45
Mérignac Airfield, near Bordeaux. June 17, 1940. 8 a.m. 15°C. A small plane sent by Winston Churchill takes off. Among its passengers is Charles de Gaulle, a junior general in the defeated army. Although France has surrendered, he will defy orders and set up a Free French government in London. He looks down on shattered tanks lining the roads and a torpedoed ship, sinking, with two thousand British troops on board. Years later, André Malraux will ask what it was like. Grasping his hands, the general, deeply affected, says, “Oh, Malraux. It was appalling.”
THE GERMANS HAD FABULOUS WEATHER FOR THEIR INVASION. Hitler’s armies attacked Holland and Belgium on May 10. By June 14, five weeks later, they had overrun those countries and were in Paris. It didn’t rain once. The Wehrmacht marched down the Champs-Élysées under blue skies, perfect for the newsreel cameramen who framed them with a background of the Arc de Triomphe.
Some say those sunny days lost Germany the war. Instead of ordering an immediate amphibious assault on southern England that might have forced Britain to surrender, Hitler took time out to enjoy France. The official newsreel Die Deutsche Wochenschau filmed him on the esplanade of the Palais de Chaillot, overlooking the Champ de Mars and the Eiffel Tower, grinning as widely as any tourist.
How obliging of the French, he must have thought, to surrender so quickly, making it unnecessary to level Paris as he had Warsaw the previous fall. Now the city could serve as a rest-and-recreation center for the Reich. Every serviceman was promised at least one week’s leave in Paris. Luftwaffe Oberleutnant Dietrich Schultz-Köhn, a familiar figure on the prewar Paris jazz scene, acted as emissary to the café and club owners, arranging entertainment for the troops. His efforts earned him the nickname “Doktor Jazz.”
With the armistice of June 22, hostilities ceased. The armed forces stood down. A puppet government under the eighty-year-old World War I hero Marshal Philippe Pétain administered most of the country from the spa town of Vichy. The coasts and Paris remained under military rule.
Along the Atlantic, battalions of prisoners built submarine pens. Protected by 3.5 meters of solid concrete, the bases at Saint-Nazaire, Lorient, La Rochelle, and Bordeaux would survive the worst that Allied bombers could drop on them.
I know this area well. Once a year, as reliably as any migrating bird or upstream-swimming salmon, we close our Paris apartment, arrange for the concierge to water the plants and feed the cat, and retreat for two weeks to the southwest and the breezier, fresher, less complicated countryside of Charente, where Marie-Dominique’s grandparents were thoughtful enough to bequeath her their spacious home in the village of Fouras.
Paris has few memorials to the occupation. Here and there, discreet marble tablets embedded in walls signify that some resistant died on this corner pour la Patrie. On anniversaries, a military charity attaches a bouquet to each memorial, using the metal ring conveniently provided. Otherwise, there are few tangible souvenirs. It’s not something of which the French wish to be reminded. As the British novelist Sebastian Faulks wrote, “De Gaulle offered his battered country a fairy tale; we resisted the Germans and we freed ourselves by force of arms. His weary, disillusioned people were happy to accept this politically necessary fable.”
Paradoxically, the occupation has left more signs in the country, particularly in areas like Charente, where the Nazis had time to put down roots. Incongruity makes such survivals stand out. A crumbling pillbox is more sinister for being surrounded by grazing cows, and a rusting metal pylon for the family of storks that has set up house on top. At the La Pallice submarine base a few kilometers outside La Rochelle, pleasure boats idle by as their owners peer into the dark from which wolf packs of U-boats once slipped out into the Atlantic. Today, the bases are maintained as locations for foreign filmmakers. Those at La Pallice were used in Raiders of the Lost Ark and Das Boot.
La Rochelle bears numerous signs of occupation. With twenty-two thousand Germans billeted in a town of only thirty-five thousand people, its cafés, theaters, and cinemas were so completely engulfed that the Germans created their own.
Nazi bunker in La Rochelle.
The strangest began life as the best hotel in town, a four-story building down a quiet side street. As was typical, the officers of the Kriegsmarine moved in, which created a tempting target for local resistants or a precision bombing raid. The officers needed something solid to protect them from bombs; a shield as thick, in fact, as that protecting the submarine pens. With Teutonic thoroughness, engineers cleared the lowest floors of the hotel and filled the rooms with concrete.
Once the bombing intensified, the basement was enlarged to accommodate a small hospital. As they spent more time there, officers demanded a bar and a space for dancing. They decorated the walls with examples of Navy humor, and a few mermaids. An air-raid shelter became the town’s hottest, indeed only, nightclub.
