by Lisa Hilton
Before he left Bordeaux that evening, Gaston was able to have a meeting with the Spanish ambassador, Lequercia. He was anxious to protect his mother, who was still at Louveciennes, though he prudently gave as his reason his intention to join De Gaulle in London rather than the fact that Rose was Jewish. If the families of those who had joined De Gaulle were persecuted, he asked the ambassador, could he help Rose with a visa to Spain? Lequercia agreed to do all that was necessary, but encouraged him not to leave, declaring airily that the Germans were only ‘savages’ because they were poor. Now that they should be rich, their spirit and their methods would become more moderate. It should be perfectly possible, he continued, to live easily alongside the new conquerors of Europe. Concern for Rose forced Gaston to swallow his fury, but he could not resist remarking to the Chinese ambassador, as he left, ‘Sans doute vous allez me voir arriver chez vous?’
More promising was an interview with the British ambassador, Ronald Campbell, not least as it was conducted in the elegant surroundings of the famous Chapon Fin restaurant. Campbell, who had heard of Gaston’s decision to join De Gaulle, assured him that he would be welcome in London, whether or not he managed to bring any of his planes with him. Flying the fifty modern aircraft of the 34th Squadron to London had been Colonel François’s original plan, but the new orders rendered it impossible. The air force attaché to Campbell’s embassy managed to whisper to him, as he left despairingly for the aerodrome, ‘Go to Africa. From there, you’ll be able to escape to England.’ By dawn of 16 June, just as De Gaulle reached the English coast, Gaston was in Casablanca.
Reynaud, described by Georges Mandel with that very French use of litotes as ‘easily influenced’, 5 was incapable of holding out any longer. His domineering mistress, Gaston’s old enemy Hélène de Portes, was pushing him towards armistice and he was, in the words of the American ambassador William Bullitt, ‘completely under her influence’. On the evening of 16 June, as De Gaulle flew back to Bordeaux, he tendered his resignation to Lebrun, who accepted it. On arrival at Merignac airport at 10pm, De Gaulle was informed that since the Reynaud administration was dissolved, he no longer held ministerial office. Half an hour later, Maréchal Pétain was appointed head of the French state. De Gaulle recorded: ‘It was certain capitulation. I made my decision at once. I should leave the next morning.’
That night, as Pétain called on his new ministers to approve the armistice, a measure passed in less than twenty minutes, De Gaulle called on Reynaud. They agreed that De Gaulle should go to London and Reynaud undertook to provide immediate funds and passports for Yvonne De Gaulle and the children. At midnight, the general met Spears and Ambassador Campbell at the Hôtel Montre. They agreed that De Gaulle might use the plane Churchill had put at his disposal and next morning at seven, De Gaulle, Spears and Jean Laurent (equipped with 100,000 francs from Reynaud) drove in two cars for the airport. No document has ever been produced to validate the claim that De Gaulle had been given an official ‘mission’ by Reynaud, who the previous day had still been in a position to continue immediate government business: De Gaulle was effectively deserting his military post. There was a real danger, then, that he could be arrested, but in the chaos of the airfield ‘an indescribable mass of people, something between a scrap metal fair and a gypsy encampment’, 6 there was little likelihood that the small party would be noticed. De Gaulle appeared serene, ‘lost in his thoughts’, even as the plane took off and banked over the ports of La Rochelle and Rochefort, where the clear summer sky was fogged with the drifting smoke from the firing ships of France’s new ally. They touched down briefly on Jersey, where Spears recalled De Gaulle asking for a cup of coffee. After one taste, he declared it to be tea. ‘It was his first introduction, ’ wrote Spears, ‘to the tepid liquid which, in England, passes for one or the other. His martyrdom had begun.’ ‘It was awful, ’ De Gaulle wrote later, ‘awful.’ Though presumably he was referring to the gravity of his position, not the coffee.7
As the four-seater RAF plane came in to land at Heston, Maréchal Pétain was delivering ‘a heavy-hearted’ message to the French people informing them that they must cease to fight. Churchill, in a telephone conversation with Pétain two days before, had attempted to shame the marshal into continuing to resist, but the only thing Pétain appeared capable of resisting was the prime minister’s ‘roars’. Churchill greeted De Gaulle in the Downing Street garden that afternoon with friendly warmth, and agreed to permit the general to broadcast to the French, though as neither man was as yet informed of the contents of Pétain’s speech, it was decided to wait until the terms of the armistice were clarified. Perhaps an eleventh-hour surge of French pride could still preserve the country from capitulation. That evening, De Gaulle denounced Pétain’s treasonable behaviour at dinner with Jean Monnet before settling down to write the speech that, more than anything else, would earn him his place in history.
