But Sir Winston was determined not to let France fall without making one supreme effort to bolster her strength and morale. On 16th June he made his great offer on the telephone; France and England were to be united as one country, ‘the Franco-British Union’. Since no soldiers or airmen could be spared to help France on the eve of defeat, the Prime Minister offered himself and a bunch of politicians instead—as if France had not enough politicians already. Reynaud at first received the idea enthusiastically, but presumably the soldiers pointed out that it would not make a pin of difference. No more was heard of it; the battle of France was lost.
General Spears’ book should be read by everybody interested in the Second World War, for his work placed him at the very centre of affairs, where he was an observant onlooker. He can describe men and events vividly. Even those who agree with the French lady who said to him: ‘I hate the war. It is the fault of your country. You bear a heavy responsibility, you were a belliciste, like your Churchill’—even they must be glad that General Spears was there to describe Reynaud, Pétain, de Gaulle, Weygand and the rest, their words and their actions, in those fateful June days.
The Fall of France, Spears, E. (1954)
Jungle Knights
The third and last volume of M. Benoist-Méchin’s* history of the summer of 1940 is in some ways the most interesting of the three. It describes the early days of Vichy, the formation of the new government, and how full power was conferred on Marshal Pétain by the National Assembly voting 569 for to 80 against with 17 abstentions. This overwhelming parliamentary majority accurately reflected feeling in the country as a whole.
The extent to which this was so is illustrated by the fact that even André Gide, most liberal of men, who was subsequently attacked by Vichy as a writer who led youth astray, had noted in his Journal a few days earlier: L’allocution de Pétain est tout simplement admirable [Pétain’s address is brilliant], after listening to a broadcast speech.
The second half of the book consists of a series of portraits of the principal French actors in the drama of the sixty days, and of two foreigners, King Leopold and Sir Winston Churchill. Although, like everything he writes, these essays are full of illuminating anecdote and intelligent observation, they nevertheless have the defect (probably inevitable, yet so admirably avoided in the remainder of this detailed history) of being partisan. Thus, while admitting his brilliant cleverness and power of managing men, the author does much less than justice to Laval, and perhaps more than justice to the Marshal and the King of the Belgians. These two honourable men have been meanly treated, and M. Benoist-Méchin’s view of them as perfect gentle knights is very well as a corrective to vilest denigration, yet his readers are bound to ask themselves whether these qualities alone, in the jungle world, are adequate. M. Benoist-Méchin, in redressing the balance, insists perhaps rather too much. However this may be, there is no corresponding failure of objectivity in his account of General de Gaulle.
The great value of this enormously long book is precisely that it recaptures the day-by-day atmosphere, through the use of contemporary memoranda, diaries and the like. The portraits, on the other hand, may be slightly coloured by subsequent events, by successes and failures, developments and changes which subtly altered the size and shape of the personages themselves. Yet, at a time when almost all France was agreed in giving the Marshal pleins pouvoirs [full powers] to get the best terms possible from the conqueror and to negotiate the difficult details of inevitable collaboration, M. Benoist-Méchin does not deny a certain nobility to the lonely figure of de Gaulle. Snubbed and used by the English government, kept in the dark about military projects, his correspondence censored, spurned by many of the French soldiers and sailors who happened to find themselves in the island, unable to induce a single governor or prominent personality from the French overseas empire to join his revolt, suffering the humiliation of appearing to have condoned the bombardment of the French fleet by the English at Mers el Kebir, he yet persisted, and huffed, and believed in final Allied victory. (True, he had passed the point of no return.) In the summer of 1940 the liberation and the terrible events accompanying it were infinitely remote and unpredictable; and M. Benoist-Méchin does not allow their shadow to cross his sad little sketch of the General as he was then.
It would be impossible to over-praise this book as a whole. With M. Fabre Luce’s Journal de la France it presents a detailed, accurate, vivid and absorbing picture of a vitally important episode. In English we have nothing comparable; translators should be found for the Soixante Jours.
