The End in France
IN EARLY JUNE 1940, Maggiore Publio Magini flew to Tripoli in Libya, where he was to collect a plane and fly back to Italy. Thirty years old and the son of a teacher from Livorno, he had been called up for military service in 1931 and had duly joined the Regia Aeronautica and trained as a pilot. He had been stationed in Rome, and these had been good times: he had met and married his wife, and had enjoyed both the flying and the camaraderie of his fellows. But two years later, with his statutory service over, he had left the Air Force and moved to Florence, finding work as a chemist.
The job was no compensation for the excitement of flying, however, and in any case he missed his Air Force friends, so he rejoined and was posted to Brindisi in the south, where he became something of an expert at both night flying and operating flying boats. By 1938, he had been given the job of setting up a special training school for bad-weather flying near Rome and was still based there on the eve of Italy’s entry into the war.
Although most of his work was at the school, there were the occasional trips such as this one, and on reaching Tripoli he was invited to dinner by Maresciallo Italo Balbo, in the Libyan Governor’s castle. Magini was delighted to accept but was surprised when the Marshal began speaking out quite openly about Mussolini’s plans to enter the war, something he thought would be disastrous. ‘He thought any war with Britain was a mad idea,’ noted Magini. Balbo thought Mussolini showed a total lack of understanding of the world, and of the ties between Britain and America, and the United States’ industrial might. ‘I worried about what he had said for a long time,’ added Magini.
A few days later, in Rome, on the evening of 10 June, Pace Misciatelli-Chigi, a young and beautiful Tuscan aristocrat, had gathered together a number of friends at her flat in the Piazza Venezia. At 6 p.m., they had been told, just across the way from them on the balcony of the Palazzo Venezia, Benito Mussolini would appear and announce his declaration of war. The speech would be broadcast all around the country, from speakers in piazzas in every town, but Pace Misciatelli-Chigi and her friends had a grandstand view of the live event.
That day was Pace’s first wedding anniversary. There had been talk of war the previous June, but she put it out of mind – the sun had been shining, she was marrying the Marquese Flavio Misciatelli in the cathedral in Siena and her thoughts were on anything but politics. A year on, it was unavoidable. Her husband was not even with her that day – he had left to join his regiment, the Genoa Cavalry, leaving her with their baby daughter, Maria Aurora. With a restriction on lights in place already, she had embraced him in the dim light and watched him leave; she had been determined not to cry in front of him, but after he had gone, she worried her heart would break.
At 6 p.m., as promised, Il Duce appeared on the balcony. ‘An hour appointed by destiny has struck in the heavens of our fatherland!’ he told the Italian people. ‘We go to battle against the plutocratic and reactionary democracies of the west who, at every moment, have hindered the advance and have often endangered the very existence of the Italian people.’
From her flat, Pace Misciatelli-Chigi looked down on the crowds below. There were a few Fascist rabble-rousers, but for the most part the people listened in silence. A gigantic struggle lay ahead, Mussolini told them, but he also assured the people they would win. ‘People of Italy!’ he ended with a flourish, ‘Rush to arms and show your tenacity, your courage, your valour!’
Pace Misciatelli-Chigi watched the crowd slowly and quietly disperse and then spotted some Fascists carrying a German and an Italian war veteran, blind and with no hands. Suddenly overcome, she began crying and hurried to her room.
Later, she was awoken by the sound of air raid sirens wailing. ‘I got up calmly,’ she noted, ‘but that sound made me shiver.’ No enemy planes arrived, however, and after the all-clear sounded, she determined to pack there and then; the following day, she and her daughter would escape Rome and head back to Siena, just as she had promised her husband.
Millions heard Mussolini’s declaration of war that evening. Hitler was appalled – not that Italy was now in the war, but by the manner of its announcement, which he thought vulgar. As far as the Führer was concerned, one didn’t make a declaration of war, one just got on and fought it. For others, however, it made a powerful impression. Listening in the Piazza Maggiore in Bologna, for example, was Sergio Fabbri, a 22-year-old financial worker. ‘The declaration of war filled my friend and me with joy,’ he wrote. It was greeted with equal excitement by the seventeen-year-old William Cremonini, who was listening along with a large group of his friends in the very same place. ‘We were full of enthusiasm,’ he said, ‘and in a jolly mood. Maybe some of the older people didn’t see it that way, but we were all excited.’
Cremonini had been brought up in Bologna, one of Italy’s largest and most industrialized cities, and had greatly enjoyed being part of the numerous Fascist youth organizations while growing up. As Hitler had done in Nazi Germany, so Mussolini had recognized that young minds could be easily manipulated and that by introducing militaristic organizations it would be possible to create new generations of young Italians who both bought into the Fascist ideal of honour and duty to the state and learned important lessons in obedience and discipline. Cremonini had joined the Children of the She-Wolf at five, then the Opera Nazionale Balilla, a Fascist youth organization, before progressing into the Balilla Musketeers, the Avanguardisti and finally the Giovani Fascisti, the Young Fascists. In other words, from the age of five, he had been steadily indoctrinated in Fascist ideology, not that he had realized it at the time. ‘In those days,’ he says, ‘everything worked well, discipline was respected and one might say that we were better off despite being worse off.’
