Operation Paula

On 3 June 1940, in the final days of the evacuation from Dunkirk, large formations of German bombers appeared over Paris for the first time in the war. The Luftwaffe carried out an operation codenamed Paula (Unternehmen Paula): a massed raid on airfields, aircraft works and armaments factories in and around the French capital. It was meant to destroy what remained of the French fighter force before the second phase of the German offensive, and to break the morale of the Parisians. Bombs fell on the Citroën and Renault factories, on the airfields around Paris, on residential districts and on the Air Ministry building, where the United States ambassador happened to be having lunch. 254 people were killed, most of them civilians. Yet the Germans did not achieve their military objective: the French air force lost a few dozen aircraft, and within two days every airfield that had been hit was operating again.

Sperrle’s plan

At the end of May the German high command was preparing the second part of the campaign in the West. With the Allied armies in Flanders and Belgium smashed, there remained the rest of France, defended by an army whose new Commander-in-Chief, General Maxime Weygand, had been building a defensive line along the Somme and the Aisne ever since he replaced Gamelin. The attack on that line, called Fall Rot (Case Red), required command of the air, and the French air force, though badly weakened, still existed and was receiving new aircraft from factories working flat out.

The commander of Air Fleet 3, General Hugo Sperrle, had long wanted to strike at Paris. On 22 May he ordered a raid on the city, but the weather intervened. The next day he instructed General Otto Hoffmann von Waldau and the commander of one of the bomber groups to prepare an operation, which was named Paula. It was to destroy the airfields and aircraft works around the capital and, in passing, as von Waldau wrote, “to have the desired effect on the morale of the capital”. German air reconnaissance counted 1,244 aircraft on the airfields in and around Paris, including 550–650 single-engined machines, and mapped the positions of the French anti-aircraft artillery in detail. The raid was planned for 30 May, but once again the weather prevented it.

Units of General Albert Kesselring’s Air Fleet 2 and Sperrle’s Air Fleet 3 were assigned to the operation. According to figures cited in the literature, the Luftwaffe committed around 1,100 aircraft, including some 640 bombers, mainly Heinkel He 111s and Dornier Do 17s, and around 460 Messerschmitt Bf 109 and Bf 110 fighters. Not all of this force reached its targets; the American agency United Press reported that day that 155 aircraft had flown over Paris in six waves.

The warning

The operation came as no surprise to the French. British intelligence at Bletchley Park, which was reading some of the messages encrypted with the German Enigma machine, intercepted on 30 May a message from one of the air corps commanders about preparations for the raid, and then a query from another commander who had received incomplete orders and had learned only that the target was “Paris”. This information was passed on to the French. Reading Enigma was possible thanks to methods that Polish cryptologists had handed over to the Allies in 1939. Marian Rejewski’s team was then working near Paris, at the Franco-Polish centre PC Bruno.

The command of the Northern Air Zone doubled the number of fighters at readiness: instead of about 60, 120 aircraft were to wait for the alarm. The units defending the Paris region had some 240 machines in all, including the modern Dewoitine D.520 and the less successful Bloch MB.152, but only half of them were serviceable.

The raid of 3 June

The French knew about the approaching bombers roughly an hour before they arrived. Yet the warning system failed at the decisive moment. The order to take off was broadcast from a transmitter on the Eiffel Tower, and many squadrons did not hear it, which some French authors attribute to German jamming. In the end around 80 fighters took off to fight. The German bombers flew high, and the French machines, which first had to climb, often failed to intercept them in time. Some fighter groups were caught on the ground.

The sirens sounded in Paris at 1.18 p.m. According to news agency reports, the aircraft came in waves for nearly an hour, and the all-clear was given at 2.18 p.m. The Germans attacked more than a dozen airfields in the Paris region, aircraft works and armaments factories, as well as 28 railway junctions and marshalling yards. For the first time they used the new C-250 incendiary bomb, cleared for service only a day earlier. Depending on the source, between about 1,060 and 1,200 bombs fell on Paris and its surroundings, a few dozen of them on the city itself. Hits were scored on the Citroën works on the Seine in the Javel district, which was then producing artillery shells, and on the Renault works at Boulogne-Billancourt, as well as on neighbouring Issy-les-Moulineaux, the western and northern districts of the capital and the suburbs.

