Never Surrender

by John Kelly

  * * *

  “We shall go on to the end. We shall fight in France. We shall fight on the seas and oceans.” It was the late morning of June 5; the German offensive on the Somme–Aisne line was several hours old; and Spears was reciting Churchill’s Dunkirk speech to Pétain (who was staring “down at the floor”) and Reynaud, who was becoming annoyed. “It is useless to stress the extreme gravity of the situation . . . if the British air fighter force does not render our army . . . support,” he said when Spears finished. Two days later, on June 7, the Germans breached the Somme–Aisne line, the last major French strongpoint before Paris, and on the eighth, a Panzer division was reported to be halfway to Rouen, eighty-two miles northwest of the capital, and a second was said to be approaching Pontoise, eighteen miles from Paris.

  Later, when Spears thought of this period, events would often come back to him in a kaleidoscope of images and voices: Anthony Eden telling him that there were only two regular brigades and some territorial units available for home defense. Reynaud saying that if Hitler wins the war, “it will be the Middle Ages again but without the mercy of Christ.” General Weygand musing about the nature of fate: in 1918, Weygand had presented the Allied terms to the Germans; now, twenty-two years later, it would fall on him to receive the German terms. Spears also remembered listening to Big Ben chime 1:00 a.m. on the morning of June 10, and thinking Britain and Italy were now at war; and the late-night call from a Frenchwoman of long acquaintance, with two young soldier sons, her voice “sparking with hate and accusation” as she said, “It is the fault of your country. You bear a heavy responsibility, you were a belliciste like Churchill. Won’t you try to find my sons?” Then “a sob” and the humming sound of a dead phone line in his ear. His other memories of this time included: Hélène de Portes, Reynaud’s mistress, in red pajamas and a dressing gown, standing in the courtyard of a château, instructing drivers where to park. The Daily Telegraph headline of June 10 proclaiming that the French government would “never” abandon Paris . . . on the day the French government abandoned Paris. A caravan of refugee automobiles in the rain, the sodden mattresses on their roofs hanging over the side like dead animals. Hélène de Portes again, this time interrogating Reynaud after a meeting with his ministers, asking him, “What did he say? What is the sense of going on? Thousands of men are dying. . . . Delay will only mean harsher German terms.” And Weygand again, this time issuing an order of the day to the French Army: “For each man, this is a fight without thought of retiring. . . . The German offensive is now launched along the entire front from the sea to Montmédy [a fortress town near the German border]. Tomorrow it will extend to Switzerland. We have reached the last quarter hour. Hold on!” And a final memory: the Allied Supreme Council meeting in Briare on June 11.

  A small town of leafy vistas and languorous canals eighty-six miles south of Paris, Briare owed its brief hour of fame to its proximity to the capital, which the Reynaud government had abandoned the previous night, and perhaps also to the fact that General Weygand had a home in the town, La Château du Muguet. Before leaving for France that afternoon, Churchill told a noontime session of the war cabinet that he hoped the meeting would produce a new Anglo-French “Grand Strategy” and that he intended to impress on the French the need to hang on. At some point, Germany’s economic vulnerability would slow the pace of the Wehrmacht’s advance. (This was a favorite half-truth of British intelligence.) Finally, Churchill got to the paramount reason for the trip. He said he hoped to “discourage any signs of movement towards making a separate peace.”

  The possibility of a French collapse now loomed so large in Churchill’s mind, he had asked Lord Hankey, that most artful and shrewd of civil servants, to prepare a memorandum on the subject. Once his Flamingo was airborne, Churchill removed the memorandum from his valise. It was the kind of document Joe Kennedy would have called “tremendous.” Upon capitulation, Hankey urged that the French fleet be sunk immediately, the French air force flown to Britain or to a British territory, and France’s gold reserves seized and transferred to the United States. Churchill kept his thoughts on the assumption that underlay the Hankey paper—that the French would help the British implement these measures—to himself. But Spears, who was seated a few rows behind the prime minister on the Flamingo, noticed that for most of the flight, Churchill “brooded in his armchair, his eyes on the horizon.”

