The Resistance

by Matthew Cobb

  After Dunkirk fell on 4 June, the Nazis turned their gaze southwards and saw a French military leadership that was convinced it had lost the war. Two weeks earlier, Reynaud had sacked the French Supreme Commander of Land Forces, General Maurice Gamelin, who had been responsible for the defence strategy that had proved so useless. Reynaud had a problem, however, as there was no suitable replacement – all of the leading French generals were either directly tainted by the disaster or were out of action (one had a mental breakdown; another was killed in a car accident). His only choice was the seventy-three-year-old Maxime Weygand, who had been brought out of retirement the previous year. This career officer was stoutly anti-German, but he had somehow managed to get through over half a century of soldiering without ever once coming under fire – hardly the man to inspire French troops faced with the Nazi onslaught.18

  But if Weygand was a poor choice, Reynaud’s second appointment was calamitous. In an attempt to strengthen the government’s influence among both the population and the armed forces, Reynaud named eighty-four-year-old Marshal Philippe Pétain as Deputy Prime Minister. Although Pétain had a reputation as an inspiring commander in the First World War, he was now widely reputed to be semi-senile (he slept through many Cabinet meetings). Neither Weygand nor Pétain thought the Germans could be repulsed, and both were soon leading figures in a growing capitulationist wing within the Cabinet and the army. Far from uniting the government, the arrival of Pétain and Weygand prepared its collapse, which duly took place within a month.

  In glorious June weather – forty-four-year-old art historian Agnès Humbert noted in her diary ‘Never has Paris looked more beautiful, never has it been such a mass of flowers’19 – the German advance towards Paris continued. Despite brave defensive actions, key French positions fell like dominoes. The roads south were crowded with fleeing civilians. In the second half of April ninety per cent of the 200,000 population of Lille had left their homes, together with eighty-five per cent of the 82,000 population of Turcoing. Now the fighting began to catch up with them, so they had to move further south. An astonishing 8 million people – nearly a fifth of the total French population – are thought to have become refugees during this period, known in France as ‘the Exodus’. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry talked to some of them:

  ‘Where are you bound?’

  ‘Nobody knows.’

  They never knew. Nobody knew anything. They were evacuating.

  There was no way to house them. Every road was blocked. And still they were evacuating. Somewhere in the north of France a boot had scattered an anthill, and the ants were on the march.20

  On 3 June 300 German aircraft bombed the Citroën and Renault factories on the south-western edge of Paris, killing 254 people, including 195 civilians. On 6 June Nazi ground troops breached the French lines on their southward thrust; on the same day, at a meeting of the War Committee in Paris, Weygand sharply reproached the RAF for their lack of support in May, shouting shrilly at the British representatives. For one of the British officers present, Weygand’s attitude gave ‘the clear indication that, before the fate of the present battle was cast, it was considered lost by the Commander-in-Chief and his excuse for this was British duplicity’.21 Two days later distant artillery fire could be heard in the capital; on 9 June the Nazis took Rouen with ease. The historian Marc Bloch, who at the time was an ordinary soldier, later wrote: ‘The Germans took no account of roads. They were everywhere . . . They relied on action and on improvisation. We, on the other hand, believed in doing nothing and in behaving as we always had behaved.’22 Meanwhile, the government began to totter.

  As Paris baked in the June heat, a kind of resigned panic began to seize the capital. Eerily, on Saturday 8 June trains heading south from the Gare d’Austerlitz had no announced destination – they were simply leaving, going somewhere, anywhere. Over the next few days the stations were in continual chaos as people sought to escape the inevitable occupation, storming trains, crowding at the ticket offices, desperate for a way out. Soon the roads were equally full. But not everyone fled. Many of the cars leaving on the evening of Sunday 9 June met the traditional traffic jam on the other lane, as people returned from a day in the countryside, oblivious to the advancing danger from the north. Although the richer, western sections of Paris gradually emptied, most of the working-class inhabitants of the eastern side of the city stayed where they were. The poor had nowhere to go, and no means of getting there.23 Even the rich had difficulties – petrol shortages meant that cars were often useless, the volume of traffic made the shortest journey take hours, and when the refugees did arrive somewhere, what would they eat? One refugee wrote:

