with an estimated fifty antitank guns and heavy antitank-mortar, machine-gun, and scattered-artillery pieces, along with rifle and bazooka strong points and sporadic minefields.
Chartres was a German “report station” or absorption point for disorganized and beaten units and stragglers withdrawing east from other surrounded and battered units. As a result, an estimated two hundred to three hundred men per twenty-four-hour period would reinforce the garrison. The German commander at Chartres was taking control of the defeated elements and, using the airfield and rail hub, resupplying and reorganizing those units for counterattack. Several German infantry and armored battalions were preparing to defend Chartres, along with personnel from the Luftwaffe flak-training center located at Chartres and two already-trained flak battalions operating on the south edge of Chartres that had been defending the airfield. In the last few days, the flak school had been transformed into a mixed flak regiment.
As Griffith, Stark, and Dugan drew closer, the city entered into view, clustering around the cathedral-topped rocky hill. The late afternoon sun breaking through the approaching storm clouds would have illuminated the cathedral’s western facade.
The Seventh Armored Division maintained a position in the wheat fields west of Chartres.
Neither the Germans nor the Americans were expecting any early major encounter as of the time the American Seventh Armored Division lead elements began probing at Chartres’ outskirts. When the Seventh had arrived, it overran the defenses along the Eure River to the south of Chartres, but soon it became evident that Chartres was well defended. The corps had seriously underestimated the size of the defense force. The expected eight hundred troops had turned out to be 3,500 and growing.
At around 2 p.m., Griffith and the other men arrived in their jeep at the bivouac area on the plateau of Seresville, two miles south of the city, where an armored battalion and accompanying mobile artillery units were gathering. Reports had surfaced that the Germans in the city were starting to evacuate and were leaving many of their wounded behind. In the American armored column’s approach to Chartres so far, it had encountered relatively light resistance, but now—despite the reported German evacuation—it faced determined opposition. The commander of the column had halted its forward progress to permit consolidation. Griffith told Dugan to wait with the jeep while he and Stark went to talk with General Thompson, in charge of the bivouacking units. With artillery shells landing in the vicinity, soldiers questioned whether the Germans were using either of the cathedral towers as an observation post from which to guide artillery fire toward Allied forces.
Griffith probably had several things in his mind at the time. He hoped for action, and he had been impressed with the young people and in particular the Resistance fighters he had encountered so far in France. The FFI were active all along the Americans’ line of advance, often taking towns ahead of the armor and contributing valuable information on the strength and distribution of German forces. And last, Griffith was determined to do what he could to minimize the risk of the cathedral being fired upon by Allied forces.
What went through Griff’s mind after meeting with Thompson at the bivouac area as he prepared to head back to the CP? Was he thinking about the briefing reminders to avoid shooting near the cathedral and his own fears of hitting it? Had he grown irritated with trigger-happy commanders who might lose sight of General Eisenhower’s order to protect monuments, fearing that they might just shoot at it and be done with it? He’d no doubt heard the motto “It’s easier to apologize than to get permission.” Did he learn that more Germans had been sighted withdrawing from the city, giving him the notion that he and Stark might somehow surreptitiously work their way close enough to the building to listen and observe whether there was any enemy activity up in the towers?
We don’t know, but he likely told Dugan to wait while he and Stark climbed into another vehicle driven by a Seventh Armored Division driver. They probably pulled out of the bivouac area and headed east for the counterclockwise swing around the city to reenter from the east while the fighting was to get under way from the east.
Griff, Stark, and their driver reached the southwest suburb of Lucé. From there, they slowly and quietly worked their way toward the center of the city along Rue du Maréchal Leclerc, heading toward the main square, the Place des Épars. The streets were empty, townspeople hidden in their homes, listening for the next of the small explosions that had popped up from time to time.
Griff would likely have ordered the driver to maneuver them quietly toward the cathedral so he and Stark could get close enough to observe whether there was activity up there. And likely they advanced close enough to scope it out but saw nothing. The driver jockeyed them into side streets to avoid German roadblocks that they expected to be positioned both at that square and at the railway station a few blocks before the beginning of the hill leading to the cathedral. They proceeded slowly, looking for German positions and snipers, but encountered none. The German defenses were concentrating near the series of bridges across the river, which ran north along the east side of the hill, and the area around the cathedral seemed very quiet, even as tanks, armored trucks, and infantry battled their way into the outskirts of the ancient town.
