The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill: Defender of the Realm, 1940-1965

  Inspector Thompson, who prepared the prime minister’s bath on these trips, had been billeted in another building and was without transportation. Thus Churchill awoke alone the next morning. Two French officers were finishing their café au lait in the conference room, which was the château’s dining room, when a big double door burst open, confronting them with what one later described as “an apparition resembling an angry Japanese genie”—an irate, plump Churchill with sparse, mussed hair, dressed in a flowing crimson dressing gown belted with silk, and angrily demanding: “Uh ay ma bain [where’s my bath]?”103

  His frustration mounted after a telephone call from a furious air marshal, Sir Arthur Barratt, stationed in Salon. Barratt reported that local authorities, fearful of reprisals, had not permitted RAF bombers to take off for targets in Italy. They had dragged farm carts on the runway, forcing him to cancel the mission. Others in the British party thought that was the last straw. However, the P.M. did not reproach his hosts. Tormented by the martyrdom of the French and by England’s niggardly contribution to the Allied cause here, he disregarded the incident.104

  The next morning, the twelfth, after Churchill had exacted a promise from Admiral Darlan never to surrender the French fleet, the British party left. Near tragedy brushed them on the way home. Unescorted by Hurricanes—an overcast sky had grounded them—they were flying over Le Havre when the sky cleared and the pilot saw two Heinkel bombers below, firing at fishing boats. The unarmed Flamingo dived to a hundred feet above the sea and raced for home. According to Inspector Thompson, one of the Nazi fighters fired a burst at them, but then they were gone, and the prime minister landed safely at Hendon.105

  In parting, Churchill had told Reynaud that in the event of any “change in the situation,” the French premier must let His Majesty’s Government know “at once” so that the British could return “at any convenient spot” to discuss the situation before the French took any irrevocable step “which would govern their action in the second phase of the war.” Clearly England’s allies were at the end of their tether. Late that evening, HMG learned that the British 51st Division had surrendered to the Germans in the fishing port of St-Valéry-en-Caux, a loss of more than 12,000 men. In his diary Jock Colville wrote: “Speaking of the surrender of the 51st Division, W. said it was the most ‘brutal disaster’ we had yet suffered.”106

  Early on the thirteenth, when Churchill was donning his sleeping smock, Reynaud phoned. The connection was bad. Eventually Colville got through to one of the premier’s aides. The message was grim: the premier and his advisers had moved from Briare to Tours; he wanted Churchill to meet him at the Préfecture there that same afternoon. This would be the P.M.’s fifth flight to France in less than four weeks. At 11:00 A.M. he and his party gathered at Hendon—Ismay, Eden, Beaverbrook, Halifax, and Cadogan. Escorted by eight Spitfires, the Flamingo detoured around the Channel Islands and entered French air space over Saint-Malo.

  Lashed by a thunderstorm, they landed on an airstrip pitted with bomb craters. The field was deserted. No one was there to meet them. They taxied around the craters, looking for someone, and found a group of French airmen lounging outside a hangar. Churchill disembarked and told them, in his appalling French, that his name was Churchill, that he was the prime minister of Great Britain, and that he would be grateful if they could provide him with “une voiture” to carry him and his small staff to the town’s Préfecture de Police. The airmen loaned them a small touring car, into which they crammed themselves with great difficulty and much discomfort. Halifax’s long legs were a problem; so was the P.M.’s bulk. No one at the Préfecture knew who they were or had time for them. Luckily an officer appeared, recognized them, and led them to a small restaurant, where they lunched on cold chicken, cheese, and Vouvray wine.107

  It was there that they were found by Paul Baudouin. In what Churchill called “his soft, silky manner,” Baudouin lectured them on the hopelessness of French resistance. No one knew when Reynaud would appear, or even where he was. At length the premier arrived, followed by General Spears and Sir Ronald Campbell, the British ambassador. The meeting—destined to be the last of the Conseil supérieur de la guerre—was to be held in the Préfet’s study, a small, shabby room looking out on an unkempt garden. The study was furnished with a desk, behind which Reynaud presided, and assorted unmatched chairs. Churchill took a leather chair and eyed his French hosts warily. He was confronting France’s split personality. Reynaud—still backed by a majority of the Chamber and the Senate—stood for a never-say-die, death-before-dishonor last stand against Nazi barbarism, with which Churchill agreed. Baudouin, Churchill knew, represented the defeatists; in his final report to Whitehall, Campbell would describe Baudouin as a man whose “dominating motives were fear and the desire to stand in well with the conqueror after the inevitable defeat.” Even now Churchill had not grasped how eager for peace such men were. U.S. ambassador to France William Bullitt, no admirer of the British, told Washington that “to have as many companions in misery as possible, they hoped England would be rapidly and completely defeated by Germany and [that] the Italians would suffer the same fate.” As for their own country, Bullitt reported, they hoped France would become “Hitler’s favorite province.”108

  Reynaud told the British that Weygand had declared Paris an open city; panzers were in Reims; Nazi troops were below the Seine and the Marne. It was too late to withdraw into a rédout Breton. He himself wanted to “retreat and carry on, but the people would remain; France would cease to exist.” Therefore the alternative was “armistice or peace.” He asked what the British position would be “should the worst come” and raised the issue of the pledge—made at France’s insistence and signed by him—that neither ally would made a separate peace. The French wanted to be left off the hook. They had, he said, “already sacrificed everything in the common cause,” had “nothing left,” and would be shocked if the English failed to understand that they were “physically incapable of carrying on.” Would Britain face the hard facts now confronting France?