  Spears, who “had no papers to study,” also spent the flight brooding. Sometimes he would look up into the sky and imagine a flight of Messerschmitt-109s coming out of the sun. The Flamingo had an escort of twelve Hurricanes, and the Hurricane was the tough little street fighter of the RAF; still, on almost every measure that mattered—speed, dive, power of gun—it was outmatched by the Me 109. At other times, Spears thought of his wife. He had seen her a few days before in Paris, and the image of her “sitting on the edge of a low sofa [in the] long gray cape of her [ambulance] unit . . . looking like a little girl” had stayed with him. Now she and her ambulance were somewhere below in the burning French countryside, “very near to, and perhaps in the conflagration.”

  The airfield at Briare amounted to a few slabs of concrete thrown over what looked like a deserted cow pasture; the “scattered confusion” of aircraft parts on the runway and tarmac suggested a recent visit by the Luftwaffe. Anthony Eden, who was a member of the British delegation, “felt almost ashamed to be landing in such a desolate, shabby place in the company of a dozen smart-looking Hurricanes; but the fume of danger that the field gave off seemed to stimulate Churchill. While Eden, Generals Dill and Ismay, and the other members of the British delegation deplaned, the prime minister “strolled about the aerodrome, beaming as if he had left all his preoccupations on the plane and had reached the one spot in the world he most wanted to visit at that particular moment.” Spears’s other vivid memory of the Briare trip was Château du Muguet, Weygand’s home and the setting of the Supreme Council meeting. The château’s architecture was absolutely “hideous . . . the sort of building the nouveau riche French bourgeoisie delight in, a villa expanded by a successful business in groceries or indifferent champagne into a large monstrosity of red lobster-colored brick and the stone the hue of unripe Camembert.” The only notable feature of the château was its name, which Spears thought perfectly suited its kitschy architecture. In English Château du Muguet means Lily of the Valley Castle.

  The meeting was scheduled to begin at 7:00 p.m., but a few minutes before its official start, a visibly uncomfortable Reynaud rose from his chair and said he wished to make an announcement. There was an awkward pause. Then, finding his courage, Reynaud said that it was the desire “of the French government that the Anglo-French air strike on Turin and Milan planned for later this evening be canceled.” The Italians were sure to retaliate, and Lyon was “completely unprotected,” as were “the great petrol depots” near Marseilles.

  After a whispered consultation with Ismay, a “beaming” Churchill said that was impossible. The British bombers were already airborne. Reynaud’s eyebrows arched upward and Weygand frowned, but they did not challenge the British action. There was another awkward pause, and then Reynaud invited Churchill to address the fourteenth and penultimate session of the Allied Supreme Council. The prime minister began reassuringly. He said his “own impression was that as soon as the Germans had established themselves on a front in France, they would turn on England. He hoped they would. . . . It would give France relief . . . and enable the British to take a fuller and more equal share in the struggle, but, above all, it would give our RAF the opportunity of smashing German airpower.” Broadening the survey, Churchill said, “Today we have the battle of France, tomorrow we should have that of Britain, and it is on this field the fate of the war” would be decided. Britain would “never give in,” he said. “Never!” She would fight on, of that he was certain, until Germany could “at last be brought to her knees.”

  This was the first time General Charles de Gaulle, the new French undersecretary
for war, had heard Churchill speak; he was impressed by the Englishman’s performance. Churchill “appeared imperturbable, full of vitality, yet [he seemed] to be confining himself to a cordial reserve toward the French at bay and to be preoccupied already—not perhaps without an obscure satisfaction—by the terrible and magnificent prospect of an England left alone in her island, waiting for him to lead her in her struggle toward salvation.” Later in the meeting, Spears caught Churchill glancing over at de Gaulle and thought “the prime minister . . . was searching for something [in him] he had failed to find in other French faces.”

