England's Last War Against France

by Colin Smith

  In Salonika the prisoners were held in foul conditions on the merchant ship Théophile Gaultier whose master made it quite plain that he considered this payback time, having been interned, along with the crew of the Surcouf, at the Aintree camp the previous summer. After the ceasefire was announced the British had expected to be shipped back to Beirut immediately. When they learned they were going to France with the withdrawing Vichy logistics headquarters their disappointment was acute. Despite French assurances that they would remain in their custody the chances of passing through so much German territory without being marched off to the nearest prisoner-of-war camp seemed slim. But they received no harassment from the Germans whatsoever. Twice, at Augsberg then Tuttlingen, they were given comfort parcels by the German Red Cross. Four German soldiers under a Feldwebel who were on the train as a liaison unit to the French were friendly and even serenaded them with the German versions of ‘Roll Out the Barrel’, ‘Tipperary’ and ‘Pack Up Your Troubles in Your Old Kit Bag’. The sight of guarded working parties supplied by that part of the British Expeditionary Force that did not escape at Dunkirk brought them down to earth. At one point one of these was toiling close to the track when, immune and about to be free, the excited prisoners from Syria rattled past, startling them with their shouted English greetings and thrown cigarettes.

  Once in France they had found most of the French they encountered sympathetic though war-weary and not inclined to believe them when they expressed their unshakable belief in ultimate victory. Lieutenant Colonel Percy Calvert-Jones, a Royal Artilleryman captured with his driver going too far forward on reconnaissance, was the Senior British Officer. On his return he reported: ‘The resistance put up by the Russians has had a good effect. A British victory against the Germans would have a still greater effect.’

  For the moment Syria would have to do. It was not as good as the victory Freyberg had allowed to slip through his fingers in Crete. Or the one Wavell would have needed a miracle to win in North Africa the following month when Rommel lured the British armour onto his 88mm anti-tank gun screen. But the successes in Iraq and Syria had secured the rear areas behind the desert front and given Britain’s Middle East defence a lot more depth. On 15 July, the day after the armistice was signed, Churchill explained these gains to the House of Commons.

  If anyone had predicted two months ago, when Iraq was in revolt and our people were hanging on by their eyelids at Habbaniya and our Ambassador was imprisoned in his embassy at Baghdad, and when all Syria and Iraq had been overrun by German tourists, and were in the hands of forces controlled indirectly but none the less powerfully by German authority – if anyone had predicted that we should already, by the middle of July, have cleaned up the whole of the Levant and have re-established our authority there for the time being, such a prophet would have been considered most imprudent.

  Dentz and his officers boarded the ship that took them from Beirut on 10 September while a band played the ‘Marseillaise’, an Australian honour guard presented arms and the diminutive de Verdilhac was being seen off by several attractive women. This brought the number of French troops who had obeyed the order they had received at the eve of the ceasefire to ‘remain faithful to the unity of France and to Maréchal Petain’ to 32,032. Only 5,668 had elected to join the Gaullists. Catroux had been hoping to raise another Free French division. Instead he did not have enough to bring the one he had up to full strength. De Gaulle continued to blame the English for indulging the Vichyites and not giving his agents enough time though perhaps they had done as well as could be expected when the only certain thing on offer was exile.

  The Vichy loyalists of the Armée du Levant returned to a France riven by violent internal dissent. Since the attack on Russia, the Germans had executed almost 100 hostages – some of them young men picked up for minor infringements of the curfew – as a response to an outbreak of Communist-inspired urban terrorism. At least five members of the occupying forces had been shot dead by hit-and-run assassins including the Feldcommandant of Nantes. Nor were all the victims Germans.

  Pierre Laval was in hospital recovering from gunshot wounds after an attempt that had very nearly killed him. Since Pétain had dismissed him in February he had been living mostly in Paris, biding his time, all the considerable political nerve-ends in his being telling him, as they had so often done before, to wait and let others make the mistakes. Darlan had done exactly that, losing Syria for no gain and seeing his Paris Protocols with the Germans come to naught.

