by John Lukacs
Three items appearing in most of the newspapers on 24 May may have some significance. One was the front-page treatment, and unanimous approval, of the government’s decision to arrest Oswald Mosley and his wife, together with the Germanophile Captain Ramsay, member of Parliament, and other Fascists (more than one thousand of them). Other, less agreeable evidence of superpatriotism were numerous letters to editors and even some articles protesting against the presence and the free movements of German refugees (those writing were either unaware of or indifferent to the condition that most of these refugees were anti-Nazis and Jews).50 Suspicion of aliens showed up in many newspapers: in the News Chronicle there were a number of letters critical of refugees (“Where does their money come from?”). On the same page the News Chronich reported that the Dagenham Girl Pipers had applied “for permission to form a defence rifle corps”
One interesting sign — interesting mostly because of its longrange significance — was the attention devoted in the newspapers to relations with Russia: a kind of anxious looking around for eventual allies. This accorded, by and large, with the intention of the government—of Halifax as well as of Churchill — to improve these relations, to send Sir Stafford Cripps on another mission to Moscow, as early as 18 May. On the twenty-fourth the News Chronicle quoted R. A. Buder: “We are taking immediate steps to improve our relations with the Soviets.” “Our London Correspondent” of the Manchester Guardian had a telephone interview with G. B. Shaw, who praised both Stalin and the British resolution to fight to the bitter end: “An understanding with him is vital.” That understanding would not come for a long time, although not for a lack of British willingness for it. When on 22 June 1941 Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union brought about a de facto alliance between Britain and Russia, there followed a wave of Russophilia in Britain, partly of course because of the relief that people felt not only about the course of the war but also about the slackening of the German bombing of Britain. Yet such inclinations, including illusions about Russia, had their forerunners in May 1940, and not only among leftist intellectuals or elements of the British working class.
The Mass-Observation reports recorded, as usual, reactions and expressions that were more varied than what appeared in the press. The summary “Morale Today” of 24 May reported little change, “though perhaps a slight increase in anxiety and a slight decrease in optimism. There is a general recognition of the seriousness of the situation, but still extremely little idea that this could be more than a temporary setback or could lead to an attempt to invade ourselves” [sic]. The general impression is of an uneasy fluctuation of moods: “It cannot be good for people’s nerves to pin so much on the small incidents of each day, to give a great gasp of relief and happiness at a headline about Arras, to be plunged into temporary gloom by bad news about Boulogne.” “A new feature today is the great increase and sometimes intense violence of criticism against the French.”51 “All these remarks apply particularly to the upper and middle classes, and to women.” Yet in the same report there is an account of a conversation among middle-aged trade unionists: “Do you know, our women went round canvassing for the Housewives Union and some of them, especially some of the younger housewives they talked to — have got to the stage where they would more or less welcome Hitler here. They say it couldn’t be worse, and they’d at least have their husbands back.” “That’s right.… They say it can’t be worse, so what’s the good of fighting? I can see that if the morale goes on the decline so steep as it is at the moment, there won’t be much resistance to him, when he does come.”52
But that was not typical. More typical was the universal approval for the arrest of Mosley. And perhaps the words of “Nella,” an M-O reporter in Bolton who wrote 2 million words during the war, published in a book forty years later. On 11 May she wrote: “If I had to spend my whole life with a man, I’d choose Chamberlain, but I think I would sooner have Mr Churchill if there was a storm and I was shipwrecked.”53 One interesting condition in both the M-O and the Ministry of Information reports and diaries is the almost entire absence of comments about Halifax. People were indifferent, even ignorant, about him. There is a single report of the words of one man on 11 May: “Halifax wants to be made Archbishop of Canterbury. He doesn’t want to be in the Cabinet.”
CHAPTER THREE
Saturday, 25 May
An English weekend. – The French: Weygand and Pétain.– Halifax and the Italian ambassador. – Churchill and the Defence Committee. – “Depression is quite definitely up.”
