On 6 June 1944 Allied forces began the long-awaited invasion of northern France. Operation Overlord, codename for the Normandy landings, was the largest seaborne invasion in history, as British, American and Canadian forces landed on a fifty-mile stretch of coast. Fighting was intense, casualties high and progress slower than the Allies had hoped. The town of Caen, a major objective, was not captured until 21 July, and the Allies could not break out beyond Bayeux until 1 August. But, as they advanced towards Paris, many towns saw spontaneous demonstrations of support from the local people, the vast majority of them women, often wearing red, white and blue and kissing every soldier in sight.
The battle for Paris itself began on 15 August. Colonel Henri Rol-Tanguy, commander of the Paris Region FFI (Forces Fran?aises de l’Intérieur), the umbrella network for the military resistance, led the popular uprising in the city as the police went on strike and the Métro closed. Cécile Rol-Tanguy, the young activist married to Henri, knew in advance that this was the moment and remembers frantically typing out propaganda posters calling for insurrection which needed circulating across the city. The patriotic French – ‘all men from 18 to 50 able to carry a weapon’ – were urged to join ‘the struggle against the invader’, promising ‘victory was near’ and ‘chastisement for the traitors’, the Vichy loyalists. The Rol-Tanguys, both committed communists, had managed to survive in occupied Paris for four years leading a dangerous and clandestine existence, taking enormous risks while bringing up a young family. They were fortunate not to be arrested, like so many of their fellow fighters. Although Cécile worked as Henri’s liaison officer, they could not live together as he was a wanted man, far too well known by the Germans.
In 1942 Cécile’s father, Fran?ois, had been arrested for a second time, this time deported to Auschwitz where he was killed, and the following year Cécile gave birth to a son, Jean. So Cécile and her mother now lived together in a tiny studio with the two children, Hélène, born in May 1941, and baby Jean, struggling to find enough to eat. She remembers being so thin at one point that her culottes fell down. Cécile had to traverse the city for her work, so she sometimes carried Hélène in her arms while hiding weapons in a sack of potatoes which she pushed in the pram. At other times she buried papers underneath the pram bedding, with the baby on top. She had a number of aliases, Jeanne, Yvette and Lucie, and occasionally changed her hairstyle or wore a fashionable turban, but she did little otherwise to disguise herself. Afterwards, she always made light of her activities, claiming she had done nothing special. ‘My strength was always in remaining cool. I think that was my character.’