Voices from the Dark Years

by Douglas Boyd

  Every available inch of space was occupied by some kind of vehicle … being loaded ready to leave. The food shops were besieged; everyone was scrambling to purchase as much as possible. One sensed a feeling among the people that they might not see food again for many days. There were no newspapers to calm their fears, no garages to attend to repairs, no petrol to help them on their way, and no police to control them. Desperate, they seemed unable to decide whether to fight for the food they needed now, or take a risk and escape before the arrival of the Germans. In the space of one hour, Sens had become a ville en panique.10

  It was not the only one. While the driver of a van taking all the municipal records of the Paris suburb of Boulogne-Billancourt was desperately searching for petrol, two deserting soldiers hijacked the vehicle and disappeared with the registers of births, marriages and deaths.

  Heading back the way they had come, Freeman and Cooper passed columns of African and Vietnamese troops, the latter carrying their kit on sticks over their shoulders. Unable to find a refuelling dump, the two Britons took the risk of filling up their petrol tank from a pump at a service station that was already blazing from a bomb. From time to time they met up with comrades from the same unit and a group of English women volunteers driving ambulances financed by a large American acting as their commandant.

  On 14 June at 5.30 a.m. the first German units drove through the Porte de la Villette and into the heart of Paris beneath clouds of black smoke from fuel dumps set on fire by the retreating French army. The previous afternoon two French officers with a trumpeter had met the Germans at Sarcelles and confirmed that the city would not be defended. With most of the capital’s food supplies coming from the north, where the disruption to road and rail traffic was total, 700,000 Parisians who had not fled watched the enemy from behind closed shutters and drawn curtains, venturing out only when the sparkling clean mobile kitchens of the German Winterhilfe organisation began dispensing hot soup and bread for the asking. It would be well into the autumn before all the other 2.1 million residents returned, less the more prudent Jewish ones.

  Inhabitants of Orléans who had defied orders to flee found it impossible to replace lost documents after the municipal records and Joan of Arc’s house went up in smoke during German air raids on 14 and 15 June. The telephone system was destroyed. Had it been working, there was no one in local government offices to deal with the problems of 3,000 families whose homes had been destroyed. The various departments were dispersed in Nontron, Tulle, Guéret, Millau, Bordeaux, Toulouse, Tonneins and Marmande – and would stay there until 17 July.

  With water and gas mains ruptured, fires smouldered everywhere for the next two weeks, causing more destruction. Streets were blocked by collapsed buildings. There was no electricity and no food. The French army had blown up the Joffre and Georges V road bridges – which did not prevent the incoming Wehrmacht from using the intact Vierzon railway bridge to cross the River Loire, but the disruption for normal traffic was so great that clearing up by French prisoners of war and unemployed Parisians was to last eight months. In nearby Neuville-aux-Bois the only medical care for refugees streaming in was provided by the wives of generals Ecot, Berre and Velle, whose ambulance had run out of petrol there, Madame Ecot literally taking a hat round each morning to beg money for food.

  That month, a record 1,212 million francs were withdrawn before the savings banks put up their shutters. The Finance Ministry, finding itself stuck at Avoine near Saumur with the Germans approaching, paid a street-cleaner to burn banknotes to the value of 25 million francs. The prefect of the Nord département having demanded several million francs for the immediate needs of his population cut off from the rest of France by the German advance, the government loaded the money aboard two Glenn-Martin aircraft that were shot down as unidentified by a British ack-ack battery near Lille. Of the six crewmen, only one managed to parachute to safety through the clouds of whirling banknotes. Millions were lost, the Prefect eventually signing a receipt for only 240,000 francs.11

  South of Orléans, the remaining inhabitants of Poitiers dismantled the makeshift barricades erected by men of 274th Infantry Regiment and sent the mayor out with a white flag to inform the approaching Germans that the town would not be defended. A few miles away at Le Blanc, veterans from the First World War beat up sappers trying to destroy the bridge over the River Creuse and stamped out the sputtering fuses before the charges blew. At St-Benoît-sur-Loire, 54-year-old surrealist poet Max Jacob refused to flee because St-Benoît had neither bridges nor factories meriting German bombardment. The decision to stay put was to cost this long-term friend of Picasso his life.

