Weller's War

by George Weller

  Jointly Mark First Birthday of Liberty Tomorrow on Banks of Congo

  Brazzaville, French Equatorial Africa—August 26, 1941

  A rivalry native to the chilly lowlands of Flanders and northern France is being buried by the banks of the mighty Congo near the equator tomorrow, when liberated France and the unmolested Belgian Congo celebrate together the first birthday of Free French Africa.

  Across the two-mile eddying expanse of Stanley Pool, above where the Congo is forced into a bottleneck of rapids so terrible they are still unconquered, the dusty little cities of Léopoldville and Brazzaville, whose white inhabitants number hardly 6000 against a total of nearly 100,000 blacks, face each other. They are the headquarters for most of what remains free of France and Belgium.

  Here on the watershed of the wild crystal mountains the relations of old Europe are reversed. Each little capital is named in honor of its founding father, the Belgian for Leopold I, grandfather of today's prisoner king, and the French for Count de Brazza, Stanley's intrepid rival. Although Léopoldville—Brussels on the Congo—represents a smaller European country, it is bigger, more ornate and more pretentious than Brazzaville—Paris on the Congo. Neither is large enough to shut out the green wilderness around the brutal river flowing between them.

  Each city extends about four miles along the riverbank. Each is fringed by native encampments, airports, hospitals and wireless stations. But the Congo is broader than either narrow strip of civilization. The current races between them faster than an automobile can traverse either city.

  Only about 28,000 Belgians—less than the number of immigrants the United States absorbed from Europe during a single month at the height of the refugee exodus—rule some 12,000,000 blacks. They have taken over the shipment of vital supplies to the Allies as their responsibility and are content not to need a de Gaulle as an emblem of unremitting battle.

  Among the colonial men and women in sun helmets on the streets of both Léopoldville and Brazzaville, the charge by France's former Premier Paul Reynaud that Leopold III laid down his arms without being beaten has now been buried and forgotten. Both parties are prepared to admit King Leopold's innocence. Such forgiveness has not been easy because for years the French and Belgians, in their frankest moments, used kinship of language to criticize each other with the same candor, sometimes acerbity, as Americans and Canadians.

  Free France's birthday finds both in the same position of following Great Britain's marching tune because Britain is intact and has veto control over all American arms assignments, without which neither can fight. Finding himself obliged to carry on the war strictly upon British lines, both the Frenchman and the Belgian has found tolerance in seeing a cousin in the same position.

  Even celebrating de Gaulle Day, Brazzaville seems more of an African city and Léopoldville more European. Even more, Léopoldville resembles Mississippi River towns of the Deep South. Its single large hotel reaches four stories. Although a government seat and headquarters of would-be tourist traffic, it is actually a business center operating a handful of large corporations that own the Congo commercially, with a fleet of American taxis to conquer its enormous distances.

  Brazzaville, smaller, is more picturesque and more military in tone, content with its “push-push” monocycle rickshaws using two native runners.

  Both cities have responsibilities far beyond their dimensions and even when they are putting on their brightest show, the Congo seems mightier than either. At six in the evening, when the bluish autumnal dusk ends the twelve-hour equatorial day and the sun drops like a burning orange behind the hills, the 25-foot launches to take Europeans and natives alike across the spinning whirlpools cease running, fearful that in the darkness they may be swept into the rapids. After ten even telephone conversation between tropical France and Belgium is severed and the Congo splits this miniature African Axis until morning.

  With Brazzaville celebrating and Léopoldville helping, the trans-river traffic now has mounted to two launches hourly, which is the equivalent of a traffic rush. Each side's Ellis Island consists merely of an official in shorts, studying a book resembling a hotel register, under the veranda of a small cottage with a pair of native soldiers to help him. All persons crossing the river sign this book.

  In the waterside customs houses both apply regulations with a severity and thoroughness as though this were Central Europe. The war has heightened the Congo's closed door policy and it is far easier for harassed Europeans to enter the U.S.A. than the relatively unpopulated and unexplored Belgian and French Congos.

