by Colin Smith
In the wet and cold of the Algerian winter Bonnier de la Chapelle, as he preferred to be remembered, was training hard and anxious not to be excluded from anything. He had missed out on the excitement of the 8 November coup when, for reasons he could not understand, his friends had not invited him to participate. Since then he had remained close to Abbé Louis Cordier, confessor and secretary to Henri d’Astier de la Vigerie, an aristocrat highly regarded by the Orléanist pretender. It was Abbé Cordier who had arranged for the young men to train with Coon. The priest, a sinister figure, was known to the OSS as ‘Necktie’, widely believed to be the abbe’s chosen instrument for disposing of Axis agents after first forgiving them their sins.
On 24 December Bonnier de la Chapelle put two bullets into Darlan from an old Spanish automatic pistol of a type produced in its thousands for the French Army during the First World War. The shooting took place at Darlan’s office, which was in a compound known as the Summer Palace, shortly after he returned from a late Christmas Eve lunch. Abbé Cordier had arranged to get his assassin into the building by providing Bonnier with a letter and other forged papers, which showed that he had an appointment with a civil servant on the floor below Darlan’s office. Cordier knew that the man would not be there and Bonnier would have plenty of time to go up the stairs to the next floor and wait in its narrow corridor for his target to return from lunch. Before they parted the abbé heard the young man’s confession and gave him absolution for what he was about to do plus 2,000 US dollars and a forged passport to get him to Spanish Morocco where he was to stay until things cooled down.
But Bonnier did not escape. After shooting Darlan in the corridor the plan was that he should get away by jumping through an open window of the low building into the courtyard below. It turned out that the window was barred. Cornered, the gunman fired several more shots with his .32 automatic, one of which wounded one of Darlan’s aides in the thigh, before he was overpowered and badly beaten up by guards.
Darlan, who had been shot in the chest and the jaw, was taken to the Maillot Hospital, where Alain had been treated, and died in the operating theatre. The fatal bullet had gone through a lung and lodged in the lower part of his heart. Berthe Darlan arrived at the hospital a few minutes too late.
Forty-eight hours later his killer was dead, shot at dawn on 26 December by a French firing squad after a Christmas Day trial. A confession stating that he had acted alone, motivated solely by the love of his country, had been presented before a military judge who immediately passed sentence. There was no right of appeal. It was, of course, preposterous to imagine that a young man found with 2,000 dollars on his person, a fortune anywhere in 1942 let alone French Algeria, had been acting alone. And as the hours before his execution had slipped away Bonnier had assured his father, who visited him, guards and a priest that he had powerful friends who would not allow him to die. At the last moment the priest persuaded him to say some prayers but he was shot before he could finish them. The haste of Bonnier’s trial and execution, without even a Christmas postponement, inevitably led to speculation of a cover-up though some said it was merely Giraud, who was now in charge, determined to demonstrate to the Anglo-Saxons just how efficient the French could be. ‘Darlan’s murder,’ admitted Churchill, ‘relieved the Allies of their embarrassment for working with him and left them with all the advantages he had been able to bestow.’
From the moment he was shot Darlan never properly recovered consciousness though one account has him gesturing feebly to somebody who was trying to give him encouragement. Certainly, he never recovered the ability to speak. But this was not good enough for Vichy Radio who thought it would be wasteful not to give the man who had once been Pétain’s chosen successor some suitable last words. It was decided that he had been heard to whisper: ‘Nothing more can be done for me. England has attained her goal.’
EPILOGUE
April in Paris 1944. Outside Notre Dame on the 26th of that month, cheering people were giving Philippe Pétain a rapturous reception as he emerged from a requiem mass for French civilians who had been killed in allied air raids. Most were paying homage to the victor of Verdun. They were indifferent to the now almost defunct Vichy government whose major preoccupation had become the savage civil war its Milice was waging against the Resistance, mostly in the old free zone area of southern France. Nonetheless, German propaganda made the most of it and news pictures of Pétain acknowledging his applause and people singing ‘Maréchal nous voilà!’ were widely distributed.