It was largely thanks to Duff Cooper, then minister of information, that the 18 June speech was allowed to go ahead at all. When the War Cabinet met at 12.30pm that day, they concluded that it was ill advised to permit De Gaulle to broadcast while there remained the possibility that the new French government might still act ‘in conformity with the interests of the alliance’, notably with regard to the French fleet. Cooper consulted Churchill, exhausted after delivering his own great speech to the Commons:
But if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new dark age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science. Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves, that if the British empire and its commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, This was their finest hour.
Cooper and Spears, authorized by a sleepy Churchill, went to each member of the Cabinet in turn and convinced them to allow De Gaulle to go ahead, though Cooper graciously gave the general no indication of the effort this had required when they met for lunch that day. At 6pm De Gaulle took a cab to Oxford Circus, his boots gleaming with polish. There is some disparity between the BBC’s records, which state the broadcast was made at 8.15 and transmitted at ten, and De Gaulle’s Mémoires, where he claims he spoke shortly after six. Churchill’s ‘finest hour’ peroration was broadcast from 9pm until 10pm; it seems probable that De Gaulle followed him.
In the concierge’s lodge of the Institut Charles de Gaulle on the Rue de Solferino, a little cartoon is pinned to the wall. It shows two BBC recording engineers in a sound box, chatting as De Gaulle reads his speech. One asks the other if they should bother switching on the tape. No, his colleague replies, ‘not worth it, he’ll be gone soon enough’. The text of De Gaulle’s speech is preserved on the wall of the institute lobby, and though it is now as famous and beloved to the French as Churchill’s wartime speeches to the British, it deserves to be quoted in full.
The leaders who have been at the head of the French armies for many years have formed a government.
This government, alleging the defeat of our armies, has entered into communication with the enemy to stop the fighting.
To be sure, we have been submerged, we are submerged, by the enemy’s mechanized forces, on land and in the air.
It is the Germans’ tanks, planes and tactics that have made us fall back, infinitely more than their numbers. It is the Germans’ tanks, planes and tactics which have so taken our leaders by surprise as to bring them to the point that they have reached today.
But has the last word been said? Must hope vanish? Is the defeat final? No!
Believe me, for I know what I am talking about and I tell you that nothing is lost for France. The same means that beat us may one day bring victory.
For France is not alone. She is not alone! She is not alone! She has an immense Empire behind her. She can unite with the British Empire, which commands the sea and is carrying on with the struggle. Like England, she can make an unlimited use of the vast indu
stries of the United States.
This war is not confined to the unhappy territory of our country. This war has not been decided by the battle of France. This war is a worldwide war. All the faults, all the delays, all the sufferings do not do away with the fact that in the world there are all the means for one day crushing our enemies. Today we are struck down by mechanized force, in the future we can conquer by greater mechanized force. The fate of the world lies there.
I, General de Gaulle, now in London, call upon the French officers and soldiers who are on British soil, or may be on it, with their arms, or without them, to get into contact with me.
Whatever happens, the flame of French resistance must not and shall not go out.
