by Colin Smith
The French were rotten. That’s the only way to describe them. We ended up thinking of them as our enemies and not the Germans. They treated us like animals most of the time. It’s quite impossible for me to describe the filth of the place. We were infested with lice and fleas and almost everybody suffered from dysentery. We were a burden to the French and they made it quite clear they hated us.
All a great contrast from the usual treatment of military prisoners, Coutts excepted, as the former Commando officer Gerald Bryan makes clear in his 2008 account of a hospital visit by Madame Dentz, wife of Syria’s Vichy High Commissioner. Bryan, who had lost his right leg from below the knee during the Litani operation, was sharing a room with Pilot Officer Tommy Livingstone, a Hurricane pilot shot down in a dogfight with one of Le Gloan’s Dewoitines over Rayak, where he bailed out wounded.
I am afraid that Tommy and I were not very polite and did not give her a great welcome. She asked us if we had any complaints and I said, ‘Yes.’ We were about to complete one month as prisoners of war and under the Geneva Convention we were entitled to the pay of corresponding rank in the French Army. I would be glad if she would arrange for me to be paid accordingly. To my astonishment two days later I received a relatively small sum of money but it was sufficient to allow me to acquire a wrist watch with luminous hands. This made an enormous difference to my life because I no longer woke up in the middle of the night with no idea what the time was or how long it would take for day to break. It is impossible for me to explain adequately the enormous improvement this made to my morale.
In 1944, unfit for active service, Bryan transferred to the Colonial Office and by the early 1960s was Governor of the much fought over and still francophone Caribbean sugar island of St Lucia, which by 1814 had changed hands between the British and the French five times. Among his official duties was to make a New Year’s Day broadcast in French, including a greeting to neighbouring Martinique which had been staunchly Vichy. Another, every 11 November, was to lay a wreath on St Lucia’s French war memorial.
Memorials for England’s last war against France are few and far between. The epitaphs in Plymouth’s Weston Mill cemetery of the three British sailors killed on board the Surcouf give no indication who they were fighting. ‘Greater Love Hath No Man’, says Commander Sprague’s tombstone. The cemetery at Mers-el-Kébir where Amiral Gensoul’s men lie, and where the remains of Darlan were reinterred in 1962, has recently been desecrated by Islamic fanatics. In Madagascar goats graze on the overgrown graves of the 171 French servicemen who lie in Diego Suarez, their neglect made more reproachful by the neat contrast of the nearby British war cemetery where the casualties from the Joffre line are to be found. In Damascus there is a French cemetery with about 800 graves, Vichy and Gaullist, with an inscription over its gate that reads: ‘Morts pour la France’.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
In 2005 Oxford’s Bodleian Library republished a school-masterish booklet about France and the French that, in the spring of 1944, the War Office issued to every British serviceman about to take part in the Normandy landings. It was written by Herbert Ziman, a Daily Telegraph journalist and 1914–18 veteran, then serving as an officer in the Intelligence Corps. Apart from some useful advice about sex, alcohol – ‘don’t drink yourself silly’ – and remembering that the French tend to be much politer than we are, it included a chapter entitled ‘What do the French think of us?’ which starts: ‘It is fair to say that in 1940 we and the French parted on pretty bitter terms. They felt that we had not sent them a large enough British Expeditionary Force and that we had left them in the lurch at Dunkirk. Few of them believed we should carry on the war long after the evacuation.’
Over the last three years I have come to feel considerable admiration and sympathy for Ziman, confronted by his iconoclastic task in the face of almost four years of relentless contemporary propaganda. It took me much longer to write about this forgotten war within a war than I thought it would. The more I got to know about it the more important it became to put it all into context and explain what led up to these ‘bitter terms’. It would have taken me even longer had it not been for the help of a number of people.
Murray Wrobel, who served against the Vichy French in Syria in 1941 and to whom this book is dedicated, looked at the kind of military documents he last translated as a 21-year-old lieutenant in the Cairo branch of the secretive Combined Services Detailed Interrogation Centre. His ability to sort out the wheat from the chaff – ‘now it gets interesting’ – was always invaluable and saved me months of work. Most of these papers came from the archives kept in Paris at the Chateau de Vincennes by the Service Historique de la Defense whose staff were unfailingly helpful to the Englishman come among them probing sensitive areas of the national psyche. For over a year, the leads they provided me with were followed up by the indefatigable Caroline Huot who unearthed one little scoop after another then mailed the copies to me in Nicosia where I live.
