The Last Lion

by William Manchester

  The issue had already been decided. The French defeatists were preparing to move to Vichy—an appropriate seat for Pétain’s new government, the Times acidly commented, Vichy being a favorite resort of invalids. They were already drawing up legislation to abolish the republic and set up a dictatorship—the État Français—when General Spears and Ambassador Campbell arrived at Bordeaux’s Quartier Général, the premier’s temporary office in the rue Vital-Carles. They hoped to persuade him to stay in office. It was a doomed call—he had lost control of his cabinet and had submitted his resignation—which led to unexpected consequences. At 10:00 P.M. they had entered the building’s huge, darkened hall. As they were approaching its wide staircase, Spears had noticed a tall figure standing bolt upright behind one of the columns, “shrouded,” as he recalled afterward, “by shadow.” It was de Gaulle, who had called him in a loud whisper. He said, “I must speak to you. It is extremely urgent.” After the general explained that Reynaud awaited them, de Gaulle whispered, “I have very good reason to believe Weygand intends arresting me.” Spears told him to stay “exactly where you are,” and, after the brief, sad appointment with Reynaud, suggested they meet within the hour at the nearby Grand Hôtel Montré.116

  De Gaulle explained a plan to encourage a French Résistance movement, using London as his base. Spears approved; he phoned Churchill, who agreed. Spears had a plane at the Bordeaux airport. They would fly out at 7:00 A.M. the next morning, the seventeenth. He never knew where de Gaulle spent that night—the hotel was too dangerous—but in the morning the self-appointed leader of the Free French (as those poilus who fled to Britain called themselves) appeared with an aide and an immense amount of baggage. Because there were French authorities at the field—the hunt for de Gaulle had already begun—it was decided that he and his aide-de-camp would behave as though they had come to see Spears off. In Spears’s words, “We had begun to move when with hooked hands I hoisted de Gaulle on board”; the aide followed “in a trice.” The baggage was tossed on board. De Gaulle arrived at No. 10 Downing Street in time for lunch. Pétain, upon learning what had happened, convened a military court. The expatriated general was found guilty of treason and sentenced to death in absentia. Churchill, of course, took another view. He wrote that de Gaulle had “carried with him, in this small aeroplane, the honour of France.”117

  De Gaulle was one of countless thousands of others escaping Vichy’s État Français that week. When the armies ceased fire at 12:40 P.M. on Monday, June 17—Britain’s first day alone—French ports and airfields were enveloped in chaos. Escapees from Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Scandinavia, many of them Jews, had found refuge in France. Their names were on Gestapo lists, they knew it, and they were frantic. RAF fields on French soil were closing down; pilots and ground crews were taking off for home. Forty thousand British fighting men, together with Belgian and Polish soldiers, were being evacuated from Brest, Cherbourg, St-Nazaire, Bordeaux, and Saint-Malo. It was a time of appalling tragedies, unnoted at the time and forgotten in the next five years of struggle for mastery of the Continent. One, which would have shocked the world even in wartime, was the loss of the liner Lancastria, just as she was leaving St-Nazaire with five thousand troops and civilian refugees aboard. Nazi bombers sank her, and three thousand drowned. Churchill forbade publication of this, saying, “The newspapers have got quite enough disaster for today, at least.” Among the uprooted were Queen Wilhelmina of Holland, a fugitive from her own homeland granted asylum by King George; Somerset Maugham, who had fled his Cannes villa in a boat packed with fellow refugees, in which he spent three weeks without changing clothes; and, most remarkably, the Duke of Windsor, the former King Edward VIII, accompanied by his Baltimore duchess.

