1000 Years of Annoying the French

by Stephen Clarke

  But their reactions to the situation were very different. Britain was disturbed by France’s eternal anti-German belligerence and felt rather guilty about the vengefulness of the Treaty of Versailles, while France was aghast at Britain’s apparently short memory. Meanwhile, America wisely decided to stay out of all this old-fashioned European posturing – it was just recovering from the Depression and didn’t need a war to bankrupt it again.

  All of which explains why the Munich Conference in September 1938, between France, Britain, Italy and Germany, was such a farce.

  The motive for the summit was that Hitler wanted international permission to ‘repossess’ the Sudetenland, a mainly German-speaking region that had become part of Czechoslovakia after World War One. The French Premier, Edouard Daladier, was all for saying non, and warned Britain’s PM, Neville Chamberlain, that ‘if the Western powers capitulate, they will only hasten the war they wish to avoid’. Daladier even predicted that Hitler was aiming for a ‘domination of the continent in comparison with which the ambitions of Napoleon were feeble’. Quite something, coming from a Frenchman.

  Chamberlain, though, dearly wanted to believe Hitler’s assurances that once Germany had taken the Sudetenland, everything would become peaceful again. The 69-year-old old-school Englishman had already been to visit Hitler at his alpine hangout in Berchtesgaden (taking an aeroplane for the first time in his life) and returned to London announcing that they had had a ‘friendly’ talk. He told Daladier that Hitler was sincere, and actually persuaded the Frenchman not to oppose the Führer’s ‘one last invasion’ request.

  The conference itself, which took place in Munich on 29 September 1938, was therefore a mere rubber-stamping session. The British and French delegations hadn’t even met to discuss their strategy. The photos taken just before the agreement was signed show Chamberlain resembling a cross between a tailor’s dummy and a startled chicken, Daladier looking as if someone is about to shoot him (which, politically, they were), Mussolini unsure whether to burp or pout, and Hitler a picture of pure serenity. It was a shotgun wedding at which France and Britain were the brides, and Hitler the groom with a prior agreement to use the honeymoon tickets to take his best man, Mussolini, to Las Vegas. (In separate bedrooms, of course.)

  Worse still, from the French point of view, next morning Chamberlain had a private meeting with Hitler at which they co-signed a non-aggression pact that didn’t even mention France.

  Chamberlain then flew home to Heston aerodrome near London (later used as a base for Hurricanes, Spitfires and B17 bombers), which was where he famously waved his ‘peace for our time’* letter, the scrap of paper signed by Hitler that morning. Pointedly excluding his supposed French allies, Chamberlain spoke to the assembled crowd: ‘We regard the agreement signed last night … as symbolic of the desire of our two peoples never to go to war with one another again.’ The Brits and Germans, he promised, were going to work together ‘to ensure the peace of Europe’. Later that day, he made another speech telling everyone to go and sleep soundly in their beds. Less than a year later, the same people would be sleeping much less soundly in bomb shelters.

  It is very easy to glower back with perfect hindsight, of course. In archive film footage, Chamberlain looks like a nice old man who wants everyone to be friends. But as he is making his optimistic speech at Heston, there is a younger man in the background, a reporter or plain-clothes policeman perhaps, looking sceptical, not joining in any of the cheers or applause. He was one of the men who would soon be doing the fighting.

  On the other side of the Channel, Daladier, like Chamberlain, returned home from Munich to a hero’s welcome. His reaction, though, was less rosy-eyed. Looking out at the cheering crowds, he apparently told an aide, ‘Ah, les cons.’ The twats.

  And when Hitler invaded Poland less than a year later and Chamberlain announced that Britain and Germany weren’t going to have any more friendly talks for a while, there was a resounding cry from French politicians of ‘we told you so’. Not that Daladier got much of a chance to scoff. In 1940 he was arrested by the pro-Nazi French regime, and later sent to Buchenwald concentration camp. He was one of the few prisoners who survived.

