CHAPTER 12

Finest Hours, Darkest Years

Upon this battle depends the survival of Christian civilization. Upon it depends our own British life . . . Hitler knows that he will have to break us in this island or lose the war. If we can stand up to him, all Europe may be free and the life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands. But if we fail, then the whole world . . . will sink into the abyss of a new dark age . . . Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that, if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say: ‘This was their finest hour.’

WINSTON CHURCHILL in the House of Commons, 18 June 1940

Is the last word said? Must hope disappear? Is defeat final? No! . . . For France is not alone! She is not alone! She is not alone! She has a vast empire behind her. She can make common cause with the British empire, which commands the seas and is continuing the struggle . . . This war has not been decided by the battle of France. This war is a world war . . . The fate of the world is at stake . . . Whatever happens, the flame of French resistance must not and shall not be quenched.

CHARLES DE GAULLEon the BBC, 18 June 1940

On 18 June 1940 the two nations’ destinies intersected. The two dominating figures of their modern histories summoned both to a common struggle not just for themselves, but for humanity – a grand role which patriots had often claimed for them, though never with such good reason. The next five years would draw them closer than ever before, but also create differences of emotion and memory that would mark them for the rest of the century and beyond.

The ‘Phoney War’, September 1939–May 1940

He [Daladier] fully expected to be betrayed by the British and added that this was the customary fate of allies of the British. Comment by EDOUARD DALADIER, prime minister, January 1939¹

The English have . . . such confidence in the French army that they are tempted to consider their military support as a gesture of solidarity rather than a vital necessity.

French ambassador, October 1939²

As Chamberlain broadcast the news that Britain was again at war, air-raid sirens sounded over London. But no bombs fell. The French army’s fear that bombing might disrupt their mobilization – the reason they had delayed France’s declaration of war – was similarly unfounded. The barracks filled; the Maginot Line was manned; the RAF improvised bases in France; the British army crossed the Channel undisturbed and returned to places familiar to the older men. One general, at a Franco-British wreath-laying at the war memorial at Lens, remembered over twenty years earlier giving orders ‘to shell this self-same square’.³ The ‘phoney war’, the ‘drôle de guerre’, had begun. French and British governments and commanders were convinced that they could do nothing to save the Poles. The French army had promised Warsaw it would launch an offensive on the seventeenth day of mobilization. It took the form of a token attack on the Saar, cynically exaggerated in the press. Two-thirds of the German army were in Poland. On the Western Front, Germany was defended by middle-aged reservists with three days’ ammunition and no air cover. The Allies had a superiority of three to one in men, five to one in artillery, and all the German tanks were in the east. But the Allies had no intention of attacking, or of bombing German factories in the Ruhr, for fear of retaliation against France. The Poles were abandoned to conduct a hopeless defence, which lasted a month. German commanders could not believe their luck.⁴

The Allies did nothing because they feared repeating the carnage of the last war. Both sides had used that experience to build scientifically planned defensive systems, the ‘Siegfried Line’ and the Maginot Line, elaborate crystallizations of the lessons learnt in 1916–18. The Germans were manufacturing barbed wire and shells more than aircraft and tanks. The Allies planned a modern, relatively bloodless version of the previous war. Then, Germany had been worn down by superior resources and the strangling blockade. The Allies’ main fear since 1936 had been of an immediate German knockout blow from the air. This had not happened, so it was possible to believe, as Chamberlain proclaimed, that Hitler had missed the bus. Both British and French appeared confident, and tended to over-estimate each other’s strength.⁵ The plan was that this strength would increase as the British army swelled with conscripts, the forces of the two Empires rallied, and rearmament programmes, adopted in the nick of time, reached completion in 1940–41. German strength would decline as the blockade deprived it of vital food and raw materials, and domestic opinion turned against Hitler. Germany would then be defeated in 1943 or 1944, unless, as optimists predicted, Hitler were overthrown earlier. It was a great relief that Italy and Japan had not immediately entered the war. Perhaps in time, the United States would again join the coalition.

However, the French suddenly developed doubts about this optimistic vision, owing to the collapse of the eastern front, to political divisions at home, and to realization that French industry was failing to meet arms production targets.⁶ They began to fear that a long war might actually favour Germany, and desperately sought some way of winning quickly. Their two main ideas were to help the Finns, who were resisting attack from Hitler’s Soviet ally, and to bomb Russian oilfields. Alliance with Finland might permit them to cut off Swedish iron-ore exports, 40 per cent of Germany’s needs, and bombing Baku would reduce the flow of Russian oil to Germany. Daladier derided the British, who were dubious, as ‘all old men’. This French strategy was dangerously unrealistic, and risked bringing the USSR into the war as Hitler’s ally. But the Germans moved first. In April 1940, they invaded Denmark and Norway with the connivance of the Russians and the Swedes. An Allied expedition to help the Norwegians failed, though it did cripple the German surface navy. Daladier and Chamberlain resigned, and were replaced by Paul Reynaud and Winston Churchill.

The British Expeditionary Force – more correctly, the Field Force – was, as in 1914, the junior partner, roughly one-tenth the size of the French army. The British acquiesced in French leadership, acknowledging that French commanders, under the quietly cerebral General Gamelin, were professionally pre-eminent. They certainly treated their British counterparts with some condescension: ‘it is for us to give them moral support, to organize the strategy of the campaign, and to provide the necessary planning andinspiration’.⁷ The astonishing dependence of the British is shown by a diary entry as late as 17 December by General Ironside, chief of the imperial general staff: ‘So far I have failed to get out of Gamelin his idea as to a possible offensive. Perhaps it is probable that he has none.’⁸ The BEF’s original four divisions rose to nine divisions and an armoured brigade by May 1940. Unlike in 1914 it was placed, if rather ambiguously, under French command. It was more than the token two divisions promised in 1938, but was far from what the French had hoped for. They had wanted the British to compensate for their small numbers by creating a mechanized and armoured striking force in case of another Schlieffen Plan. But British rearmament had concentrated on the RAF, to build a deterrent bomber force and fighters for home defence. This had required money and industrial capacity, to the neglect of the army.

The BEF embodied twenty years of collective British reluctance to contemplate involvement in another European war. It was small, abysmally trained, and poorly equipped. It even lacked modern maps of France. The regulars had until recently been on imperial police duties in Palestine and India. The territorials were still amateurs. The BEF was admittedly the only fully mechanized army, with plenty of lorries – the German army had bought up many of their discarded horses. But they were lamentably short of artillery, had few usable radios and their ‘main defect’, as the commander-in-chief Lord Gort unanswerably observed, was ‘the absence of a tank with a gun’.⁹ The French hoped that the RAF would be used to provide compensating air power, both to defend French cities and to support the armies. But the British had their sights fixed on the strategic air war of the future, defending British cities and bombing German ones. They sent a modest force of Hurricanes and reconnaissance aircraft for the BEF, and an Advanced Air Striking Force (ten squadrons of obsolescent short-range light bombers and six squadrons of fighters) to eastern France to bomb neighbouring areas of Germany when the time came. The limits of British air support would become ‘the single greatest irritant’ between the Allies and a rankling French reproach.¹⁰

The French army had belatedly started to modernize its equipment, and there is ample evidence of its difficulties. Powerful interests long defended the proven methods of 1914–18. Mechanization, for example, threatened those French farmers who produced horses, mules and fodder. A strong parliamentary lobby protested when Daladier began to replace animals with lorries. Nevertheless, the Popular Front and its successors had forced through a rearmament programme, and by 1940 the French had a bigger tank force than the Germans, and with better tanks. But they were handicapped by the experience of 1914–18. Their commanders had perfected defensive tactics founded on sophisticated theory and mathematics: ‘all is foreseen and prepared’. They believed a strategic breakthrough to be impossible. This pseudo-science was inward-looking and reluctant to consider other possibilities. One bizarre symptom was the dislike expressed by military writers for ‘barbarous’ franglais neologisms such as le tank, la motorisation and la mécanisation – ‘Must we continue to take from the English all the horrors of their language?’¹¹ Defensive doctrine had been powerfully endorsed by Marshal Pétain, the dominant inter-war military figure, whose cautiousness had founded his success and popularity in 1917: defence meant sparing soldiers’ lives. Defensiveness had taken literally concrete form in the Maginot Line, which reminded several visitors of a fleet of sunken battleships. One British general was suitably impressed when shown round – ‘a masterpiece in its way’ – but he wondered whether the money would not have been better spent on tanks and aircraft, and he worried that if the ‘fence’ were brought down, ‘French fighting spirit [would] be brought crumbling down with it.’¹² The Maginot Line did not impose passivity, however: it freed France’s best infantry and armoured units for an advance into Belgium and Holland. The French were even keen on sending expeditions far afield, from Finland to Salonika. Yet old assumptions lingered. Though they were hastily creating new mobile armoured divisions, two-thirds of their tanks were still, as in 1918, dispersed in small groups, communicating by flag, not radio, to support the infantry. As one French general later put it, they had a thousand groups of three tanks; the Germans had three groups of a thousand tanks.

During the coldest winter of the century, the Allies waited. The king, the prime minister, and Gracie Fields visited British units. Senior officers attended lunches with French authorities, and one found having to eat oysters ‘a very high test of “l’entente cordiale”’. A French visitor was struck by the characteristic English smell of cigarettes and bacon.¹³ RAF pilots shared goodwill binges with their French counterparts, interspersed with the occasional inconclusive dogfight. The army trained for defence and built pillboxes. Major-General Montgomery advised his men about venereal disease in such ‘obscene’ terms (‘any soldier who is in need of horizontal refreshment would be well advised to ask a policeman for a suitable address’) that the army’s Anglican and Catholic chaplains almost got him sacked. The great French historian Marc Bloch, brought from Cambridge to serve as a liaison officer with the BEF, had mixed feelings about the British regulars. ‘The soldier immortalized by Kipling knows how to obey and how to fight . . . But he is, by nature, a looter and a lecher . . . vices which the French peasant finds it hard to forgive when both are satisfied to the detriment of his farmyard and his daughters.’ Moreover, he noted that the Englishman, though ‘kindly and good-natured’ at home, tended when abroad to ‘confuse his European hosts with “natives”’ – a boorishness aggravated by ‘natural shyness’. There was annoyance that British soldiers were paid vastly more than the French. British officers – so memoirs suggest – were over-keen to discover whether their French comrades were ‘gentlemen’. They must frequently have been disappointed. Sometimes up to 40 per cent of officers in infantry regiments were schoolteachers, many of them socialists.¹⁴

The BEF settles in for a long war. By some accounts, the BEF were leading a very quiet life. The Revd Thomas Tiplady reported with satisfaction in the Methodist Recorder that ‘I saw no British soldier under the influence of drink. The army keeps itself to itself . . . It was very rarely indeed that I saw an officer or soldier with a lady, and when I did the circumstances would not have justified me in attributing evil to the association.’¹⁵

The commander of II Corps, General Alan Brooke, a French speaker brought up in Pau and educated at the local French school, ‘could not help wondering whether the French are still a firm enough nation to again take their part in seeing this war through’. Although he found them welcoming, their ‘slovenliness, dirtiness and inefficiency are, I think, worse than ever’. Many of their defences were ‘to all intents and purposes non-existent’. The soldiers had ‘a very amateur appearance’, and Gamelin looked ‘old and tired’. Brooke was no less scathing about his own men, largely untrained, and his superior, Lord Gort, VC, who had the ‘brain . . . of a glorified boy scout’.¹⁶ On the surface, confidence reigned. Churchill was impressed by the French army when he visited in October. Ironside was delighted in March 1940 to find French officers and soldiers ‘working like beavers, and very intelligent’, not, like the British, distracted by square-bashing which ‘smothered the intelligence of our men’.¹⁷ The French had limited confidence in the BEF. Gamelin believed that ‘1914–18 has shown that one must always keep large French forces alongside the . . . British. Whenever these were removed, they had to be rushed back in times of crisis.’ He redeployed the strongest element of France’s strategic reserve, the 7th Army, on to the BEF’s left, to counter a possible German advance into Holland, and to discourage any British rush for the ports.¹⁸ This was to prove a disastrous move.

The French government and public had a number of grievances, most stemming from the realization that France, with millions of men in the army, was far more affected by the war than Britain. Some worried that the British, ‘with their bishops and their socialists’, would again let them down at peace negotiations. To bolster the alliance, schemes for ‘ever closer union’ in economic and political matters, and even for an ‘Anglo-French Federation’ were floated in Paris and Whitehall. Ideas were suggested for strengthening Franco-British solidarity at grass-roots level: mutual playing of national anthems in cinemas, special postage stamps, tactfully edited history textbooks, compulsory language lessons, and French cookery demonstrations in British schools.

In both countries, some urged that the war should be stopped and a deal done with Hitler or preferably a more rational Nazi leader. There was still a pro-appeasement current composed of pacifists, the anti-imperialist Left, the revolution-fearing Right, and all those whose terror of Armageddon induced wishful thinking, or just non-thinking, among them establishment figures, celebrities and intellectuals. In Britain, these included Lloyd George, George Bernard Shaw, a clutch of bishops, the Peace Pledge Union with the vocal feminist Vera Brittain, Bloomsbury aesthetes, show-business celebrities such as John Gielgud, eccentric pro-fascists, socialist academics such as G.D.H. Cole, and a solid number of MPs and peers of all parties, notably the mostly Labour ‘Parliamentary Peace Aims Group’, which even made contact with the Germans. In France, opposition was far more dangerous. The Communist Party, powerful among the trade unions, campaigned against the war and was banned. Some pro-fascists took a similar line, though many had been called up and subsequently fought. More dangerous were those who campaigned from inside the establishment, including pro-appeasement politicians such as former prime minister Pierre Laval, and the foreign minister Georges Bonnet, for the moment in favour of prosecuting the war, but pessimistic as to its outcome. When things went disastrously wrong, such people would make many converts. For the moment, they were a minority, as mass support for pacifism collapsed. For most people, appeasement had failed and war was necessary to stop Hitler. There was one Franco-British divergence, however, which echoed pre-war views. Polls showed that the French thought they were fighting the Germans. The British overwhelmingly thought they were fighting Hitler, not the German nation as a whole.¹⁹

Hitler returned the compliment by regarding Britain as his main enemy. His plan was for a thrust into Holland and Belgium to secure airfields and ports for bombing and eventually invading England. The Allies captured a copy of this plan, and decided to counter it by a rapid advance through Belgium. But the inaction of France and Britain when Hitler had remilitarized the Rhineland had scared the Belgians into declaring neutrality. They feared that complicity with the Allies might bring on a German attack, and so refused to allow joint planning. They had their own modern frontier fortifications, and were confident of holding out until help arrived. So the French and British armies would have to leave their carefully constructed trenches to improvise a hasty defence on unknown Belgian ground. Having to move fast, they would send their best-equipped mobile divisions. Brooke worried that if this went wrong ‘not only would we lose the whole of Belgium but probably the war as well.’²⁰

The Real Disaster, May–June 1940

Greenwood [a Labour member of the Cabinet] was inclined to say ‘these bloody gallant Allies’. I told him that we had depended upon the French Army. That we had made no Army, and that therefore it was not right to say ‘these bloody Allies’. It was for them to say that of us.
GENERAL SIR EDMUND IRONSIDE, chief of the imperial general staff, 17 May 1940²¹

You, the English, were done for [in March 1918]. But I sent forty divisions to rescue you. Today it’s we who are smashed to pieces. Where are your forty divisions?
MARSHAL PETAIN TO WINSTON CHURCHILL, 11 June 1940²²

