“If you can 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.”
—General Jean de Monsabert, August 20, 1944
As the Americans and the Germans traded blows up the Rhône Valley, two other battles of equal significance to the Allied war effort were being fought on the Mediterranean coast. The Germans had not abandoned the ports of Toulon and Marseille. On the orders of Adolf Hitler, they were to be turned into fortresses and defended “to the last man.” If they could not be held, their harbors were to be utterly destroyed, just as had happened at Brest, Cherbourg, Nantes, and Saint-Malo in the north and Cannes and Nice in the south on August 15. When the order to deny Toulon to the Allies arrived on General Wiese’s desk, he handed it on to Lieutenant General Johannes Baessler, commander of the 242nd Infantry Division defending Toulon.
Baessler was a seasoned soldier who had been transferred into what had seemed a quiet sector in the summer of 1943. In 1939 he had been Chief of Staff of the 11th Corps in Poland and then in the Netherlands, Belgium, France, and the Balkans, the years of Blitzkrieg triumph. In February 1942, he was promoted to Major General and assumed command of the 9th Panzer Division. In the following November, he took command of the 14th Panzer Division at Stalingrad, where the division was virtually wiped off the order of battle and he was seriously wounded after just over three weeks in the post. He was flown out of the encirclement and judged medically unfit to return to active service until July 1943, when he took command of the static 242nd Infantry Division headquartered in Hyères. The division consisted of approximately 18,000 men, including 5,500 naval personnel and 2,800 Luftwaffe troops, plus naval and army artillery and antiaircraft guns.
Toulon itself lay in a formidable defensive position. The city had grown up around a massive bay behind which rose the limestone masses of three hills, Monts Caume, Faron, and Coudon, rising to 2,500 feet and dominating the heights above the port. All three had been heavily fortified by the German occupiers. Below them lay the Saint-Mandrier peninsula, arching into the Mediterranean and connected to the port by a causeway—the Isthme des Sablettes—which housed numerous gun emplacements, containing fifty-four artillery pieces and seventeen antiaircraft guns. The most formidable items of ordnance in this sector, controlling the approaches to Toulon, were two turrets, each containing two 340mm guns removed from the French battleship Provence. The Provence had been sunk by the Royal Navy in the harbor at Mers el Kébir in July 1940, refloated, and moved to Toulon. In November 1942, when the Germans occupied Toulon, the French scuttled the Provence, only for her to be raised in July 1943 and her guns removed for coastal defense. The batteries on the Saint-Mandrier peninsula were linked by a maze of tunnels containing electric power plants and well-stocked ammunition depots. Access to substantial water supplies anticipated a prolonged siege by the Allies. However, the majority of the guns could not be trained inland.
The landward approaches to Toulon were dotted with anti-tank obstacles, pillboxes, minefields, and more artillery positions. A strongly defended Toulon might have unhinged the Dragoon timetable but for events beyond the control of its defenders. Several days before Dragoon was launched, the senior naval commander in Toulon died of a heart attack and the defense of the city was taken over by Rear Admiral Heinrich Ruhfus, who attempted, not wholly successfully, to evacuate the civilian population, who were by now anticipating the arrival of the Allies. Ruhfus’s subsequent assessment of Toulon’s defenses confirmed his suspicions that they were strongest in all the wrong places. They were at their weakest on the landward side with scant attention being paid to the northern and western approaches to the city. Much depended on the speed of the Allied assault on Toulon. The city’s defenders manned their posts, while in the heavily mined harbor block-ships waited for orders to sail into position to deny the harbor entrance to Allied shipping.
Meanwhile, Truscott was executing some nimble diplomatic footwork to ensure that the French Army B took Toulon. General Patch was concerned about the time the French were taking to come ashore and feared a delay in the launching of a full-scale attack on the city. Truscott believed that the Germans were not holding the city in any great strength and was confident that his 3rd Infantry Division could take Toulon within forty-eight hours. In a meeting with Patch on August 17, he offered to undertake the operation if Patch wished him to do so. Patch briefly considered the offer, but both men quickly agreed that the diversion of the 3rd Division for this purpose would be a mistake that would have grave political repercussions and would make de Lattre de Tassigny, the commander of French Army B, even more difficult to deal with than he had been thus far. Truscott was to drive on to the west, isolating Toulon and Marseille before leaving them to be taken by the French.