  A quick outing to France

  Dunkirk was never a peaceful place. Like its sister town of Calais just along the coast, it has been fought over for centuries, and changed hands countless times. Dunkerque, to give it its real French name, actually had three owners in one day on 25 June 1658. In the morning, it was under Spanish control, and then it surrendered to a besieging army of Frenchmen, before Louis XIV gave the town to Oliver Cromwell as a goodnight present. France finally bought the title deeds back from King Charles II of England in 1662 for around £320,000 (the current price of a small farmhouse in the region). In World War One, the Germans tried to take the town, sending Zeppelins to bomb the Dunkerquois into submission, but it held out and became a vital supply port for the Allies.

  So it probably felt like business as usual when the Second World War swept over the town and made its name for ever synonymous with British pluckiness – or, in French eyes, British cowardice and desertion.

  Britain and France didn’t go into war the best of allies, and started out just as they had done in 1914, with a joint catastrophe.

  The army that was shipped across to prevent Hitler from invading France was called the British Expeditionary Force (the same name as the small bunch of soldiers sent to get a beating in the autumn of 1914). The karma could hardly have been worse if they had been called The King’s Own Royal Losers.

  This force of just under 400,000 men, most of them carrying World War One weapons and less ammunition than the average hunter takes on a rabbiting trip, arrived in late 1939 to play their part in the French army’s master plan for defending its borders against attack from the east, helping to plug the gap between the Maginot Line and the Channel coast.

  And France’s ploy worked after a fashion – when the Germans began Blitzkrieging westwards on 10 May 1940, the Maginot Line wasn’t breached, because the Nazis simply ignored it and entered France by the side door. The Panzer tanks swept through the Ardennes hills (which the French had claimed to be impregnable) and encircled the British and French troops who had been waiting for an attack further north.

  This Blitzkrieg army wasn’t the all-new, 100 per cent stainless-steel cutting force that popular myth has remembered. The front edge was made up of new tanks and dive bombers, but behind them came the same plodding First World War-type infantry that the French and Brits possessed. The trouble was that the Blitzkrieg machines scattered everyone before them, sending their confused opponents reeling backwards before the more vulnerable German troops came within range.

  The French, needless to say, wanted to dig in and defend Paris, but the Brits quickly saw the way things were going. Winston Churchill – who had taken over as leader of the wartime government the day the Nazi attack began – decided that having practically the whole of Britain’s regular army stuck in a POW camp would not be of use to anyone. Now was the time for the French to ‘look after their own safety’, as he’d put it.

  So, on 26 May 1940, barely two weeks into the campaign, Churchill told his men to come home. However, he neglected to inform his hosts that their visitors were leaving, and the French fought on, thinking that they were covering a strategic British retreat with a view to making a stand on the Channel coast. When the French found out what was really going on, they were understandably angry, especially because the Brits had blocked roads so that no one, friend or foe, could follow them.

  The evacuation from Dunkirk began on 27 May, with only 7,000-odd Brits being loaded on to waiting naval ships that day. The Ministry of War saw that this wasn’t going to be enough, and sent out a plea to private boat owners to join the flotilla. The next day, civilian vessels came teeming across the Channel. Over the course of nine hellish days, soldiers trooped down to the beaches and jetties, often having to queue for hours in shoulder-deep water as shells and bombs chur
ned up the sand and sea around them. The shallow-bottomed civilian boats had to manoeuvre inshore under intense fire and haul the exhausted troops on board, filling every square inch of deck, cabin and hold before they set off, either to shuttle men out to larger ships offshore or to head straight back to England with their priceless cargo. As well as some 200 military vessels, over 700 small craft, including private yachts, trawlers and river Thames pleasure boats, made the Channel crossing once or more. In all, some 200 boats were sunk during the rescue operation.

