EARLIER IN THE DAY, BEFORE GRIFFITH HAD LEFT CHARTRES CATHEdral to drive to the Thirty-Eighth’s assembly area, he had reported the cathedral clear of Germans. One reason we know it was clear when he did so is that Father Paul Douin, in his diary for the day, described his before-noon encounter with the tall, rifle-carrying American officer who had come into the cathedral through its north door looking for Germans and had sought the priests’ help to locate the tower stairs, had climbed the towers, and had confirmed that at the moment he had found no Germans—neither artillery spotters nor snipers—anywhere in the towers or elsewhere in the building. Douin did not learn the American officer’s name but was struck by his imposing presence and had initially feared that he might have shot Douin and his fellow priest in the chaos of the moment before learning that they were clerics.
That afternoon, after he had known the American officer had left, Douin heard shots and saw street fighters shooting up at the towers and yelling about snipers hiding there, a sign that Germans must have reentered the cathedral from time to time and somehow gained access to the towers.
Through the sixteenth, the Americans had sent only the Twenty-Third Armored Infantry Battalion into the zone, not yet sufficient infantry-troop strength to conduct house-to-house searches. During and after Griffith’s drive to the Thirty-Eighth’s assembly area, scores of previously defeated German soldiers, who had escaped from other battles, continued to gather and reassemble at Chartres and were being resupplied and redirected by local German commanders to reenter the city—or may never have left and still hid in cellars and on rooftops sniping to sow chaos and inflict injury and death on American soldiers, French Resistance fighters, monuments, and bridges.
Thus, toward the mid- and late afternoon of the sixteenth, well after Griffith’s inspection and departure, a Father Launay, along with Father Douin—and a handful of American news correspondents—had witnessed German riflemen shooting intermittently from the cathedral’s towers. And at least once during that period, a half dozen Germans—who had somehow entered the towers and were shooting as a group—and French resisters were shooting back. American infantrymen and armed French civilians had crouched at corners and had peered from behind walls as they fired hour after hour at what they believed were German snipers perched up there. From the street below the towers, numerous nicks were visible in the scrollwork of stone where bullets had hit, but no serious structural damage had been inflicted. Douin reported that he’d heard that German soldiers had been ordered, in the course of their retreat from the city, to snipe from the north tower and to blow up the historic Porte Guillaume gate to the city and some bridges.
The northern tower’s many openings made it attractive to the German snipers. The sniping and the counterfire peaked that afternoon as the bells rang out at 3:00 p.m. in their normal fashion, as they’d done for ages. Only this time they did so as Germans were despoiling the city.
Inside, at about the same time, Douin and Father Cassegrain felt things had calmed down a bit. They wanted to leave by the south door but thought it wasn’t prudent to do so, because when Douin had looked out that door, he saw an American soldier, with a carbine, at the corner of the small street running up to the south door of the cathedral, shooting in the direction of the bell towers. The priest thought the soldier didn’t know that there were Americans in the gallery and that he risked shooting at the first head that he saw up there. Having seen the priests signaling to him, he ran over to the entrance of the south door and finally understood that there may not just be suspected Germans up in the towers but also at least one American soldier in pursuit of Germans. Earlier he had heard the snipers in the tower sniping busily and armed civilians in the streets and alleys returning the fire ten for one. By 5:00 p.m., the sniping from the tower had died down, the city at last appearing to be under American control.
According to the notes of Father Douin, he and his companion priest spent the remainder of the afternoon with scraps of boards, hammer, and pincers, repairing the doors to the cathedral’s kitchen storeroom and its Chapel of the Sacred Heart, which had been battered by explosions during the night.
At about 6:30 p.m., Douin was about to set out to pay a long-delayed visit to the Carmelite convent, two miles north of the cathedral, to deliver a bundle of old newspapers and clean white leaflets salvaged from the office material in his seminary quarters. But as he was leaving the cathedral via the west doors, rain started to fall again. He went back in through the same doors but learned that the north doors had been locked. He was standing by the south door thinking about what to do when he saw three people walking around the choir toward him in front of the Chapel of the Sacred Heart.