Forty-two days later the Anglo-Americans landed on the Normandy beaches and Pierre Laval made a national radio appeal for people to conduct themselves as neutrals. ‘We are not in the war,’ he told them. ‘You must not take part in the fighting. If you do not observe this rule you will provoke reprisals the harshness of which the government would be powerless to moderate. Those who ask you to stop work or invite you to revolt are the enemies of our country.’
But the brave minority willing to take on the Germans did not require an invitation and were certainly not going to listen to Laval. The Resistance, now more or less united under the leadership of de Gaulle (who in 1943 had moved his main headquarters to Algiers), rose en masse with their parachuted British weapons and instructors. Bridges were blown, railway lines cut, convoys ambushed. An entire SS panzer division, the Das Reich, was delayed for two vital weeks on its way from the south of France to Normandy. Among those involved were the two Litani River veterans Paddy Mayne and Tommy Macpherson. Colonel Mayne, whose raids on desert airfields had become legendary, commanded an SAS regiment and was one of the most decorated soldiers of the British army.
The kind of terrible reprisals Laval had predicted failed to diminish the appetite of the Forces Françaises de l’Intérieur, as the Resistance now called themselves, for guerrilla warfare. Less than three months after the Allied landings the street barricades were up in Paris and behind them men and women wearing FFI brassards. The Wehrmacht, outflanked by the Allies, were already withdrawing and the partisans awaiting the arrival of Général Leclerc’s Free French 2nd Armoured Division to link up with their uprising and complete the capital’s liberation.
When de Gaulle arrived in Paris on 25 August elements of the German rearguard and a few Milice snipers were still at large. There is a famous photograph of a welcoming crowd, looking no more or less Parisian than the one that greeted Pétain almost exactly four months before, suddenly trying to find cover in the Place de la Concorde. De Gaulle, refusing to crouch and apparently unafraid, strode into the old War Ministry building on the rue Saint Dominique. Shortly afterwards he left to address the crowd gathering outside the Hôtel de Ville (town hall). Introduced as ‘Charles de Gaulle, President of the provisional government of the French Republic’, he then made his second most remembered speech since 1940’s ‘France has lost a battle but not the war’. It contained these words:
Paris stood up to liberate itself and knew how to do this with its own hands … Paris! Outraged Paris! Broken Paris! Martyred Paris! But liberated Paris! Liberated by itself, liberated by its people with the help of the French armies, with the support and the help of all France, of the France that fights, of the only France, of the real France, of the eternal France! … France returns to Paris, to her home … bloody, but resolute.
This was the new truth and, like all cosseted seedlings, it swiftly took root. Paris had liberated itself. Later in the speech there is passing reference to ‘our dear allies’ but the driving force behind this victory was ‘all France’ which was Gaullist. Vichy had been an aberration invented by the Nazis. Certainly not an administration that, for well over two years and in some cases much longer, most of its citizens regarded as the legitimate government of France. Who cared to mention Pétain’s last April in Paris now? Certainly not those who had been singing maréchal nous voilà. History was not only being made. It was being rewritten.
Pétain and Laval both spent the last eight months of the war in what virtually amounted to German
custody, briefly at Belfort in eastern France and then at Sigmaringen Castle, once the seat of the Hohenzollern kings, at Württemberg on the Danube. On 24 April 1945 Pétain had his eighty-ninth birthday there. Two weeks later, he made his way through the rubble of Nazi Germany to Switzerland and thence to France. By the end of July, charged with treason, he was on trial for his life in a hot, stuffy courtroom in the Palais de Justice where he sat, saying little, ‘dignified but dumb’ according to the the New Yorker’s correspondent. As expected, de Gaulle commuted to life imprisonment the sentence that he be shot by firing squad. Pétain died in 1951, aged 95, on the bleak fortress island of Ile d’Yeu off the Atlantic coast. By then, without the stimulation of affairs of state, he had become quite senile.
One of the witnesses at his trial, called by both the prosecution and the defence, was Pierre Laval. In the last week of the European war he and his wife Eugénie had got away to Spain, landing at Barcelona airport in a Junkers 88 bomber on I May. Laval had been trying to persuade the Spanish to grant them asylum for the last two weeks along with the Swiss and Liechtensteiners. ‘It is a tired and worn out old man who is writing to you,’ Laval, just turned 62, had told Spanish Foreign Minister José Felix de Lequerica, an old friend, asking if they might ‘enter Spain and await better days’.
