The Second Battle of Paris
Towards the end of April in 1951 Emperor Napoleon IV wrote a letter to Queen Elizabeth II of England, congratulating her on the successes of the Franco-English joint operations in Scotland which had finished securing the heavy industries of the Scottish central belt and lowlands and were advancing into the highlands in pursuit of some 30,000 German occupation forces.
With the pride of the Kriegsmarine reduced to blackened radioactive hulks the German soldiers were trapped in what the English Ministry of Propaganda was calling the “world’s largest prison camp” and Enoch Powell’s government was already planning the ways to make best use of the future POWs as “voluntary” labour to assist with the clearing of bombed out areas of northern English cities.
In northern France, however, there was far less cause for celebration. The Second Battle for Paris (the First being the failed initial push for the city which followed Imperial French landings in northern France), originally merely proving costlier than expected, had turned into one of the bloodiest battles in European history.
Both French and German forces alike had suffered tens of thousands of casualties as the dug-in German defenders fought to hold the city with a tenacity only matched by that shown by the French commanders as they flung ever more men headlong into the battle.
But the biggest casualty of the battle was undoubtedly the city of Paris herself. The Germans had refused to allow the civilian population to evacuate in order to avoid clogging their supply lines with refugees and an estimated 100,000 of them would die from being caught in the crossfire.
Amongst the civilians killed were an estimated 5,000 pro-Napoleon French partisans who attempted to wage a guerrilla war within the German controlled parts of the city, often resulting in brutal reprisals by German military police.
And beyond the cost to the city’s inhabitants was the damage to the city itself. The ‘City of Light’, home to many spectacular cultural and architectural treasures, found many of them destroyed in the fighting - including its most famous symbol, the Eiffel Tower.
Struck by a misplaced bomb from an aircraft (which side dropped it has never been established), the tower suffered severe structural damage to one of its four legs and was demolished by German engineers two days later in order to prevent it from an uncontrolled collapse. Whether this was structurally necessary or an act of vengeance for Berlin is still a matter of considerable debate.
All that is known for certain is that on the 1st of May 1951, after standing for 62 years, Gustave Eiffel’s masterpiece and symbol of Gallic pride was reduced to twisted iron wreckage.
Coincidentally, at the same time, French forces entered Chateauroux, routing 29 German divisions who fell back towards Auxerre, itself already under pressure from French forces from both north and south.
And on the battlefields of north Africa Arab troops were making their debut, swiftly turning the tide decisively in favour of the League of Nations, routing German colonial forces in Morroco and allowing French soldiers to be sent south to Dakar where they succeeded in finally catching and trapping the German force which had spent weeks wreaking havoc behind French lines.
But despite these League victories, as well as significantly driving back the German lines west of Auxerre, Paris hung over the first half of May like a dark cloud until, finally, on the 16th, the French forces in the western half of the city were ordered to cease offensive operations until reinforced. The Second Battle of Paris had ended in a defeat for the French with dozens of units having lost so many men that they would have to be broken up and entirely reconstituted with new recruits from the Empire’s increasingly depleted reserves.
