by John Kelly
However, the road to Washington led through Joe Kennedy, and few men were more ill equipped to understand Churchill, a romantic if there ever was one (in the old-fashioned sense of having an emotional attraction to the heroic), than Joe Kennedy, a man without a romantic bone in his body. In a cable to Roosevelt after the meeting, Kennedy argued against the destroyer request. “I asked [Churchill] . . . what could we do if we wanted to help you all we can? . . . The bulk of our navy is in the Pacific, and we have not enough planes for our own use and our army is not up to requirements. So if this is going to be a quick war, all over in a few months, what could we do?” Unusually, in this instance, Kennedy confined his observations about Churchill’s personal behavior to his private diary. “I couldn’t help but think how ill conditioned Churchill looked and the fact that there was a tray with plenty of liquor on it alongside him and he was drinking a Scotch highball, which I felt was indeed not the first one he had drunk that night. . . . The affairs of Great Britain might be in the hands of the most dynamic individual in Great Britain, but certainly not in the hands of the best judgment in Great Britain.”
The next morning Reynaud called again. This time he sounded hysterical. “We are beaten. We have lost the battle.” The official French communiqué for May 15 was more restrained, but for the half of Paris who had lived through the Great War as adults, the use of the phrase “particularly desperate” to describe the fighting around Sedan and Dinant evoked memories of September 1914 and the news that the Germans had reached the Marne, only eighty-seven miles east of the capital. But if the experience of war had taught Parisians anything, it was that, in the shadow of the apocalypse, the only way to retain one’s sanity was to live in the moment. That afternoon Picasso and his “jealous, dark mistress” could still be found seated at their usual table at Café Flores; statues of an Aberdeen terrier urinating on a copy of Mein Kampf continued to fly off the shelves of the stores on the rue de Rivoli; there were Punch-and-Judy shows in the parks, honking taxicabs on the streets. “The air was sweet, the unstartled birds sang,” and the laughter of children sang through the Bois and Luxembourg Gardens. Still, in the back of everyone’s mind was the awareness that, 130 miles to the east, French soldiers were marching into captivity, hands over their heads, the “dim candle of fear burning in their eyes.” At six that evening, Reynaud called Churchill again: “The road to Paris is open. Send us all [the] aircraft and troops you can.”
The next morning (May 16), when Panzer units reached Laon, a town seventy-five miles east of Paris, General Gamelin announced that as of midnight he would disclaim any responsibility for the safety of the capital. Gamelin’s decision was kept quiet, but the rumors about Laon could not be suppressed. Walking to the National Assembly at 10:30 a.m., Achille Bardoux, a French senator, thought “Paris seemed normal.” When Bardoux left the Assembly at a quarter past twelve, the Laon rumor was everywhere and the atmosphere in the city had become “frantic.” The police were requisitioning buses in the streets; soldiers were unloading antitank guns from flatbed trucks outside the Bois. The railway stations were under siege by the frightened, the desperate, the determined, and the hopeless; and police with tommy guns patrolled the streets. At Galeries Lafayette, there was a run on walking shoes and suitcases. And at the headquarters of the French High Command in the Paris suburb of Vincennes, a group of young secretaries was taken out to the courtyard in their summer dresses and shown how to load and fire a 75-millimeter cannon. A visiting French staff officer wondered if the High Command had “completely lost their heads.” Inside the main headquarters building, General Gamelin, who had delegated the closing of the broken Meuse front to his subordinates, sat in his office, “sad and unoccupied.”
