The Second World War

by Antony Beevor

  Motorcars streamed forth, led by the rich who seemed well prepared. Their head-start enabled them to corner the diminishing petrol supplies along the way. The middle class followed in their more modest vehicles, with mattresses strapped to the roof, the inside filled with their most prized possessions, including a dog or a cat, or a canary in a cage. Poorer families set out on foot, using bicycles, hand-carts, horses and perambulators to carry their effects. With the jams extending for hundreds of kilometres, they were often no slower than those in motorcars, whose engines boiled over in the heat, advancing just a few paces at a time.

  As these rivers of frightened humanity, some eight million strong, poured towards the south-west, they soon found that not only petrol was unobtainable, but also food. The sheer numbers of city-dwellers, buying every baguette and grocery available, soon produced a growing resistance to compassion and a resentment of what came to be seen as a plague of locusts. And this was in spite of the numbers who had been wounded by German aircraft strafing and bombing the packed roads. Once again it was the women who bore the brunt of the disaster and who rose to the occasion with self-sacrifice and calm. The men were the ones in tears of despair.

  On 10 June, Mussolini declared war on France and Britain, although well aware of his country’s military and material weakness. He was determined not to miss his chance to profit territorially before peace came. But the Italian offensive in the Alps, of which the Germans had not been informed, proved disastrous. The French lost just over 200 men. The Italians suffered 6,000 casualties, including more than 2,000 cases of severe frostbite.

  In a decision which only increased the confusion, the French government had moved to the Loire Valley, with different ministries and headquarters established in various chateaux. On 11 June, Churchill flew to Briare on the Loire for a meeting with the French leaders. Escorted by a squadron of Hurricanes, he and his team landed at a deserted airfield near by. Churchill was accompanied by General Sir John Dill, now chief of the general staff, Major General Hastings Ismay, the secretary of the War Cabinet, and Major General Edward Spears, his personal representative to the French government. They were driven to the Château du Muguet, which was the temporary headquarters of General Weygand.

  In the gloomy dining room, they were awaited by Paul Reynaud, a small man, with high arching eyebrows and a face which was ‘puffy with fatigue’. Reynaud was close to a state of nervous exhaustion. He was accompanied by an ill-tempered Weygand and Marshal Pétain. In the background stood Brigadier General Charles de Gaulle, now Reynaud’s under-secretary of war, who had been Pétain’s protégé until they fell out before the war. Spears noted that, in spite of Reynaud’s polite welcome, the British delegation were made to feel like ‘poor relations at a funeral reception’.

  Weygand described the catastrophe in the bleakest terms. Churchill, although wearing a heavy black suit on this hot day, did his best to sound genial and enthusiastic in his inimitable mixture of English and French. Not knowing that Weygand had already given orders to abandon Paris to the Germans, he advocated a house-by-house defence of the city and guerrilla warfare. Such ideas horrified Weygand and also Pétain who, emerging from his silence, said: ‘That would be the destruction of the country!’ Their main concern was to preserve enough troops to crush revolutionary disorder. They were obsessed with the idea that the Communists might seize power in an abandoned Paris.

  Weygand, trying to shift responsibility for the collapse of French resistance, demanded more RAF fighter squadrons, knowing that the British must refuse. Just a few days before he had blamed France’s defeat not on the generals, but on the Popular Front and schoolteachers ‘who have refused to develop in the children a sense of patriotism and sacrifice’. Pétain’s attitude was similar. ‘This country’, he said to Spears, ‘has been rotted by politics.’ Perhaps more to the point, France had become so bitterly divided that accusations of treason were bound to fly.

  Churchill and his companions flew back to London with no illusions left, although they had extracted a promise that they would be consulted before an armistice. The key issues from a British point of view were the future of the French fleet and whether Reynaud’s government would continue the war from French North Africa. But Weygand and Pétain were resolutely opposed to the idea, since they were convinced that in the absence of government France would descend into chaos. The following evening, 12 June, Weygand openly demanded an armistice at a meeting of the council of ministers, of which he was not a member. Reynaud tried to remind him that Hitler was not an old gentleman like Wilhelm I in 1871, but a new Genghis Khan. This, however, was Reynaud’s last attempt to control his commander-in-chief.