  On the sixteenth, when de Gaulle was describing his mission to General Spears in a Bordeaux hotel suite, the telephone there had rung. Henry Mack, Ambassador Sir Ronald Campbell’s first secretary, answered it and, to his astonishment, found himself talking to the Duke, who was calling from Nice. He and the Duchess were marooned there, he explained. Could a destroyer be sent to pick them up? Mack, shocked, told him there was only one British ship in Bordeaux’s harbor, and that was a collier. He suggested that the Windsors drive to Spain. They did. They were staying with Sir Samuel Hoare, Britain’s ambassador in Madrid, when the Duke decided to lean on Winston Churchill. After all, they were old friends. Churchill had nearly destroyed his own career trying to keep the Duke, then King, on his throne. Now Windsor wanted to return to England. He also insisted that he be appointed to an official position. And: “In the light of past experience, my wife and myself must not risk finding ourselves once more regarded by the British public as in a different status to other members of my family.” All of this he sent Churchill in a telegram. In a separate message, Hoare reported that they wanted to be briefly received by the King and Queen, and that news of the meeting appear in the Court Circular.118

  Apart from the fact that Churchill was busier than any other prime minister in the history of England, meeting any of these demands was impossible. The Duchess was anathema to the royal family, particularly Mary, the Queen Mother, and their opinion of her husband had plummeted upon learning that he and his wife admired Hitler. The Windsors had since the war’s outbreak muted their former openly pro-Nazi rhetoric, but remained vehemently anti-Semitic, and moved comfortably in circles sharing their views. Also, although the Duke may have forgotten it, he was in uniform. At the war’s outbreak, he had been commissioned a major general and appointed a liaison officer with the French. After the Germans entered Paris, he had been assigned to the Armée des Alpes, then to military headquarters in Nice. Although Ambassador Campbell’s private secretary had suggested he go to Spain, no one had authorized him to do so. What to do with him?119

  King George VI told Churchill: “Keep him out of England at all costs.” Churchill wired the Duke, curtly reminding him that he had “taken active military rank,” and “refusal to obey orders” would create a grave situation. He added, but then cut: “Already there is a great deal of doubt as to the circumstances in which Your Royal Highness left Paris.” The King’s private secretary suggested the Duke be appointed to the army staff in Cairo; Churchill vetoed that. By now the Windsors were in Lisbon, where a British agent sent back word that the Duchess’s activities were alarming; she was reported to have said that she and her husband could accept the possibility of German victory. The King’s private secretary wrote No. 10 that “this is not the first time that this lady has come under suspicion for her anti-British activities, and as long as we never forget the power she can exert over him in her efforts to avenge herself on this country we shall be all right.”

  It was the King who proposed that his brother be appointed governor and commander in chief of the Bahamas. This was a royal comedown; the Bahamas was down there with the Falkland Islands and Ghana—the Gold Coast—in lack of imperial importance. Nevertheless, Churchill, who had better things to do, offered the Bahamian post to Windsor, adding, “Personally, I feel sure it is the best option in the grievous situation in which we all stand. At any rate, I have done my best.” Later that day he asked Beaverbrook, “Max, do you think he’ll take it?” According to Colville, who was present, Beaverbrook said, “He’ll find it a great relief,” and Churchill said, “Not half as much as his brother will.”120

  Windsor accepted it, though noting that he did not “consider my appointment as one of first class importance,” and observing that it was “evident that the King and Queen do not wish to put our family differences to an end.” But there was more. The prime minister told him there were conditions. His two British servants, being of military age, would have to serve in the army, and neither the Duke nor his Duchess would be permitted to visit the United States. The P.M. further warned that “sharp and unfriendly ears will be picked up to catch any suggestion that your Royal Highness takes a view about the war, or about the Germans, or about Hitlerism, which is different from that adopted by the British nati
on and Parliament…. Even while you have been staying in Lisbon, conversations have been reported by telegraph through various channels which might have been used to your Royal Highness’s disadvantage.” Warning Roosevelt that the Duke was on his way, he explained that he had been “causing His Majesty and His Majesty’s Government some embarrassment,” and that “Nazi intrigue seeks, now that the greater part of the Continent is in enemy hands, to make trouble about him.”121

  Churchill had ended his message to Windsor with “I thought your Royal Highness would not mind these words of caution.” Of course the Duke minded, and he flouted them. Interviewed by the American magazine Liberty, he encouraged isolationists to leave no stone unturned in their campaign to keep the United States out of the war, this at a time when Churchill was toiling to get the U.S. into it. American guests were told by both the Duke and Duchess that their country would be foolish to fight at England’s side. It was too late, they said; Britain was finished.122

