1000 Years of Annoying the French

by Stephen Clarke

  Churchill and Roosevelt kept de Gaulle out of the loop yet again – wisely, as it happened, because when the Frenchman got wind of a combined British and American landing near Algiers, he told one of his men, ‘I hope that the people of Vichy throw them into the sea.’ As if they were following his orders, French troops fired on the Americans who came to liberate Casablanca before being overrun.

  Unsurprisingly, in January 1943, when the Allied leaders held their conference at Casablanca on the future of Europe and Africa, they were cagey about inviting the volatile de Gaulle, or ‘Joan of Arc’ as they had jokingly taken to calling him.

  Churchill sent a telegram to de Gaulle inviting him to join them for the discussions, but without saying exactly where. Theoretically the Général was still under a travel ban, and subject to an even tighter information blackout. The reply was blunt. De Gaulle refused to discuss the fate of France and French colonies with foreign nations. OK, Churchill and Roosevelt said, in that case we will deal with a more malleable World War One veteran called Henri Giraud, one of de Gaulle’s adversaries in the pre-war arguments about modernizing the French army.

  The threat had the desired effect, and the Général quickly changed his mind.

  When he arrived in Casablanca, he was his usual tetchy self. He pointedly snubbed Giraud – official photos are often cropped to show de Gaulle apparently sitting alone between Churchill and Roosevelt – and said how indignant he was to find American troops everywhere. (Yes, he was reminded, they’re here to stop the Nazis overrunning the place and to keep the Vichy men from shooting you.)

  The conference was carried out in the same spirit as the preliminaries. The Général issued a declaration that ‘I am the Joan of Arc of today’ and must have wondered why he could hear laughter in some quarters. He went on to refuse any talk of power-sharing in Africa and demanded to be flown back to Europe. With a stunning lack of diplomatic tact, he refused to leave in an American plane on the grounds that a US pilot, being a late arrival in the war, would probably land him in Nazi-occupied France by mistake.

  This singular lack of co-operation simply earned de Gaulle yet another bout of naughty-boy punishment. Not only was the travel ban upheld, but his offices were now bugged by the British secret services, which had come to the conclusion that the Général was not interested in the wider war effort, but only in his own political power over France and its empire. Churchill went so far as to describe de Gaulle as ‘Fascist-minded, opportunist, unscrupulous, ambitious to the last degree … his coming to power in the new France would lead to a considerable estrangement between France and the Western democracies’.

  He didn’t know that his prediction would come true well before the war was over.

  * Strictly speaking, France only finished off the Ligne Maginot during the Hitler years – work had actually begun in 1928.

  * Chamberlain is often misquoted as saying ‘peace in our time’, probably because of the line in the Book of Common Prayer, ‘Give us peace in our time, O Lord.’

  * In a way, you could say the same thing about Churchill. A church on a hill does seem to conjure up something profound and unchanging about the peaceful English countryside.

  * He was Lawrence of Arabia’s second cousin.

  * Though surely Churchill’s main motive for secrecy must have been that if de Gaulle had been informed, he would have gone out and asked the local chemist what anti-malarial drugs you needed for a trip to Madagascar.

  † I use the word colony loosely. Morocco and Tunisia were protectorates, while Algeria was actually considered part of France, and all Algerians were (legally speaking) French citizens. However, to the locals of all three countries, the French were les colons.

  26

  World War Two, Part Two

  The Brits protect the Resistance from the French

  Ever since the debacle at Dakar, the Brits had warned de Gaulle about security breaches, but his men in London refused to accept that their codes could be broken. Which was why, almost from the start, the Allied security services resolved to share no sensitive information with the Free French, even if it involved France. The Français were being kept in the dark about Allied goings-on in their own country – it was a situation that would annoy anyone.