  Paris was an almost deserted city. A huge column of black smoke arose from the Standard Oil refinery, which had been set on fire at the request of the French general staff and the American embassy to deny petrol to the Germans. Franco-American relations were extremely cordial in 1940. The United States ambassador, William Bullitt, was so trusted by the French administration that he was temporarily made mayor and asked to negotiate the surrender of the capital to the Germans. After German officers under a flag of truce had been shot at near the Porte Saint-Denis on the northern edge of Paris, Generaloberst Georg von Küchler, the commander-in-chief of the German Tenth Army, ordered that Paris should be bombarded. Bullitt intervened and managed to save the city from destruction.

  On 13 June, as the Germans were poised to enter Paris, Churchill flew to Tours for another meeting. His worst fears were confirmed. At Weygand’s prompting, Reynaud asked whether Britain would release France from its engagement not to ask for a separate peace. Only a handful, including Georges Mandel, the minister of the interior, and the very junior General de Gaulle were resolved to fight on whatever the cost. Reynaud, although in agreement with them, appeared, in Spears’s words, to have been wrapped up in bandages by the defeatists and become a paralysed mummy.

  When faced with the French demand for a separate peace, Churchill indicated that he understood their position. The defeatists twisted his words to imply assent, which he hotly denied. He was not prepared to release the French from their commitment until the British were certain that the Germans could never get hold of the French fleet. In enemy hands, it would make an invasion of Britain much more likely to succeed. He demanded that Reynaud should approach President Roosevelt to see whether the United States might be prepared to assist France in extremis. Every day that France continued to resist would give Britain a better chance to prepare for a German onslaught.

  That evening a council of ministers was held at the Château de Cangé. Weygand, insisting on an armistice, claimed that the Communists had seized power in Paris, and that their leader, Maurice Thorez, had taken over the Palais de l’Élysée. This was a grotesque delusion. Mandel promptly rang the prefect of police in the capital, who confirmed that it was totally untrue. Although Weygand was silenced, Marshal Pétain brought out a paper from his pocket and began to read. Not only did he insist on an armis tice, he rejected any idea of the government leaving the country. ‘I will remain with the French people to share their pain and suffering.’ Pétain, now emerging from his silence, had revealed his intention to lead France in its servitude. Reynaud, although he had the support of sufficient ministers, as well as the presidents of the Chambre des Députés and the Sénat, lacked the courage to sack him. A fatal compromise was agreed. They would await the reply of President Roosevelt before making a final decision on an armistice. Next day, the government left for Bordeaux in the last act of the tragedy.

  General Brooke’s worst fears had been confirmed soon after he landed at Cherbourg. He reached Weygand’s headquarters near Briare on the evening of 13 June, but Weygand had been at the Château de Cangé for the council of ministers. Brooke saw him next day. Weygand was less concerned by the collapse of the army than by the fact that his military career had not ended on a high note.

  Brooke rang London to say that he did not agree with his orders for the second BEF to d
efend a redoubt in Brittany, a project close to the heart of de Gaulle and Churchill. General Dill understood immediately. He would stop any further reinforcements from being sent to France. They agreed that all British troops remaining in north-west France should pull back to ports in Normandy and Brittany for evacuation.

  Churchill, having returned to London, was horrified. An exasperated Brooke had to spend half an hour on the telephone to him, spelling out the situation. The prime minister insisted that Brooke had been sent to France to make the French feel that the British were supporting them. Brooke replied that ‘it was impossible to make a corpse feel, and that the French army was, to all intents and purposes, dead’. To carry on ‘would only result in throwing away good troops to no avail’. Brooke was riled by the implication that he had ‘cold feet’, and he refused to back down. Eventually, Churchill accepted that it was the only course.

  German troops were still bemused by the readiness of most French troops to surrender. ‘We were the first to enter one particular town,’ wrote a soldier with the 62nd Infantry Division, ‘and the French soldiers had been sitting in the bars for two days, waiting to be taken prisoner. So that’s how it was in France, that was the celebrated “Grande Nation”.’

