The raid on La Chapelle

On the night of 20–21 April 1944 RAF Bomber Command attacked the La Chapelle marshalling yard on the northern edge of Paris – one of the largest railway junctions in the region, carrying traffic from the Gare du Nord to northern France and Belgium. The target was the tracks, engine sheds and workshops, not the city itself: the raid was part of the so-called Transportation Plan, intended to paralyse the French railways before the invasion. But bombs also fell on the densely built-up quarters of the 18th arrondissement of Paris and the neighbouring communes of Saint-Denis, Saint-Ouen and Aubervilliers. According to French tallies between about 640 and 670 people were killed and 377 wounded. It was the bloodiest raid on Paris and its suburbs of the entire war.

It is often spoken of in general terms as an “Allied raid on Paris” in which many civilians died. This needs to be made more precise: it was an exclusively British night raid aimed at a specific railway target on the boundary between the city and the suburbs, and the victims – though very numerous – were the result of bombs that missed the tracks, not of a deliberate attack on residential districts.

The Transportation Plan

In the spring of 1944 the Allies were preparing the landing in Normandy and looking for a way to stop the Germans from rapidly moving reserves to the coast from the interior of France, Belgium and the Reich. The commander of the Allied Expeditionary Air Force, Air Chief Marshal Trafford Leigh-Mallory, and the Deputy Supreme Commander, Air Chief Marshal Arthur Tedder, backed a plan drawn up by the air force’s scientific adviser, the zoologist and operational research specialist Solly Zuckerman. It called for the systematic destruction of marshalling yards, engine sheds and repair workshops in northern France and Belgium, so that the rail network would lose the capacity to handle large military movements. The RAF was given the first such targets – among them the yards at Trappes, Aulnoye, Le Mans and Amiens – as early as the beginning of March 1944.

The plan met opposition from the strategic bomber commanders. The head of Bomber Command, Air Chief Marshal Arthur Harris, believed that his heavy bombers, designed for night raids on large cities, would not hit small railway targets, while the American General Carl Spaatz preferred to strike at German refineries and synthetic fuel plants. The dispute, which had been running since the winter, when SHAEF was set up, was settled at a meeting at the end of March at which General Dwight Eisenhower came down in favour of the Transportation Plan. On 14 April 1944 Eisenhower, acting through Tedder, took over the direction of the British and American heavy bombers for the period of the invasion preparations.

Harris, for his part, soon found that his crews could bomb more accurately than he had thought. By the spring of 1944 Bomber Command had the Oboe radio-navigation system, Pathfinder marker aircraft and experienced raid leaders circling over the target (master bombers) who corrected the bombing by radio. The command also began sending smaller forces against individual railway targets, in several waves. The arithmetic of losses pointed the same way: after the disastrous Nuremberg raid of 30–31 March, further deep penetrations over the Reich on light nights were becoming too costly anyway, whereas targets in France were close by and less heavily defended.

In the weeks before the La Chapelle raid the bombers struck several other junctions around Paris. On the night of 18–19 April they attacked, among others, the marshalling yard at Noisy-le-Sec in the eastern suburbs, where according to French figures 464 people were killed, and the junction at Juvisy-sur-Orge to the south. La Chapelle, a sprawling yard covering part of the 18th arrondissement and the Plaine Saint-Denis, was the next obvious target.

The night of 20–21 April

The raid was carried out by 247 Avro Lancaster heavy bombers, most of them from Bomber Command’s No. 5 Group, and 22 de Havilland Mosquitos. Pathfinder Mosquitos of No. 8 Group were to mark the yard with flares (target indicators) using Oboe, while Mosquitos of No. 627 Squadron dropped strips of aluminium foil over the target just before the attack to jam the German radars. The attack was planned in two waves about an hour apart: the first was to destroy the western part of the yard, from the Pont Marcadet in Paris to the Plaine Saint-Denis, the second the eastern part, as far as the Pont de Soissons.

