by Conrad Black
Conditions were now so desperate that it was almost every man for himself among the three national leaders. Churchill was asking King to impress upon Roosevelt the need to help Britain be the first line of American defence. Roosevelt was asking King to rouse the dominions to demand that Britain fight to the finish and then send its navy to the United States, and King was happy to be a go-between for two great men at the head of great powers at a supreme moment of history, but refused to be the bearer of Roosevelt’s initial message. King wrote in his diary on May 26 that “I would rather die than do aught to save ourselves or any part of this continent at the expense of Britain.” Compromiser though he was by nature, in this immense crisis King was no less determined than Churchill, though he was not as eloquent. He refused to try to influence the dominions, who would immediately impute to him the role of American lackey, and he reluctantly entertained the thought that Roosevelt was just trying to prop up a potentially indefensible Britain as an obstacle to Hitler and inherit the Royal Navy if British resistance were overcome. He sent Keenleyside back to clarify whether Roosevelt wanted his message conveyed to Churchill directly or via the other dominions. Keenleyside returned, after conveying to Roosevelt King’s suggestion that recommendations of this gravity should be made by the president to the British ambassador in Washington. He also told Roosevelt that if the president did not wish to communicate directly with the British, King would do it, but either for Roosevelt or on his own behalf, but not as part of any plan to mobilize the Commonwealth, which would be dismissed at once as the American scheme that it was. He was the junior member of the trio, but King was much too intelligent to play such an unseemly role as Roosevelt tried to give him.4
The Belgians surrendered to Germany without notice on May 28, leaving the continuing Allied combatants even more exposed. The British, French, and Canadians struggled with great courage and tenacity to make an orderly retreat to Dunkirk and to build that port into a redoubt. The seas were calm and the Royal Navy was historically unchallengeable in these waters. Churchill ordered heavy reinforcements on sea and in the air, and the Royal Air Force more than held its own with the Luftwaffe, though it was outnumbered, and about a thousand craft of all sizes and descriptions, yachts, tugs, ferries, and passenger ships, were mobilized, and these moved the stranded soldiers out constantly from May 28 to June 4, evacuating an astounding 338,000 men, including 100,000 French. The Germans took 40,000 prisoners and all the heavy equipment had to be left behind, but it was an inspiriting delivery of the cream of the British Army. The British had knocked out about four German aircraft for every loss of their own, though a significant number of the German planes were relatively vulnerable bombers. As this drama unfolded before the entire world, Churchill, sustained by the now-dying Chamberlain in the war cabinet, prevailed over the cautious Halifax, swayed the Labour Party members Attlee and Greenwood, and won official, open-ended approval, supported by Parliament, the king, and national opinion, for a policy of total and permanent resistance.
Keenleyside came back again from Washington on May 29 – with the evacuations from northern France to Britain already underway – with Roosevelt’s request that King send as much of the U.S. message as he could justify sending to Churchill on King’s own account, and that Roosevelt would follow himself in a few days if Churchill did not flare up uncontrollably. On May 31, King, in perhaps the most important missive of his very long and eventful career, sent Churchill his own formulation as the motley evacuation fleet, protected by large contingents of the Royal Navy and Air Force, continued to take off the expeditionary forces and their French comrades at Dunkirk. He wrote that Roosevelt felt the fall of France a distinct possibility and an early attack on Britain by Germany from the air in heavy strength also a possibility. In those circumstances, while there was every reason to hope for British success, there was a possibility that Britain would not be able to carry on, and that this condition might be arrived at before the United States was able to intervene directly at Britain’s side as a belligerent, in which case that victory would still be attained if the fleet and merchant navy were then sent to the overseas Empire, where the United States would assist to maintain them. “As soon as grounds could be found to justify direct and active American participation (and neither Mr. Roosevelt nor Mr. Hull believes that this would be more than a very few weeks), the United States would participate in a stringent blockade of the continent of Europe.… And interference [by Germany] would mean instant war.”5 It wasn’t exactly what Roosevelt said, and what Roosevelt did say was both uncharacteristically clumsy, not so uncharacteristically self-serving, and was part of a shabby effort to make King the bearer of a message that would have damaged Anglo-American relations at a decisive moment if Roosevelt had delivered it himself. King handled his task brilliantly, reformulated it very skilfully, and did Canada and himself honour.
On June 4, Churchill cautioned, in a world broadcast, that “wars are not won by evacuations,” but also stated as a united national resolve, and as if speaking personally to Roosevelt and King,
We shall go on to the end. We shall fight in France. We shall fight in the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing stregnth 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, and if, which I do not for one moment believe, this island or a large part of it were subjugated and starving, then our Empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the British Fleet, would carry on the struggle until, in God’s good time, the New World, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and liberation of the Old.6
Mackenzie King was as inspired by this tocsin as were the scores of millions of others who heard it, but imagined and wrote in his diary that he had incited the last flourish about the Royal Navy, by passing on, after artful editing, the message from Roosevelt. King wrote, “I am quite sure that Churchill prepared that part of his speech, which was the climax, in the light of what I sent him and that I shall receive an appreciative word of thanks from him.”7 In fact, on June 5, Churchill warned King “not to let Americans view too complacently prospects of a British collapse, out of which they would get the British Fleet and the guardianship of the British Empire, minus Great Britain,” though he did thank King for his efforts.8 This cold douche of great power ingratitude from Churchill following a very inappropriate initiative from Roosevelt was quite a letdown in Laurier House. King’s role was still many cubits taller than that enjoyed by any previous Canadian leader opposite the leader of either the United States or Britain. Civilization was at stake, and Canada’s voice was being heard and listened to by the American and British governments, and was better attuned to them than, temporarily, their own leaders were to each other.