  In Paris, apart from an ordinance prohibiting listening to non-German radio stations in public places, there seemed nothing to fear, just the curious sight of a swastika flag atop the Arc de Triomphe. Next day, as the government straggled into Bordeaux, the cinema Pigalle reopened its doors in Paris. On Sunday 16 June the faithful in many northern parishes, whose priests had fled, had the bizarre experience of hearing Mass read for them by Wehrmacht chaplains.12 With the litany in Latin, only the celebrants’ accents were different.

  Also in the north, near Abbeville, British POW Terence Prettie managed to escape from a column of prisoners being marched from Dunkirk towards captivity in Germany. In the several days while he was on the run before recapture, he experienced the gamut of civilian attitudes. One Belgian refugee told him to give himself up because the Germans would treat him well; other homeless Belgian refugees insisted on sharing their precious last chocolate bars with the escapees; a French farmer fed and sheltered Prettie and his companions despite a foraging party of Wehrmacht men politely but insistently requisitioning supplies at the same time; a priest procured for them charts and tide tables in the hope they could find a seaworthy boat that had not been confiscated by the Germans.13

  The Académie Française met by tradition every Wednesday, but on 12 June the only académicien who turned up was the aged Cardinal Baudrillart, who sat alone beneath the cupola working on the great dictionary. To him, as to many right-wing Catholics, the incoming Germans were welcome as an alternative to the godless communists of Stalin’s USSR. It was on this day that Churchill had his last meeting, before flying back to Britain, with Admiral of the Fleet François-Xavier Darlan. When the British bulldog growled at the man who controlled the fourth largest navy in the world, ‘Darlan, you must never let them get the French fleet’, Darlan promised he would not.14

  The government’s temporary home 700km to the south-west, Bordeaux had its peacetime population swollen by a half-million refugees. In every restaurant and on the café terraces were to be seen famous faces from the world of politics, literature, entertainment, journalism. Every lapel seemed to sport the Légion d’Honneur. Politicians went through the motions of governing the country by meetings held in hotel corridors and on street corners. High functionaries were reduced to sleeping in corridors or in their cars. Even so august a figure as Marshal Pétain could at first not find a bedroom until offered one in a private home, whose concierge raided her ‘bottom drawer’ to find a set of linen for the marshal’s bed. In the corridors of their temporary accommodation ministers discussed mobilising all male school-leavers and throwing them into the battle against the panzer spearheads advancing at a rate of 50km and more a day. The only thing that stopped such lunacy was the non-availability of uniforms and weapons with which they would have got themselves killed.

  All over France, in churches and before war memorials, the mothers, wives and fiancées of soldiers prayed and wept, holding the hands of young sons and daughters terrified by the corpses of men, women, children and animals by the roadside after Stuka attacks. Other planes emblazoned with the swastika bombarded the half-empty cities and the military units still fighting with leaflets reading:

  The English warmongers want the war to last another three or five years. People everywhere, however, want peace. EACH OF YOU WILL BEST SERVE HIMSELF AND THE INTERESTS OF HIS COUNTRY IN L
IVING FOR FRANCE, RATHER THAN DYING FOR ENGLAND!

  Never mind dying for anything, the young and old were dying of exhaustion en route. Children, and even babies, had become separated from their parents in the panic of machine-gun attacks by Stuka dive-bombers swooping on the columns of refugees with sirens screaming. Pathetic advertisements in shop windows and those newspapers that still appeared asked for information about a lost child or infant last seen hundreds of kilometres away, or appealed for whoever had stolen a car, a wallet or a handbag to contact the advertiser for a reward. Outside the mairies and town halls, crowds gathered for news about food distribution or a roof over their heads, and scanned the boards used for election posters, on which were pinned thousands of requests for news of loved ones. By the end of 1942 the French Red Cross had managed to return nearly 90,000 children lost during the panic of the defeat.

