Being a combat soldier was never more satisfying, and enjoyable, than it was 70 years ago when the Allies entered Paris. The capital city of France had suffered remarkably little damage during the four years of Nazi occupation, and was liberated almost without the need for a fight. And while the population surely experienced hardships, on the whole they were in pretty good shape. As we can clearly see from the two shapely French girls greeting their liberators. At almost the same time that the people of Paris rose up to overthrow the German occupiers, the people of occupied Warsaw also mounted an uprising. But, the respective outcomes could not have been more dissimilar. When the Allied high command received word that the citizens of Paris were taking up arms, units were diverted to lend them assistance. Despite the fact that Eisenhower was planning on bypassing Paris entirely. The leader of the Free French, Charles De Gaulle, put intense pressure on his allies and they relented. And, as it turned out, the commander of the German forces in Paris opted not to carry out Hitlers orders to destroy the city. Paris was spared. Meanwhile, slightly less than 1000 miles to the east, the Wehrmacht was methodically reducing Warsaw to rubble. The Western Allies were effectively unable to lend the Polish fighters any assistance, and the Red Army had paused on the outskirts of the Polish capital. And there it would wait until the Germans completed the job of destroying the Polish resistance. For 63 days, the Poles fought with virtually no outside support. It was the largest single military effort undertaken by any European resistance movement during WWII. And it was ruthlessly crushed by Wehrmacht forces using every weapon in the German arsenal. And Stalin just smoked his pipe and let it to happen.
Posted on: Sat, 16 Aug 2014 04:17:56 +0000
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