Voices from the Dark Years (7 page)

  
6.
  Freeman and Cooper,
Road to Bordeaux
, p. 90.

  
7.
  Ibid., pp. 112–3.

  
8.
  May,
Strange Victory
, p. 450.

  
9.
  Freeman and Cooper,
Road to Bordeaux
, pp. 176–7.

10.
  Ibid., p. 189.

11.
  H. Amouroux,
La Vie des Français sous l’Occupation
(Paris: Fayard, 1961), Vol. 1, pp. 15–16.

12.
  Kernan,
France
, p. 177.

13.
  
The Escapers
, ed. E. Williams (London: Collins/Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1953), pp. 270–88.

14.
  S. Berthon,
Allies at War
(New York: Carroll & Graf, 2001), p. 11.

15.
  
Infirmières Pilotes, Secouristes de l’Air
.

16.
  H. Noguères in
1940: La Défaite
, p. 555.

17.
  The masculine form
français
then also included French women.

3

A
N
E
ND
TO
THE
K
ILLING

Heard over the radio by millions, the ill-considered phrase
the fighting must stop
was the last straw for the French soldier and his officers because the marshal’s actual words, ‘
Il faut cesser le combat’,
could be taken to mean, ‘You must stop fighting!’ After French-speaking Wehrmacht radio monitors picked up this ambiguity, all along the shifting front German officers approached French units under a flag of truce with the message, ‘What are you waiting for? Pétain said to stop fighting.’

France’s second most senior serving soldier Major-General Doumenc hastily signalled the armies and military regions from GHQ as follows:

No armistice has been signed. The enemy has used the white flag to approach defended positions. I remind you that the white flag covers only (unarmed) parleys and not armed troops. We must continue to defend our territory everywhere with our last reserves of energy.
¹

Cleaving a path through the panic and terror, on 18 June the Germans reached the great naval port of Brest in Brittany, its magazines and fuel storage tanks blazing beneath a pall of smoke just after the French Atlantic battle fleet put to sea, leaving behind one torpedo boat and four submarines undergoing repairs, which had been reduced to scrap metal. The largest and most heavily armed submarine in the world, the 3,300-ton
Le Surcouf
had also been in dry dock, its diesel engines removed for overhaul. Unable to dive, it was heading slowly on its two 1,700hp electric motors towards the English coast.

Admiral Darlan, the short, balding, pipe-smoking Minister of the Navy in Pétain’s cabinet, had graduated first in his
promotion
from the naval gunnery school but, like Gilbert and Sullivan’s ‘admiral in the Queen’s Navee’, had spent little time at sea. With the army and air force beaten, he was the only commander whose forces were intact. On his orders, a total of seventy-four warships and seventy-six merchant vessels were now steaming away from Brest, some heading for French North African ports and others to a nearer haven in England.
²
What else could Darlan do, when ordering his warships to bombard the incoming Germans would have destroyed not only the port, but the town with its thousands of inhabitants and homeless refugees? From Fécamp, St Nazaire and Bordeaux too every naval vessel remotely seaworthy steamed away from the enemy at its best speed, some under fire from German field artillery until safely out of range.

On the morning of 18 June Darlan received from President Roosevelt a cable suggesting that the French Mediterranean fleet should similarly put to sea … and head for American ports. Coming from the head of a state that refused to become engaged in the conflict, this understandably enraged Darlan, whose proper office on the Place de la Concorde in Paris was now the Kommandantur von Gross-Paris, from the windows of which the new occupants had a grandstand view of the daily parade down the Champs Elysées of a Wehrmacht band and goose-stepping storm-troopers. On an even shorter fuse than usual, Darlan dictated a barely diplomatic reply to Roosevelt’s démarche: ‘The head of the French navy has no need of advice from other people as to the decisions he should take to defend the honour of the flag which has been entrusted to him alone.’
³

To his deputy Admiral Auphan, Darlan confessed that it was ‘not only the Americans who are pissing me off’. Anglophobic since Britain signed a naval pact in 1935 sanctioning the rearmament and expansion of the German fleet without consulting France,
⁴
Darlan had received that afternoon First Lord of the Admiralty A.V. Alexander and the First Sea Lord, Admiral of the Fleet Sir Dudley Pound, who had flown by seaplane to the naval air base on Biscarosse Lake to ask for similar assurances. In a signal to the fleet dated 28 May Darlan had already given instructions that no return to French or other German-controlled ports should be made unless over his signature and counter-signed ‘from Xavier-François’. A letter from Darlan to his wife next day likened the British envoys to ‘heirs come to the deathbed in order to be sure the will has been made in their favour’.
⁵

Thanks to Darlan’s foresight, the bulk of the world-class navy he had created was out of Hitler’s reach in ports of North Africa, the Far East or Britain – with the exception of Admiral Duplat’s Mediterranean fleet, moored 400km away from the Demarcation Line in Toulon harbour after its latest raid on the Italian port of Genoa. Should the Germans or Italians try to take over Duplat’s vessels, there would be plenty of time to see them coming.

