“German soldiers streamed toward the German frontier through Picardy and Belgium, Lorraine and the Ardennes, bellowing, ‘The Americans will be here in twenty minutes!’. . . . In what the OB West war diary called an ‘ignominious rout,’ Germans unable to find white flags surrendered by waving chickens.” – Rick Atkinson, The Guns at Last Light
“A dignified American woman with close-cropped gray hair, whose living room in Culoz was dominated by a large portrait of her painted by Picasso, sent a note to Seventh Army headquarters along with a fruitcake baked by her companion, Alice B. Toklas. ‘We have waited for you all so long and here you are,’ wrote Gertrude Stein. ‘I cannot tell you enough what it means to see you to hear you to have you here with us.’ (Of Stein’s prose, an American officer wrote: ‘I understand that she puts together a lot of repetitions which have significance only to those whose minds are in a higher sphere than mine.’)” – Rick Atkinson, The Guns at Last Light
“Warm summer rain drenched the motley legions of liberation at dawn on Thursday, August 24 [1944], as three columns from the French 2nd Armored Division made ready for battle twenty miles southwest of Paris. Village women scurried through the bivouacs carrying urns of coffee and platters heaped with fried eggs and breakfast rolls. Soldiers finished shaving with ritualistic precision, then shouldered their weapons and swaggered into formation, ‘booming like bitterns throughout the wood,’ as an American colonel later wrote, ‘pounding their chests and screaming, “En avant!” ’ Tricolor pennants flew from three thousand vehicles named for Napoleonic triumphs or for French towns now unshackled, like Caen and Cherbourg. Each tank and scout car bore a white silhouette of France with the cross of Lorraine superimposed. The twelve thousand troops comprised not only French regulars, but sailors far from the sea, Lebanese Christian engineers, and Senegalese riflemen who until three weeks earlier had never set foot on European France. Also in the ranks could be found Spanish Republicans, Gaullists, monarchists, Jews, Muslims, Catholic reactionaries, animists, anarchists, antipapists, communists, socialists, freethinkers, and militant Quakers.” – Rick Atkinson, The Guns at Last Light