Voices from the Dark Years

by Douglas Boyd

  French army and air force units not already captured were to withdraw to the Free Zone for disarming and demobilisation, but all surrendered and captured troops would be held as POWs. That clause of the Diktat sentenced 1.6 million men, including 4,000 priests serving as chaplains, to four years of incarceration in fifty-six Stalags and fourteen Oflags spread out all the way from north-eastern France to Poland. For the most part, officers were not required to work, but the men and NCOs left their camps without escort each morning and marched themselves to work in factories, on farms and as road-building gangs. Their daily rations were ersatz coffee made from acorns, a thin soup in which small pieces of unidentifiable meat floated and 250g of bread per man per day. The best-off were those working on farms, where extra food could be had. Supplementary food parcels from home were allowed, but limited to one 5kg parcel or two 2kg parcels per man per month.

  France divided by the Armistice Agreement of 22 June 1940.

  No mention was made of occupying the French North African territories, for fear of prompting their secession. The French fleet was to be neutralised, but not delivered to the Germans. The bitterest pill Huntziger had to swallow was Article 23, which made the Armistice subject to Italian confirmation. Dictator Benito Mussolini had only attacked France in order to suffer a token few thousand casualties that would permit him to attend the anticipated peace conference and make territorial demands on France after its defeat by German arms. On the Alpine front in the south-east of the country, he had massed thirty-four divisions totalling 550,000 men against 80,500 French soldiers with a few outdated planes and hardly any anti-aircraft defences against the Italian air force. Yet, Mussolini’s invasion gained little ground against an intelligently led and flexible defence that contrasted sadly with the disastrous inflexibility in the north.13

  Two amendments to Article 9 passed unnoticed by the general population. In the first, Admiral Canaris of the Abwehr required the immediate liberation of German citizens imprisoned by the French authorities ‘for espionage and defeatism’. In the second, aimed at Jewish and political refugees, Heinrich Himmler required all German refugees in France to be handed over to his Gestapo.

  While the fate of France was being thus settled, 800km to the south on the Spanish border the Comtesse de Portes’ final gamble had come unstuck. In defiance of customary diplomatic dispensation, Franco’s border guards insisted on opening the diplomatic pouch in the car of Lecca and Devau. Inside, they found the comtesse’s personal jewellery plus bonds and currency. They also found $2 million in gold. Confiscating the contents, they informed the new French government.

  It could all have been quite innocent. After all, what could a French Purchasing Commission do without money to buy things with? However, the comtesse panicked Reynaud into meeting her clandestinely at a remote country inn to discuss their situation. After some time spent in visibly anxious conversation, they left with Reynaud at the wheel of their car. There were no witnesses when he drove into a telegraph pole, killing the comtesse and sustaining head injuries himself so grave that for several days he hovered between life and death after being transported by ambulance to his villa at St-Maxime.14

  The first German troops to arrive at the Spanish border in Hendaye shook hands with the jubilant Spanish customs men in their tricorne hats and were toasted in local brandy. They had arrived in a motley collection of patched-up German vehicles and commandeered French trucks, the mobile field workshops having been left far behind in their unopposed dash over hundreds of kilometres since the cease-fire. Capt Barlone had noted in his diary the impeccable organisation of the Germans, with each column having several French-speaking interpreters and a reserve of drivers for driving French army transport, to augment their own.15

  Heading for the beach to strip off and bathe nude in the Atlantic surf, the Germans were approached by a number of French soldiers carrying their rifles. When they attempted to hand their weapons over, the laughing bathers told them to go away and give them to the nearest gendarme. Weapons and all other military materiel in the Occupied Zone were declared legitimate booty; in the Free Zone they were to be stockpiled under German control.

  The Armistice terms came into force on 25 June. That day, the marshal warned his people by radio, ‘The conditions are severe, but at least our honour is safe. The government is free. France will be administered only by Frenchmen. I hate the lies that have done so much harm.’