On 10 May, the day Churchill took office, the Germans launched their long-awaited invasion of Holland, Luxembourg and Belgium. The Dutch retreated, and the Belgians failed to hold their border fortresses. Allied bombers failed to destroy the Rhine bridges at Maastricht. All thirty-two RAF planes engaged were damaged or destroyed. Ground support operations were suspended: the Advanced Air Striking Force had lost half its aircraft in forty-eight hours. The French and British armies hastened north to hold a line in central Belgium and south-west Holland. The first tank battles in history took place, and the French won them: near Breda, they destroyed 100 German tanks with a loss of five of their own.²³

However, to their original plan, which the Allies knew about, the Germans had made an ambitious and risky addition. As well as invading the Low Countries, they would launch a nearly simultaneous attack further south through the wooded hills of the Ardennes. Reaching the River Meuse at Sedan, a weakly defended sector, they would break through to cut off the Allied forces in Belgium and end the war at a blow. This plan was a result not of confidence but of desperation: it seemed the only possibility of avoiding a long unwinnable replay of the First World War, which the Germans feared as much as the French did. The chief of the general staff concluded that ‘Even if the operation had only a 10 per cent chance of success, I would stick to it. Only this operation will lead to the destruction of the opponent.’ In case it failed, Hitler ordered continuing preparations for a long war.²⁴

Success depended on surprise and concealment. Moving tanks and vehicles through the Ardennes was slow and dangerous, for they would have to stick to the roads, and the packed queues of vehicles would be vulnerable to air attack. It is often said that French commanders believed that the Ardennes were impassable. In fact, Gamelin had earlier expected an attack there. But the French did overestimate the time it would take an attacker to get through that terrain. They expected to have time to bring up reinforcements if necessary. The Allies were misled by their capture of the original German plan – the most disastrous intelligence success in history. Their intelligence services failed to detect the other build-up in the southern Rhineland. The air forces, committed further north, did not attack the world’s biggest-ever traffic jam, created by 134,000 German soldiers, 1,200 tanks and thousands of other vehicles. Nor did the French army rush in reinforcements to destroy them as they trickled out of the forests. It took four days, until 14 May, for the Allies to realize that this was not merely a diversion. By then, the Germans had reached Sedan (the site of their crushing victory in 1870), and on 13 May had crossed the Meuse. Most French troops in that sector were second-line reserves, with no effective antitank or anti-aircraft weapons. Taken by surprise, they were subjected without air support to the heaviest air bombardment so far in history: ‘it goes on and on and on . . . Not a French or British plane to be seen. Where the hell are they?’²⁵ Whole units eventually broke. At last, on 14 May, the Allied air forces intervened, trying to bomb the Sedan bridges, on which, said the French commander General Billotte, hung victory or defeat. Attacking in small groups, the obsolescent light-bombers failed: bridges are difficult targets, and the bombs were too small. If they flew high, they were shot down by fighters; if low, they were shot down by ground fire. Some French officers accused the British of not pressing home their attacks, though forty of their seventy-one bombers were shot down – the highest casualty rate ever suffered by the RAF. The French air force lost 30 per cent of all its aircrew in a month – a higher proportion of casualties than the army had suffered during the whole of 1918 – and it reported that in two weeks it would have no more fighter aircraft.²⁶

The Fall of France, 1940

‘Well, Poilu, my friend’ German propaganda played on the plausible belief that the British were happy to rely on the French to bear the brunt of the fighting – a belief inherited from the First World War

The news of the Sedan breakthrough caused incredulity and panic at headquarters. ‘French officers were in tears . . . at having to admit the shame they felt in acknowledging the appalling fact that the French had walked out of their forward positions without any attempt at genuine resistance.’²⁷ Resistance did continue south of Sedan. A German officer wrote later of a Moroccan cavalry brigade, half of whom were killed, that ‘I have fought against many enemies in both wars . . . Seldom has anyone fought as outstandingly.’²⁸ They were protecting the northern flank of the Maginot Line, assumed to be the target. But the Germans moved not south, or south-west towards Paris, but west at full speed where there was nothing in their path. This exceeded the original plan: it was carried out by General Guderian in defiance of orders, and in consequence he was temporarily sacked.²⁹

Reynaud telephoned Churchill on 14 May to break the news and ask for ten more squadrons of fighters to counter the dive-bombers. A British army liaison officer with the RAF thought that ‘500 fighters could have saved Sedan’ by chasing away the Stukas, and that ‘lack of fighter support is in my opinion the only justified grouse that the French have against us’. In London, General Ironside, furious with the ‘wretched’ airmen, thought the same, and considered that ‘this battle may be decisive of the whole war and it is impossible to neglect a call such as this from the French’. But the RAF was determined not to send major reinforcements. Bomber Command deluded itself that it could win the war once it was allowed to bomb the Ruhr. Fighter Command considered itself indispensable to Britain’s survival and insisted that a minimum of thirty-six squadrons should be kept at home. The RAF based in France had lost roughly half its combat aircraft in ten days, including 195 Hurricanes – a quarter of all Britain’s modern fighters – and with negligible impact on the German advance. Most of the Hurricanes, under repair or without fuel, were abandoned in the retreat. As one pilot put it, ‘here we were with all our beautiful little aeroplanes, but no bloody troops, no bloody equipment, no bloody petrol’.³⁰ At that rate, in two weeks there would not be a single Hurricane left anywhere. Without fighter opposition, the Luftwaffe would be able to bomb industry by day, cripple the navy, and cover an invasion. Air Marshal Sir Hugh Dowding put the issue starkly: ‘If the Home Defence Force is drained away in desperate attempts to remedy the situation in France, defeat in France will involve the final, complete and irremediable defeat of this country.’ Reynaud’s plea for ten more squadrons was refused, but it was agreed to commit four.³¹

By 15 May, seven German armoured Panzer divisions were on the loose. Reynaud rang Churchill at 7.30 a.m., announcing in English and ‘evidently under stress’ that ‘We have been defeated . . . we have lost the battle.’ Churchill hoped he was exaggerating, and offered to fly over to ‘have a talk’. But he also told him that ‘whatever the French might do, we should continue the fight – if necessary alone’. Arriving in Paris the next afternoon, he was told that the Germans were expected within days. At the Quai d’Orsay, where he met the French government and high command, clouds of smoke were rising from bonfires of official documents. In the dramatic account in Churchill’s memoirs, Gamelin described the situation, and when Churchill asked about the strategic reserve he replied ‘None.’³² The best reserve formations, it may be recalled, had been rushed into Holland partly owing to French doubts about the BEF. Churchill’s account – ‘a superbly artful passage’ – went down in history as effectively ‘the obituary of the Third Republic’, bereft of ideas and determination. In fact, Reynaud was far from accepting defeat, and the discussion was less ‘melodramatic’ than Churchill’s description.³³ Nevertheless, the British did face a recurring and insoluble dilemma: how to bolster French morale and resistance, which seemed essential to any chance of victory, and yet prepare for the possibility of having to fight on alone. The first object required whole-hearted commitment; the second, the preservation of both the BEF and the RAF. Their first gesture demonstrates the contradiction. They now agreed to the earlier French request to engage ten new squadrons of fighters, but kept them based in Kent; while squadrons already in France soon began to withdraw. Churchill also ordered preliminary planning for a possible evacuation of the BEF.³⁴ Late that night, wreathed in cigar smoke, he tried to ‘revive the spirits’ of French ministers by promising that Britain would fight on whatever happened, and would bomb German towns and burn their crops and forests. The effect on at least one French minister of this ‘apocalyptic vision’ was counter-productive: Churchill ‘saw himself in the heart of Canada directing, over an England razed to the ground by high-explosive bombs and over a France whose ruins were already cold, the air war of the New World against the Old’.³⁵ This was not an attractive vision, and a growing number of French politicians and soldiers began to think that they must ‘get France out of the ordeal she is undergoing so as to allow her, even if defeated in the field, to rise again’.³⁶

The Germans were nervously aware that their advancing Panzers were vulnerable to a simultaneous attack from the north and the south, which would cut them off as they were trying to cut off the Allies. Hitler was close to a nervous breakdown, and ordered his forces to slow down.³⁷ The French, now under General Weygand, wanted the BEF, as yet less involved in the fighting, to take the lead by attacking from the north. But the British were now fighting the Germans in Belgium, making an about-turn dangerous, if not impossible. They were running short of food and fuel, and had ammunition for only one battle. Gort, increasingly doubting the ability of the French to fight back, concluded that evacuation was the only way to save his army. But London insisted on an attack to join up with Weygand and isolate the German spearhead. Ironside, a large and forceful man, came over to ginger up both Gort and the French. He thought he had managed by losing his temper and shaking the demoralized French General Billotte – notionally in charge of the BEF – ‘by the button of his tunic’. Any galvanizing effect was short-lived. The best the BEF managed was on 21 May near Arras, when their single armoured brigade – two battalions of the Royal Tank Regiment, backed by two territorial battalions of the Durham Light Infantry – gave General Rommel’s Panzer division a fright by tearing into its supply columns, and slaughtering some poorly trained SS infantry. But it lost most of its tanks and withdrew. Gort had earmarked two divisions to join up with the promised French attack from the south, but on 25 May he redeployed them to meet growing German pressure from the north-east – without consulting the French and against orders from London. This decision was blamed by many Frenchmen, not only anglophobes, for losing the last chance to turn the tide. But were Weygand’s forces really going to attack? Gort believed not.

The Allies, trained for static warfare, slow to react, confused, sometimes panicky, their communications and supply lines disrupted, and without effective leadership, never acted fast enough or with enough coordination to stop the German rush. Large parts of their armies, deprived of information and orders, with hundreds of tanks and aircraft out of fuel and ammunition, began to disintegrate. ‘This is like some ridiculous nightmare,’ wrote a British officer in his diary. ‘The BEF is cut off. Our communications have gone . . . I have told myself again and again that the German threat could not be sustained. Against all the rules of warfare it has been sustained. The Germans have taken every risk – criminally foolish risks – and they have got away with it.’ Ironside thought the French generals were ‘in a state of complete depression. No plan, no thought of a plan. Ready to be slaughtered . . . Très fatigués and nothing doing.’³⁸ Gort insisted on retreating on Dunkirk. The BEF carried out a skilful fighting withdrawal, but hampered their allies by blowing up bridges with abandon and destroying the Lille telephone exchange, which deprived the French First Army of most of its communications.³⁹

This was the lowest point for the British. The BEF seemed trapped at Dunkirk. Voices inside and outside the government urged peace, and muttered criticisms of Churchill. On 28 May he insisted to his colleagues that successful resistance was still possible, while nothing could be hoped for from Hitler. ‘If this long island story of ours is to end at last, let it end only when each one of us lies choking in his own blood.’⁴⁰

DUNKIRK AND THE FRENCH, 26 MAY–4 JUNE

General Alexander: All that could be saved has been saved. Capitaine de La Pérouse: No, General. There remains honour. Dunkirk, 31 May, 4.30 p.m.⁴¹

England’s day has passed. No matter what happens now, she will lose her empire . . . She will not gain a foothold in Europe again. She left it forever when she re-embarked at Dunkirk . . . Everything that doesn’t end up by being Russian will be American . . . the British empire will become an American empire.

PERRE LAVAL, Vichy prime minister, August 1940⁴²

Dunkirk is, for the British, the most moving epic in their history. An outnumbered and seemingly doomed army is brought home from under the enemy’s nose to fight another day; by the quiet courage and spontaneous ingenuity of ordinary people, sailing off in fishing boats, yachts and pleasure steamers not to conquer, but to face bombs and shells unarmed in a mission of mercy. It has profound meaning for an island people wary of continental dangers. But for many French, it seemed typically British in a different way: ‘They can’t resist the call of the harbours,’ jeered Weygand. ‘Already in March 1918 they wanted to embark.’⁴³ Dunkirk meant being abandoned by the British to face defeat alone.

Dunkirk is portrayed in this Vichy poster as a betrayal: British troops leave, and force the French to stay behind

The British began to think about leaving a week after the German attack began. As in 1914, they mistrusted their allies, and feared being overwhelmed if the French and the Belgians gave way. As early as 18 May, preliminary planning began for evacuation through Dunkirk. This was a desperate extremity, for it was thought impossible for more than a small number of men to escape. By the 23rd, General Brooke thought that ‘nothing but a miracle can save the BEF . . . We are . . . beginning to be short of ammunition, supplies still all right for three days but after that scanty.’⁴⁴ The Germans had reached the coast, cutting communications with Calais and Boulogne. But on 24 May, Hitler, still highly nervous, ordered the Panzers to halt. The French agreed to a retreat towards Dunkirk. But the two Allies had different intentions. The British wanted to embark, and on 26 May Churchill gave the order. The French, however, wanted to establish a strong Franco-British bridgehead, supplied by sea, to threaten the German rear if they turned their forces south against the French heartland. This was a way to buy time – but at a price that Britain could not accept, namely the probable sacrifice of their whole army, and heavy naval and airforce casualties, leaving Britain exposed to invasion. Though the French must have realized that the BEF might leave – as had nearly happened in 1914 and 1918 – the British kept their intentions secret until 27 May. This caused anger and misunderstanding at all levels. The French commanding general threatened to stop the evacuation by force. French soldiers, intending to fight on, were incensed when British troops preparing evacuation destroyed weapons and equipment. The French were left defending more and more of the Dunkirk perimeter as the British left. As Marc Bloch noted, French soldiers ‘would have needed a superhuman dose of charity not to feel bitter as they saw ship after ship drawing away from the shore, carrying their foreign companions in arms to safety’.⁴⁵ By 29 May, 72,000 British had already left, but only 655 French. Some French who tried to board ships were turned away, sometimes by force – but many of these were stragglers or deserters regarded as not deserving embarkation when places were so short that the wounded had to be left behind.

Gort, before being ordered back to England, had promised that elements of three British divisions would help to defend the town, but on 31 May, in a tense and bitter scene, General Harold Alexander told the French commander Admiral Abrial that the BEF was pulling out as fast as possible. ‘So you are admitting that the French army alone will cover the embarkation of the English army, while the English army will give no help to the French army in covering its own withdrawal’, French officers protested. ‘Your decision . . . dishonours England.’⁴⁶ Paris was equally indignant, and Churchill gave orders that British and French must leave ‘bras-dessus bras-dessous’ – arm in arm. He promised that the BEF would help hold the perimeter, and some did for a time. But the War Office and commanders on the spot disagreed with Churchill. It was moreover hard for men to stay put when there was a chance of going home, and many units melted away, eventually leaving the French unsupported. Fortunately, French troops fighting from house to house in Lille held seven German divisions away from Dunkirk for four vital days until 1 June. Then the French 12th infantry division, supported by local reservists, was ‘deliberately sacrificed’ to hold the approaches to Dunkirk.⁴⁷ The Germans, tired and short of ammunition, were ordered by Hitler, in a panic at the risks being taken, not to press home their attack. Men and tanks were needed to move south and complete the conquest of France. Hitler did not believe the BEF could all escape – neither, after all, had the French or the British themselves.