Over most of Europe and England the weather was beautiful in May 1940 — relendess sunshine pouring over the land, the calmest of seas (which was to be a blessing for the British once the sea haul from Dunkirk back to Dover began). None of the great capital cities of the warring nations had, as yet, the experience of bombs raining down upon them. Everyday life went on in London, as it went on in Berlin and Paris, although in London, unlike in Paris or Berlin, sandbagged small barricades with armed sentries went up before some of the principal government buildings. Still there was a special quality of the calmness of London on a Saturday, because of the English weekend habit. A vignette of 25 May, Saturday, from Evelyn Waugh’s wartime diary: “This morning, just as the battalion had decided that its training was so deficient that we must break up into cadres, the Brigadier, having boasted that we would have held Boulogne, reported us as trained and ready for service. Cadre training will continue. The major put in charge has eluded all responsibility and left me in charge of the NCO’S cadre. … At midday Saturday, Laura and I set off for an idyllic weekend at Alton in the Swan Hotel. A charming town not only devoid of military but full of personable young civilians of military age. A hotel full of foliage plants and massive, elaborate furniture. We went to church, read P. G. Wodehouse (who has been lost along the Channel ports),1 watched old men in panama hats play bowl, and forgot the war.”2
The “London News and Comment” column of the Scotsman reported on 25 May: “During these days of anxiety, London life proceeds with every outward appearance of normality. On the surface, at least, it is difficult to find signs comparable with the uneasiness which prevailed in the first few days of September when the realities of war were yet to come.” West End shopping streets were “far from deserted.” The list of entertainments in the newspapers was long and varied.3 Both the Daily Mail and the Daily Express printed half pages of holiday advertisements for places on the southern coast of England.4 The Manchester Guardian advertised a vacation in Paris: “STAY IN PARIS near the Opera and the Grands Boulevards. Ambassador, 16, Boulevard Haussmann. Room (running water and private w.c.) from 55 Frs. Special rates for members of Allied forces.”
Allied forces notwithstanding, there was a prewar tone and touch to this and other advertisements of the daily newspapers. There was no prewar tone in the deliberations of the highest council of the French who met that Saturday evening. It was postwar rather than prewar: postwar in the sense that the supreme commander of the French army was proposing an ending of the war, that is, surrender, to Hitler.
There were many in France — many more than in England—who did not have their hearts in the war. There were such people in the government and among the representatives elected to the Chambers. There were at least three reasons for their state of mind, reasons on different levels, involving also people with different inclinations. Perhaps instead of “reasons” we should say “elements.” The overwhelming element was the memory of the last war, in which France had lost 1.4 million men. The French population now was aged, especially when compared to those of Germany and Italy. There were almost three times as many Germans and Italians of military age as there were Frenchmen. Yet defeatism was not widespread among the French people, not even after the Black Fortnight of May 1940. The civilian population showed a remarkable degree of quiet discipline, behaving better than did some of the soldiers, especially those of the Ninth Army at the Meuse. That would change once the German onslaught approached French towns and vil
lages. Then there would follow an enormous wave of mass flight and panic, but not much of that had occurred, as yet, in May.
The French politicians were divided. Many of them thought—and muttered, rather than said openly—that France should not have gone to war in September 1939. Again, as in so many other countries, the division was not so much between Right and Left as between two Rights: between those who thought that this war was a mistake and others who thought that France, because of her traditions and honor, had no other choice. Did the former consider that if France were to acquiesce in the German (and Italian) domination of all of Europe, except perhaps for the few democracies on the western edge of the Continent, this would reduce France to the state of a Belgium or a Holland, to a timorous neutrality, hardly able — and unwilling — to oppose almost anything that Hitler or Mussolini would demand? Even after nearly sixty years we cannot answer this question, because the antiwar politicians had not put this question to themselves. For many of them, their motives were ideological as much as political. They thought that France would be better off seeking an accommodation with Mussolini than becoming dependent on England. Anglophobia, rather than pro-Fascism, was the common denominator of these preferences, ideas, and sentiments, yet in many cases it included an ideological element. They were convinced not only that the British were hypocritical and selfish but that their system and their view of the world were old and probably useless, which was not the case with the new order of Mussolini or, alas, of Hitler either.