  On 16 June, Marshal Pétain declared that he would resign unless the government sought an immediate armistice. He was persuaded to wait until a reply had been received from London. President Roosevelt’s answer to Reynaud’s earlier appeal was full of sympathy but promised nothing. From London, General de Gaulle read out a proposal by telephone apparently first suggested by Jean Monnet, later regarded as the founding father of the European ideal, but then in charge of arms purchases. Britain and France should form a united state with a single war cabinet. Churchill was enthusiastic about this plan to keep France in the war, and Reynaud too was filled with hope. But the moment he put it to the council of ministers, most reacted with savage disdain. Pétain described it as ‘marriage with a corpse’, while others feared that ‘perfidious Albion’ was attempting a take-over of their country and colonies at their moment of greatest weakness.

  A totally dejected Reynaud saw President Lebrun and tendered his resignation. He was on the edge of a nervous breakdown. Lebrun tried to persuade him to stay on, but Reynaud had lost all hope of resisting the demands for an armistice. He even recommended that Marshal Pétain should be called on to form a government to arrange an armistice. Lebrun, although basically on Reynaud’s side, felt obliged to do as he suggested. At 23.00 hours Pétain presided over a new council of ministers. The Third Republic was effectively dead. Some historians have argued with a degree of justification that the Third Republic had been already been killed off by an internal military coup mounted by Pétain, Weygand and Admiral Darlan, who had been won over on 11 June at Briare. Darlan’s role was to ensure that the French fleet could not be used to evacuate the government and troops to North Africa to continue the fight.

  That night de Gaulle had flown back to Bordeaux in an aircraft provided on Churchill’s orders. On arrival, he found that his patron had resigned and that he himself was no longer part of the government. At any moment he might receive orders from Weygand, which he would find hard to refuse as a serving soldier. Keeping a low profile, which was not easy with his height and memorable face, he went to see Reynaud and told him that he intended to return to England to resume the struggle. Reynaud provided him with 100,000 francs from secret funds. Spears tried to persuade Georges Mandel to leave with them, but he refused. As a Jew, he did not want to be seen as a deserter, but he underestimated the anti-semitism which was resurgent in his country. It would eventually cost him his life.

  De Gaulle, his aide-de-camp and Spears took off from the aerodrome amid wrecked aircraft. As they flew to London via the Channel Islands, Pétain broadcast to France the news that he was seeking an armistice. The French had suffered 92,000 killed and 200,000 wounded. Nearly two million men were rounded up as prisoners of war. The French army, divided against itself, partly through Communist and extreme right-wing propaganda, had handed Germany an easy victory, to say nothing of large quantities of motor transport, which would be used the following year in the invasion of the Soviet Union.

  In Britain, people were shocked into silence by the news of France’s surrender. The implications were underlined by the government announcement that henceforth church bells should not be rung except to warn of invasion. Official pamphlets distributed by postmen to every house warned that, in the event of a German landing, people should stay at home. If they fled, packing the roads, they would be machine-gunned by the Luftwaffe.

  General Brooke had wasted no time in organizing the evacuation of the remaining British troops from France. This was fortunate, since Pétain’s announcement placed his men in an invidious position. By the morning of 17 June, 57,000 of the 124,000 army and RAF personnel still in France had got away. A massive seaborne effort was mounted to take as many of the rest as possible from Saint-Nazaire in Brittany. It is thought that over 6,000 servicemen and British civilians boarded the Cunard liner Lancastria that day. German aircraft bombed the ship and probably over 3,500 drowned, including many trapped below. It was the worst maritime disaster in British history. In spite of this appalling tragedy, another 191,000 Allied troops returned to England in this second evacuation.

  Churchill welcomed de Gaulle to London, hiding his disappointment that neither Reynaud nor Mandel had come. On 18 June, the day after his arrival, de Gaulle made his broadcast to France from the BBC, a date which would be celebrated for years to come. (He appears to have been unaware that that day also happened to be the 125th anniversary of the Battle of Waterloo.) Duff Cooper, the francophile minister of information, found that the foreign office was firmly opposed to de Gaulle speaking. It was afraid of provoking Pétain’s administration at this moment when the future of the French fleet was unclear. But Cooper, backed by Churchill and the Cabinet, told the BBC to go ahead.