10
FLIGHT
The 34th Squadron had received further orders to regroup on Tunisia. In Tunis, Gaston was received by the new governor, Marcel Peyrouton. He tried to persuade Peyrouton that there was still hope in resisting, but the governor was convinced that Britain would fall and that negotiation was the only possibility. Palewski reported this to the British consul, who cabled London for instructions and received the expected response that no negotiation with the Nazis was to take place. Gaston presented this to Peyrouton, who then claimed he could do nothing without the agreement of Général Noguès, the military commander of French North African troops. Gaston drove to Alger to confront the general who, despite having received telegrams from De Gaulle in London, was determined to wait. He could only hold North Africa with warships, he insisted, and these Darlan had refused him.
With the armistice negotiations under way, the war was obviously over for the 34th Squadron. Gaston made his way via Meknes to Rabat, where he sought out an old acquaintance, Christian Funck-Brentano, later amongst the founders of the newspaper Le Monde in 1944, who was then the curator of the national library. Gaston was encouraged to finally encounter the defiant morale he had so vainly been trying to incite in others. ‘There was a marvellous atmosphere of courage, of intelligence, ’ he remembered, so much so that he wondered whether his duty really lay in remaining in North Africa. He did what little he could to support the resistants’ cause, producing pamphlets from the library with Funck-Brentano’s help to spread the Gaullist word through the coastal towns. Yet any hope the Free French had of support from the region was destroyed in the tragic assault of Mers el-Kebir.
Among the principal anxieties of the British in the face of French surrender was the fate of the French fleet. As late as 18 June, Admiral Darlan had given his word at Bordeaux that his ships should never be taken by what still remained a mutual enemy, but the British were unconvinced. Some time during the days immediately preceding the armistice, Operation Catapult was formulated. Its end was the destruction of much of the French navy. Under the terms of the armistice, the French ships had not been handed over either to Germany or to Italy. However, to Churchill’s anxiety, there were conditions that required them to return to their peacetime bases. In Churchill’s view, this made an invasion of Britain even more likely. Two thirds of French ports were in the newly established Occupied Zone, and therefore at the mercy of the Wehrmacht. The risk was simply too great. De Gaulle’s biographer, Jean Lacouture, also suggests that in insisting on implementing Operation Catapult, Churchill was ‘flinging down an irrevocable challenge to Hitler’, casting himself as a latterday Robespierre (Churchill was almost as passionate about French history as De Gaulle) in a blow against both the lingering disappointments of Munich and the Pétainist capitulators. It was nevertheless, in Churchill’s own words, ‘a hateful decision, the most unnatural and painful in which I have ever been concerned’.1
On 3 July, Admiral Somerville, in command of Force H at Gibraltar, sent an ultimatum to Amiral Gensoul, the commander of the French fleet at Mers el-Kebir. He offered five choices: join the British navy to continue the fight against the Axis powers, moor in English ports, sail to the United States or the West Indies, or scuttle the fleet. He warned Gensoul that the port at Mers el-Kebir was mined and that if none of his demands was met, then at 5.30pm Force H would attack. Amiral Darlan was on leave in Gascony, so it was to Amiral LeLuc that Gensoul communicated Somerville’s threat. However, he gave LeLuc only two options, internment in British ports or ‘battle’. With LeLuc’s authorization, Gensoul rejected the ultimatum and Force H opened fire slightly before the deadline in a battle that lasted less than sixteen minutes. Three French ships were sunk, with only one battle cruiser managing to escape and steer for Toulon, 1,380 French sailors were killed and another 370 wounded. At Portsmouth and Plymouth, the French men-of-war were commandeered by the Royal Navy and their crews interned, while the pride of the French fleet, the battleship Richelieu, was bombed by British planes.
The effect on French morale was, of course, terrible. There was already much resentment among French sailors at their perceived abandonment by the British at Dunkirk. The theme of ‘perfidious Albion’, that atavistic hatred of France’s old enemy, which had always bubbled beneath the alliance, burst out in a geyser. From Bordeaux to Casablanca, the talk was of British treason. De Gaulle, hearing the news on the evening of 3 July, recognized that Operation Catapult rendered the position of the Free French almost untenable. His grief and rage as a Frenchman were augmented by his position as the leader of a rebellion supported by the British. Worse still, Vichy was quick to capitalize on this relationship, claiming that Mers el-Kebir was De Gaulle’s brainchild, devised to eradicate any threat to the Free French movement by destroying the possibility of an understanding between London and Vichy.
