The French government and population were not unprepared for a bombing war. As in Britain, the French state had begun to plan for passive defence against air attack as early as 1923; a law for compulsory passive defence organization was passed in April 1935, compelling local authorities to begin the organization of civil defence measures. In July 1938 a Director of Passive Defence was appointed in the Defence Ministry to coordinate the protection of civilian lives and property with the committees of passive defence set up in each French administrative département.66 The problem for French civil defence was the sudden defeat and occupation in the summer of 1940. In the area occupied by the Germans, civil defence was likely to be a necessary safeguard against British air activity; in the unoccupied zone, the urgency for continued civil defence seemed less evident. The Vichy government set up the Directorate of Passive Defence in the southern city of Lyon in 1941 under General Louis Sérant, but it was starved of funds and personnel. Spending on passive defence had totalled more than 1 billion francs in 1939 but by 1941 was down to just 250 million.67 In both zones of France the difficult task was to reach a satisfactory working relationship with the German occupiers. The active air defence of the occupied zone was in the hands of Field Marshal Sperrle’s Air Fleet 3. Following the switch to the war against the Soviet Union, the number of fighter aircraft and anti-aircraft guns left in France was seldom adequate for the weight of Allied attack. German priority was given to the protection of the most important military sites, including the submarine pens and German airbases. Air-raid alarms could only be activated on German orders, though French observers were expected to supply information to allow German officers to calculate whether it was worth sounding an alert. In the occupied zone the blackout was enforced on German orders. Mobile emergency units for air protection were sent from Germany to help with firefighting and rescue work alongside the residual French passive defence organization. They found the French attitude at times lackadaisical. German firemen fighting a blaze in Dunkirk in April 1942 were astonished at the lack of discipline among French colleagues who ‘stood around on the corners smoking’.68
The relationship with the unoccupied zone was a constant source of friction for the German air command in Paris and the Italian occupation zone set up in 1940 in south-eastern France. The Italian Armistice Commission insisted that Vichy impose a blackout throughout the area abutting the Italian occupied regions to avoid giving British bombers an easy aid to navigation against Italian targets, but even when the French Air Force agreed, it proved difficult to enforce.69 In November 1941 the German Armistice Commission in Wiesbaden complained that British aircraft regularly flew over the unoccupied zone without any blackout below: ‘The contrast between the occupied zone, plunged into darkness, and the unoccupied zone, where the blackout is up to now only intermittent, nicely indicates to enemy planes the frontier of the two zones.’70 The German Air Force demanded complete blackout every night along a cordon 100 kilometres from the occupation zone, and effective blackout over the whole of unoccupied France when aircraft were sighted. French officials regarded the request as ‘inopportune’ and prevaricated for months until August 1942, when the French government finally accepted a blackout of the frontier zones.71 A German aerial inspection a few weeks later showed that many houses had not bothered to take blackout measures; vehicles could be seen driving with full headlights; in Lyon the blackout occurred only after the anti-aircraft artillery had begun to fire.72 The long delay reflected a more general reluctance on the part of the French military leadership to comply with German demands. Failure to observe the blackout was also a simple way to express non-compliance. Free French radio broadcasts encouraged householders to keep lights on throughout the night to help the RAF find German targets. Only when the whole of France was occupied could the German occupiers insist on the blackout, but even then complaints continued about its inadequacy.
The occupation of the southern zone on 10 November 1942 coincided with the intensification of Allied bombing. As this became heavier, so the French authorities recognized that failure to collaborate fully with the German occupiers would expose the population to unnecessary risks. The ambivalence remained, however. When German Air Fleet 3 asked for French anti-aircraft gunners in 1943 to man batteries in the north of the country, French officials preferred to site them in central France where they could be used for training purposes rather than to fire at Allied aircraft.73 In February 1943 the German military command in Paris insisted that a unitary French anti-air defence system should be set up covering the newly occupied French territory and working in close collaboration with the thinly spread German anti-air resources. The Vichy regime was asked to establish a Secretariat for Air Defence, including a national director for ‘Passive Defence’, and it was the German intention that the French organization would eventually operate over the whole of France.74 The new French defences included anti-aircraft batteries which were, unlike their German counterparts, controlled by the army. The German Air Force command in France insisted that the new French units come under air force control, and the army was forced to comply.75 A new air-raid warning system, the Securité Aérienne Publique (SAP), was activated in February 1943, manned by French personnel under French Air Force control, using a mixture of radar and visual observation. In the southern zone the force numbered 3,800 officers and men; in the northern occupation zone the German Air Force still kept its own system of alerts, but Vichy officials and officers were posted to the main air-defence centres to help coordinate air defence measures across the whole country.76 The system suffered from the same problems found in the northern zone, since alerts could only be authorized by the Germans on information passed to them by French observers, except in more remote areas where there were no German officials.77 The result once again was that alerts were sometimes sounded only when aircraft were already overhead, minutes before the bombs dropped.