  Did he really think that was not a lie? His country was divided by an internal frontier of more than 1,000km running from the Spanish frontier north to the level of Tours and then in an irregular zigzag to the east, to reach the Swiss frontier near Geneva. The annexation of the oil reserves, potassium mines and metallurgical industry of Alsace and the coal mines and steel industry of Lorraine meant that they did not contribute to the heavy taxes payable to cover occupation costs. Dismantled machinery of factories north of the Line disappeared eastwards on French rolling stock that never returned and industry’s needs for 49.5 million tons of coal per year could not be met from the 3 million tons left after German requisitions. The better part of 2 million men of working age were POWs in Germany and, even after the return home of all the refugees, unemployment would stand at 1 million. Few governments have faced worse problems.

  The following day, Mussolini imposed his terms for an armistice, which included occupation by Italian forces of seven pockets in the southeast that would become a haven for thousands of Jewish refugees, safe there from the Gestapo’s writ.

  NOTES

  1. G.Q.G. No. 2004 – 3 FT, quoted in 1940: La Défaite, p 289.

  2. H. Le Masson, 1940: La Défaite, pp. 309–14.

  3. Admiral Auphan, No. 2 to Darlan, 1940: La Défaite, p. 325.

  4. Kernan, France, p. 260.

  5. Ibid.

  6. General E. Spears, quoted in The Voice of War, ed. J. Owen and G. Walters (London: Penguin Books, 2005), p. 56 (abbreviated by the author).

  7. De Gaulle’s address of 18 June 1940.

  8. H. Guillemin, Parcours (Paris: Seuil, 1989), p. 400.

  9. Personal communication to the author.

  10. H. Amouroux, in 1940: La Défaite, p. 350.

  11. Duchess of St Albans, The Road to Bordeaux (London: W.H. Allen, 1976), pp. 143–6.

  12. Kernan, p. 260.

  13. P. Masson, in 1940: La Défaite, p. 304.

  14. Kernan, France, p. 232.

  15. Barlone, A French Officer’s Diary, p. 89.

  4

  ‘TRUST THE

  GERMAN SOLDIER!’

  Early on the Sunday morning after the Armistice, as an amateur of grand architecture, Hitler made a lightning tour of deserted Paris, admiring the Eiffel Tower and Trocadero. His vision of parading like a Roman emperor in triumph at the head of his legions down the Champs Elysées had to be foregone for security reasons, which were cloaked in pretended concern for French pride. Pretended, because he had prophesied seven years earlier to Hermann Rauschning:

  [The French] do not want any more to do with war and greatness … We shall find plenty of allies on the spot. We shall not even need to buy them. They will come to us of their own accord, driven by ambition, blindness, partisan discord and pride.1

  With his obsession for racial unity, how could the Führer respect a nation of 40 million, of whom 1.7 million spoke a Germanic dialect and another 10.5 million did not have French as their first language?2 However, the achievements of France’s glorious past were something else. Architect Charles Garnier’s Second Empire opera house was high on his must-see list. Shown around the resplendent red and gold interior by a concierge in the absence of any other staff, he discussed the statuary with his guide, sculptor Arno Breker. As the party was leaving, one of the escorting officers proffered a tip to the concierge, who refused it politely, to the surprise of the Germans.

  Breker, who would spend much of the war in Paris, had the distinction of being the first German civilian to enter the capital, having been invited by his Führer becaus
e he spoke French and knew the capital intimately, after living there until 1934. He afterwards recalled Hitler being most moved at the tomb of Napoleon in Les Invalides, where he decided to return the remains of Napoleon’s son the Duke of Reichstadt, interred at Shönbrunn Palace outside Vienna, as a gesture to France’s past greatness.

  By this time Freeman and Cooper were ignoring orders and counter-orders, and using the priority accorded their ambulance bells to part the flood of refugees in hope of reaching Bordeaux before the consulate staff had left. As they drove across the elegant Pont de Pierre over the Garonne into the crowded city, the weather was sultry. Crowds thronged outside the Grand Théâtre where the Chamber of Deputies was in session, as well as every other place where news might replace gossip. Along the chic rue de l’Intendance and rue Ste-Catherine in the city centre piles of uncollected garbage stank in the sun between the intermittent showers. On the Place des Quinconces, where the temple to the tutelary gods of the Roman city had stood, motor vehicles with empty tanks and registration plates from all over France were jammed bumper-to-bumper.

