by Lynne Olson
The sheer absurdity of Churchill’s statement—that Belgium’s neutrality, not Germany’s military prowess, had been responsible for the defeat of Poland and other European countries—registered with Roger Keyes but with few others in Churchill’s parliamentary audience. An MP himself, Keyes listened to the prime minister’s diatribe with mounting anger and disbelief. Instead of praising the Belgians for having protected the BEF from the worst of the German onslaught, Churchill was echoing Reynaud in accusing them of having endangered the British evacuation, as well as causing the encirclement and surrender of thousands of French troops.
Yet, in retrospect, Churchill’s harangue, though unjustified, is understandable. Prime minister for only four weeks, he considered his political position at that point to be extremely tenuous. Many Conservative MPs, whose party dominated Parliament, had not yet reconciled themselves to his succeeding Neville Chamberlain; indeed, a fair number were openly hostile to him. “Seldom can a prime minister have taken office with the establishment so dubious of the choice and so prepared to have its doubts justified,” noted John Colville, one of Churchill’s private secretaries.
With his country now facing the greatest challenge in its history, Churchill was eager not only to fortify his own position but also to draw a veil of secrecy over the incompetence of his top generals as well as the other grave shortcomings of the British military’s performance thus far in the war. What better way to do so than to pin the blame on a smaller ally whose king and commander in chief was unable to defend himself?
Roger Keyes, however, refused to fall into line. In early June, he filed a libel suit against the Daily Mirror for a story accusing him of abetting what the Mirror called Leopold’s treachery. Determined to exonerate himself as well as the Belgian king and his military, Keyes pressed for a public trial. Before the case was finally heard in March 1941, the Mirror acknowledged that it had erred in its statements about Leopold and Keyes and agreed to apologize to both. Declaring that “the public interest would not be served” by publicizing the matter, Churchill and his government pressured Keyes to accept an out-of-court settlement rather than go to trial. Keyes agreed, but, in settling the case, his lawyer outlined in open court what had really happened in Belgium the previous May; in the same hearing, the newspaper’s attorney conceded that the Mirror had done the king “a very grave injustice.”
The story of Leopold’s vindication made front-page headlines in Britain. K.C. CLEARS KING LEOPOLD’S NAME: LONDON TOLD OF SURRENDER PLAN, one blared. Another noted, KING LEOPOLD WARNED BRITAIN OF SURRENDER. But the BBC, under pressure from the War Office, suppressed the news of the king’s exoneration; it remains relatively unknown to this day. In the seventy-plus years since 1940, many if not most historians who have written about the battles in France and Belgium have accepted as true the charges made by the British and French against Leopold and his country.
Yet even during the chaos of May 1940, there was one celebrated Briton who knew better and who refused to participate in the mudslinging. King George VI was said to be furious at the campaign aimed at the Belgian sovereign, who was a distant cousin of his and whom he had known and liked since the teenage Leopold had attended Eton during the Great War. When British officials proposed that Leopold be dropped from the Roll of the Knights of the Garter, Britain’s highest order of chivalry and one of its most prestigious honors, George, who keenly understood the excruciating dilemma faced by his fellow monarch, rejected the idea.
As George’s biographer, the historian John Wheeler-Bennett, has pointed out, the choice confronting the heads of state of German-occupied countries was “one of hideous complexity, [with] little time for calm consideration. To leave their homeland and follow their Governments into exile leaves them open to the charge of desertion by those who remained behind; yet to remain [in their countries] involves the risk of their being held hostage for the submissive conduct of their peoples.”
The day before Belgium surrendered, Leopold wrote a fond letter to George, whom he addressed as mon cher Bertie—a diminutive of his given name, Albert, which was used only by members of the British king’s family and a few others close to him. In the letter, Leopold explained his rationale for staying in Belgium, declaring that his overriding duty was to share the ordeal of German occupation with his troops and the rest of the Belgian people and to protect them as much as possible. “To act otherwise,” he told George, “would amount to desertion.”
As it happened, King George did not agree with Leopold’s choice. When Harry Hopkins, Franklin Roosevelt’s closest aide, visited London in early 1941, George told him he thought that Leopold had gotten his two jobs—king and commander in chief—“mixed up.” In a memo to FDR, Hopkins observed that George had “expressed a good deal of sympathy for the King of the Belgians and had little or no criticism of him as C-in-C of the Army, but as King…he should have left the country and established his government elsewhere.” Yet while questioning the wisdom of Leopold’s decision, George never doubted that his cousin was following his conscience and keen sense of duty in staying behind.
Ironically, George himself had taken the same vow made by Leopold: under no account, he said, would he leave his country if it were invaded by Germany. Fortunately for him and for Britain, he was never called upon to make that choice.
Just days after Leopold decided to remain in Belgium, King Haakon VII of Norway found himself wrestling with the same dilemma. For most of May 1940, war had continued to rage in the far north of Norway, even as the world’s attention turned to the collapse of France and the British evacuation from Dunkirk. Having played a major role in bringing Winston Churchill to power just one month before, the Norwegian conflict “already seems incredibly remote,” Mollie Panter-Downes observed in the New Yorker.
