PARIS '44: The Shame and the Glory by Patrick Bishop(Viking, £25)
Following the D-Day landings the Allies' plan was to bypass Paris, which was of no strategic importance, and to push on as quickly as possible to Berlin. But other pressures and political considerations came to bear, and the commander of US forces, Lieutenant General Omar Bradley, remarked that everybody suddenly seemed to want to liberate Paris: 'Everybody, that is, except me.'
The savage crushing of the Warsaw Uprising by the retreating armies of the Third Reich was leading to the almost total destruction of the city and the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Poles, yet the Communist-led French Resistance was threatening a similarly desperate insurrection in advance of the arrival of the Allies.
How Paris was saved, almost miraculously intact while other towns and cities were being laid waste, is the subject of Patrick Bishop's book. The author is a veteran front-line foreign correspondent and distinguished military historian. During his many stays in Paris he became intrigued by the hundreds of discrete commemorative plaques erected by friends and relatives on boulevards, streets and squares, recording where Resistance fighters and civilians fell during the struggle to liberate the city. His subsequent research into the tumultuous and sometimes surreal events of that summer are now brought together in this gripping, vividly written day-to-day account.
Acts of heroism and self-sacrifice marked the restoration of French pride, after abject defeatism in the face of the Nazis in 1940, wholesale collaboration with the invaders and the utterly shameful betrayal of French and refugee Jews. As Bishop writes: 'The liberation of Paris was momentous history but it was also performance, and everyone - soldiers and civilians, French, Americans and Germans - played their part to perfection.'
Roderick Conway Morris
This review first appeared in the July 2024 issue of The Lady magazine.
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