The 9th Company

On August 25, 1944, just hours after the liberation of Paris, Charles de Gaulle declared that Paris had been “[f]reed by its own people, with the help of French troops and the support and assistance of France as a whole, a fighting France: the only France, the true France, the eternal France.” The country had not yet been fully liberated that de Gaulle already sowed the seeds of the prevailing postwar narrative, which posited that Vichy had been an anomaly, at best an epiphenomenon. That approach, which was meant to reunite the French, automatically excluded the many non-French and colonial troops that had partaken in the war effort. This explains in part the dearth of documents on the Spanish presence in Paris in August 1944. For instance, the August 25th issue of Libération went so far as to rename the half-track Guadalajara Nº2 (featured here) “Romilly”. 

The Spanish represented a large proportion of non-French 2nd Armoured Division troops. Many of them had deserted the Foreign Legion after the Allied landing in North Africa, to join General Philippe Leclerc’s 2nd Armoured Division. Leclerc (“el Patrón”) was aware that many of those men had seen action during the Civil War and would help compensate for the loss of some of his African troops, after the Allied High Command had insisted that the unit be “whitened.” Among the 700-odd Spaniards who joined the division, 186 were part of the transnational 9th Company (La Nueve) commanded by the French Captain Raymond Dronne – assisted by Amado Granell, who had led a brigade during the Spanish Civil War. 

In 1944, the 2nd Armoured Division was transferred to Britain and landed in Normandy on August 4th. On the road to Paris, La Nueve saw action while crossing the small but strategic town of Écouché. A few days later, the company formed the bulk of the vanguard that entered the capital in the midst of an insurrection led by the French resistance. Most notably, Amado Granell and his men offered critical support to the insurgents by attacking several key points on the Champs-Élysées–rue de Rivoli axis. La Nueve fought on until the end of the war, participating in the capture of the Nazis’ Eagle’s Nest, near Berchtesgaden. By then, only sixteen Spanish soldiers were still active in the company. 

As evidenced in the footage from the August 26th parade and other visual archives, the legacy of the Civil War was ever-present in the ranks of La Nueve. This memory lived on in the names given to some of the armoured vehicles, e.g., “Guadalajara,” “Brunete,” “Madrid,” “Guernica,” “Belchite.” However, it was not until the late 1970s-early 1980s that the Franco-French narrative of the liberation began to be amended and the contribution of Spanish – as well as colonial and other foreign – troops in the fight against Nazism broadly acknowledged. 

AB-V