Zee French, zey air zo clever! Zey trane zee bowwows to sneef out zee exploseeves.

ASSOCIATED PRESS

Police at Paris’ top airport lost track of a passenger’s bag in which plastic explosives were placed to train bomb-sniffing dogs, police said Saturday. Warned that the bag may have gotten on any of nearly 90 flights from Charles de Gaulle, authorities searched planes upon arrival in Los Angeles and New York.

French police said the explosives were harmless and there was no chance of their going off, since no detonators were connected to them.

More than 300 passengers were evacuated and their luggage searched when their Air France flight from Charles de Gaulle arrived in Los Angeles late Friday the U.S. Transportation Security Administration said

Two Air France and one American Airlines flight to Paris were also searched in New York City, TSA spokesman Norm Brewer said. No explosives were found on any of the flights.

French police at Charles de Gaulle deliberately placed up to five ounces of plastic explosives into a passenger’s luggage Friday evening, police spokesman Pierre Bouquin said.

But a “momentary lack of surveillance” led to the bag being lost on a conveyor belt carrying luggage from check-in to planes, he said.

Mon dieu! Quel malheur! Or, as we say in Joisey “What a buncha maroons!”

The French will be celebrating their liberation of Paris during this week. So, I want to play a little game. Just complete the following sentence:

After fierce fighting, victorious French troops entered the city of [ ]

RULES:

• The city named must be a city, not a village or hamlet.
• The city named cannot be in France.
• The city named cannot be in a current or former French colony.

The Liberation of Paris:

• August 15-18, 1944: Strikes break out
• August 18, 1944: Communists call for insurrection
• August 19, 1944: Combat breaks out. The Resistance occupies several public buildings. Cease fire proclaimed late in day.
• August 20, 1944: The Americans enter Fontainbleau and cross the Seine at Mantes. Publicly, cease fire is maintained.
• August 21, 1944: Despite public cease fire, combat continues.
• August 22, 1944: General LeClerc ordered by Bradley to advance on Paris.
• August 24, 1944: French armor enters the heart of the city.
• August 25, 1944: General von Choltitz signs the act of surrender at just after 3 p.m.
• deGaulle walks from the Arc de Triomphe to Notre Dame. Intermittant sniper fire continues, including inside Notre Dame.
• August 27, 1944: French armor push through northern suburbs.
• August 29, 1944: The 28th US Infantry Division marches down the Champs Elys’es and into combat that same day.

An AP account that shows more Americans involved in the fighting, from August 25, 1944:

Street fighting raged through the heart of Paris today as American and French columns drove into the city from the south amid a tumultuous welcome from hundreds of thousands of Parisians.

The first French column to enter the city reached Luxembourg at 10:20 a.m. The Germans, the collaborationist militia and the French Gestapo organization opened fire with machine guns, rifles and pistols and the battle was on.

An American infantry column drove to Notre Dame at 11 a.m. in a spectacular ground attack to close in on strongholds still defended by the embattled Germans and the Vichy French militia.

[This dispatch was filed at 12:28 p.m., 6:28 a.m. Eastern War Time.]

The columns fought toward the center of the city where French Forces of the Interior (F.F.I.) and city police have held out for the past week.

Machine guns and rifles cracked on all sides as the column I was with drove to within a block of the Luxembourg.

Joyous, happy throngs who greeted the entrance of the tanks and infantry with a thundering welcome fled to the safety of buildings and within a few minutes the streets that had been choked with humanity, laughing and crying over the liberation, were bare battlegrounds.

As I write this story, the Germans are still holding out in the area on both sides of the Seine, halfway along the Champs Elysees, Place de la Concorde, Quai d’Orsay, Tuileries, Gardens of the Louvre, the Madeleine, the Chamber of Deputies, the Senate and the Hotel Crillon.

French patriots have a grip on the Ile de la Cite, the Calais de Justice, the Prefecture of Police, the Prefecture of the Seine, most of the Mairies and the factory district.

But Frenchmen are fighting Frenchmen as well as Germans in liberating a city wild with happiness over the freedom which they waited for for four years.

Politics and the Military in the Liberation of Paris

Hoping to shame the French into greater effort, Gerow asked Bradley whether he could order the 4th US Division into the city. An angry Bradley wondered how long after the truce Choltitz would wait for regular troops before destroying the capital. Bradley could hardly let the French “dance their way to Paris.” He told Gerow, “To hell with prestige. Tell the 4th to slam on in and take the liberation.”[16] Precedence in favor of the French, Gerow informed Barton and Leclerc, no longer applied.