One was Father Guédou, who was accompanied by an American officer in uniform and a young girl. She was a “Nogentise,” a former prisoner of the Germans at Nogent, who explained that she was acting as the interpreter for the American and that he had come to investigate reports that that morning Germans had been in the bell towers. As he left, the officer asked everyone to repeat the names and duties of the two priests, Fathers Finet and Guédou, who were interrogated, so he could make a written record. When he was done, he walked out the south door into the square where his jeep was waiting. The officer jumped into the jeep, and the driver pirouetted the jeep south, away from the cathedral, to pursue the investigation.
Father Douin talked then with Monsieur Manuel, who recounted German atrocities that had occurred that morning against Resistance members near the Place des Épars and the Avenue Maunoury, three blocks south of the prefecture. Monsieur Manuel said, “Mr. Tuvache managed to survive by pretending he was dead, but his son didn’t make it, the Germans firing their machine guns without pity on the pile of cadavers in front of them. So this is war, and this time, here.”
Thus, through the evening of the sixteenth—the Germans continuing to reenter the city of Chartres, counterattack, and redeploy to oust advancing American units and defend against their penetration—the battle for Chartres continued around the city, despite intervals of relative peace and quiet, which had drawn Chartres’ citizens out into the streets for intermittent celebrations and displays of reprisal against collaborators.
The next morning, the seventeenth, at 06:00, a Captain Johnston of the Seventh Armored Division Eighty-Seventh Cavalry Mechanized Reconnaissance Squad, while scouting through Lèves, discovered Griffith’s body and notified corps headquarters.
At CP 7 in Courville-sur-Eure, Griffith’s corps headquarters colleagues and superiors took his death hard. The corps had suffered significant losses. That morning’s casualty list handed to General Walker reported eleven killed; twenty wounded, sick and injured; and forty-nine missing. The corps had captured three hundred additional prisoners besides the three hundred they had already evacuated. More than one hundred other prisoners still huddled under corps detention during the night in an area threatened by enemy troops, requiring reassignment of an antiaircraft battalion for protection during the night.
Even in the feverishly busy headquarters, so close to the corps’ next objective, all took time out to honor Griffith. Staff officers located the best casket available in Chartres, and an Army mortician prepared him for a temporary formal military burial, which was conducted by the corps on the afternoon of the seventeenth in a temporary cemetery in a plowed-up field surrounded by trees at Saint-Cornielle, seventy miles southwest of Chartres, nine miles northeast of Le Mans. A bugler sounded taps, and more than two dozen corps headquarters officers and staff stood at attention, facing Griffith’s flag-draped and flower-covered casket, which would be marked by a simple white wooden cross until later reburial.
Back at Chartres, more Germans were showing up as each hour passed. According to eyewitness newspaper reporters at the scene, late that afternoon street fighting was still going on, and snipers were again firing persistently from the north tower of the cathedral. Rather than destroy the tower with heavy fire to dislodge the German gunners, Americans and Frenchmen used only small arms. Hence the lengthy resistance. It is not clear why the cathedral had not been secured by the Americans.
Late that afternoon, snipers were still firing from one of the bell towers as the American forces consolidated their position in the area and pressed on and after the Germans, who were fleeing in several directions. Another reporter wrote that into the afternoon a half dozen snipers were still holding out in the tower and drawing counterfire from local patriots which put fresh nicks in the tower’s tracery. The houses along the streets showed marks of a tank battle and one disabled American tank was pulled up on the sidewalk.
But even on the afternoon of August 17, German attacks continued in the city. At 2:00 p.m., two American newspaper reporters were in the cathedral being shown around by the curate and cathedral historian.