Then they may have told the driver to hide the jeep in an alley and stay with it while Griff and Stark took off on foot to get closer, ducking inside shaded doorways in the flat light under threatening storm clouds to stay out of sight. Stark and Griff probably decided it would be best to slowly approach and try to sneak inside the cathedral to confirm whether any Germans were in the building. The two men edged out in careful steps, guns drawn, looking around for German positions and snipers.
They inched their way toward the cathedral, looking through binoculars for any sign of German spotters in any of the windows of the twin towers of the cathedral. The two approached and searched for any snipers in the windows of the cathedral’s roofs or towers or on any of their balconies or parapets. They saw no snipers and no other soldiers, nor did they see any sign of German observation equipment in or on the cathedral.
They advanced doorway by doorway. Covering each other, they prowled along the buildings of Chartres toward the cathedral, darting from cranny to cavity for shelter, finally arriving at one of the doors of the cathedral itself.
The late-morning Mass had ended hours before, and twilight vespers would not begin until 6:00, and no one was going in or out of the cathedral. It was now midafternoon, so the parishioners who had participated in morning Masses and other activities had dispersed; yet the cathedral was open, and they entered through the heavy wooden doors into the darkness, hearing only the dim echoes of distant artillery shells exploding to the south of the city.
Griff would have seen the ramparts that had been constructed over each of the cathedral’s portals. He may have thought, Something isn’t right about this place, because nothing but peace and quiet pervaded the building—even in the middle of the city still occupied by the Germans, with more coming in by the hour, into what he knew would erupt before midnight into a firefight and terror not only on the occupiers but also on the town, its people, his own men, and possibly the cathedral.
They conducted a rapid search and found no sign of Germans; they couldn’t enter either tower because the stairway doors were locked and no priests or caretaker were evident. They had to get back to the CP, so, finding the church clear of apparent use by German forces, the two men returned on foot to their jeep and drove quickly away to head back to the bivouac area. Griff looked back. The cathedral quickly shrunk in size, but its towers continued to stand out against the darkening sky behind them, like a giant owl with wings high, watching over the area.
As Griffith, Stark, and Dugan drove back toward Luisant, groups of young French Resistance fighters were busy at work against the Germans. They drew fire to ferret out and eliminate German snipers from buildings, fired small arms and tommy guns at retreating Germans, threw grenades to disrupt German trucks and troop movements, and reported enemy positions to the Americans, all in spite of the threat of brutal retaliation.
For the American Seventh Armored Division, H hour, the hour to launch the operation, would be at 21:30 hours that night, August 15, 1944. A severe rainstorm was approaching.
With tanks and self-propelled guns, the combat commands breached the German defensive lines and drove through into the heart of the city. The mayor and citizens welcomed them as liberators, but after a brief interval of fighting, the German garrison counterattacked and drove the tanks back. The Germans beat up the mayor, which would cause the townspeople to hesitate to cooperate with the Eleventh Infantry when it arrived two days later.
Force 2 launched the attack as planned, from the assembly area to the southeast of Chartres. Company C of the Thirty-First was to leave Force 2 as they passed through Luisant and drove on into Chartres to help Force 1 mop up the city. Force 1 penetrated enemy defenses with infantry and established a command post in the city’s northeast quarter.
Force 2 encountered heavy antitank fire in the southwest suburbs of Lucé and Luisant. It drove to the edge of the old town in Chartres but failed to maintain continuity of attack and suffered heavy losses in the very narrow streets that impaired the tanks’ ability to maneuver. Force 1 remained and maintained continuous pressure on the enemy through the night, but Force 2 withdrew and resumed the attack at daybreak.