  The Brits think of the Dunkirk evacuation the same way that France remembers the Taxis de la Marne, the fleet of cabs that ferried French reinforcements out to repel the German army that was advancing towards Paris in 1914. But, as we saw in Chapter 24, the French are always keen to remind the Brits that their taxis were taking men in to attack, whereas the Dunkirk boats carried out a massive retreat – a desertion, even – leaving the heroically battling French army to its fate.

  This is not entirely fair. As soon as the main force of Brits were on their way back home, the boats started loading up with Frenchmen, and eventually got almost 140,000 of them out safely. In addition, thousands of Brits stayed on in France to fight a hopeless rearguard action, defending both the French and British escape, and only surrendering when they ran out of ammunition or their French commanders waved the white flag. These Brits spent the rest of the war as POWs, and their self-sacrifice wasn’t even mentioned in Allied news reports of the time because it would have been bad for morale.

  Instead, on 4 June Churchill made his battling Dunkirk speech to the House of Commons, proving despite his lisp that he, rather than the old softie Chamberlain, was the man for the job. And although the speech annoyed the French for a reason that will become clearer in a moment, this must be one of the greatest pieces of political rhetoric ever. You can listen to it on the internet, and the unwavering voice from seventy years ago still stirs up the emotions.

  First, Churchill gives a breathtakingly lucid analysis of the reasons for the Nazis’ success. ‘The great French army was very largely cast back and disturbed by the onrush of a few thousands of armoured vehicles,’ he says. A few days into the fighting, and already the Blitzkrieg held no more secrets.

  Churchill concedes that Dunkirk ‘is a colossal military disaster … We must be very careful not to assign to this deliverance the attributes of a victory. Wars are not won by evacuations.’ But, he adds, ‘there was a victory inside this deliverance’ – the RAF had won the battle in the skies, protecting the beaches and the escape fleet from potentially disastrous air attack. Churchill predicts that the success of Britain’s defence against invasion will hang on this completely new tactical weapon: the aeroplane. The first real fighting of the war has just begun and he has got it all worked out.

  The speech climaxes with the oft-quoted catalogue of places where the Nazis could expect to meet British resistance:

  … we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, 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.

  He has come a very, very long way since the ‘More tea, vicar?’ days, and the brilliant thing about the speech, apart from its pure morale-boosting toughness, was that it confirmed everything that both the Germans and the French thought about Britain.

  The Nazis really were afraid of setting foot in Britain and unleashing the kind of ferocious, house-by-house opposition that was the complete opposite of their dash through France. Dunkirk had shown what individual, civilian Brits were capable of, and Churchill had put their spirit into words.

  The French, meanwhile, were thinking: Those Anglais are only concerned about their own little island – as usual. If a Frenchman had been listening carefully, he would have heard the words ‘we shall fight in France’ slipped in just before the mention of seas and oceans, but he probably wouldn’t have believed them. No one expected a British army to come rushing back across the Channel just yet – it’s probably the only false note in the whole speech.

  And if they hadn’t had more pressing things to worry about, some French military historians would also have been calling copyright lawyers, because they would have recognized the theme of the speech. Churchill, a highly aware military historian himself, had clearly borrowed it from France’s former leader, Georges Clemenceau, who had motivated his troops in World War One by promising them: ‘We will fight in front of Paris, we will fight in Paris, we will fight behind Paris.’ Yet even the most patriotic French soldier would have had to admit that Churchill had taken what sounds like someone reading from a grammar book and turned it into a rabble-rousing tear-jerker.

  Meanwhile, somewhere in France, in between attempts to evacuate himself and his family to Britain, a very tall Frenchman was gasping with outrage and telling everyone: ‘But that was my idea!’

