by Lynne Olson
In a broadcast to his countrymen, Pétain attributed France’s defeat to “too few arms, too few allies” and to France’s own moral failures, which included a lack of discipline and an unfortunate “spirit of pleasure.” Ignoring Pétain’s reference to a scarcity of allies, the British, along with much of the rest of the world, readily accepted his condemnation of France’s grave internal shortcomings—social, psychological, economic, and political—as the primary reason for the country’s astonishing collapse.
In doing so, however, British leaders conveniently overlooked their own country’s role in the defeat. As Robert and Isabelle Tombs wrote in their magisterial history of the Anglo-French relationship, Britain’s contribution to the two countries’ World War II alliance was “shamefully feeble.” And before the creation of that uneasy partnership, the British government’s two-decade-long policy of “deliberate estrangement” from France had had a profoundly negative effect on French diplomacy, military strategy, and sense of confidence and security.
In the end, each ally blamed the other for the French fiasco—a pointing of fingers that exists to this day. “The fact is that they let each other down,” Robert and Isabelle Tombs noted, “and neither has entirely forgotten it.”
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AS THE CBS CORRESPONDENT Eric Sevareid was departing France by ship for England in late June 1940, he sensed a distinct change of mood among the British journalists also on board. “They seemed almost happy,” he recalled. “They were British, and their course was clear. They were sticking together now.”
Although their country’s future appeared impossibly bleak, many other Britons shared that same sense of relief and exhilaration. As an island people, they had never been comfortable with alliances, European or otherwise. Now they were on their own again, and proud to be so.
Even those with strong ties to France felt that way, among them General Edward Spears, Churchill’s personal liaison with the French government, and General Alan Brooke, one of Britain’s top commanders in France. Both Spears and Brooke had been born and raised in France, spoke its language fluently, and always considered it a second home. Yet Brooke told a fellow British officer in mid-June that he was determined “not to remain in this country an hour longer than necessary.” Spears, for his part, noted that “a lifetime steeped in French feeling, sentiment, and affection was falling from me. England alone counted now.”
Similarly, when King George VI asked War Secretary Anthony Eden why he was in such good spirits, considering the direness of Britain’s situation, Eden replied, “Now we are all alone, sir. We haven’t an ally left.” The king himself observed to his mother, Queen Mary, “Personally I feel happier now that we have no allies to be polite to and pamper.”
Yet regardless of whether they wanted allies or not, the British desperately needed them. The soaring combative rhetoric of Churchill had inspired his countrymen to fight on, but inspiration by itself would hardly ward off a German invasion. “Certainly everything is as gloomy as can be,” Sir Alexander Cadogan, the permanent undersecretary of the Foreign Office, wrote in his diary. “As far as I can see, we are, after years of leisurely preparation, completely unprepared.”
Despite the miraculous Dunkirk rescue, Britain’s situation verged on the calamitous. Many of the RAF’s most experienced pilots—not to mention hundreds of planes and more than 20,000 ground troops—had been lost during the defense of Belgium and France. The country now had only enough men to field twenty army divisions, less than a tenth of the forces mustered by Germany. And that small number had almost nothing to fight with, having left behind virtually all their tanks, armored cars, weapons, and other equipment in France. There were only a few hundred thousand rifles and five hundred cannons in all of Britain—and most of the cannons were antiques, appropriated from museums.
On June 26, Churchill inspected the defense line hastily being cobbled together along the coast of southeast England, where the Germans were expected to land if they invaded. The general in charge of the defenses near Dover told the prime minister that he had only three antitank guns to cover five miles of coastline, with just six rounds of ammunition per gun. “Never,” Churchill would later write in his memoirs, “has a great nation been so naked before its foes.”
