19441776 Club
French troops close on Marseille; the Resistance seizes the Prefecture
The German garrison could have crushed the uprising but seemed fixed instead on the regular army advancing outside the city.
By August 1944, Marseille had spent nearly two years under German occupation, its Old Port already dynamited the previous January. On August 23, as General de Lattre de Tassigny's French First Army pushed toward the suburbs, fighters from the city's resistance movements moved on the Prefecture and took it. The German garrison, still holding fortified points across the city, had the strength to put the uprising down. Instead its attention stayed on the approaching French divisions…
