Last Hope Island

by Lynne Olson

  As Churchill envisioned the operation, the Royal Navy would transport British and Free French troops to Dakar, where de Gaulle would be installed “to rally the French in West Africa to his cause.” But when he proposed the idea to de Gaulle in August 1940, the general was initially reluctant, noting the lack of any concrete evidence that French officers and troops in Dakar were in fact inclined to support him. He finally succumbed to Churchill’s insistent cajoling, but with one caveat: if his men met any opposition there, “he would not consider going on with the operation.”

  Once de Gaulle had signed on, however, he was given no say in the operations’s planning, which turned out to be as botched, in the words of one historian, as “the worst muddles of the Norwegian campaign” five months earlier. The British had acquired almost no intelligence about Dakar, its coastal defenses, or the strength of the Vichy forces there. The expedition’s commanders had no experience in working with the troops assigned to them, who in turn had been given no training in landing operations. The great flotilla of ships envisioned by Churchill was whittled down to two old battleships, four cruisers, and a few destroyers and transports.

  There were also several major security leaks. French officers had been overheard offering toasts “to Dakar” in several restaurants in London and the expedition’s embarkation point at Liverpool. British intelligence officers had talked openly about the operation’s destination when gathering information about Dakar at London travel agencies; so had Liverpool dockworkers when loading the expedition’s ships. Assault landing craft had been trucked across England and then loaded onto transports, with no effort to disguise them.

  The mission’s chance of success, hardly auspicious to begin with, became even slimmer when, a few days after the troops had sailed from Liverpool on August 31, five Vichy warships steamed from the southern French port of Toulon to Dakar, undetected and unchallenged by the British fleet at Gibraltar. When Churchill and his military chiefs were informed of this latest difficulty, they wanted to cancel the undertaking at once, but de Gaulle and the expedition’s British commanders, now close to their target, strongly objected. The War Office reluctantly gave them permission to proceed.

  As the expedition neared Dakar on September 23, de Gaulle broadcast an appeal to its military forces and other inhabitants to rise up against Vichy and join the Free French cause. In response, the shore batteries of the fortress and the guns of the warships in the harbor opened up on the Anglo-French fleet, seriously damaging two cruisers. Less than forty-eight hours later, after it had become abundantly clear that the French at Dakar had no intention of switching sides, de Gaulle and the British naval commander scrubbed the mission.

  Bungled from beginning to end, the Dakar expedition proved to be yet another humiliating military fiasco. It was ridiculed by Vichy and German propaganda and lambasted by the British press: the Daily Mirror declared that it marked “the lowest depths of imbecility to which we have sunk.” Yet although British officials were almost entirely to blame for the failure, much of the condemnation was aimed at de Gaulle and the Free French, largely because of their indiscreet security breaches before the mission was launched. In fact, the breaches, both Free French and British, played no part in what happened at Dakar; Vichy officials did not know about the expedition until it approached the port. That, however, made no difference to de Gaulle’s many critics in Whitehall and elsewhere.

  Churchill, however, remained steadfast. In response to calls from several British lawmakers to cut off ties with the Free French, he declared to the House of Commons that his government had “no intention whatever of abandoning the cause of General de Gaulle until it is merged, as merged it will be, in the larger cause of France.” De Gaulle, for his part, refrained from casting any public blame on the British. Thanks to his restraint and Churchill’s vigorous support, the attacks died down, and the furor eventually faded away.

  Nonetheless, the collapse of de Gaulle and Churchill’s first joint military venture had highly damaging long-term consequences. De Gaulle was devastated. Both he and his movement desperately needed a success to prove themselves to their critics; instead, this highly public failure only reinforced the naysayers’ skepticism. It was a profound personal humiliation for the proud, thin-skinned general, and some of those around him feared he might try to kill himself. “After Dakar, he was never entirely happy again,” recalled one of his top lieutenants.

  De Gaulle’s detractors in the British government, meanwhile, claimed that the Free French’s indiscreet toasts about Dakar proved that they couldn’t be trusted with secret information. The security lapse became a pretext for not informing de Gaulle and his men about future military operations on French territory. The failure of the mission also gave added impetus to the efforts of those in Whitehall who were still eager to establish closer ties with Vichy.

  Indeed, secret discussions between Britain and Vichy had begun just a few months after the fall of France—a fact revealed by the American newspaper correspondent Helen Kirkpatrick in late 1940. The talks were sanctioned by Churchill, who, for all his efforts to further de Gaulle’s cause, was unwilling to give up hope of persuading Vichy to abandon its subservience to Germany and transfer its military forces and empire to the Allies.

  De Gaulle was deeply upset, of course, when he learned of the talks. It was obvious to him that his efforts to establish himself and the Free French as a political as well as military entity had failed, at least for now. He warned Churchill and his government that the discussions were bound to collapse, as they ultimately did.

  General Edward Spears, Churchill’s liaison to de Gaulle, took note of how “the intolerable strain of constantly recurring rebuffs and disappointments” was worsening the general’s already formidable temper and sharpening his suspicions of the British. “During those days, he was like a man who had been skinned alive,” another observer remarked.