Throughout the spring and summer of 1940, the new British leader made several desperate appeals for aid to the neutral United States and its president, Franklin D. Roosevelt. Though FDR was sympathetic to Britain’s plight and wanted to do all he could to help the country survive, he was wary of his isolationist opponents in Congress and skeptical about Britain’s chances. Indeed, many in Washington had already written the country off. How could this small island resist an invader that had toppled every country in its path? “One had to be little short of a visionary and mystic to believe that the war might still be won,” the Dutch historian James H. Huizinga observed. The New Yorker’s Mollie Panter-Downes put it another way: “It would be difficult for an impartial observer to decide today whether the British are the bravest or merely the most stupid people in the world.”
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EVEN AS SOME OF his countrymen celebrated their lack of allies in the summer of 1940, Churchill did the opposite. Having heaped blame on the occupied countries for their defeats just a few weeks before, he now threw open Britain’s doors to their governments and armed forces. With his customary energy and passion, he welcomed anyone prepared to carry on the fight. In doing so, he ignored strong opposition from members of his Cabinet and Whitehall officials, many of whom harbored a strong prejudice against foreigners. The Foreign Office, for one, complained that Churchill was enlisting “every crank in the world.” Nonetheless, as France approached collapse in mid-June, the prime minister ordered his government to rescue as many foreign troops and airmen fighting there as possible, regardless of their politics or nationality.
The largest contingent to fetch up in England was, by far, the Poles. After Poland fell to the Germans in September 1939, its surviving soldiers, airmen, and sailors—tens of thousands of them—had been ordered by their government to escape, however they could, and fight on. In charge of that effort was General Władysław Sikorski, a highly respected war hero and the new Polish prime minister and commander in chief.
Sikorski was named to head the Polish government on September 29, 1939, after the collapse of the authoritarian military junta that had ruled Poland during the 1930s; many of the junta’s members had been interned in Romania following their escape from their homeland. As soon as he assumed office, Sikorski, from his base in France, established an elaborate underground network, using forged passports and visas, to spirit Polish forces out of Romania and the other countries to which they had fled and back into combat. “All we knew was that we had to get to the only remaining front [in France] at any price,” said one Polish pilot.
During the fighting in France, Polish forces comprised some 85,000 men, of whom about 10 percent were in the air force. The 75,000 Polish ground troops were a motley group that included university professors, coal miners, poets, priests, and college students. On June 13, 1940, a Polish armored brigade repulsed a German attack near the French industrial town of Montbard and mounted a counteroffensive, inflicting heavy casualties. Farther east, near Belfort, the 2nd Polish Rifle Division held the Germans at bay for six days, facing an artillery barrage three times stronger than its own. General Weygand later remarked that if he had had a few more Polish divisions, he might have been able to stem the German tide.
When the French armistice with Germany was announced, Polish airmen and soldiers were almost as distraught as when their own country had fallen. But there was no time to mourn France, a nation that had given refuge to Polish political exiles for almost two centuries. On June 18, Sikorski flew to London for an urgent meeting with Churchill. He asked if Britain would help rescue Polish forces so they could fight again. Churchill’s response was swift and unequivocal: “Tell your army in France that we are their comrades in life and in death. We shall
conquer together—or we shall die together.” Later that day, he ordered the British admiralty “to make every effort to evacuate the Polish forces and personnel.” Sikorski, in turn, instructed all Polish forces in France to head immediately to ports in the south. British and Polish ships, he said, were already on their way to pick them up.
In all, some 20,000 Polish soldiers and 8,000 airmen made it to Britain. So did hundreds of sailors, along with three destroyers, two submarines, and other smaller vessels that had sailed for Britain at the outbreak of the war. In fact, the Polish navy had already been in combat against the Germans, fighting with the Royal Navy in the battle for Norway.
