GUERRILLAS OF THE RESISTANCE
The Spaniards who liberated Paris
Le Monde diplomatique
August 2004
The German governor of Paris surrendered to a Spanish soldier two
hours before he signed the capitulation of his forces in August
1944. Will this year’s celebrations remember the foreign Resistance
fighters?
By Denis Fernandez Recatala
France has not done much to acknowledge its debt to the many
foreigners who helped free the nation in 1944. No significant
monuments pay tribute to the thousands of Spaniards who fought the
German occupation forces. As France prepares to celebrate the 60th
anniversary of the liberation of Paris, it should gratefully honour
the men and women who fought beside the French and died for freedom.
After the 1936-39 civil war many Spaniards fled to France and later
joined the Resistance or the Free French forces. In the Reina Sofia
Museum in Madrid, just next to Picasso’s Guernica, there is another
Picasso, Monument to the Spaniards who died for France, a reminder of
their sacrifice. Spanish Republicans contributed substantially to
liberating France. In the south they have had some recognition; in all
more than 10,000 fought all over France, in Brittany and the
Cévennes(1) and around towns such as Poitiers, Bordeaux, Angoulême,
Avignon, Montélimar, Valence or Anneçy(2). An all-Spanish force
liberated Foix, joined at the last moment by one Maurice Bigeard(3), a
token French contribution to the victory.
Near the end of summer 1940 Charles Tillon, founder of the French
Irregulars and Partisans (FTP-F) group, contacted local members of the
Spanish Communist party (PCE) in Bordeaux. Foreign nationals were a
ready source of volunteers, since unlike French citizens they had not
been mobilised and the Germano-Soviet pact had not discouraged
them(4). Spanish communists also remembered French support for the
International Brigades. Meanwhile the PCE’s underground leadership was
trying to meet its French opposite number and contacted Lise London in
December. She and her husband, Artur London, were plausible
go-betweens, having fought in Spain in the International Brigades(5).
>From then on, the resistance by communists and sympathisers started
to take shape. The Spanish community had arrived in two waves, first
because of poverty after 1918, then because of defeat by Franco’s army
in 1939, and settled all over France. The French Communist party (PCF)
started the Immigrant Workers (MOI) movement in the 1930s. The MOI
played an important part in the Resistance, integrating most Spanish
communists. The others formed armed detachments under PCE command,
coordinating their attacks with the Special Organisation (OS) and then
with the FTP-F.
In and around Paris Conrado Miret-Must, under the name of Lucien, took
charge of MOI combatants from 1942 on. The liberation of France was a
long way off, but preparations were already underway, despite a
massive raid that decimated the Spanish activists that year. The
trial of what the authorities claimed were terrorists from the Spanish
National Union was a foretaste of the trial of the members of the
Manouchian group(6). In the Little Spain neighbourhood of Plaine Saint
Denis(7) arrests became frequent, much as in Paris, Brittany and the
suburbs of other cities. In all, 135 Spaniards, including six women,
appeared in court. In their buttonholes they wore tiny espadrilles
with the colours of the French and Spanish republics. When their
sentences were read out they sang the Marseillaise and the Himno de
Riego(8). The sentences seemed relatively light, but meant torture,
deportation and, for many, death.
After the raids, which dislocated his unit and led to the
disappearance of his comrades, Celestino Alfonso, a former tank
commander, joined the Manouchian group and met Michel Rajman. With the
other members of the Manouchian group Celestino was executed on 16
February 1944, only months before the liberation of Paris. In his
farewell letter he wrote: “I lay down my life for France.” For many
Spaniards the Resistance was the continuation of the civil war by
other means. For the communists it was a way of repaying their debt to
the International Brigades, originally set up by the Komintern(9).
Spanish activists from Paris took refuge in neighbouring departéments
till the storm passed, returning to the capital under the command of
Rogelio Puerto. On 6 June 1944, when Allied forces landed on the
Normandy beaches, José Baron, known as Robert, mobilised all available
combatants and they formed the battalions that took part in the Paris
insurrection in August. They were determined and ready for anything,
convinced that once France regained its freedom the fascist regime in
Spain would soon collapse.
History does not always work out as planned, but there are fortunate
coincidences. The overall commander of the Paris insurrection was
Henri Rol-Tanguy, who had been a political commissar in the 14th
International Brigade in Spain. This eased contacts between insurgents
from the two countries. Military experience from 1936-39 combined well
with the invention of guerrilla tactics both in the maquis and in
cities.
With the prospect of Paris being liberated the Spanish anarchists came
to the fore. In 1939 the French authorities had interned the defeated
Republican army in camps in southeast France. Every morning gendarmes
visited the barracks encouraging internees to join the Foreign
Legion. Several thousand accepted the offer, seeing it as a way of
continuing the fight against fascism. They were sent to French
dependencies in North Africa or further south to Chad or Cameroon.
Those who went south joined the Free French in 1940, linking with the
force formed by General Leclerc(10). The others had to wait till the
Allied landings in Algeria in November 1942. But all – at least those
who survived – were among the first Allied troops to enter Paris on 24
August 1944.
Paris was fighting, but it needed help. A truce had been signed on 20
August by representatives of General de Gaulle and Choltitz (the
commander of the German garrison) providing for the peaceful
withdrawal of occupation forces. But the next day the Resistance
decided to break the truce, afraid that the Germans would use it to
their strategic advantage. Rol-Tanguy sent Commander Gallois to meet
the approaching Allied forces. Gallois convinced Leclerc to speed up
his 2nd armoured division’s advance on Paris. Leclerc sent the 9th
armoured company, led by Captain Raymond Dronne, ahead of the main
force: all its men were Spanish anarchists who spoke Castilian. In his
memoirs(11) Dronne writes of their courage; Leclerc thought highly of
them.