This information prompted Leclerc to make one more attempt that night. It was impossible for him to order the northern column to continue beyond the Sevres bridge because, as the French reported, “liaison between the columns for all practical purposes no longer exists.”[17] Leclerc’s mistake or oversight was perhaps due to inexperience.

So Leclerc, who was with the main effort in the south, sent a small detachment of tanks and half-tracks forward. This force rolled along side roads and back streets, crossed the Seine River by the Pont d’Austerlitz, drove along the quays on the right bank, and reached the Hotel de Ville, the city hall, just before midnight, 24 August.

The bells of nearby Notre Dame began to ring joyously. Another church took up the refrain. A third joined. Soon all the churches in Paris were pealing in celebration. A cascade of sound washed over the city.

Few Parisians had gone to bed that night. The telephones were functioning, and everyone knew of the Allied soldiers in the suburbs. The church bells could mean only that the liberators had arrived.

On the following morning, 25 August, the official day of liberation, enormous crowds of excited Parisians welcomed the 2d French Armored Division, which swept the western part of Paris, and the 4th US Infantry Division, which cleared the eastern part. Everywhere were joy, delight, tears of happiness. Unbounded elation took hold of Parisians and the French and the whole civilized world.

Most of the Germans had melted away during the night. Two thousand remained in the Bois de Boulogne, seven hundred more in Luxembourg Gardens. A few small and scattered groups awaited capture.

In the early afternoon of 25 August, under the arcades of the rue de Rivoli, a young French officer sprang into the Hotel Meurice. He burst into Choltitz’s suite of rooms. To Choltitz, who sat at his desk, he shouted in his excitement, “Do you speak German?” Choltitz replied coolly. “Probably better than you.”[18] He allowed himself to be taken prisoner.

In the presence of Leclerc and the French Resistance commander in Paris, Choltitz signed a formal act of capitulation. Teams of French and German officers circulated copies to the Germans still in the city.

As for the internal political situation, the Gaullists proved to be better organized and disciplined than their opponents. Taking advantage of the uprising on 19 August, they had seized and occupied the seat of government. They held the buildings and the facilities and thus the means of political control.

On 26 August, De Gaulle wrote and thanked Eisenhower for letting Leclerc liberate Paris. With cheering crowds present, De Gaulle, Leclerc, and members of the Provisional Government walked from the Etoile, now named the Place du General de Gaulle, down the Champs Elysees to the Place de la Concorde. De Gaulle then proceeded to the Cathedral of Notre Dame where an overflow congregation celebrated a mass of thanksgiving.

When Hitler learned that Allied troops were in Paris, he asked whether the capital was burning. “Brennt Paris?”[19] Enraged by the negative response, he ordered artillery, V-weapons, and planes to destroy the city. His military commanders were busy with other matters. Getting their forces back to Germany, rearming the Siegfried Line, and preparing to keep the Allies out of their homeland were their priorities.

To make clear the participation of Allied troops in the liberation, Eisenhower marched the 28th US Infantry Division through the city to the front on 29 August. Eisenhower, Bradley, Gerow, De Gaulle, and Leclerc reviewed the parade. Eisenhower had invited Montgomery to attend, but he said he was too busy to come.

Ernie Pyle:

We entered Paris from due south and the Germans were still battling in the heart of the city along the Seine when we arrived, but they were doomed. There was a full French armored division in the city, plus American troops entering constantly.

The farthest we got in our first hour in Paris was near the Senate building, where some Germans were holed up and firing desperately. So we took a hotel room nearby and decided to write while the others fought. By the time you read this I’m sure Paris will once again be free for Frenchmen, and I’ll be out all over town getting my bald head kissed. Of all the days of national joy I’ve ever witnessed this is the biggest.

It seems quite clear that a combination of Allied troops liberated Paris. Let the French have their little fantasies. Americans, too, died to liberate Paris.

Then in June 1995, on the day that Chirac took office as president of France, a unit of French UN peacekeepers was taken hostage by the Serbs, tied to trees and chained to Serbian artillery pieces.

Chirac, who had been wounded after he volunteered to serve in the French Army in Algeria, was outraged. “I will not accept this,” he told aides. “You can kill French soldiers, you can wound them, but you cannot humiliate them!…”

From the International Herald Tribune

1814: Napoleon abdicates and is exiled to Elba
1815: Napoleon defeated at Waterloo
Paris was surrounded by the Germans on Sept. 19, 1870 and a grueling siege began.
1940: Paris falls, Vichy’s government formed
8/11/42: Allies land in North Africa, French surrender
5/7/54: French surrender at Dien Bien Phu
7/3/62: Algeria given independance

Yeah, you just can’t humiliate a French soldier!

