1 ere armée (1944–1945)

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Operation Dragoon map, August 15 - September 12, 1944
Advance of US and French troops, August – September 1944

The 1ere Armée , also Première armée française ( German  1st Army ) was created in the final phase of the Second World War from the regular French B-Army, which was stationed in North Africa, and parts of the Armée française de la liberation (part of the Resistance ) under the Order from General Jean de Lattre de Tassigny . She took part in the Allied liberation of France (French called La Liberation ) as part of the landing in southern France, fought in the Rhone Valley , liberated Alsace and conquered parts of southwest Germany. Parts of the army were involved in fighting in the Alps and Italy .

history

Combat operations of the 1st Armée Française,
April 15 - May 8, 1945

De Lattre came to Algiers from London on December 20, 1943 and took over command of the remnants of the regular army in French North Africa , the so-called B Army, on behalf of De Gaulle . From Corsica, which had been free from German and Italian occupiers since October 1943 , the invasion of Elba took place on June 17, 1944 ( Operation Brassard ); Command units of the Royal Navy supported the overall successful procedure.

The 6th Army Group , consisting of the 7th US Army under General Alexander M. Patch and the B Army, then carried out Operation Dragoon , the invasion of southern France . De Lattres troops landed in a second wave on August 16, 1944, taking Toulon and Marseille . On September 25, 1944, the French B Army was renamed the 1st (French) Army (there was a Provisional Government of the French Republic at that time ). Members of the Resistance , the French resistance who wanted to continue the armed struggle, were integrated into the 1st Army by De Lattre.

It followed from

After Paris and the whole of France had been liberated , the 1st Army crossed the Rhine near Speyer and Germersheim on March 30th to 31st , occupied Karlsruhe (April 4th) and pushed over Freiburg on the Upper Rhine (April 21st) as part of the Allied expeditionary forces ) and the Black Forest to the Swiss border before (April 27), as well as north to Stuttgart and further south along the Danube to Vorarlberg and Tyrol . It destroyed Freudenstadt (April 16/17) and then took Tübingen (April 18), Reutlingen (April 19), Esslingen am Neckar (April 21), Sigmaringen and Stuttgart (April 22). The remnants of the French Vichy regime had been prisoners of Hitler in exile in Sigmaringen Castle since the summer of 1944 . Their intended arrest explains the thrust of part of the army.

The circumstances surrounding the destruction of Freudenstadt with mass rape are now regarded as war crimes , but are rarely discussed in public outside the region. De Lattre himself felt that the destruction of Freudenstadt was just revenge. In the first few days, French troops committed mass rape, looting and, in numerous cases, the killing of people who opposed them in the areas they occupied. The French officers let their troops have their way and after a few days intervened, sometimes drastically by executing soldiers without trial. Numerous local reports attest to this. In Reutlingen, the captain of the security service of the French army, Max Rouché - a professor of German studies in Bordeaux - had four German civilians executed as hostages on April 24, 1945 as reprisal of the suspected assassination death of a French soldier who probably died in a traffic accident .

Between April 23 and April 26, 1945, parts of the army still got into fierce fighting with German troops who attempted to break through to the east in the Blumberg area from the Black Forest .

Army badge of the "1re armée"

On 25 April 1945, the army reached Radolfzell am Bodensee , occupied on April 26, Konstanz and ended on 29 April 1945 after taking Markdorf war in southwest Germany. There were clashes between the Allies over Stuttgart , which was occupied by the French on April 21, against the will and the agreement with the American armed forces. It was not until July 8, 1945 that Stuttgart entered the American zone of occupation .

The commander-in-chief of the 1st Army represented France at the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF) in Reims , including on May 7, 1945 and May 8, 1945 at the headquarters of Marshal Zhukov in Berlin at the German surrender to the anti-Hitler Coalition . He later represented France in the Allied Control Council in Berlin. De Lattre was relieved and promoted in August 1945. In 1952, the French government posthumously awarded him the honorary title Marshal of France .

structure

Five French infantry and three tank divisions were subordinate to this corps in a changing composition:

There were also various smaller units.

See also

literature

  • Première Armée Française. Ordres du jours et messages . Strasbourg 1945
  • Textes du général de Lattre de Tassigny . Paris 1947
  • Histoire de la 1re Armée française . édition Plon, 1949
  • Reconquérir: 1944-1945 . Texts réunis et présentés by Jean-Luc Barre. Plon, 1985

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Cf. Edgar Wolfrum, Peter Fässler, Reinhard Grohnert: Years of Crisis and Time to Break Up. P. 24 f.
  2. ^ Bernard Destremau: Jean de Lattre de Tassigny , Flammarion, Paris, 1999, ISBN 978-2-08-067376-3
  3. ↑ Ian Kershaw : The End. Fight to the end. Nazi Germany 1944/45. Munich 2011, p. 417 and note 9
  4. ↑ Facts and background information on the shooting of the hostages in Reutling in 1945, Reutlinger General-Anzeiger from April 16, 2005, accessed on December 6, 2016
  5. ^ E. Wolfrum, R. Grohnert: Liberation and occupation shock . The end of the war in the southwest in 1944/45 . In: Edgar Wolfrum , Peter Fässler, Reinhard Grohnert: Years of Crisis and Time to Start , p. 25
  6. ^ Henry Jules Jean Martin, 1888–1984, commander of the 87 e DIA, Marrakech division, and the 1 er DMM. Later commander of the XIX. Corps (Algeria, 1944–1946, then retired)
  7. ↑ Made from 1re division française libre (1 Mot. Infantry Division, fr. DMI of FFL, even 1re DFL 3 brigades. Since April 18, 1944 under Diego Brosset and from 20 November 1944, Pierre Garbay , who later was deployed in Madagascar , Indochina, Dakar and Tunisia) and the 3rd Algerian Infantry Division and the 9th Cololonial Infantry Division (partly from Senegal)