  Weygand, who spoke next, was still the impatient mortician. A “deep penetration by enemy tank units might make it impossible to reestablish the [French] line,” he said. “If the armies are disarticulated and cut off, it would be impossible to maintain a coordinated defense of the French territory.” Later in the meeting, General Georges, commander of the French ground forces, painted an equally black picture of the military situation. Of the 103 divisions the Allied Army possessed on May 10, the day the German offensive began, only 68 were left, Georges said. “In preparation for the new battle . . . the French Command had rushed everything that could be spared from eastern and southeastern France, but the activity had been impeded by the rapidity of the German advance and the activity of the German bombers. . . . Eight to ten divisions had now been reduced to two battalions and a few guns. [A division has ten thousand to fifteen thousand men; a battalion, three hundred to seven hundred.] Half-trained troops had been put in to fill the gaps, but now there was nothing left to put in.” Spears glanced over at Churchill, who looked “horrified.” Weygand, Churchill could dismiss as a defeatist, but he knew and admired Georges. He was an honest man, and a professional who would not manipulate information to advance his personal views. If he said the situation was desperate, it was desperate. Churchill began “working his mouth.” In Spears’s experience, this was usually an indication that “he was pouring his ideas into the mould of words.” A moment later the prime minister began to speak.

  He said he “wished to express Great Britain’s immense admiration for the manner in which the French armies were now defending their territory and her grief at finding [he] could give so little help at such a moment. The hard fact [was] that what remained of the BEF had come out of Flanders literally naked and could only resume the struggle once it had been rearmed. . . . If the [French] line could be held for the next few days, [he hoped] it would be possible to organize a counterattack with the help of British forces. . . . If the line held for another three or four weeks, there would be a substantial British force available to attack the enemy’s flank.”

  “It is a question of hours,” not days and weeks, Weygand said.

  The CIGS, Dill, told the French they could use the British reinforcements currently landing in France for any purpose they wished.

  Pétain, who knew how small that number was, dismissed the offer. “At the height of the Verdun battle,” he said, “the French still had been able to relieve each unit after a four-day stint in the trenches. Today, the French troops were fighting continuously with no hope of relief within a measurable time.”

  Eden also couldn’t get anywhere with the French. Reynaud dismissed his report about German concern over the high casualty rate as beside the point. “The enemy was now almost at the gates of Paris,” Reynaud said. “He had crossed the Seine and the Marne; the French troops were worn out through lack of sleep and shattered by the action of the enemy bombers. There was no hope or relief anywhere.”

  The British expressions of concern were sincere, but the French delegates could be forgiven for thinking it was all words, and words and a few British reinforcements would not change anything. Only the RAF might—and the British were holding the RAF back for the defense of the home island. It was a poignant moment. The men gathered around Weygand’s dining room table had fought two wars together. They had endured the Somme, Ypres, and the 1918 Michael offensive together. They had lost common friends, shared common horrors, and they believed in the same things: honor, duty, freedom, liberty, and the dignity of the individual. Many of the men at the table had risked their lives to defend those values. But national interests, like tectonic plates, are subject to tremendous forces of drift, and French and British interests were now moving in opposite directions. Before leaving Briare the next morning, Churchill encountered an example of how wide the breach had become. He was dressing after his bath when Air Vice Marshal Arthur Barratt burst into his lodgings and reported that the bomber attack on Italy, scheduled for the previous night, had miscarried; the French ground crews at the bombers’ base in southern France had blocked the runways and the planes were unable to take off.

  * * *

  In the thirty-six hours between Churchill’s visit to Briare and his visit to Tours, site of the fifteenth and ultimate meeting of the Allied Supreme Council, British and French national interests continued to move in opposite directions. At a meeting of the French War Committee on June 12, the day after the Briare conclave, Weygand warned that, failing an immediate armistice, the army would disintegrate and the nation would descend into anarchy and lawlessness. In London that afternoon, British officials examined a new hypothesis. Hankey was wrong. The French would resist attempts to seize their remaining assets and gold reserves.

  In between Briare and Tours, Spears had a final conversation with Marshal Pétain.

  “Africa?”