  Meanwhile, both at home and abroad, Laval had made certain that he did not disappear from sight. Towards the end of May, Ralph Heinzen, the Vichy-based American reporter for United Press who had seen him produce a pocket knife to defend himself on the night of his sacking, was given a long interview which appeared in the New York Times. In it Laval rebutted the idea that his country was awaiting liberation from the German yoke. ‘France does not want to be liberated,’ he told Heinzen. ‘She wants to settle her fate herself in collaboration with Germany. Would the United States want to push France into a contrary peace, a peace of destruction and division, by urging her to spurn the extended hand of Hitler – a hand extended in a gesture quite unique in history?’

  At home he tried to live by example and do what he could to keep Abetz and Berlin happy. On 27 August 1941 he had been at Versailles inspecting the Légion des Volontaires Français contre Ie Bolchevisme who were hoping to get to the Eastern Front in time to share in the Wehrmacht’s inevitable triumph. As he and the clever French Nazi Marcel Déat (author of the famous eve-of-war article ‘Why Die for Danzig?’) examined the eager young faces, Paul Collette, a former sailor from Caen who was 21, had stepped from the ranks and started shooting at them with the kind of 6.35mm handbag gun Dr Le Nistour had used on the Surcouf.

  By the time he had emptied the magazine five people were wounded. Laval was the worst hit with a chest wound which an X-ray revealed was caused by a bullet lodged a quarter of an inch from his heart. An infection set in and with it a temperature of 104°F. For some days it looked as if he might die but he recovered in time to join Déat in successfully petitioning Pétain to reprieve Collette who had been sentenced to death by a French court. According to some accounts Abetz would have liked to see the sentence upheld but Laval did not want to make a martyr. The Germans were already doing quite enough of that.

  He spent the autumn and the onset of winter convalescing at Châteldon enjoying its air and its wine and the company of his wife Eugénie. In Russia the Germans were close to Moscow and in the North African desert the British, who were nothing if not obstinate, had gone on the offensive against Rommel again. Only this time they won.

  A week before the Syrian ceasefire Churchill had replaced Archibald Wavell with Claude Auchinleck as Middle East Commander-in-Chief and sent Wavell off to be Commander-in-Chief of India with an eye on the possibility of Japan entering the war. Amply equipped with the abundance of tanks made available since Hitler’s Russian adventure had scotched fears of an immediate invasion of Britain, Auchinleck’s Operation Crusader had begun on 18 November.

  After a fifteen-day tank battle on 7 December the 8th Army, as it was now called, had relieved Tobruk. The siege had lasted 242 days. Among the troops fighting their way out to meet them were the King’s Own and almost all the UK infantry battalions from Syria which some of them thought had been much harder fighting. Hotly pursued by the British armour, Rommel had retreated another 250 miles to the west, at which point British supply lines were dangerously stretched. In the course of this victory all three of the Afrika Korps’s divisional commanders had become casualties. Two were dead and the third, 21st Panzer’s General Johannes von Ravenstein, had become the first German general to go into captivity anywhere in the world. But Rommel himself was still at large, having conducted a skilful withdrawal with several stings in its tail. An attempt to capture or kill him, intended as a prelude to Operation Crusader, had gone disastrously wrong.

  On 13 November Geoffrey Keyes,
accompanied by Tommy Macpherson and some of the other stars of the Litani crossing, had been put ashore by submarine at Beda Littoria some 250 miles behind the German front lines to kill or capture Rommel who was wrongly thought to be there. It turned out to be the quartermaster general’s headquarters and Rommel, who was out of the country at the time, celebrating his fiftieth birthday in Rome, was rather hurt that the British thought he would be operating so far behind the front. Nonetheless, Beda Littoria was still well guarded. In a gunfight in and around a darkened building Keyes and four German soldiers were killed. Macpherson tried to walk back to British lines and was eventually captured, though he would later escape from Germany to Sweden and was still only halfway through his extraordinary war. Keyes was awarded a posthumous Victoria Cross and, as the man who had tried to kill Rommel, was briefly more famous than his father. The Germans buried him with full military honours next to their own.