  It was not only the French authorities that had abandoned their citizens. The British Consulate staff had fled, although the Dutch, the Poles and the Belgians still had diplomatic representatives in Bordeaux.3 Rumour had it that passage could be procured for England in fishing boats from Bayonne, Biarritz, St Jean de Luz or Hendaye on the Spanish border. By any transport they could find, hundreds of stragglers from the sizeable British community in southwest France were heading south, indulging in their favourite game of complaining about the way the French had let them down.

  More calmly, the elderly but still majestic ‘Baboushka’ Cahen d’Anvers was trying to get her English grandchildren Madeleine and Nelly safely home to their parents after curtailing their summer holiday at the family’s seaside villa near Arcachon. Her friend, British Ambassador Campbell declared himself unable to help before departing precipitately, but she hoped for better luck on receiving a telegram telling her to hurry to the Hôtel Splendide in Bordeaux. Driven there by the chauffeur of her neighbour Robert de Rothschild, Baboushka met his employer ‘looking distraught, nervous and terribly worried’. He asked whether she needed money, which was thoughtful because it was next to impossible to withdraw money from a bank. Also in the Hôtel Splendide was the famous pianist-conductor Alfred Cortot, hoping to follow in the footsteps of Vladimir Horowitz and Arturo Toscanini, to whom Baboushka had bidden farewell there not long before as they were leaving for New York.

  The Cahen D’Anvers family was well connected, to put it mildly. Among Baboushka’s other friends in the hotel was ex-Queen Amelia of Portugal, but she could not help either. Learning that the only port where a ship for England might be found was Bayonne, Baboushka had herself and the children driven there in de Rothschild’s car, against the advice of her daughter Renée, who was afraid their ship might be torpedoed. The British consul having fled, a surly underling stamped the children’s travel documents while an elderly Englishwoman announced grandly that ‘Mr Churchill will never let us down’. Churchill had other preoccupations, but when Robert de Rothschild’s daughter-in-law commandeered the car for her own escape to neutral Portugal, Babouschka and her granddaughters were stranded in Bayonne until the Dutch-owned SS Queen Emma entered port. Hurrying to the quayside, they had to step over hundreds of exhausted people sleeping on the pavements.

  The Queen Emma was full of celebrities as it pulled away from the quay with the two children waving to their relieved grandmother. She could not afterwards recall how she made her way back to the family’s villa along 120km of roads choked with refugees, to find that her son-in-law Capt Hubert de Monbrison had briefly called in to see his wife and children when his unit passed nearby during the rout. On being taunted by his 14-year-old daughter Françoise that the Germans would be there before her fifteenth birthday on 18 June, he had given her a stinging slap across the face. But he had now departed and Baboushka found instead another anxious relative relying on her to get him away to safety: anti-fascist author Ignace Legrand had no illusions how the Germans would treat him. On the morning of Saturday 22 June, his wife ran to the villa with the news that a Royal Navy pinnace was waiting at the Moulleau jetty, less than a kilometre distant, to shuttle the last British officials to a destroyer waiting just over the horizon. Hurrying to the jetty, Babouschka’s tall and beautiful auburn-haired daughter Renée begged transport for the Legrand couple:

  ‘And who would be responsible for them in Britain?’ asked the RN commander sarcastically.

  ‘My sister lives in England,’ Renée replied. ‘She is married to an Englishman, Anthony de Rothschild.’

  ‘Good Lord,’ said Commander Ian Fleming – later to achieve fame as the creator of James Bond – ‘Tony Rothschild’s a chum of mine. I’ll take all your family on board, if you like.’4

  Some people have all the luck! Hungry and exhausted by three weeks of driving on the lethally dangerous roads, Freeman and Cooper headed for the docks on arriving in Bordeaux. Finding a single White Ensign flapping damply in the breeze, they were not alone in wondering what a British destroyer was doing there at this late stage. After explaining away their French uniforms, they were allowed to board largely on account of their native diffidence in protesting that they did not want to be a bother to anyone if there was no room on the ship!

