by Lynne Olson
In the 1930s, this regal young officer conducted a one-man campaign against the French high command’s military strategy, warning against its reliance on prepared fortifications like the Maginot Line and arguing for creation of a fast-moving mechanized army working closely with and supported by aircraft. His was a prescient plan with striking parallels to the blueprint implemented by the Germans in their blitzkriegs of Poland, Norway, France, and the Low Countries.
When army leaders ignored his recommendations that they jettison their emphasis on defense and reform France’s obsolescent military machine, de Gaulle made his contrarian views public in a book published in 1934. That, too, had little effect except to heighten the enmity of the military brass toward him.
The German invasion of France resulted in yet another diatribe from de Gaulle, this one openly critical of the General Staff’s conduct of the war and addressed to dozens of high-level military and civilian leaders throughout the country. To describe de Gaulle’s letter as “an ‘undisciplined act’ is too weak; ‘mutiny’ is nearer the mark,” Jean Lacouture, a de Gaulle biographer, wrote. De Gaulle’s superiors were ready to cashier him, but he had the support of Paul Reynaud, who agreed with his views. On June 6, when Reynaud appointed de Gaulle undersecretary of war for national defense, he told him that “your presence at my side is a sign of our resolve” to carry on the war.
Reynaud’s resolve, however, proved as evanescent as a soap bubble. Ten days later, he gave way to Pétain, who had helped orchestrate France’s failed defense strategy and was a fierce critic of de Gaulle. On the night of Reynaud’s resignation, de Gaulle waylaid General Edward Spears, Churchill’s representative to the French government, at the government’s temporary headquarters in Bordeaux. De Gaulle told Spears that Pétain and Weygand planned to arrest him the following day. He appealed to the Englishman to help him escape to London so he could “rally French opinion in favor of resistance.”
After getting Churchill’s blessing, Spears put the escape plan into motion. Early on the morning of June 17, de Gaulle and his aide-de-camp accompanied Spears to a small airport outside Bordeaux, as if to see him off. The two Frenchmen watched as Spears boarded a four-seater RAF plane. Then, as the pilot revved up the engines and began taxiing slowly down the runway, Spears abruptly pulled de Gaulle and his aide aboard. Slamming the door, the British general noted the “gaping faces” of the French pilots and ground crews standing nearby.
A few hours later, Spears and de Gaulle arrived at 10 Downing Street. It was a lovely late-spring day, and Churchill was sitting in the garden, enjoying the sunshine. He rose with a smile to greet his guest, who, at six feet, seven inches, towered over him by a foot.
As warm as the prime minister’s welcome was, however, it could not disguise the fact that de Gaulle was, as General Pug Ismay noted, “in a hideously difficult position.” Unlike the governments of the other occupied European countries, he and his infant movement were not recognized by Britain—or the rest of the world, for that matter—as the official governing body of his nation. Because Reynaud had legally handed over power, Pétain’s regime, now based in the spa town of Vichy, was without question the legitimate government of France. Technically, that made de Gaulle an insurrectionist; indeed, a few weeks after his escape, a Vichy military court sentenced him to death for treason.
Not surprisingly, then, many leading British officials wanted nothing to do with the newcomer. As much as they might disapprove of the actions of the Vichy government, not only was it legal but it also had significant resources—a large naval fleet and far-flung French colonies—that must be kept out of German hands. In the view of some in the British government, appeasement of Vichy might even lure Pétain and his men back to the Allied side.
Whitehall’s reaction to de Gaulle himself was, for the most part, condescending and hostile. Alexander Cadogan, for one, referred to the French general as “a loser” and “that ass de Gaulle.” After his first meeting with de Gaulle, Cadogan told his colleagues that “I can’t tell you anything about [him], except that he’s got a head like a pineapple and hips like a woman.”
Churchill, however, viewed de Gaulle in a far different light. He had tremendous admiration for the Frenchman’s refusal to accept defeat and for his iron-willed determination to fight on in the face of what appeared to be impossible odds—qualities shared by the prime minister himself. But he also saw in de Gaulle what he wanted to see in France. When Anthony Eden told Churchill that France’s disgrace was so great it could never recover, Churchill vehemently disagreed. France, he said, would unquestionably rise again. But for now, he and Britain would have to settle for de Gaulle as the lone emblem of an undefeated France.
