Ernest Hemingway Returns to Paris – August, 1944

For many in Barton’s 4th (IV) Division (known as the Ivy League Division because of the use of Roman numerals) the chance to get into Paris was a dream, and for others a re-union with a city they’d known in their youth.

Sergeant Larry Kelly had known Paris back in 1917. As a 15 year old infantryman in the US Army he’d been badly wounded in the trenches of the First World War, and spent one hell of a time in Paris recuperating.

Larry was a born adventurer, and after re-joining the army in the 1930s – like Pelkey – to avoid the worst of the depression, he found himself volunteering, in 1942, for the newly formed American Airborne. Apart from the romance, and daring-do of the airborne regiments, it was the extra $50 a month pay that was the big incentive.

The 42 year old Kelly jumped with the 82nd Airborne on D-Day and was badly wounded. When he recovered he had to transfer out of the airborne and elected to join Barton’s 4th as a forward artillery observer. On that Thursday evening, when Hemingway – fortified by all that free booze – decided, again, to be the first American into Paris, Sgt Larry Kelly was himself racing toward Paris ready to direct American artillery fire across the racecourse and into the German positions on the far side of the Seine. He also decided he wanted to be the first American soldier into Paris – he felt he somehow had the right – and there was someone very special he wanted to look-up too. And he almost made it.

Early on the Friday morning Kelly was making his way along the far bank of the Seine trying to locate German armoured positions when he was mistaken for a German by a young French resistance fighter (he’d never seen an American soldier before) who shot Kelly several times. The young Frenchman soon realised his mistake and went for medical help. Kelly died of his wounds one year later in a military hospital in Washington DC. It is possible he was the first American serviceman to cross the Seine in August 1944.

Men like Kelly – a professional soldier who knew the risks he was taking, and why he was taking them – had, in the words of military historian Charles Whiting, “…no time for the games played by Hemingway and his various irregulars.”