The Dunkirk escape and Churchill’s mighty philippics had the desired effect on Roosevelt, who abandoned his role as a devious and defeatist schemer and without consulting Congress, and despite the reservations of his own service chiefs, dispatched to Britain at once 500,000 rifles, 900 artillery pieces, 50,000 machine guns, 130 million rounds of ammunition, 1 million artillery shells, and large quantities of high explosives and bombs. The restrictive U.S. neutrality laws, which Roosevelt was in the act of repealing, were circumvented by selling this materiel to private corporations, which by prearrangement sold them on at once to the British government. There was dawdling in the War Department until officials were overwhelmed by direct instructions from the president, even as he orchestrated his staged renomination to the presidency, and this resupply of the British Army was sent on fast American flag vessels, which the Germans would not dare to try to intercept.
The German army outnumbered and outgunned the remaining French by more than two to one, and on June 5 Germany launched a general offensive to the south to sweep France out of the war. Italy declared war on France on June 10, “flying to the aid,” as de Gaulle put it
, “of the German victory,” and in Roosevelt’s words, “The hand that has for so long held the dagger, has struck it into the back of its neighbour.” In the same speech, at Thomas Jefferson’s University of Virginia, in Charlottesville, which was broadcast to the world, Roosevelt said that if the French and British were defeated, “The United States … would become a lone island … in a world dominated by the philosophy of force,” and would be in a prison “handcuffed, hungry, and fed through the bars by the contemptuous, unpitying masters of other continents.”9 Churchill and the French premier, Paul Reynaud – who had finally succeeded Édouard Daladier, and who had long advocated policies that might have avoided the horrible crisis in which he was now submerged – made increasingly urgent appeals to Roosevelt to announce that the United States would enter the war (which Churchill knew to be completely out of the question). Reynaud was now wrestling with a defeatist faction which wished peace at any price. His government evacuated to Bordeaux, and Paris, declared an open city, was occupied by the German army on June 14.
Churchill did his best to energize the battered French and to shore up Reynaud and reinforce de Gaulle. He wrote Roosevelt on June 12, having just returned from the itinerant French headquarters, “The aged Marshal Pétain, who was none too good in April or July 1918, is, I fear, ready to lend his name and prestige to” capitulation. “If there is anything you can say, publicly or privately to the French, now is the time.”10 Churchill made a similar appeal to King, who wrote Reynaud on June 14 on behalf of Roosevelt and himself and read his letter in Parliament: “In this hour of the agony of France … the resources of the whole of the North American continent will be thrown into the struggle for liberty at the side of the European democracies ere this continent will see democracy itself trodden under the iron heel of Nazism.”11 Roosevelt wrote to Reynaud and copied Churchill, urging on Reynaud the merits of fighting on, if necessary, with the French fleet (the fourth in the world and greater than Germany’s or Italy’s) and the French empire. He quoted his countryman and late acquaintance Admiral Alfred Mahan (the world’s leading naval historian and academic strategist), and pitched directly to the French navy commander, Admiral Jean-François Darlan, whom he knew to be even more politicized than most senior French officers. Churchill was back the next day asking that this letter to Reynaud and himself be made public. Roosevelt fired his isolationist war secretary, Harry Woodring, on June 17 for opposing the shipment of arms to Britain after Dunkirk and the dispatch of a dozen B-17 bombers with them, and replaced him and the outgoing navy secretary, in a brilliant coup a few days before the Republican convention, with former Republican secretary of state Henry Stimson and former Republican vice presidential candidate (in 1936) Frank Knox. In the correspondence getting rid of Woodring, Roosevelt confirmed his “pronounced non-intervention policy.” Both the spirit and the letter of this missive were at stark variance with what he had just written Reynaud and Churchill, so he could not agree to the publication of either letter. Roosevelt’s artistic effort to hold the centre in American politics as he prepared to break all electoral precedents, while defending the national interest abroad, required him to exchange pledges of non-intervention with Woodring and send intimations of early intervention in the war to Reynaud. This was a long and unstable bridge between irreconcilable views, but its existence was a monument to Roosevelt’s strategic insight and tactical dexterity.