  Spears quietly pointed out that capitulation was not the only alternative to war. Norway had not surrendered; neither had Holland. In the meantime, Churchill scowled, weighing his words. Britain, he replied at last, knew what France had endured and was still suffering. If the BEF had not been cut off in the north, they would be fighting beside the French now. They could not be there “owing to our having accepted the strategy of the army in the north.” The other Englishmen sat up. They had long hoped he would say that. The reason for the present crisis was not a lack of fighter planes. It was GHQ’s decision to ignore the Ardennes threat and send the best Allied troops into Belgium. The British had not yet “felt the German lash” but knew its force, the prime minister rasped. “England will fight on. She has not and will not alter her resolve: no terms, no surrender.” He hoped France would carry on, fighting south of Paris and, if it came to that, in North Africa. Time was of the essence. It would not be “limitless: a pledge from the United States would make it quite short.” A “firm promise from America,” he said, “would introduce a tremendous new factor for France.”

  He was grasping at straws. Churchill knew that Roosevelt’s hands were tied by the U.S. Constitution. As well, if Roosevelt announced his intention to seek an unprecedented third term in office, he surely would not do so on an interventionist platform. Indeed, Roosevelt made no announcement that June, telling Americans only that he would abide by the decision of the July Democratic convention. The P.M. also knew that Washington then had no arms to give. So did Reynaud. Although unschooled in American politics, the premier had served as France’s ministre de finance for the first six months of the war, had bought some arms from the United States, and knew how little matériel was there. Nevertheless he accepted the possibility of American intervention. It was a delusion. Churchill was wrong to have encouraged it, though much of the blame was Ambassador Bullitt’s. Alistair Horne points out that “through him [Bullitt] the French government was
led to expect far greater aid than could possibly have been forthcoming at that time.”109

  Briefly stirred, the premier agreed to appeal to Roosevelt. Nevertheless he again asked that Britain agree to “a separate peace.” The prime minister replied that although Britain would not “waste time in reproaches and recriminations,” that was “a very different thing from becoming a consenting party to a peace made in contravention of the agreement so recently concluded.” Then he reported that the Royal Navy was fast approaching a tight blockade of the Continent, which could lead to famine, from which an occupied France could not be spared. The French could not withdraw from the war and remain on good terms with the British. Reynaud, disturbed, darkly remarked: “This might result in a new and very grave situation in Europe.”110

  They had reached an impasse. Spears scribbled a note to Churchill suggesting a pause. Churchill told Reynaud he must confer with his colleagues “dans le jardin [in the garden].” The Englishmen withdrew to pace around the garden, “a hideous rectangle,” in Spears’s words, surrounded by a muddy path. After twenty minutes Beaverbrook spoke up: “There is nothing to do but repeat what you have said, Winston. Telegraph to Roosevelt and await the answer.” He added: “We are doing no good here”; therefore, “Let’s get along home.”

  And so they did. Everything now depended upon the reply from Washington. Reynaud, who had been joined by Charles de Gaulle, seemed confident that the Americans would save his country. As they prepared to leave, Churchill noted that among the Allied prisoners in France were 400 Luftwaffe pilots. He asked that they be sent to England, and the premier immediately agreed. As the P.M. passed de Gaulle, he said in a low tone, “L’homme du destin [the man of destiny].” The general remained impassive, but he understood: The French troops who had escaped from Dunkirk to Britain formed an army in waiting, but were without a leader. Large French forces in Brittany, who might fight on, likewise were in need of leadership. “There is apparently a young French general named de Gaulle,” Colville told his diary the day before, “of whom Winston thinks a great deal.” He did, and his statement to de Gaulle amounted to both a challenge and a promise of support were de Gaulle to lead a resistance in Brittany. On some level everyone knew that the alliance was finished, and it was in keeping with its last five ragged weeks that it should end in a grotesque scene. Outside the Préfecture, the Comtesse de Portes accosted Churchill, crying: “Mr. Churchill, my country is bleeding to death. I have a story to tell and you must hear me. You must hear my side of it. You must!” He ignored her and entered his car. Later he remarked: “She had comfort to give him. I had none.”111

  What Baudouin did was less forgivable. From time to time in the Préfet’s study, when Reynaud was speaking, Churchill had nodded or said, “Je comprends,” indicating his comprehension of words before they were translated. After Churchill’s car had left, de Gaulle called Spears aside to tell him that Baudouin was “putting it about, to all and sundry, notably to the journalists,” that Churchill had shown “complete understanding of the French situation and would understand if France concluded an armistice and a separate peace.” De Gaulle asked, “Did Churchill really say that?” If he had, it would sway those not prepared to break France’s pledge and permit defeatists to argue that there was no point in fighting on when even the English didn’t expect it.