At midday, Reynaud called an emergency meeting at the Quai d’Orsay and summoned General Pierre Héring, the military governor of Paris; Roger Langeron, the prefect of police; Édouard Daladier, the minister of defense; Jules Jeanneney, the leader of the French Senate; and Édouard Herriot, the leader of the Chamber of Deputies. When the meeting convened at 1:00 p.m., the French bureaucracy had already answered the first question the officials addressed: Could Paris be saved? Outside the window, enormous columns of black smoke were billowing skyward from courtyards in the government quarter. None of the defense measures proposed at the meeting would have extinguished the fires. One involved sending a flotilla of shallow-bottomed warships up the Seine to Paris to bombard the Germans; another involved blowing up French factories, though how that would save the capital was never clearly explained. General Héring seemed to interject a note of reality into the discussion when he described his plan for defending Paris; but then he admitted that he did not have enough explosives to implement the plan. The second question the officials addressed—should the government evacuate Paris?—produced a sharp exchange between Reynaud, who had already drawn up a plan to evacuate the government to Tours, a town 149 miles south of the capital, and Daladier, who believed the evacuation of Paris would have a devastating effect on national morale. The two men argued back and forth until another minister, Anatole de Monzie, pointed out that they were arguing about nothing. There was not enough transportation available in Paris to support a large-scale evacuation.
In London, May 16 also began with troubling news. Earlier in the morning, a “very seriously alarmed” Reynaud had told Ronald Campbell, the British ambassador, that German armored units could be in the capital by nightfall. There were also reports that some French units were abandoning their positions on the Dyle line and retreating westward behind Brussels. Churchill, who found the Belgian news “extremely grave,” proposed that “he himself should go to France that very afternoon” and assess the situation personally. As his fat-bodied De Havilland Flamingo rose into the London sky at 3:00 p.m., Reynaud was addressing the French National Assembly. “We shall fight before Paris; we shall fight in Paris if need be,” he declared.
An hour later the Flamingo was circling above the runways of Le Bourget Aerodrome, which cut diagonally across a sprawl of suburban homes and stores. Off in the distance, the Eiffel Tower stood, serene and confident in the clear air of the day. The mood at Le Bourget was neither of those things. As General Hastings Ismay, who had been appointed Churchill’s chief military adviser, was walking into the reception area, Colonel Harold Redman, head of the British military mission at Gamelin’s headquarters, pulled him aside and said that Paris could fall within the next few days. Ismay was “flabbergasted.” “They never got here last time in four years. . . . You will find things are different this time,” Redman said. Stepping out of the Flamingo, Churchill immediately sensed that the situation was “incomparably worse than we imagined.”
When the British party arrived at the Quai d’Orsay, Reynaud, Daladier, and Gamelin were already seated in the conference room, where the meeting was to be held. The expression of “complete dejection” on each man’s face said all that needed to be said. “The French High Command is already beaten,” Ismay thought. Like the Halifax-Churchill meeting on May 11, there are several versions of the Allied summit at Quai d’Orsay on May 16. Churchill has “everybody standing,” Reynaud has everybody “seated,” and a number of the incidents mentioned in the French accounts are absent from the British and vice versa. However, everyone agrees that a situation map rested on an easel in the meeting room and that the most dominant feature of the map was the “small but sinister bulge” that extended from Sedan to Laon. After Churchill said a few words, Gamelin placed himself in front of the easel and “like a good lecturer . . . gave an admirable discourse, clear and calm, on the military situation. . . . His ladylike hand marked here and there on the map the positions of our broken units and our reserves. . . . He explained but he made no suggestions. He had no view on the future.” This account by Paul Baudouin, Reynaud’s chef de cabinet, also includes the observation that during the lecture, Daladier, the general’s chief patron, “sat in the corner like a schoolboy in disgrace.”
The room was quiet for a moment
after Gamelin finished. Then Churchill asked how large the French Army’s strategic reserve was. Gamelin shrugged and said: “Aucun” (none).
“Aucun?”
Churchill got up and walked to the window. The French bureaucracy was still in the grip of pyromania. Below, in the courtyard, “venerable officials [were] pushing wheelbarrels of archives into [large bonfires].” Gazing down at the scene, Churchill realized that no matter what the French said about defending Paris, they were preparing to evacuate the capital. When he returned to the table, Gamelin was saying that he intended to abandon the Dyle line and fall back behind Brussels. The general concluded his presentation with an interesting new hypothesis. He said that the Channel coast, not Paris, might be the German objective. A German corridor between the Meuse and the sea would cut the Allied army in half and trap the French and British units in Belgium, the best equipped and trained Allied troops, in a giant pocket, where they could be destroyed piecemeal. Gamelin’s new hypothesis also explained the mysterious absence of the Luftwaffe during the march up to the Dyle: the French and British were being lured into a trap.
