The End Is in Sight

The tanks and guns, the trucks and jeeps thundered to the edges of Paris and spread around it. Paris would be the greatest single victory prize of Allied arms since the tides of war rolled back upon the Germans. Paris could probably be had for the taking. But Paris could wait. In strategic sight were even greater prizes: complete destruction of the German armies in northern France; the borders of Germany itself.

If the German armies were destroyed or even driven back beyond the Seine, Paris would fall in General Ike Eisenhower's own good time. Perhaps the hour was already set. The actors in the drama of triumph were in the wings with him. Already in France General Charles de Gaulle awaited his entrance cue. The chariots were assembled--the tanks and trucks of General Jacques Leclerc's armored division which had rolled up to the rim of the city with the Americans. Other victory parade leaders were ready -- among them General Joseph Pierre Koenig, the commander of France's underground army, which was already rising against the last Germans in the murk that hovered over the "City of Light" just before the dawn.

Politically, sentimentally, in prestige, Paris would be a tremendous victory. But militarily, Paris was a tactical objective, already partly taken. Paris was the hub from which rail and road spokes radiated all over northern France; to the south, west and northwest most of them had already been cut. Its further importance was that it was a center of wire communications and administration, a storehouse of German arms. Its ring of airfields could be quickly put to Allied use. But Paris as a strictly military victory was overshadowed by one behind it and one beyond.

Enveloping Arc. Meanwhile Paris struggled in its hour before liberation. Great fires raged -- reportedly the Germans' destruction of their depots. Refugees told of General Koenig's F.F.I, fighting Germans in the streets, of the Germans machine-gunning demonstrators.

The Germans openly admitted the gravity of the uprising. They proclaimed a state of siege and dire punishment if armed revolt persisted. Theaters and cafes were closed, a curfew clamped on from 9 p.m. to 7 a.m. Parisians were ordered to stay away from their windows at all times, to leave doors open at night (for easy search). Gatherings of more than three persons were verboten.

Venturesome Parisians surveyed these restrictions against the sorry background of Germany's military situation. Many of them went ahead breaking out their hidden Tricolors and Allied flags for the day of liberation. A few climbed into dilapidated jalopies, drove out past Nazi sentries to Allied positions and reported the state of things in the city.

The Americans had thrown an arc around the city on two sides, buckled it to the Seine.

From Versailles's gardens, ten miles west of the Place de la Concorde, the arc extended to Corbeil, 15 miles up the Seine from Paris. General Eisenhower did not tell the Germans exactly how far his encircling arc reached. But he was al ready in position to sweep completely around Paris to the east.

During the "fateful week" that Eisenhower had proclaimed (TIME, Aug. 21), the destruction wrought upon the enemy in the Normandy traps (see map) alone had been historic. There the Germans had lost most of the Seventh, their finest army in the west. Some elements of Field Marshal Guenther von Kluge's armies still writhed convulsively in the narrowing caldron against the Seine, under increasing cannon fire and air pounding.

Enveloping Traps. The Germans fought amid their dead and in the wreckage of their transport (in three days Allied airmen knocked out 10,000 vehicles and tanks). Some of the Germans had burst out of the tight bag fashioned for them back of Argentan and Falaise. But they had burst into a greater bag in front of the Seine's left bank, a bag that was also slowly tightening.

The British, Canadians and Americans pressed in. Bewildered, Germans were sometimes found unloading ammunition and gasoline in towns already in Allied hands. Groups of the shattered Seventh Army wandered about in the maelstrom, some fighting in corners, some seeking capture. The Germans milled in the fog of war, halting now & then to lash out blindly in desperate counterattacks.

Those Germans who reached the bridgeless Seine were under almost continual daylight air attack. Some swam across. Some got across at night. But airmen sank scores of barges.

The count of destruction could not be complete for many days, but there were telling examples of Kluge's plight. London estimated the enemy's casualties in northern France at 400,000 men. The U.S. Third Army of Lieut. General George S. Patton Jr., in its wheeling movement to the east, counted 109,575 casualties as its own work. Its bag of prisoners alone was close to 50,000.

Most of 14 German divisions of the Seventh Army and elements of four more were chopped to bits. Even parts of the German Fifteenth Army, which Kluge had brought down from the Pas-de-Calais robomb area to support the Seventh, were cut up in the battle south of the Seine.

Enveloping Disaster. It appeared that if the Germans hoped to establish a line along the Seine to Paris, Bradley and Patton had already frustrated them. Patton's tanks established a bridgehead by night across the Seine at Mantes, 25 miles northwest of Paris. There was another crossing, upstream from Paris near Fontainebleau.

Whither Bradley's enveloping tentacles were pushing, the Germans had to learn by touch, for Bradley did not tell. Moving swiftly, he continued to achieve surprise after surprise with Patton's hard-riding forces. They had arrived at the Seine while Kluge was still bringing troops of the Fifteenth Army across the river. By this week it was doubtful whether Kluge had more than a dozen divisions left north of the Seine. It was doubtful whether more than fragments of his advanced forces would ever come back to join them. Last week the air forces went to work on the highways and railroads beyond the Seine, deep into Belgium and Holland.

On D-plus-77 the Germans were close to disaster in the west. General Sir Bernard Montgomery, squinting over the countryside where most of a once-great German army had been cut up, delivered a sanguine estimate: "The end of the war is in sight."

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