Roosevelt and Churchill both knew that France was finished, and both were concerned with stretching out the resistance, such as it was, detaining as many Germans as possible in France for as long as possible, and with keeping the French navy out of the hands of the Germans. Reynaud sent de Gaulle and Jean Monnet, chairman of the Franco-British committee for the purchase of war material, and later the founder of the European Common Market, to London in mid-June to try to negotiate federal union with the United Kingdom. Churchill and his cabinet accepted, but Reynaud’s government collapsed. The eighty-four-year-old Marshal Philippe Pétain, the hero of Verdun, succeeded Reynaud as premier on June 17 and asked for German peace terms. France surrendered in Marshal Foch’s railway car, where the 1918 Armistice was signed, at Compiègne on June 22. The long battle between the French and the Germans was apparently over, as Germany crushed and humiliated and disarmed France, and occupied more than half of it, including Paris. The Third Republic, the most successful French regime of any durability since Richelieu, which had presided over the greatest cultural flowering in French history and had seen the country through the ordeal of the First World War, ignominiously voted itself out of existence at the Grand Casino at Vichy on July 10, just two months after the beginning of the great German offensive. The greasy fascist collaborator Pierre Laval (of Hoare-Laval Pact infamy) would govern in the German interest in the French unoccupied zone in the name of the senescent marshal. Virtually all France meekly submitted to the Teutonic conquerors as they marched in perfect precision down the fine principal boulevards of the occupied French cities, resplendent in their shiny boots, full breeches, and shortish tunics, tightly belted at the waist and subtly emphasizing the stallion-like haunches and buttocks of Hitler’s brave, drilled, and obedient legions. Not since Napoleon decisively defeated Prussia in 1806 had one great European power so swiftly and overwhelmingly crushed another. And in this case, the occupier intended to stay, and most of France, including Paris, was annexed to Germany.
Appearances were deceiving, however. Charles de Gaulle had been a pioneering advocate of mechanized and air warfare, and though only a junior minister in Reynaud’s government, in the absence of anyone senior to do it he refused to accept defeat and flew to London on June 18. As Churchill later wrote, “De Gaulle carried with him, in this small aeroplane, the honour of France”12 (so little of it now remained). He had almost no support at first, and represented only the vestiges of France’s national spirit and interests, but he personified France’s imperishable pride and valour and intelligence (and possessed some of its less attractive traits as well). Churchill recognized his legitimacy and gave him the BBC to use to address his countrymen. In words that would long resonate, de Gaulle said, “France has lost a battle; France has not lost the war.” As he later wrote, “By the light of the thunderbolt, the [French] regime was revealed in its ghastly infirmity as having no proportion and no relation to the defence, honour, and independence of France.” And of the last president of the Third Republic, Albert Lebrun, he wrote that while amiable and well-intentioned, “As chief of state, two things were lacking, he was not a chief and there was no state.”13
Churchill bade farewell to France, a country he loved; he had been one of the founders of the Entente Cordiale thirty-five years before. He spoke in his heavily accented but comprehensible version of French: “People of France, it is I, Churchill.… Good night, then. Sleep to gather strength for the morning, for the morning will come. Brightly will it shine on the brave and true, kindly upon all who suffer for the cause, gloriously upon the tombs of the heroes. Thus will shine the dawn. Vive la France!”14
Few would realize it at first, but in his conduct de Gaulle joined the front ranks of the great protagonists of the mighty struggle, leaving Mackenzie King in the vanguard of the second group, and though King was not, by his position, force, or personality, a candidate for the historic stature of Churchill, Roosevelt, or de Gaulle, or for the historic significance of Hitler or Stalin, he was not found wanting, and his comment on the shocking turn of fortunes in Europe was original and intelligent: “The tragic fate of France delegates to French Canada the duty of carrying high the traditions of French culture and civilization, and its burning love of liberty.”15 Though not immediately accurate, it was a brilliant insight into the potential vocation of Quebec. The surge of support for the war in English Canada in the face of the mortal threat that had suddenly arisen imposed a respectful silence even on the traditional fascist sympathizers of French Canada. The isolationist and non-participationist Leopold Richer wrote in Le Devoir, “Our English language compatriots
are living through these events in Europe as if they were unfolding on our own borders. Danger weighs heavily on an Empire, a mother-country, on political institutions and on a commercial and industrial system which are dear to their hearts.”16
Though Quebec was opposed to conscription for overseas service, it was certainly in favour of defending Canada and was, except for a mere handful of woolly-minded Pétainists, emphatically on the Allied side in the war. On June 10, as Canada declared war on Italy, the defence minister, Norman Rogers, King’s former assistant and biographer, was killed in an air crash near Toronto. He was only forty-five, and had been widely considered a potential successor to King. The Quebec Legislative Assembly voted a resolution of condolence to King and the federal government, moved by Adélard Godbout and seconded by Maurice Duplessis and passed without dissent, and expressed Quebec’s determination “as an integral part of Canada to persist in the pursuit of this war for the defence of the liberty of conscience and the maintenance of honour among nations, to the last extremity, to ultimate victory.”17 Colonel J.L. Ralston became minister of national defence, and James Ilsley replaced Ralston as minister of finance, both capable appointees.