  All these human beings in movement were marked by lack of sleep and lack of food. We slept however we could, wherever we could. A few hours later, we were on the move again. It was impossible to feed such a column of people in towns that were already overpopulated. Could we demand more milk, more meat, than the region contained?24

  On Monday 10 June the government officially left Paris, heading south for the Loire Valley, where the various ministries were scattered around a series of châteaux commandeered for the purpose. Despite British urging, there was no question of using Paris as an obstacle, a way of tying up the Germans in a long and bloody fight, street by street. Pétain dismissed the idea out of hand: ‘To make Paris into a city of ruins will not affect the issue,’ he said.25 The French government preferred to leave, but where it was going, and why, was never clear. Reynaud had instructed Weygand to prepare plans for holding Brittany against the Nazis, retaining sea and air links with Britain. But despite British support, this plan came to nothing. Weygand thought it was pointless, while Reynaud simply forgot about it, caught up in a series of mood swings that punctuated his slow downfall. In his more excitable moments, Reynaud talked of the government leaving for French North Africa, or for French territories in the Americas, but no real plans were ever made.

  On the afternoon of 11 June Churchill and a small British delegation flew to meet the French government at Briaire in the Loire Valley. Escorted by twelve Hurricane fighters, the small twin-engine de Havilland Flamingo landed late in the afternoon, and the visitors were taken to the Château du Muguet, ‘a hideous house . . . expanded by successful business in groceries or indifferent champagne into a large monstrosity of red lobster-coloured brick, and stone the hue of unripe Camembert’.26 The château had only one telephone (accessed via a toilet), which worked only when the village operator was on duty – she finished work at 6 p.m. and took a two-hour lunch-break.27 As a result, the meeting was effectively isolated from the outside world and from the terrible events taking place where the Germans were advancing.

  Desperate to rally his allies, Churchill cranked up the rhetoric, urging the French to fight in the capital, conjuring up ‘the lurid glow of burning cities, some as beautiful as Paris, collapsing on garrisons who refused to accept defeat’.28 The French were unmoved. Weygand’s response was that the battle of Paris had already been lost and that every other French city would also fall unless the British intervened decisively. Over and again, the two governments looked at things from completely different points of view, each expressing their own national interest. For the French, the British would soon collapse under the inevitable Nazi onslaught, so they might as well throw everything they had into the Battle of France. For the British, the Battle of France was a mere prelude to the Battle of Britain and, above all, they felt that both sides should try to hold out until the USA could be persuaded to enter the war.

  This difference in outlook was strikingly expressed when Weygand again demanded that the RAF immediately put every one of its planes into the sky over France, leaving no reserve to defend Britain, proclaiming: ‘Here is the decisive point . . . this is the decisive moment.’ Churchill replied, equally forcefully: ‘This is not the decisive point, this is not the decisive moment.’29 More of the same followed when Churchill argued that a campaign of guerrilla warfare in France would delay, and coul
d even halt, the German advance. Pétain awoke from his sleep to reject the idea out of hand: ‘It would mean the destruction of the country,’ he grunted.30

  It became clear that the French were going to sue for peace, and on 12 June Churchill returned to London armed only with a French promise to consult the British government before they came to a final decision. But within a day Churchill was summoned back to France for a meeting at which the French leader Reynaud asked whether France could be released from the three-month-old treaty which stated that neither country would enter into a separate peace.31 Churchill rejected the request, asking perceptively: ‘What is the alternative? The alternative is the destruction of France, more certain than if she fights on, for Hitler will abide by no pledges.’32 Once again, Churchill urged the French to hold out until President Roosevelt could persuade the Senate and the US public, both of which were strongly anti-interventionist, that the USA should enter the war against Hitler.