For a few days after the armistice, British authorities had hoped that at least one or two weightier French political figures—Reynaud, former interior minister Georges Mandel, Édouard Herriot, the president of the Chamber of Deputies, or any of the few other opponents of capitulation—would join de Gaulle in London. But none did, and Churchill finally called a halt to the official foot-dragging over de Gaulle’s status. On the evening of June 27, he summoned the general to Downing Street and told him, “You are alone! Well, I shall recognize you alone!” The next day, the British government gave official recognition to “Gen. de Gaulle as the leader of all free Frenchmen, wherever they may be, who rally to him in support of the Allied cause.” That announcement, limited as it was, provided the legal basis for de Gaulle’s relationship with the British government from then on. The brainchild of Winston Churchill, it was, noted the French historian François Kersaudy, “an act of faith in a solitary man and an abstraction called Free France.”
Although de Gaulle’s wartime relationship with Churchill would later become highly contentious, he never forgot the great debt he owed the British prime minister for his support in 1940. “I was nothing to begin with,” he noted after the war. “Washed up from a disastrous shipwreck upon the shores of England, what could I have done without his help? He gave it to me at once.”
With Churchill’s recognition in hand, de Gaulle set out on his “magnificently absurd” undertaking to reclaim France. In the beginning, his London headquarters consisted of several small rooms in St. Stephen’s House, a dilapidated office building on the bank of the Thames. From this makeshift office, furnished with a table, four rickety chairs, a phone, and a large map of France, de Gaulle and a handful of aides began the long, painful effort of building an army.
To the few Frenchmen who initially answered his call, he didn’t mince words about how arduous this quixotic campaign would be: “I have neither funds nor troops. I don’t know where my family is. We are starting from scratch.”
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* Over the course of the war, the Belgian government in exile shipped 1,375 tons of uranium to the United States—a stockpile that fueled the Manhattan Project.
In the early morning of June 22, 1940, a large group of rumpled, bleary-eyed passengers clustered together on a platform at London’s Paddington Station, surrounded by luggage, wooden crates, and twenty-six metal canisters. The crowds hurrying by paid little attention to the bedraggled travelers, who had just arrived from France. Londoners were focused on more important concerns that day, including the imminent capitulation of France to Germany.
Nothing about the group’s members indicated their prominence; they included some of France’s most distinguished scientists and engineers, experts in everything from ballistics and chemical warfare research to explosives manufacturing. Also on the platform were two nuclear physicists from the renowned Collège de France in Paris, a leading center of nuclear fission experiments. Unobserved as their arrival was, the physicists—and the precious substance in the canisters beside them—would end up playing a vital role in one of the most momentous developments of the war.
A tall, unshaven Englishman, wearing flannel trousers and a travel-stained trench coat, was tending to the group. Known as Jack to his family and friends, he was Charles Henry George
Howard, the 20th Earl of Suffolk and a scion of one of Britain’s most ancient and powerful families. Lord Suffolk had scooped up the scientists a few days earlier and spirited them out of France aboard a scruffy Scottish coal freighter. An awestruck Harold Macmillan, then a junior minister in Churchill’s government, was introduced to the swashbuckling Suffolk a few hours after the group’s arrival in London; he would later describe the thirty-four-year-old peer as a “mixture between Sir Frances Drake and the Scarlet Pimpernel.”
Yet while Lord Suffolk had shown considerable daring and ingenuity during his adventure in France, its success was not due solely to him. His partner in arranging the rescue was Raoul Dautry, the French minister of armaments. Unlike most of his colleagues in the French government, the fifty-nine-year-old Dautry, a former head of the French railway system and a man of audacity and vision, was determined to do all he could to help Britain and defy the Nazis.