  Both sides are especially watchful against Vichy spies. Long ago all provincial maps of the Congo and French Equatorial Africa were collected from the bookstores by military authorities. Today it is impossible to buy even a large-scale map of Africa in either Congo capital.

  THE GENERAL CHANGED HIS MIND

  1944

  It is doubtful if a newspaperman remembers any event more sharply than his original loss of innocence. For a reporter, particularly in politics, his own descent from the mount of belief and entrance into the valley of distrust (whence few travelers return, because the going is easier) retains a bitter sweetness he likes to savor again. As paratroopers recall their first jump, as schoolgirls remember their first kiss, as lawyers argue again their first case, the newspaperman remembers the day he found out that men can be liars. The pain is gone now, and understanding has decanted some of the indignation. But still he feels a wry tug, remembering when the world caved in—the day a man told him a story to publish, then repudiated it.

  How can a man say a thing today and tomorrow deny that he has said it? This is a mystery, at least it is to a newspaperman until it happens to him. If the denial is equivocal, with many an “I said” and “You made me say,” and the writer is young and conscientious, he will argue out the affair with himself abed, till weariness puts his shredded mind finally to sleep. But if the denial is bold, flat and unequivocal—if the statesman or the cinema star or the military man baldly repudiates in public what both the journalist and himself know he issued for publication—then the shock is great. Now he lies sleepless until morning, and dawn finds him a different man.

  “Confidence,” the French say, “is a plant which does not sprout a second time.” Yet it is a callow scribe who allows his bitterness to be permanent. The intelligent one understands that this is the upturn in his career. Until today he was only a journalist; he believed in ethics. Now he has become a newspaperman. He believes in people … people whose ethics he knows.

  This writer's tumble into maturity occurred in French Equatorial Africa.

  Mobile governments often have “old” and “new” capitals. Brazzaville, the old capital of France's Fourth Republic, is the first capital of the regime of General Charles de Gaulle—a torpid town of yellowish plaster houses beside the muddy Congo, just above the toothy white rapids discovered by Stanley. The Congo is here the boundary between France and Belgium, the colonies properly called Afrique Equatoriale Française and Congo Belge. The opposite Belgian capital, with speeding muddy river between, is Léopoldville.

  On both sides, tugged with tight hawsers against the riverbank, lie gaunt paddlewheel steamers, Mississippi-built and Congo-assembled. These steamers go on month-long journeys up the Congo and Ubangi. A smell of smoke drifts pleasantly through the air, and the black women of Brazzaville and Léopoldville, draped in gaudy cottons, bend over washing stones on each side of the racing brown flood and pound and slap and scrub with trading soap and pound again.

  Two gasoline launches bear passengers between the two capitals of empire from six o'clock in the morning, which is dawn on the equator, to six in the evening, which is sunset. Then the capitals are cut off from each other. The honorific choice of Brazzaville by de Gaulle as his capital did not make the slightest difference.

  One dark night de Gaulle's predecessor, the Vichy governor of French Equatorial Africa, straitjacketed in blankets, was bundled across the river after a coup de main
jointly prepared by British and de Gaullist agents on the Belgian side. This snatch called for a special motorboat to cross the Congo after the cocktail hour. Otherwise the routine dominated by the great brown river was undisturbed by the coming of de Gaulle to Central Africa.

  Above French soil rose the webby tall towers of the voice of France. Through this radio station alone, of all those in the world, the tall general could speak his mind. In London and Cairo he had to submit to the censorship of the British, who were paying the costs of his political administration and keeping a correspondingly close watch. This dependence on Britain approximated that of Haile Selassie, similarly inhibited in Addis Ababa, but with the important difference that in Brazzaville de Gaulle was free.

  De Gaulle lived in a suitcase. His life was a constant V-for-Victory three-way shuttle 8000 miles long: Cairo-Brazzaville-London, then back again London-Brazzaville-Cairo. Unpopular with Britons, frequently irked by them, the general must often have felt, seeing the tempting antennae of free speech soaring above his own French capital, an impulse to tell the world his intensely patriotic hopes and troubles. He knew the consequences. If he spoke his thoughts today in Brazzaville he would have to answer for whatever he said in London or Cairo within the week.

