Never Surrender

by John Kelly

  In Congress, where isolationist feeling was intense, the Welles mission aroused deep suspicion. Senator Hiram Johnson of California reminded his Senate colleagues that on the eve of the Great War Woodrow Wilson had sent Colonel Edward House to Europe on a similar mission, and three years later American boys were dying on French fields. The president is trying to “entangle us in Europe’s quarrels,” Johnson warned. Similar accusations were made by Representative Roy Woodruff of Michigan, Senator Robert Reynolds of North Carolina, and several other prominent senators and congressmen.

  London was also unenthusiastic about the Welles mission. The phony war was making it harder and harder to impose curfews, rationing, and evacuations on a public less and less enthusiastic about a war whose purpose remained obscure. Polling in February showed that a stubborn quarter of the British public continued to favor a negotiated settlement with Germany in one form or another. In a letter to Roosevelt, Prime Minister Chamberlain cautioned that an Allied public excited by Welles’s “sensational intervention” might force London and Paris into a patched-up peace settlement “that apparently righted the wrongs done in recent months,” but “sooner or later . . . [would] result in a renewed attack on the rights and liberties of the weaker European States.” A few weeks later Chamberlain again cautioned the president about the Welles mission, this time evoking Finland. “We fear that . . . if the Governments of [neutral] Sweden and Norway get the idea that some peace suggestions are likely to be set afoot, they will refuse to grant [the Anglo-French Expeditionary Force] the passage we want in order to save Finland.” This was a half-truth at best. To London, the most attractive aspect of saving Finland was that British troops would pass the Swedish iron ore fields on their way north.

  Reaction to the Welles mission in Berlin and Paris was also unenthusiastic, but Rome, Rome was different.

  * * *

  Two weeks after the New York Times announcement, Welles was sitting in Mussolini’s office on the Piazza Venezia. For a man who embodied grandiosity in its most florid form, the Duce’s office was surprisingly restrained. High-ceilinged and long, the room sought its effects in the play of light on empty space and in clean, unadorned lines. There were no furnishings except Mussolini’s desk, which sat at the far end of the office and the three chairs in front of it, and no light except for the natural light flooding through the windows, and that from a single lamp on the Duce’s desk. The aged figure who rose to greet Welles was also a surprise. In person, Mussolini looked “fifteen years older than his actual age of 58 . . . moved with an elephantine motion . . . and was very heavy for his height.” For most of the nearly two-hour interview, the Duce sat sphinx-like behind the desk, the small lamp illuminating the folds of skin on his fleshy face, his eyes shut except when a question particularly interested him. When Welles asked if he thought a negotiated peace settlement was still possible, the eyes popped open.

  “Yes!” Mussolini replied, “emphatically.” None of “the people now at war desired to fight. The situation . . . in that regard [is] utterly different from that which existed in 1914”; but if a “real war breaks out, with its attendant slaughters and devastations, there will be no possibility, for a long time to come, of any peace negotiation.” Welles left the meeting feeling that one part of Mussolini was genuinely interested in brokering a peace settlement, but that part was at war with the Roman emperor, who was fond of proclaiming, “I was born never to leave the Italians in peace.” Welles had heard the rumors about a German offensive in the West, and believed its outcome would determine which of the two Mussolinis prevailed. If “Germany obtains some rapid apparent victory, such as the occupation of Holland and Belgium,” Welles cabled Washington, “I fear very much that Mussolini would then bring Italy in on the German side.”

  Four days later Welles stood in a cold Berlin wind, examining two monumental black nudes in the Court of Honor, the entrance to Hitler’s Chancellery. The statues were the sole expression of humanity in the court, and they failed to express it convincingly enough to relieve the acute sense of oppression that Welles felt standing in a rectangle of “high blank walls” open only to the sky. It was March 2, and Welles was in Berlin to confer with Hitler, who proved even more unlike his public image than did Mussolini.

  Charlie Chaplin’s comic Hitler in The Great Dictator had made such a deep impression on the Western public, it was almost impossible for a non-German to imagine the Führer doing anything except goose-stepping, tugging at his mustache, or throwing a temper tantrum. The Hitler who greeted Welles under the mural of the cardinal virtues bore little resemblance to the Chaplin creation. In person, Hitler was taller and more physically prepossessing than he appeared in newsreels; he also spoke a surprisingly “beautiful German” in a “low, well modulated voice” and was dignified in manner and temperate in his observations. Indeed, European peace had no better friend than Adolf Hitler until Welles asked about the prospect of negotiating an end to the war. “I can see no hope for the establishment of any lasting peace until the will of England and France is itself destroyed,” Hitler replied. “There is no way by which the will to destroy Germany can be itself destroyed, except through a German victory. I believe that German might is such as to ensure the triumph of Germany, but if not, we will all go down together.” How much of this Hitler really believed, Welles was unsure, but he was sure that the average German believed it. The Treaty of Versailles and a decade of Nazi propaganda had convinced the German people that the Western powers were committed not just to Germany’s defeat but also to its annihilation. The outburst over, Hitler assumed the statesman’s mantle again, and the meeting concluded on a cordial note. “I appreciate your sincerity and that of your government,” he told Welles. As Welles was boarding the Paris train a few hours later, Hitler was issuing a secret directive for Fall Weserubung: the occupation of Norway and Denmark.