In the run-up to Dragoon, de Lattre had planned for the separate, successive seizures of Toulon and Marseille, but the accelerated landings of the French 2nd Corps, and the withdrawal of German forces up the N-7, encouraged him to modify these plans and contemplate the simultaneous capture of the two ports from the north. The French 1st and 3rd Infantry Divisions had arrived in France on August 16, along with the armored combat commands of the 1st Armored Division, followed two days later by the French 9th Infantry Division. Once ashore, de Lattre divided them into five tactical groups, breaking up the armor of 1st Armored into its constituent combat commands to support the infantry formations. In overall command of 2nd Corps was General Edgard de Larminat, who had joined the French Army as a private in 1914, served at Verdun, and had risen to the rank of captain by the Armistice. After the war he served in the colonial infantry in Morocco, Mauretania, and Indochina. In 1939 he was a lieutenant colonel in the Middle East. He refused to acknowledge the French surrender in 1940 and was imprisoned in Damascus, but escaped to join the Free French in Palestine. He subsequently saw action with the 1st Free French Division in North Africa and Italy.
Two of de Larminat’s four subordinates in 2nd Corps shared his colonial military background. General Joseph Magnan commanded the 9th Infantry Division, consisting of Senegalese and Moroccan units and the Groupe de Commandos d’Afrique (African Commando Group). General Joseph de Goislard de Monsabert led the 3rd Infantry Division, consisting principally of Algerian troops. His relations with de Lattre were notoriously prickly. The 1st Free French Division, commanded by General Diego Brosset and formed by the first units to rally to de Gaulle after the fall of France, contained troops from mainland France and its colonial empire. Along with the 3rd Infantry Division, it was the most highly decorated French division of World War II. Brosset himself had fought at Bir Hakeim, in North Africa, and Italy. The 1st Armored Division was led by General Jean Touzet du Vigier, who had served as an infantryman with 9th Cuirassiers in World War I. After the war he had served under de Gaulle, training troops in the newly independent Poland, before being bitten by the armored warfare bug. In 1936 he was assigned to the Joint Tactical Studies Center at Versailles, where he became head of the cavalry section. As commander of the 2nd Armored Cuirassier Regiment in 1940, Touzet du Vigier witnessed the fall of France and later, during the Vichy regime, headed a cavalry department at Versailles while making clandestine contact with the nascent Resistance movement. His superiors chose to turn a blind eye to these activities and transferred him to Tunisia. When the Allies invaded French North Africa in November 1942, Touzet du Vigier joined the Free French.
De Lattre’s first task was to overcome the concentration of German troops at Hyères, nine miles east of Toulon, which had a fortified harbor housing a heavy concentration of artillery. The town of Hyères lies some two miles from the sea, from which it is separated by dense pine forests. The capture of Hyères’s offshore islands, Le Levant and Port-Cros, has been covered in Chapter 10. A town much favored by the British from the 18th century, Hyères’s famous visitors included Queen Victoria and Robert Louis Stevenson. In World War I it was a popular convalescing center for wounded British servicemen. Now its unwelcome guests were Armenian Ost troops of the 242nd Division. By August 19, the French were relieving the 3rd Division’s 7th RCT north of Hyères, suggesting that Patch had successfully encouraged de Lattre to move more quickly. On a trip to the front, Truscott met with General O’Daniel west of Brignoles, twenty miles north of Toulon. There he instructed O’Daniel to remain east of Saint-Maximin, blocking the roads into Toulon until he was passed by Combat Command Sudre, still under Truscott’s command and driving southwest to cut the coast road. Shortly afterward, Truscott instructed Brigadier General Sudre to push west to cut the coast road at Aubagne before joining French forces to attack Toulon from the west.
