The surrender of Toulon and Marseille

On 28 August 1944 the last German garrisons of the two largest ports on France’s Mediterranean coast surrendered. In Marseille General Hans Schaefer, commander of the 244th Infantry Division, signed the instrument of surrender before General Joseph de Goislard de Monsabert. In Toulon Rear Admiral Heinrich Ruhfus, the commandant of the German fortress, agreed to unconditional surrender late in the evening of 27 August on the Saint-Mandrier peninsula, and on the morning of 28 August his men laid down their arms. The city of Toulon itself had been in French hands since 26 August; on 28 August the last defended forts and batteries fell.

Both ports were taken by General Jean de Lattre de Tassigny’s French Army B, which had been coming ashore since 16 August on the beachhead won in Operation Dragoon. The plan had assumed that Toulon would fall roughly three weeks after the landing, and Marseille later still. In the event it took less than two weeks.

The plan and de Lattre’s decision

Under the original plan the French were first to assemble all their forces on the beachhead, then surround and take Toulon, and only after that move on Marseille. The rapid collapse of the German coastal defences and Hitler’s order of 16/17 August, which told the Nineteenth Army to retreat up the Rhône valley and the garrisons of both ports to fight to the end, led de Lattre to decide not to wait. On 18 August, with only part of his divisions ashore – some 16,000 men, thirty tanks and a few artillery batteries – he threw them into the attack. He divided his forces into two groups: General Edgard de Larminat, with the 1st Free French Division and the 9th Colonial Infantry Division, was to attack Toulon from the east, while General de Monsabert, with the 3rd Algerian Infantry Division, Moroccan tabors and tanks of the 1st Armoured Division, was to bypass the city to the north, cut the road from Toulon to Marseille and head for Marseille.

Army B was to a large extent a colonial army. Alongside French officers and NCOs, volunteers and soldiers from settler families in Algeria, its ranks included Algerian, Tunisian and Senegalese tirailleurs (the last term covering soldiers from the whole of French West Africa) and Moroccan goumiers – Atlas mountaineers organised in tabors, who had earlier made their name in the fighting in the mountains of central Italy. On the German side Toulon was defended by General Johannes Bäßler’s 242nd Infantry Division together with numerous naval and coastal artillery units, and Marseille by the 244th Infantry Division and Luftwaffe and Kriegsmarine units; according to French studies there were some 13,000 German troops in Marseille and between ten and twenty thousand in Toulon.

Toulon

Toulon was the main base of the French Navy and a city of particular symbolic importance. It was here, on 27 November 1942, when the Germans burst into the port after occupying the unoccupied zone, that the French scuttled their own fleet to keep it out of the hands of the Third Reich. The wrecks of battleships and cruisers still lay in the harbour basins. The Germans had strengthened the city’s defences: in the forts and batteries on the hills and on the Saint-Mandrier peninsula they had mounted guns taken from French warships, including a turret with two 340 mm guns. For days Allied aircraft bombed the batteries and the submarine base; in August bombs sank the battleship Strasbourg and the cruiser La Galissonnière, which had earlier been raised from the bottom and which the Germans intended to use to block the harbour entrance.

After heavy fighting at Hyères and on the hills of the eastern suburbs, where the 1st Free French Division and the Senegalese tirailleurs of the 9th Colonial Division took one fortification after another, the French reached the outskirts of the city on 20 August. From the north, Algerian tirailleurs and commandos of the Shock Battalion, supported by the local FFI, seized the fort on Mont Faron, which towers over Toulon, and on the evening of 21 August entered the city’s streets, cutting it off from the west. In the following days the French cleared the city district by district. General Bäßler was taken prisoner, and by 26 August organised resistance in the city itself had ceased.

The arsenal and the heavily fortified Saint-Mandrier peninsula, which closes off the roadstead to the south, were still holding out. The 340 mm batteries were still shelling the city on 27 August, as the French were preparing their first victory parade there. Under fire from land, air and sea, Rear Admiral Ruhfus agreed to surrender on the evening of 27 August, and on the morning of 28 August just under two thousand of his men marched out of Saint-Mandrier into captivity. According to French figures the battle for Toulon cost Army B some 2,700 killed and wounded; around 17,000 Germans were taken prisoner and around a thousand were killed.

Marseille

In Marseille, France’s second-largest city, events took a different course, because the inhabitants themselves joined the fight. On 21 August the local FFI under Henri Simon, in agreement with the liberation committee, proclaimed an uprising and a general strike. The poorly armed insurgents – from both non-communist groups and the communist Francs-Tireurs et Partisans – occupied a number of buildings and crossroads, and on 22–23 August took over the prefecture and the town hall; at the town hall the socialist Gaston Defferre, one of the Resistance leaders in the city, took charge of the insurgent authorities. The Germans, busy defending themselves against the approaching army, did not crush the uprising, but the insurgents could not force them to surrender on their own and called for help from regular troops.