  Later that day one of the most absurd events in a series of tragicomic governmental antics took place. At a French Cabinet meeting in Cangé, near Tours, Weygand announced that the Communists had seized power in Paris, that the mob had disarmed the police and that all telephone communications with the capital had been cut. Mandel, the Minister of the Interior, calmly phoned the Prefect of Paris, and got Weygand to come and hear that his story was utter nonsense.33 Despite this public humiliation, Weygand continued unabashed and proceeded to argue that the government should have remained in Paris in order to negotiate with the Nazis, before calling for the arrest of the most junior member of the government – General Charles de Gaulle, who had been made Under-Secretary of State for National Defence and War merely a week before – for having begun to send men and material to North Africa without consultation. Like many of Weygand’s rants, this one went unchallenged and unacted on – for the moment.

  Meanwhile, Paris awaited the arrival of the Nazis. The government had declared the capital an open city – that is, a city that was ‘open’ to the invader, and which would not be defended. To add to the apocalyptic atmosphere, the sky was blotted out for hours on end, as thick black smoke from the burning oil depots at Rouen settled over the capital. As the streets emptied, the Paris-based Swiss journalist Edmond Dubois walked through one of the smartest parts of Paris and stumbled on a surreal scene:

  Wednesday 12 June, at 6 p.m., a herd of cows . . . wanders unhindered through the Place de l’Alma. Nobody is with them. The animals are hungry and their lowing resounds sadly along the deserted riverside roads. The odd passer-by barely bothers to glance at this surprising spectacle.34

  The same day, Sergeant Guy Bohn, a lawyer, was ordered to blow up the Eiffel Tower to prevent the radio transmitter from falling into enemy hands. Bohn, who had absolutely no explosives training, was horrified and had no idea how to proceed. He eventually managed to persuade his superiors that the project was doomed to failure, and he was instead sent off to the fort at Issy-les-Moulineaux, where despite his inexperience he successfully destroyed a more reasonable target – a small military transmitter.35

  Christian Pineau, who was working at the Ministry of Information, helped evacuate the ministry on 11 June, and then left with a convoy carrying personnel and key papers. But when they reached Moulins, 230 kilometres south of Paris, they realized that they had left behind them files containing names that would greatly interest the Gestapo. Together with three other volunteers, Pineau clambered into an old Citroën and drove all the way back to Paris against the flow of refugees. Having burned the papers late into the evening of 13 June, Pineau then crossed the Seine to spend the night at his empty apartment. The following morning, as the Nazis were about to enter the city, Pineau returned to the car. Only two of the three helpers turned up. The third had disappeared with the contents of the Ministry’s ample wine cellar.36

  A few days earlier, two decisive but highly secret events had taken place. First, a convoy of a dozen vehicles had left Paris for Vincennes, carrying replicas of a German Enigma coding machine. The fact that the Allies could read Nazi messages encoded by the Enigma machine was one of the biggest secrets of the war. The Poles had first cracked the Enigma code in 1933 and had given two replica machines to the French in 1939, one of which was then handed on to the British and was used at Bletchley Park to help decode Nazi messages.37 Had the Nazis captured the French machine, they would have realized that their communication system was not secure, and the shape of the war – and even its outcome – could have been very different. As it was, this machine stayed hidden in the south of France throughout the war. At around the same time, the French physicist Frédéric Joliot-Curie left Paris with France’s entire supply of ‘heavy water’ (deuterium oxide) sloshing around in jerrycans strapped to the bottom of his car. The Nazis were using heavy water as part of their nuclear weapons programme and would have been delighted to get their hands on the material that Joliot-Curie managed to get to the UK within a week.

