The Last Lion

by William Manchester

  Flying over France had become more hazardous since Churchill’s last flight to the theater. Although the Flamingo was escorted by nine Spitfires, north of Paris the sky was swarming with Nazi fighters. Churchill’s pilot detoured and they arrived late. Spears saw the hunched but resilient figure of the prime minister emerge, “obviously in grand form. He might not have had a care in the world…. Danger, the evocation of battle, invariably acted as a tonic and a stimulant to Winston Churchill.”85

  The Conseil met at 2:00 P.M. on May 31, in a large first-floor room, giving out on a garden, in the Ministry of War in the rue Saint-Dominique, with the conferees sitting at an immense green-baize-covered oval table, the visitors on one side and, facing them, their hosts: Reynaud, Admiral Jean Darlan; Paul Baudouin, a protégé of Reynaud’s mistress and an admirer of the defeatist Pétain; Weygand, booted and spurred; and, finally, a newcomer to the war council: eighty-four-year-old Maréchal Henri-Philippe Pétain, in mufti.

  Reynaud had appointed Pétain his deputy premier, hoping to increase the public’s confidence in the government. In France the old marshal was regarded as a hero of the last war, le vainqueur de Verdun (the conqueror of Verdun). The British saw him differently. In 1917 he had suppressed a mutiny in the French army by promising his soldiers that the British and the Americans would do most of the future fighting. He was, moreover, an impassioned Anglophobe who despised democracy; the responsibility for France’s present plight, he believed, lay with the leftist Popular Front of 1935. “Now,” Ismay thought, Pétain “looked senile, uninspiring, and defeatist.”86

  Churchill opened by suggesting that they consider three questions: the Allied force still in Norway, the fighting in Flanders, and the strong likelihood that Mussolini would soon enter the war at Hitler’s side. First, however, he thought the French would be interested in a piece of good news. The Dunkirk evacuation was succeeding beyond all expectations: 165,000 men had been taken off, including 10,000 wounded. It was then that Weygand sounded the first dissonant note. In an aggressive, querulous voice, he interrupted to ask, “But how many French? The French are being left behind?”87

  The Englishmen present expected a Churchillian outburst. All the signs were there: the light had died out of his face, he was drumming his fingers on the table, and his lower lip jutted out like the prow of a dreadnought. Clearly he was angry, and with reason. Weygand had known of Operation Dynamo for six days, but had neglected to tell his commander in the north and had issued no orders authorizing French participation in the evacuations. Indeed, that was one of the reasons the prime minister had flown over. However, he controlled himself; his expression became sad; he said quietly, “We are companions in misfortune. There is nothing to be gained from recrimination over our common miseries.”88

  Baudouin wrote that there were “tears in his eyes,” that he was obviously moved by “the common sufferings of England and France.” Spears felt that “a stillness fell over the room.” They then proceeded with the agenda, agreeing, first, to reinforce the Allied armies in France by withdrawing their forces from Norway. Briefly they discussed fortifying a redoubt in Brittany, into which they might withdraw if France fell. The RAF would bomb Italian targets if Mussolini entered the war. At that point the French translator, misunderstanding the P.M., said it was understood that British soldiers at Dunkirk would embark before the French. Churchill interrupted him; waving his arms, he roared in his extraordinary accent: “Non! Partage bras dessous, bras dessous”—the soldiers from both countries would leave together, arm in arm.89

  The French wanted more RAF squadrons. Churchill pointed out that His Majesty’s Government had already given ten additional squadrons, needed for the defense of Great Britain. If they lost the rest, the Luftwaffe could, with impunity, attack “the most dangerous targets of all, the factories producing new aircraft.” It was, he said, “impossible to run further risks” with British aircraft.