Later that day, Truscott received an order from the Seventh Army that CC Sudre was to move to Flassans, twenty miles north of Toulon, where it was be relieved of its attachment to 6th Corp at 2100. Truscott was resigned to the loss of the combat command but was furious that the order for Sudre to move to Flassans meant that his combat command had to about-face and countermarch for some twenty miles against the flow of 6th Corps’s traffic on the N-7. Truscott’s protests were unavailing. When he met Patch later that day in the latter’s headquarters in Saint-Tropez, he was told that de Lattre had been informed of his discomfiture but was not prepared to accommodate him. De Lattre, it seemed, was convinced that the capture of Toulon was going to be a difficult operation and had demanded the transfer of CC Sudre to his command. There was nothing Patch could do. Coalition unity trumped common sense and Truscott was obliged to execute his orders. The result, according to Truscott, was “Traffic congestion and confusion on that road [the N-7] all through the night and much of the following morning . . . for there was neither time to plan or facilities for, strict control. And then, no sooner had Sudre reached the Flassans locality than he was turned around and sent back again over the same road toward the same objectives that I had proposed to him.”1
On August 19, the attack on Hyères was launched by a regimental combat team of Brosset’s 1st Infantry Division, while Magnan’s 9th Infantry advanced along the N-7 from the north, sealing off the town. Allied warships bombarded the port sector south of the town, including the island of Porquerolles, the largest and most westerly of the Isles d’Hyères. The honor of opening the bombardment was given to the French battleship Lorraine. By August 21, French forces had seized control of Hyères and German positions to the north and east, including the fort on Mont Coudon. Among the Germans who fell into Allied hands was General Baessler, who had been trapped in his divisional headquarters. Command of the forces defending Toulon then passed to Admiral Ruhfus, who from the evening of August 21 was headquartered in the Saint-Mandrier peninsula with orders from Admiral Dönitz, commander-in-chief of the Kriegsmarine, to defend Toulon “to the last cartridge.”
Allied air raids on Toulon had begun on August 18, and a day later a bombardment was launched by ships of Western Naval Task Force, during which the destroyer Fantasque and the cruiser Georges Leygues were hit by German artillery. However, by August 21 naval gunfire had silenced most of the German batteries. The only regiment of the 242nd Division in the immediate vicinity of Toulon, the 918th Grenadier, had lost two battalions in the fighting at Hyères but was now tasked with establishing a perimeter defense north of Toulon in the foothills of Monts Coudon and Faron, which for centuries had been studded with stone fortresses. Now they stood in the path of three French columns descending on Toulon from the north.
French pressure on Toulon built up from the north and the east. To the east of the city, the French had fought their way through to Forte Sainte-Marguerite in La Garde, on the sea cliffs, by August 24. The senior German officer there, Lieutenant Commander Franz, agreed to surrender, declaring, “There have been too many deaths, too many injuries. I cannot continue.” With the French, he devised a face-saving paper trail indicating that he had defended the fort to the best of his ability before walking into captivity with six hundred officers and men in mid-afternoon. By the evening, three more strongholds, Carqueiranne, Colle-Noire, and Gavaresse, had capitulated. At Carqueiranne, the senior naval officer surrendered without a fight.
Progress to the north of Toulon followed a similar pattern. Units of Magnan’s 9th Division approached Fort Sainte-Catherine and dispatched a reconnaissance party, led by a Major Gauvin, to negotiate with the German garrison. With the help of his driver, an Alsatian who spoke German, Gauvin informed the fort’s defenders that their position was hopeless, and shortly afterward took the surrender of the strongpoint and sixty-five officers and men. Gauvin was less successful with the fort at Artigues, where the commander, a Major Fleischhut, refused to surrender, prompting a three-hour barrage. The way to the sea was open to the French, but the fort at Artigues, now isolated, still held out.