No sooner had Mussolini’s declaration finished than recruiting began to sign up young men like Cremonini and his friends into the Giovani Fascisti battalions, even though there were nothing like enough uniforms, let alone rifles and weapons, to go around. Cremonini was unperturbed. Joining the Bologna Battalion, he was then sent off to begin his training in Liguria. His war had begun.
But for all the youthful excitement of boys like Cremonini, it was the reaction of Pace Misciatelli-Chigi that was more commonplace, as Ciano, for one, was well aware. ‘The news of the war does not surprise anyone and does not arouse very much enthusiasm,’ he wrote in his diary. ‘I am sad, very sad. The adventure begins. May God help Italy.’
Despite the irrational fears of the British, Germany took the obvious course of action and prepared to finish the job in France before turning attention elsewhere. It was clearly not a matter of if France would capitulate, but when. Général Weygand had promised to fight on, and so had Reynaud, but the men on the ground knew their cause was a lost one. Trapped in the giant pincer, the cream of their armies had been annihilated; by 5 June, some 1.2 million French troops had been killed, wounded, or taken prisoner. After such a defeat there really was no way back, physically or psychologically.
The pause prompted by the German assault on Dunkirk had given Weygand a slight breathing space to reorganize his forces roughly east–west along the Somme and Aisne rivers, but he now had just sixty-four divisions and no reserves opposing 104 divisions flush with victory and brimful of confidence. Weygand’s air forces were also in disarray, while in the skies the Luftwaffe continued to reign supreme.
Case RED, the German operation to conquer the rest of France, was launched on 5 June. Some regrouping had taken place, with Panzerkorps Hoth, for example, now attached to Armeegruppe B and part of the sweep south-west towards Le Havre and Normandy. Armeegruppe A, on the other hand, was to wheel south-east towards Switzerland and achieve another encirclement. The plan was to attack the Maginot Line around the back.
As it turned out, the French did put up far stiffer resistance and performed much better than they ever had in the first phase of the campaign. Nevertheless, the Germans overcame resistance swiftly enough, and among the first to break through the line was Generalmajor Rommel’s 7. Panzerdivision. Once again, Hauptmann Hans von Luck’s recce battalion was in the van, charging across country to avoid road congestion. He managed to take the Somme bridges intact, but then ran into the main French defences and immediately came under heavy fire. It was still early morning and von Luck and his men were taking cover from French artillery shelling when he heard one of his runners say, ‘Captain, your breakfast.’ Von Luck turned around. ‘I couldn’t believe my eyes,’ he noted. One of his runners had crawled through enemy fire to deliver a tray of sandwiches and was even clutching a napkin.
‘Man, are you mad? I’m hungry all right, but at the moment I have other things to do than eat breakfast.’
‘Yes, I know,’ the runner replied, ‘but a hungry commander gets nervous. I feel responsible for your welfare.’ Then he was off again, while those around von Luck collapsed with laughter.
Soon after, they broke through, the combination of artillery, armour and the Luftwaffe proving unstoppable. Von Luck and his men advanced around sixty miles in just two days. By the 7th, they were approaching Rouen, huge clouds of smoke guiding them from where the Luftwaffe had already called.
They were preparing to cross the Seine when they were ordered due west to Le Havre. Here they came up against one of the last British units, 51st Highland Division. This had been on rotation in the Maginot Line when the battle had begun and had been posted west when Case RED started. Rommel’s men reached the coast on 10 June and cut the road to Le Havre, so, together with the remnants of the French IX Corps, 51st Highland Division was forced back to Saint-Valéry. An attempt was made to lift its men off but rain and fog hampered efforts, so that only a few more than 2,000 got away. The rest were forced to surrender.
Meanwhile, it was Hauptmann von Luck who took the surrender in nearby Fécamp, from where a smaller number of British and French had been trying to evacuate. He accepted the surrender of the mayor, ordered occupation of the southern hills, switched off the local radio station and sent out patrols. He then signalled to Rommel.
‘Bravo, von Luck,’ Rommel replied. For 7. Panzerdivision, the battle was over.
Paris was emptying. The American broadcast journalist Edward Sevareid had been told by his NBS bosses to leave the capital when the French Government left; now it had, so it was time for him to go too. He had already sent his wife and their baby twins back to the US, managing to get them on a train to Italy and then the last American ship to leave Genoa, which, he had correctly guessed, meant Italy was about join the fight.