Joining the Poles were some 5,000 members of the Czech armed forces, about 1,000 of them airmen. In the weeks following the German occupation of Czechoslovakia in March 1939, thousands of soldiers and pilots had managed to leave the country, most of them heading for Poland. While some had remained to fight alongside the Poles, others had moved on to France. Until war was formally declared in September 1939, the French had assigned them to the Foreign Legion in North Africa. Afterward, they were integrated into the French armed forces and took part in the battle for France, distinguishing themselves in the general fighting as well as in the defense of the Dunkirk perimeter during the British withdrawal.
After France’s capitulation, the Czechs, like the Poles, were ordered south for evacuation by British ships. As one Czech army officer prepared to leave the garrison where he was stationed, its French commander barred his way, declaring, “The war is over.” “That’s true for you, Colonel,” the Czech replied. “For us, the war is only beginning.” The Frenchman, visibly moved, signed a pass and let him go.
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THE ARMED FORCES OF the other occupied nations numbered just two or three thousand men each. Nonetheless, those countries possessed additional resources that would soon become crucial in the British struggle for survival. King Haakon, for example, brought with him only 1,400 soldiers, 1,000 sailors, and 3 pilots (a number that would grow rapidly in the coming months). But he and Norway had another asset that was greatly coveted by both Germany and Britain: the fourth largest and most modern merchant marine fleet in the world. Fast and efficient, Norway’s 1,300 oceangoing merchant ships, most of which had been built in the previous decade, totaled more than 4.4 million gross tons and were manned by some 30,000 seamen.
When Germany invaded Norway in April 1940, most Norwegian ships were at sea, and the Germans and Norwegians engaged in a frenzied contest to gain control of them. German-run broadcasting stations in Norway ordered the ships to proceed to Norwegian or other German-occupied ports, while the Norwegian government, over the BBC, directed them to go to Britain, France, or one of the Allies’ dominions or colonies. Virtually every Norwegian ship captain obeyed the instructions from London. In late April, the Norwegian government requisitioned the ships from the companies that owned them—more than 1,200 vessels in total—and leased them to Britain, whose own merchant shipping was being decimated by German submarines. The very survival of Britain depended on those ships and the oil, food, and other goods they transported to the island nation.
With the Norwegian ships and crews at its disposal, Britain was able to keep open the crucial Atlantic lifeline—and eventually win the Battle of the Atlantic. In early 1941, a British official declared that the Norwegian merchant fleet was worth more to England “than an army of a million men.” The Norwegian navy, together with the Polish and Dutch navies, also helped man the destroyers protecting Britain’s merchant marine convoys.
The Dutch government contributed its own sizable merchant fleet of some six hundred ships, as well as some of the rich material resources of the Dutch East Indies. The Belgians, meanwhile, had considerable gold reserves, along with the immensely valuable raw materials of the Congo, including rubber, iron, and uranium.* At the beginning of their wartime relationship, however, the Belgians presented the British with two major problems: their king had remained behind and the two top leaders of their government, who had escaped to France when Belgium fell, now refused to come to Britain.
When France collapsed, Prime Minister Hubert Pierlot and Foreign Minister Paul-Henri Spaak of Belgium collapsed with it. Having accused King Leopold of defeatism less than a month before, Pierlot announced after the French armistice, “France has thrown in the sponge. We abandon the struggle with her.” British officials made repeated offers to spirit Pierlot and Spaak out of France, but the demoralized Belgians just as repeatedly turned them down; they had allied themselves so totally with France that they completely lost heart when it fell. For those two men, Britain was a truly foreign land. Neither of them had ever visited it or spoke its language.
The British were horrified. So were several of Pierlot and Spaak’s Cabinet colleagues, who had gone to London immediately after France’s capitulation. The Belgian ambassador to Britain passed on to Pierlot and Spaak a message from Lord Halifax, the British foreign secretary, warning that “if you give up now, you lose everything, whereas if you continue the struggle, you safeguard the future.”