The German grip on the western approaches to Toulon was weakening. At the Hôtel de la Tour in Sanary-sur-Mer, ten miles from the center of the city, a battery commander, Lieutenant Kaiser, agreed to terms of surrender, and with his men handed over their weapons. French troops had now surrounded Toulon and were moving into the heart of the city, leaving holdouts like the fort at Artigues completely cut off. The assault on this strongpoint was renewed on the afternoon of the 25th, cheered on by a watching crowd of French civilians. Losing patience with the recalcitrant Fleischhut, Colonel Raoul Salan,* the commander of the 6th Senegalese Infantry Regiment, who had broken into the fort’s communications system, threatened the German commander over the telephone with a massacre by his bloodthirsty troops. In the early evening terms of surrender were agreed over a table groaning with beer and cigarettes. The approaches to the fort were de-mined and its garrison of 488 men, 62 of them wounded, marched out into captivity.
Later that day, as the sun set, the garrison at Malbousquet laid down their arms. At 0700 on the 26th, 150 of their wounded were evacuated and 1,450 officers and men emerged from the citadel. The last man to walk out was the commander of the port of Toulon. German resistance now collapsed like a house of cards but not without the occasional soldierly flourish. At noon on August 26, the commander of the fort at Six-Fours told his men, “Soldiers, we have honored ourselves through combat. We have attempted the impossible. Over three months our battery has brought down 102 aircraft. Today, surrounded on all sides, we are now powerless. As your commander, I am obliged to avoid a pointless massacre. You are from this moment forward prisoners. Conduct yourselves with dignity. Heil Hitler!”
Admiral Ruhfus and some 1,800 men were now under siege on the Saint-Mandrier peninsula. On the 27th General Magnan’s artillery, supported by Allied warships, began a heavy bombardment of the batteries on the peninsula, calling a halt at 1745 to give the Germans there time to reconsider their position. The surrender, when it came, left Ruhfus with no choice but to call it a day. He still had almost two thousand men under his command but was not prepared to send them to their deaths. Nevertheless, he remained a stickler for military protocol and reluctant to disobey his explicit orders to defend the port to the “last cartridge.” A get-out-of-jail-card soon appeared in the form of a German propaganda broadcast announcing that the stout defense of Toulon had enabled the 19th Army to cross the Durance River. While this escape had been engineered by the 198th Division’s rearguard rather than the defenders of Toulon, it gave Ruhfus the excuse he needed. He threw in the towel, surrendering shortly before midnight. On the morning of August 28, the French rounded up approximately 17,000 prisoners who also handed in huge quantities of arms and ammunition. French casualties had been high, at 2,700, over twice the German losses. Nevertheless, Toulon had been taken a week earlier than had been anticipated and with less damage to the harbor facilities than had been feared. Within three weeks, warships of the French navy sailed back into Toulon’s harbor that had been abandoned to the Germans at the end of 1940. One down and one to go.
Forty miles to the west of Toulon was the great commercial harbor of Marseille, the second-largest city in France. This ancient city, founded by the Greeks around 600 B.C.E., contained two harbors: the rectangular Old Port (Vieux Port) around which the city grew up and which is guarded by two impressive forts; and the huge modern harbor to the northwest. Unlike Toulon, Marseilles is not cradled by mountains but is sheltered to the southeast and northeast by ranges of hills and mountain chains. Like Toulon, Marseilles boasted seemingly formidable defenses: on the outskirts of the city roadblocks and minefields; numerous coastal batteries, minefields, and anti-submarine nets around its offshore islands; and concentrations of antiaircraft artillery in the Old Port and modern harbor. Block-ships were moored in the harbor, waiting to be sunk. Also targeted for destruction by the Germans was the massive transporter bridge connecting the quays in the Old Port, designed in 1905 but unused since the 1930s due to lack of maintenance. In early 1943, the Old Port district itself had been badly damaged by the Germans, and its population forcibly evacuated to camps outside the city, as a reprisal following the explosion of a number of bombs by the Resistance.