  Back in the 1920s and 1930s, General Charles de Gaulle had been one of the earliest proponents of mechanized warfare. He had opposed the construction of the Maginot Line as an outdated concept, and been ignored. He had long been calling for France to spend its money on tanks and aeroplanes, and the Nazis had stolen his proposal and thrown it back in his face. He had been proved horribly right, and now Churchill was claiming the credit for his analysis of the way war was evolving. Not only that, the Englishman was suggesting that deserting France was a victory. It was almost like a conspiracy between the French-hating Germans and the sneaky, self-obsessed Anglais.

  De Gaulle was an angry, bitter man – and he was on his way to London.

  The Frenchest of Frenchmen

  Charles André Joseph Marie de Gaulle was born on 22 November 1890, the son of a minor aristocrat – hence the ‘de’. It was a name that was to stand the Général in very good stead because it was so perfectly French. ‘Charles of Gaul’ sounds like an ancient king from the days of resistance against the Roman invaders (which was a failed resistance but is remembered as a heroic one nevertheless, like so many French military campaigns). If the name hadn’t existed, it could have been invented for a character in the Astérix comics.*

  The boy Charles was brought up a strict Catholic (he had been christened one, too – note the inclusion of both Joseph and Mary in his list of first names), and destined for a military career. He studied at Saint-Cyr, the military school founded by Napoleon.

  De Gaulle served in World War One as an officer under Marshal Pétain (the future pro-Nazi collaborator), and was wounded five times before being made a POW at Verdun in 1916. After the war, under Pétain’s guidance, he wrote a military history, La France et son armée, with no mention of Waterloo.

  In short, it would have been hard to find a Frencher Frenchman.

  Not that de Gaulle realized this yet. When he arrived in London as a refugee on 16 June 1940, he must have been taken aback to find that he was suddenly the number-one Français in town. He popped up like the sole repatriated passenger of a bankrupt airline who realizes that it’s up to him to rally public opinion and get the stranded tourists out of Corfu airport – and who also sees the chance to get free air travel for life.

  He was in the right place at the right time. Ten days or so previously he had been made a member of the crisis government as France realized that his modern warfare theories might be useful after all. But all the other senior men in the government had stayed at home to capitulate. Most French politicians were as good as saying that the fight was over, and Paris had been offered up as an ‘open city’, meaning that it was surrendering to the Nazis without a struggle so as to preserve its historic monuments. Meanwhile, the French navy was refusing to sail to British-held ports to ensure that its ships wouldn’t be press-ganged into the Nazi battle fleet.

  And then on 17 June Pétain made a radio announcement that was the diametric opposite of Churchill’s rousing speech. ‘It is with a heavy he
art that I say to you today that you must stop fighting,’ he told his troops. ‘I contacted our opponent last night to ask if he would be willing, amongst soldiers, after an honourable struggle, to seek a way of ending hostilities.’

  No armistice had been agreed by the Nazis, no conditions set, but Pétain was giving up.

  The French troops immediately began laying down their arms, and around one million offered themselves to the Nazis as prisoners of war. About 100,000 of these had been evacuated from Dunkirk, and had returned to France after a short stay in England.

  The surrender was a key moment in Anglo-French relations, as important as Agincourt, Waterloo or even Dunkirk (yes, two key moments in a single month – it was an intense time). Churchill had announced that the Brits were for fighting on (albeit from the safety of their own island, having left the French in the merde) and now the arch Anglophobe Pétain was saying non merci.

  In a way, France was also showing that Paris was the centre of their universe. There had been plans to regroup Allied forces in the west and use ports like Brest and Bordeaux as bases for a British-aided fightback. De Gaulle himself had suggested evacuating French troops to the territories in Africa and the Middle East, and then launching an invasion of France. There were already hundreds of thousands of unconquered French and colonial troops out there, ready to fight.

  But no, unlike in 1914, when they had mobilized old men and taxis to sweep the Germans off their doorstep, the Parisians had decided that it was all over. Hitler was going to take Notre-Dame, the Champs-Élysées and the all-important cafés on the boulevard Saint-Germain, so there was nothing left worth fighting for.