They had begun in the parapet below the Roman tower, from which they’d heard Americans firing on German snipers. They climbed further into the tower hoping to get a view through binoculars all he way to Versailles, but as they reached the midway point, above the belfry on a narrow, winding stone stairway, a shell hit the other tower, sending masonry and clouds of stone dust billowing over the towers and rooftops. In less than a minute, two other shells came over, one of which hit the other tower. The reporters’ driver was waiting in the street. They tried to take a shorter route down, but the curate struggled to unlock an ancient door, and they had to retrace their steps and went instead onto a catwalk around an outside railing never meant for support and within view of anyone, including any snipers, below. After climbing, crawling, and stooping, they arrived behind the main altar and made their way to the street and safety.
At 3:00 p.m. on August 17, the Seventh Armored Division was ordered by General Walker’s Twentieth Corps to clean out Chartres completely, commencing its attack at 4:00 p.m. with additional artillery support.
Still, the Germans weren’t giving up. Walker realized that the corps faced losing the newly liberated city, so he rushed in a combat team of the Fifth Infantry Division. Large and still organized groups of German troops occupied portions of the city and the woods to the south with many forty-millimeter and eighty-eight-millimeter antiaircraft weapons, but corps troops eliminated those pockets of resistance with hard, close fighting, supported by concentrations from corps artillery. One group of over eight hundred Germans, commanded by a colonel, surrendered as a group.
On the eighteenth, General Walker ordered his Seventh Armored Division to pull its tanks away from the city into an improvised tank park. He gave his Fifth Infantry Division the mission of taking the town with a third attack, following the Seventh Armored Division, as the Fifth Infantry Division had done with prior towns in the race across France.
This task fell to the Fifth’s Eleventh Combat Team, including the Eleventh Infantry Regiment and others, to provide more riflemen, and it secured the town by a final assault on the morning of August 19, taking more than 1,500 German prisoners, with an estimated 1,800 German dead, and capturing many vehicles and stores and two airfields in the vicinity together with thirty to forty destroyed planes. A separate task force of the Thirty-Eighth Armored Infantry Battalion took control of the area around the airport. The American forces suffered approximately one hundred casualties during the battle for Chartres.
On the seventeenth alone, more than a dozen FFI members had been killed in Chartres’ city center, and many more were injured, including both FFI and among the civilian population, due to artillery fire from unknown sources.
Many FFI complained that they could have avoided many losses of men had they received from the Americans the use of one or two armored vehicles, but the US Army was not inclined to receive directives from such unofficial soldiers with little experience. Firemen of Chartres intervened to fight blazes ranging from Lèves on the north to Luisant on the south along Maunoury Avenue, but lack of water made the fight impossible.
Kenneth Foree, a prominent editor with the Dallas Morning News, would investigate Griffith’s death during the year following, and he interviewed General Walker and various corps headquarters officers and other witnesses. Foree would write in mid-1945 that “Young as colonels go, being only forty-three,” Griffith was
a big, bulldog, driving fighter who had everything, said his associates, that could be expected of a West Pointer, [and who’d] proved a marked addition to the desert staff, became a training expert and had so much punch that at times he had to be held back. To him there was only one kind of soldier—one who gave everything he had.
But two decades later, Reader’s Digest published in its August 1965 issue a story written by a renowned war correspondent, Gordon Gaskill, for its series of First-Person Articles (inviting “hitherto unpublished narrative” stories of “an unusual personal experience,” for which the magazine had awarded Gaskill one of its First Person Awards). In his story, “The Day We Saved Chartres Cathedral,” Gaskill claimed that he and his fellow correspondents in Chartres on August 16, 1944, had saved the cathedral by staring down a young trigger-happy artillery lieutenant.
Some could interpret it as a second history of what happened at the cathedral that day, but others, including Griffith’s family—and some of Griffith’s war colleagues, including William Dugan, Robert Cullen, Melville Stark, and even Colonel William Collier—would take umbrage. Some accused the author of deceit.