By the evening of 31 May, there were only 50,000 British troops still in Dunkirk, and 200,000 French. Some places on ships were now being reserved for French troops. From 1 June onwards, as the BEF had mostly gone, the effort was directed to taking off as many French as possible. French navy ships and French and Belgian civilian craft joined in, taking off about 30–40,000 men. On 3 June, the Royal Navy sank blockships to render the harbour useless to the Germans, which had it worked would have trapped the remaining French inside. But another 30,000 French troops were taken off that night. When the rearguard finally left their combat positions the last ships had gone. A British naval officer compared them to the Spartans at Thermopylae. A German officer put it less elegantly: ‘Tommies gone and you here; you crazy.’⁴⁸

French troops reaching England were greeted by ‘ham and cheese sandwiches handed through the windows by girls in multi-coloured dresses . . . the faint, sweet smell of cigarettes showered on us . . . the acid taste of lemonade and the flat taste of tea with too much milk . . . groups of cheering children at level-crossings . . . “How genuinely kind they are!” said my companions.’ They had only a dazed view of ‘the cosy green of lawns; a landscape made up of parks, cathedral spires, hedges’ as they were rushed across to Plymouth and sent back to Cherbourg to rejoin the fight after only a few hours in England.⁴⁹

Dunkirk surrendered on 4 June. About 40,000 French troops were captured. But 186,000 British (mainly between 29 May and 1 June) and 125,000 French and other Allied troops (mainly between 1 and 4 June) had been rescued – vastly more than anyone had thought possible.⁵⁰ Although Churchill reminded the House of Commons that wars are not won by evacuations, defeat was certainly avoided by this one. It dealt, concludes a German military historian, ‘a fatal blow to German strategy.’⁵¹ Without the intrepid professionalism of the Royal Navy, the bravery of civilian boat crews, and the tenacity of the French troops holding off the Germans, the BEF could not have lived to fight another day. Admiral Abrial was invited to Buckingham Palace on 5 June to receive the personal thanks of the king. Perhaps it was some consolation. But the French ambassador was bitterly disappointed that Churchill said so little in the House of Commons about the courage of the French army. The epic boosted British confidence, and enabled Churchill on 4 June to make his defiant promise – perhaps inspired by a famous speech by Clemenceau that he knew well – that ‘We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing-grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.’⁴

Across the Channel, anglophobia sprouted, and Dunkirk provided material for anti-British propaganda. Was there genuine cause for reproach? Some French commanders accused the British of deceiving them over their evacuation plans and leaving French troops behind. It was not so simple. Only during the night of 28 May did the French army order its troops to embark, and the French navy delayed its participation until the 29th. The French were then slow to realize how little time was left, and failed to tell the Royal Navy how many men they had to be taken off. Some French soldiers anyway decided to stay put.

The French government at first considered two options for continuing the war: to withdraw the army to Brittany and Normandy, in sea contact with Britain, or to retreat at once to North Africa. Weygand, however, insisted on another course: a last-ditch defence of a line across northern France, along the Somme and the Aisne, the killing fields of 1914–18. If this failed, it would leave little option but an armistice, as Weygand knew. But France and Britain had signed an agreement on 28 March not to make peace without the consent of the other. Reynaud had gone to London on 26 May to hint at either a joint request for an armistice, or British consent to a French request. The British refused, and urged the French to keep fighting.

Both sides began to shuffle responsibility for defeat on to the other. ‘Many people now blamed the whole horrible fiasco on the English High Command, or on some rumoured counter-order of Churchill, which had marred Weygand’s last attempt to get through.’⁵² Weygand accused the BEF of a ‘refusal to fight’.⁵³ The British could reply that French commanders talked of fighting on although they had no realistic plans and perhaps no real belief in their chances – they had begun thinking of an armistice as early as 16 May – and they had no right to demand the sacrifice of Britain’s army and air force in a lost cause. Leaving aside emotional recriminations, the two governments had increasingly different aims: the British, to provide for the defence of their islands and continue the war; the French, to prolong resistance with a view to gaining reasonable peace terms. A growing number in the French government, army and public believed that France must now look after itself.

The French army fought on, having already lost a quarter of its strength. A young officer wrote stoically on 7 June, in words that Churchill would certainly have approved, ‘I am waiting to be thrown on to the red-hot anvil with my peasants from the French countryside, men of little faith but prepared to die in vain.’ British liaison officers and the Germans reported rising French morale and strengthening resistance, as they fought to hold the Somme and the Aisne. This was the great battle of 1940, largely forgotten in France, and never heard of in England. The German casualty rate doubled after 3 June. The 10th Panzer Division lost two-thirds of its tanks between 5 and 7 June near Amiens. Every anti-tank gun of the 17th Infantry Regiment on average destroyed five German tanks before being knocked out. A regiment of foreign volunteers fought to the end, the last survivors killing themselves to avoid falling into German hands. A French tank officer wrote to his wife:

We’ve taken a heck of a pasting, and there’s hardly anyone left, but those still here have fantastic morale . . . we no longer think about the awful nightmare we’ve been through. That’s typical of the French soldier; if you could only know the happiness of going into a scrap with chaps like these . . . My wound is completely healed. I don’t know if I’ve been mentioned in dispatches, by the way, but I don’t give a damn. You do what you have to do without thought of reward.⁵⁴

In factories and shipyards too the effort stepped up. Despite invasion and bombing, arms production leapt in May and June. In the biggest northern tank factory, workers loaded unfinished tanks on to trains under German bombs. Much of this eventually benefited the Wehrmacht, amply supplied with French tanks and aircraft for its 1941 attack on Russia. The French were demanding that the whole RAF should be committed to the battle, as the French air force was now outnumbered three to one in front-line aircraft. But the RAF had lost 959 aircraft and 435 pilots in two months. Its ground attacks had been entirely ineffective: by day, the bombers were shot down, and by night they could not see their targets. Over 400 Hurricanes and Spitfires had been lost in France, and there were only 331 modern fighters left. Increased production could replace the aircraft, but not the men. There was therefore no reason to think that the RAF could save France, but the chiefs of staff officially advised the government that only air power could prevent a German invasion of England. They resisted reinforcing the three squadrons still based in France, although English-based aircraft did make sorties over western France.⁵⁵ On 7 and 9 June the Panzers began to pierce the overstretched front, and on the 12th Weygand ordered a general retreat. The Germans marched into Paris two days later.

A growing French belief that they were making disproportionate sacrifices while the British held back was corroding the alliance. Weygand and Pétain (the most popular man in France and now deputy prime minister) were incensed at British ‘selfishness’, which they blamed for their inability to stop the German advance. There were angry scenes, with Weygand ‘literally yelling’ about British backsliding.⁵⁶ Pétain told the American ambassador that Britain would ‘fight to the last Frenchman and then seek a compromise peace’, and he said to Paul Baudoin, war cabinet secretary, that ‘England has got us into this position. It is our duty not to put up with it but to get out of it.’⁵⁷ Weygand was determined to preserve the honour of the army (and his own) by forcing the politicians to ask for an armistice. Most of the government wanted to fight on, but their resolve was steadily eroded. Having evacuated Paris on 10 June, ministers and officials were scattered among various Loire châteaux, where communication was hampered by rustic shortage of telephones, and where ‘motors were . . . as important and rare as horses on the battlefield of Bosworth’.⁵⁸ Reynaud was increasingly beleaguered, including by his ubiquitous and interfering mistress, the defeatist Comtesse de Portes, whose appearance in red pyjamas reminded Edward Spears that ‘I had not seen red trousers on French legs since 1914’. This situation confirmed censorious British stereotypes of the French. Churchill had sent Spears, the young liaison officer of 1914, now stouter, a general and a Tory MP, as his personal representative. Although a leading member of the ‘pro-Frog boys’, he knew France too well to be a starry-eyed francophile, and he and Churchill soon began to regard their beloved ally as a hopeless case.

Churchill was determined to prolong French resistance, eventually from North Africa. Both countries were bound by their March agreement not to seek a separate peace. For the French, it was a matter of honour, and also of not antagonizing the British empire and America. On 13 June, the last meeting between Churchill and the French took place at Tours, where the British rather alarmingly found no one awaiting them at the airport, no French government, and no lunch. When they found the appointed venue, Churchill insisted that the fight must go on: Britain would accept no terms, and could not agree to France considering terms either. Reynaud replied tartly that he was sure that Great Britain would not give way ‘until she had known sufferings equal to those now endured by the French people’. Churchill argued that the United States would soon be an ally. Meanwhile, France must fight on, as it had nothing to hope for from Hitler. The army, if overwhelmed, should wage a ‘gigantic’ guerrilla war. The government should withdraw to North Africa if necessary. The French must accept that British self-defence came first, because ‘if Germany failed to destroy England . . . then the whole hateful edifice of Nazism would topple over’, and France could share in an eventual Anglo-Saxon victory.⁵⁹ The gamble the French faced was whether to commit their future to a seemingly punch-drunk Britain, or to bargain for a place within a German-dominated Europe. Reynaud still preferred the former. He told his colleagues that Hitler was not the Kaiser, he was Genghis Khan. The newly promoted Brigadier-General Charles de Gaulle, junior defence minister, was sent to London to organize shipping to North Africa. But the balance of opinion within the government was shifting.

Meanwhile, the last British forces were leaving. Reinforcements, including units from Dunkirk, had been sent back to Normandy to form a second BEF. The 51st (Highland) Division, the only formation really to have taken part in the fighting, was trapped in the Norman port of Saint-Valéry-en-Caux and surrendered on 12 June. The rest were ordered on 14 June to re-embark. Their commander was ‘anxious not to remain in this country an hour longer than necessary’.⁶⁰ Soon after, the last RAF aircraft flew home. Large quantities of war material were again abandoned. Unserviceable planes and other equipment were destroyed – all except one staff car, given to a friendly café proprietor.

On 16 June 1940 was seen arguably ‘the most dramatic and confusing sequence of events perhaps ever recorded in the history of either nation’.⁶¹ The French government asked for British consent to an exploration of armistice terms. The first British reply, as before, was that France should fight on, with a government in exile in England or North Africa. Second thoughts were that this was a lost cause, and that the best was to limit the damage. London informed the French at midday that they could make enquiries about peace terms, but only on condition that the French fleet sailed at once for Britain. There then arrived a telephone call from de Gaulle in London conveying the astounding offer of a political union between France and Britain, creating a single war cabinet, dual citizenship, unified military command, and financial partnership. De Gaulle even suggested that Reynaud might lead the joint government.

‘NO LONGER TWO NATIONS’: 16 JUNE 1940

It was a myth, made up like other myths by Jean Monnet. Neither Churchill nor I had the least illusion.

CHARLES DE GAULLE⁶²

This proposal ‘that France and Great Britain shall no longer be two nations, but one Franco-British Union’ could figure on any list of great might-have-beens of history. The idea was suggested to Churchill following a meeting on 14 June between Sir Robert Vansittart, his francophile chief diplomatic adviser, his private secretary Major Morton, and René Pleven and Jean Monnet, both of the French economic mission in London, who drafted a Declaration of Union together. Monnet’s later career as ‘father of Europe’ gives extra spice to an idea often regarded as essentially his. It stemmed from Monnet’s work during the First World War and earlier proposals for economic union. The idea had other sources. Professor Arnold Toynbee, director of the Royal Institute of International Affairs, had suggested it late in 1939. The left-wing intellectuals Hugh Dalton and Philip Noel-Baker wanted France and Britain to form the nucleus of a post-war European Union and the ‘hard core of a new world order’. A French senator had proposed union in March 1940. The idea was being discussed by several committees, notably that chaired by the definitely non-francophile Lord Hankey, and language about Anglo-French union became current in Whitehall. The Franco-British declaration of 28 March had already proclaimed ‘community of action in all spheres’.

Churchill’s reaction to the June proposal was sceptical, but he was impressed by the support shown in his cabinet and by French representatives in London, and especially by the ‘unwonted enthusiasm’ displayed by the phlegmatic de Gaulle. It may have been de Gaulle’s fighting spirit that made Churchill think that it was worth trying something spectacular to keep France in the war. However, there is less to this British plunge into Europe than meets the eye. Hankey was ‘shocked’ by ‘these half-baked ideas’ to ‘merge our nationhood . . . our most precious possession’, especially as he blamed France, ‘our evil genius from the time of the Peace Conference’, for the war and the defeats. But he was reassured by Chamberlain, now Lord President of the Council, and by the foreign secretary, Lord Halifax, who both stated that the Union was a wartime measure only. French ministers reacted even more cynically. Most assumed it was a symptom of collapse rather than of resolve, a ruse to implicate France further in Britain’s inevitable defeat. Pétain said grimly that it was an invitation to marry a corpse. Hélène de Portes urged Reynaud not to imitate Isabelle of Bavaria – the French queen who in 1420 had disinherited her son in favour of Henry V of England. The French suspected that the real British motive was to control their fleet and colonies, and ingrained anglophobia ascribed this to calculating selfishness, rather than to determination to fight to the finish. The Union proposal was contemptuously dismissed by the council of ministers that evening. There were sour comments about not wishing to become subjects of His Britannic Majesty and make France a dominion of the British empire. Reynaud thereupon resigned, and was succeeded by his deputy, Pétain. Only a week after it was formally proposed, Halifax wrote that, to widespread relief, the idea was ‘completely dead’. Yet the brusqueness of the French rejection had a significant impact on British attitudes. No offer was made again for such close alliance or post-war association, and no promises were made about the future, other than basic restoration of independence. Halifax predicted that after the war the entente cordiale would be replaced by a special relationship between Britain and the United States.⁶³

Much has been written on the rights and wrongs of these events, and the complex motives of their protagonists. What must be remembered is the vertiginous crisis assailing France. The army was beginning to disintegrate. The enemy advance was unstoppable. Between 6 and 8 million refugees were flooding south from the war zone. The government was being chased across France, from Paris via Tours to Bordeaux, without parliament and the usual levers of power. There was public pressure for peace, and threats of rioting in Bordeaux. The pressure to find a way out was agonizing, and the moderates buckled.

Those who pushed themselves to the fore were inclined to believe on ideological grounds that the war had been a terrible mistake and that defeat was preordained. Pétain, an admirer of General Franco, had a sentimental view of himself as the paternal saviour of France, as at Verdun. He utterly rejected the view that the government should go abroad, abandoning the nation to its fate and scrambling on board the sinking British ship: France would be left to the mercies not only of the Germans but also of their Communist allies. How anyway, asked Weygand, could a republic go into exile? Pétain’s first act on 17 June was to broadcast to the nation that ‘with a heavy heart, I tell you today that the fighting must cease’. That evening, he requested an armistice.

Pétain’s ambiguous broadcast – for there was not yet an armistice – cut the ground from under those still fighting. German soldiers waving white flags encouraged the belief that the war was over. Only then were there mass surrenders: nearly two-thirds of all French prisoners of war were captured after Pétain’s broadcast, as over a million soldiers began to lay down their arms. Civilian officials tried to stop the fighting, especially after the new interior minister ordered that no towns should be defended. Yet some soldiers fought on regardless. The Loire bridges were held until 20 June: alongside aristocratic cadets of the Saumur cavalry school fought ordinary students doing their reserve-officer training and an infantry battalion notorious for Left-wing militancy. Among those who fought most determinedly were colonial troops from Africa, up to 3,000 of whom were subsequently murdered by the Germans – in part belated revenge for the Ruhr occupation in 1923.⁶⁴ In total, the French had lost over 50,000 killed; the BEF, 13,000; the Germans over 27,000.⁶⁵

Churchill and the British realized France’s plight, and sympathized – but not to the extent of acquiescing in a total French surrender. Churchill appealed by radio to the French people over their new government’s head, and his Cabinet agreed, ‘not without argument’, to let ‘a French general’ speak on the BBC at 10 p.m. on 18 June. This was de Gaulle’s ‘Appeal to the French People’, the most famous broadcast in French history, though few heard it live and it was not even recorded. He called on them to reject Pétain’s policy and join him in continuing the struggle alongside Britain.⁶⁶ His global conception of the war – ‘France is not alone!’ – in contrast with the Eurocentric view of Pétain and Weygand, was exactly Churchill’s.