Help arrived quickly. After the fighting for Aubagne on 21–22 August, tanks of the 1st Armoured Division, Moroccan tabors and Colonel Léon Chappuis’s 7th Algerian Tirailleurs began to infiltrate the city – some of them through the mountain massifs to the east, guided by partisans. By 23 August the first units were already in the centre. De Monsabert, who had taken his troops into the city faster than de Lattre’s cautious plan envisaged, called on Schaefer to surrender; the talks came to nothing and on 24 August the fighting flared up again. The heaviest was for the hill crowned by the basilica of Notre-Dame-de-la-Garde (25 August), for the Saint-Charles railway station and for the forts guarding the Old Port. By 27 August most of the city was free; the Germans held only part of the port installations and a few strongpoints in the north. On 28 August Schaefer signed the surrender; Moroccan goumiers also cleared the last positions on the coast south of the city. The batteries on the Frioul islands surrendered a day later. On 29 August de Lattre took the salute at a parade of the victorious troops on the Canebière.

According to French figures the fighting for Marseille cost some 1,800 killed and wounded, and around 11,000 Germans were taken prisoner. In all, from the landing on 15 August to the capture of Marseille, Army B lost, according to de Lattre’s figures, 933 killed, 19 missing and 3,732 wounded.

The pursuit north: Grenoble, Avignon, Montélimar

While the French fought in the ports, General Lucian Truscott’s Americans were pursuing General Friedrich Wiese’s retreating Nineteenth Army. General Frederick Butler’s motorised task force set out northwards from the beachhead on 18 August by the road through the Provençal Alps – partly along the old Route Napoléon – through Digne, Sisteron and Gap. Everywhere it was preceded or supported by FFI units, which in many towns had disarmed the German garrisons themselves. The German 157th Reserve Infantry Division, instead of blocking the road, withdrew into the Alps, and on the morning of 22 August members of the FFI entered Grenoble, followed in the afternoon by soldiers of the 143rd Infantry Regiment of the American 36th Division.

Meanwhile Truscott’s main forces turned west towards the valley of the Rhône, along which the German retreating column was flowing. On 21 August Task Force Butler occupied the hills north of Montélimar and began shelling the road and railway along the river. For the next several days a fierce battle raged there: General John Dahlquist’s 36th Division, short of fuel and ammunition, tried to block the road, while General Wend von Wietersheim’s 11th Panzer Division repeatedly reopened it. On 25 August, as Paris was celebrating its liberation, the Germans abandoned Avignon on the Rhône, which the FFI and American troops entered almost without a fight. At Montélimar most of the German columns managed to break through northwards on 26–28 August, although they left thousands of burnt-out vehicles and dead horses along the road. On 29 August the Americans took the town, and the last Germans in the area surrendered.

Ports in ruins

Hitler had ordered both garrisons to fight “to the last man” and, in the event of defeat, to destroy the ports. That part of the order was carried out thoroughly. In Marseille, as early as 20 August, the Germans sank several dozen ships in the basins, blew up the transporter bridge over the entrance to the Old Port and destroyed the quays, cranes and warehouses with – according to American figures – some two thousand charges and mines. In Toulon the entrance was blocked by the wrecks of the 1942 fleet and of the ships sunk in August 1944. According to some studies Schaefer did not want to sacrifice his men in a hopeless defence and limited the destruction – the port was badly damaged but not completely destroyed.

Despite the damage, American and French engineers had both ports working again within a few weeks. The first ships entered Marseille and Toulon in mid-September, and a fuel pipeline was laid to Marseille that in time reached Lorraine. In the autumn about a third of the supplies for the Allied armies on the Western Front passed through the ports of southern France – at a time when Antwerp, though captured, was for a long while still inaccessible from the sea.

Significance

The capture of Toulon and Marseille less than two weeks after the landing settled a dispute that had divided the Allies for a year: the ports on which the Americans had insisted were in Allied hands sooner than even the operation’s supporters had expected. For the French it was something more – the first great victory of the reborn French army on its own soil, won at the same time as the Paris uprising and the liberation of the capital. General Charles de Gaulle, who visited Toulon and Marseille in mid-September, emphasised in his speeches the part played by the French army and the Resistance in liberating the country. Less was made at the time of the fact that a very large proportion of the dead and wounded in Provence were soldiers from North and West Africa; their part in the liberation of France was fully commemorated only years later.

Army B, renamed the French First Army in September, moved north after the surrender of the ports, through the Rhône valley and Burgundy towards the Vosges and Alsace. The Nineteenth Army, although badly mauled – it lost nearly 30,000 prisoners in the ports alone – managed to withdraw the core of its forces and take up the defence on the frontiers of the Reich. But the south of France, from the Pyrenees to the Alps, was liberated within a few weeks, and in September the forces from Provence linked up with those advancing from Normandy.