Raymond Dronne; First Allied Officer to Enter Liberated Paris

Raymond Dronne, 83, the first Allied officer to enter Paris when it was liberated after four years of Nazi occupation in World War II. Dronne, an army colonel, was one of the first volunteers to join Gen. Charles de Gaulle’s Free French Forces after France fell to the Germans in 1940. He commanded a company in the Free Forces’ 2nd Armored Division, which led the Allied assault on Paris on Aug. 24, 1944. Dronne fought in Indochina after the war and retired in the late 1940s. The French state radio did not report a date or cause of his death.