The immediate British concern was not to risk the French navy falling into German hands. London repeatedly insisted that it must sail to Britain or the USA as an absolute precondition of British consent to the French government’s seeking peace. But the French – even those sympathetic to the alliance – saw the navy as a vital safeguard of their empire against Italian attack, and as strengthening their future bargaining position with Hitler. Those unsympathetic to the alliance thought that the half-heartedness of British military and air support removed any right for London to make conditions. To let the fleet go to Britain would anger the Germans, and wreck any chance of favourable terms. Besides, Britain would soon surrender. The French were unanimous that the British should accept assurances that they would not allow the fleet to be used against them. Hitler showed unwonted subtlety in offering Pétain’s government a ‘golden bridge’: to leave an unoccupied zone in southern France, and to allow France its government and administration, an army of 100,000 men and continuing possession of its colonies and navy. Like the British, he was thinking of the future.

London redoubled its pressure because the armistice terms of 21 June, while declaring that Germany ‘had no intention’ of using the French fleet, required it to be disarmed ‘under German or Italian control’. Semantics aggravated the dispute: contrôle meant supervision; control implied possession. If the French navy had been added to the German and the Italian, the Royal Navy would have been outnumbered in capital ships. The Mediterranean would have been lost, and Atlantic convoys would have been in greater danger from surface ships than they ever were from submarines. Churchill fulminated that Britain would not forgive such a betrayal ‘for a thousand years’.⁶⁷ France would face blockade and bombing, and would suffer serious post-war punishment. The two governments practically broke off relations during the last week in June.

MERS-EL-KÉBIR

The wrenching break came on 3 July. ‘Operation Catapult’ aimed to seize or otherwise neutralize the French fleet. Ships in British ports – 200 in all – were boarded, with little resistance, and seized (along with 7,000 barrels of wine).⁶⁸ Those in Alexandria, after tense negotiations, agreed to disarm themselves. A battle-cruiser at Dakar was torpedoed. The nub was the core of the main Atlantic fleet, which had sailed to Mers-el-Kébir, the naval base of Oran, in north-western Algeria. Here were half the navy’s biggest ships – two modern battle-cruisers and two older battleships – plus destroyers and a seaplane carrier. Admiral Sir James Somerville arrived on 3 July with a force including a battle-cruiser, two battleships and an aircraft carrier. He presented a polite ultimatum: Admiral Marcel Gensoul could rejoin his ‘comrades up to now’ and fight the Germans; he could sail with reduced crews either to a British port, to the French West Indies or to the United States; or he could scuttle his ships. Otherwise, ‘whatever force may be necessary’ would be used. The Admiralty expected that the French would scuttle. Gensoul considered that honour and duty forbade acceptance of the ultimatum. (He also felt insulted that it had been brought by a mere captain, a French-speaking former naval attaché.) He thought the British were bluffing, and played for time so that reinforcements could arrive. But Churchill was not bluffing. The Admiralty warned Somerville that French reinforcements were on the way, and reluctantly he told Gensoul that he must accept the ultimatum or be sunk. Gensoul’s position was poignant. Unusually for a French naval officer, he was an English-speaking anglophile Protestant, and his wife was distantly related to the Duke of Wellington. He admired the Royal Navy, and the summit of his career had been commanding a mixed squadron of French and British ships. Although he had prepared for action, he had convinced himself that his British comrades would never open fire. After eleven hours’ stand-off, they did, and within ten minutes fired 144 fifteen-inch shells which sank or disabled a battle-cruiser and two battleships. The French lost 1,297 men killed and 351 wounded – their worst naval losses of the war.⁶⁹ Two British sailors were slightly injured. In seventeen days the two countries had gone from discussing an Indissoluble Union to armed conflict.

What the French remember as ‘Mers-el-Kébir’, almost forgotten in Britain, remains a raw nerve, and the subject of a steady stream of writing. French naval officers today are taught it as a case study in the problems of command. Most take the view that Gensoul was right.⁷⁰ Few Frenchmen have ever regarded the British attack as justified: the French government and navy had promised that the ships would not be used against Britain, and they would have kept their word. French naval officers sent a letter to Admiral Somerville expressing their ‘disgust’ that ‘the glorious White Ensign had been sullied with the indelible stain of murder’.⁷¹ Hitler was pleased. De Gaulle was described as either ‘exasperated’ or ‘shattered’, and he momentarily considered leaving for Canada. But a few days later he appeared ‘objective’, and made a speech which, while expressing pain at the ‘odious tragedy’, recognized that destroying the ships was better than surrendering them.⁷² Hindsight is ambiguous. When the Germans occupied southern France in 1942, the French warships at Toulon were indeed scuttled. On the other hand, those at Bizerta were handed over. In 1940, the British were not sure they could trust Pétain’s government; even less sure that they could trust some unknown future regime; and quite sure that they could not trust the Germans. The Americans were ‘very apprehensive’, and President Roosevelt said that if there were only one chance in ten that the Germans might get the fleet, it was a risk Britain must not run. For a week, other options were explored – even the idea of offering to buy the fleet for up to £100 million.⁷³ The Admiralty, and at first the Cabinet, were willing to trust the French navy. They thought it unlikely that the Germans could find crews for the ships even if they obtained them. British naval officers involved were extremely reluctant to attack their former comrades. But Churchill, backed by the Chiefs of Staff, finally insisted on ruthless action. By his own account, he realized that as well as removing a mortal danger, it would prove that Britain truly meant to fight on, as when the French revolution guillotined Louis XVI. ‘I thought of Danton in 1793: “The coalesced Kings threaten us, and we hurl at their feet as a gage of battle the head of a King.”’⁷⁴

France’s defeat was seen by many in Britain, and by others across the world, as a failure of determination, leadership and national cohesion. This continues to colour perceptions: critics of French policy decades later are quick to sniff out the spirit of 1940. British soldiers, politicians and journalists formed this view early through contacts with French politicians and generals. It was not simply a resurgence of traditional francophobia. It was a view shared by disillusioned francophiles, such as Churchill, Spears and Ironside, who concluded bluntly that ‘the French [were] not fighting and not even trying to fight’.⁷⁵ This reversed the staple francophobe view, particularly marked since 1919, that the French were aggressive and militaristic: now they were seen as a nation of effete capitulators. ‘They are too much attached to their mistresses, and their soup, and their little properties,’ wrote Dalton, the new Labour minister of economic warfare. ‘We see before our eyes nothing less than the liquification of France.’⁷⁶ A similar judgement was propagated by the French themselves, particularly by Pétain and his millions of admirers. He blamed defeat not only on weak allies, but on national vices. He dourly pronounced that since 1918 ‘the spirit of pleasure has overcome the spirit of sacrifice’. Pre-war leaders, notably Blum and Daladier, were blamed for defeat and put on trial. A rump parliament voted full powers to Pétain, and a new capital was set up at the spa town of Vichy. An authoritarian ‘National Revolution’ set out to regenerate the country by combating democracy and individualism, rooting out Jews, freemasons and foreigners, restoring religious authority, imposing traditional values – in short, liquidating the inheritance of 1789.

If defeat in 1940 were proof of national ‘decadence’, it would apply not only to France (and other countries that were defeated), but to Britain too. Its contribution to the Alliance was shamefully feeble. As in France, ‘guilty men’ blamed for Britain’s weakness were publicly vilified. Ironically, in both countries, those blamed included those who had begun rearmament against widespread opposition. If the French government failed to give united leadership, this was not unique in Europe. Had Britain been successfully invaded, Lloyd George or the Duke of Windsor might have played the role of a Pétain.

France’s defeat in 1940 was not, in fact, due to some general moral failure. The people faced up to war in a way not dissimilar from 1914, and soldiers continued fighting until Marshal Pétain, a man they trusted, told them to stop. Defeat was due to strategic mistakes and political decisions. Ever since 1940 it has been common to criticize the French for trying to refight the last war. In a sense they (and the British) did. But so did the Germans. The difference is that the latter – however nervous they were about their chances – did it successfully, having developed the tactics and technology pioneered by both sides in 1918: ground infiltration, tanks and aircraft. The breakthrough in 1940 achieved what the Schlieffen plan had failed to do: smash the French army, take Paris, and throw the BEF into the sea. French and British politicians and generals had not prepared adequately for war because they had hoped never to fight one: their goal had been deterrence, not victory. They aimed to limit the war and to keep it at a distance, rather than undergo a repetition of the carnage of 1914–18. The defeat of France at least avoided that ordeal, and also the danger that the Allies might have reverted to the French plan for bombing Russian oilfields, thus creating a Nazi–Soviet alliance of incalculable danger. Then came the 1940 equivalent of the ‘Miracle of the Marne’ – the Battle of Britain. Hitler’s inability to defeat or cajole Britain spurred him into his long-term fantasy, a genocidal attack on Russia in 1941. Japan widened the conflict, which forced the United States to fight. Britain and France would emerge as victors largely owing to the carnage of the Eastern Front and the resources of America. As the French historian Robert Frank has pointed out, the original logic of the Phoney War still applied in the West: the Allies waited until 1944 to launch an offensive, when they had built up massive forces and German capacity had been eroded.⁷⁷

The British and French did respond differently to the catastrophe of 1940, however, and this was not only a matter of geography. The defeatist, even treasonable, behaviour of key French politicians was a blatant continuation of the factional conflicts of the 1930s. Britain did have greater political cohesion in the face of disaster – though as Reynaud observed, it was a far less overwhelming disaster. The American historian John Lukacs, in a generous yet acute assessment, identifies an ‘obtuse’ British bravery that refused to recognize the extent of the danger. He quotes George Orwell: ‘You have all the time the sensation of kicking against an impenetrable wall of stupidity. But of course at times their stupidity has stood them in good stead.’ Lukacs emphasizes the difference in historical experience: ‘The English, who had not been conquered by an invader for nearly one thousand years, knew in their bones that their defeat would mean a kind of death for England, that its effect would not be temporary. The French, on the other hand, knew in their heads . . . the memory of national defeats together with the memory of their national recoveries.’⁷⁸ A Foreign Office memorandum put the British view bluntly: ‘either the German Reich or this country has got to go under, and not only under, but right under’.⁷⁹ The alternative visions were respectively incarnated in the bellicose Churchill, offering ‘blood, toil, tears and sweat’, and the lacrymose Pétain, promising to ‘attenuate the disaster’.

Great though these differences were, Britain’s resistance owed much not only to the width of the Channel, to the heroic ‘Few’, and to German failures, but also to the unsung sacrifices of French soldiers. France’s defeat, on the other hand, owed much to pre-war British appeasement, which not only made Britain a feeble ally, but had a profound effect on France’s diplomacy, strategy and confidence. If Dunkirk was not the callous desertion that many Frenchmen felt, it was nevertheless the consequence of a policy of deliberate estrangement from France pursued from 1918 to 1939. Britain had the long war it had always expected, and its people lived ‘their finest hour’. But France, the only major power unprotected by sea or distance from Germany, had succumbed, as Foch, Clemenceau and Poincaré had long before predicted, and it faced its darkest years.

Churchill and de Gaulle

My mission seemed to me, all of a sudden, clear and terrible. At this moment, the worst in her history, it was for me to assume the burden of France.

CHARLES DE GAULLE⁸⁰

I knew he was no friend of England. But I always recognized in him the spirit and conception which, across the pages of history, the word ‘France’ would ever proclaim. I understood and admired, while I resented, his arrogant demeanour . . . The Germans had conquered his country. He had no real foothold anywhere. Never mind; he defied all.

WINSTON CHURCHILL⁸¹

Mr Churchill and I agreed modestly in drawing from the events which had smashed the West this commonplace but final conclusion: when all is said and done, Great Britain is an island; France, the cape of a continent; America, another world.

CHARLES DE GAULLE⁸²

The strained interconnectedness of French and British history is embodied in the stormy intimacy between the men each nation regards as its greatest historic figure. Both were writers as well as men of action, and by the power of their words breathed life into stricken nations. Both drew on history, theatre, poetry and patriotism. Both mastered the drama of public oratory, not yet emasculated by the cosiness of the airwaves. To defeat the apocalyptic future imagined by Hitler and Mussolini, they conjured up the past, with images of continuity, destiny, and romance. ‘The emotional side of me tends to imagine France, like the princess in the fairy tales . . . as dedicated to an exalted and exceptional destiny.’ ‘We must regard the next week or so as [ranking] with the days when the Spanish Armada was approaching the Channel, and Drake was finishing his game of bowls; or when Nelson stood between us and Napoleon’s Grand Army . . . but what is happening now is . . . of far more consequence to the life and future of the world.’⁸³

What gave them both the confidence to speak for nations facing disaster? Both had dreamt of themselves from childhood as men of destiny. Both said so. On 10 May, when called to power, Churchill felt ‘as if I were walking with destiny, and that all my past life had been but a preparation for this hour’. On 18 June, as de Gaulle made his broadcast, and ‘the irrevocable words flew out upon their way, I felt within myself a life coming to an end . . . I was entering upon adventure, like a man thrown by destiny outside all terms of reference.’⁸⁴ These pretensions evoked exasperation and mistrust, as well as loyalty and adulation. Churchill, conscious of his descent from the Duke of Marlborough, a leading politician for a generation, whose return to office had been increasingly called for since 1938, and who held the power and prestige of legitimate office, was eminently placed to command exceptional authority. De Gaulle, the son of a schoolmaster from Lille, an unknown middle-ranking army officer, never part of the establishment, and a rebel against his country’s saviour, could only rise, like Napoleon, in the wake of a cataclysm. What gave him the magnificent effrontery to ‘assume the burden of France’, with neither royal blood like Louis XIV, nor divine inspiration like Joan of Arc, with both of whom he was mockingly and admiringly compared? As a Catholic, a republican, and a soldier he combined three powerful but often conflicting elements of French identity, and so was potentially able to rally broad support. As a writer in uniform (like Napoleon) he drew inspiration from French high culture, and from earlier patriotic intellectual exiles in England, men he admired and quoted, René de Chateaubriand and Victor Hugo.

Both Churchill and de Gaulle gained moral strength from being proved right. Churchill had famously opposed disarmament and appeasement – even if not as early or as bluntly as later (partly self-composed) history suggested. ‘My warnings over the last six years . . . were now so terribly vindicated that no one could gainsay me.’ De Gaulle, naturally prickly and insubordinate, had criticized the conservatism of the high command, advocated a modern, mechanized army, and predicted that without it the Germans would ‘advance from the Ardennes to Bayonne in three weeks’.⁸⁵ He had been opposed by the military establishment, led by Pétain. When the latter blamed France’s defeat on deep-seated national ills, de Gaulle could retort that the real cause was the blindness of men like Pétain. Both Churchill and de Gaulle realized that they were engaged in a long world war. This was a reality easier to grasp in the islands than on the ‘cape of a continent’: Weygand had said to de Gaulle on 8 June, ‘As for the world, when I’ve been beaten here, England won’t wait a week before negotiating.’ That de Gaulle did not believe it testifies to his vision.

As soon as he was made a junior minister, de Gaulle called in the press. Already, said one witness, he was preparing France’s ‘resurrection myth’, with himself as messiah.⁸⁶ But his epiphany depended on others – above all, Churchill. They met early on 9 June – what one French historian calls ‘the meeting of the century’.⁸⁷ A veteran Gaullist has summarized their relationship as ‘instant attraction, followed by a passionate engagement, a hasty wedding and a stormy marriage, to end in an old couple forever linked by history’.⁸⁸ De Gaulle’s escape from Bordeaux was arranged by Spears, who on 17 June literally pulled him on to a British plane. The following day, he was allowed to make his historic broadcast in reply to Pétain’s message thirty hours earlier.