In Rabat, Gaston’s grief over Mers el-Kebir was compounded by the news that his brother Jean-Paul had been captured and interned in a camp in Silesia, where he was to remain until 1941. Another blow was the death of Marcel Diamant-Berger, who had been wounded fighting in the Vosges mountains with the 82nd Infantry Regiment. Gaston was now desperate to leave North Africa, and telegraphed De Gaulle to that effect. Destiny called in five words: ‘Come as soon as possible.’ But how? Through a former ministerial colleague, Yvan Martin, he managed to obtain a pass which allowed him to spend a weekend in Tangiers. The city at that time was a parody of a Graham Greene novel, its hotels – including the grand Minzah, whose paintings Gaston characteristically took the time to admire – chock-full of spies of every nationality, frantically spying on one another.
Evading the boozing spooks was not easy, but Gaston made contact with the British consul-general, Gascoigne, who provided a plane. At dawn on an August morning, Gaston took off for Lisbon, where he found a former companion of his Sciences Po’days, François de Panafieu, second secretary to the French Embassy. Evidently infected by the atmosphere of Tangiers, when his university friend suggested he come to the Embassy, he replied with mysterious relish: ‘I’m still visible, but soon I won’t be.’ They met instead at François’s home and agreed on an official story, assiduously gossiped about by the Embassy staff, that Palewski would shortly be returning to Vichy. Gaston was so disheartened at this point that he asked if he would have time to reach London before the Nazis did, but the British ambassador, Sir Walford Selby, reassured him and showed him the plane in which he would escape. The next day at dawn, he was in England where, almost immediately, Winston Churchill summoned him to Downing Street.
As Gaston stepped into the Cabinet office, Churchill launched into a eulogy for the honour of France ‘with a passionate and poetic eloquence, as a lover addressing a lost mistress – “La France! La France! How could she have let herself be conquered? … how could she have so abandoned herself?”’ The effect was rather spoiled by the fact that Churchill was wearing a peculiar pair of blue combinations, but for a few moments both men gave way to their emotions. The prime minister then asked Gaston’s opinion as to the responsibility of the British in the fall of France. They discussed the effects of German propaganda, the implications of Mers el-Kebir, and Gaston stressed the importance of a British promise not to appropriate the French colonies. Churchill then became confidential
, lit a cigar and asked Gaston whether the former minister Camille Chautemps, presently at Lisbon, ought to be permitted to come to Britain. Gaston argued forcefully that Chautemps, instrumental in the removal of Reynaud, was responsible for the idea of the armistice and the institution of the Vichy regime. He added that all those who had retained a friendship for Britain in their hearts would be disgusted by Chautemps’s appearance in London. Churchill thanked him, and took his advice.
Gaston’s next call was paid to Sir Orme Sargent, the director of political affairs at the Foreign Office.
‘Finally!’ Sir Orme greeted him. ‘Someone who knows De Gaulle.’
English civil servants, he told Gaston, were confused by and sceptical of the general. They saw Free France as little more than a fantasy which could not endure for long. Gaston explained urgently that De Gaulle was the only French general with any real grasp of the political situation, and that during the period of defeat, when the French government had fled, he had been the only man who had stood firm. Working himself into a splendid fit of rhetoric, Gaston declared: ‘I have always seen our only hope in him … At Bordeaux, I met old friends, destroyed by the defeat. They bowed their heads and said to me “It’s finished.” I answered them “No! Nothing is finished! For there is De Gaulle! De Gaulle! De Gaulle!”‘ His rousing speeches performed an essential service to De Gaulle, whose fanatical hauteur had given the impression to many that he might be more than a little mad. As an old friend, who had believed in the general’s cause for so long, Gaston was able to use his excellent English, his urbane charm and his knowledge of English culture to convince the British of De Gaulle’s credibility.