  One of the few positive forces in the maelstrom was made up of the courageous women volunteers of the Service Sanitaire Automobile. Using their own vehicles when no official ones were available, they rescued orphaned infants found by the bullet- and shrapnel-torn corpses of their parents. They moved with and against the flood of terrified civilians, convoying bandages, dressings, plasma and blood to hospitals overflowing with injured and sick people, before returning to the dangerous highways and byways to transport the exhausted, the dying and the newly wounded to those hospitals still manned. Often without food for themselves and sleepless for nights on end, they stacked up mileages all the more incredible when one considers the impassable state of many roads and the hundreds of bridges that had been pointlessly blown up by retreating engineer units.

  Other women led to safety through the lines the elderly, the infirm and the insane. Others still did what they could for the dead also. Medically trained women pilots of the IPSA15 flew badly wounded soldiers to safety almost from the front line. One of them, Germaine L’Herbier Montagnon, logged all sightings of downed aircraft, and spent months afterwards defying the transport chaos, the heat of summer and the snows of winter to trace 500 crash sites on the ground and arrange burial for what remained of the crews.

  On 16 June in Bordeaux Reynaud was persuaded by the Comtesse de Portes to resign and seek appointment as ambassador to the US – whether to escape or in an attempt to enlist help from Washington, is unclear. His aides Lecca and Devau had been named Financial Attaché in Washington and Head of the French Purchasing Commission to enable them to travel with a diplomatic bag, whose contents were known to few. Confronted with Reynaud’s resignation, Albert Lebrun, the debonair moustachioed polytechnicien President of the Republic, called the leaders of the Senate and the Chamber of Deputies to a consultation. All three men were personally in favour of continuing the fight, but Lebrun resisted the house leaders’ urging that Reynaud be invited to form another cabinet, because there was nothing to be gained by it and further indecision would only cost more lives.

  In accordance with French tradition, whereby outgoing Prime Ministers suggested likely successors, a few days earlier Reynaud had tentatively put forward the name of Pétain. Lebrun therefore summoned the 84-year-old marshal, who arrived in civilian clothes looking like a stern but benign grandfather. Accustomed during his eight-year term as President to lengthy negotiations in such situations, Lebrun was enormously relieved when Pétain opened his wallet after a couple of minutes and took out the handwritten list of names he proposed including in his cabinet. They were all men with whom he had worked in previous administrations because the marshal had a horror of new faces.

  After two hours and with a minimum of wheeling and dealing – in which the 57-year-old wheeler-dealer Pierre Laval was at first in, then out of, the government – all was agreed. At twenty minutes before midnight, Pétain’s cabinet included all thirteen of Reynaud’s ministers who were in favour of an armistice. Among those out of favour was Georges Mandel, who had been arrested while dining in a restaurant with his mistress. Released, he confronted Pétain and received a written apology, which he still had in his pocket when murdered in July 1944 by the marshal’s Milice.

  When Pétain called the first meeting of his cabinet, although the short notice and general confusion meant that many were absent, it was agreed and minuted to ask the Germans for an end to the conflict. The urbane and imperturbable Spanish ambassador to France, Señor José-Maria de Lequerica made the ideal neutral channel to relay the cabinet’s decision to the German government. Over an open telephone line, he passed it to St-Jean-de-Luz, where two of his staff forwarded it to the Foreign Ministry in Madrid via Irun, and thence to Berlin.

  At 1 a.m. on 17 June, Pétain retired to bed exhausted. An hour later, his Foreign Minister Paul Baudouin personally conveyed the decision to British ambassador Sir Ronald Campbell and Mr Biddle, the US chargé d’affaires – in the absence of Ambassador Bullitt, who had remained in post at the Paris embassy, where the Germans had by now been settling in for three days.

  While the marshal slept, in the depopulated cathedral city of Chartres, 41-year-old prefect Jean Moulin was agonising over the best way to kill himself after refusing to sign a German document blaming a unit of French Moroccan infantry for some civilian deaths in St-Georges-sur-Eure resulting from enemy action.16 If he signed, innocent men would be shot for the crime. If he refused, he would have to pay the price. Moulin was a handsome debonair divorcee, an accomplished sportsman and talented cartoonist, whose playboy lifestyle disguised a rare breed of courage. Despite being in German custody, he managed to slash his throat with a broken glass, but was resuscitated by his guards.