  “There is only one way to deal with a mad dog,” Georges Clemenceau, France’s Great War leader, once observed. “Either kill him or chain him with a steel chain that cannot be broken.” During his visit to Paris, Welles heard several versions of the Clemenceau doctrine from his successors. Albert Lebrun, the French president, said that after three German wars in seventy years, “it was a vital need of France to ensure herself that at least one generation of Frenchmen can be born to live a normal span of life.” Jules Jenneney, president of the French Senate, put that thought more fiercely: Germany, he said, had to be “taught such a lesson as to make it impossible for the German people ever again to bring about a European conflagration.” The only major French politician who spoke of a negotiated settlement was Édouard Daladier, the premier, who told Welles he believed an agreement with Germany was still possible, but, just before leaving Paris, Welles heard that France was assembling a fleet at Brest to carry the fifty-thousand-man Allied Expeditionary Force to Finland. Had Welles spoken to the former foreign minister Georges Bonnet, or to Pierre Laval, a prominent French senator, he would have left Paris with a different impression of French resolve.

  In London, Chamberlain and Lord Halifax spoke of punishing Germany for its aggression, but in the company of intimates, the foreign secretary took a slightly different view. One day, when his undersecretary, Rab Butler, said the war was a mistake, Halifax thought for a moment and then replied, “I agree.” However, below Chamberlain, Halifax, and a few other cabinet ministers, everyone else Welles met in London was in full war paint. Admiral Dudley Pound, the first sea lord, talked of burning Berlin to the ground, dividing Germany into small principalities, and imposing a fifty-year occupation. Oliver Stanley, the secretary of war, and Churchill, the first lord of the Admiralty, favored a hundred-year occupation. The German people should have no illusions “as to where the mastery in Europe lay.”

  Of all the personalities that Welles met on his trip, none made as deep an impression as Churchill.

  Mr. Churchill was sitting in front of the fire smoking a 24 inch cigar and drinking a whiskey and soda. It was quite evident that he had
consumed a good many whiskeys before I arrived. As soon as the preliminary courtesies had been concluded, Mr. Churchill commenced an address which lasted exactly one hour and fifty minutes, during which I was never given an opportunity to say a word. It constituted a cascade of oratory, brilliant and always effective and always interlarded with considerable wit. It would have impressed me more had I not already read his book . . . [of] which his address to me constituted a rehash.

  By March 16, when Welles returned to Rome for a second visit with Mussolini, rumors of war were everywhere. From Norway to Spain, people sensed a real shooting war was coming, maybe in Scandinavia, maybe in France, maybe somewhere else, but it was coming, and with spring, the traditional campaign season almost upon Europe, it was coming very soon. “The minute hand is pointing at one minute before midnight,” Mussolini said, then told Welles about his recent conversation with Joachim von Ribbentrop, the German foreign minister. According to von Ribbentrop Germany “would consider no solution other than a military victory.” Hitler expected to conquer France within three or four months and for Great Britain to crumble shortly thereafter. The prospect of war seemed to energize Mussolini. Welles noticed that “the nervous oppression” that the Duce had evidenced at their first meeting was gone. Mussolini’s eyes closed less frequently, his fleshy face was more animated, and his manner more relaxed and casual. Two days later, at a conference on the Brenner Pass, the Duce pledged to Hitler that Italy would march with Germany.

  * * *

  Welles returned to Washington convinced that the principal obstacle to peace was not the statuses of Poland, Austria, and Czechoslovakia. As serious and difficult as those issues were, the principal obstacle was insecurity. Each side was preparing for total war because each side believed its enemies were bent on its annihilation. Hitler was responsible for fomenting the atmosphere of distrust, but the Treaty of Versailles and the subsequent humiliations imposed on Germany had given him a lot to work with. In Welles’s view, the only solution to what was essentially an existential crisis was a security guarantee imposed by an outside force strong enough to enforce the guarantee. In his final report, he suggested that the force might take the form of an American-led coalition of neutral states. But even supposing an isolationist Congress would agree to sanction such a measure, by the time Welles filed his report it was spring, and spring was the campaign season in Europe.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  SEARCHING FOR SOMETHING SPECTACULAR

  To her admirers, the Comtesse Hélène de Portes was a great beauty. It was true that the comtesse had a large nose and a chin that was not all a chin should be, and in certain quarters of Paris her taste in hats was regarded as almost tragic. “Perfectly silly,” Edward Spears said, of “the ridiculous saucer shaped contraptions” the comtesse favored. To admirers, however, these minor flaws were more than offset by a head of wonderfully thick, dark, curly hair, sparkling eyes, “very good feet and ankles,” and a figure so perfect it constituted a French national treasure. “She had a way of walking,” wrote Elie Bois, a columnist for Le Petite Parisian, “that disclosed the suppleness of her limbs and the agility of [a] whole body maintained by physical exercise.” Clare Boothe, who was spending the spring in Paris, thought Bois was being ridiculous. Describing Hélène de Portes as the “du Barry of France” is like “describing Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt as the Cleopatra of the New Deal,” she said.

