England's Last War Against France

by Colin Smith

  But on the fourth day of Bouillaut’s incarceration Watkins received a telephone call from the Admiralty ordering his immediate release and repatriation. If he had expected anything else he was sadly out of touch with Their Lordships’ desire not to lose the advantage gained at Taranto. Anything that might contribute to Italy’s recent losses being made up by Darlan’s excellent ships joining the Axis was to be avoided at all costs.

  Earlier in the month they had been horribly embarrassed by the sinking off Libreville in Equatorial Africa, where de Gaulle was consolidating his hold, of the French submarine Poncelot by the sloop HMS Milford. True, the Poncelot had started it by hitting Milford amidships with a torpedo that should have blown her in twain but merely made a dent having failed to explode. She then surfaced to see what had happened only for the sloop’s outrageous run of good luck to continue when a fluke shot from her 4-inch gun made it impossible for her attacker to dive. The submarine then scuttled herself and all the crew were saved except for Capitaine de corvette de Saussine who, by accident or design, went down with his command.

  To add the trial and execution of a French lieutenant to Darlan’s growing list of grievances against the Royal Navy was not considered appropriate. Since the Djenné had sailed the day he was arrested, Bouillaut was moved from his military prison to Liverpool’s Stork Hotel to await the next sailing of a Red Cross repatriation ship to France which needed the approval of all the interested parties: Britain, France and Germany. But before he moved into the Stork, Bouillaut was required to report to Admiral Watkins who was determined to have the last word. Their conversation, which was conducted through an interpreter though Bouillaut seems to have known enough English to have had some conversation with his soldier jailers, started amicably enough.

  I was asked not to leave Liverpool for too long at a time so as not to miss the sailing. The Admiral also asked me whether I wanted to be protected by either the army or the navy and have an escort because he thought there were a certain number of English who had little love for me. Naturally, I refused the offer. And then, wanting to have the last word, Admiral Watkins told me that, in his personal opinion, I should not have shot at the English officers sitting in our wardroom without being ordered to do so and that he considered me to be a murderer – which Anderson [the interpreter] nicely translated as ‘meurtrier’ (murderous) instead of ‘assassin’ (murderer) – and that he would not like to be me when I came before God. I replied that my conscience was completely clear, that I thought I had only done my duty; far from sitting in our wardroom as friends, the English officers were standing, revolvers in hand, threatening the life of one of my comrades. The interview ended.

  Dismissed, Bouillaut went to the Stork where he met up with several other French officers who had missed the Djenné and the French consul general from Southampton who had been sent there to work out the passenger lists for the repatriation ships. Despite the cold weather there were still about 400 French sailors, some of them merchant seamen, under canvas on the Aintree racetrack. Bouillaut was among those who attended the funeral of a quartermaster from a submarine chaser who had died in hospital of bronchial pneumonia. As the winter nights lengthened, the air raids on and around the docks intensified. On 28 November Liverpool had 200 killed, 164 in a public shelter beneath a school. Behind the blackout curtains at the Stork Hotel its French guests played endless card games, one ear cocked for the closer explosions, and wondered whether the English would have surrendered before they got home.

  A few French naval officers had been told they would not be going home for some time. These were five members of the liaison team serving at the Government Code and Cypher School at Bletchley Park, a hideous Victorian stockbroker’s pile set in extensive grounds about 50 miles northwest of London. It was here that the abnormally gifted broke wireless codes and produced the intelligence the British called ULTRA.

  All but one seem to have taken the news of their enforced stay philosophically enough. The other four either remained at Bletchley or did signals intelligence work with the Free French, though one did at first attempt to sit out the war in an honorary job at the British Museum. The fifth man managed to escape aboard one of the repatriation ships using somebody else’s identity papers. It seems he kept his mouth shut because ULTRA was not compromised. In any case, Bletchley Park’s operation was in its infancy and its triumphs would not start until the following year.