During the battle, many officers showed valor. When the vanguard tank of Major Leslie A. Lohse, acting battalion commander, was set ablaze and disabled by an eighty-eight-millimeter shell and antitank rockets, while under heavy fire Lohse helped put out the fire and took cover only after members of the crew had done so, concealing himself in an enemy headquarters. The lead tank, which carried the company commander, was destroyed after enemy forces fired Panzerfausts and antitank mines from concealed positions, killing the company commander and knocking out the second tank. That meant First Lieutenant George C. J. Racine, in his column’s third tank, took over command of the column and led it through heavy fire to the center of town. Enemy volleys then wrecked a half-track in the column and cut off two platoons. Racine heard of the wreck by radio, stopped his tank, entered the fire-swept street, and signaled his location by flashlight. He made his way back to the enemy-occupied square, ignoring machine-gun cross fire from street-facing windows; he cleared out the shattered half-track, reformed the disorganized column, and led the company out of town. In all, four US tanks were destroyed. The corps retreated to regroup and rallied for a dawn attack.
The forces ran into murderous antitank fire, flares, and mines in the outskirts of Luisant, and the two rear tank companies were forced to withdraw to their alternate rallying positions. Company C of the Thirty-First went on into Chartres as planned but was unable to gain contact with Force 1 and suffered loss of both vehicles and men and became disorganized after the company commander was killed and the battalion commander’s tank was blown up. The remaining elements reorganized and pulled out of the city to the south into an assembly area, and on the morning of August 16 they rejoined the combat command.
The initial fighting for the city took two days, with the Seventh Armored Division constrained from using heavy-artillery support because of concerns about damaging the cathedral.
Near the cathedral, two priests endured the night of fighting. Father Paul Douin was on temporary assignment from his permanent home, a monastery in Le Theiulin, almost twenty miles west of Chartres, and Marcel Cassegrain was a professor at the Major Seminary and master of pontifical ceremonies. Douin woke from his brief spell of sleep and wrote in his diary that “daybreak had finally arrived after a long night.” It had been the first night of the four-day battle for Chartres. The two priests had huddled outside the cathedral school, avoiding bullets, and then had run through neighborhoods, looking for wounded. They saw burned-out tanks and bodies everywhere. Casualties overwhelmed the hospital.
Before dawn on the morning of Wednesday the sixteenth, Joe Messner worked the night shift as clerk to the G-3 at CP 7. Following his all-night shift on the previous night, he had been unable to get any sleep because he and the other headquarters enlisted men had been required to spend the day moving the CP, including tents, food, and other supplies and command and communications equipment from CP 6 in La Ferté-Bernard to CP 7 in Courville-sur-Eure.
During Joe’s shift, in the dim light of kerosene camp lamps, he read dispatches that reported the heavy fighting through the night and into the dawn hours. He plotted the latest information in grease pencil on the situation map, sipping coffee and chewing gum to stay awake. He had become adept at translating the flow of information into moving rectangles, each containing a unique symbol identifying each fighting unit, and its class as infantry, armor, artillery, cavalry, or other.
Before dawn, General Walker gathered his section heads, including colonels Collier and Griffith, Colonel Zeller, who was the G-2 officer, and other group heads and staff around the situation map. Messner stayed for the briefing, and Gene Schulz joined upon commencement of his shift. While artillery bursts and airplane engines droned from the front lines, Walker with his staff reviewed the current situation in Chartres: Force 1 had captured its sector in the north part of the city by 1:30 a.m. after ferocious fighting in the storm followed by sporadic unorganized resistance. Although the Germans had started withdrawing in the afternoon of the fifteenth, some had succeeded in infiltrating back into the city during the night and were expected to continue. Sniper fire was to be expected throughout the day and into the night of the sixteenth, at least at routes of entry to the city and likely inside as well. Walker and the staff reviewed battle strategy, tactics, and timing.
The corps’ standing order remained in place—that all units, including artillery, armor, and infantry, were to avoid shelling near the cathedral and were to employ spotters to ensure accuracy and avoid accidental hits on or near it. German machine-gun and mortar emplacements still occupied strategic spots in Chartres. During the briefing, according to one source, Griff was reported as having learned that corps artillery had received an order to destroy the cathedral, the order coming from someone who believed the Germans were occupying the twin towers as observation posts, but no record of any such order has been found. Griffith and Stark thought there was no reason to fire on the cathedral, as the two of them had been in it the day before and had found it clean.
