Last Hope Island

by Lynne Olson

  In January and again in July, Churchill faced votes of censure in the House of Commons over his direction of the war. Although he won both handily, the attacks on his leadership took a severe psychological toll. “Papa is at a very low ebb,” his daughter Mary wrote in her diary in early 1942. “He is not too well physically, and he is worn down by the continuous crushing pressure of events.”

  Reeling from the relentless battering, Churchill was not inclined to argue with Roosevelt and Stalin about their backhanded attitude toward the smaller European allies, whom both clearly regarded as Lilliputians. In January 1942, Roosevelt and Churchill stage-managed the signing in Washington of an agreement by the United Nations, as the president dubbed the twenty-six nations then in the alliance, all of them pledging their full resources to the fight.* “The United Nations constitute an association of independent peoples of equal dignity and equal importance,” Roosevelt declared. Yet only the Soviet Union and China, which the president had anointed as another major ally, were consulted in advance about the drafting of the document, and only the Soviet and Chinese ambassadors received formal invitations to the White House signing ceremony with Roosevelt and Churchill. The ambassadors of the other Allied countries were merely informed that they could drop by, at their convenience, to sign the declaration. Jan Ciechanowski, the Polish ambassador to Washington, noted that “if the concept of the United Nations could still be regarded as an international family concern, it was one definitely composed of rich and poor relations.”

  Throughout the war, Roosevelt had a disconcerting habit of talking about the fates of smaller nations as if they were his alone to decide. In a 1942 meeting with Soviet foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov, for example, the president remarked that the Soviet Union needed a northern port that was not icebound in the winter and suggested that the USSR annex the Norwegian coastal town of Narvik. The startled Molotov rejected the idea, noting that his country did not “have any territorial or other claims against Norway.”

  A few months later, in a White House chat with Oliver Lyttelton, the British minister of production, FDR mentioned the divisions between Belgium’s two main ethnic groups: the Dutch-speaking Flemish and the French-speaking Walloons. After declaring that the Flemish and Walloons “can’t live together,” he proposed that “after the war, we should make two states, one known as Wallonia and one as Flamingia, and we should amalgamate Luxembourg with Flamingia.” Incredulous at the thought of forcing a European ally to partition itself, Lyttelton later wrote of Roosevelt, “He allowed his thoughts and conversations to flit across the tumultuous and troubled [world] scene with a lightness and inconsequence which were truly frightening in one wielding so much power.”

  When Lyttelton reported Roosevelt’s comments to Anthony Eden, the British foreign secretary said he was sure the president was joking. But when Eden himself visited the White House in March 1943, Roosevelt reintroduced the proposal. “He seemed to see himself disposing of the fate of many lands, allied no less than enemy,” Eden remarked. “I poured water, I hope politely, on [the idea], and the President did not revert to the subject again.”

  FDR’s attitude toward the countries of occupied Europe and the other small allies revealed some of the contradictions in his immensely complex personality. He sincerely believed that the United States’ mission after World War II would be to help build a freer, more just world. Yet he also felt that the United States, the Soviet Union, and Britain had the right to dictate to the less powerful states, not only during the war but afterward as well.

  Although in public Roosevelt and Churchill continued throughout the war to espouse equal rights and freedoms for all nations, the occupied European countries, like the other smaller allies, were excluded from any significant role in war planning. The military staffs of the governments in exile, for example, were barred from participating in meetings of the U.S.-British Combined Chiefs of Staff, which was responsible for the planning of future Allied military operations, including campaigns that would take place on the Europeans’ own territory. The Netherlands, which lost the Dutch East Indies to the Japanese in March 1942, was excluded, much to the Dutch government’s indignation, from all high-level Allied decision making regarding operations against the Japanese in the southwest Pacific.

  Yet while all the exiled Europeans in London were diminished by the addition of the Americans and Soviets to the Allied cause, three national groups—the Free French, Poles, and Czechs—saw their wartime efforts and the futures of their countries dramatically and immediately affected.