The Passive Defence system insisted on by the German Air Force already existed in a skeleton form throughout Vichy France, organized by local prefects and mayors. In the southern zone the system had not been properly tested and required a rapid expansion. The Vichy regime, now led by Pierre Laval as premier, established an Interministerial Protection Service against the Events of War (SIPEG), not unlike the committee established in February 1943 by Joseph Goebbels in Germany, designed to oversee all the policies necessary to maintain economic and social survival in the bombed cities.78 The Passive Defence Directorate, a branch of the new department of Aerial Defence, held an awkward constitutional position between the German authorities on the one hand and the French SIPEG on the other. One of the things the new organization had to provide were mobile support units to cope particularly with the threat of firebombing on the model already adopted in northern France. Emergency fire and rescue battalions were set up at Avignon, Lyon, Aix-en-Provence and Montpellier, to be summoned with German approval to any raid where local civil defence could not cope.79 But they remained short of personnel – there were only 1,500 to cover the whole of southern France – and short of essential equipment because it was being supplied by French factories to meet German orders. When units were sent to help with raids in northern France the shortages of manpower and equipment were evident, while the population in the south complained that they were not left with adequate protection.80 In general, French cities were much less well protected than British or German cities, while the tension between the French organization and the German authorities, whose principal interest was in safeguarding German military installations and industries working to German orders, left civilian communities potentially more vulnerable to the effects of inaccurate raiding.
In many cases, however, the German air defence forces cooperated with French civil defence and emergency services. At Lorient the German Air Defence Regiment 34, stationed in north-west France, was called in during January 1943 to try to stem the fires not only in the port area where German personnel were stationed, but also in the residential areas hit by the ra
in of incendiaries. The local civil defence also summoned help from seven fire services in other towns. The failure to save Lorient resulted not from the lack of effort on the part of both French and German emergency workers, but from the sheer weight of the attack.81 In Nantes, later in the year, the two forces, French and German, also cooperated in fighting the effects of the raid not only on the port, which the Germans needed, but also on the streets of the town itself.82 Again it was the scale of the bombing that made it difficult for civil defence to cope with the immediate crisis, but by the day following the heaviest raid, 17 September 1943, there were 800 French and German workers, helped by local miners and teams from the National Youth movement, opening roads, making damaged housing safe and searching for buried survivors. Eventually 1,500 emergency workers and volunteers worked to restore some kind of order. They were hampered first by the lack of equipment – there were only four mechanical shovels and just 50 lorries – and then by the attacks which followed on 23 September. On the following day only 400 men remained to tackle the rescue work since many workers had fled with their families from the ruined housing. Eventually twice this number could be found, but the French authorities observed that many were German workers, who displayed a greater discipline because they had no personal ties to the city itself.83
The disaster at Nantes highlighted the problem of orderly evacuation as a solution to the increased threat from bombing. Evacuation had always been the French state’s preference as a way of providing really effective salvation to the urban population, but after the disastrous results of the mass exodus in 1940 during the German attack, priority was given to trying to prevent extensive evacuation and to keeping families together. Here again the German occupiers played a central part in dictating the pattern of evacuations. Following the bombing of Lorient, in which thousands of workers and their families disappeared into the surrounding countryside, the German High Command in Paris decided that the vulnerable coastal towns should be evacuated in a planned way, giving priority as in Germany to children, mothers and the elderly. In Cherbourg the Germans demanded the evacuation of 30,000 out of the 50,000 inhabitants, in Dieppe and Le Havre around one-quarter of the population.84 The evacuations were carried out despite the reluctance of many inhabitants to leave. In Cherbourg over one-third of the evacuees later returned in the summer and winter of 1943, while the German commanders were lobbied for permission for wives and young children to return to live with male workers regarded by the Germans as indispensable. Once Allied invasion in 1944 became likely, however, the German occupiers insisted that the populations of the northern littoral evacuate as fully as possible to avoid being in the battle zone. There were only 5,000 people left in Cherbourg when the American army arrived in June 1944.85 The Germans insisted on similar measures on the south coast of France, where it was possible that the Allies might launch a surprise invasion. Since the cities of the south were also now threatened by heavy bombing, evacuation of the coastal zone was seen by the French government as a useful means to reduce casualties. Preliminary plans in January 1944 suggested the transfer of up to 485,000 people for whom transport and accommodation had to be found in inland rural areas unprepared for the exodus. The combination of bombing and imminent invasion forced the French government to produce coordinated plans to move their wartime refugees more successfully than in 1940.86