  For the politician in Châteldon mending from his closer call with an assassin’s bullet, muted news of the British victory in the sand – surely a mere tactical withdrawal on the part of the German maestro? – was entirely eclipsed by the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Unfortunately for Auchinleck this happened to coincide with the relief of Tobruk and the rest of his good fortune. All over Christmas and well into the New Year the Anglo-Americans’ Asian dominoes fell, their ships were sunk, their women raped. Towards the end of January, Rommel did indeed go back on the offensive in North Africa and the British lost Benghazi and reeled back 100 miles.

  In March 1942 the English had brought the war back to France. On the night of the 3rd, 235 RAF bombers had wrecked a large part of the Renault works at Billancourt near Paris. The factory, on an island in the Seine, was making hundreds of trucks for the Wehrmacht. Civilian casualties were high, twice as many as had yet been killed in any raid on a German city. Most of the 397 dead had been sleeping in the collapsed workers’ apartment buildings nearby. There was a national day of mourning with flags at half mast. Admiral Leahy, the US ambassador in Vichy who was finding his tenure increasingly difficult now that Germany and America were at war, noted ‘violent anti-British feeling in both the occupied and unoccupied zones’. Darlan, who had been in Paris during the bombing, sent Leahy a handwritten note on the bombing that ended: ‘We shall never forgive them. To murder, for political motives, women, children and old people is a method of Soviet inspiration. Is England already bolshevized?’

  Then later that month the barbarous English came back. But this time they came by sea to the port of St Nazaire where they destroyed the dry dock originally built for France’s magnificent liner Normandie which, having languished in New York since the war started, had caught fire and capsized in the Hudson only six weeks before. They did it because the Normandie dock, as it was still known, was the only one on the Atlantic coast big enough for the battleship Tirpitz and there was nothing the British would not do to deny Tirpitz a facility that would make raiding their shipping lanes easier.

  HMS Campbeltown was originally the USS Buchanan, one of the fifty old American destroyers Churchill had got in the crisis summer of 1940 for American bases in the West Indies. Almost two years later frantic British shipbuilding had made her expendable enough to hide a 3-ton time bomb of twenty-four depth charges in her bows, remove her heavy guns to give her the draught for shallow waters, reduce her crew to seventy-five plus Commando demolition parties and send her on her last voyage.

  At 1.25 a.m. on 28 March, having bluffed her way up almost the entire length of the Loire estuary flying a false flag and flashing chatty Kriegsmarine Morse signals, the German gunners finally made the right decision. But by now Campbeltown, accompanied by a flotilla of seventeen wooden-hulled motor launches carrying more Commandos, was less than a mile away from her target. The destroyer ran up the White Ensign, tore through a steel torpedo net, and despite repeated hits rammed the dock’s outer caisson at 20 knots. And there she stuck. The Commando demolition parties took their satchel charges to the machinery selected for destruction, while the men from the launches scrambled ashore to cover them or create diversions. One after another the small craft that had delivered them – little more than stage sets of plywood and mahogany veneer with big-hearted engines – burst into flames. In places it looked as if the Loire itself was alight. Only six of these boats would get back to the open sea, all crammed with dead and wounded.

  The time fuzes on the Campbeltown’s hidden depth charges did not work properly. They were due to detonate at 9 a.m. Instead they did not go off until 11.30 by which time German engineers, who had still not discovered this enormous bomb, had declared the ship safe. As a result their casualties were much higher than they would have been. The old ship’s sloping upper deck was crowded with sightseers: senior officers, administrative personnel, U-boat crews from their bomb-proof pens and, according to most reports, a few female companions. In all about 250 people were killed. More importantly, the Normandie dock was wrecked and would never provide a home for the Tirpitz.