  What concerned him most was the flagging spirit of all Frenchmen—soldiers, civilians, and, except for Reynaud, members of the government. He could not say that there, of course, but he wanted them to know that England meant to crush Nazi Germany, whatever the cost. “I am absolutely convinced,” he said, his voice rolling with oratorical cadences, “that we have only to fight on to conquer. If Germany defeats either ally or both, she will give no mercy. We should be reduced to the status of slaves forever. Even if one of us is struck down, the other must not abandon the struggle. Should one comrade fall in battle, the other must not put down his arms until his wounded friend is on his feet again.”90

  Attlee endorsed every word the prime minister had said, adding: “Every Englishman knows that the very basis of civilization common to both France and Britain is at stake. The Germans kill not only men, but ideas.” Reynaud was pleased; that was the line he had been taking with his ministers. They, however, were divided. Spears thought that Baudouin had been swept away by Churchill’s fire. Not so; in his diary he wrote that he had been “deeply troubled” by Churchill’s vow and asked, “Does he consider that France must continue the struggle, cost what it may, even if it is useless? We must clear that up.”

  Beaming, Churchill said merrily: “Fini l’agenda!”

  But he himself was not finished. As they rose from the table, gathering in groups to discuss this or that, Churchill headed for Pétain, followed by Spears. The old man had not said a word. His voice would carry great weight with the people of France, and the P.M. thought he looked “detached and sombre, giving me the feeling that he would face a separate peace.” One of the Frenchman said that if events continued on their present course, France might have to reappraise its foreign policy, including ties to Britain, and “modify its position.” Pétain nodded. Spears told them in perfect French that such a change would result in a British blockade of French ports. Then, looking directly into Pétain’s eyes, Spears said, “That would not only mean blockade but bombardment of all French ports in German hands.” Afterward Churchill wrote, “I was glad to have this said. I sang my usual song: we would fight on whatever happened or whoever fell out.”91

  No one had mentioned the Anglo-French accord signed by both governments nine weeks earlier—they had solemnly agreed to “neither negotiate nor conclude an armistice or treaty of peace except by mutual agreement.” In March, when the pledge was signed, the strength of the opposing forces on the Western Front had been roughly equal, but by May 31, when the Conseil was meeting in Paris, the Nazi edge was enormous. The Germans had taken almost 500,000 prisoners at a cost of 60,000 casualties. Unaccountably, Weygand issued no orders to move the seventeen divisions manning the Maginot Line. As a consequence he had to face the coming onslaught with forty-nine divisions. The Germans attacked with 130 infantry and ten panzer divisions—almost three thousand tanks.

  On June 5 the Germans launched their offensive against the Somme. The French, fighting desperately, held their line for two days and thwarted a pincer movement toward Creil from Amiens and Péronne, but on June 7, the 7th Panzer Division, led by Erwin Rommel, broke through toward Rouen, and on Sunday, June 9, they were over the Seine. That day they lunged across the Aisne, took Dieppe and Compiègne; then tanks drove through the breach toward Châlons-sur-Marne before turning eastward toward the Swiss frontier, to cut off the huge garrison in le Maginot. Rommel drove his tanks so far and so fast that the English called the 7th Panzers the Ghost Division. Nobody—including the German high command—knew where it was until it appeared someplace where it was not expected.

  On Monday, June 10, Italy declared war on Britain and France. Franklin Roosevelt declared in a radio broadcast, “The hand that held the dagger has plunged it into the back of its neighbor.” Churchill merely muttered, “People who go to Italy to look at ruins won’t have to go as far as Naples and Pompeii in the future.” He ordered that all male Italian citizens be rounded up and interned. A few hours after Mussolini’s declaration of war, mobs smashed the windows of Soho’s spaghetti joints, but in London, unlike in Rome, th
ere were no organized demonstrations against the new enemy. Mussolini’s dagger was very small. Almost immediately the French hurled back Il Duce’s badly led, dreadfully equipped army. Churchill wired Roosevelt: “If we go down Hitler has a very good chance of conquering the world.” In that case, small dagger or no, Mussolini would get his share.92

  That night, as German armies advanced toward Paris, the prime minister decided to fly to Paris once more, hoping to persuade the French to defend their capital. Then a message arrived, telling him the government was leaving it. “What the hell,” he growled, fuming until a second telegram told him they could meet at Briare, on the Loire, eighty miles south of Paris. Tuesday morning—the eleventh—he took off with Ismay, Eden, and Spears, escorted by twelve Hawker Hurricanes. He wanted to fly over the battlefields, but the pilot told him that the flight plan made that impossible; he and the Hurricanes were following precise instructions from the Air Ministry.

