Last Hope Island

by Lynne Olson

  For more than a year after France’s fall, the country’s burgeoning resistance movements focused on making contacts, building up their membership, publishing newspapers, gathering intelligence, creating false identity papers and other documents, and weighing the possibility of future paramilitary actions. At that point, there was little thought of direct confrontation with the enemy. “Above all, no isolated violent action,” a movement newspaper cautioned its readers. “The moment has not yet come.”

  After Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union, however, French communists decided differently. Earlier, the French Communist Party had followed Stalin’s lead in cozying up to the Germans, remaining aloof when its own country was vanquished by the Reich. But in July 1941, the Soviet Comintern ordered the French communists to launch an armed struggle against munitions factories and German troops in France, in hopes of weakening the Reich’s campaign in Russia. They obeyed the order with alacrity.

  Their first strike came on August 21, 1941, with the fatal shooting of a young German naval cadet in a Paris subway station. The Vichy government, in an attempt to appease the Nazi authorities, ordered the execution of six French communists who had had nothing to do with the ambush. Rather than halting the communist attacks, the reprisal was followed by more assassinations: on October 20, a high-level German official was killed in Nantes, followed by another in Bordeaux. In retribution, ninety-seven additional French hostages were shot. Over the next seven months, more than four hundred French citizens would lose their lives as a result of German vengeance.

  The French people, already restive over growing food and fuel shortages, were infuriated by the wanton killing of their compatriots. By 1942, words such as “hate” and “rage” were commonly used in reports about French attitudes toward their occupiers. In June of that year, a meeting of several dozen German intelligence officers in Paris was told that “ninety-nine percent of the French population are openly hostile to us. The French despise the Germans. They will not even forgive us for treating them so decently.”

  Fierce enmity, however, did not immediately translate into widespread direct resistance; as long as Germany seemed unbeatable, the idea of rebellion seemed quixotic in the extreme. In November 1942, that myth of invincibility finally began to crumble, thanks to Britain’s victory at the Egyptian port of El Alamein, its first battlefield triumph, followed a few days later by the Allied invasion of North Africa.

  Adding to the cascade of events was the German takeover of Vichy-controlled France on November 11, 1942, just three days after the attack on North Africa. The whole of France was now under enemy domination, with the severe repression in the north spreading to the comparatively more relaxed south.

  The takeover also thrust Vichy’s open collaboration with Germany into sharper relief. In the view of an increasing number of the French, Vichy’s cooperation in the hostage shootings and its leading role in the roundup and deportation of French Jews to death camps had turned Pétain and his officials into nothing less than Hitler’s henchmen.

  But the biggest impetus to the resistance’s growth was the Reich’s decision in 1942 to draft hundreds of thousands of French citizens to work as forced labor in its factories. It did so because of a major miscalculation by the Nazis: when they had invaded the Soviet Union, they had expected the campaign to last no more than six weeks. Yet a year later, the battle was still grinding on, with millions of German troops fighting—and dying—on the eastern front. So many men had been drafted into the Wehrmacht that Hitler found himself with a severe shortage of factory workers to produce the tanks, planes, artillery, submarines, and other matériel he so desperately needed. He decided to fill the gap with conscripted workers from all over Europe.

  In the late spring of 1942, the Führer demanded that some 350,000 French citizens be assigned to the Nazi industrial war effort. Vichy prime minister Pierre Laval called on the French to volunteer, but when few responded, he issued an order requiring all Frenchmen between the ages of eighteen and fifty and all unmarried women between twenty-one and thirty-five to give two years of service to German war work. The service du travail obligatoire (or STO, as it was commonly called) was in effect a national draft of slave labor, imposed by the French government itself. Of the more than one million French citizens shipped to Germany over the course of the war, more than two hundred thousand never returned.

  Until the work draft, the lives of most of the French had not been deeply affected by the German repression. The STO, however, hit home in the most literal way: virtually every family had a loved one in danger of being rounded up. For many, enduring the occupation was now no longer an option; it was time to work to end it. Clandestine newspapers called on all French citizens to refuse to obey the order. Worker strikes and protests multiplied. More important, tens of thousands of men left their homes and went underground. The lightly populated, heavily wooded French countryside, along with mountainous regions in the east and south of the country, became favorite hiding places; in those out-of-the-way places, members of newly formed quasi-guerrilla groups, called maquis, lived off the land and began to plot sabotage and subversion.

  From that point on, the resistance began to count as a real force in France, but it still had a number of major weaknesses. The various movements throughout the country were working independently and sometimes at cross-purposes. They had no money, few arms, and little sense of discipline or direction. And until early 1942, they had virtually no connection with Charles de Gaulle and the Free French in London.

  Although neither realized it at first, de Gaulle and the resistance needed each other to achieve their common goal: the liberation of their country. Providentially, there was at least one man who understood that point. He was Jean Moulin, a short, stocky, boyishly handsome French civil servant who walked, uninvited and unannounced, into de Gaulle’s London headquarters one day in late October 1941.