Tasked with the defense of the city was the 244th Infantry Division, which had been weakened by the transfer of one of its regiments, two of its regimental headquarters, and two artillery batteries. Its remaining formations consisted principally of Volksdeutsche ethnic Germans from Eastern Europe and some 450 Russian and Italian auxiliaries. In all, Marseille’s defenders numbered approximately 13,000, including 2,500 from the Kriegsmarine and 3,900 Luftwaffe personnel. The divisional commander was Lieutenant General Hans Schaefer, another veteran of the Eastern Front, who had been badly wounded near Kharkov in June 1943 and had only returned to active duty in April 1944. Schaefer was not convinced of the effectiveness of the defenses in the port sector and the fortified area of La Ciotat to the southeast of the city and had ordered the Kriegsmarine to deploy most of its troops in an infantry role, deploying them as a second line of defense between Marseille’s Saint-Marcel and Saint-Jerome districts, to the east of the city. By August 19, many of the outlying defenses of the city had been abandoned but for patrols.
The French advance on Marseille, spearheaded by Touzet du Vigier’s 1st Armored Division, was largely unopposed as the concentration of the major German formations on the coast had left the road network unguarded except for military police units, enabling de Lattre to range his forces around the city, exploiting the relatively open ground to the north on either side of Chaine de l’Étoile (Star Mountains). Inside Marseille, the harbor commander, Captain Zoss, reported that he had completed preparations for the demolition of the modern harbor installations and the Old Port. However, it would be a lengthy business, estimated at between four and six days.
There was another factor inside Marseille that was troubling General Schaefer, the French FFI Resistance. Schaefer, clearly a pessimist, estimated the FFI’s possible strength at about 80,000. In fact, debilitated by efficient Wehrmacht and SS “anti-terrorist” measures, it now numbered only some 500 armed activists. However, the Résistants in Marseilles had been massively encouraged by events in Paris in August. As late as August 13, two days before the launching of Dragoon, Pierre Laval, Petain’s deputy head of state, had returned to the French capital in the hope of reconvening the Chamber of Deputies to accord him powers as a legitimate head of government who might treat on sovereign terms with the liberating Allies. However, it was clear to the city’s civilian population that the days of German occupation were numbered, and armed resistance broke out in the streets. On August 18, the Paris police force had raised the flag of revolt on the Île de la Cité, prompting the left-wing FTP to rally to the cause. By August 20, the German garrison was under such pressure to maintain order in the city that the military governor of Paris, General Dietrich von Choltitz, was obliged to negotiate a truce. In Marseille feelings also ran high, particularly in the small towns on the city’s outskirts where support for the Resistance was highest. Attempts by the Germans to establish outposts in these districts were often thwarted by armed insurgents. If anything, the Résistants in Marseille were more effective than their counterparts in Paris, not least in their ability to alarm the apprehensive Schaefer and disrupt his attempts to defend the city.
Another man whose resolve was wavering was the German consul general in Marseille, Freiherr Edgar von Spiegel, a World War I submariner and from 1942 an SS Oberführer (colonel), who advised Schaefer to spare the dock facilities at Marseille. Schaefer was reluctant to do this, but delayed giving the go-ahead by some sixteen hours to enable Spiegel to seek permission from OKW to countermand the demolition. Unsurprisingly, OKW did not reply, but Schaefer then approached the harbor commander, Captain Stoss, with an order to spare the Old Port and the road that ringed it, which was also scheduled for destruction. This intervention proved to be crucial to the rehabilitation of the dock facilities at Marseille following the German surrender.
A second intervention, this time on the French side, also had a direct bearing on the fate of the Old Port. De Lattre had ordered Monsabert’s 3rd Infantry Division to move into Marseille’s northeastern suburbs and hold them. De Monsabert had other ideas. He informed one of his subordinates: “If you see an opportunity [to capture the city] seize it. I can assure you that, by this time tomorrow, I’ll be drinking a pastis in Marseille.” On the evening of August 20, Monsabert attacked with the 7th Algerian Infantry Regiment, two shock battalions, and the armored units of CC Sudre from the 1st Armored Division. The immediate effect of the arrival of these elements of the French 3rd Division in the eastern outskirts of Marseilles was to spark a popular insurrection and the establishment of a “provisional government” inside the city. At this point, however, the Resistance lacked the strength to wrest control of Marseille from its occupiers. Nor did the Germans have the ability to crush the revolt.