On that same confusing day in Bordeaux Charles de Gaulle, the 49-year-old acting brigadier who had paid two visits to London pleading for help, made several appointments for the afternoon to give himself an alibi for accompanying his friend General E.L. Spears to the military side of Bordeaux-Mérignac airport. As head of the now redundant British military mission to Reynaud’s government, Spears was on his way home in an RAF aircraft. With his agreement, de Gaulle had had several heavy cases of confidential files secretly placed on board, but the pilot would not take off until they had been secured, in case he had to take evading action during the flight. Lieutenant Geoffrey de Courcel, the tall, gangling cavalry officer serving as de Gaulle’s aide-de-camp, departed to hunt for a ball of twine, leaving his master and Spears increasingly tense as the minutes ticked by. Had de Gaulle’s plan become known, or the contents of his cases been suspected, he would have been arrested on the spot and the course of the war and the shape of post-war Europe changed, all for want of a piece of string. Spears recalled later:

At last Courcel appeared, his stilt-like legs carrying him fast although he appeared to be moving in slow motion. In his hand, a ball of string. I hope that never again will this commonplace article be so important to me. Our troubles were over. We had begun to move when, with hooked hands, I joisted de Gaulle on board. Courcel, more nimble, was in in a trice. The door slammed. I had just time to see the gaping face of my chauffeur and one or two more beside him.
⁶

Their flight path lay directly over the French liner
Champlain
, sinking with 2,000 British troops aboard after hitting a mine. The plane refuelled at Jersey and landed at Heston before noon, at which moment one of the main actors in the Second World War placed himself on the board with immaculate timing. Although Madame de Gaulle arrived in Britain aboard a trawler the following day, among those of his family who paid a price for this was his brother Pierre, deported to Germany in 1943. His sister and her husband were imprisoned and sent to Buchenwald and a niece was deported to Ravensbrück.

Welcomed by Churchill, who was grasping at any straw, de Gaulle immediately went to the BBC Overseas Service in Bush House to broadcast to his fellow countrymen. So little importance was attached by BBC staff to this broadcast by the tall, arrogant, aloof French officer that no recording was made of this historic event. To listeners in France, de Gaulle promised that ‘the flame of French resistance must not and will not go out’.
⁷
To the many thousands of French servicemen evacuated from Norway and Dunkirk, and those elsewhere who could make their way to Britain with or without their weapons, and to French civilians trapped by the German attack in Britain, he offered the possibility of continuing the war by enlisting in his personal army. This was at the time devoid of any legal status and consisted of himself and Lieutenant de Courcel with their secretary, 24-year-old shorthand typist Elisabeth de Miribel, working in a private house put at de Gaulle’s disposal by its owner in London’s West End, from where the voice of Free France was a lone cry in the wilderness.

François Mauriac, later a supporter, remarked at the time: ‘Purely symbolic, his obstinacy. Very fine, but ineffective.’
⁸
The reaction of most of his audience to the radioed call to arms, or its clandestinely printed copies, was bafflement. They reasoned that France’s two most famous soldiers Philippe Pétain and Maurice Weygand must know the situation better than this unknown in London. There was also the worrying thought that, should de Gaulle lose his solitary gamble – which seemed only too likely at the time – his supporters could legally be shot for high treason by the French government.

In his elegant chateau above the sleepy Dordogne village of Le Breuilh, gentleman farmer Louis de La Bardonnie agreed with every word. He had been a member of the right-wing Action Française, whose members were pro-Pétain, but regarded the defeat as wholly due to poor leadership and a matter of national shame. Perhaps there was an element of bloody-mindedness in his decision to rally to de Gaulle, for the Bardonnie family was Catholic whereas most of their neighbours were Protestant. Whatever his reasoning, his actions followed swiftly and resulted in a handful of friends he trusted getting together to assemble intelligence for London. With two of them working as pilots for the port of Bordeaux, they had much useful information. The problem was how to transmit it but, when that was solved, it was never acted upon because London thought it too good to be true.

De Gaulle’s appeal to the French people of 18 June 1940.

Translation: To all the French people, France has lost a battle, but France has not lost the war! Unworthy leaders have capitulated through panic and delivered the country into servitude. However, nothing is lost! Nothing is lost because this war is a world war. The immense forces of the free world have not yet come into play. One day, they will crush the enemy. On that day, France must share in the victory to recover her liberty and her prestige. That is my sole aim, and the reason why I invite all Frenchmen, wherever they may be, to join me in action, in sacrifice and hope. Our fatherland is in danger of dying. Let us all fight to save it.
Vive la France
!