The events of the Black Fortnight activated these sentiments. Those who held them blamed not the wretched performance of some of their own army but the British. The British and the Anglophile politicians in Paris, this reasoning went, had gotten France into this war. After that the British sent but a few divisions and a few squadrons of airplanes to France, and now they were retreating to the Channel ports, abandoning the French. They were also false; they were not telling the French what they were doing. There was some reason to arrive at such conclusions. We have seen that the British, including Churchill, were considering withdrawal to the ports and evacuation to England days before the twenty-fifth of May. The previous night Reynaud had telegraphed to Churchill that the British army “was no longer conforming to General Weygand’s plan and has withdrawn toward the Channel ports.” Churchill had answered, “We have every reason to believe that Gort is still persevering in his southward move.” This was not so. Two British divisions were withdrawing from Arras. Churchill knew that the “Weygand plan,” the joint Franco-British counterattack, amounted to nothing: “Nothing in the movement of the B.E.F. of which we are aware can be any excuse for the abandonment of the strong pressure of your northward move across the Somme, which we trust will develop.”5 There was no such pressure, strong or weak, and Churchill must have known that develop it would not. There was a War Cabinet at 11:30. Churchill informed his colleagues of his exchange with Reynaud, adding: “No doubt the action taken had been forced on Lord Gort by the position in which he had found himself. Nevertheless, he should at once have informed us of the action which he had taken, and the French had grounds for complaint. But this was no time for recriminations.”6
General Weygand and Marshal Pétain thought that the time had come for recriminations — and then some. Weygand was the newly appointed commander-in-chief, Pétain a national hero from the First World War whom Reynaud had appointed as his vice premier but three days before. They distrusted the British, and they were opposed to the Anglo-French alliance from the beginning. There were many indications of this, especially on the part of Pétain, who knew that he had his partisans. The previous day Pierre Laval, after 1935 a convinced Anglophobe, spoke to an Italian diplomat in Paris, whose report to Rome is telling: “Laval thinks that more than ever it has become indispensable and urgent to establish contact with Rome.” It is “the only way to talk with Hitler. The present government will not do that. A Pétain-Laval government must come.”7
At seven in the evening of 25 May the highest council, the Comité de Guerre, convened in Paris. Present were the president of the Republic, Albert Lebrun; Premier Reynaud; Pétain; Weygand; two other ministers; two other generals; and the secretary of the Comité de Guerre, a Pétain follower. Weygand began with a long account. The military situation, he said, was impossible and hopeless. “We have to fight one against three.” “We will be smashed.” What remains, then, is that “each portion of the army must fight until exhausted, to save the honor of the country.” Then came Weygand’s conclusion: “France had committed the immense mistake to enter into the war without the material or the military doctrine that were needed. It is probable that [France] will have to pay dearly for this criminal thoughtlessness.”
Then the president of the Republic, Lebrun, spoke: “We are committed not to sign a separate peace.” (In March the French and British governments made such a reciprocal commitment.) “Still — if Germany offers us conditions that are relatively advantageous, we must examine them closely and with calm heads.”8 Weygand agreed. Reynaud intervened: “If we were presented with a peace offer, France, in any case, must tell the British.… We are bound by a formal commitment.” Now Pétain: “I question whether there is a complete reciprocity with the British.… Actually they have given only two divisions while eighty French divisions are still fighting.” Reynaud considered, “An exchange of views with England may be justified, if only because one may ask them whether they would be ready to agree to important sacrifices to prevent Italy from entering the war.” There was a brave countermove by the minister of the navy, Campinchi: “The loyalty of France must not be risked; a peace treaty must never be signed by France without a previous agreement with England. [I am] not entirely in agreement with Marshal Pétain when the Marshal compares the military contribution of the two nations. … If this government had given its word to England, perhaps another government might feel less bound to the signing of a peace treaty without the former agreement with England.” But “being unfortunate is one thing; being disloyal another. It is urgent now to talk to the English.”
There was another verbal skirmish between Campinchi and Weygand. Reynaud then declared that he would go to London the next day to explain “clearly the situation to the English: the inequality of fighting with one against four; but that nonetheless the French government was ready to continue the struggle even if it would be fighting for one’s honor.” He would ask the English what would happen if Paris were to fall. Their response might be, “You are bound by your signature; you must fight even when hopeless.” But Weygand had the last word. The total destruction of the French armed forces, fighting to the end only to save their honor? “We must preserve the instruments of order. What troubles would result if the last organized force, that is the Army, is destroyed?” “The English must be sounded on all these questions.”9 Reynaud consented. The entire meeting took two and a half hours.
A few hours before this momentous gathering of the French leaders in Paris (the essence of which the British remained unaware), Lord Halifax chose to make an attempt of his own. He asked the Italian ambassador, Giuseppe Bastianini, to meet him that afternoon. This was somewhat unusual since it occurred on the weekend, which many people in Britain, among them foreign ambassadors and Halifax himself, still observed. The tone of their conversation, including Halifax’s careful and sober language, was of course very different from what Weygand and Pétain were saying in the depressive and agitated climate of the French Council of War. Yet their purposes were not entirely different: to prevent Italy from entering the war, with concessions, if necessary—and, concealed behind his matter, the suggestion that Mussolini might be instrumental in bringing about a “general European settlement.”