  Sporadic fighting under conditions of total confusion had now reached within 300km of Bordeaux. The German spearheads were at Le Mans, Cherbourg, Rennes and Angers. Near Saumur, the whole promotion of cadets from a military academy were pointlessly killed as they attempted to halt a Panzer column in their parade uniforms. In the east of the country an entire army of 400,000 men was encircled and cut off from resupply.

  Just after noon on 17 June, Pétain sat down at a microphone hastily rigged in the Préfecture building in Bordeaux, pince-nez perched on his nose, and read a prepared speech to the nation in the voice of a tired old man:

  At the request of the President of the Republic, I have taken over as from today the government of France. Confident of the support of our wonderful army, which is fighting with a heroism worthy of its long traditions against an enemy superior in numbers and equipment, I can say with certainty that its magnificent resistance has acquitted all obligations towards our allies. Confident also of the support of the ex-servicemen I have had the honour to command and of the trust of the entire nation, I dedicate myself to the task of resolving France’s misfortunes.

  At this painful hour, I send my compassion and my caring to all the unhappy and destitute refugees thronging our roads. It is with a heavy heart that I say to you today that the fighting must stop. Last night, I contacted the enemy to ask soldier-to-soldier whether he can find an honourable way to put an end to the hostilities. May all Frenchmen17 rally to my government in these testing times, forgetting their anguish and placing all their faith in the destiny of the Fatherland.

  When he heard the news that France was surrendering, King George VI remarked to his mother that it was a great relief not to have to be polite to his foreign allies any longer. She had been born German, as Princess Mary of Teck, and the House of Windsor had only changed its family name from Saxe-Coburg-Gotha after three long years of the First World War. Was that really all Britain’s king-emperor felt about the suffering of his Czech, Polish, Belgian, Dutch and French allies?

  At that moment four German officers were in the crypt of Les Invalides, recovering the German regimental banners captured during the 1914–18 war. Outside, Parisians were looking at notices warning that they were now forbidden to drive a motor vehicle in the capital. These, however, were minor drawbacks. Virtually 100 per cent of the listening population heaved a sigh of relief that the Saviour of Verdun was now in charge. For them, the war was
over – or so they thought.

  NOTES

  1. W. Thornton, The Liberation of Paris (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1963), pp. 91–2.

  2. P. Burrin, Living with Defeat (London: Arnold, 1996), p. 8.

  3. P. Bourget, in 1940: La Défaite (Paris: Tallandier, 1978), p. 285.

  4. US War Department, February 1924. US casualties as amended by the Statistical Services Center, Office of the Secretary of Defense, 7 November 1957, quoted in Encyclopaedia Britannica 2002 Deluxe CD-Rom edition.

  5. For greater detail, see D. Boyd, The French Foreign Legion (Hersham: Ian Allan Publishing, 2010), pp. 335–50.

  6. Freeman and Cooper, Road to Bordeaux, p. 90.

  7. Ibid., pp. 112–3.

  8. May, Strange Victory, p. 450.

  9. Freeman and Cooper, Road to Bordeaux, pp. 176–7.

  10. Ibid., p. 189.

  11. H. Amouroux, La Vie des Français sous l’Occupation (Paris: Fayard, 1961), Vol. 1, pp. 15–16.

  12. Kernan, France, p. 177.

  13. The Escapers, ed. E. Williams (London: Collins/Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1953), pp. 270–88.

  14. S. Berthon, Allies at War (New York: Carroll & Graf, 2001), p. 11.

  15. Infirmières Pilotes, Secouristes de l’Air.

  16. H. Noguères in 1940: La Défaite, p. 555.

  17. The masculine form français then also included French women.

  3

  AN END TO THE KILLING

  Heard over the radio by millions, the ill-considered phrase the fighting must stop was the last straw for the French soldier and his officers because the marshal’s actual words, ‘Il faut cesser le combat’, could be taken to mean, ‘You must stop fighting!’ After French-speaking Wehrmacht radio monitors picked up this ambiguity, all along the shifting front German officers approached French units under a flag of truce with the message, ‘What are you waiting for? Pétain said to stop fighting.’