  In 1941, the British Special Operations Executive (SOE) had begun setting up Resistance cells within France, using French agents, but had refused to tell de Gaulle where they were or who was running them. De Gaulle came up with the typically French wheeze of centralizing the management of Resistance groups under an umbrella group called the Conseil national de la Résistance, which would have brought them all under his control, but would also have meant that catching one key member of the network would expose absolutely everyone else to mortal danger. As a result, the SOE decided to ignore de Gaulle’s suggestion and run small, independent cells that wouldn’t even know the existence of any other group.

  In the early years of the war, the Resistance was less about blowing up railways and killing Germans – the type of actions that could get innocent hostages killed in reprisals – than smuggling out Allied airmen. Churchill’s prediction about the importance of superiority in the skies had quickly come true, and it was vital that Allied bomber and fighter crews who came down on the wrong side of the Channel should return home safely.

  Active resistance therefore began with a few brave French people risking their lives to hide the men until they could be brought out. They weren’t so much underground fighters as people-smugglers and owners of safe houses, whose addresses would be given to pilots verbally before they left on a mission. Hiding Allied servicemen in their attics, cellars or barns, these ordinary civilians got almost 6,000 airmen, escaped POWs and other stranded troops safely out of France during the war.

  And sad to say, the biggest danger to the escapees and their rescuers was not cracked codes, it was other ordinary French civilians. Because Pétain and his political cronies weren’t the only collaborators.

  There is one foolproof way of exasperating a Frenchman, and that is to mention collaboration. Either he will tut – ‘Oui, oui, it’s all been said before’ – or he will say that it’s lucky Britain and America weren’t put to the test like France was. But there is no getting away from the scale of everyday cooperation between French civilians and their German occupiers.

  A recent article in Britain’s Daily Telegraph pointed out that informing on your neighbours is such a common habit in France that French has two distinct terms for informing on someone. Dénonciation is doing the right thing by giving the authorities information, whereas délation is telling them something you shouldn’t. During the war, the issue became so painful that nowadays both types of informing are taboo in France, which is why there are fewer security cameras in the streets and almost no public appeals to help the police to track down killers and rapists.

  It has been hard for France to come to terms with the fact that, under Nazi occupation, ordinary French men and women informed on their fellow citizens for hiding Allied servicemen, belonging to the Resistance, being Jewish, listening to the BBC or simply saying something unflattering about Pétain. And the first on the scene to investigate these ‘crimes’ were either the French police or the more overtly pro-Nazi paramilitary milice.

  Of course, some ordinary gendarmes did refuse to work under the Nazis – during the war, 338 were executed and 800 deported to Nazi prison camps. But many of them guarded transit camps for prisoners on their way to extermination, and turned Resistance fighters and fugitive servicemen over to the Nazis for inevitable torture and execution.

  Up merde creek without a paddle

  One story illustrates the complex relationship between all these factions. It was a British raid known as Operation Frankton, which was made famous in a 1955 film called The Cockleshell Heroes.

  On 7 December 1942, six two-men canoes were launched from a British submarine called HMS Tuna (a joke, surely – a tin can called ‘Tuna’?) about 15 kilometres off the west coast of F
rance. The team of twelve men was led by a 28-year-old major called Herbie Hasler, who had previously been awarded the French Croix de Guerre for his bravery in support of the Foreign Legion during a mission in Norway. Hasler had planned the almost suicidal Operation Frankton himself. The idea was to canoe up the river Gironde (difficult in summer, almost impossible against the winter tides, especially in canoes that were so small they were nicknamed cockleshells) and sabotage Nazi ships that were lying at anchor in Bordeaux, waiting to take on a cargo of radar equipment to Japan and return with raw materials. Destroying them would also block the harbour and render the port unusable.

  Meanwhile, the submarine was not going to wait around for the twelve men to return. They had more than 100 kilometres to paddle and no one expected them to make it back, their only potential escape route being across country to Spain. The men had been told to go to a village called Ruffec, 160 kilometres northeast of Bordeaux, where, it was said, they could get help. For security reasons, no names or addresses were given, meaning that the survivors would just have to take their chances. And to make things even more perilous, Hitler had recently issued an edict ordering all captured British commandos to be executed as soon as they had been interrogated. They were too dangerous to be left alive.

