25/08/2026
On August 21, 1944, General George Patton’s troops were headquartered at Chartres, some 50 miles southwest of Paris, but a rumor reached the city that “the Americans” were even closer — at the village of Rambouillet, just 30 miles from the capital.
Unfortunately, “the Americans” consisted only of David Bruce and his OSS staff who had traveled far ahead of Patton’s forces to collect useful intelligence along the road to the city. At a local hotel in the village, Bruce joined forces with a motley group of local French Forces of the Interior (FFI) partisans and their unofficial capitaine, the adventurous war correspondent Ernest Hemingway.
The writer was no stranger to the OSS. He had been a frequent companion of raucous Jedburghs in the pubs in London, and his own son, John, parachuted into southern France weeks earlier on an OSS mission to the Resistance.
“We were enchanted to see him,” wrote Bruce, who gave Hemingway a handwritten order appointing him OSS chief of his constantly growing group of Resistance fighters.
Hemingway collected an arsenal to defend the village against possible attack by the Germans (who were only miles away) and began to gather intelligence that might prove useful in an Allied drive toward the capital.
Friday, August 25, 1944, was the great day. The Second Armored Division of General Jacques LeClerc, accompanied by an American infantry division, roared into the city, flushing out pockets of German resistance with the aid of the victorious
Resistance.
Bruce and Hemingway were with the advance units as they fought their way through an artillery battle to the Arc de Triomphe. Finding the Champs-Élysées completely bare of traffic, Bruce and Hemingway, accompanied by a railroad engineer and two truckloads of FFI partisans, decided to perform their own symbolic act of liberation.
While Generals LeClerc and de Gaulle received the German surrender in a railway station and the valorous Communist Resistance buried its dead and nursed its wounded, the OSS colonel and the dashing writer made their way through thousands of cheering men and women to the most exclusive hotel in Paris, the Ritz.
The building was completely undamaged and entirely deserted, except for the manager, who welcomed the distinguished American visitors at the door and asked Hemingway if there was anything the Ritz could offer him. The writer looked as his buoyant, shabbily dressed FFI proletariat already roaming the lobby of the upper-class hostelry and said, “How about seventy-three dry martinis?”
The OSS had come to Paris.
By R. Harris Smith, author of OSS: The Secret History of America’s First Central Intelligence Agenc
