Ernest Hemingway Becomes a Problem for General Patton: France, 1944

The city of Paris may have been wide open, but the period between the 22nd and 24th August 1944 was one of intense information gathering, and it has to be said, utter confusion in Rambouillet. Bruce, Hemingway, and Michel Pasteau – a French intelligence officer assigned to Bruce – continually interrogated German prisoners, many of whom were Polish – invariably elderly, or very young – who were keen to pass on what information they could about the retreating German divisions, and the German officers and NCOs who had made them fight at the point of a gun.

It was Bruce’s job to get General Leclerc and his French armour into Paris first, but where the hell was he? Bruce had received reports that Patton’s Third Army was already in the outskirts of Paris, with several units across the Seine and heading north toward Belgium. Patton had agreed, reluctantly, not to enter Paris until Leclerc had done so, but good fighting time was now being wasted for the sake of diplomatic niceties. Patton was growing increasingly frustrated and angry.

On the morning when he heard about Hemingway’s antics, General George Smith Patton Jr was sitting-up in bed re-reading, probably for the thousandth time, an old battered copy of Homer’s The Iliad, and marvelling again at the sheer tenacity – in the face of overwhelming numbers of invading
troops – of the Trojan defence. And as Patton sipped his coffee and looked out of the huge bedroom windows of the chateau that had once briefly been the headquarters of Rommel just a week or two before – with the pin-sized Eiffel Tower just visible in the distance – the general knew in his bones his own invading army would face the same tenacity when they finally crossed the border into Germany. It was going to be tough, it had been tough here in France, but not as tough as it was
going to be in Germany. No, it was going to be worse than tough, it was going to be hell and if the German’s were given just the slightest chance they might easily re-group and mount a counter-offensive in the winter that could wipe out a good proportion of the allied armies. What in God’s name was he going to use as his Trojan Horse?

As Patton read his deputy Chief of Staff, Colonel Paul Harkins, came into the room.