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DAUTRY’S INVOLVEMENT IN THIS cloak-and-dagger episode had begun a few months earlier, when Frédéric Joliot-Curie, the son-in-law of Nobel laureates Marie and Pierre Curie, paid him a series of visits shortly after France and Britain declared war on Germany. In 1935, Joliot-Curie and his wife, Irène, had won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their seminal work on artificial radioactivity. Under Joliot-Curie’s direction, nuclear physicists at the Collège de France had demonstrated that uranium had the potential to produce an explosive chain reaction and had even designed a workable reactor on paper.
Joliot-Curie told Dautry that his team’s research might well lead to the development of a vastly powerful new bomb. But to harness nuclear energy, he said, it would be necessary to find a material that would slow down the rapid chain reaction caused by the splitting of uranium nuclei, which in turn would allow the reaction to become self-sustaining. One such moderator was an extremely rare substance called heavy water, a liquid that looked like ordinary water but contained deuterium—an isotope, or variation, of hydrogen. Only one company in the world—a Norwegian firm called Norsk Hydro—produced heavy water in quantities greater than a few drops, Joliot-Curie said. It was manufactured at a Norsk Hydro electrochemical plant nestled in a narrow, mountain-rimmed valley about seventy miles west of Oslo.
In late December 1939, soon after his meetings with Joliot-Curie, Dautry received alarming news from officials in France’s military intelligence bureau. Norsk Hydro, which produced heavy water as a sideline and sold small amounts of it to laboratories all over the world for various kinds of scientific experiments, had just informed them that I.G. Farben, the huge German chemical-industry conglomerate, had placed an order for its entire heavy water stock. When the Norwegian company had asked the reason for such a large purchase, Farben had declined to answer.
Dautry’s fear—that Germany was also pursuing the possibility of producing a nuclear bomb—was in fact correct. Indeed, the German government had created a military department devoted exclusively to the wartime development of nuclear energy. “The country which first makes use of [nuclear fission] has an unsurpassable advantage over the others,” observed the German physicist Paul Harteck. Under government sponsorship, Harteck and other physicists had formed what they called “the Uranium Club,” conducting nuclear chain reaction experiments in half a dozen laboratories throughout the Reich. Like Joliot-Curie and his team, the Germans had decided on heavy water as the best instrument for controlling and sustaining a nuclear reaction.
News of the Germans’ interest in heavy water galvanized Dautry into action. Determined to keep nuclear weapons out of Nazi hands, he organized a secret mission to Norway to bring back all the heavy water its operatives could find. To head the operation, Dautry chose Jacques Allier, a dapper, bespectacled young Frenchman who in peacetime was an officer at the Banque de Paris et des Pays-Bas, one of France’s leading banks and a chief shareholder in Norsk Hydro.
On February 28, 1940, Allier, now a reserve officer with the Ministry of Armaments, left Paris for Oslo—and the adventure of his life. Traveling under an assumed name and with a false passport, he carried with him a letter of credit for 1.5 million Norwegian kroner (more than $5 million today).
In the snowbound Norwegian capital, Allier told Axel Aubert, Norsk Hydro’s director, of the race between French and German scientists to build a nuclear bomb and of the vital importance of heavy water in that endeavor. When the Frenchman offered the letter of credit in exchange for all of Norsk Hydro’s stock, Aubert shook his head. His company, he said, did “not wish to receive one centime” for the heavy water; instead Norsk Hydro would lend it to France, as well as any the company manufactured in the future. “I know that if the [German] experiments succeed and if later France has the misfortune of losing the war, I will be shot for what I am doing today,” Aubert said. “But it’s a matter of pride for me to run that risk.”
With the heavy water in hand, Allier and his team of agents faced a new challenge: how to get it out of the country without German interference. Despite the secrecy of the French mission, the Nazis knew all about it: the Abwehr, Germany’s military intelligence agency, had cabled its operatives in Oslo to follow and waylay a suspicious Frenchman named Allier, who was traveling under an alias.
Late one evening in early March 1940, workers at the Norsk Hydro plant poured the heavy water into twenty-six metal canisters, then drove over ice-covered roads to deliver them to Oslo. The following morning, Allier and one of his French colleagues arrived at Oslo’s Fornebu Airport. Two passenger planes were revving up on the airfield side by side, one bound for Scotland, the other for Amsterdam. Both were scheduled to depart at about the same time.