The first detachments of the 9th company entered the south of Paris at
8.41pm though the Porte d’Italie. A tank called Guadalajara after a
Republican victory in 1937(12) led the way. Forty minutes later, the
tanks and half-tracks halted on Place de l’Hôtel de Ville in the
centre. A crowd surrounded the 120 Spaniards and their 22 vehicles,
greeting them as liberators. “Were they American?” people asked,
surprised to hear them speaking Spanish. Their tanks were named after
civil war battles – Ebro, Teruel, Belchite, Madrid – and also called
Don Quijote, and Durruti, after the anarchist leader.
Their arrival ended the siege of the town hall, where Resistance
forces had been holding out against German attacks for five
days. Inside the building the Spanish troops set up a gun, El abuelo
(grandfather). As night fell everyone waited for reinforcements. Amado
Granelli, a lieutenant in the 9th company, met members of the National
Resistance Council, led by Georges Bidault. Meanwhile Leclerc, with
the rest of the 2nd armoured division, raced towards Paris, reaching
it the following morning.
In the days after, fighting increased in intensity. According to
Tillon, the Spaniards – the partisans who joined the French Forces of
the Interior (FFI) – were excellent street fighters. But he
exaggerated their contribution to the liberation of Paris. In the
preface to a book on the Manouchian group in 1946, he estimated their
number at 4,000 and used the same figure in Les FTP(13). Manuel Tunon
de Lara, a Spanish historian, is more cautious.
Once the fighting in Paris was over Rogelio Puerto led his Spanish
detachments – from the FTP, UNE and PCE – to the Reuilly
barracks. There Boris Holban, the MOI leader, merged a motley force of
combatants into a single battalion called Liberté. They included
Italians, Poles, Armenians and even escaped Russian prisoners of
war. The Spanish contingent, about 500, was the largest. They had
fought all over Paris, on Place de la Concorde, outside the National
Assembly, around the Arc de Triomphe, inside the Hotel Majestic that
housed the Gestapo headquarters, on Place Saint Michel and Place de la
République. Several dozen were killed, including José Baron, who had
supervised the regrouping of the guerrillas earlier that year.
The 9th company carried on with the 2nd armoured division towards
Germany. It took part in the liberation of Strasbourg, where
Lieutenant- Colonel Putz, a former International Brigade volunteer,
fell fighting alongside Spanish Republicans. The company ended the war
at Berchtesgaden, Hitler’s residence in the Bavarian Alps. Sadly only
a few Spaniards survived to scale the dictator’s mountain retreat.
In 1941 thousands of Spanish volunteers had set out from Chad
determined to help overthrow the Nazi regime, which had supported the
fascist forces that had conquered Spain. They had a single objective:
to carry the fight against fascism back into Spain, but this time with
the support of the Allies. Their hopes were betrayed and Franco stayed
in power until 1975. France, for which they laid down their lives,
forgot them.
Denis Fernandez Recatala is a journalist and writer, author of Matière
(Le Temps des Cerises, Paris, 2002)
NOTES
(1) See Hervé Mauran, Un Maquis de républicains espagnols en Cévennes,
Lacour, Nimes, 1995.
(2) See Eduardo Pons Prades, Los Republicanos españoles en la segunda
guerra mundial, La Esfera de los libros, Madrid, 2003; and Memoria del
olvido. La Contribucion de los Republicanos españoles a la Resistencia
y a la Libération de Francia, 1939-1945, FACEEF, Paris, 1996.
(3) General Bigeard made his name in Vietnam and in Algeria, where he
was accused of torturing National Liberation Front militants.
(4) The non-aggression pact of 23 August 1939 between Germany and the
Soviet Union drove a wedge between the communists and the rest of the
left in Britain and France.
(5) London’s activism made him a target for Nazi repression (he was
deported to Buchenwald), then persecution under Stalin. He narrowly
escaped a death sentence during the 1952 show trials in Prague,
alongside Rudolf Slansky and other former members of the government.
(6) An FTP-MOI group led by the Armenian activist, Missak Manouchian,
was executed on 16 February 1944 with 21 comrades. Louis Aragon
dedicated a poem to them, L’Affiche rouge. The title refers to the
bill Nazi authorities posted all over occupied France denouncing
attacks by an army of criminals.
(7) A working-class district north of Paris. See also Natacha Lillo,
La petite Espagne de la Plaine-Saint-Denis, 1900-1980, Autrement,
Paris, 2004.
(8) The national anthem of the Spanish Republic, proclaimed on 14
April 1931.
(9) Russian name for the Communist International, founded in 1919,
disbanded in 1943.
(10) Philippe Leclerc (1902-1947) was military governor of
Cameroon. He assembled a column of Free French forces which set out
from Chad to join British forces under General Montgomery at Tripoli
in January 1943. He took part in the Normandy landings with the 2nd
armoured division and entered Paris on 24 August 1944.
(11) Carnets de Route, two volumes, Editions France-Empire, Paris,
1984 and 1985.
(12) The battle of Guadalajara was the only major Republican victory
during the civil war. Italian units fought on both sides, the
Garibaldi battalion on the Republican side and regular army units and
fascist militia on the other. A popular song, Guadalajara no es
Abisinia, celebrated the event, contrasting it to Italy’s invasion of
Abyssinia in 1935-36.
(13) Les FTP, Julliard, Paris, 1966.
Translated by Harry Forster