Reynaud, who spoke next, disagreed with his general. The German target is Paris, he said, pointing to the “sinister” red bulge. “I assure you that in this bulge there is at stake not only the fate of France but also that of the British Empire.” Reynaud repeated the sentence for emphasis.
Churchill turned to Gamelin: “When and where [did the general] propose to attack the flanks of the bulge?”
Gamelin shrugged. “Inferiority of numbers, inferiority of equipment, and inferiority of method.” Outside, columns of smoke were still rising into the early evening sky. Churchill got up and walked over to the window again. “The old gentlemen were [still] bringing up their wheelbarrows and industriously casting their contents into the flames.”
A debate about the air war brought the meeting to an acrimonious conclusion. The previous day (May 15), the RAF had sent four of the ten squadrons Reynaud had requested. Now the premier was insisting that the other six were needed immediately to stop an expected German drive on Paris. Churchill refused. The twenty-nine RAF fighter squadrons still in Britain “were the life of the country and guarded our vitals from attack. We must conserve them.” As the evening wore on, however, another consideration began to press on Churchill. The German attack on Paris would give the French Army “a last chance to rally its bravery and strength. It would not be good historically if [French] requests were denied and their ruin resulted.” Later that evening, he sent the war cabinet a cable endorsing the French request for the additional squadrons. In Downing Street, minds accustomed to the dry, crisp minutes of British officialdom read the prime minister’s rich, rolling Gibbonesque prose with mounting surprise and alarm. The “moral gravity of the hour”; “allow France to find her bravery and strength.” As he scanned the cable, an aide said, “Churchill is still thinking of his books.” “Blasted rhetoric!” said another. John Colville was too transfixed by the “terrifying” math in the cable to notice the prime minister’s prose. On May 14 alone, the RAF had lost seventy-one planes. Now Churchill was proposing to pledge a quarter of Fighter Command’s remaining aircraft to France, and the only safeguard imposed on this precious gift was that six of the newly pledged squadrons would operate from bases in southern England.
At about ten, the war cabinet telegraphed its assent to Churchill in Hindustani. Ismay, an old India hand, had suggested the idea, knowing the language would befuddle the German code breakers. As the teletype machine printed out “h-a-n”—Hindustani for “yes”—Churchill decided he must tell Reynaud the good news in person and commandeered Ismay for driving duties. The city the two men drove through that night was engulfed in a “wind of panic.” The singing of drunken soldiers echoed through the blacked-out streets; in the crowded railway stations, passengers strained to hear the departure announcements over the crying of children and the shouts of the gendarmes; and on the westbound roads, drivers stood next to their automobiles in the spring darkness, wondering whether the traffic would move before the dive bombers returned at first light.
In Reynaud’s quarter, one of the wealthiest in Paris, there was no sign of expectant life behind the shuttered windows above the deserted streets. Most of the residents were in Brittany, Provence, or another province far from the war, and those who remained were observing the blackout. At Reynaud’s apartment, Churchill and Ismay were greeted by a maid, who said that the premier was in the bedroom and deposited the English visitors in a sitting room. Ismay noticed that a woman’s coat was slung over one of the chairs. Presently, Reynaud appeared in a dressing gown, and Churchill received his grateful smile. Phone calls were made, the doorbell began to ring, and the apartment filled with cigarette smoke, the clink of glasses, and French and English voices. Daladier, who arrived at about midnight, clasped Churchill’s hands in his when he was told that France would receive the additional six squadrons. But the restorative effect of the British gift was short-lived. A half hour later, Daladier was slouched in a chair, looking “crushed and bowed down with grief.” One guest described Reynaud as looking “like some small broken piece of machinery.”