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  FROM THE START, FDR felt nothing but disdain for Charles de Gaulle and France. He had little understanding of the complexity of the situation in that defeated, traumatized country and scant sympathy for its citizens. All he knew or cared about was that it had failed the Allied cause. By capitulating to Germany, he believed, France had lost its place among the Western powers. “There is no France,” he declared, insisting that it would not really exist again until after its liberation.

  As for de Gaulle himself, Roosevelt considered him insignificant and absurd, a British puppet with grandiose ambitions. From the beginning, the president was scornful of this general, “who had escaped from an army of beaten men but who talked of ‘indefeasible rights,’ ‘long-standing splendor,’ and ‘immortal France.’ ” FDR was “convinced,” a U.S. official wrote, “that de Gaulle’s ambitions were a threat to Allied harmony and a menace to French democracy. Accordingly, he made up his mind—and once it was made up, it was never changed—that the U.S. would make no concession which would help de Gaulle to achieve his ambitions.”

  Unlike Britain, the United States had formally recognized Vichy as the legitimate government of France almost immediately after the country’s capitulation to Germany. In a sign of regard for Pétain’s regime, Roosevelt sent a good friend—Admiral William Leahy, a former chief of naval operations—to Vichy as ambassador. As the war progressed and Pétain’s government stepped up its collaboration with Nazi Germany, not to mention the repression of its own citizens, the administration’s close ties to Vichy came under increasingly severe criticism in the United States and elsewhere.

  FDR was unapologetic. He believed, just as Churchill did, that he could persuade Vichy to keep French North Africa and the remainder of the French fleet out of German hands and perhaps come over to the Allied side. To that end, the United States vigorously wooed Vichy by, among other things, dispatching food and critically needed supplies to North Africa. Though it accepted the American gifts, Vichy showed no sign of complying with the U.S. government’s wishes, just as it had ignored British overtures. Instead of discouraging Roosevelt, the rebuff only served to redouble his determination to win Vichy over.

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  THE CONFLICT BETWEEN BRITAIN’S support of de Gaulle and FDR’s intense antipathy toward him first surfaced in mid-1942, after the two new Western Allies began planning their first joint offensive against Germany. U.S. generals had pushed for an invasion of the Continent, but the British protested that Anglo-British forces were not ready for such a high-risk campaign. The Allies finally compromised on a British alternative proposal: an amphibious invasion of North Africa, to take place in November.

  Convinced that the United States was popular with Vichy, Roosevelt argued that Vichy troops in North Africa would put up little or no resistance to the landings as long as U.S. soldiers took the lead, British forces were in the background, and Free French troops were nowhere to be seen. By early 1942, de Gaulle had acquired an army of more than 50,000 men, an air force of more than a thousand pilots and crew, and several dozen ships. None of that mattered to Roosevelt, who told Churchill that the general and his followers “must be given no role in the liberation and governance of North Africa and France.” The president also insisted that de Gaulle be kept ignorant of all planning for the invasion.

  Churchill was faced with a highly painful dilemma. As contentious as his relationship with de Gaulle had become, he had made
a solemn pledge to support the general in June 1940, and he shrank from having to go back on his word. He also sharply disagreed with FDR’s belief that France had lost its status as a great nation. When he was told of a quip by Roosevelt about de Gaulle’s supposed belief that he was a lineal descendant of Joan of Arc, Churchill didn’t laugh. The idea didn’t seem at all absurd to him. The prime minister sadly noted that “France without an Army is not France. De Gaulle is the spirit of that Army. Perhaps, the last survivor of a warrior race.”