A few days later, bombs had fallen on Paris, and specifically on the Citroën works and the Air Ministry. In the days that followed, Sevareid watched thousands of cars emerge from the garages and, with mattresses and luggage strapped to the roofs, head south.
On 10 June, dark smoke over the city obscured the sun, and he drove down the Champs-Élysées and looked at the empty cafés. Later that night, he made his last broadcast from the capital and then made his way south in his own black Citroën, along with endless miles of others. ‘Paris lay inert,’ he wrote, ‘her breathing scarcely audible, her limbs relaxed, and the blood flowed remorselessly from her manifold veins. Paris was dying, like a beautiful woman in coma.’
On 12 June, a young Parisienne, Andrée Griotteray, arrived at police headquarters to find the courtyard full of trucks as all the archives were being taken and moved elsewhere. ‘The latest news is the Germans are still advancing,’ she jotted in her diary the following day. ‘Bastards.’ That day, the 13th, the Chief of Police, Monsieur Langeron, who had given Andrée her job in the first place, called all the administrative staff together and told them that if the city were to be occupied, the police and Head of Police would all stay and carry on with their jobs. Later, Andrée packed a suitcase just in case, although she had decided she must obey orders and stay and continue her job as requested. Her mother, brothers and sister, however, had already gone, having taken a train to Nantes. From there, they planned to go to England, where her mother had friends. ‘All my friends have gone,’ she wrote. ‘We are alone and it is very scary.’
The same day that von Luck was taking the surrender in Fécamp and Eric Sevareid was heading south from Paris, a British delegation including Winston Churchill, Anthony Eden, General Dill, the Deputy CIGS and Edward Spears was flying to France for urgent talks with Reynaud and the French war leaders. The French Government had already left Paris – the meeting was to take place at Weygand’s new HQ at Briare on the Loire.
Increasingly desperate calls for reinforcements had been coming from Reynaud. More fighter squadrons immediately, more divisions, more bombers. He had also been bombarding President Roosevelt, and on 10 June signalled again. ‘I beg you,’ he wrote, ‘to state publicly that the United States will give the Allies all the moral and material support within their means, short of sending an expeditionary force.’
Most of Churchill’s Cabinet and Chiefs of Staff were against sending France anything more, but the PM, as well as being a Francophile, was conscious of the need to be seen to be helping the French as much as possible. Resentment was growing on both sides: the French felt the Brits had cut and run, the Brits believed French incompetence had led to this disaster in the first place; Churchill believed gestures needed to be made, and that the longer the French were kept in the fight, the better Britain’s position would be.
The talks achieved little. There was discussion about a ‘Breton redoubt’ in Brittany, an idea with which Reynaud was particularly taken. General Sir Alan Brooke had already landed back in France, at Cherbourg in Normandy, with a newly reconstituted BEF consisting of one division and two more to follow. It was a gesture and nothing more, yet Weygand was demanding more divisions to enter the fray immediately. They simply didn’t exist. Churchill’s biggest concern was the French Fleet and what would happen to it if the worst happened and France sued for terms. He was not given a clear answer until the following day, when he collared Amiral Darlan. The French admiral assured him the Fleet would never be handed over to Germany. The British contingent set off for home again early the following morning in bad weather and en route spotted a couple of German fighter planes; fortunately, the Germans did not see them.
When they had gone, Reynaud had a short talk with Pétain and Weygand. Under the terms of the alliance with Britain, one nation could not make terms with the enemy without the permission of the other, and Reynaud intended to honour that. Moreover, he believed they should fight to the last – that they could establish a redoubt in Brittany and that their sea and air forces could continue the fight alongside Britain. And if not Brittany, then North Africa. They should never surrender.
‘The country will not forgive you,’ Weygand replied, ‘if, in order to remain faithful to Britain, you reject any possibility of peace.’ Reynaud was horrified; it was not about Britain but continuing the fight and never surrendering to Nazi tyranny. That Weygand and Pétain believed servitude was preferable was anathema to him.
The following day, 12 June, the Council of Ministers met at Tours, to where the government had now moved. Général Weygand urged them to ask for an armistice. The arguments for and against raged with no conclusion, but Reynaud’s authority, never strong, was being undermined by the two old warriors.
A request had been made by the Council of Ministers to see Churchill. Reynaud invited him back and he came, barely thirty-six hours after he had last left. They met at Tours, but, bizarrely, Reynaud spoke to Churchill without his colleagues. Furthermore, he admitted Weygand wanted to surrender but told Churchill he hoped he could dissuade the defeatists so long as the USA entered the war. This was a line that had not been put forward at the Council of Ministers the previous day; no such thing had been suggested. At any rate, it was the last time the two met.