Although Germany had swiftly conquered southern and central Norway in April, an Allied force fighting in the north finally captured the key port of Narvik on May 27 and drove the Germans there back to the Swedish border. As the Allied troops celebrated their victory, they had no idea that the British government, facing what it believed was an imminent German invasion of its own soil, had ordered yet another evacuation: all British troops in Norway were to be on their way home by early June. Once again, the British were doing what they had accused Leopold of doing: deciding to withdraw without consulting their allies. “One feels a most despicable creature in pretending we are going on fighting when we are going to quit at once,” General Claude Auchinleck, the commander of British forces in Norway, wrote to a colleague.
The news hit King Haakon like a thunderclap. From their refuge in Tromsø, he and Norway’s government ministers had vowed to fight on. When told of the withdrawal, the king reluctantly agreed to go to London as the British government requested. But he immediately had second thoughts. On the night of June 5, he sent a letter to Britain’s envoy to Norway, Sir Cecil Dormer, declaring that he could not abandon his soldiers or people and that “on further reflection, he felt it his duty to remain behind in Norway.”
At five o’clock the next morning, Dormer drove to the farmhouse outside Tromsø where Haakon and Crown Prince Olav were staying. It was an unseemly hour to be calling on royalty, the British diplomat knew, but his mission was urgent. Wasting no time on diplomatic niceties, he told the king that Norway was doomed and that if he stayed, he would become a German pawn, “unable to help his people in any way or even be in touch with them. The Germans would issue orders purporting to be made with his approval: in short he would be playing into their hands.” But if Haakon escaped to Great Britain, he and his government could join the other Allies and renew the fight.
There was yet another reason for Britain’s determination to spirit Haakon to safety, one that Dormer left unmentioned. Twenty-three years before, Haakon had offered to send a warship to rescue his first cousin, Tsar Nicholas II, and the tsar’s wife and children after Nicholas was dethroned in 1917. King George V, Haakon’s brother-in-law and another first cousin of Nicholas’s, ha
d told the Norwegian king not to bother, that he would send a ship for the Russian royal family himself. The British vessel, however, had not been dispatched, and Haakon had reportedly never forgiven his brother-in-law for abandoning Nicholas and his family, who were murdered by the Bolsheviks in 1918. George V’s son, the current British king, was determined not to repeat his father’s mistake; he urged his government to do everything in its power to save his uncle from the Germans.
Dormer told Haakon that the last British ship to leave Norway, HMS Devonshire, would depart from Tromsø harbor promptly at 8 P.M. the following day; he hoped that Haakon and his government would be on board. The king replied that he would have to consult with his Cabinet before making a final decision.
That day and the next, Haakon agonized about what to do. A few hours before the Devonshire was to sail, he met with key government officials at the creamery that had become their makeshift headquarters in Tromsø. After a heated debate, they decided to leave. As the session ended, Haakon, his voice trembling, struggled to speak. He was still not sure they were doing the right thing, he said. What could they possibly accomplish in England? Were they cutting themselves off forever from Norway? His voice trailed off, and, looking at his son, he was barely able to utter the words “God save Norway!” The others in the room, most of them in tears, stood up and repeated, “God save Norway!” As the ministers drifted out of the room, the king said in a broken whisper, “I am so afraid of the Norwegian people’s judgment.”
That evening, as government officials and foreign diplomats boarded the Devonshire, Dormer stood on the dock and anxiously scanned the road leading to the harbor. Finally, just a few minutes before eight, a car pulled up, and, to Dormer’s intense relief, Haakon and Olav stepped out, accompanied by their aides-de-camp. The king paused for a moment, looking back at the snow-clad mountains towering over the town and then out to sea, as if imprinting the breathtaking views on his memory. After another glance around, he slowly climbed the ship’s accommodation ladder, his head bowed. He seemed “extremely depressed,” recalled a Norwegian official who watched Haakon from the ship’s railing. “It was certainly one of the most painful hours of his life.”
At precisely 8 P.M., the Devonshire weighed anchor. Within minutes, it had disappeared into a heavy mist, setting its course for Britain.
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WHEN HAAKON REACHED LONDON on June 9, still dressed in his winter uniform and high boots, he found a jubilant city, whose residents were acting as if their country had just scored a major military triumph. Over the previous two weeks, more than 220,000 British troops had been snatched from the beaches of Dunkirk, far more than anyone had thought possible.
For many if not most Britons, the unexpected success of the effort to save what was thought to be a doomed army completely overshadowed the ongoing military catastrophe in France. The triumph of that massive rescue, aided by hundreds of pleasure boats and other small craft that had crossed the English Channel, was viewed, then as now, as one of the most heroic epics in British history. “So long as the English tongue survives, the word Dunkirk will be spoken with reverence,” the New York Times declared at the time. “For in that harbor…the rages and blemishes that have hidden the soul of democracy fell away. There, beaten but unconquered, in shining splendor [Britain] faced the enemy.”
With the curtain now drawn over the fiasco across the Channel, the British and their new prime minister now focused on their own struggle for survival. “We shall fight on the beaches,” a defiant Winston Churchill declared to Parliament on June 4. “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.”
