Liberation of Paris

The Liberation of Paris appears in Richard Cantwell’s recollection as a double event: an emotional return to a city he knew and loved, but, in his judgment, not the decisive military operation its reputation might suggest. He recounts it to Renata as part of a conversation about what fighting is really like, moving between routes, orders, and casualties on one hand and the happiness of Paris’s residents on the other. That tension shapes his account: the city matters profoundly, even as he resists turning its liberation into a grand military legend.

The Account and Its Stakes

Cantwell introduces his military stories with a warning that a soldier does not share the trade with anyone, and says he can insert anecdotes to make an account interesting or plausible. The qualification matters. His telling is an intimate, retrospective explanation to Renata, not a detached operational record; he offers a veteran’s skeptical judgments alongside the sequence of events. He calls the taking of Paris an emotional experience rather than a military operation, while also acknowledging that he took part and describing the decisions and fighting that brought his force into the city.

His sense of scale is deliberately unsentimental. He says that German troops had left a screen behind during their withdrawal, including typists who were killed, and dismisses the French firing of many rounds as an attempt to make the occasion appear important. Yet he does not deny the event’s emotional force. The distinction is between the symbolic weight of taking Paris and the military difficulty he believes the operation itself involved. His account asks Renata to see both without confusing ceremony, public feeling, and combat effectiveness.

The Approach and the Delayed Entry

Cantwell describes his force separating from General Leclerc’s column at Clamart. Leclerc’s men continued toward Montrouge and the Porte d’Orleans, while Cantwell’s group went directly to Bas Meudon and secured the bridge at the Porte de Saint Cloud. They established a bridgehead on the far side of the river. In Cantwell’s account, the Germans defending the bridge were thrown into the Seine, dead or alive; he characterizes their defence as token and argues that the bridge should have been demolished.

The following morning, his unit was told that German strong points remained at several locations, artillery stood on Mount Valerien, and tanks were moving through the streets. Cantwell says only some of this information was true. He was also asked not to enter too quickly, because General Leclerc was supposed to take the city. Cantwell complied by advancing slowly. He explains the delay concretely: the attack was held for two hours, while champagne offered by patriots, collaborators, or enthusiasts was accepted. The episode puts formal orders beside the improvised pauses and public welcome through which the advance unfolded.

He places this delay within a larger plan for encircling Paris. In his telling, the French had taken the city four days earlier, but the plan of the Supreme Headquarters of the Allied Expeditionary Forces meant that his force could not simply proceed to occupy it. He also says they had to wait for the possible arrival of Bernard Law Montgomery, who had been unable to close the Falaise Gap and did not reach them in time. These explanations are Cantwell’s account of the operational constraints; they help explain why, despite the apparent opportunity, the entry proceeded under restrictions.

Fighting and the Bridgehead

Cantwell describes the fighting in more than one scale. For the movement into Paris itself, he says his force fought three times, none of them seriously. In a wider account of the advance from Rambouillet toward the city, however, he counts twelve engagements, of which only those at Toussus le Noble and Le Buc deserved, in his view, to be called fights. He treats the others as necessary preliminaries rather than substantial battles. The distinction makes his claim that Paris was not a major military operation more precise: it does not mean that the approach was entirely without combat.

The contrast is clearest at the bridge. Securing it gave Cantwell’s force a crossing and a bridgehead, but the defence was, by his assessment, limited. His description of Germans being cast into the Seine also resists a polished account of liberation: the advance involved the defeated enemy’s dead as well as survivors, and the river crossing was not simply a ceremonial passage into a welcoming city. At the same time, Cantwell says that his force suffered no deaths in the subsequent fighting through streets he knew and loved, and that it caused as little damage as possible. He presents that restraint as part of what made the operation meaningful to him.

The City and Its Meaning

Cantwell’s account does not reduce Paris to terrain or objectives. He recalls the happiness of the people and the sight of elderly general officers walking about in old uniforms; his own force, he says, was happy not to have to fight. Those impressions qualify his earlier dismissal of the taking as militarily unimportant. The liberation could be modest in operational terms and still be extraordinary as an experience of the city and its people.

He also recalls a small, complicated incident at the Etoile. Elsa Maxwell’s butler was taken prisoner after being denounced as a Japanese sniper, amid allegations that several Parisians had been killed. The man had taken refuge on a roof, and three soldiers were sent up to him; Cantwell identifies him as an Indo-China boy. The mistaken accusation and the oddly specific identity of the prisoner bring the confusion of wartime reports into the account, even as Cantwell avoids presenting the incident as a major engagement.

The liberation’s significance therefore rests, in his telling, on a contrast rather than a single heroic climax. Paris was a city whose streets he already knew and loved; its people’s happiness and the relief of moving through it without serious fighting gave the entry its emotional force. Against that, Cantwell sets the managed pace of the advance, the bridgehead, the limited street combat, and the larger chain of engagements that preceded arrival. His recollection neither denies the city’s liberation nor accepts the inflated military drama he associates with its public image.