Tom Finneran: Fear Came Quickly On a Summer’s Day

Friday, July 17, 2015

Tom Finneran, GoLocalWorcester MINDSETTER™

An AWACS plane, otherwise known as a Boeing E-3 Sentry.

The setting was special---children at play in a beautiful park on a spectacular summer day. We were in Paris. I was working but an open afternoon gave me a chance to join my wife and granddaughters in one of those oh-so-special French parks. There were hundreds of other families there too, most of them French, but with a smattering of English, German, American, and Aussie clans.

The sounds of joyful children filled the park, undiminished in any way by the watchful eyes and occasional stern warnings of cautious parents and grandparents.

The chill came out of the blue. A jet streaked across the sky moving at high speed to the East. I paid it no heed as it reminded me of the occasional American fighter planes one sees and hears over the Cape. My nonchalance changed in a hurry.

The single jet was soon followed by several groups of two, three, four, and five fighters flying in formation and making haste. This was not an air show and the grandparents on the ground shivered a bit. The mood changed, quickly. Several helicopters appeared, escorted both above and below by more fighters. The children still played, oblivious to the adult anxieties and even entertained by the parade.

The adults, more alert to world history, both past and current, shared ominous looks and whispered questions. One need not be an expert on WW I, WW II, Europe, the Middle East, Russia, Iran, Israel, or Egypt to understand that events often gallop in the saddle, overwhelming diplomacy and triggering cataclysm.

Over the horizon and soon overhead came an AWACS plane. This is a warcraft, plain and simple. It was surrounded by fighter jets and it too headed to the East, a bristling battalion, armed to the teeth. A tanker plane, escorted, followed and the air caravan ended as quickly as it had started.

Our questions, never answered, slowly dwindled. I can find no explanation for what we saw. Was this a training exercise over the heart of Paris? Were these practice runs for the celebration of Bastille Day, the French national holiday, the French equivalent of our Fourth of July? Were these aircraft returning to their bases in the aftermath of the Paris Air Show? Were these flights, these aircraft, designed to demonstrate French resolve to the Iranian rulers or to the terrorists run amok in Tunisia? Or even to French citizens? I have no answers but I do know this---the watchful adults in that beautiful French park felt the chill of looming war and they prayed quietly for their children.

"We'll Always Have Paris"

Pont Alexandre III.

Humphrey Bogart’s great line to Ingrid Bergman in the legendary movie Casablanca has stood the test of time. It’s a classic line from a classic love story. The words also apply to a German general’s decision to disobey direct orders from Adolf Hitler……….

Dietrich von Choltitz was a battle-scarred and battle-tested German general of Prussian origins. The Prussians of course were the most military-oriented and warlike of all the German people. It was virtually unthinkable that a Prussian would deliberately disobey a military command of the Fuehrer.

After fierce fighting service on the Eastern front in Russia and Poland and in the West in Normandy, Choltitz was given command of Paris. His direct orders from the lunatic Hitler, as the Allied armies closed in on the German frontiers, were to destroy all the religious and historic monuments of Paris and to reduce the city to a pile of rubble. The Prussian agonized. And he concluded that Hitler was insane.

In typical fashion and with the customary German skill and thoroughness every bridge, every museum, every monument, and every church was mined with immense explosives in anticipation of an order to retreat from the city. Choltitz was buying time as he wrestled with his conscience---should he follow orders or should he spare the historic city as the unwinnable war ground on. It was quite clear that, should he give the final order, Paris would indeed be turned to rubble and ruin as had so many other European and Russian cities already been reduced to ashes.

The Prussian had soul. Pont Neuf, Pont Alexandre III, the Louvre, Notre Dame, Les Invalides, the Eiffel Tower, the Tuileries, indeed the entire city, was spared the prodigious preparations of the German sappers.

History has its twists and turns. And General Choltitz, the Prussian and Nazi, had his demons as well. That he conquered those demons allows us to say “we’ll always have Paris”.

Tom Finneran is the former Speaker of the Massachusetts House of Representatives, served as the head the Massachusetts Biotechnology Council, and was a longstanding radio voice in Boston radio.