  More worrying for the British was the presence in Vichy of Colonel Gustave Bertrand, former head of the French decrypting service and a man who could claim a founding role in ULTRA. In 1931 a German traitor passed this intelligence officer copies of the manuals for a new Dutch-designed Enigma coding machine the Wehrmacht had just acquired. After the Nazis came to power Bertrand, always Bertie in MI6 reports, shared some of the information with France’s Polish and British allies. The first man to break a code set by an Enigma machine was a Polish mathematician. When Poland fell, some of the brightest of its decrypting team escaped to Paris and joined Bertrand who was working closely with the British.

  By the time the Franco-German Armistice had been signed some of Bertie’s loyal Poles had followed him to Vichy’s unoccupied zone. Before long the colonel had soon established a mini-Bletchley of his own though in rather more agreeable surroundings. Code-named Cadix, it was quartered in Languedoc’s medieval fortress town of Uzès with its stone architecture and quiet courtyards, a remote place where many of the natives still spoke the old Occitan dialect of southern France. Bertrand was also running a branch office in Algeria but what he really wanted to do was resume contact with the British. Messages were passed, probably through Lisbon which was the more discreet of the neutral Iberian capitals. In them Bertie insisted Bletchley’s secrets were still safe with him and they could exchange information.

  It was an impossible request, and in his heart he must have known it was, but the British did not want to offend him. The colonel knew what the enemy must never know: he knew that ultimately Enigma did not work. Its codes could be broken. And this information was almost within the Wehrmacht’s grasp. All they had to do was become curious enough to charge across the undefended demarcation line and dig the Polish mathematicians and the rest of Bertie’s crew out of the cobbled labyrinths of Uzès for interrogation. The Abwehr might have already managed to place an agent into Cadix. As far as Bletchley was concerned, Bertie was a time bomb.

  They suggested to the colonel that they could arrange for him to come and see them in London, where no doubt they would have offered him everything except his ticket back; but he would not be led into temptation and suggested Tangiers. Then he called off Tangiers and offered Lisbon instead, but apparently this would take some time. Commander Alastair Denniston, the Admiralty code-breaker in charge of Bletchley since 1939, wondered if it might be a good idea to send Bertie ‘some Enigma keys of a minor character’ to keep him happy. In some notes on the painful divorce Bletchley was having with its French counterpart, possibly by Denniston himself, their predicament was plainly stated. ‘It was felt that if we continued to put the French off they might become discouraged and possibly resentful and, with the information they already have, this state of affairs could be extremely dangerous to us.’

  Meanwhile, it was noticeable that not once had Bertie even raised the subject of the fate of the French officers who had remained in England. Presumably he realized he would be wasting his time.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Bouillaut did get home for Christmas. He arrived in France aboard the Compagnie de Navigation vessel Djenné on 14 December. It was an auspicious time for a career naval officer, and one so fully committed to Vichy, to make his return because that evening Pétain made a radio broadcast announcing that he had sacked Pierre Laval. Nothing was confirmed but Amiral Darlan, while remaining Navy Minister, was expected to be his most likely replacement as Petain’s deputy.

  It had all happened with astonishing speed. For several weeks Laval had spent most of his time in Paris negot
iating with the Germans how best they might go about recovering those African colonies they had lost to de Gaulle. This was entirely contrary to the secret agreement Professor Rougier was supposed to have brokered between Pétain and Churchill but the maréchal was fully aware they were going on. For much of the time the talks were also attended by Général Huntziger and Darlan who, according to German records, were both very bullish. As well as a land offensive against Gaullist Chad from neighbouring Vichy territory, Huntziger wanted to attack British colonies. On his itinerary was the capture of Bathurst, that Anglo-Saxon blot on French West Africa, and air raids on Freetown in Sierra Leone and northern Nigeria. Not to be outdone, Darlan had proposed that while Freetown’s defenders were distracted by the air attack one of his submarines could take them unaware and wreak havoc in its harbour. Laval stressed that the French public should be prepared for action of this kind by a declaration from Berlin that the Germans had no desire for French colonies. If Germany made such a gesture de Gaulle would be exposed as the ‘common English agent’ he was.