On August 21, the German anti-tank positions in Aubagne, on the eastern edge of Marseille, were overrun after a sharp fight in which the French colonial troops went in at bayonet point. On the same day, Monsabert sent in two battalions of the 7th Algerian Regiment with orders to push into Marseille from the north. The route they chose lay across a mountain range two thousand feet high that brought them down into the La Valentine and Les Olives districts in the city’s 11th arrondissement. In Les Olives the colonial troops surprised dozens of German soldiers stripped to the waist and enjoying the sun.
Inside Marseille, FFI forces surrounded the naval hospital and attempted to seize the post office in the Old Port, where they were dispersed by overhead fire from antiaircraft guns. De Lattre was attempting to restrain Monsabert until the arrival of forces released from Toulon while at the same time taking an anxious note of American reports, derived from Ultra, of the 11th Panzer’s approach to Avignon. Meanwhile, Monsabert, champing at the bit and convinced that the German forces in Marseille were too weak and disorganized to offer much resistance, gave the commander of the 7th Algerian Regiment, Colonel Abel Chapuis, a free hand to thrust into the heart of the city.
On the morning of the 23rd, Chapuis’s men were greeted with cheers, flowers, and kisses from the overjoyed civilian population. Guiding the 7th Algerian Regiment down La Canebière, an impressive boulevard running down to the Old Port, was an army chaplain, Captain Jean Croisa.
Suddenly the column’s progress was interrupted by shellfire from the Saint-Jean and Saint-Nicolas forts, which guarded the north and south entrances to the Old Port, and the arrival by car of representatives of the FFI. They told Croisa that they had a plan: they would inform Schaefer that they had captured Spiegel, who was now in their hands. Croisa then telephoned Schaefer and persuaded the general to meet at 1600. The meeting, held behind German lines, was also attended, to Schaefer’s considerable astonishment, by General Monsabert. The meeting opened with the discomfited Schaefer raging against Marseille’s Resistance fighters, whose actions, he legitimately claimed, had caused the Old Port to become a combat area and thus a target for the German artillery firing from the harbor forts. The meeting closed with both sides demanding an armistice.
Monsabert was allowed to leave and the battle was resumed at 1900. According to de Lattre, the fighting was confused and untidy: “In a few yards, one passed from the enthusiasm of a liberated boulevard into the solitude of a machine-gunned avenue. In a few turns of the track, a tank covered with flowers was either taken by the assault of pretty, smiling girl or fired at by an 88mm shell.” By the end of the day, the 7th Algerian Regiment had reached the waterfront. On the 25th, Monsabert’s troops captured the cathedral of Notre Dame de la Garde, a massive 19th-century basilica, topped with a gilded statue of the Virgin Mary, which dominates the Old Port. Monsabert had forbidden artillery barrages or air raids on the cathedral. It was to be taken by infantry supported by the tanks of CC Sudre. There were German positions around Notre Dame de la Garde but, as it turned out, none within it. At 0600 on August 25, troops of the 7th Algerian Regiment began to move cautiously up the slope toward the cathedral under heavy German fire.
With the aid of a French soldier, Pierre Chaix-Bryan, who was familiar with the street layout, an indirect route into the cathedral was taken by some Algerian riflemen through a house on rue Cherchell (now rue Jules Moulet).† Inside they found a priest, some Franciscan monks, and seventy-four German soldiers seeking sanctuary from the city’s vengeful civilian population. Meanwhile, the fate of the cathedral hung in the balance. German positions in the harbor were now in the French line of fire from around Notre Dame de la Garde and Schaefer came under increasing pressure to bring his guns to bear on the cathedral. He held firm, and on the morning of the 26th resumed his dialogue with Monsabert, writing: “I take the liberty of informing you that the German [companies] located in the vicinity of the cathedral . . . had been subjec[ted] to repeated mortar and machine gun 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.”