* A Minister in Pétain’s government.
Soixante jours qui ébranlèrent l’Occident: III La Fin du régime, Benoist-Méchin, J. (1956)
Hanging Offence
If a militarily unprepared country declares war on a militarily stronger neighbour it must envisage the possibility of defeat. If this unprepared country is alone in the fight it will then have to accept the best peace settlement it can get. If, on the other hand, it has unbeaten allies it must await the final outcome of the war, enduring meanwhile, as best it may, occupation by its conquerors. All this seems self-evident, and would not be worth stating except that ever since 1940 an unrealistic argument about what should or should not have been the attitude of the French during the four year armistice has raged with inconceivable bitterness.
This was not a case where a stronger aggressor country pounced on a weaker country in order to conquer it. France declared war on Germany, not the other way about. And the consequence of this declaration of war might have been foreseen.
There were then, roughly speaking, four courses open to Frenchmen. They could completely withdraw from public life; or they could choose co-operation with Germany, working for the so-called New Order in Europe; or they could harry and sabotage the occupying power by every possible means; or they could hold a balance between these two extremes while waiting to see which side would win the war. The vast majority preferred to take this last course, and meanwhile were content for France to have a number of extremists on either side, to be ready for any contingency.
At the same time, it was also obvious that ‘resistance’ was not analogous to, for example, the resistance of the Irish forty years ago to the English. In that case every act of violence might be thought to be hastening the end of a hated foreign domination. But there was never any question of Germany occupying and ruling France except for the duration of war, and therefore acts of violence were gestures of defiance which led only to immediate reprisals suffered by the whole population, and for that reason were disapproved of by many patriotic Frenchmen.
To hold the balance, to keep the life of the country going, defending its interests in every sphere and ensuring that a maximum of sovereignty remained in French hands was the difficult and ungrateful task performed with admirable skill by the brilliant Pierre Laval. That his efforts on behalf of France should have cost him his life was due to the fact that he was a great opponent of communism, and at the end of the war it was the communists who ran France (and indeed all Europe) for a time. The surprising thing is that communist politicians and leaders of the resistance should have found non-communist Frenchmen willing to work with them. General de Gaulle’s first act was to bring Thorez back from Moscow to a seat in the government.
These three large volumes of documents, collected and published by the Hoover Institute, contain the testimony of hundreds of men who worked for the Vichy Government, and in particular for Laval, between the armistice and the German retreat in 1944. Soldiers, politicians, diplomats, police, businessmen, all agree that Laval’s tireless efforts spared his country the worst rigours of an oppressive occupation. His policy was to endeavour to save France from the harsh treatment meted out to Poland. One of his hardest struggles, of which there is massive evidence in these volumes, was to limit as far as possible the number of French workers sent to Germany. His method here, as elsewhere, was to prevaricate, argue and delay, and the difference between the numbers asked for and th
e numbers sent represents the success of his design.
Almost all the witnesses speak of Laval’s love of country, and many end their testimony by saying that, had he had a trial, this is the evidence they would have given. Because he had no trial, the Hoover Institute, in the interest of history, has published this lengthy book. One of the witnesses thus sums up Laval’s attitude: ‘Chez lui, le patriotisme c’était l’amour de son pays et non pas, comme chez la plupart des Français, la haine de celui des autres. Il voulait le bonheur des Français et comprenait que celui-ci ne pouvait être réalisé que dans la paix par une large compréhension européenne.’ [For him patriotism meant the love of his own country and not, as with most of the French, the hatred of others. He wanted the best for France and he understood that this couldn’t be realised except through peace and a greater European understanding.]
Laval, one of the first Europeans, had always worked for peace: he thought it a grave error for France to declare war in 1939. But in the hour of defeat he set himself to do whatever was possible, in the difficult circumstances, for his country. Forty million Frenchmen could not all find rooms in London’s Connaught Hotel, somebody had to help them through dangerous, hard, disagreeable years.