  On 15 June the Manchester Guardian published the following report:

  The main German forces entered the city at noon yesterday. They came from the north-west and by the Aubervilliers Gate from the north-east. From the north-western suburbs they marched through the west end down the Champs-Elysées – tanks, armoured reconnaissance cars, anti-tank units, and motorized infantry. Machine-gun posts were set up at important points, and the wireless stations were seized. The people left in Paris watched the entry in silence, reports the Associated Press correspondent. Small groups of people still sat along the terraces and boulevards and in the cafés. Shops were boarded up. In the Place de l’Opéra stood a solitary motor-car with a big ‘for sale’ sign. The Paris police still patrolled the streets. Occasionally could be heard the drone of an unmolested plane.38

  What the newspapers did not report is that around a dozen suicides took place on 14 June.39 For some, the fall of Paris was the end of everything.

  *

  As the Nazis draped Paris with swastika flags, the French government left its ramshackle and dispersed headquarters among the châteaux of the Loire and headed for Bordeaux, desperate to keep a reasonable distance between itself and the advancing German troops. The final, brief scene in the rather pathetic French governmental drama lasted only a few days, as the capitulationist wing in the army and the government gradually came to dominate.

  In a final attempt to galvanize Reynaud and those who wanted to continue the fight, and desperate to keep the powerful French fleet out of the Nazis’ hands, the British proposed an immediate ‘indissoluble union of our two people and our two empires’.40 The proposal was dictated over the phone by de Gaulle, who was in London pressing the British to send more troops and aircraft. It briefly made Reynaud perk up, but the defeatists scornfully dismissed the idea as a British attempt to grab the French Empire. Pétain showed what he thought of Britain’s chances against the Germans when he asked why anyone would want to ‘fuse with a corpse’. His fellow defeatist Ybarnegaray – a pre-war fascist – was even clearer: ‘Better to be a Nazi province. At least we know what that means.’41 Reynaud abandoned the idea without even putting it to a vote. With Roosevelt not only refusing to come to the aid of France, but even forbidding the French government from making public his telegrams of support (the US President was campaigning for re-election), a crushed Reynaud resigned during the evening of 16 June. Pétain became Prime Minister and immediately contacted the Nazis to discover what the peace terms would be.

  At the same time, Weygand began to move against those who wished to carry on fighting. He had already been bugging Reynaud’s phone and had been mobilizing young recruits in the Bordeaux area in preparation for a military coup, should the government prove intransigent. His final target was de Gaulle, who had returned from London only to see the government disintegrate. De Gaulle was concerned that he might be arrested by Weygand, and was determined that the struggle against the Nazis should continue even if the government collapsed. He therefore insisted to Major-General Edward Spears,
Churchill’s personal envoy, that he had to return to London. On the morning of 17 June Spears and de Gaulle left Bordeaux airport, bound for London.42 De Gaulle’s personal luggage contained only a spare pair of trousers, four clean shirts and a family photo.43

  At midday Pétain went on French radio. In his thin, metallic voice (Arthur Koestler wrote in his diary that it ‘sounded like a skeleton with a chill’44) Pétain announced: ‘It is with a heavy heart that I tell you today we must cease hostilities. The fighting must stop.’ Although no armistice had been signed, and French soldiers were still engaging German troops, the clear implication was that the French armed forces should lay down their arms. That was the conclusion drawn by the drunken soldiers encountered by André Dewavrin, a naval officer who had recently arrived back in Brest: ‘“The war is over – Pétain said so!” they shouted. “Why should we go and get killed, if the war is over? We might as well go home!”’45 Dewavrin, like many others, initially thought the broadcast was a Nazi ruse. He soon had to accept that Pétain, and the whole military establishment, had thrown in the towel. A few hours later the broadcast was repeated, with the key sentence changed to ‘we must try to cease hostilities’, but the damage was done.46 Within four days the armistice was signed – in the same railway carriage as the 1918 armistice, but with victor and vanquished reversed and with the terms imposed by the Nazis.