  The journalist René Benjamin once described the Marquise de Crussol, the comtesse’s great rival, as “a pretty little gilded goat,” but Benjamin’s was a minority opinion. Small, with “peculiar features,” the Marquise de Crussol possessed none of the comtesse’s physical glamour and bore the additional burden of a humiliating nickname—“La Sardine qui estee Cure Sole”—the sardine who took itself for a sole: a reference to the advertising slogan of her family’s sardine-canning business. The rivalry between two of Paris’s most formidable femmes du monde had many sources, including the leadership of rival salons, but at bottom it was a rivalry about men and power. The marquise’s lover, Édouard Daladier, was the premier of France, and the comtesse’s lover, Paul Reynaud, the minister of finance, wanted to be the premier of France. Of the two women, the comtesse was the more aggressive and controlling. A persistent and intrusive presence at the Ministry of Finance, where a special telephone line had been installed for her use, on at least one occasion the comtesse had been seen presiding over a meeting of ministry officials in Reynaud’s office. There was much speculation about why Reynaud put up with it. The most widely accepted explanation was height; he was barely five feet tall and the comtesse “made him feel tall and grand and powerful.” If Reynaud had been three inches taller, the history of the world might have been changed,” said one Parisian.

  For years, the comtesse had been relentless in her efforts to advance Reynaud’s career, and for years those efforts had floundered on the same two objections. A national leader required a political base, and Reynaud, a lawyer and a financial technocrat, lacked a base. The second objection was linked to the first—and perhaps also to Reynaud’s height—he threw off a fume of superiority that was politically toxic. In group photos, Reynaud always seems to stand a foot or so in front of everyone else: his smile full of self-pleasure; his slightly slanted eyes giving his small, handsome face an exotic oriental cast; and his perfectly cut suit suggesting that he was a man who paid more attention to his appearance than a man should. There were two schools of thought about the origins of Reynaud’s nickname. One held that he was called “Mickey Mouse” because of his diminutive stature, the other that the nickname was a backhanded tribute to Reynaud’s tremendous energy. The French, who liked their politicians with a little dirt under their fingernails, found it easy to imagine the earthy Daladier as a resident of the “real France,” that mystical national homeland where men spent their days in a field, back to the sky, face to the black earth; Reynaud, they found impossible to imagine anywhere except where he in fact lived, in one of Paris’s most exclusive districts. Reynaud had much to offer France: intelligence, competency, and determination to wage the war aggressively. Still, it is likely that he would have ended up marooned on the shoals of history had not a political crisis at the end of the Finnish war done what all the Comtesse de Portes’s efforts had failed to do.

  * * *

  In no nation had the “great and glorious” cause of Finland aroused more passion than in France. On February 10, 1940, when Daladier announced that the Allies would send fifty thousand men and a hundred aircraft to Finland, the Chamber of Deputies erupted in applause. Here, at last, was the France the deputies had been waiting for, the France the French people had been waiting for: the France of Verdun, of the Marne, the France who defended the weak and helpless and embodied liberal democracy. Daladier’s popularity soared after the announcement, but then, in early March, Finland surrendered, the Allied Expeditionary Force disbanded, and the languorous rhythms of the drôle de guerre reasserted themselves. The press returned to printing photos of Allied generals pinning medals on one another, while, along the Western Front, Allied and German troops resumed “pranking” one another. In one famous incident, a German unit posted a sign near the French line: “Soldiers of the Northern Army, beware of the English. They are destroying your properties, eating your food, sleeping with your wives, raping your daughters.” The next day the French troops responded: “Who gives a damn? We’re from the South.”

  In Paris, the femmes du monde, bored with war work for a nonexistent war, resumed their long champagne lunches, and shopkeepers ignored the boring blackout regulations. “What does the word ‘war’ really mean?” the writer Simone de Beauvior wondered. The previous September, “when all the papers printed it boldly across their headlines, it meant horror, something undefined but very real. Now, it lacks all substance and identity.” As the old malaise reasserted itself, Daladier’s political fortunes fell.

  Entering the French Chamber of Deputies on March 19, the premier looked like a man who had been i
nvited to his own funeral. The vote of confidence that afternoon went overwhelmingly against him. “The Bull of Vaucluse has received something more than darts this time,” wrote Elie Bois. “The toreador ha[s] planted the sword firmly between his ribs.” On March 21, Paul Reynaud assumed the premiership, promising to reinvigorate the war effort with a spectacular new plan.

  By late March, Prime Minister Chamberlain was also feeling the need to do something spectacular, and for the same reason. Boredom and disaffection were undermining civilian discipline and morale. To many Britons, the war was beginning to feel unreal, as if it was something Whitehall, Westminster, and Downing Street had concocted for their own personal amusement. “Keep out,” declared a cartoon in the Picture Post. “This is a private war. The War Office, the Admiralty, the Air Ministry and the Ministry of Information are engaged in a war against the Nazis. They are in no account to be disturbed. Nothing is to be photographed. No one is to come near.”