World War Two tanks rumbled through Paris yesterday and thousands of Parisians danced in the streets to re-enact the arrival of French and US forces 60 years ago to liberate the city from four years of Nazi occupation.

Women in war-era fashions kissed men in faded uniforms as two columns of olive-drab vehicles snaked into the city from the south, just as the French Second Armoured Division and the US Army's Fourth Infantry Division did on August 25, 1944.

President Jacques Chirac honoured the "2nd DB", as the French division is known, decorating three veterans.

"The liberation of Paris is the victory of the Resistance and the people of Paris, together with French and Allied armies," Mr Chirac told flag-waving crowds at City Hall, which the resistance seized five days before the liberation.

He singled out Colonel Henri Rol-Tanguy, the Communist rival of General Charles de Gaulle, as the "soul of the insurrection" for leading the street fighting that led to the liberation.

Thousands of Parisians had combed their attics for 1940s style platform heels, ankle socks, berets or suspenders to dance despite the rain and join a giant street party with swing music at the Place de la Bastille later in the evening.

Jerome Savary, famed for his popular musicals celebrating French culture, is directing a free show by 1,500 actors, hoping to recreate the euphoria that greeted French and Allied groups.

The day's flag-waving fervour was clouded by the firebombing of a Jewish soup kitchen last Sunday and Mr Chirac called on his compatriots, and especially all younger French, to work towards a just and peaceful world.

"I call on them to be vigilant, to have the spirit of the resistance, to stand in the way of contempt, this hatred of others that is still at work and that is the darkest side of the human soul," he said.

Israeli Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom had similar thoughts as he visited the burned-out shell of the soup kitchen.

"It can't be that 60 years after the liberation of Paris, Jews will live under threat here or in any other country in the world," he said, adding France was doing all it could to fight a rising wave of anti-Semitism.

Paris was not a key military objective for the Allies, who had planned to bypass it on their way to defeating Nazi Germany, but its liberation gave a powerful boost to the forces that landed on D-Day, June 6, 1944, to retake Europe from Hitler.

About 2,000 French civilians and 500 resistance members died in the week-long uprising and liberation day fighting. Discreet plaques around the city still mark where many of them fell.

In contrast to the D-Day celebrations in June, no foreign dignitaries have been invited to the Parisian celebrations.

But Paris has taken care to pay ample homage to the GIs who brought freedom, chocolate and bebop music to the city and to several hundred Spanish Republicans who fought in the front ranks of the 2nd DB at the liberation.

In his famous liberation day speech at City Hall, Mr de Gaulle declared Paris had liberated itself, omitting any reference to his Communist rivals in the resistance or the Allied troops who paved the way from Normandy to Paris.

Chronology

Here is a short chronology of the end of World War Two in Europe from the liberation in 1944.

1944: August 25 - Paris' German commander Dietrich von Choltitz surrenders.

September 17-25 - Ill-fated Allied airborne assault on Arnhem in the Netherlands. The operation, known as "Market Garden", should have outflanked the German defensive line and placed the Allies at the Ruhr, shortening the war. However, following stiff German resistance, Allied forces surrendered. Some 1,200 died and more than 6,000 were taken prisoner.

December 16 - German troops counter-attack through the Ardennes forest known as the "Battle of the Bulge".

1945: January 16 - German advance in Ardennes beaten back, US troops counter-attack.

January 17 - Soviet troops take Polish capital Warsaw and a Polish government arrived from Lublin the next day.

January 27 - The first Red Army troops liberate Auschwitz concentration camp in southern Poland.

February 4-11 - Last war-time conference at Yalta in the Crimea. Soviet leader Josef Stalin, US President Franklin D. Roosevelt, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill agree on postwar division of Germany.

April 28 - Italian dictator Benito Mussolini is shot and killed by partisans while attempting to escape.

April 30 - Adolf Hitler commits suicide in bunker in Berlin.

May 4 - All German forces in northwest Europe surrender.

May 7 - German forces sign capitulation at General Dwight D. Eisenhower's headquarters in Rheims in France.

May 8 - Capitulation proclaimed on Victory in Europe Day (VE Day).

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