  The Congo town was a symbolic rather than a real capital. De Gaulle spent little time there. While other overrun empires like the Dutch and Belgian were content to have their administrative headquarters in London, since the uninvaded portions of their empires were too remote, being on French soil was important to the general. Brazzaville was little, hot and dirty; it was clique-ridden, poor, uncertain. But it was France and it was his own.

  At this time the United States had neither entered the war nor recognized the de Gaulle regime. American recognition of [Marshal Philippe] Pétain was sustained by a game of bluff and counter-bluff Vichy was a kind of buffer state between the Germans and the Americans. Their mutual recognition of Vichy kept them both, though actually already at war, frozen in a neutral pose, like boxers divided by a referee in an old-fashioned sporting print. Germany wanted time to beat Russia, America wanted time to tool up for war. The silver cup was Northwest Africa; each power was ready to make war as soon as the other reached for it. Neither America nor Germany foresaw that Japan would push them into war before either was ready.

  In supporting Britain the United States was supporting de Gaulle. Churchill supplied him headquarters in London and Cairo, and money for the salaries of his officers and men, thus controlling him politically. British credits in the U.S. were exhausted, but there was enough on hand to keep going the tall leader of the fallen ally, and uphold the old entente cordiale.

  Of the American lend-lease arms supplied to the British, a small trickle went to de Gaulle. It was nothing like the heavy stream that would eventually flow, but it whetted the general's dry throat. After the Americans entered the war the British retained financial control of the Free French army, while the Americans completely outfitted one French division after another by lend-lease.

  While Brazzaville was capital of Free France, the vastness of Northwest Africa was in Vichy hands, with German plainclothes men and Gestapo watching the same “neutrality” which American consuls were also overseeing. The southern Sahara and the humid little French mandates of the Gulf of Guinea were the line between Vichy and de Gaulle. At the same time all de Gaulle was divided into three parts: Central Africa, the Middle East and London.

  The general chafed under unilateral British control. His American aid was coming through British brokerage, closely safeguarded. He wanted more American support and he wanted it directly.

  In the relation between America, Britain and the Soviet Union, de Gaulle has always tried to work a little more closely with the rising member. Because the other two powers must come to terms with the ascendant power, they must come to terms with de Gaulle. The United States was the rising force, for Russia was reeling back before Hitler's armor and the British were barely holding out in the desert while awaiting more American tanks and aircraft.

  De Gaulle decided to do exactly what Britain had in the period before lend-lease: to make the United States an offer of strategic advantage for her coming participation in the war. Churchill had offered Roosevelt a ninety-nine-year lease on certain Atlantic bases in return for fifty four-stack destroyers of the old Atlantic Fleet. De Gaulle decided to make Roosevelt a similar offer, but go one step farther. He would offer the United States bases beyond the Atlantic—bases in Africa.

  In some respects the offer was more attractive than Churchill's. American participation in the war was certain. Already American freighters were unloading lease-lend aircraft at British ports in the armpit of western Africa. These aircraft were flying across the Chad—first of the African colonies to go de Gaullist—to the Sudan and Middle East. To fly the same route, would the Americans not welcome ports of entry under their own supervision? As well as naval bases in the Gulf of Guinea to meet the submarine menace and prepare to strike Dakar? As soon as Hitler got himself unencumbered in Russia, he would edge across to French Northwest Africa, and then where would an American expeditionary force land?

  So de Gaulle began formulating his offer. It was of the greatest importance that this step, taken as leader of Free France and without Churchill's knowledge, should succeed. If it failed, if Roosevelt ignored or neglected the offer, de Gaulle would be exposed without support between the mighty Anglo-American opposites.

  If Roosevelt accepted the offer London would probably go along in the interest of unity. Acceptance of African bases would be an American step toward war, hence in the British interest. If Roosevelt refused, de Gaulle would be out on a cracking limb. Without having gained new support, he would have shown his wish to gain more independence of the old. Churchill would not put him overboard, but he was sure to be displeased. “Whose bread I eat, his song I sing,” goes the proverb.