One bomb pierced the roof of the Air Ministry. The minister, Laurent Eynac, was entertaining the United States ambassador, William Bullitt, to lunch there. According to contemporary American press reports, the two men went out onto the balcony, unable to believe that the Germans were bombing Paris, and a bomb broke through the ceiling and landed a few metres from the ambassador, but did not explode. The story went round the newspapers in the United States and made a powerful impression on Americans.

The victims

The first communiqués spoke of a few dozen dead. The Ministry of Education announced that ten children were among them. The final toll cited in the French literature is 254 dead, including 195 civilians and 59 servicemen, and 652 wounded, including 545 civilians. Some studies give a higher number of wounded, as many as 900. Because of censorship, the press wrote about the raid only in general terms. Officials and clergy visited the sites of destruction, and the government tried to prevent panic and the flight of civil servants from Paris. For the inhabitants of the capital, who since September 1939 had heard only false alarms, it was their first direct contact with the war. The raid accelerated departures from the city, which over the following days turned into a mass exodus.

The balance

German reports proclaimed a great success: the destruction of 75 French aircraft in the air and some 400 on the ground, and a long list of wrecked factories. The Luftwaffe command concluded that the French air force had been broken, and in the following days turned its strength against the Channel ports and to direct support of the ground forces. The reality was different. The French lost 20 aircraft on the ground, including 16 fighters, and 15 fighters in air combat. Serious damage was recorded at six of the sixteen airfields hit, and fifteen factories were lightly damaged. At the Citroën works the assembly line for 75 mm gun shells was destroyed. The railway junctions were working again within a day at most, and all the airfields within two days.

According to figures cited in the literature, the Germans lost around ten aircraft, including four bombers. The French claimed a dozen or more victories, so both sides, as usual, overstated their successes. Among those shot down over France at that time was Colonel Gerd von Massow, commanding the fighters of one sector, who was taken prisoner. On the same day Colonel Josef Kammhuber, the commander of bomber wing KG 51, was also shot down and captured, although it is not certain whether his unit took part in the raid on Paris. Both were released after the armistice.

France could not strike back on a comparable scale. The most symbolic gesture was the flight of the four-engined Farman NC.223 Jules Verne of French naval aviation, which on the night of 7–8 June, after a long flight over the coasts of the Netherlands and Denmark and over the Baltic, dropped bombs on the outskirts of Berlin. It is regarded as the first raid by an Allied bomber on the Reich capital. The damage was negligible, and the purpose above all psychological.

Its place in the war

Operation Paula did not give the Germans what the Luftwaffe command had wanted, but it did not need to. Although the French air force was still receiving aircraft from the factories, it had fewer and fewer serviceable machines and trained crews. On 5 June, the day Fall Rot began, the French had more than two thousand aircraft on paper, but fewer than 600 were ready to fly. The Luftwaffe quickly secured superiority over the front, and the British, husbanding their fighter squadrons for the defence of the British Isles after their experience over Dunkirk, could not fill the gap. From 5 June Army Group B attacked on the Somme, and a few days later Army Group A on the Aisne. Weygand’s front broke within a week. On 14 June German troops entered Paris, which had been declared an open city, and on 22 June France signed an armistice.

The raid of 3 June 1940 was the first of many that struck Paris and its suburbs during the war. The next major raids came nearly two years later and were the work of the Allied air forces, which bombed factories working for the occupier, including the same Renault works at Boulogne-Billancourt. Operation Paula also revealed two things that were to recur in the Battle of Britain: the Luftwaffe’s overestimation of enemy losses, on which the German command based mistaken decisions, and the importance of signals intelligence, which allowed the defenders to know where and when an attack would come.