  “I do not think I shall ever get on with les Anglais,” de Gaulle stormed to Spears. “You are all the same, exclusively concentrated upon your own interests and business, quite insensitive to the requirements of others….Do you think I am interested in England winning the war? I am not. I am only interested in France’s victory.” When a shocked Spears replied, “They are all the same,” de Gaulle shot back, “Not at all.”

  By the end of 1940, de Gaulle’s close relationship with Churchill was beginning to fray—a deterioration that accelerated throughout the difficult days of 1941. The British prime minister knew perfectly well why de Gaulle behaved as he did: “He felt it was essential…that, although an exile, dependent upon our protection…he be rude to the British, to prove to French eyes that he was not a British puppet.” Churchill’s insights into de Gaulle’s personality, however, did not make it any easier for him to bear the Frenchman’s escalating outbursts.

  He finally reached the end of his patience in the summer of 1941 when de Gaulle gave an interview to an American newspaper correspondent in which, for the first time, his complaints about Britain included a personal disparagement of Churchill himself. Deeply hurt by de Gaulle’s seeming lack of appreciation for all he had done for him and his cause, the prime minister erupted in rage, writing to Anthony Eden, “He has clearly gone off his head.” He ordered members of his Cabinet to cut off all relations with de Gaulle and the Free French and barred them from making BBC broadcasts. “De Gaulle’s attitude is deplorable and his pronouncements, private and public, are intolerable,” John Colville, one of Churchill’s private secretaries, wrote in his diary. “The PM is sick to death of him.”

  After De Gaulle claimed he had been misquoted in the interview, Churchill calmed down and rescinded his bans against the general and his supporters. But neither leader ever fully forgave the other, and their conflicts would take on increasingly operatic dimensions until the war’s end.

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  AS THE CONFLICT BETWEEN the British and de Gaulle deepened, the other exile groups paid close attention. Since their escape to Britain, the vari
ous European governments, with their separate and unique interests, had contended with one another for their host country’s favor. But as the war ground on, they also began to see the advantages of forging tighter bonds. Haunted by their countries’ prewar powerlessness and by the failure of neutrality, a number of European officials in London set out to explore the idea of gaining greater security and strength for their small nations through a possible European union. “A genuine feeling of solidarity developed between the governments and their heads of state,” Queen Wilhelmina recalled.

  The Europeans’ need for greater unity was underscored in 1941 by the addition of two powerful countries—the United States and the Soviet Union—to the antifascist alliance. With those titans now committed, the early closeness between Great Britain and occupied Europe gave way to great power politics.

  * * *

  *1 Unknown to SOE, one of the key aims of the Lofoten raids was to seize Enigma machines and operating manuals from captured German ships. Those materials would play a role in Bletchley Park’s later success in cracking the German naval Enigma settings.

  *2 In its takeover of Czechoslovakia, the Germans cut it in two. The western two-thirds of the country was incorporated into the Reich as the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. Unlike the protectorate, which was under direct German occupation, the Slovakian region was allowed to secede, becoming a Nazi satellite state. Its government was composed of Slovaks who did what the Germans told them to do.

  *3 Eden replaced Lord Halifax as foreign secretary in early 1941.

  For most of World War II, the United States maintained two embassies in London. The U.S. embassy in Britain took up half an acre on Grosvenor Square and numbered some seven hundred employees. Presided over by Ambassador John Gilbert Winant, this frantically humming nerve center of U.S.-British relations was the United States’ largest and most important diplomatic mission in the world. It required an around-the-clock staff of twenty-four telephone operators to handle the more than six thousand calls that streamed in each day.

  The second embassy—located in an apartment in Berkeley Square, just a few blocks from Winant’s bustling fiefdom—served the European governments in exile. The apartment’s master bedroom, festooned with a large wall map of Europe, doubled as the ambassador’s office, while the remaining six staffers operated out of the drawing room and smaller bedrooms. The embassy’s reception area consisted of a narrow wooden bench in the foyer, where European leaders and other visitors sat while awaiting their appointments.

  At first glance, Anthony J. Drexel Biddle, Jr., the U.S. ambassador to occupied Europe, appeared as undistinguished as the space his mission occupied. A wealthy socialite descended from two of Philadelphia’s oldest, best-connected families, Biddle was, as Life magazine quaintly put it, “financially and socially beyond reproach.”

  Before embarking on his ambassadorial career, the tall, lean, fortyish Biddle had been noted primarily for his frequent appearance on the annual list of best-dressed American men and for his membership on multiple corporation boards and in more than twenty private clubs. Charming and debonair, he had a penchant for calling every man he met, no matter how casual an acquaintance, “old sport” or “old boy.” A British official once tartly remarked, “One rather expects him to leap into the air and begin a Fred Astaire sort of dance. Very disconcerting.”

  Biddle’s first diplomatic nomination—as U.S. minister to Norway in 1935—came as a quid pro quo for his sizable donation to FDR’s first presidential campaign. At the time, the appointment was widely scorned. His “previous career,” wrote one journalist, “included nothing that could have been charitably regarded as the slightest clue to a brilliant future in diplomacy.”