  As it happened, Hitler did have something special in mind to help keep the French happy but it was not the kind of thing that had occurred to Laval or probably anybody else for that matter. Twenty-five years after Waterloo, 15 December was the centenary of Napoléon Bonaparte’s state funeral following the return of his mortal remains from mid-Atlantic island exile on Britain’s St Helena. As a mark of reconciliation, and a useful reminder that the Führer shared Bonaparte’s enthusiasm for uniting Europe, Germany would celebrate the anniversary by sending the body of Napoleon’s only son, the Duke of Reichstadt, for entombment at Les Invalides. Pétain was invited by Hitler to attend the ceremony where the son would be laid to rest alongside his father. The Nazis loved a good funeral.

  Since 1832 the duke’s body had lain in Vienna, now part of the Reich, where he died of tuberculosis aged 21 and was buried by his mother, the Empress Marie-Louise, who was Austrian. For a while his grave had become a shrine for the wealthier nineteenth-century Bonapartists who could afford the trip. The Parisians of 1940 tended to be less respectful about this celebrity corpse. ‘What we want is not bones but meat,’ they said. There were food shortages in all the major cities because the summer fighting and lack of manpower that followed had left harvests uncollected and livestock untended. The British blockade, another reminder of things Napoleonic, denied the French imports from their colonies and the combination of a bitterly cold winter and French coal being sent to the Ruhr added to their misery. Contemporary accounts report how thin and tired some people were beginning to look.

  Laval suspected that Pétain would be no more enthusiastic about the funeral pomp on offer at Les Invalides than the average Parisian and he was right. But he was determined that the maréchal did not offend Hitler by declining to collaborate in a little harmless theatre when so much bigger collaborations were at stake and knew it would take a face-to-face meeting to convince him. So he rushed off to Vichy taking with him Fernand de Brinon who, since the Germans already regarded him as Vichy’s ambassador in Paris, was the bearer of Hitler’s official invitation to Pétain to attend the Napoleonic occasion at Les Invalides.

  Laval was on a high. He felt that things were going so well with the Germans that they would soon begin to reap the rewards of Montoire. A mass release of prisoners of war would certainly make his position within the Vichy hierarchy unassailable and still only a heartbeat away from the octogenarian at the top. It never occurred to the deputy Prime Minister, busy with affairs of state in Paris and so often away from Vichy where his sharp political nerve ends would have alerted him to danger, that Pétain had already been persuaded to sack him.

  But it was not just Baudouin, whom he had replaced as foreign secretary, who was against him. Or Finance Minister Bouthillier, enraged that Laval did not bother to consult him when first he arranged German control of French-owned copper mines in Yugoslavia then agreed that Belgium’s gold reserve, entrusted to France in 1939 and stashed in Senegal, should be handed over as well. Or Darlan and Huntziger who had both been quite happy to sit beside him in Paris and compete at telling the Germans how beastly they were going to be to the English but loathed the way Ambassador Abetz obviously regarded him as much more important than themselves. It was also the Justice Minister Raphael Alibert, a monarchist Catholic fundamentalist of the Action Française. Alibert was a rare anti-Semite – he was the author of Vichy’s recently promulgated Statut des juifs – in that he appeared to hate the Nazis as much as he did Jews, Freemasons and Protestants, detesting the Anglo-Saxon world as a nest of all three. And perhaps most important of all, it was also Marcel Peyrouton, formerly Resident General in Algeria and now Interior Minister with the Brigade Mobile under his command, a gendarmerie said to include ex-Cagoulard terrorists in its ranks whose newly formed Groupes de Protection guarded Pétain.

  Dining alone with Robert Murphy, Peyrouton had confided to the American chargé d’affaires that he was prepared to use his paramilitaries to oust Laval and there might be fighting in Vichy. He had even tried to persuade Pétain that his deputy should be shot as a traitor but the old soldier knew this was not the time to shoot the architect of Montoire for being too pro-German however insufferable his smoke-filled insubordination. As it was, he had felt it necessary to draft a letter to Hitler disclosing his dismissal of Laval and assuring, ‘I remain more than ever a partisan of the policy of collaboration’.