In the departure hall, the Frenchmen, under the watchful eye of Abwehr operatives, confirmed their reservations for the Amsterdam plane. As passengers for both flights began boarding, a taxi drove up to the departure gate, was waved through to the tarmac, and stopped between the two aircraft, out of sight of the terminal. The cans of heavy water were hurriedly transferred from the taxi to the Scotland-bound plane as Allier and his colleague headed for the other. Hidden in a swarm of fellow passengers, they abruptly shifted direction, scrambling aboard the airliner flying to Scotland just as its door was closing. Both planes took off and headed out over the North Sea.
A few minutes into the flight, two Luftwaffe fighters intercepted the craft heading for Amsterdam and forced it to land at Hamburg, a port city in northern Germany. As soon as it touched down, Abwehr agents forced its cargo compartment open and unloaded several large wooden crates. Inside, they found loads of Norwegian crushed granite instead of the heavy water they had been ordered to retrieve. By then the canisters were safely in Edinburgh. By March 16, they were in Paris, stored in the cellars of the Collège de France. Three weeks later, Germany invaded Norway.
Raoul Dautry, however, had little time to savor his success. On May 16, he received an urgent call from General Weygand, informing him of the German breakthrough at the Meuse River. Unlike his superiors, Dautry was not focused on the twin specters of defeat and capitulation. He shared Churchill and de Gaulle’s belief that his country must stand its ground and fight; if vanquished on French soil, he argued, its army should retreat to France’s colonies in North Africa to continue the battle alongside Britain.
His prime concern at the moment, though, was to ensure the safety of the Collège de France physicists and the heavy water they were sheltering. At his urging, two leading members of Joliot-Curie’s team—the tall, burly, Russian-born Lew Kowarski and Hans von Halban, a cultivated Austrian who had grown up in Germany—accompanied the precious substance to Clermont-Ferrand, an industrial town some 250 miles south of Paris, where they set up a temporary lab. In early June, as the enemy drew closer to Paris, Joliot-Curie and his wife joined them. By then Dautry had realized the hopelessness of the situation; it was essential to get the scientists and the heavy water out of France before the Germans tracked them down. Just as he was working out plans to do so, Lord Suffolk providentially appeared in his office.
In early 1940, Suffolk, a scientist in his own right, had been sent to Paris as the liaison between Dautry’s Ministry of Armaments and the British Ministry of Supply’s department for scientific and industrial research. After taking a suite at the Ritz, he set about acquainting himself with the latest French developments in science and engineering, including Joliot-Curie’s nuclear fission experiments.
In the first days of June, with France about to fall, Suffolk decided on his own initiative to rescue from the country whatever he could of scientific and industrial value. Dautry wholeheartedly approved and presented Suffolk a letter authorizing him to do so. With that in hand, Suffolk raced around Paris collecting scientists, engineers, state-of-the art machine tools, and millions of dollars worth of industrial diamonds, dispatched from Belgium and Holland in advance of the German blitzkrieg. When some of the bankers in whose vaults the diamonds were stored refused to hand them over, the English lord pulled out two ivory-handled pistols along with Dautry’s letter. The bankers quickly complied.
The Earl of Suffolk
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LORD SUFFOLK’S CONFRONTATION WITH the bankers in Paris was not atypical. All his life, Jack Howard, as he preferred to be called, had refused to follow the rules of polite society. His rebellion against conformity and thirst for adventure seemed to have been firmly embedded in his family’s DNA. “For twenty generations,” an observer remarked, “the earls of Suffolk have done just what they pleased—and what they pleased to do was invariably dangerous.” Thomas Howard, the 1st Earl of Suffolk, was given his title by Queen Elizabeth I for the key part he played in defeating the Spanish Armada in 1588. The queen referred to him as “Good Thomas,” to distinguish him from his father, Thomas Howard, the 4th Duke of Norfolk, who was executed in 1572 for plotting to dethrone Elizabeth and replace her with Mary, Queen of Scots. Some three hundred years later, Queen Victoria tartly referred to the family as “those mad Howards.”