Vichy France (14 page)

It was against the Anglo-Gaullists in Africa that the “new policy” built most firmly upon shared Vichy-German interests. The Germans now allowed the French to unstock more weapons and even tanks in Africa, overriding Italian preferences for French disarmament there; they also freed specially trained French colonial officers from German prison camps to serve in Africa. Not lukewarm in this case, the German authorities twice sent a special representative, General Walther Warlimont of the OKW staff, to Paris to confer with Laval and the French service chiefs, on November 29 and on December 10. His assignment was to find out about French plans for reconquest of segments of French Equatorial Africa that had fallen under Gaullist influence and, beyond that, for attacks upon British Africa. France was not supposed to declare war on Britain, but it was “important that the French be brought into a clear confrontation [Frontstellung] against England by an attack (even if it were only against Gambia).” Or, as Abetz put it at the 29 November meeting, in his characteristically more ambitious fashion, it was
a step toward “the unification of the continent against England.”
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War Minister Huntziger launched the military follow-up on 31 October by presenting Colonel Speidel, the Militärbefehlshaber in Frankreich’s chief of staff, with an ambitious request for bigger and more independent French Army, Navy, and Air Forces. Vichy would then put these to work in “military collaboration” with Germany to keep and even extend Vichy control over French Africa.

The frank and unswerving conception of Marshal Pétain and his associates is not only to resist the English in Africa but also, where it is necessary, to attack them in order to get back lost territory. “Il faut chasser les anglais.”
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Germans like General Warlimont had every reason to take Huntziger’s bellicose promises seriously. While the African situation remained fluid in August–September 1940, Vichy had done its conspicuous best to throw the Anglo-Gaullists out of Africa. The three cruisers and three destroyers they sent down the African coast on September 6 acted decisively to thwart the Gaullist mission to Dakar. They got General Têtu released from a prisoner-of-war camp to command loyal French forces in the Gabon, and General Falvy to command the planned operation into the Chad. They bombed Gibraltar on September 24 and 25. They proposed to convoy French merchant shipping with warships through the straits of Gibraltar, which the Germans denied. They appealed repeatedly for release from armistice restrictions on the French Army in Africa. No doubt it was German and Italian reluctance more than French hesitancy that kept them from doing even more.

When Franco-German joint planning actually began a month
later on November 29, however, the French military ministers had become much more cautious. Conditions by then had stabilized in Africa. The Gaullists had won the Gabon in October, rounding out French Equatorial Africa, but they were unable to make any headway in West Africa. A rollback operation seemed much more hazardous, too, after Sir Samuel Hoare had warned Ambassador de la Baume at Madrid that French action against the Gaullists in Africa would lead to war with Britain.
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Abetz was bitterly disappointed to hear General Huntziger explain to General Warlimont a future French plan for a march east across the desert from Niamey to Zinder and Lake Chad that could not take place for another year—that is, not until November 1941.
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The following day, agreeing with Abetz that the 29 November session had been a disappointment, Laval promised to bring pressure upon Marshal Pétain to support more aggressive plans in Africa.
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Did he mean it, or was he simply trying to blame his own caution upon others while talking to Abetz? We know that he returned to Vichy to reassure the cabinet on December 9 that these operations would not lead to war with Britain. The following day, contradictorily, he told General Warlimont that he expected the British to fight back, exposing France to even greater risks—perhaps merely in an effort to impress Warlimont with the urgency of greater concessions to France. Just before leaving for Paris, he told American representative Robert Murphy that he “hoped” for a German victory, for then “Britain will pay the bill and not France.”
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Reassured by Laval that action in Africa would not produce a war with England, while it would persuade Germany to make
Italy less demanding in Africa, leaders of the French cabinet decided in an “armistice meeting” on December 9 that a plan for retaking Fort-Lamy and Lake Chad should be prepared. The following day, December 10, General Warlimont was back in Paris to discuss military plans.
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It was a much more positive occasion than two weeks earlier. General Huntziger now thought a spring 1941 operation was possible. He asked for the liberation of three thousand selected colonial officers and NCOs from prisoner-of-war camps, along with release of the motorized equipment necessary for offensive operations.