“You must not lose heart,” Churchill told him, then launched into a remarkable soliloquy about honor, redemption, and Armageddon. “Crowned like a volcano by the smoke of his cigars,” said the poet laureate of May 16, Paul Baudouin. Churchill told his French colleagues “that even if France was invaded and vanquished, England would go on fighting until the United States came to her aid, which she would soon do in no halfhearted manner. . . . Until one in the morning, he conjured up an apocalyptic vision of the war. He saw himself in the heart of Canada, directing over an England razed to the ground by high-explosive bombs and over a France whose ruins were already cold, the air war of the New World against the Old dominated by Germany.”
* * *
Returning to London the next morning, General Ismay was comforted by the orderliness and calm on the streets. The city “seemed like a much loved old nanny gathering me to her bosom and saying: ‘Don’t fuss and budget, dearie, it will all come out all right.’ ” Ismay’s observations said more about his state of mind than the state of British morale. That comforting old cliché—Britain loses every battle except the last one, a cliché that had sustained the nation through two centuries of crises—was losing its power to reassure. Holland, Belgium, France: what a French officer had said about the Allied campaign in Norway seemed even truer now. Against the German Army, the French and British were “the Zulus.” “We are living in a new phase of history, the course of which no man can foresee,” General Ironside wrote. “Nobody believed that we should be in a war, certainly not in a death struggle, so soon. We made no preparations, even for a war industry . . . and we cannot catch up now. It is too late. The year may yet see us beaten.” That thought had also occurred to many ordinary Britons. On May 13, the day the Germans breached the French defenses on the Meuse, two workmen in the yard below Muriel Green’s home were discussing the possibility of a German invasion. Two weeks earlier, Muriel would have considered such talk seditious. Now most of the people she knew—friends, family, even her deliveryman—were expecting a German invasion, or something worse. During a tennis match at a local park, Muriel overheard the deliveryman say to his partner, “I think they are going to beat us, don’t you?” “Yes,” the partner replied, but “if they do win, [we’ll] still be able to play tennis.’ ” The Nazis were sports enthusiasts. In Norfolk, a housewife told an official from Mass Observation, “Oh Lord. This is serious. I think we are going to lose the war.”
During the third week of May, Mass Observation and the Home Intelligence Service, a new survey organization, both noted a dramatic change in the public mood. Unmoored from the old certainties and assumptions about British power, people were cycling daily, sometimes hourly, from anxiety to optimism to pessimism to bewilderment, depending on the latest news from France. On May 18 the Evening Standard proposed an antidote to th
e unsteadiness. The paper urged readers to embrace a belief in ultimate victory, though, as the title of the Standard’s editorial, “Faith,” acknowledged, at present there was almost nothing to sustain that belief but faith. Public perceptions of Hitler were also changing. The old view of the Führer as a clownish Charlie Chaplin figure had been washed away by the remarkable German victories in France and the Low Countries; in place of the clown there was now a wizard. Mass Observation reported that many people had developed an “autosubconscious tendency to think of Hitler as wonderful” and of his advances “as inevitable.” Mass Observation noted that women, in particular, were inclined to view Hitler as “a somewhat mystical astrological figure” who does whatever he says he will do. Proof of the observation came when the Evening Standard published a cartoon of Hitler peering across the English Channel from a tour bus emblazoned with the placard “London, August 18.” The cartoon, intended to ridicule Hitler’s invasion threat, had “precisely the opposite” effect, noted Mass Observation. Anti-American feeling was also growing. On the Dover–London train, an MO official overheard a man reduce his fellow passengers to giggles with the latest joke about the Americans. “A Yank ship left the other day,” the man said. “You know what it was called? Gone with the Wind.”
Churchill briefly discussed morale at the war cabinet on May 17, but mostly he talked about France. He had been deeply impressed by the pessimistic atmosphere in Paris the day before, and saw little prospect of a sudden French revival. Gamelin and Daladier were “depressed”; the French Air Force had been reduced to a quarter of its preoffensive strength; and the French Army was showing signs of instability. There was no talk of a French defeat that morning, but in the days that followed Churchill began to act like a man who believed it had become a serious possibility. He suspended all further aircraft deliveries to France, ordered Britain’s domestic defenses strengthened, had an emergency evacuation plan drawn up for the BEF, and requested an “emergency powers” bill that would give the government “totalitarian powers.”