  The captain of the destroyer was a lieutenant-commander, but there was also a Royal Navy commander on board, a high-ranking army officer and an admiral, which made Freeman and Cooper surmise that the ship was in Bordeaux on some important intelligence or diplomatic mission. Their 400 last-minute fellow passengers on a vessel designed to carry no passengers at all included three autocratic betrousered Englishwomen, who were given the captain’s cabin as the only suitable accommodation. In a gesture of positive discrimination typical of the all-male navy, they were also allotted half of the officers’ ‘heads’ or toilet facilities for their exclusive use on the crowded journey.

  Understandably, Freeman and Cooper were hazy about exact dates by this time in their odyssey, so this destroyer may have been the same one that rescued the Legrands from Moulleau, in which case the supernumerary commander was Ian Fleming. After casting off, the White Ensign was hailed with loud cheers of ‘Vive l’Angleterre!’ from the crews of French warships at their moorings. Then followed a nail-biting few hours’ being piloted between the shifting sandbanks of the Gironde estuary on constant lookout for magnetic mines. Passing at dusk the Le Verdon memorial on the tip of the Médoc peninsula to the first ‘doughboys’ who landed there in 1917, Freeman thought it looked like a beacon whose flame had gone out, for he had seen no evidence of the ‘resistance’ of which de Gaulle had spoken on 18 June.

  In the darkness of German-occupied Royan on their starboard bow, Pablo Picasso was preparing to leave his top-floor studio in a typical turn-of-the-century seaside villa built there by the city-dwelling middle classes when the railway arrived at the end of the nineteenth century. A refugee from civil war in Spain, he had been painting at Antibes in September 1939 and fled from there to Paris. The German advance had panicked him and his mistress-model Dora Maar into heading with his secretary Jaíme Sabartés and dog Kasbec for the south-western resort, where his daughter Maïa and her mother were already staying, in the belief that they would be safe there. Now that the Wehrmacht had caught up with him, he decided to take his complicated ménage back to Paris, where life was more amusing.

  Taking refuge with friends in the Loire Valley after fleeing the capital, Simone de Beauvoir wrote of the German arrival there: ‘To our general surprise, there was no violence. They paid for their drinks and the eggs they bought at farms. They spoke politely. All the shopkeepers smiled at them.’5 Further north, Gen Erwin Rommel was writing to his wife: ‘The war is turning into a peaceful occupation of the whole of France. The population is calm and in some places even friendly’ – as they were in the British Channel Islands, where the Wehrmacht landed on 30 June with
out opposition, the islands having been demilitarised a week earlier as impossible to defend.

  Casualties of the German advance included one of the first tax exiles. P.G. Wodehouse, creator of Jeeves and Bertie Wooster, had arranged for himself and his wife to be warned of the German advance by British troops near their home in Le Touquet but were caught out by its speed, having refused to return to Britain earlier because their Pekinese dog would have been put in quarantine for six months. Like all male citizens of enemy powers under 60, Wodehouse was taken hostage and confined in a former mental hospital at Tost in Upper Silesia to await his 60th birthday.

  One of the most bizarre jobs handed out by Pétain’s government at this time landed on the desk of Gen de la Porte du Theil, whose 7th Army Corps had fought well in Alsace and retreated in good order successively to the Marne, the Seine and the Loire, before withdrawing for regrouping at Bourganeuf near Limoges, safely inside the Free Zone. On 2 July he was CO of 13th Military Division, based in Clermont-Ferrand. Summoned to nearby Royat, where Gen Weygand’s War Ministry was in temporary accommodation, de la Porte du Theil was informed of his new posting. While all else failed in the débâcle, the bureaucracy of conscription had continued running impeccably: 70,000 20-year-old men had been called up for military service on 8 and 10 June, since when they had been without uniforms, weapons, NCOs or training. Since, under the Armistice agreement, it would have been illegal to issue them with uniforms or weapons, de la Porte du Theil asked Weygand what exactly he was supposed to do with so many useless mouths. The answer: anything that would occupy these bored and rightly angry young men.

  ‘And where do I get the officers to train them?’ he asked.

  ‘You can have the pick of the cadet schools,’ was Weygand’s reply.