A more charitable view of Gaskill’s story could be that—assuming his could also be true—both events may have occurred hours apart, with Griff’s inspection (as told by Father Douin and reported by Dugan, Stark, and Cullen and confirmed by American and French military authorities soon after in official citations) having occurred before or around noon, whereas Gaskill’s tale occurred considerably later into the afternoon. Gaskill’s evoked a somewhat different scene at the cathedral that day, here paraphrased:
Gaskill and two companion war correspondents, Clark Lee and Bob Reuben, had trailed behind the Third US Army. The day before, fifty miles to the west at Third Army headquarters, an American colonel at a command tent had briefed the three about the cathedral, reminding them of the supreme commander’s standing order that American artillerymen were to avoid hitting historic monuments, including the cathedral, and were to aim at only observed point targets.
If the Germans don’t hurt the building, the colonel explained, “of course we won’t, either, unless absolutely necessary. In such matters, we’re following Eisenhower’s directive to the letter.”
The correspondents had arrived in Chartres on the sixteenth, following behind the lead American forces, and had just sat down to a surprising special lunch of eggs, sausage, and salad at a Chartres hotel when they were interrupted by a frantic Frenchman who ran into the dining room, crying out, “The Americans are going to shell the cathedral!”
They jumped out to the reporters’ jeep and sped up the hill to the large square a few hundred yards from the cathedral. The square was filled with Frenchmen who were scared almost silent by what they saw: three American tanklike vehicles, with snub-nosed guns for close-range shelling, had come to a halt facing the cathedral and were aiming their barrels upward at the cathedral’s towers.
The reporters pushed their way through the crowd to position themselves nose-to-nose with a young Seventh Armored Division lieutenant in charge of the guns who was facing down the shouts of an enraged Frenchman in a major’s uniform and failing to understand what the major was saying, so one correspondent asked what was up. The lieutenant pointed up to the cathedral and said, “The Jerries must have left some artillery spotters behind, up there. We’re going to knock them out.”
But just how, asked the reporter, did the lieutenant know that German spotters were up there?
“Bound to be,” the lieutenant said. “Can’t you hear those shells falling? That means they’ve got a spotter somewhere around, and those towers are the obvious place.”
The French major frantically spelled out to the reporter—who spoke some broken French—that of course the locals had been suspicious about the cathedral and had organized a guard that for the last several days had kept close watch on it. The major concluded, “I can assure you that there is not one single German in the cathedral, and thus there is no need to fire on it.”
The reporter translated these words to the lieutenant, who scoffed, “Ahhh, I don’t trust him.”
The French major pleaded, “Surely you can see this is not observed artillery fire!”
The lieutenant ignored both the major and the correspondents and ordered his men to load and aim. The crowd let out a murmur of fright, and with more pleading with the reporters, the major convinced them to employ their reporters’ savvy to convince the lieutenant to allow a group of civilians twenty minutes to search the cathedral inside.
The lieutenant narrowed his eyes and barked back, “What the hell are you guys butting in for? You’re civilians. It’s none of your damn business what I do!”
Yet the reporters were making it their business right then. One of them recounted to the lieutenant Eisenhower’s standing directive that in cases like this the lieutenant was not to fire on the cathedral unless he was sure the enemy was using it militarily—and to the harm of the Allies—and said, “Even if you don’t trust this Frenchman’s story, you ought to know that this is not observed fire. It’s falling at random. It has not hit a single American soldier or vehicle.” In fact, he noted, it was hitting and killing French, and yet it was the French who were insisting that there were no Germans up in the towers guiding the fire, and he implored the lieutenant again to let the Frenchmen take twenty minutes to check the church.
The lieutenant just ignored the reporters until one of them blurted out, “I’ll take your name personally to Eisenhower, and I can promise you that you’ll be the sorriest lieutenant in the American Army.”
The reporters had all just interviewed Eisenhower over several days. They thought they could—and would—get through to the general if they were forced by the lieutenant to do so, but the lieutenant—red in the face—answered through tight lips, “Okay. Twenty minutes, but that’s all. I’ll be watching and waiting, right here.”
The correspondents translated the lieutenant’s answer and heard the crowd’s sigh of relief. The French major and the reporter hopped into the jeep and rushed to the cathedral. The locals knew the layout of the cathedral and split into two groups, one for each tower. The Americans followed the major’s group all the way up the long climb through the spiral stairs and were panting for air by the time they reached the top. They found that the French major had been right: no one—German or other—was in either tower. One correspondent rang the heaviest of the imposing bells of the tower, with three shorts and a long—a Morse code V for victory—and the crowd below hooted its rapture. But by then, the lieutenant and his mobile guns had disappeared.