Evacuation had already begun in 1942 on an improvised basis and by early 1944 over 200,000 children had been moved from the most vulnerable cities. In December 1941 a scheme was established between the bombed city of Brest and the southern city of Lyon in which the bombed-out (sinistrés) were to be housed in Lyon and given welfare and funds by the council and population which adopted them. The scheme failed to attract even 100 children since parents were reluctant to accept separation and the children were reluctant to go.87 In 1942 other bombed towns either sought or were offered adoption by cities regarded as safe, including Le Havre, which was eventually adopted by Algiers, but much of the aid came in the form of money or clothes or books for the homeless rather than a new home. Most French evacuees moved to family or friends in nearby villages, and French planners insisted, against German objections, that on practical and political grounds it made more sense to house evacuees locally rather than in remote areas in central France. With the heavy bombing of Lorient, St Nazaire and Brest in early 1943, the population flowed out into the surrounding countryside in tens of thousands.88 On 4 February 1944 Laval issued comprehensive guidelines on evacuation policy following the severe bombing of the winter and the expectation that the military threat would escalate. The guiding principles of the programme were the need for an ordered transfer of population and the consent of those to be transferred, ‘voluntary but organised’. The government favoured persuasion, using a programme of posters, radio broadcasts and public meetings. Priority was to be given to ‘the human capital of the Nation’, above all to children, who carried the demographic future of a post-war France.89 Mothers and children and pregnant women were the chief categories, though the elderly and disabled were also included; those who remained were classified as ‘indispensable’ (administrators and officials), ‘necessary’ (labourers and white-collar workers, doctors, welfare workers) and ‘useful’ (those who helped to maintain the activity of the indispensable and necessary). Families nevertheless remained unenthusiastic about evacuation; they feared looting if they left their homes, and disliked the loss of independence and reliance on welfare in the destination zones. Eventually around 1.2 million moved as refugees, evacuees or bombed-out, most in reaction to the urgent imperative of survival.90
It has sometimes been remarked that the French failed to exhibit the ‘Blitz spirit’ evident in Britain, and later in Germany, in the face of bombing. In a great many ways the opposite is true. The French population faced an inescapable dilemma that made it difficult to know how to respond to the raids: they wanted the Allies who were bombing them to win, and they wanted the Germans who protected them to lose. Since they were not themselves at war, the sense that they represented a national ‘front line’ against a barbarous enemy could not easily be used to mobilize the population as it could in Britain and Germany. The bombing was not part of an orchestrated offensive against French morale, and civilians were not supposed to be a target; nor was bombing experienced either regularly or over a wide area, except for the bombing of northern France during the Allied invasion. French towns and cities were nevertheless caught between two dangerous forces, the German occupiers and Vichy collaborators on the one hand and the Allied air forces (including the B-24 ‘Liberator’) on the other. Resisting the Germans by helping Allied aircrew or sabotaging what had not been bombed meant running risks of discovery, torture and execution that no one in Britain’s Blitz was expected to run. Lesser infractions – deliberate refusal to observe the blackout, or absenteeism from a civil defence unit – could be interpreted by the occupiers not simply as an act of negligence but as an act of resistance. When evacuees returned without authorization, the local German commanders withdrew ration cards or threatened the returnees with a labour camp. French people exposed to the bombs experienced double jeopardy, both the damage and deaths from raids and the harsh authority of the occupiers.
This dilemma was exploited politically by both sides during the war. The German propaganda apparatus presented the Allied air forces as terror flyers, as in Germany, and the French press was encouraged to focus on the barbarous and indiscriminate nature of the attacks. The Vichy authorities shared this perspective, and may indeed have believed it. Cinema newsreels on the bombing of French targets broadcast by France-Actualités carried titles such as ‘War on civilians’, ‘Wounded France’, ‘The Calvary continues’, while after every major raid there were elaborate official funerals with full pageantry and speeches condemning the massacre of the innocents.91 Since the Vichy regime was widely unpopular among important sections of the urban population, the bombing was used as a way to show that the authorities cared about the we
lfare of the damaged communities and to forge links between state and people. The bombed-out were entitled to state welfare at fixed rates; the state paid the funeral expenses of bomb victims; evacuation costs could be met in full for transfers of less than 15 kilometres distance; pensions were introduced for those disabled by the bombs, and for those widowed or orphaned in the raids.92 In addition, bomb victims were entitled to welfare assistance from two voluntary welfare organizations, the Secours National (National Assistance), re-established in 1940 with Marshal Pétain as its president, and the Comité Ouvrier de Secours Immédiat (COSI, the Committee for Workers’ Emergency Assistance) set up following the Billancourt raid in 1942 under the collaborationist René Mesnard. Both relied on state funds as well as voluntary contributions, and both echoed the propaganda of the Vichy regime in condemning the bombing and highlighting the efforts to aid the victims as a means of binding together the national community. The COSI took funds directly from the German authorities and in reality distributed little of it to the bombed-out and much of it to the officials who ran it.93 The committee did play a part in redistributing to the victims of bombing some of the Jewish apartments and furnishings confiscated under German supervision, while the money given to the committee by the Germans came from expropriated Jewish assets. The first consignment of Jewish-owned furniture was handed over to COSI in April 1942 and large quantities continued to be diverted to help the bombed-out until 1944, though an even greater volume was shipped directly to the Reich from France and the Low Countries to supply German civilian victims of bombing, a total of 735 train-loads during the course of the occupation.94
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