The first bombs fell a few minutes after midnight, already on 21 April; according to the press of the time the air-raid alert in Paris lasted from about 11.30 p.m. to 2 a.m. The start did not go smoothly. The Oboe Mosquitos were slightly late, communications between the bombers, the marker aircraft and the controllers broke down, and some of the flares drifted in the wind: one green flare came down in Aubervilliers, another near the Boulevard de Rochechouart at the foot of Montmartre. Successive formations arrived every few minutes, from south to north and from north to south. In the first minutes the bombing was accurate; later, smoke and dust from the burning yard obscured the markers and more and more bombs fell on the houses around the tracks. The second wave repeated the same pattern over the eastern part of the yard.

According to Bomber Command’s assessment, of some 2,000 bombs dropped roughly 200 fell outside the target, and the yard itself was judged destroyed. The La Chapelle engine shed and most of the tracks were almost completely wrecked; their reconstruction was not completed until 1952. Flak and German night fighters shot down or damaged several bombers: French researchers of air losses count seven Lancasters lost in the operation (one crashed in England after returning), with 44 airmen killed. For a raid of this size the losses were light – much lower than on missions over the Reich.

Victims and destruction

The price of destroying the yard was paid by the inhabitants of the working-class districts that had huddled against the tracks for decades. French tallies give between 641 and about 670 dead (the differences arise from how those who died in hospital and unidentified victims are counted) and 377 wounded. The largest number of victims – between 423 and 452 according to different sources – died in the 18th arrondissement of Paris. Around the rue des Poissonniers, where the street now ended in bomb craters, the press alone counted 150 dead and several thousand people left homeless, and in the arrondissement as a whole some 15,000 people lost their homes or belongings. The vault of Simplon metro station collapsed, and a dozen or so bombs fell near the Basilica of the Sacré-Cœur on the top of the hill.

In Saint-Denis, on the Plaine Saint-Denis, 218 people were killed. The most terrible fate befell those who had taken refuge in makeshift shelters dug under an empty lot in the impasse Marteau, by the boulevards on the Paris boundary (where the Boulevard Périphérique ring road now runs): some hundred bodies were recovered from the rubble there. Houses on the avenue du Président-Wilson, the rue du Landy and the rue du Bailly were destroyed; factories, railway buildings and the cemetery in Saint-Ouen were also hit. Several hundred families had their homes completely destroyed, and more than a thousand had theirs partly destroyed.

The rescue operation went on for many days. The fire brigade, the civil defence and the Red Cross were helped by members of the Resistance; local memory recalls among others Suzanne Leclézio and Yvonne Ziegler, who cared for the injured. Bodies that could not be identified were buried in a common grave in the La Chapelle cemetery; the other victims were laid to rest in the cemeteries of Paris, Saint-Denis and Saint-Ouen. On 25 April the collaborationist municipal authorities of Saint-Denis held a memorial service in the Basilica of Saint-Denis.

The La Chapelle raid was not the first in which Allied bombs killed Parisians. As early as the night of 3–4 March 1942 the RAF had bombed the Renault works at Boulogne-Billancourt in the western suburbs, killing several hundred inhabitants, and in 1943 American raids on factories around the capital claimed further victims. None of these attacks, however, was as bloody. In 1943 alone Allied bombs killed about 7,500 civilians in France, according to French figures; in the spring of 1944, when the Transportation Plan got under way, those numbers began to rise rapidly.

The dispute over the price of the Transportation Plan

The threat of such losses was known in London before the plan was even put into effect. Marshalling yards usually lay in the middle of towns or in their working-class suburbs, and the first staff estimates spoke of tens of thousands of French and Belgians killed and wounded. Winston Churchill and the British War Cabinet received them with great concern. The Prime Minister feared that mass casualties among the people of a country the Allies meant to liberate would turn the French against the British and Americans for many years and make the task of German and Vichy propaganda easier. At the beginning of April 1944 he wrote to Eisenhower that the Cabinet took a grave and rather unfavourable view of the proposal, and the matter came back many times to meetings of the Cabinet and its Defence Committee.

Eisenhower and Tedder would not give way. They argued that there was no other way to slow the German reserves in time, and that the lives of tens of thousands of soldiers – and ultimately of the French themselves – depended on the success of the invasion. They did, however, agree to concessions: some targets in the most densely populated places were postponed or struck off, the bombers were to attack in good visibility, and the inhabitants were warned by leaflets and BBC broadcasts to keep away from railway junctions. The casualty estimates were recalculated several times and revised downwards. Even so, every report of a raid such as Noisy-le-Sec or La Chapelle, where hundreds of people died, fed the Prime Minister’s doubts.