During the briefing, Walker also reacted to Force 2’s having failed to hold its position during the attack and its forced retreat, so Walker ordered the force to launch a dawn attack, and he reportedly appointed Griffith to be first-line director of military operations in the sector that included the cathedral and units of the Seventh Armored Division that were to pass through Chartres and proceed north through Lèves and toward the Seine.
Griff emerged from the briefing and as usual drafted orders reflecting decisions reached, for Gene Schulz to promptly type onto mimeograph stencils from the handwritten instructions. Liaison officers, second or first lieutenants, or even senior officers such as Mel Stark, stood by waiting for Schulz to finish and Griff to approve and shoved the orders into their courier cases to head by jeep for the front lines to deliver the orders to division and battalion commanders.
But Griffith couldn’t let things just stand as they were. Something about the situation troubled him, so he took it upon himself to investigate. As he left the G-3 office, he told Schulz and Messner he would be going into Chartres on a personal mission without giving any details.
“Goodbye, be careful, and God be with you,” Schulz said to Griffith.
Griffith, with his pistol and M1 semiautomatic carbine, hopped into his jeep along with Mel Stark and Colonel Robert E. Cullen, who also carried weapons, and, with William Dugan back at the wheel, drove out of the CP toward Chartres.
Cullen was the corps’ adjutant general—the principal administrative staff officer, responsible for procedures affecting awards and decorations, casualty operations, and administration and preservation of records of all personnel, normally subordinated to the chief of staff and known as the G-1. The adjutant often works directly for the deputy chief of staff, the position in which Griffith also served in addition to preforming his duties as G-3.
Griffith left to determine whether German forces had now occupied the cathedral, despite the fact that his job and training were all to plan, oversee, receive information collected by G-2 through proper channels, and draft and disseminate orders to others at the front to carry out. Why did Griffith take it upon himself to investigate what Eugene Schulz, in his 2012 memoir, would call a “personal mission”? It is likely that requests had been received during the night from field commanders whose troops were being hit by what appeared to them to be coordinated fire. Those commanders could have been likely to order artillery and mortar fire to protect their troops. Sources are in conflict as to whether anyone had sought to change the standing order.
What is clear is that corps artillery was under the overall command of corps headquarters, and specifically its G-3 Section. Griffith’s job was foremost to administer tactical plans and develop orders for battle in conjunction with the location and strength of the enemy as assessed by the G-2 Section and then write battle orders and assign units to execute them. G-3’s function was not to engage in surveillance, much less to do it personally. It appears, then, that Griffith’s personal investigation was more than a standard inquiry he could have undertaken simply by asking the G-2 to look into it.
Within a couple of hours after General Walker’s briefing, two local priests began daily Mass before a small group of congregants in the cathedral’s Chapel of the Sacred Heart, which was tucked along the south hallway on one shoulder of the main altar. Those attending the morning services entered the cathedral through the rampart-shrouded west portal and one of its great west doors, which opened into a Gothic 125-foot vaulting-capped nave, supported by huge marble-faced pillars running the distance of one and a half football fields along the marble floor through the nave and then the choir, leading to the altar poised at the east end.
One of the two priests who conducted Mass was Father Cassegrain, and the other was Douin, who also served in temporary assignments as vicar for the cathedral’s adjoining seminary and of the hospital in Chartres. Douin had walked all the way to Chartres the prior Sunday, August 12, carrying his bag and seeing along the way charred vehicles on the roadside. He had spoken with locals concerning the movement of the Germans in retreat from the Allied forces and of the acts of sabotage and skirmishes between Resistance fighters and the Germans. He also passed through German checkpoints and learned of their actions to seal up the city—permitting people to enter but none to leave.
The morning of the sixteenth, Father Douin felt the air still moist from the night’s rain. He heard another priest’s voice reverberate through the vast, open cathedral, as well as bursts of rifle fire and occasional explosions in the distance. These sounds also echoed through the narrow streets, reminding the parishioners who attended the Mass that the cathedral provided both physical and spiritual sanctuary.