The Foreign Office grumbled that Churchill was enlisting ‘every crank in the world’.⁸⁹ He seemed too little known to lead national resistance. The intention was to rally weightier figures and leave de Gaulle only military command of French forces in Britain. Men who were better qualified – Reynaud, or Blum – did not, or could not, arrive. Georges Mandel, Clemenceau’s tough and dauntless former acolyte, an admired friend of Churchill, would have been the British choice. Fatally, he hesitated: he was a Jew, and knew that anti-semites would accuse him of running away. Then it was too late. He was arrested to prevent him leaving for England, imprisoned, and murdered by French fascists.

Churchill was a life-long francophile. His time in France added up to nearly four years, beginning with childhood visits to Paris. Admiration for French military glories, ‘a mixture of Péguy and the Napoleonic’,⁹⁰ dated from his attendance at army manoeuvres in 1907. In the trenches in 1916 he wore a French helmet. He admired Clemenceau. He shared the usual Edwardian pleasure in French sights, tastes and sunshine, and regularly wintered on the Riviera. His first post-war holiday in July 1945 was near Biarritz. He enjoyed speaking ‘strange and at times incomprehensible’ French. ‘He speaks remarkably well but understands very little.’ He played this up as part of his John Bull persona: ‘If I spoke perfect French, they wouldn’t like it very much.’⁹¹ In the late 1930s he and the ‘pro-Frog boys’ had developed political friendships with like-minded opponents of appeasement, including Reynaud and Mandel. Yet this represented a change of tack, not consistent prescience. A few years earlier, he had urged leaving France to ‘stew in her own juice’, and preferred a trilateral agreement including Germany rather than an alliance with France alone.⁹² He had shared the general desire in the 1920s to conciliate Germany and avoid European commitments, and was unorthodox only in his impatience with disarmament and insistence on appeasement from a position of strength. His famous exclamation in 1933 – ‘Thank God for the French army!’ – was not a call for an alliance, but support for French containment of Germany while Britain ‘stood aside’. This was complete fantasy. Only in 1938 did he urge treating ‘the defensive needs of the two countries as if they were one.’⁹³

De Gaulle had no comparably romantic feeling for Britain. He was brought up in a patriotic atmosphere as resentful of ‘England’ as of Germany: he recalled Fashoda as a childhood tragedy, and admired the nationalist writings of Maurice Barrès and Charles Péguy praising the French soil, Catholicism, Joan of Arc and Napoleon. His history of the French army omits Waterloo. Suspicion of the British – ‘that oligarchy that Napoleon mocked’ – was second nature in these circles, and he retained it. His ideas about English national character were conventional: the action at Mers-el-Kébir he considered ‘one of those dark bursts by which the repressed instinct of this people sometimes smashes all barriers’.⁹⁴ He knew little English literature, except some Shakespeare and Kipling in translation; spoke little English, unwillingly; and had never been to Britain before 1940. He disparaged the British military contribution in the First World War, and saw the 1940 disaster as largely Britain’s fault.⁹⁵ After 1940, he depended on Churchill for status and every means of action, from office space and money to troops, weapons and above all communication with France. ‘He had never pretended to like the English. But coming to them as a beggar, with his country’s wretchedness branded on his forehead and in his heart, was unbearable.’⁹⁶ An acquaintance recalled that ‘He was often biting, scathing, in his criticism of England and the English . . . just as much or more so than France.’⁹⁷ This came naturally, but he also calculated that aggressiveness was the right way of dealing with the British: ‘you have to bang the table,’ he told his subordinates, ‘they back down.’⁹⁸ Whether this was always the best way seems doubtful: it helped to exclude de Gaulle from Allied liberation of the French empire. But it made sense to a man who viewed les Anglais as cold, ruthless and duplicitous. He thought that ‘a few hundred lords, big businessmen and bankers exercised real power’ in 1940.⁹⁹ Closeted at his headquarters, surrounded by his French entourage, and cut off within his carapace of prejudice, he thus failed to perceive one of the most momentous acts of genuinely popular resistance in history. One thinks of the Duke of Dorset’s attempt to head off the French revolution with a cricket match.

Churchill and de Gaulle are often taken to exemplify the characteristics of their respective nations. In fact, they did much to change those perceptions: across Europe, the stiff, umbrella-carrying Chamberlain and the dapper Reynaud were considered national archetypes. Churchill and de Gaulle each embodied many supposed characteristics of the other nation. The tall Frenchman, cold, laconic, mordant, prudish, monoglot and arrogant, could have stepped from the pages of Colonel Bramble. The chubby Englishman, ebullient, emotional, artistic, hedonistic and eloquent, would have been more at home with Cyrano. Perhaps this partly explains why they were so much appreciated in each other’s country.

Bearing the Cross of Lorraine

Our two ancient peoples, our two great peoples, remain linked together. They will both succumb or else they will win together.

CHARLES DE GAULLE, 23 June 1940¹⁰⁰

The general stereotype of the French . . . is of a voluble, excessively excitable, often slightly bearded and somewhat lecherous personality. Mass-Observation, ‘Public opinion about the French’, 1939–41¹⁰¹

Sometimes we can see France shining like a mirage at the end of a London street.

ANDRE LABARTHE, exiled journalist¹⁰²

Personally I feel happier now that we have no more allies to be polite to & to pamper.

KING GEORGE VI, 27 June 1940

The king spoke for many. In Britain, as in France, the disaster was blamed on the failings of the ally. In Britain, this fed determination to fight, in Churchill’s words, ‘if necessary for years, if necessary alone’. The historian G.M. Trevelyan, Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, ordered champagne for the high table on 18 June, proclaiming ‘I know we will win this war.’ The Canadian historian Talbot Imlay argues that the suspension of the war on the Continent in 1940 was indeed ‘the best of all available alternatives’ for Britain and the world, for it made eventual victory possible.¹⁰³

In France, on the contrary, the sense of isolation justified acceptance of defeat. Anglophobia was an active element of this acceptance. It comforted amour-propre to have a scapegoat. It drew on ancient and familiar themes. Not least, much of it was justified. The most ideological variety, bringing the old ‘Carthage’ idea up to date with an injection of anti-semitism, saw Britain as the core of global capitalism. ‘The British,’ said one French general, ‘represent those things that almost destroyed us: democraticmasonic politics and Judeo-Saxon finance. They represent the past, nothing constructive.’ This appealed to reactionary intellectuals such as Charles Maurras and to fascists eager to ingratiate themselves with the winning side. Old-fashioned authoritarians had not forgotten historic grievances – Joan of Arc was conscripted by Vichy propaganda – and they acquired a set of new ones, especially Dunkirk and Mers-el-Kébir. Some wanted Britain to be defeated, both to salve their own pride and to improve France’s relative international position. Such views were shrilly reiterated by newspapers, books, cartoons, newsreels, films and radio programmes both in the German occupied zone and in the ‘free zone’. Bombing of London gave rise to gleeful reports of panic and starvation. Later, British bombing of France provided a new anglophobe theme.

Anglophobic propaganda had limited, and decreasing, effects, once the Luftwaffe lost the Battle of Britain and the Wehrmacht failed to invade England. In the unoccupied zone, French newspapers continued to print British communiqués alongside, and even before, German ones. Official anglophobic statements were printed, but were rarely backed up by editorial comment. This was noticed by British observers: ‘Reserve regarding “collaboration”, and reticence and respect regarding Britain and her effort, are the attitudes to be read between the lines.’¹⁰⁴ Many people combined loyalty to Marshal Pétain with goodwill towards Britain. They imagined that he was secretly cooperating with London and hoodwinking the Germans. Others were torn between their anger with the British and their detestation of the Germans. It was thus summed up by someone pro-British enough to write a letter to the BBC:

the immense majority of people, despite the hatred the cowardly attack on Mers el Kébir has inspired, despite everything, wants to see England victorious. If the French gain nothing from this victory, because of the ferocious egotism of Albion, they know nonetheless that they have everything to lose if Hitler wins.¹⁰⁵

The Vichy regime took the opposite view, and gambled on a German victory. Pétain was prudent in public, but outspoken in private: ‘England [was] the source of all evils that had befallen France.’ As early as 1936 he had told the Italian ambassador that ‘England has always been France’s most implacable enemy’, and he hoped for an alliance of France, Italy and Germany to ensure ‘a more equitable distribution of British colonies [to] provide wealth and work for all’.¹⁰⁶ Pierre Laval, prime minister in 1940–41 and 1942–4, believed that whatever happened overseas Germany would dominate the Continent, and that France must seek junior partnership by ‘collaboration’. Admiral Darlan, commander of the navy and briefly prime minister in 1941–2, wanted a German victory over Britain to prevent France from being ‘the principal victim of this war of nerves and famine’, suffering unemployment, poverty, revolution and the breakaway of its colonies.¹⁰⁷ He hoped to use the colonies and the navy to make France a key partner in a global struggle between the Continent and the Anglo-Saxons, and eventually a leading power in a future German-led European federation.

Joan of Arc, Napoleon and Fashoda feature in this poster combining historic grievances with fears for the future.

It took a long time for people in France, including many in the Resistance, to realize that Vichy’s leaders were truly working for Germany. Some never realized it. Pétain was revered as the humane defender of Verdun and as one of the patriarchs the French turn to in adversity. ‘Are you more French than he?’ ran one slogan. He was a formidable obstacle for those trying to continue resistance. Vichy did maintain ambivalent contacts with the Allies. The British were sceptical, having decided early on that ‘the Marshal and his friends are too old, or too crooked, to clean up France or anything else’.¹⁰⁸ They were willing to retain indirect contacts in the hope that some elements in Vichy or the Empire might change sides. But the Americans subsequently remained wedded to the idea of a rapprochement with Vichy despite the evidence, thus enraging de Gaulle and damaging post-war relations.

Churchill recognized de Gaulle officially on 28 June 1940 as ‘leader of all the Free French’. This was vital, but it laid him open to accusations of being a British puppet. Pétain’s authority and the ambient Anglophobia blighted de Gaulle’s efforts to rally support. Mers-el-Kébir came at the worst moment. A French naval officer in England wrote that ‘there is no longer any question of joining those with French blood on their hands. Only adventurers and fools are staying in England. Between our two navies, if not our two countries, there will be the same tenacious hatred as after Trafalgar . . . and that for a century!’ Of 11,500 French sailors in England, only 882 joined de Gaulle and 700 the Royal Navy (whose pay was three times the French); the rest went home. Some airmen joined the RAF, and fought in the Battle of Britain. Among the military, de Gaulle rallied some 2,000 men by July 1940. Sailors and soldiers were loosely interned – loosely enough for at least one to meet an English girl at a dancehall and marry her. Spartan conditions in the early days increased French sentiments of being hard done by, which pro-Pétain officers encouraged. Those who did join de Gaulle were not only adventurous but junior and often rather unusual, none more so than the aristocratic monk turned naval officer, Thierry d’Argenlieu. This gave the Free French a reputation for extremism and eccentricity. De Gaulle was no more successful among permanent French residents in London, of whom there were about 10,000: only 300 volunteered.¹⁰⁹ Civilian refugees, like those in uniform, mostly wanted to get home.

The little that was known about de Gaulle – that he was a regular soldier of conservative views and authoritarian temperament – put many off. Admittedly, had he been a politician, he might have put off even more. Spears, now Churchill’s representative with the Free French, put it rather well: he ‘compelled admiration while rejecting sympathy.’¹¹⁰ A less polite description would have been that he was cold, rude and arrogant: he had an extraordinary capacity for alienating wellwishers. Leading French personalities in London, whether for political or prudential reasons, refused to join him. The authors André Maurois (famous from his writings on Britain), Jacques Maritain and George Bernanos left for north or south America, as did the former ambassador in London Charles Corbin. The poet-diplomat Alexis Léger and the businessman-cum-bureaucrat Jean Monnet went to preach against de Gaulle in Washington, with damaging results. Even politicians , academics and journalists who decided to stick it out in London were not all eager to rush to the Gaullist banner. Some preferred independent activity or direct involvement with the British, and were to play vital roles within the BBC and the Special Operations Executive. The most influential exile paper, La France Libre, run by the left-wing scientist André Labarthe, kept its distance from de Gaulle.

Amid the many exiles making ‘our London . . . the metropolis of the banished’,¹¹¹ the Free French formed a visible and distinct community. In the early days, the French colony offered clothes, money and hospitality. De Gaulle was given 4 Carlton Gardens, the site of Lord Palmerston’s house overlooking the Mall, as his headquarters. (His statue there today looks unfortunately like someone asking for a tip.) He lodged at the Connaught Hotel, joining his family in the suburbs at weekends. Free French troops were camped at Olympia and the White City (built for the Anglo-French exhibition of 1908), before being relocated to various army bases, where they were ‘impressed by the comfort of the barracks’.¹¹² Civilians found cheap accommodation in Kensington, some occupying rooms at the French Institute, or in Soho, traditional quarter for French exiles. They colonized pubs, clubs and restaurants including Chez Céleste and Chez Rose (frequented by Free French sailors and Soho hookers). The Petit Club Français, in the Astors’ house in St James’s Square, became one of wartime London’s smartest and raciest nightspots. The British government were active in promoting the Free French image. The king and queen visited them. Churchill invited de Gaulle to Chequers, and Mrs Churchill took flowers to his office. The government, to the general’s annoyance, paid for a professional public relations campaign ensuring laudatory press coverage of de Gaulle the man of destiny and ‘the flood of recruits’ joining him: ‘The flag of Joan of Arc floats over England.’ On 14 July 1940, the Free French paraded down Whitehall, and on the 21st, French aircrews played a symbolic role in a bombing raid on the Ruhr. A Mass-Observation survey in September 1940 showed that de Gaulle was the most popular foreign personality. French military personnel in England after Dunkirk had aroused public criticism because of their eagerness to accept the armistice and their indisciplined behaviour, but once they had gone home, the Free French volunteers were more popular, and were constantly invited to stay with English families.¹¹³ One young French woman soldier recalled having her restaurant bill paid by anonymous English well-wishers; and ‘How often in the street the British shouted “Vive la France” when I was wearing my uniform!’¹¹⁴Friendship societies held collections, French choirs gave concerts, and numerous sporting fixtures were arranged. Better still, ‘the English girls were receptive to [our] advances’.¹¹⁵ De Gaulle himself recalled ‘the generous kindness which the English people everywhere showed’. When he was sentenced to death and had his property confiscated by Vichy, quantities of gifts were sent to his office.¹¹⁶

Official relations soured in the autumn of 1940. Churchill got de Gaulle to agree to a Franco-British expedition to Dakar, the French West African naval base strategically placed on the route to the Cape. At Dakar were the modern battleship Richelieu and the Belgian and Polish gold reserves. De Gaulle believed he could persuade the garrison to join him, but a sizeable British naval force went along in case. However, most French colonial administrators were pro-Vichy and anti-British, and those at Dakar were no exception. The operation became a fiasco, with several hasty changes of plan and some bad luck ending in an abortive landing and a long exchange of shells in which several British ships were seriously damaged. De Gaulle was devastated at being implicated in a failed British attack on French forces, which scuppered his hopes of rallying the Empire and seemed to confirm Vichy propaganda about British designs on French colonies. Some thought he contemplated suicide. Spears denied this, but found him more remote and difficult. He certainly considered abandoning his whole mission. Churchill and the British had been badly humiliated at a critical time: ‘to the world at large it seemed a glaring example of miscalculation, confusion, timidity and muddle’.¹¹⁷ Churchill defended de Gaulle publicly in the House of Commons, but both sides blamed each other. Free French intelligence had been too optimistic about the attitude of the garrison. When things went wrong the British thought the Free French reluctant to fight against their compatriots. They also blamed the French for gross lapses of security: there had been public toasts ‘A Dakar!’ and de Gaulle had openly bought tropical kit at Simpsons in Piccadilly. Vichy never got wind of this, but belief that the Free French talked too much caused the British to consider them a permanent security risk, with major consequences. De Gaulle (nicknamed ‘Cheer-Up Charlie’) tried harder to assert political independence of his ally, and in a way that maximized ill feeling. Some in Whitehall looked for other Frenchmen to deal with: ‘the number of occasions when British officials withdrew their support after making contact with Carlton Gardens is truly astonishing’.¹¹⁸ Clashes of personality and of cultural styles aside, it became increasingly clear that the priorities of de Gaulle and the British conflicted. The former aimed to take over in the Empire and eventually France, in order to rebuild France as an independent power. The latter – like the Americans later – subordinated French politics to winning the war, and were prepared to use any means or persons to that end.