  The raid on St Nazaire, which was entirely in the spirit of Churchill’s original concept of butcher and bolt, was probably the most effective large-scale Commando action of the entire war and the most costly. Out of the 622 Commandos and sailors who took part 169 were killed or died of wounds, over a quarter. Another 214 were captured, of whom at least a third were wounded. Five Victoria Crosses were awarded, two of them posthumously. Three were to the navy. Only 27 out of 268 Commandos got back, 22 by sea and the rest overland to Spain and Gibraltar. From the outset these five evaders were helped by French civilians who knew that if they were caught they would face a firing squad. Corporal George Wheeler and Lance Corporal Sims managed to get through St Nazaire and into the countryside beyond. They were discovered, hiding in a haystack, by a farmer. Wheeler spoke some French.

  After I had explained who we were the man brought us food and wine and at about 11pm he took us to the farm house and fitted us out with civilian clothes and gave us 250 francs each. He also advised us to get rid of traces of our identity, to keep to the small roads, and to make for Nantes. We gave him our Colts, which he said he ‘might be using one day’.

  Wheeler and Sims took his advice and were the first back on 21 May – just under two months. When, passed from one French escape chain to another, Wheeler reached neutral Madrid the corporal told the British military attaché there that ‘the propaganda value of the raid was enormous’.

  This was not a France that Darlan or Laval knew or wanted to know. By the spring all the former premier’s wounds had healed. The one near his heart had been declared inoperable and the bullet would remain in him but, as the momentum to bring him back into government grew, all his old vigour had returned. For this he had a lot to thank the Americans, who had made a tactical mistake. Ever since his interview had appeared in the New York Times the US Embassy in Vichy had been hinting that if Laval was restored Ambassador Leahy might well be withdrawn and perhaps all diplomatic ties would be severed.

  The Germans seized on this. Suddenly the future of Pierre Laval, a wheeler-dealer politician of the kind Hitler most detested, had been elevated into a trial of strength between the now belligerent capitals of Washington and Berlin. ‘By asking Vichy not to compose a collaborationist government the USA has forced Vichy to chose between Washington and Berlin,’ lectured the journalist Jean Luchaire in Le Nouveau Temps in a piece that was said to have been inspired by the German Embassy, not that Luchaire normally needed much guidance in these matters.

  There was never any choice. By mid-April Pétain had formally given in. Laval would return as Chef de gouvernement, a position that had not exactly existed before. He would also be Minister of Foreign Affairs, the Interior and Information and would, of course, choose the rest of his Cabinet. Darlan would still be there as titular head of all the military as well as Pétain’s designated successor but the message was clear: he was not the man the Germans wanted.

  For Laval, with his unshakable belief in German victory, it w
as a good time to come back. Almost everywhere he looked the Allies were in disarray. In London the War Cabinet had discussed the possibility of Laval making a formal declaration of war against Britain and ruled that it was not out of the question.

  PART THREE

  The Island Campaign

  Chapter Twenty-One

  In the madness of a world at war Tananarive seemed to be one of its oases of sanity. Visitors had always been struck by the spacious beauty of the Madagascan capital, a pleasing blend of the Franco-Malgache which sat towards the eastern edge of the central plateau and 100 miles from the nearest coast. Surmounted by the palace of its long deposed royalty, it was built around a narrow hilltop some 700 feet above the emerald-green rice paddies of the surrounding plain, its red-roofed houses descending along a series of ridge lines like the legs of a giant starfish. Between these ridges were gardens and sports fields and broad, tree-lined boulevards with churches, restaurants and pavement cafés. At first glance only the poster rash that had erupted on every wall space, the urgent slogans reminding, ‘Travail! Familie! Patrie!’ and ‘Vive Pétain!’ gave any hint of the horrors and excitements beyond its shores.