The armies meet near Dijon

Around 10 September 1944 two Allied invasion waves made contact in Burgundy: the troops who had landed in Provence in August and the armies advancing from Normandy via Paris and Champagne. The popular formula has it that they met near Dijon, cutting France in two. This picture needs two refinements. First, according to the US official history (Riviera to the Rhine), on 10 and 11 September the two sides communicated only over local telephone lines, and the first physical meeting of patrols took place on the afternoon of 11 September near Saulieu, some 70 km west of Dijon; French tradition, on the other hand, commemorates the link-up of the 1st Free French Division with General Philippe Leclerc’s 2nd Armoured Division at Nod-sur-Seine on 12 September. Dijon itself was liberated on 11 September. Second, the link-up did not cut France in two but closed the gap between two fronts: from then on a single Allied line ran from the Channel to Switzerland, and the German units that had not managed to slip through it were cut off in the west of the country.

Two pursuits

After the landings in Provence on 15 August, General Alexander Patch’s US Seventh Army and General Jean de Lattre de Tassigny’s French Army B pursued the German Nineteenth Army northwards along two routes. The motorised Task Force Butler and the US 36th Infantry Division went through the Provence Alps by the so-called Route Napoléon. The 36th Division took Grenoble on 22 August, while Task Force Butler had turned west earlier, towards the Rhône valley, to cut the Germans’ line of retreat at Montélimar. The trap could not be closed, and the Nineteenth Army, covered by the 11th Panzer Division, withdrew through Lyon, liberated on 3 September, towards Burgundy and the Vosges.

At the same time, in the north, General Dwight Eisenhower’s armies, after closing the Falaise pocket, had crossed the Seine and were heading east. Furthest south was General George Patton’s Third Army, which at the turn of August and September reached the Meuse and the Moselle; its right wing – including General Leclerc’s French 2nd Armoured Division, which had liberated Paris in August – covered a long, open flank facing the Loire and Burgundy.

The meeting in Burgundy

At the beginning of September General Johannes Blaskowitz’s Army Group G was trying to hold a salient around Dijon, through which the last columns from south-western France were to pass. It was attacked from the south by General Joseph de Monsabert’s French II Corps: the 1st Armoured Division advanced up the Saône valley, and General Diego Brosset’s 1st Free French Division a dozen or so kilometres further west, through the Côte-d’Or. Both repeatedly ground to a halt for lack of fuel, and German resistance came mostly from improvised battle groups cobbled together from the remnants of divisions and garrisons. To the east, General Lucian Truscott’s US VI Corps took Besançon on 8 September and was approaching the Belfort Gap.

From the north, the 2nd Armoured Division and other units of the Third Army’s right wing reached Châtillon-sur-Seine. According to the US official history, on 10 and 11 September the two French divisions from the south kept in touch with Leclerc’s division over civilian telephone lines that were still working between the villages of Burgundy; some accounts date the first contact between forward elements of VI Corps and the Third Army to 10 September for precisely this reason. On 11 September the 1st Armoured Division drove unopposed into Dijon, which the Germans had abandoned during the night, and pushed on almost without stopping towards Langres. On the afternoon of that day a detachment of the 2nd Dragoons of the 1st Free French Division met a patrol of the US 6th Armored Division near Saulieu, which according to the Americans formally marked the junction of the forces of Operations Overlord and Dragoon.

The French regard the following day as the symbolic moment: at around 1 p.m. on 12 September at Nod-sur-Seine, north of Châtillon, a detachment of naval fusiliers of the 1st Free French Division made contact with the 12th Cuirassiers of Leclerc’s division. Two formations that both traced their origins to Free France met – one had come from Africa via Italy and Provence, the other from Africa via Normandy and Paris. The village mayor put up a plaque at the meeting place, and a monument was later erected there. Over the following days the Americans and French joined their lines between Dijon and Châtillon, and the French II Corps supported from the south the Third Army as it repelled German counter-attacks; at Dompaire in the Vosges the 2nd Armoured Division destroyed the German 112th Panzer Brigade on 12–13 September.

Cut off in the west

Closing the gap sealed the fate of the German occupation forces from south-western and central France. On 19 August they had been ordered to retreat towards Dijon and Belfort. They set off in three march groups from the Atlantic coast, Aquitaine and the foot of the Pyrenees, harried at every step by partisans, French SAS paratroopers and Allied aircraft. According to German figures cited by historians, some 88,000 men set out northwards; about 60,000 reached Army Group G’s lines and about 19,000 were taken prisoner on the way.

The largest of these groups, numbering some 25,000 men at the outset according to French accounts, trailed under the command of General Botho Elster from the Bordeaux area through Poitou towards the Loire. When partisans blocked the crossing at Decize and American aircraft bombed his columns near Châteauroux, Elster judged further marching hopeless. On 10 September – the very day usually associated with the meeting near Dijon – he signed at Issoudun, before the American General Robert Macon, commander of the 83rd Infantry Division, the surrender of some 18,000–20,000 men. He did not want to give himself up to the partisans, whom German orders called “terrorists”; the FFI commanders nevertheless insisted on a second ceremony with their own participation on 11 September. The column then marched under escort, still armed, to the Loire and in mid-September laid down its weapons before the Americans on the bridge at Beaugency. South of the Loire the fighting virtually ceased; the Germans held on there only to the fortified strongholds on the Atlantic – Royan, La Rochelle and the Gironde estuary – where they remained until the spring of 1945.

Significance

The junction of the fronts was the final chord of Operation Dragoon. On 14 September Truscott, who was still hoping for a rapid push through the Belfort Gap to the Rhine, was ordered to halt his advance, and the next day the US Seventh Army and French Army B came under General Jacob Devers’s 6th Army Group, subordinate to Eisenhower; at the end of September Army B took the name French First Army. From then on the forces from the south fought as the right wing of a single, continuous front, supplied largely through the rebuilt ports of Marseille and Toulon.

Army Group G, which from early September again came under Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt, reappointed by Hitler as Commander-in-Chief West, lost tens of thousands of men in this pursuit but managed – contrary to Allied expectations – to build a new line of defence at the foot of the Vosges and in front of Belfort. The fighting for it lasted all autumn. For France the junction of the forces from Normandy and Provence also had a political dimension: almost the whole of the country was now in the hands of the Allies and of the Provisional Government, which the day before had been recast as a government of national unity, and thousands of FFI volunteers began to be incorporated into the regular army, above all into the French First Army.