In 1965, Griffith’s brother Philip and other members of Griffith’s family would become disturbed on discovering the existence of Gas-kill’s Reader’s Digest story. Griffith’s family wrote to the magazine’s editors and asked for a retraction and also contacted Army headquarters in Washington requesting an investigation. The magazine’s editors stood by their story but pointed out that their Paris-based fact-checker had told them that she’d heard a half dozen stories from Americans and Frenchmen alike to the effect that they had saved the cathedral, and she thought they could all be true, but the important thing was that the cathedral had been saved.
Army headquarters, which shortly after the battle for Chartres had posthumously awarded Griffith the Distinguished Service Cross, replied by letter to the family that the Army’s award to Griffith was based on certified statements by four witnesses, which by 1965 were no longer available. Headquarters wrote that there was a possibility that both the story of Griffith’s inspection and the story of Gaskill’s adventure might be correct and that both “accounts described could have occurred during the heat and confusion of battle that day.”
Philip Griffith would also write to Kenneth Foree in October 1965—two decades after publication of Foree’s article based on his own investigation—and ask Foree what the editor thought of Gaskill’s account and of Gaskill’s claim that he and his companions saved the cathedral. Foree would write back:
Maybe Gordon Gaskill is right. Maybe it was saved twice. Maybe also the dust of twenty years accumulation lowers the visibility of a person and covers or softens the facts, or enlarges them, or distorts them.
But this I know damn well. That Walton Walker, a tough general if I ever met one, told me the story and if the tanks and infantry had already gone through I don’t know what the hell an artilleryman was preparing to shell the cathedral for. He was in no danger and it was always a favorite sport or tactics of the Krauts to shell the crossroads behind.
I’ll stick with General Walker who long since joined Colonel Griffith, and who told me that story only a year or so after the shooting was over.
It is understandable that recognition came to Griff. After all, he’d done a great deal more in addition to saving the cathedral and—to boot—had died doing it. Besides, why hadn’t other Chartres locals from that crowd in the square stepped forward to honor Gaskill? Also, a search of the US Army’s institutional records revealed nothing to confirm that any demands to shoot at the cathedral ever rose to the level of an order. On the contrary, many after-action reports of the various units refer to one or more orders to limit all artillery fire to “observed” shelling—shelling controlled with on-the-ground direct spotting—which was to be directed upon only fixed targets away from the cathedral. Gaskill’s story seems simply outweighed by the documentary evidence and the fact that he didn’t come forward until twenty years after the events he purported to report.
Yet it also seems clear from the later reports that fighting continued in the center of Chartres and around the cathedral throughout August 16, and on the seventeenth and eighteenth, despite the fact that the Twenty-Third Infantry had moved in and taken positions and set up a headquarters in the northeast part of the city. This condition certainly affords a predicate for an event such as that which Gaskill reports to have indeed actually occurred as he described it in his Reader’s Digest piece.
At the cathedral, Griff’s actions may not have been the only ones that saved the cathedral—and likely were not—but that made them no less actions of valor and importance in the long life of the sacred building. And later, at the battalion assembly area, and later still in Lèves—though he made his decisions quickly—he did not make them in haste. They stemmed from the mind and force of character that made him a fine soldier and from his training and experience that had brought the opportunity to serve his country, his mission, and the people of France.
Allied demolitions experts who arrived at Chartres also found the cathedral at risk of being damaged and possibly destroyed by twenty-two sets of explosives placed on nearby bridges and other structures. Stewart Leonard, one of their team, helped defuse the bombs. Robert M. Edsel, in his book The Monuments Men, recounts a later conversation over drinks in a Berlin apartment between Leonard and Bernie Taper, who served as one of the Monuments Men. Taper would ask Leonard whether he thought risking his life to defuse bombs in order to save the cathedral was worth it. That is, “Was art worth a life, Taper wanted to know . . . it was a question that haunted him.” Leonard answered,
“I had that choice . . . I chose to remove the bombs. It was worth the reward.”