  Pétain found Spears’s suggestion that France should carry on the war from North Africa absurd. “What is the use of sending recruits to Africa? There are no rifles to arm them with. In any case, the disorganization of the Ministry of War is such that they could never get the men to the harbors.”

  “You cannot leave us to fight on alone,” Spears protested.

  “You have left us to fight alone. . . . You are withholding the greater part of your air force in this decisive battle.”

  “Vous verrez, Monsieur le Marechal, vous verrez,” Spears said, (“You will see, you will see.”)

  Pétain was no longer listening. “C’est la catastrophe, c’est la débandade,” he was mumbling to himself. (“It is a catastrophe, it is the stampede.”)

  At Briare, de Gaulle had noticed a new current of alienation in British and French exchanges. The Allies no longer seemed like players playing a common game but rather like negotiators trying to resolve differences. Spears, less subtle of mind, did not notice the current until the Tours meeting, when both sides abandoned the pretense of solidarity and spoke to each other in the language of intimidation and accusation. The French were represented by Reynaud, who arrived at the meeting greatly relieved that a missing secret cable had been found that morning among the sheets in the Comtesse de Portes’s bed. Accompanying him was Paul Baudouin, his former chef de cabinet and now undersecretary for foreign affairs. In photographs of the time, Baudouin always stands out. He is taller, handsomer, and younger than anyone else in the photo. The British delegation included Churchill; Spears; Ronald Campbell (the British ambassador); Halifax; Cadogan; Pug Ismay; and the Canadian press magnate and new minister of air production, Lord Beaverbrook, whose untrustworthy face and battered hat brim turned up in the front suggested a London bookmaker of the worst type.

  Though historically significant, the Tours meeting possessed none of the pomp and circumstance of a great event. It was just ten men—two French and eight British—gathered on a rainy Thursday afternoon in a smallish, ill-lit first-floor room in a local prefecture. The size of the room produced an atmosphere of intimacy that perhaps made what each man said sound more personal than it might have in a more official setting. Reynaud spoke first, and he began well. He sounded confident and relaxed as he described the French War Committee’s rejection of Weygand’s demand for an armistice and President Roosevelt’s warm reception to his June 10 appeal for assistance. But when it came time to speak of what France would do if Roosevelt denied his request for immediate and large-scale American aid, the aut
hority and ease left his voice; he sounded plaintive and accusatory. France had been “completely sacrificed,” he said. It had “nothing left. This being the plain and simple truth, it would come as a shock to the French government and people if Britain failed to understand and did not concede that France was physically incapable of carrying on.” Churchill understood what Reynaud could not bring himself to say. France wanted to be released from its no-separate-peace pledge.

  “Great Britain realized what France had endured and was still suffering,” the prime minister said. That, however, was as empathic as Churchill was prepared to be on this rainy afternoon. “Everything is subordinated to the British determination to destroy Hitler and his gang,” he said. “No risk . . . will hinder us. Everything, absolutely everything, will be subordinated to that aim. . . . We must fight, we will fight, and that is why we must ask our friends to fight on. . . . You must give us time. We ask you to fight on as long as possible, if not in Paris, at least behind Paris, in the provinces, down to the sea, then if need be, in North Africa. At all costs, time must be gained.” Spears looked over at Baudouin. He was bent over the notepad on his knee, scribbling furiously.

  Reynaud was speaking again, and his voice contained a new element—a note of irony. “It is quite natural that Great Britain would want to go on with the war in view of the fact that she has not suffered as we have; in fact, she has suffered little, but we, the French government, do not think we can abandon our people to German domination. . . . If we left, the position would then be that Hitler, in all probability, would set up a puppet government with so-called legal powers, which would at once set about its task of corruption. . . . Would not Great Britain agree that France, having sacrificed what was the finest and best in her youth, could do no more? Would Great Britain not agree that France, having nothing further to contribute to the common cause”—now Reynaud felt agitated enough to say it—should be “release[d] from the agreement concluded three months ago and allow her to conclude a separate peace? Could not this be concluded whilst maintaining Anglo-French solidarity?”