Ernest "Pappa" Hemingway roamed the streets of Paris in the 1920s with other ex-pat writers like Gertrude Stein, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Ford Maddox Ford- but he could only afford to drink at the Ritz Hotel on the Place Vendôme once a week. After a couple of best-sellers, he had a bit more spending money, but by that time the Germans had decided to borrow France for awhile.
Big Pappa didn't appreciate that, so when D-Day came he decided to play soldier as a war correspondent for Collier's magazine. By most accounts, he did a pretty good job- rounding up a gang of Resistance fighters and outfitting them, then drinking at cafés and wine cellars while dodging German snipers on the way to Paris. Their mission: to liberate the Ritz.
On August 25, 1944, while Gen. Jacques Leclerc's 2nd French Armored Division and a number of American units liberated Paris, Hemingway and his band of freedom fighters liberated the Ritz.
Read the article here.