British policy towards France was formulated by several competing bureaucracies: the Foreign Office and its Secret Intelligence Service, the Political Warfare Executive and its Special Operations Executive, and the BBC. There were three fundamental problems, all connected. First, how to treat Vichy and Pétain. Second, how to treat de Gaulle. Third, how to respond to the French Resistance. Pétain remained popular, as all realized. German intelligence reported in May 1941 that ‘For 90 out of 100 Frenchmen the Marshal represents France and is beyond criticism. Even in working class circles he is considered as entirely decent and as the nation’s guide.’¹¹⁹ As late as 1944 Pétain was cheered by huge crowds in Paris. Direct attacks on him might be counter-productive in propaganda terms, and might also hamper efforts to win over patriots in France and the Empire. Some Vichy officials and soldiers were already working secretly for the Allies, which made that hope seductive.

Second problem: how to treat de Gaulle. The Gaullist view – now broadly accepted in France – is that the British, by prejudice and by toadying to the Americans, treated de Gaulle disgracefully, fearing his proud independence. The reality is more complex. Much of the opposition to de Gaulle originated with French politicians, journalists and broadcasters in London and figures in Washington such as Monnet and Léger, who helped to turn Roosevelt against him. They feared that he had reactionary if not fascist views and dictatorial ambitions. Moreover, de Gaulle seemed to be a failure by 1941–2. He was not attracting support beyond ‘sand-blown colonials, a few soldiers, and the most rigidly Teutophobic readers of Action Française’.¹²⁰ He had not won over the Empire. He produced few constructive political or social ideas. He seemed more concerned with accumulating power than with fighting the Germans: again, this was the impression of some French patriots as well as London and Washington, and it was partly true. British pressure aimed to induce de Gaulle to broaden his political support, which might – some hoped – loosen his control of the Free French. In July 1941 he had to agree to a French National Committee. The true architect of the new Free French structure came from inside France. A young former prefect, Jean Moulin, arrived in London via Lisbon in October 1941 and presented himself as the spokesman of several important resistance organizations, largely unknown to London. He impressed the British, and persuaded de Gaulle, whom he regarded as a useful figurehead and an essential link with the British, to sanction a broad organization encompassing the Resistance movements, the Free French in London, and other sympathetic politicians. This would carry on a more aggressive campaign inside France, ‘organize the French people for a nation-wide uprising at the appropriate time’,¹²¹ and not least show the world that de Gaulle was recognized as leader inside France. Until then, the general had shown little interest in clandestine activity. Moulin went back to create a federated national Resistance movement, which in time increased de Gaulle’s leverage with the Anglo-Saxons.¹²²

De Gaulle persisted with his claim to be an ‘Ally of the Allies’, with the right to pursue independent policies. This attitude, which seemed to his supporters (and his subsequent admirers) the height of courageous patriotism, was to his critics arrogant and irresponsible. De Gaulle at his best or worst can be seen over the Levant, where his 1940 rescuer Spears became his main antagonist. In May 1941, with the Middle East and its oil threatened by Rommel, a British and Free French force invaded French-ruled Syria and Lebanon, to prevent Vichy offering air bases to the Luftwaffe, and there was quite serious fighting against Vichy forces. The British, needing to conciliate Arab opinion, wanted independence for the two territories. De Gaulle convinced himself that this was a British plot against France, and he reacted violently. This worked, and the British – who hated scenes, as their representative admitted – largely gave in. But the bickering continued beyond all reason throughout and even after the war. All this dangerously damaged de Gaulle’s relations with the British, on whom he depended. But he had decided that his most effective tactic was intransigence. It had its costs, not least in confirming the suspicions of the Americans. De Gaulle and his troops were excluded from future colonial expeditions, and not informed when the British occupied the French colony of Madagascar in May 1942, or when an American and British force landed in Morocco in November. This led to the greatest threat to de Gaulle’s position, as the Americans persisted in trying to have him replaced with a more pliable, and less anti-Vichy, figure, such as General Giraud, General Weygand, or even Admiral Darlan.

Late in 1942, the crisis broke. One of the worst moments was a coldly venomous face-to-face row between Churchill and de Gaulle on 30 September at Downing Street. Churchill told him that ‘I cannot look upon you as a comrade or a friend . . . Instead of making war on Germany you have made war on England and you have been the chief obstacle to an effective collaboration with Great Britain and the United States.’ De Gaulle responded with laconic insolence.¹²³ Churchill was determined not to quarrel with Roosevelt over de Gaulle, and allowed the Americans to prod him into a violently anti-Gaullist position. But this American policy of wooing Vichy was not well received in Whitehall, including by Churchill’s Cabinet colleagues. The Foreign Office warned that it risked creating a semi-fascist oligarchy in North Africa and civil war in France. As the war was supposedly being fought for democracy and progress, this would send a disastrous message all across occupied Europe. A deal with Vichy would also amount to an American takeover of policy towards France. Cadogan, permanent under-secretary at the foreign office, promised himself a ‘God-Almighty show down’ with the Americans.¹²⁴ Although ‘Charles of Arc’ caused gibbering irritation in Whitehall, he also retained support – partly because it would have been embarrassing to disavow the monster they had created, and partly because he was the only man who could unite the kaleidoscope of Resistance activity. Churchill was persuaded by his Cabinet to be more emollient, and he urged de Gaulle to be calm and wait for the Americans to realize their error.¹²⁵ The American secretary of state, Cordell Hull, complained that the British were ‘behind’ de Gaulle ‘with money, the aid of their radio stations, and through other methods’.¹²⁶American policy was sent sprawling by the German occupation of the whole of France in November 1942 (which ended the vestiges of Vichy’s independence), by stubborn British support for de Gaulle, and by the general’s own astuteness. Admiral Darlan, Washington’s strongest candidate for French leadership, was assassinated in Algiers in December 1942 by a young patriot whose motives and contacts were never discovered as he was immediately executed. So de Gaulle remained the only credible leader of Fighting France, although Roosevelt continued to suggest silly schemes for getting rid of him. De Gaulle’s belief in Anglo-Saxon perfidy was confirmed. He told Monnet that after the war France might turn to Germany or Russia to resist their dominance.¹²⁷

The third problem of British policy was: what was French resistance for? The BBC succeeded brilliantly in creating a dissident atmosphere in France and countering anglophobia. Optimists in London hoped that influencing French public opinion might force a change of policy in Vichy. For many French patriots, the dissident atmosphere was an end in itself: they were fighting for self-respect.¹²⁸ But some British and French policy-makers feared, on the contrary, that making the French feel better about themselves was doing nothing to liberate France or help the struggling Allies.¹²⁹ Some wanted an aggressively anti-Vichy Resistance movement aimed at military action – setting France ablaze, as Churchill had wanted. On the other hand, sporadic and premature acts, such as derailing trains or killing lone Germans, simply invited massive reprisals – a strategy many regarded as immoral as well as counter-productive. The Allied chief of staffs, for their part, wanted a disciplined military resistance that could act under orders to support an invasion, but this was still far off. For de Gaulle and his entourage, the real purpose of the Resistance was not military – an aspect he as a regular soldier never took seriously. It was a way for France to reassert its independence by participating in its own liberation. It was also a means for taking over power from Vichy. To this end the Gaullists laboured to bring all resistance activity under their control. This caused doubts in French as well as Allied circles, not least because of Free French incompetence in security matters.

The consequence of all these dilemmas was a fluctuating set of British policies that one might regard as timid, or as subtly balanced, or perhaps just as the inevitably incoherent product of differing aims and rival organizations. To avoid violent criticism of Pétain, while criticizing acts of his government and encouraging defections. To avoid encouraging aimless violence, yet without condemning it. To build up military units, but keep them on the leash until the right moment. To try to influence and control de Gaulle, without disavowing him. Broadly speaking, the British – Cabinet, officialdom, and public – always backed de Gaulle, even against the Americans and at times against Churchill. When they realized that, however eccentric, he was not a crackpot, his larger-than-life manner began to win grudging admiration.¹³⁰ The foreign secretary, Anthony Eden, a devoted francophile, played a vital part in mollifying American hostility and Churchillian exasperation. But the British did nevertheless restrain de Gaulle, especially by limiting Free French access to the airwaves and censoring broadcasts. Also, they insisted on operating separate and independent intelligence and Resistance organizations within France.

Feeding the Flame

The anglophiles are those who want ‘our English friends’ to win; the anglophobes are those who want ‘those English swine’ to win. French comment¹³¹

How was it possible to fight when France had been defeated and Britain ejected from the Continent? One way was strategic bombing, which turned out to need hugely greater efforts than pre-war air forces had imagined. Another way – which Churchill favoured – was to ‘set Europe ablaze’ by encouraging resistance in the occupied countries. But this too would require long and costly preparation, not least because the British had no intelligence networks in France.

Spontaneous resistance in France began at once. Early acts were associated with pro-British sentiments, especially in northern areas with memories of an earlier British liberation, and again experiencing German military rule. As the police reported, ‘the people of the Nord now await a new 1918 . . . their hope of salvation is England’.¹³² Rebuttals of Vichy anglophobia often referred back to the earlier war. One underground newspaper referred to ‘the great voice’ of the British dead of 1914–18 ‘who contradict, Pétain, your criticisms of today’. Some acts were symbolic or commemorative, and however small created a sense of resistance. Armistice Day saw collective gatherings at war cemeteries, the placing of wreaths on British graves, and the distribution of leaflets: ‘Have confidence, the English will rescue us, and France will be France again.’ British army songs were sung in the presence of German soldiers. People wore red roses on the king’s birthday. At the beginning of 1941, the BBC launched the ‘V for Victory’ campaign, and so many Vs appeared on walls that the Germans tried to stop the sale of chalk. Flowers were laid in Lille at the memorial of Louise de Bettignies. The Germans replied with other symbolic acts, such as blowing up certain First World War monuments, most spectacularly the new ‘Britannia’ at Boulogne.

Other activities built on experiences of the earlier war, for example helping escaping British soldiers and airmen, now in a long trip across France to Spain. The Comtesse de Milleville (née Mary Lindell), an admirer of Edith Cavell, organized escape routes, travelling France in her red-cross uniform bearing British decorations won in 1914–18. In time, elaborate escape networks, of which women were the mainstay, involved couriers, forgers, doctors, Pyrenean smugglers, and suppliers of food, clothes and safe-houses. There was even an ‘exotic dancer’ – subsequently decorated by the British government – whose private performances helped to maintain the morale of escapers waiting in hiding.¹³³ All were risking not only their own lives, but those of their families and friends. This created intense and personal Franco-British links, as escapers had to entrust themselves implicitly to their rescuers – doctors, housewives, farmers, students, railwaymen, teachers, even a Scottish missionary. One Australian airman reckoned that twenty families had aided his escape. Many of the helpers were very young, though one of the most successful was the elderly Mademoiselle Françoise Dissart (with her cat Mifouf), who sheltered escapers in her flat in Toulouse near Gestapo headquarters – she used their lunch hour to ferry her charges in and out. Although there are many picaresque stories, the activity was deadly dangerous. Though Mary de Milleville carried scissors to snip off moustaches, fit young men speaking no French often looked exactly what they were: one officer disguised in workman’s clothes still looked ‘as if he had just come out of the Guards depot at Pirbright’. The need to accept unknown escapees made the organizations vulnerable to penetration by German agents and traitors. The worst of these was a fatally plausible British conman, Harold Cole, a petty criminal who deserted from the BEF, worked for the Germans, infiltrated and betrayed the famous ‘Pat O’Leary’ escape line, and was eventually killed in a gun battle with French police in 1946. Moreover, as in 1914–18, servicemen were sometimes careless. One group was caught, and their female courier tortured and sent to a concentration camp, because an RAF man lit a cigarette. Mary de Milleville had ‘one rule for Englishmen . . . NO GIRLS . . . once they meet a pretty girl everything goes to hell’. But there was at least one marriage.¹³⁴ Air force morale benefited from the crews’ realization that if shot down they had a good chance of being rescued, but word spread unofficially of where to go and whom to contact, multiplying the dangers for the organizers. In one café that became known, RAF men in uniform walked in openly asking for help. Late in 1941, a successful RAF escaper gave a friend contact details of families who had helped him. The friend was shot down and killed, the addresses were found on his body, and the families were executed. Devoted amateur organizers received limited help from London, and were left operating too long for safety. Hence, one of the biggest lines, which saved 600 airmen, at its peak involved 250 helpers; but it lost 100 people killed or sent to camps. In all, 5–6,000 allied airmen were aided. Some 12,000 people were part of organized escape lines, in addition to those who helped spontaneously. Thousands suffered torture, concentration camps or death.¹³⁵

Intelligence gathering, vital to a Britain threatened with invasion and attacks on its shipping, also began spontaneously as people sought to pass on things they saw near their homes or learned at work. A right-wing patriot set up a large network which penetrated the Vichy intelligence service and sent information to MI6. Post-office workers tapped the main German telephone cables, and for months sent a stream of information to Vichy, where a senior officer passed it on to MI6. Several groups formed in western France, whose naval ports – built for earlier wars against Britain – were strategically vital in the gruelling Battle of the Atlantic as bases for German surface ships and submarines. One network, the largely Catholic Confrérie Notre-Dame, sent information about the German fleet, and contributed to the successful hunting of the battleship Bismarck in 1941. Detailed plans of Hitler’s Atlantic Wall coastal defences were delivered to London before they were even built.¹³⁶

Intelligence of a less spectacular kind came from published sources.¹³⁷ Churchill complained in August 1940 of the paucity of information even from the unoccupied zone: ‘We seem to be as much cut off from these territories as from Germany.’¹³⁸ In time, however, France can never have been so closely scrutinized. And never can the French people, through the BBC and a mass of print, have been so exposed to British influences. Total mobilization for war provided unprecedented resources. The Royal Institute of International Affairs set up a Foreign Research and Press Service in September 1939, for a time based at Balliol College, Oxford, and in 1943 this became part of the new Foreign Office Research Department. Its French Section (eventually led by the Cambridge historian J.P.T. Bury) had 150 people monitoring and interpreting French radio broadcasts and newspapers, as well as confidential information from agents. Letters leaving France were read. They even received official reports on French public opinion from friendly sources in Vichy. Material was brought out by agents. Even newspapers used as wrapping paper were recovered and analysed. From the earliest days, masses of clandestine material – from handwritten leaflets to increasingly sophisticated newspapers – was produced in one of the earliest forms of resistance. Late in 1941, an agent brought a suitcase full of these underground publications, the biggest arrival so far. From 1942, the Free French systematically copied and circulated every sample they obtained. Legal French newspapers were bought and dispatched by the British embassies in Lisbon and Stockholm.