  Jean Moulin

  The greatest figure in France’s wartime resistance, Moulin, more than any other person, would be responsible for bringing together the wide array of fragmented movements and welding them into a cohesive, relatively disciplined body. In the process, he would also give de Gaulle the legitimacy he needed to expand his own crusade and transform himself from an Allied underling into the acknowledged leader of France.

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  UNTIL MOULIN APPEARED AT Carlton Gardens, de Gaulle and his men knew almost nothing about France’s growing insurgency, despite their having dispatched some twenty intelligence agents to their homeland over the previous eighteen months. The agents’ assignment had been to collect information on German activities, and they apparently rarely, if ever, crossed paths with the underground. “We knew that men of good will, dispersed here and there in France, were ready to engage in violent action against the Germans,” André Dewavrin, de Gaulle’s intelligence chief, wrote in January 1941. “But we had absolutely no idea how to get in contact with them, and as a consequence, how to organize them.”

  In fact, the Free French never saw the home front as a priority until Moulin arrived in London. In de Gaulle’s initial BBC broadcast in June 1940, he had focused on recruiting Frenchmen outside France—those who had escaped from there or were living in North Africa and other French possessions. “The general appeared to have little faith in the possibilities of either a secret army at home or effective work by paramilitary forces,” Dewavrin said.

  That all changed when de Gaulle met Moulin. Like others before him, the general, who could be so rude and icy to others, fell under his visitor’s spell. With his commanding presence and fierce integrity, Moulin displayed “the sort of natural authority and experience which his past history has given him,” said one British official who met him in London.

  When the war broke out, the forty-year-old Moulin had been serving as prefect (or governor) of the department of Eure-et-Loire, a region of northwest France whose capital is the city of Chartres. Unlike his fellow administrators, most of whom willingly collaborated with the
Germans, Moulin refused to accept Nazi rule; just days after the occupation began, he was arrested by the Gestapo and tortured after refusing to follow their orders. Fearing he might yield to the pressure, he tried to commit suicide by cutting his throat, but he was found and hospitalized and eventually recovered. His wounds, however, left him with a husky voice and badly scarred throat, which, when in public, he kept swathed with a scarf.

  Although Moulin lost his job because of his insubordination, he retained his freedom. For the rest of what would turn out to be a short life, he worked to make the French resistance a force to be reckoned with. For much of the next year, he made clandestine trips around the country, making contacts with and collecting information about resistance groups. His main focus was on three large movements in Vichy France, which he called “the main organizations of resistance to the invader.”

  In a handwritten report that he presented to de Gaulle after smuggling himself out of France, Moulin laid out in detail the movements’ achievements, goals, and potential for sabotage and military action against the enemy. “There is a rising tide among thousands of young Frenchmen who want to take part in war again,” he told de Gaulle. “They want someone to tell them that they are already in the front line in France. This must be combined with some promise of organization and direction.” If properly directed and supplied, he argued, resistance groups could make a significant military contribution to ending German rule by aiding Allied forces before and during the liberation of France. He warned that if de Gaulle did not step in, the French resistance might well succumb to communist control.

  Impressed by Moulin’s arguments, de Gaulle sent him back to France as his official representative to the various resistance movements. Moulin’s mission was to unite the groups into a single entity under de Gaulle’s direction; in return, they would receive money and arms. It was an extraordinary challenge, considering the deep divisions and rivalries, both political and personal, that bedeviled the groups. Nonetheless, by the summer of 1942, Moulin had succeeded in extracting pledges of support for de Gaulle from most of the resistance organizations, including the communists, who complied only when Moulin threatened to bar them from receiving any subsidies.

  De Gaulle’s deepening influence with the resistance and the French public in general was strikingly demonstrated on July 14, 1942—Bastille Day—when, in a BBC broadcast, he urged the residents of unoccupied France to turn out en masse in public demonstrations opposing the Vichy government. Hundreds of thousands of people responded, marching down the main thoroughfares of Marseille, Lyon, and other cities and towns across Vichy France, wearing the national colors, waving flags, and singing “La Marseillaise.” (At the same time, de Gaulle instructed those in German-occupied France to refrain from demonstrating, to avoid giving the Germans an excuse for violent retaliation. In another impressive sign of his influence, most complied.)

  De Gaulle’s growing authority at home couldn’t have come at a more opportune time. It provided him with a legitimacy and political base at a moment when he faced multiple challenges to his leadership, including from the president of the United States. More specifically, it allowed him to fight back against one of the Roosevelt administration’s most controversial decisions of the war: the appointment of Admiral Jean Darlan, the commander of the Vichy armed forces and a notorious German collaborator, as governor of North Africa in November 1942.

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  THE AMERICANS’ CHOICE OF Darlan came after Vichy forces in North Africa put the lie to Roosevelt’s prediction that they would welcome an invasion by U.S. troops. In fact, the French mounted stiff opposition at almost every landing site. In an attempt to stop this resistance, U.S. military officials called on Darlan, who happened to be in Algiers visiting his son at the time of the attack. Next to Pierre Laval, Darlan, a former Vichy prime minister himself, was the most reviled of all Vichy officials, thanks to his complicity in the persecution of French Jews, the mass arrests of Vichy opponents, and the supplying of Rommel’s troops with food and matériel.