  Briare airfield was deserted. Churchill, massive in black, leaning on his stick, looked around, beaming, as though this airstrip were the place he had sought all his life and finally found. Several cars drove up, the first driven by a sullen colonel “who, from his expression,” Spears wrote, “might have been welcoming poor relatives at a funeral procession.” The ambiance was equally unpleasant when they arrived at the red-brick Château du Muguet. Spears felt that “our presence was not really desired.”

  They were shown into a large dining room. There the Frenchmen—with one exception, Charles de Gaulle, whom Reynaud had made a general, serving as the premier’s under secretary of state for defense and war—sat with hung heads, staring at the table, like prisoners awaiting sentencing. To Ismay, Pétain seemed “more woebegone than ever,” while Weygand appeared “to have abandoned all hope.”93

  Churchill tried to cheer them up by revealing that a Canadian division would be landed in France that night, joining the three British divisions already in the line, and another division would arrive within nine days. They remained glum. Weygand said that the army’s plight was hopeless. The Allies had lost thirty-five divisions—over half a million soldiers. He said: “There is nothing to prevent the enemy reaching Paris. We are fighting on our last line and it has been breached. I am helpless. I cannot intervene, for I have no reserves. It was the break-up of the army (“C’est la dislocation”).Then he went too far. He was asked what would happen if another breach were made and replied: “No further military action will be possible.” Eden noted that Reynaud immediately intervened sharply: “That would be a political decision, Monsieur le Général.” Weygand bowed and said, “Certainly,” but then he struck again, blaming “those responsible”—the French politicians—“for entering the war with no conception of Nazi power.”94

  Churchill couldn’t, or wouldn’t, believe that France was in extremis. In the beginning he had hunched over the table, his face flushed, following the généralissime’s every word, but at the end he looked away, said nothing, stared at the ceiling, ignoring Weygand but glancing quizzically at de Gaulle several times. He asked to see his old friend General Georges. Georges appeared and confirmed everything Weygand had said. Even as they spoke, he said, the enemy was only sixty miles away. The P.M., though visibly shaken, sought to revive the willpower of the French. His mouth was working; he searched for the words, found them, and spoke warmly and deeply. He wished, he said, to express his admiration for the gallant resistance of the French and Britain’s deep sorrow that her contribution had been so slight. “Every Englishman,” he told them, “is profoundly grieved that further military help cannot be given to France in this grave hour.” Had the BEF not returned from Dunkirk naked, nine divisions of Britons would now be fighting alongside the poilus. As it was, England was sending all she had left, leaving her island virtually defenseless. Then he reminded them of 1918, when the Allies had been so close to defeat, and said that might be true now; all intelligence reports agreed that the Germans were exhausted, at the end of their tether. The cloud might lift in forty-eight hours. Weygand broke in to say they hadn’t that much time; they were down to “the last quarter of an hour.”95

  Churchill wouldn’t quit. He wanted to set the French afire with the flame of Britain’s defiance. His words, Spears wrote, “came in torrents, French and English phrases tumbling over each other like waves rushing for the shore when driven by a storm. No matter what happened, he told them, England would fight—on and on and on, toujours, all the time, everywhere, partout, pas de grâce, no mercy. Puis la victoire!” He offered all the British support he could muster, including troops on their way from Britain’s Dominions and colonies, and suggested alternatives to a French defeat, raising again the possibility of a Breton redoubt, into which the troops could withdraw, supplied by the Royal Navy. He wanted Weygand’s army to fight in Paris, telling them how a great city, if valiantly defended, could absorb immense enemy armies. He suggested that the French government retreat to North Africa. If all else failed, he proposed guerrilla warfare.96

  The French were hostile, Weygand scornful, and Pétain, who had sat silent until now, incredulous, mocking, and, finally, angry. The old maréchal dismissed the prime minister’s vow that the British would fight on alone as absurd: “Since France cannot continue the struggle, wisdom dictates that England should seek peace, for certainly she cannot carry on alone.” To make Paris “a city of ruins,” he said, would not affect the issue. As for guerrillas, he said: “That would mean the destruction of the country.”97