  All the same, Churchill considered himself Roosevelt’s lieutenant and vowed to his staff that “nothing must stand in the way of his friendship for the President on which so much depended.” The British ended up handing over all initiative for the invasion to the Americans. But just a few days before it was to take place, Churchill begged Roosevelt to at least be allowed to tell de Gaulle about it: “You will remember that I have…recognized him as the Leader of free Frenchmen. I am confident his military honour can be trusted.” When FDR rejected his request, Churchill replied, “I am still sorry about de Gaulle. But we are ready to accept your view.”

  On November 8, 1942, more than 30,000 American and British troops poured onto the beaches of North Africa. Churchill would later acknowledge “the gravity of the affront offered to de Gaulle” by himself and Roosevelt. Nonetheless, de Gaulle went on the BBC that night to endorse the invasion: “French leaders, soldiers, sailors, airmen, civil servants, French settlers in North Africa, arise! Help our Allies! Join them without reservation. Fighting France adjures you to do so….Ignore the traitors who try to persuade you that the Allies want to take our empire for themselves. The great moment has come.”

  Privately, though, de Gaulle raged against the exclusion of himself and his forces. In a bitter note to U.S. secretary of state Cordell Hull, he said he particularly resented “the ungracious attitude of the United States government toward the only Frenchmen who are carrying on the war side by side with the Allies.” But he saved his sharpest barbs for the man who had so warmly welcomed him to Britain seventeen months before. “I don’t understand you!” he exclaimed at a meeting with Churchill. “You have fought since the first day. One could even say that you personally symbolize this war. Yet you allow yourself to be towed along by the United States, whose soldiers have never even seen a German. It is up to you to take over the moral direction of this war. Public opinion in Europe will be behind you.” De Gaulle would later observe in his memoir that “these words made a profound impression on Mr. Churchill, and he wavered perceptibly.”

  Yet as much as he might inwardly agree with the truth of what the general had said, Churchill was well aware of his own powerlessness to do anything about it. In joining forces with the Soviets and Americans, he had found himself in much the same position as the Europeans: he was fast becoming a junior partner to Stalin and Roosevelt, just as the small nations’ leaders were subordinate to him.

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  WHILE ALLIED LEADERS QUARRELED over North Africa and France, the French people, at long last, had begun to stir. Initially, the idea of overt resistance in France had seemed considerably less likely than in other occupied countries, in large part because its own government was actively cooperating with Germany. By granting the Vichy regime the right to function on its own as long as French police and government administrators did what Hitler wanted, the Führer had ensured that he could control France with a minimal German presence. As one historian put it, “There was no other occupied country during World War II which contributed more to the initial efficiency of Nazi rule than France.”

  French officials were hardly alone in collaborating with the enemy. Many of the country’s wealthiest and most noted citizens—industrialists, aristocrats, writers, movie stars, dress designers—socialized with their occupiers throughout the war and benefited economically and in other ways from their presence. So did thousands of others. According to the historian Julian Jackson, an estimated 220,000 French citizens could be classified as wartime collaborators.

  The vast majority of the French, however, did not follow their lead. Although most never showed any interest in open resistance, they tended to be strongly pro-British and anti-German—attitudes confirmed by public opinion reports over the course of the conflict. As early as August 1940, a German army memo sourly noted that the “exemplary, amiable and helpful behavior of German soldiers towards [the French] population has aroused little sympathy.”

  In general, the French showed their hostility by ignoring their occupiers and refusing personal contact with them. “I lower my head so that you don’t see my eyes, to deny you the joy of an exchanged glance,” one Frenchman wrote about the Germans in February 1943. “You are in the middle of us, like an object, in a circle of silence and ice.” Though emotionally gratifying, such snubs involved little personal risk to those making them. The idea of more active resistance was uncharted, far more dangerous territory.

  In the first few months after France’s fall, there were isolated acts of rebellion around the country: shots fired at German patrols, enemy posters and car tires slashed; laughter and jeers in movie theaters whenever Hitler appeared in newsreels. On November 11, 1940—Armistice Day—thousands of French students gathered at the Place de l’Étoile in Paris to sing “La Marseillaise” and protest against German occupation. It was the first large anti-German demonstration in France, and the enemy was determined to make it the last. German police and troops charged into the crowd and shot several students—a response that shocked the country and discouraged any future acts of mass defiance.