  In exchange for Darlan’s engineering a cease-fire, the Allies promised to appoint him high commissioner, or governor, of North Africa. After agreeing and then reneging on the deal, Darlan, under heavy Allied pressure, finally gave in and ordered an armistice. Once in office, however, he upheld anti-Semitic laws and imprisoned de Gaulle supporters, including many who had aided the Allied operation.

  His appointment, meanwhile, was greeted with a storm of protest around the globe. Unfazed by the criticism, Roosevelt told a French resistance leader visiting Washington, “For my part, I am not an idealist like [Woodrow] Wilson. I am concerned above all with efficiency. I have problems to solve. Those who help me solve them are welcome. Today, Darlan gives me Algiers and I cry ‘Vive Darlan!’ If Quisling gives me Oslo, I will cry ‘Vive Quisling!’ Let Laval give me Paris tomorrow, and I will cry ‘Vive Laval!’ ”

  In the view of many, such cynical pragmatism undermined the lofty moral position of the Allied cause. “The British in 1940 were the first to give the struggle a positive, idealistic meaning,” the CBS correspondent Eric Sevareid later wrote. “The Americans, to the world’s surprise, were the first to take this away.” Darlan’s appointment, Sevareid added, showed that the U.S. government and military “would use any means, including Fascists and Fascist institutions, to aid them in their task, regardless of how the basic issues were muddied and the future placed in jeopardy.”

  Members of European resistance movements, whose lives were in constant danger due in part to collaborators such as Darlan, were the most outspoken in expressing their dismay and anger. According to an SOE report, the Allies’ collusion with Darlan “has produced violent reactions on all our subterranean organizations in enemy-occupied countries, particularly in France, where it has had a blasting and withering effect.”

  In France, the march to de Gaulle accelerated. On November 17, 1942, Jean Moulin relayed a statement from French resistance leaders calling for de Gaulle, “their uncontested leader,” to be named governor of North Africa. The statement was also signed by representatives of most of France’s major political parties—a signal to the Allies that the general was gathering support not only from the resistance but from traditional political forces.

  De Gaulle could also count on the wholehearted backing of the European governments in exile, whose leaders feared that the Americans, having cozied up to Darlan, would cooperate with prominent collaborators in their own nations. He was supported as well by much of the British public, most members of Parliament, and the British press. Even some high-level British government officials, including several from the Foreign Office, joined the parade. In 1940, Churchill had backed the general in the face of Foreign Office opposition; now officials in that ministry were shielding him from Churchill’s increasing animus, believing that de Gaulle had gained legitimacy in France and that it would not be in Britain’s long-term interests to abandon him.

  Yet Churchill, like nearly everyone else, couldn’t help knowing that the Darlan appointment had been a huge political mistake and that something needed to be done. It wasn’t long before action was taken: on Christmas Eve 1942, a twenty-year-old French military trainee burst into Darlan’s headquarters in Algiers and shot him dead. There were suspicions that the U.S. and British secret services had arranged the murder, but nothing was ever proved.

  To replace Darlan, the U.S. military chose a French general named Henri Giraud, who had been captured during the battle for France and, having escaped from a German prison, had allied himself with Vichy. The appointment of Giraud, who continued his predecessor’s persecution of Jews and Vichy opponents, was also extremely unpopular and had little or no Allied support, except within the Roosevelt administration. “Between Giraud and de Gaulle, there is no real choice,” a French resistance leader told Harold Nicolson. “Giraud is not a name at all in France. De Gaulle is more than a name, he is a legend.”

  It was now clear that Roosevelt was fighting a losing battl
e where de Gaulle was concerned. “The people of France will never accept the subordination of General de Gaulle to General Giraud,” Jean Moulin declared. He called for “the rapid setting up of a provisional government in Algiers under the presidency of General de Gaulle, who will remain the sole head of the French Resistance, whatever the result of the negotiations may be.” In addition to the general’s support from France, thousands of Vichy French soldiers in North Africa had switched sides, joining the Free French and making de Gaulle’s movement a much more potent military force.

  Finally bowing, if only a little, to what most people saw as inevitable, Roosevelt acknowledged that de Gaulle could not be wholly excluded from the North Africa government. He authorized de Gaulle’s association with Giraud, who invited his rival to Algiers to share leadership of the new French Committee of National Liberation.

  Yet despite this temporary truce, the venomous duel between FDR and de Gaulle continued, with damaging long-term consequences that still reverberate today.

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  * In addition to the United States, Britain, the Soviet Union, and China, the alliance consisted largely of countries from occupied Europe, the British Commonwealth, and Central and South America.

  Because France was to be the portal for the Allied invasion and liberation of Europe, de Gaulle and his forces were able to defy the two most powerful Western Allies and get away with it. The French general “could afford to irritate British and American statesmen and tell them unpleasant truths to their faces,” Count Edward Raczyński, the Polish ambassador to Britain, wrote after the war. “They might not like it, but they could not afford to abandon either him or France.” The same, Raczyński noted, was not true of his own country, which, with the rest of eastern Europe, was treated by Roosevelt and Churchill “as something secondary, not as a vital interest of their own.”