Pentagon adviser: France ‘no longer ally’

By Martin Walker
UPI Chief International Correspondent

WASHINGTON, Feb. 4 (UPI) — France is no longer an ally of the United States and the NATO alliance “must develop a strategy to contain our erstwhile ally or we will not be talking about a NATO alliance” the head of the Pentagon’s top advisory board said in Washington Tuesday.

Richard Perle, a former assistant secretary of defense in the Reagan administration and now chairman of the Pentagon’s Policy Advisory Board, condemned French and German policy on Iraq in the strongest terms at a public seminar organized by a New York-based PR firm and attended by Iraqi exiles and American Middle East and security officials.

But while dismissing Germany’s refusal to support military action against Iraq as an aberration by “a discredited chancellor,” Perle warned that France’s attitude was both more dangerous and more serious.

“France is no longer the ally it once was,” Perle said. And he went on to accuse French President Jacques Chirac of believing “deep in his soul that Saddam Hussein is preferable to any likely successor.”

French leaders have insisted the country will oppose any military action against Iraq without a second resolution by the United Nations Security Council, where it holds one of five crucial veto powers. Last November France did vote for Resolution 1441, which promised “serious consequences” if Iraq did not cooperate with U.N. weapons inspectors verifying that Iraq has indeed dismantled its programs for chemical, biological and nuclear weapons.

“I have long thought that there were forces in France intent on reducing the American role in the world. That is more troubling than the stance of a German chancellor, who has been largely rejected by his own people,” Perle said, referring to the sharp electoral defeat suffered by Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder’s party in state elections Sunday.

Although he is not an official of the Bush administration, Perle’s position as the Pentagon’s senior civilian adviser gives his harsh remarks a quasi-official character and reflects the growing frustration in the White House and Pentagon with the French and German reluctance to support their U.S. and British allies.

“Very considerable damage has already been done to the Atlantic community, including NATO, by Germany and France,” Perle said.

“But in the German case, the behavior of the Chancellor is idiosyncratic. He tried again to incite pacifism, and this time failed in Sunday’s elections in Hesse and Lower Saxony. His capacity to do damage is now constrained. Chancellor Schroeder is now in a box, and the Germans will recover their equilibrium.”

Perle went on to question whether the United States should ever again seek the endorsement of the U.N. Security Council on a major issue of policy, stressing that “Iraq is going to be liberated, by the United States and whoever wants to join us, whether we get the approbation of the U.N. or any other institution.”

“It is now reasonable to ask whether the United States should now or on any other occasion subordinate vital national interests to a show of hands by nations who do not share our interests,” he added.

Copyright © 2001-2003 United Press International

WOW! More to come, I’m sure. Kicked Chirac right in the cheese…

Protesting unilateral French military adventurism in the Ivory Coast, tens of thousands of black Ivorians marched in the capital, Abidjan. Chanting anti-French and pro-American slogans, the marchers denounced the French brokered settlement of the recent civil war which ceded two key ministries to the Islamic insurgents.

The Ivory Coast is one of the largest producers of cocoa in the world, and French intentions concerning this important agricultural product are suspect. In a typical French reaction to opposition, the French government has urged the withdrawal of all French citizens from the Ivory Coast. French troops, deployed in the country for many years and recently reinforced, provided protection for the fleeing French civilians from the jeering and taunting native crowds.

You may recall that last year several hundred United States and other Western civilians were trapped in a school by the Islamic insurgents, despite the French military units stationed nearby. Only the arrival of American Special Forces in the region to provide a rescue provoked the French to action. In what was hardly a triumph of logistics, the French rescue forces arrived without any means of transporting the civilians who were forced to flee in a variety of cars and other civilian vehicles.

French forces have been attacked several times by the insurgents, making it difficult to understand why the French government has so forcefully taken their side in the negotiations to end the civil war. One can assume that the safety of the French military forces in the region was not of paramount concern to their government. The location of the French aircraft carrier Charles deGaulle cannot be confirmed but further French military imperialism in the country cannot be discounted.

The phrase “No Blood for Chocolate” may be an apt slogan. France’s continued interventions in this, and other former colonies, without the consent of the United Nations or its NATO allies, suggests a musketeer-like approach to foreign policy, and a persistent refusal to recognize the realities of the modern world. Chirac needs to recognize fully and completely the political and economic independence of the Ivory Coast, and all the other nations that France has officially freed from its colonial exploitation. The United States, and the NATO allies with the United Nations, should protest in the strongest terms the French racist, neocolonial policies in West Africa. If necessary, the Security Council should seek a regime change in Paris, thus freeing millions of people in Africa from the threat that France poses to their sovereignty and legitimate political aspirations.