  In this famous address, admittedly heard by very few people at the time, de Gaulle used the wireless to ‘hoist the colours’ of the Free French, or la France combattante. Although unable to attack the Pétain administration directly, it was a stirring call to arms, albeit improved in the rewriting later: ‘La France a perdu une bataille! Mais la France n’a pas perdu la guerre!’ In any case, he revealed a remarkable perception of the future development of the war. While acknowledging that France had been defeated by a new form of modern and mechanized warfare, he predicted that the industrial power of the United States would turn the tide of what was becoming a world war. He thus implicitly rejected the belief of the capitulards that Britain would be defeated in three weeks and that Hitler would dictate a European peace.

  Churchill in his ‘finest hour’ speech, delivered the same day in the House of Commons, also made reference to the need of the United States to enter the war on the side of freedom. The Battle of France was indeed over, and the Battle of Britain was about to begin.

  8

  Operation Sealion and the Battle of Britain

  JUNE–NOVEMBER 1940

  On 18 June 1940, Hitler met Mussolini in Munich to inform him of the armistice terms with France. He did not want to impose punitive conditions, so he would not allow Italy to take over the French fleet or any of the French colonies, as Mussolini had hoped. There would not even be an Italian presence at the armistice ceremony. Japan, meanwhile, wasted little time in exploiting the defeat of France. The government in Tokyo warned Pétain’s administration that supplies to Chinese Nationalist forces through Indochina must be halted immediately. An invasion of the French colony was expected at any moment. The French governor-general buckled under pressure from the Japanese, and allowed them to station troops and aircraft in Tongking around Hanoi.

  On 21 June, preparations for the armistice were complete. Hitler, who had long dreamed of this moment, had ordered that Marshal Foch’s railway carriage in which German representatives had signed the surrender in 1918 should be brought back from its muse
um to the Forest of Compiègne. The humiliation which had haunted his life was about to be reversed. Hitler seated himself in the carriage as he, Ribbentrop, the deputy Führer Rudolf Hess, Göring, Raeder, Brauchitsch and Generaloberst Wilhelm Keitel, chief of the OKW, awaited General Huntziger’s delegation. Hitler’s SS orderly Otto Günsche had brought a pistol with him in case any of the French delegates tried to harm the Führer. While Keitel read out the armistice terms Hitler remained silent. He then left and later rang Goebbels. ‘The disgrace is now extinguished,’ Goebbels noted in his diary. ‘It is a feeling of being born again.’

  Huntziger was informed that the Wehrmacht would occupy the northern half of France and the Atlantic coast. Marshal Pétain’s administration would be left with the remaining two-fifths of the country and be allowed an army of 100,000 men. France would have to pay the costs of the German occupation and the Reichsmark was fixed at a grotesquely advantageous rate against the French franc. On the other hand, Germany would not touch France’s fleet or its colonies. As Hitler had guessed, these were the two points which even Pétain and Weygand would not concede. He wanted to divide the French from the British and simply ensure that they would not hand over their fleet to their former ally. The Kriegsmarine had which had longed to get its hands on the French navy ‘for continuing the war against Britain’, was sorely disappointed.

  After signing the terms on Weygand’s instruction, General Huntziger was deeply uneasy. ‘If Great Britain is not forced to its knees in three months,’ he is supposed to have said, ‘then we are the greatest criminals in history.’ The armistice officially came into effect in the early hours of 25 June. Hitler issued a proclamation hailing the ‘most glorious victory of all time’. Bells were to be rung in Germany for a week in celebration and flags flown for ten days. Hitler then toured Paris in the early morning of 28 June accompanied by the sculptor Arno Breker, and the architects Albert Speer and Hermann Giesler. Ironically, they were escorted by Generalmajor Hans Speidel, who was to be the chief conspirator against him in France four years later. Hitler was not impressed by Paris. He felt that his planned new capital of Germania in the centre of Berlin would be infinitely more grand. He returned to Germany where he planned his triumphal return to Berlin and considered an appeal to Britain to come to terms, which would be delivered to the Reichstag.