Warlimont wanted to know about operations even beyond Equatorial Africa, in British colonial territory. Huntziger made it clear that the air raids on Gibraltar had been reprisals for previous British attacks, but he outlined further reprisals that “France is willing to undertake if there were new British destruction attempts.” If, for example, Britain opposed French efforts to retake French Equatorial Africa, France contemplated air attacks on Northern Nigeria, the conquest of Bathhurst, or some action against Freetown. Admiral Darlan, who had said on November 29 that Freetown was not important, now thought a joint air-submarine attack was feasible. Major Stehlin thought that a “general air war” was possible in Africa, growing out of these reprisals, provided that Germany permitted the free movement of French planes, the resumption of French plane and bomb production, petroleum imports from Italy, the liberation of air force prisoners of war, and the reopening of pilot schools. The French, for example, could bomb Takoradi (now in Ghana), where U.S. planes were being assembled. Laval wound up with an impassioned plea for the cooperation agreed to at Montoire. The Italians, he complained, were the main obstacle in Africa, and they weren’t doing very well in Greece anyway. The question was political. If Germany could issue a clarifying statement promising that the French Empire would remain
French at the peace, then Vichy could expose de Gaulle as no defender of the French Empire against Axis annexation, but a mere British agent. For results, however, Germany must help France, especially against Italy. Laval had denied the American Robert Murphy’s contentions that Germany wanted to take Dakar and the French fleet and had told him that “it is in our own interest that we desire a German victory.… If you help us, we are ready to negotiate. France is ready to bargain, to bargain now.”

Abetz and General Warlimont concluded that French readiness to act in Equatorial Africa had been “buoyed up since their first meeting” with the French on November 29 and that there could be “no doubt of the sincerity of the military plans of the Pétain government.” In mid-December 1940, it looked from Berlin as if the French were about to go on the march in Anglo-Gaullist Africa.
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The “new policy” did not preclude simultaneous Vichy efforts to reach some understanding with the Allies as well. Vichy wanted normalcy more than expansion, and a prime ingredient of normalcy was in British hands: the revival of trade and colonial shipping across the British blockade. Vichy could neither feed France nor keep in contact with the empire without at least the acquiescence of Britain. Although diplomatic relations with Britain were broken after the Mers-el-Kebir raid and never restored, civilian proposals for war against Britain were rejected by the military men in the cabinet, according to what American observers could learn at the time. Laval told Hitler on October 22 that Pétain could not declare war on Britain without the assent of the National Assembly, and Pétain told the French public in a speech on April 7, 1941, that it was “against French honor” to attack “former allies.”
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Instead, it was imperative to
seek some peaceful solution to the two burning issues between France and Britain: the blockade and British support for the “dissidence.”

Even before the Churchill-de Gaulle agreement of 7 August 1940 had made British aid to anti-Vichy Frenchmen public, Foreign Minister Paul Baudouin, whose frantic Anglophobia seemed diminished to U.S. observers, began making proposals to Britain around August 1 about the blockade.
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There developed a three-sided negotiation, in which Washington urged the British to relax restrictions on essential supplies going into unoccupied France in exchange for assurances that such supplies would not be transshipped to the German-occupied zone, while informal Franco-British contacts were resumed through the embassies in Madrid.

The Franco-British negotiations at Madrid from September 1940 to February 1941 between the two ambassadors—M. Robert de la Baume followed by François Piétri, facing Sir Samuel Hoare—were the real link between Vichy and London. Few aspects of Vichy policy have been more subject to postwar mystification than this. Two unofficial links, Professor Louis Rougier of the University of Besançon and Jacques Chevalier, Vichy minister of education and then of health in 1940–41, claimed after the war to have negotiated secret Churchill-Pétain “accords.” Although Professor Rougier did go to London in November 1940, the notations on his document are not in the handwriting of Winston Churchill, as he claimed.
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Jacques Chevalier did indeed receive a note for Marshal Pétain through the Canadian ambassador, Jean Dupuy, from his old Oxford classmate Lord Halifax. But that note, contrary to M. Chevalier’s postwar claims, simply revealed the chasm between the two. Churchill offered to send six divisions if the French government moved to North Africa. Pétain read the note and said, “We have not received it.” There was no agreement.
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Neither Rougier nor Chevalier affected Vichy-British relations substantially.