The dispute was not only about numbers. Harris and Spaatz still believed that their bombers would serve the invasion better by striking at German industry and fuel, and some staff officers doubted whether destroying marshalling yards would stop German traffic at all. Tedder and Zuckerman replied that the target was not individual trains but the whole network: the engine sheds, workshops and junctions without which the railway ceased to function over a large area. In practice the air forces themselves settled the matter – in the spring of 1944 both Bomber Command and the American Eighth and Ninth Air Forces struck railway targets in France and Belgium ever more often.

Vichy propaganda and Pétain’s visit

For the authorities of Vichy France and the collaborationist Paris press, the raid was a gift. From the beginning of 1944 Vichy propaganda was run by the Secretary of State for Information, Philippe Henriot, whose daily radio talks presented Allied bombing as the murder of Frenchmen by “Anglo-Saxon” airmen, and the Resistance and the Free French as their accomplices. Photographs of wrecked tenements in the 18th arrondissement, of coffins and of weeping families appeared on the front pages and in the newsreels. The propaganda kept quiet about the fact that the target was a yard serving German military transport, and exaggerated the picture of Allied ruthlessness.

The culmination of this campaign was the visit of Marshal Philippe Pétain to Paris on 26 April 1944 – his first since June 1940. The head of state came officially to honour the victims of the raids. In Notre-Dame Cathedral he attended a requiem service, at which he was welcomed by the Archbishop of Paris, Cardinal Emmanuel Suhard, and then went on to the Hôtel de Ville, in front of which a crowd of many thousands had gathered. People cheered and sang the “Marseillaise”, and in a short speech the marshal – according to accounts – joked that he hoped soon to come back to Paris without having to give notice to his “guardians”, which the audience took as an allusion to the Germans.

Historians judge these scenes differently. For the propagandists they were proof that the French still stood by the marshal and were outraged at the Allies. More often, however, it is stressed that the crowd was applauding the aged victor of Verdun and a symbol of the country’s suffering, not the policy of collaboration; four months later the same streets welcomed General Charles de Gaulle. Nor did the raid turn opinion around: despite the grief and anger after each bombing, most French people were still waiting for the Allied landing, and the Resistance helped with the rescue effort and was preparing to sabotage the railways on its own account.

Place in the war

The La Chapelle raid was one of several dozen strikes under the Transportation Plan in the last weeks before the invasion, and one of the most costly for the civilian population. The dispute in London was still going on in May. On 7 May 1944 Churchill set out his fears to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who replied on 11 May that, regrettable as the civilian losses were, he did not intend to impose from such a distance restrictions on the responsible commanders that might jeopardise the success of Overlord or increase the casualties among the troops. The Transportation Plan thus held its ground to the end, and the heavy bombers went on smashing railway junctions and, from May, bridges as well, including those over the Seine.

The effects proved serious. When the Normandy landings began on 6 June 1944, German traffic in northern France moved by detours and with great delays, and some divisions reached the front on foot or by road under air attack. A German Air Ministry report of 13 June admitted that the raids had cut all the main lines and severed the coastal defences from their supply bases. To this day, however, there is debate about how much of this success should be attributed to the bombing of marshalling yards and how much to the destruction of bridges, fighter-bomber attacks on trains and sabotage of the French railways by the Resistance.

The price was the blood of the French and Belgian population. According to French research, Allied bombing killed at least some 68,000 civilians in France in 1940–1945, a large proportion of them in the spring and summer of 1944 – in the campaign against the railways and then in the fighting in Normandy. The raid of 21 April remained in the memory of the people of northern Paris and Saint-Denis as “the bombing of La Chapelle”. Only years later was it publicly commemorated: in Saint-Denis, above the covered A1 motorway, there is a Place du 21-Avril-1944 with a plaque unveiled in 2010, and in the 18th arrondissement a square of the same name. The story of that night shows the dilemma the Allies faced on the eve of the invasion: to liberate France, they had to kill its inhabitants.