The information thus gleaned had many uses. Highly detailed fortnightly reports on conditions, public opinion and political changes in France were circulated to more than twenty government departments. There were important conclusions for policy. It was realized that anglophobia was limited, and that anti-British propaganda was ineffective. It became clear that Pétain was personally very popular, and so hostile propaganda was directed at his entourage, not him. By 1943 it was clear that de Gaulle had become the accepted leader of the whole Resistance movement. Fresh and detailed information made British propaganda material convincing. For the secret services, it was vital to make sure that new agents were familiar with details that might catch them out: ‘Did we want to know what the bicycle tax was? . . . some obscure provincial newspaper . . . used to wrap up a refugee’s smuggled bottle of wine, might provide us with a clue.’¹³⁹

Knowledge of conditions in France also helped a sustained effort to give the British a favourable image of the French. There were many newspaper articles and BBC programmes on the Free French and the Resistance. On 14 July 1943, there was a BBC French Night. That October, a Resistance exhibition, sponsored by the Free French and the British government, was mounted in London. A show of Impressionist paintings was held at the National Gallery. A Franco-British friendship week included a competition for schoolchildren to paint their ideas of France, which produced charming paintings of picturesque villages, women in folk costumes, and Joan of Arc being welcomed by John Bull and Britannia. Such events, and essays by leading French and British writers on theentente cordiale, were reflected back to France in broadcasts and French-language papers as evidence of British friendship.

‘At the beginning’, wrote one French socialist, ‘the BBC was everything.’¹⁴⁰ It countered the attacks of the official media, and created links between Britain and the French people that have never been equalled. A foreign journalist in France reported ‘a veritable pandemonium of British radios pouring news through balconies, windows and patios’. German intelligence reported in February 1941 that ‘the majority of the population continue to believe in an eventual British victory’. Young people, the Germans realized, were speaking English in private – ‘with a dreadful accent, it is true’. Vichy’s own radio propagandists, though far from ineffective, admitted by late 1943 that they were losing the contest. A secret Vichy report (which someone sent to the BBC) complained that ‘every household is imbibing ever-increasing doses’. Admitting defeat, the authorities first forbade listening and then vainly ordered the confiscation of wireless sets.¹⁴¹ The BBC’s success rested on a talented French team. They were new to broadcasting, tending rather to have experience of journalism, show business or the arts. They became household names – though several of those names were false. ‘Pierre Bourdan’ was Pierre Maillaud, a journalist. ‘Jacques Duchesne’ was Michel Saint-Denis, a theatre producer, who had served as a liaison officer with the BEF and been evacuated from Dunkirk. Jean Oberlé was an artist. Pierre Dac was a nightclub comedian, twice imprisoned while trying to reach London, who specialized in writing satirical words to popular songs. As stressed by the title of its most popular programmes, ‘Ici la France’ and ‘Les Français parlent aux Français’, the service had to be authentically French, not British propaganda. ‘The very soul of French wit has fled to London,’ wrote one listener. As well as providing reliable news, talks and discussions, it featured satire, catchy slogans, and jingles – the most famous (sung to ‘La Cucaracha’) being ‘Radio Paris ment, Radio Paris ment, Radio Paris est allemand.’⁵ Radio Paris was France’s biggest radio station. A Spanish newspaper reported hearing their songs hummed across France. They cleverly kept in touch with their audience. Amazingly, listeners kept writing in: letters from the unoccupied zone arrived by the hundred, and even people in the occupied zone managed to get letters through. One wrote that his ‘greatest pleasure is listening to English broadcasts, the only ones that give me the truth and are not under the Boche jackboot’. A French postal censor sent on the letter to the BBC with the comment, ‘All my best wishes to you who have the courage to fight for liberty.’¹⁴² The BBC had its own French intelligence department. Letters were carefully analysed and people arriving from France were interviewed. Many letters were acknowledged over the air, thus encouraging a feeling of involvement and encouraging yet more correspondence. Letters also provided valuable intelligence information, which was regularly circulated to government departments and to the Free French.

The broadcasts were backed up with vast quantities of printed material produced by the Political Warfare Executive. This was grudgingly carried by the RAF, who only liked dropping things that exploded. A bomber carried up to 24,000 leaflets, and over 500 titles were produced in French, as was an illustrated magazine, Accord. They carried justifications of British policy, circulated detailed war news from around the world as well as from inside France (including resistance activity and German exactions) and gave advice (‘Look after your radios’). The regular Courrier de l’Air carried BBC wavelengths as well as news, photographs, features, and cartoons.¹⁴³ Literary reviews aimed to show that the intellectual elite was not collaborating with the Germans, and carried pieces by leading writers including T. S. Eliot and Georges Bernanos. There was a book of satirical radio songs mocking Vichy and the Germans, delivered by ‘your friends in the RAF’, as well as the ‘Song of the Partisans’, which became the anthem of resistance. Newspapers were also produced in English to represent the French view to the outside world. The first, La France Libre, began in November 1940. Clandestine newspapers from inside France were republished, including extracts in translation. One of their great themes, of course, was the closeness of Franco-British friendship. They underlined changes in Britain, to show that the war was aimed not only at defeating Germany, but at creating a better world. The Beveridge Report was important here and attracted wide attention. An underground Catholic newspaper remarked that Britain no longer fitted ‘the familiar images of Colonel Bramble’: ‘Mr Churchill presents . . . the traditional face of John Bull. But how his compatriots have changed!’¹⁴⁴

Part of the mass of propaganda dropped by ‘your friends of the RAF’, here containing new satirical words written to popular songs broadcast by the BBC.

Resistance of a more active kind was the domain of SOE, the Special Operations Executive.¹⁴⁵ France was its most important theatre of operations, and eventually it had five sections there (including an escape section and one working with Polish immigrants) and another in Algeria. It had huge influence on the French resistance, controlling all radio and air communications, providing all weapons and explosives, and committing 1,000 British, French and Polish agents on the ground. Its two most important sections were F and RF. F Section was the original French section, set up in October 1940, recruited from French-speaking British subjects and French volunteers. RF Section was set up in May 1941 to provide backing for the Free French: its agents were nearly all French, and its operations were in practice directed by de Gaulle’s intelligence service, the Bureau Central de Renseignements et d’Action, BCRA.

Both BCRA and SOE had started from scratch. De Gaulle’s intelligence chief, André Dewavrin, ‘Colonel Passy’, was a very young army officer with no intelligence training: de Gaulle was not interested in subversion and did not expect it to be an important job.¹⁴⁶ Also a beginner was Colonel Maurice Buckmaster, longest-serving head of F Section, who had been in the motor trade in France. Many recruits were drawn from similar Anglo-French business circles. The most famous British member of RF Section, its intrepid second-in-command F.F. Yeo-Thomas, had been educated and spent much of his life in France, and worked in the Paris fashion business – an unlikely occupation for a man who had volunteered to fight for the Poles against the Bolsheviks in 1920 and escaped execution by strangling his guard. Most of RF Section were French citizens, and came from a wide range of backgrounds. Their most successful sabotage team, trained in Britain, consisted of a fireman, a chauffeur, a garage mechanic and a student. They destroyed a strategic canal system, wrecked a tank factory and killed eleven Gestapo officers (during the appropriately named Operation RATWEEK). F Section agents were mostly British subjects, and the need to speak French well enough to pass as French – or at least Belgian or Swiss – meant that they were typically drawn from Franco-British families and international business circles. In background they ranged ‘from pimps to princesses’. About 500 were sent to France, of whom over 100 were killed. They were usually recruited by recommendation: SOE tried to avoid those keen to volunteer for the wrong reasons, especially the ‘neurotic or crossed in love’.¹⁴⁷ Some were the products of the First World War, being children of British soldiers. Motives were and are difficult to assess, but Franco-British patriotism, a taste for adventure, and personal animus against the enemy made an effective combination. Violette Szabo, for example, born in Paris in 1921, the daughter of a British army boxing champion and a French dressmaker from the Somme, married a Free French officer who was killed at El Alamein. When recruited she was working at the perfume counter of the Bon Marché store in Brixton. The discreet recruitment networks could sometimes cause surprises: F Section agent Francis Cammaerts, a Cambridge-educated Belgian, was taken aback to be asked casually by his old college tutor when he was going back to France.¹⁴⁸ They also recruited in the field: F Section included two French police inspectors. Women were important in SOE, which employed about 3,000 women and 10,000 men in all. F Section’s intelligence officer and its ‘hub’ was the highly competent Vera Atkins, born in Bucharest to a Romanian father and a South African mother and educated in Switzerland and Paris. In France, women attracted less suspicion as couriers and radio operators, and fifty were sent, of whom a quarter never returned. One courier, Pearl Witherington, ended up commanding 3,000 men in central France. Some, especially those who met tragic deaths, became famous after the war, notably Violette Szabo and Noor Inayat Khan, a direct descendant of Tipu Sultan.¹⁴⁹

Communications were crucial to organized resistance, and they were controlled by the British. At first they relied on conventional means, often age-old and similar to those used against the Bourbons and Napoleon, for example fishing boats and smuggling routes over the Pyrenees. Small flotillas of boats operated from Cornwall and Gibraltar. One convenient Breton cove had already been used during the French revolutionary wars.¹⁵⁰ Eventually the RAF became the main means of contact, dropping agents, weapons and equipment by parachute. Here too they had to learn by trial and error: once a team landed on the roof of a police station, and once inside a POW camp. From 1941, small Lysander aircraft dropped and picked up from improvised landing fields. Despite the risk, for resisters this could be a thrilling, even somewhat festive, occasion. The British tried to instil discipline: ‘There must be no family parties on the field. If the pilot sees a crowd he may not land . . . Anybody . . . approaching the aircraft from the right is liable to be shot by the pilot.’ Radios were essential, but they were the greatest source of vulnerability. They were big – the equivalent of a heavy suitcase – and the Germans developed efficient detection techniques. Moreover, they were sometimes able to use captured radios to set traps.

De Gaulle resented SOE, and especially F Section, as a challenge to his (and France’s) sovereignty, and his views seem to have been coloured by a paranoid view of the ‘Intelligence Service’ popularized in inter-war anglophobic writings. He and Dewavrin believed that they were being starved of resources to favour British operations – in fact, resources were simply short – and they were often exasperatingly unreasonable: ‘for God’s sake send that mad Joan of Arc to inspect his troops in Central Africa’, was one SOE plea.¹⁵¹ The British refused to place all underground operations in Free French hands. They were unwilling to make de Gaulle the only leader of French resistance, and insisted on the opportunity to work with non-Gaullist groups. There were also operational considerations. The Gaullist priority was political: to create a large, obedient, national movement. The British priority was in two senses non-political. They did not want to get involved in domestic intrigues ‘to secure the post-war establishment . . . of any particular form of government or of any particular persons as government’.¹⁵² They did want to maximize demolitions, sabotage and guerrilla warfare. These differing priorities led to fundamentally different ways of operating. The Gaullists wanted to set up central controlling institutions, most famously the Conseil National de la Résistance (CNR), and recruit large numbers. F Section wanted small units, well trained, decentralized, and unknown to each other, and in all it set up 100 separate ‘circuits’, as SOE called them. The former model was very dangerous; the latter, comparatively secure. This did not persuade de Gaulle or Dewavrin: ‘as Frenchmen we could not accept the British argument, however logical . . . What counted above all for us was to create a national entity of Resistance . . . to prove to the world that France as a whole was gradually resuming its place in the war alongside its allies.’¹⁵³ The British thought the French were negligent about security; the French thought the British were obsessive. Both had security disasters, inherent in the nature of their activity. But French disasters were aggravated both by their centralizing objectives and by failures in elementary precautions, which meant that all their radio communications with France were liable to be read by the enemy: a major reason for British mistrust. Eventually a young SOE cryptographer went round to show the French on a blackboard how easy it was to break their code.¹⁵⁴ Contemporaries thought that this cavalier attitude was ‘typically French’; but it can perhaps be explained by the lack of training of senior figures, and by a paradoxical pitfall: operating on home ground created a dangerous feeling of safety. At times, both the Gaullists and the British government froze cooperation, but generally relations between junior officers were far better than between their masters. Agents and resisters in the field were often blissfully unaware of any divergence at all. For them, ‘London’ meant a united force, the source of weapons, radios, technical training and money, and the symbol of a wider and prestigious national movement.

These were grim and testing years. There is some evidence that French public opinion criticized the British – ‘good sailors but bad soldiers’ – for postponing an invasion of Europe. It is true that Churchill and his advisers feared a premature invasion, and a repeat of the carnage of 1914–18. There were also enormous practical problems. But this perception in France contributed to a waning of British prestige and the growing admiration for America and Russia, seen in the later stages of the war and afterwards. Opinion surveys in Britain showed a similar decline in friendly feelings towards the French.¹⁵⁵

Liberation, 1943–4

It’s we who are breaking the bars of our brothers’ prisons,
With hatred at our heels, and hunger and misery to goad us.
There are countries where people lie in warm beds dreaming,
But here, can’t you see, we’re marching, we’re killing, we’re dying.
‘Song of the Partisans’, JOSEPH KESSEL AND MAURICE DRUON, written in London,
May 1943, and dropped over France by the RAF

Without the organization, communications, material, training and leadership which SOE supplied . . . ‘resistance’ would have been of no military value. Secret report to combined Allied chiefs of staff, 18 July 1945¹⁵⁶

Public support for Vichy had been waning since 1940, as Germany failed to defeat Britain and the benefits of ‘collaboration’ failed to materialize. Dramatic changes came in 1941 and 1942. Russia was invaded, bringing the French Communist Party into the patriotic cause. The United States entered the war, which seemed, as in 1917, to guarantee eventual German defeat. Violent resistance began on 19 August 1941 with the killing by a Communist of a German naval officer in the Barbès métro station in Paris. Churchill, pressed to do something to help the Russians, endorsed such acts, and the British decided to arm the Communists, who developed a large and diverse movement. Vichy’s desire to ‘collaborate’ led to mass round-ups of Jews – a generally unpopular measure – and the deportation of many thousands to death camps; and then in September 1942 to the Service du Travail Obligatoire, the conscription of workers to go to Germany. This hated ‘STO’ forced young Frenchmen and their families either to defy the government or to risk a grim future in Germany – a dilemma emphasized by the BBC. Thousands of young men evaded STO by hiding out in the central forests, the eastern mountains and the maquis, the Mediterranean scrub that gave mass resistance its name. Allied landings in Morocco caused the Germans to invade the unoccupied zone in November 1942, ending the only benefit of the armistice. The numbers participating in resistance swelled. But so did the involvement of Frenchmen in its repression, especially through the quasi-fascist Milice. There began a vicious semi-clandestine civil war.