Although La Vie de la France sous l’occupation is immensely long it is far from dull—a great deal of it is of extreme fascination: small wonder it has been a best seller in France this winter.
The Hoover Institute should follow it up with an account of the collaborators—the Déats, Doriots and Darnands. Then the picture of these years would be complete.
La Vie de la France sous l’occupation, Hoover Institute (1957)
Uneasy Alliance
Allies of a kind indeed. After Britain and France declared war on Germany, Roosevelt gave us as much help as he dared, but he had to keep an eye on the presidential election in 1940. In order to be re-elected he was obliged to make various pledges; American boys (a politicians’ expression meaning soldiers) should not be sent overseas to fight in an European quarrel. Once elected, his hands were free.
Harold Ickes, Secretary of the Interior, wrote in his diary: ‘For a long time I have believed that our best entrance into the war would be by way of Japan… which will inevitably lead us into war with Germany.’
Roosevelt increased the ‘pressure on Japan by denying her vital raw materials, notably scrap metal in the autumn of 1940 and above all oil at the end of July 1941.’ To this threat of strangulation the Japanese riposted violently; in December they attacked Pearl Harbor, precipitating war in the Pacific.
Christopher Thorne’s interesting book deals with the resulting British/United States alliance, and shows what an uneasy alliance it was. The common policy of war with the Axis powers was sometimes almost lost sight of in the general acrimony which resulted from the totally different war aims of the Allies. Churchill was concerned to defeat Germany and Japan and yet to preserve the British Empire intact, while Roosevelt was pushing towards the dismemberment and destruction of the Empire. Mr Thorne continually feels bound to remind his readers (and perhaps himself) that in spite of the recriminations the Allies did work together and they did defeat Japan. Soon after the death of Roosevelt the British Empire disappeared, but by then the war had been won.
The episode which best illumined the whole enterprise was the devising and signing of the Atlantic Charter. Under its terms there was to be ‘freedom’ for peoples everywhere in the world. Mr Churchill, who had light-heartedly signed, seems to have been surprised and chagrined when the Indians and Burmese asked if their turn for freedom would soon come. To him, they were lesser breeds without the Charter; he had not had them in mind when he signed it. He was thinking, so he said, of countries under the Nazi yoke. Mr Roosevelt on the other hand meant every word of it; there were to be no more colonies, and no more military bases like Singapore. Panama, Hawaii, and the various bases the Americans acquired (for ‘the President still had a keen eye for the possible acquisition by the US of bases that would enhance her strength at sea or in the development of new air routes’ says Mr Thorne) were a different matter. It is wonderful to see the workings of Anglo-Saxon hypocrisy under the strong light shed here.
To begin with, the Japanese were ridiculously underrated. President Roosevelt was full of strange theories: ‘the evil-doing of the Japanese might be due to the less-developed skulls of their basic stock’ he thought. (He told Stalin at Yalta that the Vietnamese were ‘people of small stature… and not warlike.’) Mr Churchill also had wishful thoughts. He sent two warships to the Far East in order to stabilize the situation and impress the enemy, rather in the same way as a gunboat in an African river might impress the local tribe. The Prince of Wales and the Repulse, with no air cover, were sunk by the Japanese. Singapore fell and many thousands of prisoners were taken. For Churchill, this was the blackest day of the war.
If the Japanese were underrated, China ‘was built up in Roosevelt’s imagination into a great power whose mighty inexhaustible armies were to help defeat Japan.’ General Chiang Kai-shek accepted money, arms and flattery but he did not move. He well knew that his own particular enemy was Mao Tse-tung.