My guide to the bunker proudly informed me that his father, who had projected films for the Germans, also found the music they most enjoyed, scouring the city and surrounding districts for records by American big bands, in particular Count Basie, Duke Ellington, and Jimmie Lunceford. As Hitler frowned on such “decadent” music, one had to be cautious about discussing titles in the hearing of the more committed servants of the Reich. “Saint Louis Blues” became “La Tristesse de Saint Louis”: “the sadness of Saint Louis.”
As the war turned against Hitler, the garrisons in La Rochelle and the nearby town of Royan were trapped in a “pocket” with their backs to the sea. The Luftwaffe air-dropped supplies and other necessities, including movies. The last production of Studio Babelsberg before Berlin fell to the Russians was the historical epic Kolberg. Goering ordered a copy parachuted into the pocket, allowing a defiant joint Berlin–La Rochelle premiere to take place on January 30, 1945. Since the film dealt with a German city’s resistance to Napoléon in 1806, when the whole population marched out against the enemy, the message was clear: La Rochelle was expected to hold out till the end.
Once I showed curiosity about the local history of the war years, word got around. Like shy animals nervous of the daylight, amateur conservators and armchair historians emerged from the shadows to show off their treasures.
“This will interest you,” one bookseller said, taking what looked like a school exercise book from his locked cabinet. “It’s a recipe book from 1943.”
I leafed through the neatly handwritten pages. Eggs, cream, ham; soufflés, roast goose, even lobster thermidor.
“They lived well,” I said. “I had no idea.”
“Oh, I don’t think the owner ever cooked these dishes. Everything was rationed. The Germans got anything good.”
“Why compile this book, then?”
He shrugged. “Perhaps . . . to remember?” He replaced it reverently. “Think of it as . . . culinary pornography.”
Fouras itself is too small to support a bookshop, but an enterprising bibliophile runs a stall in the market square. He hailed me one morning as I walked back from the halles, loaded with produce for lunch.
“I was talking to a friend in La Rochelle,” he said. From under his table, he produced a carefully wrapped book. “Is this the kind of thing you’re looking for?”
I put down the bags of cheese, peaches, and pâté. The family wouldn’t mind waiting for lunch. And if they did . . . well, even in France, history could trump appetite.
The book, in a flimsy brown paper wrapper, was called Occupation (1940–1945): Siège de La Rochelle. I’d never heard of the writer, Albert Miaux, but the fact that the book was published by an obscure press in La Rochelle suggested he wasn’t a household name. (In fact, he wrote only one book, and I was holding it. Nor was it ever circulated more widely than the La Rochelle area.)
The text was made up of poems, illustrated with smudgy drawings. From a quick glance, Miaux was no Verlaine. What made the book interesting was his subject matter: He had created a poetic history of the occupation. There were poems about the exodus from La Rochelle as the Germans approached, people clogging the roads, possessions heaped on top of ancient automobiles; the triumphant troops in gray; the huddle of people under the colonnade outside the Kommandatura as the Germans imposed their restrictions on Jews and other non-Aryans. Here were glimpses of a submarine heading back to base at La Pallice and German officers dining on the products of the black market or enjoying a film with a mostly French audience, but also the roundup of young men being shipped to Germany as forced labor. (Marie-Dominique’s father had been among them. He survived the trip, but died of tuberculosis contracted there.)
If Miaux had photographed these things or even recorded them in a diary, he would have risked imprisonment, even death, as a spy. But who would suspect an amateur poet? Poetry was like a cloak of invisibility, as the Allies knew. As D-Day approached, the British intelligence agency warned the French underground by broadcasting coded messages on the BBC. One text they used was Verlaine’s “Chanson d’automne.” The Germans listened to such transmissions as “Les sanglots longs / Des violons / De l’automne / Blessent mon coeur / D’une langueur / Monotone,” thought, “Those crazy English. What are they on about now?” and shrugged it off.
Despite the urging from Berlin to hold out, the Germans in La Rochelle surrendered on May 7, 1945.
“You know,” said the curator of the bunker, “we had that Doktor Jazz down here.”
“Schultz-Köhn?” I said. “What was he doing in La Rochelle?”
“Something to do with the surrender. He didn’t make a very good impression on the Americans, I hear.”
“Why?”
“Apparently he asked if they had any Benny Goodman records.”
One of the last of Miaux’s poems celebrated the first harvest after liberation.
It’s the month when the earth rejoices in its abundance
When the hot sun brings the wheat to maturity
When the stalks are heavy with grain
And the harvesters gather them, singing.
The poem was called “Messidor.” Naturally.