Other documents came from Britain’s National Archives at Kew, the Royal Marine Museum at Southsea, the Templer Research Centre at the National Army Museum and the Greenwich Maritime Museum. Original material also came from the Imperial War Museum’s Department of Documents where Roderick Suddaby and his team preside over a treasure trove of diaries, letters and unpublished manuscripts. All published sources are mentioned in the bibliography. While every effort has been made to trace copyright holders, if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publisher will be happy to acknowledge them in future.
I also had the luck to meet or correspond with some of the people caught up in these events. In Guernsey the late Patrick Whinney talked to me about the Darlan he had known in 1940 as an RNVR lieutenant in the British liaison team at the Chateau de Maintenon near Chartres where the French navy had its operational HQ. On the same island I also met Major General Frank ‘Griff’ Caldwell who, then a young sapper officer, made an arduous trek through the Vichy lines at night to try to get help for the besieged garrison at Mezze. I was able to talk to three of the young officers involved in 11 Commando’s action on Lebanon’s Litani river. Over lunch at his home in Berkshire Gerald Bryan relived for me how he had lost his right leg below the knee after he and his troop had captured and destroyed a French artillery battery. Sir Thomas Macpherson and Eric Garland, who both went on to have extraordinary wars, patiently did their best to answer my questions over long international telephone calls.
At the Royal Hospital in Chelsea four Pensioners who fought the French also shared their memories with me. Bill Cross of the Scots Greys (later in tanks at El Alamein) told me how he and his mates were captured at bayonet point at Merjayoun by Vichy’s Senegalese Tirailleurs. Donald Pickering and Walter Offord, both Royal Signals, recalled the way sun spots interfered with Jumbo Wilson’s ceasefire signal and despatch riding with the Australians. Frederick Bailey, a gunner with 455 Independent Battery, told me about his experiences in Madagascar with its sudden casualties from pinpoint French counter-battery fire and a bewildering Japanese submarine attack in Diego Suarez harbour.
My thanks to Alan Samson at Weidenfeld & Nicolson for his enthusiasm for this project and editor Keith Lowe (author of the excellent Inferno – the story of the Hamburg fire bombing) who did his best to keep me on the straight and narrow. And to Beatrice Hemming, who took over the book in its final stages and demonstrated great persistence unearthing some of the photographic evidence. In London I owe, as usual, a great debt to my good friends Martin and Mori Woollacott for all their hospitality and encouragement. In Paris Charles Glass shared some of the research he was doing for his own book on the Americans who remained in Paris throughout the German occupation. For providing me with a small library, some of it privately published, on the Australian contribution to the Syrian campaign, I am greatly indebted to David and Susan Balderstone of Melbourne and Kakopetria. In Nicosia Lakis Zavallis, another close friend, constantly came to the rescue of this poor technophobe, a habit he first got into during the Turkish invasion
of Cyprus in 1974. My wife Sylvia, whose native Guernsey suffered the same fate as France, sparked the idea for this book and though, as the years rolled by, she might sometimes have wished otherwise, she was, as ever, my most loyal supporter.
SOURCE NOTES
IWM
Imperial War Museum
NA
National Archive
VA
Vincennes Archives
PROLOGUE
1 ‘Each of us fights’: Robert and Isabelle Tombs, That Sweet Enemy, William Heinemann, London, 2006, p. 262.
1 ‘All of us hoped to continue the fight’: Le Nistour, Vincennes Archives (VA).
2 ‘Are we prisoners?’: ibid.
3 ‘It would be better to permit the existence of a French government’: William L. Langer, Our Vichy Gamble, Knopf, New York, 1947, pp. 48–9, quoting Graziani papers on the Hitler–Mussolini meeting at Munich, 18 June 1940.
5 the martyrdom of the general’s English exile began: Edward Spears, Assignment to Catastrophe, William Heinemann, London, 1954, p. 620.
6 ‘No more perceptible than a crack in crystal’: ibid., p. 248.
CHAPTER ONE
9 ‘French cooks are so fond of cutting up joints into morsels’: Belfast Newsletter, 6 April 1903.
10 ‘We are prisoners of an army’: Thomas Pakenham, The Boer War, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London, 1979, p. 110.