Granting asylum to Vichy’s most wanted man was not something the Franco regime was prepared to do in the delicate aftermath of the universal triumph over Fascism everywhere but on the lonely Iberian peninsula. The Spanish allowed Laval to stay for three months but made sure he did not receive a letter from Général de Chambun, his son-in-law’s father, urging him not to come back but try to get his visa extended or go somewhere else. On 31 July, their three months expired, the Lavals found themselves back on an aircraft, this time bound for Linz where they were met by the Americans who took them to Innsbruck, which had become part of the French zone of the occupied Reich and where Leclerc’s soldiers were waiting to receive them. Next day the Lavals were in separate cells in Paris’s Fresnes prison. ‘I don’t know why my wife was arrested,’ he told one of his lawyers. ‘She’s always been an Anglophile and a Gaullist.’ Some eight weeks later Eugénie Laval was released without charge. This was nine days before her husband’s trial began on 4 October.
It lasted for five days and by the end of the third day Laval was refusing to attend. So were his lawyers and the trial proceeded without the accused or defence counsel. ‘Scenes which can only be described as scandalous led to this state of affairs,’ reported the Manchester Guardian’s correspondent. The trial of one of France’s most senior politicians for treason, a man accustomed to holding high office since the early 1930s (twice Prime Minister and Foreign Minister) should have been a solemn affair. But at this point Laval was probably the most detested man in France. Far more than Pétain, his fawning collaboration had come to symbolize all the humiliation of the occupation. Pierre Monibeaux, the president of the court, could not resist playing to the gallery or controlling others who wanted to do the same.
Laval gave as good as he got. ‘His superior brain guided even the cheapest gibes,’ observed the New Yorker. Prosecuting was the newly appointed Procurateur général André Mornet who in 1917 had been on the legal team that had the spy Mata Hari shot. At one point Mornet, who had a notoriously short fuse, remarked that a quick bullet as soon as Laval fell into French hands at Innsbruck ‘would not have been a judicial mistake’.
‘That would have deprived me of the pleasure of hearing you,’ snapped the prisoner. But this set the mood. Long before all the evidence had been heard, several of the jurors found it impossible to conceal their prejudice any longer. ‘The swine hasn’t changed!’ said one. ‘Twelve bullets for him,’ shouted another.
‘The jury, before judging me, it’s fantastic,’ gasped Laval, suddenly very much the lawyer he had once been. And an editorial in the Voix de Paris, deploring the ‘unimaginable lack of propriety’ of the jurors, noted ‘the astuteness of Pierre Laval, that old warhorse quick to exploit any situation’.
Sentenced to death, put into leg irons and transferred to the condemned cell, he instructed his three lawyers not to ask for a reprieve but a retrial. De Gaulle granted them an audience – one of them had been in the Resistance – and listened to what they had to say. Their main point was that, guilty or not, the execution of a Prime Minister after such an appalling trial was a banana republic image unworthy of France. As they left they saw an aide bringing a copy of a French law book into the room they had just left and this made them hopeful.
But forty-eight hours later they were informed that the sentence would stand. The execution by firing squad was set to take place at Fort Châtillon in Paris at 9.30 a.m. on Wednesday, 15 October 1945. Laval was told the news the night before and his lawyers found him composed, even cheerful. Next morning at 8.45, as French law requires, Procurateur général Mornet, accompanied by Laval’s lawyers, turned up at his cell to read him his death sentence. Next day the Manchester Guardian published an account of what followed which was obviously based on a conversation with one of Laval’s lawyers.
Without replying, he put his head under the blankets. His advocates thought that he had had a moment of weakness and one of them raised the blanket to ask him to master himself, but saw at once from Laval’s appearance that he must have taken poison. He was already losing consciousness. He had in fact drunk from a bottle of cyanide of potassium which he still held, but in his hurry he had not drained the bottle and had not shaken it before drinking.