  In a nut(or cockle)shell, the twelve men had volunteered to give their lives to knock out a vital strategic harbour.

  The operation got off to a catastrophic start. One canoe was damaged as soon as it was launched, and its crew was unable to take part in the mission. Two more of the little boats capsized in the surf at the mouth of the Gironde and two men (George Sheard and David Moffat) drowned; the other two (Samuel Wallace and Robert Ewart) were captured by Nazis as they struggled ashore. The team was already down to half strength and they hadn’t even covered 10 per cent of the journey.

  Paddling upriver by night, without the aid of lights, it was almost inevitable that the remaining three canoes would become separated. One boat got left behind and hit an underwater obstacle on the night of 10–11 December. Its crew, John McKinnon and James Conway, made it ashore and decided to head straight for Spain rather than turning north to Ruffec. They hiked 40 kilometres to a village called Cessac, where a French couple called Jaubert hid them for three days. The Jauberts said that the best way to get to Spain was by train from the town of La Réole, 20 or so kilometres further on. The two men made it to La Réole, but were arrested by French gendarmes and handed over to the Gestapo. It’s easy to imagine the conversation between the commandos and the policemen: ‘But we’re your Allies, you can’t just give us to the Nazis to be shot.’ ‘Sorry, monsieur, but your identity papers are clearly fake, and your French accents are atrocious.’ McKinnon and Conway must have wished they’d learned a few more French swear words before leaving the UK.

  Meanwhile, two canoes were still paddling upriver, their presence unsuspected because the four captured Marines revealed nothing about their mission under interrogation. And in the night of 11–12 December, the two remaining crews clamped their limpet mines to five ships, set the timers and paddled the hell out of there.

  The men now had to hide their canoes and get 160 kilometres across occupied territory to Ruffec. Things got a bit more urgent when, just before dawn, the mines exploded and the Nazis realized that the men they had captured hadn’t been alone. Marines Wallace and Ewart were summarily executed.

  Two of the successful saboteurs, Bert Laver and Bill Mills, managed to get about 60 kilometres to a place called Montlieu-la-Garde before some locals betrayed them to the gendarmes, who also did their duty and delivered the commandos to the Nazis. They too were interrogated, sent to Paris along with McKinnon and Conway, and executed in March 1943.

  Not knowing that they were the only men still at large, Herbie Hasler and his co-paddler Bill Sparks trekked on. They had to beg for food, and were occasionally refused help but never betrayed. On 18 December, they finally got to Ruffec where, not knowing whom to contact, they took a chance and went into a restaurant called La Toque Blanche (the White Chef’s Hat). They struck lucky – the owner, a man called René Mandinaud, was sympathetic and put them in touch with the Resistance ‘pipeline’.

  At this point, a French government website about the Resistance, which tells the story of the mission, suddenly launches into a hail of details. Every person who helped Hasler and Sparks is – quite rightly – named. We learn each one’s profession, how long the fugitives stayed with them, and whom they passed the men on to. We know, for example, the name of the teacher (Monsieur Paille) who interviewed them and confirmed that they were real Brits rather than spies, and that of the woman (Marthe Rullier) who went to alert the Resistance, as well as René Flaud (who drove the men to the Unoccupied Zone in his baker’s van) and the Dubreuille family (who hid them for forty-one days on their farm).

  The final link in the Cockleshell Heroes’ escape chain was an English expat called Mary Lindell, who had married a French count and settled in the southwest of France. When the Nazis arrived, she went back to Britain, but returned to France in 1942 as a Resistance leader with the codename Marie-Claire. It was her eighteen-year-old son Maurice who smuggled Hasler and Sparks to Lyon, where Marie-Claire herself took the two men in hand.