“What reward?”
“When I finished, I got to sit in Chartres Cathedral, the cathedral I had helped save, for almost an hour. Alone.”
Overall, it seems that circumstances requiring two life-defining decisions confronted Griffith in the last hours of his life, and both circumstances Griffith attacked with fast—almost spur-of-the-moment—decision making. One of those decisions—to risk his life by searching in the purported fire zone all around the outside of the cathedral and then inside the building when enemy soldiers had been seen inside and were suspected of still being hidden there, and to employ his position of authority to call off any artillery attack on the cathedral—would place Griff’s name permanently into the backstory of a great monument, on the long list of people whose valor, dedication, and willingness to take deadly risks created, maintained, or saved the cathedral. Griff’s subsequent decision, at the assembly area, to take over command of the armored infantry column and to go ahead of it in his jeep—and, critically, to jump onto that tank and to lead from its top—would cost him his life and would place his name in the long list of soldiers who died with valor while carrying out their mission. And because of Griff’s outsized energy and drive, his still-young age and tremendous promise, his principled life and the respect and admiration he’d earned from his superiors, peers, and subordinates, he would be remembered as a great soldier.
General Walker handwrote a letter to Griffith’s widow on August 18, expressing his condolences. He revealed to her that when Griffith died he was on a tank leading an infantry unit against a detachment of the enemy, which was holding up the American advance. He also told her that “Griff was my choice as Deputy Chief of Staff and Operations Officer. I leaned heavily upon his judgment. He was a wonderful soldier. His ideals were of the noblest. His record was always superior, and his loss is a severe blow to the XX Corps . . . he died as he would have wished—a soldier performing his duty in a heroic manner.” In November 1944, Griffith’s widow received the award to him posthumously of the Army Distinguished Service Cross for his heroism at Chartres and Lèves on August 16.
Twentieth Corps fought a successful five-day battle for Chartres from August 15 to August 19, 1944. General de Gaulle visited Chartres to celebrate its liberation on August 19 before taking Rambouillet in preparation for entering Paris. Among the notables to meet him in the square in front of the cathedral was Silvia Monfort.
Twentieth Corps went on to seize a bridgehead seventeen miles east, over the Aunay River, thirteen miles beyond Chartres, and reached the Seine at Melun. To the north, the Seventh Armored Division established various bridgeheads over the Seine, including at Mantes-Gassicourt.
On August 18, the Stars and Stripes daily US Armed Forces newspaper reported that General Patton’s Third Army troops had neared Paris the night before, after capturing Chartres, Orléans, and Dreux—three capital cities on the main road into the French capital. The German high command reported heavy fighting about twenty-five miles from Paris, on the main Chartres-to-Paris road. The American advance broke through on a sixty-mile front between Orléans and Dreux in what Berlin termed “and all-out drive for Paris” by strong tank and motorized-artillery formations.
A UPI report from Chartres said French Resistance forces fought the Germans in the streets before the American entry and deserved a “lion’s share” of the credit for capture of the city. Roger Joly, who had been in combat during the war himself, wrote in his book La libération de Chartres (The liberation of Chartres), based on archival research and witness interviews, that
[t]he liberation of Chartres was essentially the work of the people of Chartres themselves.
The Americans received the order to safeguard this symbolic city, with her cathedral, which Maurice Clavel, then head of the Resistance in Eure-et-Loir, and his partner, Sylvia Montfort, dreamed of liberating.
From 15 to 19 August, the Twentieth US Army Corps fought against German units in often extremely violent combat. Simultaneously, at the cost of severe losses, the local resistance and the Resistance fighters repelled the occupiers outside the city. . . .
The symbolic value remains intact: how and why men of all ages decided one day to risk their lives to liberate the city where, on 17 June 1940, Jean Moulin engaged, alone, in the first battle of the Resistance.