The two Belgian leaders ignored Halifax’s admonition and soon became even more of an embarrassment. They ordered Belgian soldiers and airmen in France not to decamp to Britain; when many defied the order and went anyway, they were tried and sentenced in absentia for desertion. Having falsely accused their king of treating with the enemy, Pierlot and Spaak sent a message to Leopold asking him to do just that—to bring the two of them back to Belgium so they could form a government that would open peace negotiations with Germany. They dispatched a similar message to Berlin.
The Nazis failed to respond to their appeal, while the king, who had refused all contact with Nazi officials, rejected it outright. Most Belgians agreed with their monarch. “You must have no illusions,” a Belgian Red Cross official informed Pierlot and Spaak. “Belgium in its entirety is behind the king. You are despised….They consider that you have acted in an atrocious manner.” Paul Struye, a Belgian politician who became a leader of the country’s resistance later in the war, recalled that “virtually the entire country rallied around the King. This was a manifestation of spontaneity, unanimity and fervour which is quite exceptional in our history.”
Scorned by the Nazis, Pétain’s France, and their own king and country, Pierlot and Spaak finally realized they had nowhere to go but Britain. Hats in hand, the disgraced Belgian officials left France on October 24, 1940, for London, where they quickly won official recognition as leaders of Belgium’s government in exile.
Contemptuous as they were of Pierlot and Spaak’s behavior, the pragmatic British were prepared to overlook it in exchange for immediate access to Belgium’s gold hoard and the Congo’s resources. By the fall of 1940, heavy armaments purchases from the United States had drained Britain of most of its dollar and gold reserves, which made Belgian gold that much more crucial to its defense. To ensure the continuance of arms shipments, the Belgians loaned much of their gold cache, held by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, to the British Treasury.
Pierlot and Spaak were also compelled to proclaim their wholehearted support of the British war effort and their allegiance to King Leopold. In fact, both were by then acutely aware that their earlier accusations against Leopold were untrue. Yet neither retracted or apologized for them; from then on, they simply behaved as if they had never accused their monarch of anything untoward. As Spaak’s biographer noted, both men “were in too deep by now to make a public recantation of their error.”
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OF THE SEVEN OCCUPIED countries that found refuge in London in the spring and summer of 1940, six presented their British hosts with invaluable dowries of men, money, ships, natural resources, and intelligence information. The lone representative of the seventh nation, France, brought only himself.
Forty-nine-year-old Charles de Gaulle was not a king, a president, or even a high government official. The most junior brigadier general in the French army, he had been appointed undersecretar
y of war just eight days before his dramatic flight from France on June 17. Shy, unsmiling, and aloof, this minor functionary “lacked all social vices and graces,” an observer remarked. Many people found him impossible to get along with. His glacial attitude, his family joked, was the result of his having fallen into an icebox as a child.
Lord Moran, Winston Churchill’s physician, would later describe the towering, ungainly de Gaulle as “an improbable creature, like a human giraffe, sniffing down his nostrils at mortals beneath his gaze.” Paul Reynaud—a friend and ally of de Gaulle’s who, in one of his last acts as premier, appointed him to the War Department post—said that he had “the character of a stubborn pig.”
Yet for all his personal flaws, he was the only French official willing to abandon his homeland and cross the English Channel to continue the fight against Hitler. Churchill had first met de Gaulle during the prime minister’s final stormy meeting with French leaders, held June 11 at a château near Orléans. He had been enormously impressed with this cool, unemotional brigadier, who, in contrast to his panicked superiors, insisted that capitulation to the Germans was not an option.
Like Churchill, de Gaulle had been a lifelong rebel. Also like the British prime minister, he had viewed himself as a man of destiny from childhood. Writing in his journal at the age of fifteen, he pictured himself as the head of an army embarked on a crusade to save France—a Napoleonic sense of mission he retained all his life. A report on him early in his military career noted that he had “brilliance and talent; [was] very highly gifted, and [had] plenty of character. Unfortunately, he spoils his undoubted qualities by his excessive self-confidence, his severity towards the opinions of others, and his attitude of a king in exile.”