The poison, as Laval explained in a note he left, was ‘a little packet of granules which no search has discovered’.
I do not accept the sentence. I do not accept the stain of execution; it is murder. I intend to die in my own way, by poison, like the Romans … I hope it will not have lost its strength for it has often had to change hiding place. The inside pocket of my fur coat sheltered it and my briefcase, which was always respected, sometimes received the packet when it was better wrapped. To execute is the duty of soldiers but today their duty is questionable. They are obliged to commit murder. Thanks to me they will not be the accomplices, even involuntary, of those who, from their very high positions, have ordered my assassination. They will not have to fire on a man who must die because he loved his country too much.
But Laval was denied his Roman death. A prison doctor and a stomach pump were summoned and within an hour he was deemed conscious enough to face execution. Meanwhile, the firing squad had been brought from Fort Châtillon and the venue changed to one of the courtyards in Fresnes prison. Laval had put on one of his trademark white ties and wrapped as a scarf around his neck the tricolour sash that was the symbol of office of the mayor of Aubervilliers. Still bringing up the water he had been given for the terrible thirst the cyanide had brought on, he was helped to the execution stake where he managed to croak out a few last words. ‘I pity you for the work you have done,’ he told Procurateur général Mornet. Then, refusing a blindfold, he turned to the firing squad and said, ‘I pity you for having to execute this crime. Aim at my heart. Vive la France!’
De Gaulle, in his memoirs, conceded that Laval ‘died bravely’.
In May 1979 Victor, a boys’ comic, published in a series of true-war stories an account of how the half-French Peter Reynier won his Military Cross in Madagascar and was lucky to survive his own grenade. The now defunct Victor was a product of the flourishing Scots firm DC Thomson of Dundee, which at the beginning of the twenty-first century still counts the veterans Beano and Dandy among its most popular publications. It is a business with strong local ties. Their decision to include the story of the Royal Scots Fusiliers’ lieutenant among the more predictable accounts – Desert Rats, Dam Busters, Chindits and Cockleshell Heroes – probably came about because the publishers had lost at least one of their employees among the three Scots infantry battalions that served in the almost forgotten campaign in Madagascar.
Otherwise, on both sides of the Channel, memories of Vichy and b
attles fought within living memory between the English and the French quickly dimmed to the point where an entire generation, possibly two, grew up almost entirely unaware of it. Perhaps more so in Britain which knew nothing as awful as the ten minutes of sudden death meted out by a recent ally at Mers-el-Kébir. Then occasionally, like grass through concrete, it surfaces.
In January 2004 the Daily Telegraph carried an obituary of the Highland broadcaster and farmer Ben Coutts who had been horribly disfigured by shrapnel at Tobruk and, after a year of plastic surgery, was being shipped home for more. On 12 September 1942 Coutts was aboard the Laconia, which was carrying 1,800 Italian prisoners-of-war as well as about 80 women and children, when the liner was torpedoed and sunk off West Africa. Once the Germans realised so many of their Italian allies were aboard, U-boats flying red cross flags did their best to rescue or at least provision all the survivors including the British. This came to an end when an American air attack killed some of those in the water and obliged the submarines to dive. Next on the scene were Vichy warships out of Dakar but, as the Telegraph reported, the badly wounded Coutts did not arouse universal compassion.
Victor’s account of Reynier’s heroism
The French sailors, Coutts remembered, treated them with wonderful kindness; their officers, with memories of the destruction of the French fleet at Mers-el-Kébir in mind, did not. As Coutts, unable to walk, crawled from his berth to the heads, a French officer kicked him violently on the backside. Thereafter, Coutts decided to urinate where he lay.
British civilians among the Laconia survivors were sent to a desert internment camp where conditions apparently left much to be desired. In June 2005, in its People’s War website series, the BBC quoted Mrs Ena Stoneman, who at one point had been taken inside one of the U-boats along with her small daughter. Mrs Stoneman, the wife of an RAF sergeant, made some unflattering comparisons between the kindly German sailors and the treatment she received at the hands of the Vichy French at Sidi El Ayachia camp in Morocco until the Allied invasion brought her captivity to an end.