From the moment it began,â? argues Michael Neiberg, a history professor at the Army War College in Carlisle, Pa., â??the liberation of Paris was an almost mythical affair.â? He is right, and not simply because Paris meant more emotionally to the Allies than did any other city occupied by the Nazis during World War II. The story of how freedom finally came to the city in late August 1944 had to be instantly mythologized by the French themselves, in order to construct an heroic narrative through which they could recover national self-respect after four turbulent and complex years of collaboration, resignation, and occasional resistance, when the struggle over the soul of France was bitterly fought between Marshal Philippe Pétain in Vichy and General Charles de Gaulle in London.
â??To a generation raised on fanciful tales of their fathers in the American Expeditionary Forces,â? recalled General Omar Bradley, â??Paris beckoned with a greater allure than any other objective in Europe.â? Although it undoubtedly was a great objective in terms of Allied morale, Neiberg points out that the French capital was actually relatively unimportant strategically in terms of the wider war; indeed it would have been far more use to the Allies to have captured the Scheldt estuary than to have marched down the Champs-Ã?lysées. The sheer number of extra mouths to feed once Paris was liberated even tempted strategists, including General Dwight Eisenhower and Bradley himself, briefly to consider skirting round Paris altogether, leaving it to be â??mopped upâ? later.
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