11 about 2,000 bottles of claret, champagne: Tombs, That Sweet Enemy, p. 428.
12 ‘We were confronted with the fact that a ‘friendly Power’ had, unprovoked’: Winston Churchill, The River War, Standard Publications, Inc., New York, 2007, p. 319.
12 ‘An explorer in difficulties upon the Upper Nile’: ibid., p. 320.
12 ‘Great Britain was determined to have Fashoda or fight’: ibid., p. 319.
13 ‘Before they left a sous-officer’: ibid., p. 323.
13 ‘his own brooding boyhood shame at this national humiliation’: Charles Williams, The Last Great Frenchman: A Life of General de Gaulle, John Wiley, London, 1997, p. 19.
17 ‘The Great Asparagus’: ibid., p. 42.
18 ‘My heart bled’: Charles Williams, Pétain, Little, Brown, London, 2005, p. 138, quoting his memoirs.
19 ‘A Paladin worthy to rank’: Max Egremont, Under Two Flags, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London, 1997, p. xi (preface).
20 ‘red rosettes pinned to their uniforms’: ibid., p. 56.
20 ‘It is wholly unnecessary to mount huge attacks with distant objectives’: Williams, Pétain, p. 110.
CHAPTER TWO
22 About 743,000 of these came from the United Kingdom: all the British Empire casualty figures come from Martin Gilbert, First World War, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London, 1994, p. 541.
23 The Americans had suffered 50,300 battle deaths: Gary Mead, The Doughboys, Penguin, London, 2001, p. 349 (Gilbert says 48,000).
24 ‘Deep fear of Germany’: Winston Churchill, The Second World War, vol. i, The Gathering Storm, Penguin, London, 1985, p. 6.
24 ‘This is not peace’: ibid., p. 10.
25 ‘Ties that the passing years can never weaken’: Piers Brendon, The Dark Valley, Jonathan Cape, London, 2000, p. 505.
25 ‘No more wars for me at any price!’: Robert Graves, Goodbye to All That, Penguin, London, 1966, p. 240.
26 ‘The English gave way’: Tombs, That Sweet Enemy, quoting Desagneaux.
26 16,000 prisoners and more than 400 guns: Heinz Guderian, Achtung Panzer!, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London, new edn, 1999, p. 121.
26 ‘old timers like us relive that feeling of impending doom’: ibid., p. 121.
26 Life belts and rafts from cross-Channel ferries: Gilbert, op. cit., p. 646.
26 Exploiting a foggy dawn, nine North Staffords: privately published Staffordshire Regimental history available in the Templer Research Department, National Army Museum.
26 ‘I lost all my earthly faculties and fought like an Angel’: quoted in C.D. Lewis’s introduction to The Collected Poems of Wilfred Owen, Chatto & Windus, London, 1971, p. 23.
27 ‘genius and premature death’: ibid., Edmund Blunden, memoir, appendix, p. 147.
27 ‘No celebration since the Armistice has aroused such deep feeling’: Brendon, op. cit., p. 50.
27 Waiters clad in the ornate livery, powdered wigs: ibid., p. 503.
28 caviar, quail stuffed with foie gras, and Périgord truffles: ibid., p. 506.
28 ‘Let’s not be heroic’: ibid., p. 508, quoting Georges Bonnet.
28 a public appeal was started to buy Chamberlain a house: Duff Cooper, Old Men Forget, Rupert Hart-Davis (ed), London, 1954, p. 243.
29 ‘Anything, even the cruellest injustice’: Simone de Beauvoir, Prime of Life, Gallimard, Paris, 1956, p. 268.
29 ‘I know how you have struggled to avoid war,’ he said. ‘You were right; we would have been beaten’: Williams, Pétain, p. 290.
29 ‘Another few seconds please Mr Executioner’: Williams, The Last Great Frenchman, p. 204.
29 ‘Disfigured the smiling landscape’: Cooper, op. cit., p. 101.
30 ‘a pious one-eyed, one-legged war veteran’: Adam Nossiter, Algeria Hotel, Houghton Mifflin, Boston, New York, 2001, p. 104.
30 ‘a cunning talmudist’: Wikipedia, from judaisme.sdv.fr/perso/lblum/lblum.htm
31 ‘union tyranny’: Brendon, op. cit., p. 498.