  The most protracted discussion arose from the French demand that every plane left in the Royal Air Force be committed to the battle now raging. The appeal was unanimous: Pétain, Weygand, Georges, and Reynaud agreed that the RAF was their last hope, and that it could turn back the German tide. If the aircraft were withheld, Reynaud predicted, “Without doubt history will say that the battle of France was lost for lack of planes.” “Here,” said Weygand, “is the decisive point. Now is the decisive moment. The British ought not to keep a single fighter in England. They should all be sent to France.” Ismay, Eden, and Spears were holding their breaths. Air Chief Marshal Dowding, chief of Britain’s Fighter Command, had warned the prime minister and the War Cabinet that if any more fighter squadrons were sent to France, he could not guarantee the defense of England, and they were afraid that the prime minister’s generosity, his love of France, his impulsiveness, and his innate optimism would prompt him to make a disastrous commitment of further air support.98

  He didn’t. According to Ismay, after a long pause he said very slowly, “This is not the decisive point. This is not the decisive moment. The decisive moment will come when Hitler hurls his Luftwaffe against Britain. If we can keep command of the air over our own island—that is all I ask—we will win it all back for you.”99

  Reynaud, Ismay noted, was “obviously moved.” The premier asked, “If we capitulate, all the great might of Germany will be concentrated upon invading England. And then what will you do?” Thrusting his jaw forward, the P.M. replied that he hadn’t thought about it carefully, but that broadly speaking, he would propose to drown as many of them as possible and then to “frapper sur la tête” (“hit on the head”) any of them who managed to crawl ashore.”100

  It is odd that none of the Englishmen raised the question of the French air force. France had one, commanded by General Joseph Vuillemin, a daring pilot in the last war but now obese and incompetent. Vuillemin had angered the British by commenting that RAF support in the opening days of the German offense had arrived “tardily and in insufficient numbers.” In fact, Britain had sent a hundred bombers, all the RAF had then, to bomb the Meuse bridges and had lost forty-five of them. On May 28 Vuillemin had also said the RAF had three hundred planes in England and had sent only thirty to France—this at a time when eight to ten frontline British squadrons—96 to 120 aircraft—were in action every day supporting the French. Indeed, during the fall of France all but ten of the RAF’s fifty-three fighter squadrons saw action over France and the Low Co
untries, and of those ten, three were night fighters, two were in Norway, and one was nonoperational.

  During the fall of France the British lost 959 aircraft and nearly 300 pilots.* The French lost 560 planes, 235 of them destroyed on the ground. The performance of the French air force was baffling, even to its leaders and even after the war. At the outset, Vuillemin had more than 3,287 planes. (The Germans had 2,670.) Yet only a third of French aircraft saw action. Furthermore, between May 10 and June 12, French factories delivered 1,131 new airplanes, 688 of them fighters. Indeed, when France dropped out of the war, Vuillemin found that he actually had more first-line aircraft than he had had when the great Nazi offensive began. “What is this mystery about our planes?” General Gamelin asked afterward, testifying before a Parliamentary Investigating Committee. “Why out of 2,000 fighters on hand at the beginning of May 1940 were fewer than 500 used on the Northeast Front? I humbly confess to you that I do not know.” Commenting on the confusing figures, he said, “We have a right to be astonished.” Certainly it is astonishing that the généralissime was astonished.101

  At 10:00 P.M. the conferees dined. Weygand invited de Gaulle to sit beside him and flushed when the new general chose the chair beside Churchill instead. Already there was an unspoken bond between Churchill and Reynaud’s protégé. The formation of that bond was probably the only accomplishment of the Briare meeting. For Churchill the last straw came at bedtime. Before retiring, the prime minister and the premier had coffee and brandy together. Reynaud said Weygand had told him, “In three weeks Britain would have her neck wrung like a chicken.” Then Reynaud revealed that Pétain had told him that “it will be necessary to seek an armistice.” Once the “vainqueur de Verdun” had been considered the guardian of French honor. Now, the premier said, the marshal “has written a paper on the subject which he wishes me to read. He has not handed it to me yet. He is still ashamed to do it.” Churchill, appalled, thought Pétain should have been even more ashamed to have supported, “even tacitly, Weygand’s demand for our last twenty-five squadrons of fighters when he has made up his mind that all is lost and that France should give in.”102