The Bitter Road to Freedom: The Human Cost of Allied Victory in World War II Europe by William I. Hitchcock Read Free Book Online Page A

22 interns, 114 nurses, and 46 French Red Cross personnel. Across the street in the Lycée Malherbe, over 500 wounded people and thousands of homeless refugees, installed on makeshift pallets in the hallways and basements, received basic treatment from a skeletal staff of twelve doctors and a handful of Red Cross workers.

    As residents fled the city, Caen’s population dwindled to about 17,000 by mid-June. In a search for shelter from the bombing, thousands of people made for the large stone quarries two miles to the south of the city in the suburb of Fleury. Here opened up another aston- ishing chapter in this saga of Caen’s destruction. Dur-
    ing June and July, as many as 12,000 people huddled in the extensive networks of vacant caves in the old quar- ries, where the pale yellow limestone, used to build many of Caen’s churches, had been quarried since the eleventh century. The Germans, in mid-July, tried half- heartedly to evacuate the caves, perhaps to prepare them as a defensive redoubt for their own troops. Yet thousands of homeless Caennais took little notice and continued to dwell in the dark, dank network of cav- erns. Small villages sprang up overnight: the ill and el- derly were grouped together in makeshift beds, women set up laundry and cooking facilities, the men took on heavy labor on a rotating timetable: digging potatoes in the fields, hauling water, sawing lumber for the com- munal kitchens, gathering supplies from the nearby villages. Bakers and butchers from Fleury delivered supplies of bread, meat, and occasional vegetables. But the conditions of life in the close, airless caves were dreadful. There was no electric light. The floors of the caves, which had been used lately for the cultiva- tion of mushrooms, were constantly damp and muddy; there were no toilets or running water. Within days, fleas and bedbugs infested everyone; food was always in short supply; and the tension of living underground during constant bombing took a toll on the refugees. One young girl who, with her family, sought shelter in the caves at Fleury recalled the misery of it all: “apart
    from the fleas, our heads were alive with lice, scratch- scratch all day. Hygiene was non-existent; there were no toilets in the caves. We had to make do with corners or heaps of stones.” 25 Yet there was protection from the incessant shelling, and there was communal solidarity. Five hundred homeless refugees actually remained in the caves for two weeks after the complete liberation of Caen, since the city itself had become a shambles. 26

    As the people of Caen clung to life in and around their besieged city, the British Second Army continued its efforts to break through the German line blocking its advance into the interior of France. Having tried twice to outflank Caen, Montgomery now thought he might go straight at it. He called on the RAF to lay down an intense bombardment of German defensive positions and artillery to the north of Caen to open the way for an assault by I Corps directly into the city. What followed was “one of the most futile air attacks of the war,” ac- cording to historian Max Hastings. 27 Although it was well-known that most of the Germans were deployed north of the city, Bomber Command, in its care not to hit the closely engaged British troops, altered the plan and moved the bombing area farther into Caen itself. With dreadful precision, RAF Mosquitoes and Pathfind- ers flew in first and dropped their smoke-bomb mark- ers on the northern half of the already ruined city—a
    city quite free of German units. On July 7, under a clear evening sky, and facing little flak, 456 Lancasters and Halifaxes dumped 2,276 tons of bombs on Caen. “It was afterwards judged,” concludes one laconic ac- count, “that the bombing should have been aimed at the original targets. Few Germans were killed in the area actually bombed.” 28

    The sight of so many friendly aircraft in the skies over Caen was a great morale booster to