Jean Moulin succeeded in setting up the Conseil National de la Résistance (CNR) in May 1943 to provide unified leadership. De Gaulle and ‘London’ were a potent attraction, and the separate Resistance networks, with some reservations, fell in with Moulin’s plans. As Michael Stenton puts it, ‘if de Gaulle had never been invented, Moulin might not have unified the Resistance’. This had major political consequences for postwar France. But almost at once, on 21 June 1943, Moulin and seven other resistance leaders were caught when meeting near Lyons. Moulin died under torture. This is the murkiest and most emotive episode in Resistance history, with persistent allegations that Moulin was betrayed. Whatever the truth, the Gaullist ambition to centralize, combined with undeniable laxity in security, invited disaster. General Delestraint, commander of the ‘secret army’ set up on de Gaulle’s orders, had already been arrested when he forgot the password of a safe house in Paris where he was to stay, and booked into a neighbouring hotel in his own name. He was later killed in Dachau. In September, one of de Gaulle’s aides de camp was caught, and in his Paris flat were found four months of decoded dispatches and the names of fourteen proposed members of the CNR.¹⁵⁷ The Gaullist national hierarchy was thus short-lived. When later reconstituted it had little contact with the grass-roots resisters. Essentially political, it devoted its attention to planning post-war administration. The combat side of the Resistance instead adopted the decentralized British model. There would be no nationwide uprising, but hundreds of small military operations. These activities depended largely on SOE, which provided weapons, equipment, and wads of cash to feed the maquis without alienating local farmers. This did not change the political outcome, as de Gaulle was backed by London and Moscow, and now grudgingly accepted by Washington. Whatever he did, he would be the titular leader of French resistance and would benefit from its struggle. He poised himself to take power as soon as liberation began.¹⁵⁸

In 1943 and early 1944, the Resistance was organized for war. This was a slow process, as trained men and women had to be dropped to give military instruction, and stockpiles of weapons, explosives and ammunition built up. The RAF was never keen on dropping sten-guns on French fields when it could be dropping bombs on German cities. Moreover, the winter weather in 1943–4 imposed delays, and the Germans captured many arms dumps. Nevertheless, thanks to Churchill’s backing, SOE by the end had dispatched 10,000 tons of stores, including nearly 200,000 sten-guns and 800,000 hand-grenades.¹⁵⁹ The plan was to launch a campaign of sabotage and disruption when the Allied armies landed on D-Day, and to continue it as they fought their way out of the bridgehead. Military leadership on the ground was reinforced by 2,000 SAS men (including two French SAS regiments), by ninety-three ‘Jedburgh’ teams composed of three agents (one British, one American, and one French) including a radio operator, and by lone agents. One such was André Hue, a twenty-one-year-old Franco-Welshman, who after involvement in intelligence gathering and escape lines had been brought out and given SOE training. With a British army commission, he was parachuted back in June 1944 to organize contacts with the maquis in Brittany. He then arranged arms drops and the arrival of French SAS units, which led to a general uprising in Brittany, slowing the movement of German forces and greatly facilitating the American push south out of Normandy.¹⁶⁰ Thus, in the nick of time, Anglo-French disagreements were resolved on the ground. After D-Day, the various organizations in London merged as the État-Major des Forces Françaises de l’Intérieur (EMFFI), a chaotic hybrid nominally commanded by de Gaulle’s General Koenig.

D-Day saw another spat between de Gaulle and Churchill. That an invasion was imminent was well known. But the date and the place were top secret, and elaborate subterfuge persuaded the Germans that it would take place near Calais. In April 1944 the British suspended diplomatic privileges and insisted on decoding and censoring all messages leaving Britain. The French regarded this as an insulting imposition, despite their history of security failures. De Gaulle, in Algiers, was not told the D-Day plans. Churchill asked him to fly to England, and near Portsmouth on 5 June told him personally that the invasion of France was about to begin. Practically none of de Gaulle’s troops were taking part. Churchill – who had insisted against the opposition of the Americans and his own chiefs of staff on informing de Gaulle before the invasion began – intended this as a conciliatory gesture. He greeted de Gaulle literally with open arms. Accounts differ as to whether de Gaulle was angry at being kept in the dark. He was certainly outraged when Churchill, trying as usual to mediate between his two awkward allies, urged him to go and see Roosevelt and reach an agreement over the administration of liberated France. This was anathema to de Gaulle, who responded with his characteristic icy anger that he would not present himself to Roosevelt as a ‘candidate’ to govern France: ‘The French government exists. I have nothing to ask, in this sphere, of the United States of America or of Great Britain.’ He refused to dine with Churchill and left him feeling ‘chilled’. Things got worse when de Gaulle refused to make a BBC broadcast to France or give permission for French liaison officers to go to Normandy. ‘I knew he would be a pest,’ wrote General Brooke, ‘and recommended strongly that he should be left in Africa, but Anthony Eden would insist on bringing him over!’ A senior Foreign Office official wrote in exasperation, ‘It’s a girl’s school. Roosevelt, PM and . . . de Gaulle – all behave like girls approaching the age of puberty.’¹⁶¹ Several intermediaries, most importantly Eden, tried to calm things down, but sniping continued. To Churchill’s annoyance, much of the Cabinet, Parliament and Fleet Street supported de Gaulle. De Gaulle’s suspicions about Anglo-Saxon conspiracy were further strengthened. His account of an exchange with Churchill remains famous in France as the summation of Albion’s sempiternal attitude: ‘Each time we must choose between Europe and the open sea, we shall always choose the open sea. Each time I must choose between you and Roosevelt, I shall always choose Roosevelt.’¹⁶²

Despite this ringing declaration, Britain, which had always considered the restoration of France as a great power to be one of its principal war aims, insisted, through the mouths of Churchill and Eden, that France should be treated as one of the victor powers, with a zone of occupation in Germany. This was condescendingly agreed at the Yalta conference in February 1945 by Roosevelt and Stalin, who were willing to humour what they saw as their British ally’s strange indulgence.

A company of the 2nd Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry were the first Allied soldiers to set foot in France in the early hours of 6 June 1944, followed shortly afterwards by other British and American airborne troops, and then the huge American, British and Canadian seaborne landings. The Germans never seriously threatened the bridgeheads, but they did block the advance inland. This led to heavy aerial and naval bombardments, which devastated tracts of Normandy and killed several thousandFrench civilians. The town of Caen, wrote one British soldier, was left ‘a waste of brick and stone, like a field of corn that has been ploughed. The people gazed at us without emotion of any kind; one could hardly look them in the face, knowing who had done this.’¹⁶³There followed a ten-week battle of attrition between the British (supported by Canadians and Poles) and the main German forces, including seven of their ten armoured divisions, which cost some 65,000 British casualties – a proportion similar to that at Passchendaele in 1917. This helped the Americans to break out further south. The Germans clung to the defensive landscape of bocage banks and hedges – a problem the British had last met in 1758 (see above, page 134). Though the Germans underwent shattering air attacks, it took until the last week in August to destroy, capture or throw them back.

The Liberation of France, 1944

All over France, D-Day brought the Resistance its finest hour. Its job was to hamper and delay the movement of German reinforcements to the beachheads. Tens of thousands of maquisards had been called into action on 5 June by the BBC’s famous coded messages. They were now reasonably well provided with small arms, explosives, training, leaders and radios. That night, there were 950 attacks on the railway system. The telephone network was also disrupted, forcing the Germans to use radio, to which the Allies could listen. The most celebrated joint operation was that which delayed an SS armoured division ordered from Toulouse to Normandy. F Section agents blew up its fuel dumps. An attempt to move by rail was blocked by numerous demolitions. Having collected more fuel, it tried again by road, but was harried by several SOE circuits. What should have been a three-day journey took two weeks – twice as long as its journey from the Russian front.¹⁶⁴ Its most notorious reprisal was the massacre of the inhabitants of Oradour-sur-Glane. Another tragedy was taking place in eastern France, on the Vercors plateau, where a large maquis unit tried to stand and fight against much larger numbers of German troops supported by tanks and aircraft, and was massacred. These were not isolated atrocities: the Germans and their French collaborators commonly tortured, mutilated and killed prisoners, hostages and local people. By causing disruption and chaos, the Resistance made a substantial contribution in the vital period round D-Day. The mainly Franco-American landings in Provence on 15 August were given indispensable assistance by the Royal Navy, the RAF and British-led resistance groups which helped to clear their rapid progress north. France was finally ablaze.

Participation by the Resistance and by French regular troops in the Liberation was of great significance for national self-respect and for de Gaulle. It helped him to assume the position he had always claimed as France’s legitimate ruler. He insisted that General Leclerc’s 2nd armoured division – trained in Britain and partly drawn from French units of the British 8th Army – should race ‘towards the Eiffel Tower’, where the ‘national insurrection’ had begun on 19 August. His purpose was to forestall German reprisals, to show that the capital was not the passive recipient of Anglo-Saxon liberation – and to ensure that Gaullists took charge. Leclerc arrived on the 25th, followed swiftly by de Gaulle himself. In a famous speech at the Hôtel de Ville he declared that ‘Paris [had been] liberated by itself, liberated by its people with the help of the armies of France, with the support and the help of the whole of France, of France that is fighting, of France alone’.¹⁶⁵ Untroubled by magnanimity, wherever de Gaulle met a British SOE officer, his response was, ‘You have no place here,’ followed by an order to leave the country. Lieutenant-Colonel Starr, who commanded much of Gascony, answered back bluntly, and the row ended with de Gaulle shaking his hand and saying ‘they told me . . . you were fearless and knew how to say merde’. Nevertheless, F Section ‘packed its bags and slipped out as gracefully as it could’.¹⁶⁶ One young agent, Peter Maroger, son of a Franco-British family, decided to go and join in the liberation of Paris, where he was killed.¹⁶⁷ No British units shared in the glory. According to the journalist and intelligence officer Malcolm Muggeridge, ‘The Americans had insisted that, because of [Mers] El Kebir, not to mention the Battle of Trafalgar . . . the British were unpopular among the French and should as far as possible be kept out of sight.’ But he and some colleagues made their way to Paris, and happily profited from the ‘rarity value’ of the British uniform, which ensured ‘friendly smiles, embraces, bed-fellows even, as and when required, as well as limitless hospitality’. Some young Guards officers, among them Peter Carrington (later to be foreign secretary), bluffed their way in for a break at the Ritz.¹⁶⁸

Meanwhile, the British army was moving north. The terrible battle for Normandy – ‘dust, slit trenches, bulldozers and dead cows’ – was followed by rapid movement through cheering crowds along the familiar roads through Picardy and Flanders, via Amiens, Arras and Lille, to the Channel ports and into Belgium. It was one of the speediest advances in military history, meeting only sporadic resistance: ‘on the whole . . . more tiring than dangerous’.¹⁶⁹ Franco-British contacts, for good or ill, were therefore fleeting. The British authorities had been worried that the troops might be unruly. One officer had warned that ‘We, with memories of our fathers going to Paris to misbehave themselves, look upon the French as a light-moralled, rather lecherous race, not hospitable but grasping . . . They judge us on our late Victorian reputation for prudery . . . Both couldn’t be more wrong.’ An instruction booklet had been issued exhorting the men not to eat or drink too much – the French disliked British drunkenness – and to avoid arguments about 1940. It also urged dropping ‘any ideas about French women based on stories of Montmartre and nude cabaret shows . . . Like us, the French are on the whole a conventional people.’ For most soldiers, such problems barely arose. One officer of the 6th Airborne Division wrote, ‘I have few opportunities of meeting any French people. A pity: I should have liked to have learned so much more about them.’¹⁷⁰ Sergeant Richard Cobb (later an illustrious historian of France) had no such complaint. His job was producing a news-sheet in French, which permitted fraternization with a picturesque variety of people, including a Norman schoolmistress ‘so blond that she looked as though she had come down in direct descent from the Vikings. She had taken a liking to me (this was reciprocated) and used to cook me steaks, which we ate out in the vegetable garden . . . I used to think that I was perhaps the luckiest soldier in the British army.’¹⁷¹

Resentments among the leaders, politically motivated snubs and differences of policy did not dispel the euphoria of liberation, despite the destruction and death caused by the fighting and bombing. The scenes of joy and revenge marked the memories of all who witnessed them, and, as newsreel images, would enter the collective memory of generations yet unborn. Cobb, passing through the textile town of Roubaix, found ‘enormous friendliness’: many houses displayed photographs of British soldiers billeted there in 1918. The new ambassador, Duff Cooper, thought that ‘Never have the English been so popular in France . . . and the most popular of all of them is the Prime Minister . . . The general public have not the slightest idea that [he and de Gaulle] are anything but the firmest of friends.’ On 11 November 1944, Churchill came to Paris, and, wrote de Gaulle, ‘Paris cheered with all its heart.’ Cooper thought it ‘greater than anything I have ever known’. The two leaders descended the Champs Elysées together, there was a march-past of French and British troops, and Churchill laid a wreath at the statue of his hero Clemenceau. The band played a jaunty march Churchill knew well, ‘Père la Victoire’. It had been written in praise of Clemenceau, father of an earlier victory, but today, said de Gaulle in English, ‘For you!’ Churchill, weeping ‘buckets’, told de Gaulle ‘I felt as if I were watching a resurrection.’¹⁷² A large equestrian statue of Edward VII, ‘promoter of the entente cordiale’, saved from destruction and somehow hidden for two years by employees of the Société Génerale bank, was replaced on its plinth as a gesture of ‘sincere gratitude and profound friendship’. Showing less gratitude, the French rugby team thrashed the British army 21 to 9.¹⁷³

The entente was at last truly cordiale. The bitterness of the inter-war years and the trauma of 1940 gave way to shared joy and triumph. The anglophobe tradition was discredited with the Vichy regime that had espoused it, and only fragments lingered. The French patriotic saga was suffused with British images: Churchill, the BBC, de Gaulle in London, the RAF, parachute drops to the maquis, and D-Day. For the British, the indomitable figure of de Gaulle was part of their ‘finest hour’; and the heroism and suffering of men, women and children in the Resistance – a vision of what Britain might have undergone – blotted out the shared failings of 1940. These powerful impressions, celebrated in speeches, films, oral traditions, public ceremonies, history books, children’s comics and novels, even when memory dims, add something to that stock of images through which one nation perceives another, familiar enough to become even the subject of affectionate comedy. The most popular French film ever made – seen by 17 million people – is Gérard Oury’s slapstick La Grande Vadrouille (1966), the story of three British airmen rescued by a Paris house-painter and an orchestral conductor. It is practically unknown in Britain. Watching it now, it is striking that the British characters are amiable but remote, disruptive creatures from another planet. The really close relationship is between the French and the Germans.

The struggles of each side became part of the national story of the other.

Over the years there has been what Robert Frank calls ‘meaningful amnesia’. Opinion polls have shown that the French, irrespective of age, sex and class, now attribute a negligible role in France’s liberation to the British – seen as far less important than the Americans, the maquis, the Free French, or the Russians. Remarks made in September 2005 by the French foreign minister, Philippe Douste–Blazy, were widely interpreted as showing that he thought that Britain too had been defeated and occupied. Frank suggests that for the French to recognize the true British contribution would be too painful a reminder of ‘the different destinies of the two countries.’¹⁷⁴ The British are no more generous: who remembers the French soldiers who died defending Dunkirk? The year 2004 combined the sixtieth anniversary of D-Day and the centenary of the entente cordiale. On both sides, ceremonies great and small proclaimed friendship and recalled what the two countries had survived together. Yet an opinion poll showed that among the words the French most commonly chose to describe the British were ‘isolated’, ‘insular’, and ‘selfish’. The British, though somewhat less negative, commonly described the French as ‘untrustworthy’ or ‘treacherous’, and nearly one in three considered them ‘cowardly’¹⁷⁵ – doubtless a distorted echo of 1940. How sad that when our two peoples want to feel proud of themselves they need to slight each other.

⁴Clemenceau had said ‘We shall fight before Paris, we shall fight in Paris, we shall fight behind Paris.’ Churchill had quoted this speech to Pétain a few days before his own.

⁵‘Radio Paris lies, Radio Paris is German.’