  Spears replied that Churchill had said no such thing, and decided to race to the bomb-pitted runway before the prime minister’s Flamingo took off. He arrived in time and his view was confirmed. Churchill told him, “When I said ‘Je comprends,’ that meant I understood. Comprendre means understand in French, doesn’t it? Well, when for once I use the right word in their own language, it is going rather far to assume that I intended it to mean something quite different. Tell them my French is not so bad as that.” Spears did, but few listened, perhaps because Baudouin was telling them what they wanted to hear. The lie found its way into official French records and was even used against Churchill when he tried to remind them of the accord. During the armistice negotiations, Admiral Darlan declared that “the British Prime Minister, informed on June 11 [sic] of the necessity in which France found herself of bringing the struggle to an end, said that he understood that necessity and accepted it without withdrawing his sympathy from our country. He is therefore not qualified to speak otherwise.”112

  Reynaud’s appeal, cabled to Washington the next morning, June 14, declared that unless the president gave “France in the coming days a positive assurance that the United States will come into the struggle in a short space of time… you will see France go under like a drowning man after having thrown a last look toward the land of liberty from which she was expecting salvation.” In Washington, Secretary of State Cordell Hull called the plea “extraordinary, almost hysterical.” Nevertheless, the president’s reply went further than Hull and his other advisers wished. He assured the premier that Americans were doing everything in their power to send all the matériel they could and were redoubling their efforts because of their “faith and support of” the democratic ideals for which the French were fighting. Roosevelt encouraged the embattled French to fight on even in North Africa.

  Although Roosevelt had pointed out that he could not make military commitments on his own authority, Churchill told his War Cabinet that Roosevelt’s message came “as near as possible to a declaration of war and probably as much as the President could do without Congress.” Beaverbrook thought an American declaration of war was now inevitable, but this was just more straw grasping. Significantly, the president had not made his cable public, and when the prime minister asked for permission to do this, it was denied. On June 14—the day Paris fell and the French government headed for Bordeaux—Colville noted: “It seems that the P.M.’s expectations last night of immediate American help were exaggerated. Roosevelt has got to proceed cautiously, but the plain truth is that America has been caught napping, militarily and industrially. She may be really useful to us in a year; but we are living from hour to hour.” That day, the order went out to bring the rest of the BEF home from south of the Seine.113

  De Gaulle, who had been commuting between London and France as a liaison officer, now proposed a measure born of desperation. On June 16, lunching at the Carleton Club with Churchill and the French ambassador, he argued that “some dramatic move” was essential to keep France in the war. He advanced the idea of a joint Allied declaration. The British and French governments would declare the formation of an Anglo-French Union, the two nations uniting as one. Churchill liked it; so did the War Cabinet, and de Gaulle immediately took off for Bordeaux to submit the proposal. Spears wrote that after reading a draft of the declaration, Reynaud was “transfigured with joy.” It came, he said, at the best possible time. The council of ministers was meeting at 5:00 P.M. “to decide whether further resistance is possible,” and the premier told Spears that he believed the vision of union would thwart an armistice. However, the premier’s mistress Hélène de Portes was with them—she knew every state secret; one vital document, missing for hours, was found in her bed—and she read the draft over a secretary’s shoulder. Everything she knew, she shared with Baudouin. Before Reynaud could tell his ministers the news, they already knew it and had been told all the arguments against it.

  Meantime Churchill was preparing to cross the Channel once again, this time aboard a warship just after midnight on the seventeenth. At 9:30 P.M. he boarded a special train at Waterloo Station, prepared to leave for Southampton. Clementine had come to see him off. Kathleen Hill, who was also on board, recalled: “We had taken our seats on the train and were waiting. There was a delay. There had been some hitch.” Indeed there had. Ambassador Campbell had phoned No. 10 to report that a “ministerial crisis” in Bordeaux made the meeting impossible. Churchill disembarked “with a heavy heart,” as he later wrote. He knew what was coming next, and Colville set it down: “Reynaud has resigned, unable to stand the pressure…. Pétain has formed a Government of Quislings, including [Pierre
] Laval, and France will now certainly ask for an armistice in spite of her pledge to us.” Later he added: “The Cabinet met at 11.00 and shortly afterwards we heard that Pétain had ordered the French army to lay down its arms.” Churchill growled, “Another bloody country gone west.”114

  Colville wrote: “After the Cabinet the P.M. paced backwards and forwards in the garden, alone, his head bowed, his hands behind his back. He was doubtless considering how best the French fleet, the air force and the colonies could be saved. He, I am sure, will remain undaunted.”115

  De Gaulle was trapped in Bordeaux. The men now forming a new French government believed him to be—as he was—their enemy. They represented one France, he another; if left free, they knew, he would divide the country and offend the Nazis, whose servants they now were. To him their separate peace was shameful. Because he was determined to carry on the war, the British were still his allies. They were also his best hope of escaping from here and forming a new army on free soil, but the British were leaving the new France, which, they knew, did not wish either them or him well.