  Her first instruction was that Hasler should shave off his moustache – the blonde Marine looked as French as a Christmas pudding. She also warned him to stay away from the mademoiselles. In her experience, the biggest danger to escaping servicemen was their eye for the ladies, which would make them forget even rudimentary security. And she was right to be careful – just a few months later, she was wounded during a mission and sent to Ravensbrück concentration camp. She survived captivity, but one of her sons did not.

  Following Mary Lindell’s ‘pipeline’ of safe houses, Hasler and Sparks went to Marseille, Perpignan and finally over the border into Spain. Posing as tramps, they made their way to the British consulate in Barcelona, and both of them eventually got back to Britain safely via Gibraltar.

  Of the ten paddlers who died, two drowned, two were captured directly by the Nazis and four were betrayed. In short, for men on a mission to save France from Nazi Occupation, just being seen by a French civilian – especially a gendarme – was twice as dangerous as canoeing through icy waves in the middle of a winter’s night. It’s probably a statistic that the French would prefer to forget.

  What did you do in the war, Jean-Paul?

  The moral conflicts in occupied France were great material for French writers, and those with a political conscience immediately took up their pen against the Nazis. A group of them created the publishing house Les Éditions de Minuit (Midnight Editions), which began distributing its books hand to hand to avoid censorship. Big literary guns like Louis Aragon, Paul Éluard and François Mauriac went underground and relinquished fame and royalties in favour of being read by a few people who could be trusted to pass the books on to friends instead of handing them over to the gendarmes.

  Les Éditions du Minuit published books with titles like Chroniques interdites (Forbidden Chronicles) – a selection of banned texts – and L’Honneur des poètes, which speaks for itself. Print runs were small for obvious reasons, and although the company survived after the war, it spent many years on the verge of bankruptcy because of its refusal to accept Nazi or Vichy money.

  On the other side of the coin were French writers who came out as overtly pro-Nazi – Louis-Ferdinand Céline, the author of the classic novel Voyage au bout de la nuit (Journey to the End of the Night), revealed himself as an anti-Semitic maniac, making statements in favour of deporting and killing anyone with one Jewish grandparent. Only slightly less dubious was Jean Cocteau, who claimed to be apolitical, but had influential friends in the Nazi regime to make sure he was never troubled.

  Others simply sat on the fence, not overtly collaborating, but remaining ambiguously silent. The two most famous of these were Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir.

  This revered pair of intellectuals are regarded
in modern-day France as untouchables – Sartre because he was arrested on the barricades during the uprising of May 1968,* and de Beauvoir for her seminal feminist book,Le Deuxième Sexe.

  Many French people won’t hear a word against them, but this is an extreme case of denial, because for most of the Occupation the pair kept their heads down and actually prospered under Nazi rule. Both were practically unknown before 1940, and rose to prominence in the talent vacuum of Nazi Paris – with a large proportion of the literary establishment in exile or underground, it was far easier to get published, and far more likely that their books would be read.

  Sartre and de Beauvoir were anything but naïve or stupid, and must have known that French publishers had signed a collective self-censorship agreement with the Nazis, guaranteeing that no seditious literature would threaten the status quo of the Occupation. Any ‘dangerous’ writers simply wouldn’t be published through traditional channels, and to circulate unofficial anti-Nazi reading matter was a severely punished crime.

  Sartre had begun the war in the French army, but was captured by the advancing Nazis in 1940 and sent to a POW camp in the west of Germany. There he became the head of the escape committee and risked his life several times helping his fellow prisoners to tunnel out and join de Gaulle’s army in Britain … No, actually he didn’t do that at all. What he did was write a play and then get himself released and sent home back to France, claiming that his bad eyesight affected his balance. This could, of course, be interpreted as a clever escape ruse, but members of the Resistance would later find his easy release highly suspect.

  A free man again, Sartre accepted a teaching job at a Paris lycée that had become vacant because a Jewish teacher had been forced to quit – an embarrassing fact that was kept quiet until a French magazine revealed it in 1997.