  Any French statesman (except possibly Pétain) would have considered the risk fair and the offer sound and reasonable. Storm flags rode over Africa as submarine sinkings increased. Washington was wondering whether the Atlantic Fleet would have to storm the new, reinforced Dakar and take it by surprise. In the United States the unchangingly large body of Francophiles were pressing hard for Secretary of State Cordell Hull to drop Vichy and recognize de Gaulle. The general had not yet taken Washington, but New York was his.

  At this time the British were as reluctant as Roosevelt later became to grant Free France easy recognition. Churchill had not even broken with Vichy, and his confidence in de Gaulle was less than whole. But if the Americans recognized de Gaulle he would have powerful backing, making him even more difficult to handle in the Middle East. Was this desirable? Free France, weak but enterprising, would be able to establish that genteel rivalry between great supporters which has more than once benefited the small and dependent.

  De Gaulle was discreet. He did not fly to Washington. Instead, he made his offer to a State Department officer in the Middle East five months before Pearl Harbor. His offer was ignored. Perhaps de Gaulle's equivocal status caused the snub. Perhaps Washington did not wish to offend Britain by accepting. Perhaps Roosevelt and Hull concluded it was more valuable to dangle Pétain, thus keeping the French fleet immobilized and the Nazis from seizing Northwest Africa.

  De Gaulle waited a few days in the Middle East for a definite answer. Then, impatient, he resolved on a bold expedient. As he had gone over the head of the British government to offer the bases to the United States, so he would go over the head of the American government (which kept the offer secret) and reveal his bid to the American people. With the future American armies already being mobilized for battle in Europe, but the Atlantic war unwon, the advantage of possessing secure African bases would be unmistakable. And he hoped that his offer would add power to his plea for a break with Vichy and formal recognition of Free France.

  For de Gaulle to reach the American public was not easy. Cairo and London outlets were cut off by British politica
l censorship. His offer would have to come from Brazzaville, the only capital where he was supreme. A special broadcast was impossible; lacking the American tubes that had still not arrived, the Congo phone transmitter could be heard only with freakish rarity in North America. … Nor could the announcement be too bold. Nothing like an “open message” would do. The offer had to come out casually, to offend the British as little as possible.

  The foreign newspapermen who had visited Brazzaville during the war could be counted on the fingers of one hand. A few had sped through en route to or from the Middle East on the flying boats of the Lagos-Congo-Lake Victoria-Nile run. But neither the American news agencies nor the newspapers maintaining foreign services considered it worthwhile to place a correspondent in either French or Belgian Congos. De Gaulle did not dare make an official announcement through the Free French news agency; its British sources of revenue would dry up instantly. The ideal circumstance for the general's launching of his first trial balloon would have been to find in Brazzaville an itinerant American newspaperman representing a journal of good repute, and to send him aloft.

  Such a test aeronaut was precisely what de Gaulle found waiting when, late in August of 1941, he arrived from Cairo to celebrate Brazzaville's first birthday as capital of the legitimate empire. The Chicago Daily News, one of the oldest foreign syndicates in the United States, published in more newspapers than any other non-agency service in the world, had sent a correspondent to Brazzaville to write about the Free French and if possible to interview de Gaulle.

  In celebration of the same fête the Flying Wing, a highly experimental plane without fuselage, in which a dozen passengers could sit parallel in the thickened wing, arrived in Brazzaville piloted by Jimmy Mollison to become the flagship of the Free French Air Force. A British firm stopped production after two Flying Wings. Even unpious pilots blessed themselves before they put their hands on the controls. Since few officials in the Congo were interested in previewing the aerial future, the Chicago newspaperman, while awaiting de Gaulle's arrival, had been able to go on the plane's baptismal essay over the Congo. He found a quarter hour's experience exhilarating but unsettling. He had no apprehension whatever that he would shortly accompany de Gaulle himself on a transatlantic ballooning mission of an even more tentative and experimental nature.