  In fact, to the surprise of virtually everyone, Biddle proved himself an adept player of the diplomatic game. Although a millionaire many times over, he had a democratic, informal style that captivated the egalitarian Norwegians—and in particular King Haakon, who became a close friend of his. For all his jaunty ebullience, Biddle took the job seriously and worked hard to master its demands, dispatching reports to the State Department that were “notable for their authoritative accuracy and sound analysis.”

  In 1937, he was named ambassador to Poland. When the Germans invaded two years later, he and his staff made a hair-raising escape across the country by car, frequently stopping to jump into roadside ditches whenever Luftwaffe planes appeared overhead. After following the newly constituted Polish government in exile to France, he was assigned by President Roosevelt to accompany French officials when they fled from Paris to Tours and then to Bordeaux in June 1940. “In five years,” an observer wrote, Biddle “had evolved from a society man playing at diplomacy to an agent of the U.S. in one of the most tragic and delicate situations in history.” No American official knew better than he what this savage new kind of warfare was like or how much the countries to which he was assigned as ambassador had suffered as a result of it.

  He also knew that naming one man as envoy to multiple governments in exile was an absurd idea; as hard as he worked and as much as he tried, he could not adequately serve their needs and assuage their concerns. He realized, too, what his appointment signaled to the European officials with whom he dealt in London: the unimportance of their countries in the eyes of the Roosevelt administration.

  Even more worrying to the governments in exile, Winston Churchill, who used to be their most outspoken champion, would soon come to share the U.S. government’s view. Although well aware of the debt he owed the Europeans for their contributions to Britain’s survival, Churchill needed the two Allied newcomers considerably more: the Soviet Union, to lift the main burden of fighting the Germans from Britain’s shoulders, and the United States, to provide the manpower and industrial strength necessary for an invasion of western Europe and final victory.

  When Germany launched an unexpected lightning attack on the Soviet Union in June 1941, London was still struggling to recover from the worst German bombing raid it had yet experienced. As bad as the others were, none had come close to the destructiveness of the May 6 firestorm, which had done catastrophic damage to many of London’s landmarks, including Westminster Abbey and Parliament, and killed 1,436 Londoners—the highest daily death toll recorded in all the city’s history. The end to such carnage from the air seemed nowhere in sight. And with British forces on the defensive everywhere, there was also little or no hope of ultimate triumph in the war.

  Small wonder, then, that Churchill was overjoyed when he learned that Germany had marched into the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, along a vast front stretching from the Black Sea to the Baltic. Without consulting any of his European or Commonwealth allies, the prime minister went on the radio to promise unconditional support for Joseph Stalin and his country, even though the Soviets had been locked in a quasi alliance with Germany since August 1939, supplying the Reich with oil, grain, cotton, iron ore, and other raw materials crucial to its war effort.

  As much as he despised what he called Stalin’s “wicked regime,” Churchill saw its reluctant addition to the Allied ranks as a miracle of deliverance for himself and Britain, allowing both to catch their breath and regroup. America’s entry into the war after the December 7, 1941, Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor made the deliverance complete. The Soviet Union and United States had done everything they could to stay out of the conflict, but once they had been catapulted into it, Allied victory, in Churchill’s view, was certain.

  Yet for most of 1942, that outlook seemed highly improbable. The Soviets were constantly on the verge of defeat as the Germans swept toward Moscow, while the United States’ entry into the war was accompanied by one crushing rout after another. The shock of losing much of the U.S. fleet at Pearl Harbor was followed by Japanese conquests of Guam, Wake Island, and the Philippines. For the British, the situation was even worse. Vanquished the year before by the Germans in France, Greece, and Crete, they now lost their empire in the Far East and the Pacific to the Japanese. On Christma
s Day 1941, Hong Kong fell, followed by Singapore, Burma, and Malaya. The surrender of Singapore, previously regarded as an invincible British bulwark in the Far East, was a particular shock. Britons couldn’t understand how Singapore’s 85,000-man garrison could have given up so readily. Speaking in the House of Commons, an emotional Churchill called it “the greatest disaster in British arms which our history records.”

  Singapore, unfortunately, was hardly the last of a seemingly endless string of British military calamities that unspooled in the winter and spring of 1942. In North Africa, General Rommel bottled up a new British offensive in Libya, recapturing towns and cities the British had just taken. In June, after holding out against a long siege, the port of Tobruk, a key British bastion in eastern Libya, capitulated, with more than 30,000 troops surrendering to a considerably smaller German force. A far greater strategic defeat than the loss of Singapore, the capture of Tobruk cleared the way for a German advance toward Cairo and the Suez Canal, threatening the entire British presence in the Middle East.

  Ever since April 1940, with the crucial exception of the Battle of Britain, the British had suffered one humiliation after another at the hands of their enemies. As one setback followed another in 1942, the mood in Britain grew progressively fractious and sour. Among the public and in Parliament, there was widespread grumbling about the government’s handling of the war. One member of Parliament went so far as to suggest sacking all the British generals and replacing them with Polish, Czech, and Free French military officers “until we can produce trained commanders of our own.”