The Germans were not ignorant of the Madrid contacts for long. Fernand de Brinon, still an unofficial Laval contact man in Paris at that point, told Abetz about them on November 11. Laval, on November 16, promised to keep the Germans informed of every such negotiation in order to prove French loyalty to the armistice.
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Vichy achieved neither of her aims at Madrid—loosening the British blockade and ending British support for the Gaullist “dissidence.” The British blockade was indeed loosened in September 1940. For several months French merchant ships were able to use the Mediterranean and even the Straits of Gibraltar until, by the end of November, French shipping at Marseilles was estimated as 80 percent of normal, although French shipping was still blocked south of Dakar. The real reason for this, however, was British naval shortages rather than any agreement, as the tightened blockade of 1941 was to show. Eventually, foodstuffs and oil were brought from the U.S.A. to North Africa through the British blockade under the Murphy-Weygand agreement of 10 March 1941, which the British accepted only reluctantly. The British never by choice relaxed their efforts to keep war supplies out of France.
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As for the “dissidence” issue, it was settled by stalemate rather than agreement. After some fighting in the Gabon in October 1940 that rounded out Gaullist holdings in French equatorial Africa but kept them out of all French West Africa, the Vichy-Gaullist balance was set in Africa. That Vichy would fight the Anglo-Gaullists against any further encroachment was proven in the war over Syria in June–July 1941. That the Allies
would try not to tar their efforts to liberate France with the brush of dissidence was shown by the exclusion of Gaullists and all but a few British from the Allied landing in French North Africa in November 1942 and by the exclusion of the Gaullists from any share in the Normandy invasion of June 1944. But, of course, the Allies did not withdraw support from de Gaulle. The “dissidence” issue was settled by a tacit armed truce.

The Vichy government, including Laval, seems to have wanted above all to keep good relations with the neutral United States, despite the “new policy.” The United States was useful as a source of supply. Diplomatic recognition by the United States was a precious reinforcement to Vichy legitimacy. And the United States was a potential arbiter for the early compromise settlement of a war whose prolongation could only damage European social structure irremediably. The United States could not only arbitrate with the British, whose “brutal selfishness”
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kept a fruitless war grinding along, but could also counterbalance the Germans and Japanese. Not only men like General Doyen, French representative to the German Armistice Commission at Wiesbaden and eventually an active participant in the Liberation, spoke of the United States as the only power capable of restoring France to her full extent, the “great arbiter of today and tomorrow” whose good relations France must not forfeit. Laval, too, even while telling Robert Murphy that he “hoped” for German victory, said that the United States was the only counterweight to Japan in Indochina.
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Vichy spokesmen tried hard, therefore, to reassure the United States of the French will to autonomy under the armistice. Montoire produced some exaggerated rumors abroad about major French cessions of bases to Germany, and both President Roosevelt and King George VI wrote personally to Pétain. While King George VI’s letter received a curt reply, Vichy went out of its
way to convince the United States that France meant to remain autonomous and neutral under the armistice. General Réquin, who had been French delegate to disarmament conferences between the wars, came to tell Murphy on October 25 that “those who understood the position of France and her powerlessness before the Germans and consequently the necessity for reaching some agreement should explain this position to the United States.” Georges Bonnet, former foreign minister, argued on November 1 that Europe couldn’t afford a war every twenty-five years. Britain must be brought to accept a “reasonable peace.” Laval himself, while saying that he was sure of a German victory and annoyed with Cordell Hull’s suspicions of French policy, told the American Press Association on November 15 that a break with the United States would be “horrible.” The written reply to Roosevelt’s letter about Montoire was just formally cool enough to be described as “sharp” by Laval to Abetz on 16 November, but the main effort was to reassure.
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