Predictably, Monsabert took a different view. While thanking Schaefer for sparing Notre Dame de la Garde, he denied that his division had occupied the cathedral and stated that French fire was coming from around it but not from it. The fighting continued. During the afternoon tanks from the 1st Armored Division were maneuvering on the approaches to the cathedral. One of them, Jeanne d’Arc, took a direct hit that killed its crew.‡ A second tank, the Jourdan, hit a mine and was disabled, but continued firing from cover. Its wounded commander, a Sergeant Lolliot, climbed out of the tank and attached the Tricoleur to the cathedral’s railings. In mid-afternoon a section of 1st Company, 7th Algerian Regiment stormed the hill on which the cathedral stood and the Tricoleur was hoisted on the bell tower. German fire was still coming in from Fort Saint-Nicolas but the cathedral was unscathed.
While German positions in the north and south of Marseille were being mopped up one by one, Schaefer, increasingly isolated, held on in the Old Port. Its dank underground shelters were crammed with naval personnel, many of them wounded. Smoke from the fighting drifted into the shelters and into a railway tunnel at Cap Janet, in the north of the city, where hundreds of civilians had taken refuge. In a bizarre turn of events they were fed and cared for by German military personnel. On the evening of the 27th, Schaefer wrote another letter to Monsabert in which he confessed: “The situation confronting my forces has changed entirely since our August 23 conversation. The majority of positions have surrendered after an honorable 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 the evening, at 2130, an armistice that will allow the agreements of honorable surrender conditions for the morning of August 28. In the absence of such agreement, we will fight to the last man.”
When the two men met at 0800 the next day, the first item on the agenda was the de-mining of the harbor. Its commander, Captain Stoss, who had drawn up all the demolition plans, had been killed in the fighting for the Old Port, and his plans had been destroyed, possibly by himself. Ongoing demolitions were halted at midday. Only then did German engineers come forward to begin the dismantling of the mines and explosives seeded in the harbor and its approaches. German troops also stood guard over magazines and weapons stores until they could be handed over to the French. The Old Port was now clogged with seventy-five sunken ships and the remains of the transporter bridge, which had been partially demolished on August 22. The Germans had wrecked some 260 cranes, and the merchant ship Cap Corse blocked the Old Port entrance between Fort Saint-Nicolas and Fort Saint-Jean. Behind it stretched a vista of oil-blackened water, smashed concrete, and twisted metal. One significant item of machinery, the giant floating crane Goliath, had been spared, thanks to the venality of an Austrian harbor official who pocketed 200,000 francs from the Marseille Chamber of Commerce for towing it out of the harbor before the city was retaken by the French.
The Germans had wrought havoc in Marseille, but the total destruction of its modern harbor facilities, vital to the Allies, had been prevented by the prompt action of French anti-scorch teams. They had poured cement into the primer ducts leading to preset demolition charges, and in so doing had prevented the destruction of several quays. The Operation “Caique” team, led by a French engineer, prevented the sabotaging of the pipeline terminal at Port-de-Bouc, vital to the operational plans of the Seventh Army, and also refloated three tankers. Within three weeks of liberation, Liberty ships were able to unload alongside one of Marseille’s quays.
The liberation of Marseille was accompanied by wild jubilation. Unlike Paris, it had fallen after an entirely French assault and was only the second French city, after Toulon, to be liberated in this way. On August 29, de Lattre, tearing himself away from the pursuit of Army Group G in the north, participated in the victory parade alongside de Gaulle’s ministers for war and the interior, and watched what was for the general “the unforgettable and poignant procession of all the makers of this second victory—the tirailleurs, the Moroccan Tabors, troopers, zouaves, and gunners—followed by the motley, fevered, bewildering mass of the FFI, between the two lines of a numberless crowd, frenzied, shouting with joy and enthusiasm, whom the guardians of order held back.”
French casualties in the retaking of Marseilles were 1,825 killed and wounded. Some 11,000 Germans surrendered at the end of the fighting, which came about a month earlier than the Allies had calculated, on D+13 rather than D+45. In spite of the thorough job the Germans had made of the demolition of the harbor facilities, Marseille was rapidly restored as a working port by American engineers. On September 15 the first Liberty ship arrived to disgorge its cargo, and by the end of the month Marseille had taken delivery of over 100,000 tons of cargo. By October, Marseille, Toulon,§ and other ports in southern France had were receiving over 500,000 tons of cargo a month to feed Eisenhower’s broad front drive into Germany.