  Even so, Laval very nearly turned things round. Pétain, as usual, took heed from the last person he spoke to and the Führer’s plans for the reburial of Napoléon fils had already caused enough ripples in the small pool that was Vichy to make him delay sending Hitler his letter. With the help of Ambassador de Brinon, whose pedigree was so much more to the mare-chal’s taste, Pétain agreed to attend the ceremony on condition that his trip to Paris be made, like his return from Montoire, a triumphal procession with stops where he could shake hands with Verdun veterans and others giving thanks for his leadership.

  Unfortunately for Laval, too much time elapsed before the maréchal’s departure for others to talk him out of it. The rest of his Cabinet were unanimous: on no account must he accept this ludicrous invitation to Les Invalides. They were certain that if he did there was a real chance the Germans would force him to accept a more docile government under Laval, probably including some of the capital’s home-bred Fascists such as Marcel Déat who, judging by the editorials in his newspaper Oeuvre, regarded Vichy as no more than an irritating stopgap until the real thing came along. They urged him to stick to Plan A and fire his deputy which, on the evening of Friday, 13 December, he did. ‘I hope, Monsieur le Maréchal,’ Laval told him on his way out, ‘that your successive contradictory decisions do not cause too much harm to our country.’

  This was not quite the end of it. Laval had intended to clear his papers from his office in the two floors he and his staff occupied in the Hôtel du Pare, collect his wife and daughter Josée from the Laval chateau in nearby Châteldon – Josée had just returned from New York – and return to Paris on a train leaving Vichy at midnight. His chauffeur would bring his baggage and papers up by road together with de Brinon. But he had reckoned without Peyrouton.

  If the Interior Minister could not have Laval shot, he would at least hold him incommunicado long enough to ensure that Pétain could make a public announcement of his dismissal and make it a done deal before the Germans could intervene and reverse his decision. All telephone links to Paris were cut and a squad from Groupes de Protection sent to take over Laval’s floors at the Hôtel du Parc. At about 10.30 p.m. Laval had a visitor. ‘An American journalist, Ralph Heinzen the United Press’ correspondent in Vichy, reached my office with difficulty. He had been jostled and roughly handled. Only his repeated statements that he was an American newspaperman had enabled him to force his way up. He told me that my chauffeur had been arrested and the car taken.’

  At the reporter’s urging Laval looked outside and glaring back at him were a bunc
h of Peyrouton’s finest in their distinctive black leather jerkins and steel helmets and the rare French MAS M38 sub-machine guns which should have gone to the army. ‘What swine! And it’s Friday the 13th,’ said Laval, slamming the door. ‘They’re out to get me and I’ve nothing to defend myself with.’ Incredulously, Heinzen watched as he searched his pockets and produced a penknife.

  Shortly afterwards a senior officer from the National Police turned up and persuaded Laval to let him escort him past the GP squad fingering their weapons outside his office and downstairs to a waiting car. With less than an hour of the 13th remaining on the clock Laval was safely delivered to his family home in Châteldon. There he discovered that he and his family were under house arrest. Their telephone was disconnected and there were police inside the house as well as outside. But they had left or overlooked his radio. Next morning he listened to Pétain’s announcement that they had parted ways ‘for reasons of internal policy’.

  Twenty-four hours later, the Laval family were once again gathered around their set for a report on the homecoming of the young Duke of Reichstadt whose bronze coffin had passed through the high gates of Les Invalides between a line of blazing torches carried by an honour guard. Above them, a kilo of incense smouldering in a giant thurible sweetened the December chill. Pétain was represented by Amiral Darlan who had travelled to Paris with Ambassador de Brinon and Général Laure, a personal friend of the maréchal’s whose release from captivity was as yet the only other visible fruit of Montoire. Hitler was not present and it is not clear whether he ever intended to be. Abetz made a speech in which he praised Laval as ‘the guarantor of collaboration’. In case Darlan and Laure had missed the point, afterwards he made his disgust at Laval’s treatment quite clear and told them that, as far as he was concerned, some of Pétain’s ministers were little better than paid British agents. Général Laure returned to Vichy that night and reported that, in a nutshell, Ambassador Abetz was saying: France was free to choose its own government but, if it picked the wrong one, don’t expect to reap the rewards of collaboration.