  On June 18 the moon was full—a bomber’s moon. Colville noted the moon’s phase in his diary, adding: “The air raids will now begin. They were bigger last night than hitherto, and Cambridge was hit, a row of houses being destroyed.” Colville was correct. The Germans had been sending, intermittently, small forces of bombers in search of industrial and military targets since the previous autumn. Now they began to visit regularly.123

  The June 22 surrender of the French, beside whom Britons had been prepared to fight to the bitter end, staggered all of Britain. Britons began to realize that the way of life they had known and loved was vanishing. People walked about as though in a daze. Bus conductors punched tickets in silence; Cockney newsboys, usually irrepressibly cheerful, mutely handed out papers. No one could remember when London had been so quiet. “At places where normally there is a noisy bustle of comings and goings,” wrote an American observer, there was “the same extraordinary preoccupied silence.” Mollie Panter-Downes reported in The New Yorker on June 28:

  The French acceptance of the crushing armistice terms came as a profound shock to the public, which had been simple enough to believe Marshal Pétain when he declared that France would make no shameful surrender…. The average uninformed citizen found it difficult to believe that anything could be more shameful than an agreement which handed over weapons of war, airfields, munition works, and industrial areas to be used unconditionally.”124

  It is in this context of anger and bitterness that Churchill’s action against the French fleet must be seen. To put it in the best possible light, the behavior of Admiral Jean Louis Xavier François Darlan was duplicitous. As France’s naval chief of staff he had given his solemn word to everyone around him that if events led to an armistice with the Nazis, he would order all French warships to take refuge in British ports. To a French general he said that, if necessary, he would place every vessel under the Union Jack. He told a member of the Chambre des Députés who was also on his staff: “If an armistice is signed for one day, I shall round off my career with an act of glorious indiscipline; I shall sail with the Fleet.” As late as the evening of June 16, with the cease-fire only hours away, he assured Sir Ronald Campbell: “So long as I can issue orders to it [the fleet] you have nothing to fear.” Even de Gaulle believed him. “A feudal lord,” he said, “does not surrender his fief.”125

  Suddenly Darlan was the most important man in the war. Weygand’s army was a shattered hulk, but the French navy—the fourth-largest in the world, after Britain, the United States, and Japan—included some of the fastest, most modern ships afloat: three modern and five older battleships, eighteen heavy cruisers, twenty-seven light cruisers, sixty submarines (twenty-four had been sunk), and more than fifty destroyers. All were important. Were Hitler to grab just one-third of the French navy, he’d almost double the size of the German navy overnight. Britain’s army was small and weaponless; her air force was outnumbered by the Luftwaffe. Sea power was vital to the nation’s survival, but if the French, German, and Italian navies were combined, the Royal Navy would be overwhelmed. As Churchill saw it, “Admiral Darlan had but to sail one of his ships to any port outside France to become master of all French interests beyond German control”—in short, the entire French colonial empire.126

  Why did he stay? He appears to have had several motives. His hatred of the British lay deep; he believed that for Frenchmen, there was no difference between England (as the French always called Britain) and Germany; Pétain was offering him power; and he was convinced that the Nazis would win the war. He told Ambassador Bullitt that he was “certain that Great Britain would be conquered by Germany within five weeks unless Great Britain should surrender sooner.” When Bullitt remarked that Darlan seemed pleased by that prospect, he smiled and nodded in agreement. As for his promises, he preserved honor, at least in his own eyes, by resigning his commission and taking office as Pétain’s minister of marine. It was now his duty to enforce the policies of the new government whether he approved of them or not.127

  As late as June 22, first sea lord Admiral Dudley Pound told the War Cabinet that Darlan was taking “all possible steps” to prevent his ships from falling into Nazi hands. Churchill believed that they could not rely on one man’s word, because the issue was “so vital to the safety of the whole British Empire.” Within hours he was vindicated. At 6:50 P.M. they learned the terms of the armistice on June 22. The French had signed it without consulting their ally. Article VIII stipulated that the “French war fleet… will be assembled in ports to be specified and then demobilized and disarmed under German or Italian control.”