  Nonetheless, unnoticed by almost everyone, the embers of rebellion began to smolder. The Scottish writer Janet Teissier du Cros, who lived in France throughout the war, put it another way; French resistance “grew as naturally as a mushroom grows among dead leaves,” she wrote. “In its beginnings it was no organized movement. In town, village or countryside, those in whom it burned soon came to know which of their neighbors shared their views; and with no clear notion how their feelings could be translated into action, they gathered, at first simply for moral support. Heroism crept upon many of them like a thief in the night.”

  Gradually, these small clusters of would-be resisters joined forces with equally disorganized groups, creating fragmented movements around the country. Few of them had much, if any, knowledge of the others. What they did have in common was the first step most of them took as embryo resistance organizations: the publication of clandestine newspapers meant to counteract German propaganda and provide the French public with accurate information about what was occurring in the war and their country.

  Underground newspapers were central to the existence of resistance movements in every occupied nation, but they were particularly important in France, a country that places an extremely high value on the spoken and written word. According to the National Library of France, more than one thousand underground publications were published during the country’s occupation.

  Like the BBC broadcasts to France, the newspapers were aimed at replacing despair and a feeling of helplessness with hope and a spirit of defiance. “We made it clear that there was an active Resistance at work, one that was growing from day to day,” an underground editor remarked after the war. “[Our membership] was invisible to our readers….The only sign it could give at that stage was our two-page printed sheet.” The newspapers in themselves were tangible proof that Frenchmen were fighting back. Producing and distributing the papers—leaving them in post offices and on trains, slipping them through mail slots—involved considerable risk and ended up serving as the seedbed and training ground for more overt and dangerous kinds of rebellion.

  As they set about retrieving their self-respect, these early resisters also developed a sense of community that had been lacking in French society for generations, if not centuries. Transcending traditional social and economic barriers, people from all classes and walks of life—journalists, teachers, railwaymen, shopkeepers, students, stevedores, engineers, cler
ks, and farmers—banded together in what one resister called “our passionate love for our country.” Even the aristocracy was represented: Jean, Philippe, and Pierre de Vomécourt—three wealthy brothers from Lorraine who also happened to be barons—became important liaisons between SOE and resistance members.

  “In our war, the soul found redemption,” observed Emmanuel d’Astier de La Vigerie, a journalist, intellectual, and founder of Libération-Sud, one of the major resistance movements in the south of France. “We were in a revolt which, for so many of us, adrift in a sterile society, opened the door to a lost fraternity. The motive was different for each of us, but we were all, with others unknown, living in the same…state of exaltation.”

  In another challenge to the status quo, resistance movements welcomed Jews and others who were regarded as outsiders in French society. “The proportion of Jews in the Resistance was greater than that for the French population as a whole,” a French historian noted. “[The underground] remained an alternative society that had taken in Jews on an equal basis and offered them a chance to act without changing any part of their identity.”

  Just as iconoclastic was the crucial role played by women, not only in France but in virtually every other occupied country of Europe. They acted as couriers, collected intelligence, transported arms, escorted downed Allied pilots to safety, hid insurgents in their homes, and even led armed bands of resistance fighters against German targets. One U.S. intelligence agent called women “the lifeblood of the Resistance.”

  In France, as in other countries, women’s success as insurgents was due in large part to the Germans’ stereotypical view of them. Coming from a traditional, conservative society, the enemy saw women chiefly in their conventional domestic roles as wives and mothers and, at least early in the war, rarely suspected them of being spies and saboteurs. “Women have such an innocent look, you know,” noted Andrée de Jongh, a young Belgian woman who was arguably the most fearless and best-known resistance heroine of the war. “They look so terribly harmless. Germans are not accustomed to women with opinions of their own.”