Determined that India should be freed from British rule, Roosevelt suggested to Stalin, when Churchill was not present, that he felt the best solution would be reform on the Soviet line. ‘To this ingratiating observation Stalin merely replied that the matter was a complex one, and that reform from the bottom would mean revolution.’ Roosevelt and Churchill vied with one another in their courting of Stalin and there was a certain jealousy between them. ‘Poor Neville Chamberlain believed he could trust Hitler’, announced Churchill. ‘He was wrong. But I don’t think I’m wrong about Stalin.’
Just as the war in the Far East was coming to a successful conclusion the atom bomb was ready for use and the Allies dropped one on Hiroshima. They then dropped another on Nagasaki. To its credit, the Far Eastern Department of the Foreign Office, which had not been informed that the bombs were to be used, wrote a strong protest:
A more intelligent way would surely have been to have given publicity to the discovery and its possible effects, to have given an ultimatum with a time limit to the Japanese before using it, and to have declared the intention of the Allies to drop a bomb on a given city after a given date by way of demonstration, the date being fixed so as to give time for the evacuation of the city.
Something on these lines is what most people who thought about it considered should have been done, but Mr Churchill agreed with the American plan to drop the bomb on a crowded city ‘without a moment’s hesitation’ as he himself put it. Soon afterwards there were war crimes trials in Tokyo, but only Japanese were in the dock. General MacArthur was sent to Japan with full powers and thousands of bibles. We know the outcome. The clever, hard-working Japanese turned their attention from the arts of war to the arts of peace, and the yen, like the mark, soars into the empyrean.
Allies of a Kind is scholarly and thorough, but it is not a page too long. It is a book that even the most ignorant layman will read with deep interest.
Allies of a Kind: The United States, Britain and the War against Japan, Thorne, C. Books and Bookmen (1978)
Hard Lessons: Regulation 18B
‘No charge, no trial, no term set.’ Yes, regulation 18B was certainly odious in the highest degree. Cast into prison with no charge, hence no trial, by the Home Secretary, for as long as he pleased, for years, was exactly like being kidnapped. Useless to count the days, as there had been no sentence. Actions by 18B prisoners for habeas corpus all failed, the judges showing themselves in a poor light as the creatures of the executive.
The 18Bs appeared before an Advisory Committee chaired by Norman Birkett KC. In Mosley’s case his house, flat, safes and even bank account were carefully searched; as there was nothing sinister to find, nothing was found. He was interrogated for hours by Birkett, and convinced he would be released. Instead, I was arrested as well. I left four children, the youngest eleven weeks old.
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sp; Having a naive belief in British justice, I considered Birkett dishonest. He should have advised Mosley’s release, and if his advice was rejected by the Home Office, he should have resigned. By the time he interrogated me, my opinion of him was very low.
The excuse for all this? Summer 1940 was a time of panic; German armies swept west, the Low Countries and France fell. Stories of fifth columns in defeated countries were believed, though subsequently found to be fantasies. The British Union was hardly a candidate for suspicion; it was super-patriotic.
But it had campaigned during the phoney war for negotiated peace, and hundreds of loyal men and women were arrested. This was quite a popular move; the Government was seen to be ‘doing’ something. Hitherto, there had been only defeats.
A new criminal offence was invented: the spreading of alarm and despondency. The great disseminator of alarm and despondency was the BBC, which had only bad news to give. Anyone but a traitor who might be pleased at the turn of events in 1940 was bound to feel a certain alarm when Churchill, with his record of failure, recently added to by the tragic farce in Norway, became Prime Minister.
Busybodies had the time of their lives, seeing strange lights in neighbours’ houses, or marks on telegraph poles, or a man in a pub doubting a swift and final victory. All was reported to the police, and led to prison. It was one way of aiding the war effort.
MI5 is the villain, and the clown, of the book. Professor Simpson’s story is a good one, but its results were sad and horrible. MI5 invented a huge fifth column, but when required to produce evidence of its existence was unable to do so; it was a figment of its imagination. Yet men and other women were imprisoned, families broken, businesses ruined, dependants left with no means of support, health undermined.
The Pursuit of Laughter Page 25