31 ‘Who said this man has no French blood?’: ibid., p. 497.
CHAPTER THREE
33 ‘Thank God for the French army’: Roy Jenkins, Churchill: A Biography, Macmillan, London, 2001, p. 268.
34 ‘The only great army on the side of decency’: Orville H. Bullitt, For the President, Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 1972, p. 333.
34 ‘his great-grandfather Antoine Darlan’: George E. Melton, Darlan: Admiral and Statesman of France, Praeger, Westport, Connecticut and London, 1998, p. 5.
35 ‘into a meritocratic family with a strong belief’: ibid., pp. 5-6.
35 ‘I don’t have any special respect’: ibid., p. 27.
35 a spell in the British Ypres-Passchendaele sector: ibid., p. 9.
36 ‘the Battle of Trafalgar; on the other, Waterloo’: ibid., p. 17, quoting Service Historique de la Marine, Vincennes Archives (VA), 1BB2 EMG/SE, Carton 208.
36 ‘A vast fabric of stupidities’: ibid., p. 17.
37 The only bad note came at the coronation itself: ibid., pp. 50-51.
39 ‘HOPE THAT WE MAY HAVE’: VA
39 Hooky to his navy friends: author’s interview in Guernsey, 2002, with Patrick Whinney who was an RNVR lieutenant on Holland’s staff when the British naval attaché worked out of the French Navy’s operational HQ at the Château de Maintenon near Chartres.
40 ‘An infinitely courteous’: 1–TS, VA.
40 Amis de Darlan: Melton, op. cit., p. 47.
40 failed to explode: Churchill, The Second World War, vol. i, p. 592.
40 ‘surprise, ruthlessness and precision’: ibid., p. 532.
41 They informed their rescuers: ibid., p. 531.
41 ‘worth all the rest of the blockade’: Jenkins, Churchill, p. 566.
41 ‘harebrained’: Major General Sir John Kennedy, The Business of War, Hutchinson, London, 1957, p. 48.
42 ‘use bluff and good humoured determination’: ibid.
44 almost half of Britain’s oil imports: Oxford Companion to World War 2, Oxford, 2000 p. 821.
44 ‘Some of our finest troops, the Scots and Irish Guards’: Churchill, op. cit, p. 582.
44 ‘By comparison with the French, or the Germans’: Roger Parkinson, The Auk, Granada Publishing, London, 1977, p. 55.
45 ‘as great a disappointment’: Bullitt, op. cit., p. 484.
45 almost universal agreement among its chattering classes that they would have done much better: author’s conversation with Patrick Whinney, Guernsey, summer 2002.
45 ‘All I need to sit at the peace conference’: Alistair Home, To Lose a Battle: France 1940, Macmillan, London, 1969, p. 631.
45 T
hree French divisions: ibid., p. 63.
CHAPTER FOUR
47 shortly before dawn on Wednesday, 3 July 1940: Lieutenant de vaisseau Crescent, report after repatriation from England, dated Toulon 12.12.40. Vincennes (VA), Document 267c.
47 had ordered all but one of Surcouf’s four deck hatches to be battened down: ibid.
47 torpedoes had been disarmed, their fuses and firing pins removed: ibid.
48 the flotilla’s flagship was called the Entente Cordiale: NA ADM 199/822.
48 ‘All men who had fired a rifle were included’: from a report by Colonel Noyes lodged at the Royal Marine Museum, Southsea, Hampshire.
48 a typewritten sheet of four French phrases: James Rusbridger, Who Sank Surcouf?, Random Century, London, 1991, p. 38.
49 ‘The French Nation has fought gallantly to a standstill’: Admiral Dunbar-Nasmith’s letter, NA ADM 119 822.
49 ‘Any resistance can only cause unnecessary bloodshed’: ibid.
49 ‘arms and ammunition readily available’: ibid.
49 ‘Cayol was naturally very distressed’: ibid.
49 ‘he had considered the question of scuttling’: ibid.
49 ‘ran along the casing for’ard’: from Talbot’s report on the capture of the Surcouf, NA ADM 199/822.
49 its catches looked similar to the new ones on British conning tower hatches: ibid. Talbot described the hatch as ‘of the D.S.E.A.[Davis Submarine Escape Apparatus] type and thus could be opened from outboard’.
50 ‘I ordered him to close the last hatch’: Crescent’s report, VA, Document 267c.