  The British had been betrayed. The ships would be delivered into enemy hands while still fully armed. Hitler declared that Germany did not intend to use them during the war, but as the prime minister rhetorically asked Parliament: “What is the value of that? Ask half a dozen countries, what is the value of such a solemn assurance? Furthermore, the armistice could be voided at any time on any pretext of ‘non-observance.’ ”128

  The French fleet formed but one part of a much larger story. With the French surrender, the British naval blockade of the Baltic—the closing of the Skagerrak and Kattegat Straits to German ships—was broken. The Germans now held European ports from Norway through Denmark, Holland, Belgium, and France to the Bay of Biscay. The German capture of the Channel ports—Dieppe, Cherbourg, Brest, St-Nazaire, La Rochelle, Le Havre, and Lorient—had changed the entire dynamic of the war. Operating from these ports the Reich’s submariners had to sail for only a day or two in order to reach British shipping lanes. Immediately the British ceased merchant sailings into or out of the Southwest Approaches, the sea-lanes that ran south of Ireland and into the Irish Sea, to Bristol and Liverpool. That left the Northwest Approaches—the sea-lanes between Northern Ireland and Scotland—as the only route into Britain.

  Peril also loomed in the Mediterranean, where the French navy had been charged with securing the western part of that sea. The French navy was no longer a factor, unless it fell into the hands of the Germans and Italians, and that, Churchill later wrote, would confront “Great Britain with mortal danger.” To fill the void left by the French in the western Mediterranean, the British drew heavily from the Home Fleet—itself preparing against possible invasion—to create Force H at Gibraltar, a powerful fleet of battleships, an aircraft carrier, and numerous cruisers, destroyers, and submarines. The commander of Force H, Vice Admiral James Somerville, was given three objectives: keep the Germans out of the Mediterranean, keep the Italians in, and impose a naval blockade on Vichy France and its northwest African dominions. But how to remove the French fleet from the equation?129

  Churchill found himself confronted, he later wrote, with “a hateful decision, the most unnatural and painful in which I have ever been concerned.” There was no easy solution, although some thought so; on June 25, George Bernard Shaw wrote to him: “Why not declare war on France and capture her fleet (which would gladly strike its colors to us) before A.H. recovers his breath? Surely that is the logic of t
he situation?” Churchill knew the French fleet would gladly do no such thing, and any use of force to cripple it would enrage Vichy. Yet as the British blockade of Vichy tightened, French hostility would become inevitable anyway. Therefore the War Cabinet, with Churchill the apostle of force majeure, approved an operation that, in his words, would comprise “the simultaneous seizure, control, or effective disablement of all the accessible French fleet.” Accessible were ships now in English waters and those anchored at Alexandria, the Algerian city of Oran, and Dakar, in West Africa.130

  The first phase of the British action was code-named Operation Grasp. In the early hours of July 3, armed boarding parties took over all French vessels in the ports of Portsmouth, Plymouth, Falmouth, Southampton, and Sheerness. There was virtually no resistance; one French and one English sailor were killed when the crew of the French submarine Surcouf disputed the issue. Surprise was complete, and the ease with which the French ships were taken demonstrated, as the prime minister pointed out, “how easily the Germans could have taken possession of any French ships lying in ports which they controlled.”131

  The second phase, Operation Catapult, was more difficult. The P.M. called it “the deadly stroke… in the western Mediterranean.” In the eastern Mediterranean, at Alexandria, they were lucky. Darlan ordered Vice Admiral René Godfroy to sail his ships to the French-held North African Bizerte; simultaneously, Admiral Sir Andrew Browne Cunningham (“ABC” to his friends), commander in chief of Royal Navy Mediterranean operations, was ordered to stop him. The two admirals, good friends, settled the issue by a gentleman’s agreement: Godfroy discharged his fuel oil and placed the breechblocks of his guns and the warheads of his torpedoes in custody of the French consul ashore, with the British consul as co-trustee. All parties signed a formal agreement, thus achieving Cunningham’s objective without violating Godfroy’s honor.132