It was one of Churchill’s most magnificent wartime speeches, but it meant nothing to the French. For them, Dunkirk, far from being a triumph, was a tragedy and an act of betrayal. The British had not informed the French that they were evacuating until tens of thousands of BEF troops had already left. When finally informed on May 31 of the mass departure, a French admiral angrily told the British general who gave him the news, “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….Your decision…dishonors England.” At that point, the British agreed to take off French troops, too. More than 100,000 French soldiers were eventually evacuated, but for the British, they were clearly an afterthought.
As the admiral’s remark indicated, the BEF’s escape was greatly aided by a stalwart defense of Dunkirk’s perimeters by French forces, along with several British regiments. In and around the city of Lille, about fifty miles southeast of Dunkirk, one French division, fighting house to house, kept seven German divisions at bay for four vital days during the evacuation. The Germans were so impressed by the French troops’ valor that they allowed them to keep their arms during the surrender ceremonies. Thousands of French soldiers were killed and wounded in the fighting around Dunkirk, while some 30,000 to 40,000 were taken into captivity. In the overall fighting in France, more than 90,000 Frenchmen lost their lives (compared to 11,000 British), and more than 200,000 were wounded.
After Dunkirk, the myth grew in Britain and elsewhere that “the gutless collapse of the French” and the “sheer spinelessness” of the French army had been largely responsible for the BEF evacuation. It’s true that a great many French soldiers did lay down their arms, but many others kept fighting, despite the growing defeatism of their civilian leaders and their geriatric military command. As the Canadian military historian John Cairns noted, “the French war effort was substantial,” despite “political, economic, social, and finally critical military mistakes.” Echoing that view, the British historian Julian Jackson has written that French troops fought “as bravely as those of 1914 when they were properly led and equipped. The failure of 1940 was above all a failure of military planning.”
Privately, Winston Churchill acknowledged that the French had indeed borne the brunt of the struggle. On June 14, he told the British War Cabinet that “very few British divisions have fought in France. At the end, very few indeed. French losses have been out of all proportion to ours, in every sphere.” To General Pug Ismay, the prime minister declared that “our contribution to the battle in France had been niggardly. So far the French have had nine-tenths of the casualties…and endured 99/100s of the suffering.” Publicly, however, he said little about the magnitude of the French losses or the valor of the French army—an oversight that brought bitter complaints from the French ambassador in London.
Not surprisingly then, the last two meetings between Churchill and French leaders, held during and after Dunkirk, were utter failures. In the course of his desperate attempt to dissuade Paul Reynaud and his demoralized government from capitulating to the Germans, Churchill declared that Britain would never give up: whatever happened, it would fight “on and on and on, toujours, all the time, everywhere, partout, pas de grâce, no mercy. Puis la victoire!” He begged the French to remain in the struggle, too—if not in Paris, “then in the provinces, down to the sea, and then, if need be,” from their colonial possessions in North Africa.
The French were not impressed by either his eloquence or his arguments. Although Reynaud was still marginally in Churchill’s camp, General Weygand and Marshal Pétain angrily accused the British of caring only for themselves. They noted that while Churchill had refused to send more RAF fighter squadrons to France before Dunkirk, he had dispatched every British fighter available to cover the BEF’s withdrawal.
Besides, they argued, how could Britain possibly win against Germany when it had so few troops and had shown so little resoluteness up to this point? In Weygand and Pétain’s view, the war in Europe would be decided in France, not Britain. Any continued resistance by the British would be futile, they declared; according to Weygand, Britain would have “her neck wrung like a chicken” within a month.
In the midst of all this political wran
gling, some French forces fought on, inflicting a large number of German casualties in their defense of a last-ditch line along the Somme and Aisne rivers in northern France. “This was the great battle of 1940, largely forgotten in France and never heard of in England,” observed the historians Robert and Isabelle Tombs, who noted that one German panzer division lost two-thirds of its tanks in two days. Resolute as the French were, however, they were no match for the superior German forces, which soon smashed through the overextended line.
By the first week of June, France, deeply split by social and political divisions, was in profound shock, and the government was in shambles. On June 9, Reynaud and his ministers fled Paris, having made no arrangements for its defense or evacuation, and took refuge first in Tours, then in Bordeaux. Millions of Parisians also stampeded out of the city, on foot and in every imaginable kind of vehicle. Overall, more than 6 million French citizens, “like an anthill that had been knocked over,” flooded south—the biggest single movement of people in Europe since the Dark Ages. The scene was pure chaos, filled with “all the ugliness of panic, defeat, and demoralization” of a disintegrating society, remarked the American diplomat George Kennan, who witnessed the mass exodus.
On June 14, German troops goose-stepped into Paris, just as they had done in Vienna, Prague, Warsaw, Oslo, Copenhagen, The Hague, and Brussels. Two days later, Reynaud resigned, and Pétain took over as premier of France. On June 17, the aged hero of the Great War’s Battle of Verdun ordered French troops to lay down their arms and petitioned the Germans for an armistice—actions that French officials had denounced King Leopold of Belgium for taking just three weeks earlier.