Meanwhile, Eric Sevareid had finally reached Tours and found a bar full of British and American journalists who were sitting waiting for news and comparing notes. Suddenly, a small fat Jewish Parisian journalist burst into tears, bit his knuckles, then rapped them on the bar until they bled, crying, ‘France is finished! France is finished!’ As Sevareid was well aware, he also meant, ‘I am finished.’
That same day, 13 June, Leutnant Siegfried Knappe and his gunners in 87. Division advanced thirty miles and by 3 p.m. were at the River Marne with the Eiffel Tower visible in the distance. As evening fell, they were ordered to take up new positions on the Ourcq Canal. Calling up their 105mm gun, they pushed it into position only to come under return fire immediately, and at that moment Knappe felt something strike his hand – a bullet had gone clean through. Blood was pumping from the wound, but he felt no pain – not then, at any rate. He later discovered another bullet hole through the side of his jacket and map case; he had been lucky, all things considered. Their 105 had done the job, however. Opposite them, resistance had ceased, and the following morning they were in Paris.
‘A day I will remember for the rest of my life,’ scribbled Andrée Griotteray in her diary, that Friday, 14 June. The first thing she had seen as she had walked up the rue Auber to catch the Métro was a truck full of German soldiers. It felt like a stab in the back. Then, at 10 a.m. sharp, Germans marched into the police headquarters through the gates of Notre-Dame. ‘I looked out of my office window and there they were. When I left in the evening the yard was full of disarmed policemen and German soldiers,’ she confided to her diary. ‘But what a loss of face for France. What a tragedy. Paris occupied by a foreign power. I cried and cried and cried.’
Above the city that day was General Walter Warlimont, who had flown over in a small Fieseler Storch to observe the front from the air. He knew German troops were close to Paris but could clearly see large columns of infantry already there. Remembering how much they had striven to reach this goal in the last war, he felt overwhelmed by a sense of exultation and joy. On a whim, he tapped the pilot on the shoulder and asked him to land at the Place de la Concorde. After circling around for a short while, they landed at the end of the Champs-Élysées.
A couple of hours later, he was watching Leutnant Knappe’s 87th Infantry marching past and saw a French girl push by to see the spectacle for herself. ‘I for once forgot my gloomy feelings about the misery of the war,’ he said, ‘and, in particular, the sufferings connected between the French and our own people.’
That same day, 14 June, General Brooke reported it was time to evacuate the last British troops in France. He had spoken with Weygand and Général Georges and they told him plainly it was over. Churchill berated him, but Brooke was insistent. Eventually, the PM concurred. As a result, a further 200,000 troops were evacuated over the next few days, from Cherbourg, Brest and other ports. More than half a million men had been successfully brought back from France. Considering the small size of the British Army, this was a significant proportion.
Another of those arriving in Britain was the French Major-General Charles de Gaulle, one of the few men to have seen off the panzers during an armoured battle at Abbeville, but who was now a minister in Reynaud’s reshuffled Cabinet. As such, he had attended the meeting of the Supreme War Council on 11 June and had made quite an impression, not least because of his physical appearance. At well over six foot, de Gaulle was tall, with a beaked nose, trim moustache and curiously very little chin. He was also clearly determined to fight on. Churchill even muttered to him, ‘L’homme du destin.’
As German troops entered Paris, the French Government moved again, this time to Bordeaux and, once there, de Gaulle grilled Reynaud about the possibility of continuing the fight in North Africa. At this, Reynaud ordered him to fly to London to ask for British help in making such a move. In fact, there was no aeroplane available, so instead he hurried by car to see his dying mother in Brittany and then to say farewell to his wife and children. After giving them instructions should the worst come to the worst, he drove to Brest, boarded the destroyer Milan and set sail for Plymouth.
The following morning, 16 June, he was at the Hyde Park Hotel in London and was shaving when Jean Monnet, a French businessman, and Charles Corbin, the Ambassador to Britain, came in and suggested a scheme being discussed with the British to create a union between France and Britain – the two countries would become one. It was a plan with many flaws and born of desperation, but de Gaulle, who was due to have lunch with Churchill, agreed to propose it to the Prime Minister. They met at the Carlton Club, and realizing it was the only way to keep France and therefore the French Fleet in the war, Churchill offered to put the proposal to his Cabinet.
Suddenly, everyone became terribly excited, and a Declaration of Union was drafted. Jock Colville, who was snatching snippets of these developments, was astonished. ‘The Cabinet meeting turned into a sort of promenade,’ he noted, ‘and everyone has been slapping de Gaulle on the back and telling him he shall be Commander-in-Chief (Winston muttering “je l’arrangerai”). Is he to be the new Napoleon?’
De Gaulle then telephoned Reynaud, who personally took down the Declaration of Union. ‘He was transfigured with joy,’ noted Edward Spears, who as Reynaud’s British liaison officer was still with the French premier, ‘and my old friendship for him surged out in a wave of appreciation at his response.’ For Reynaud, this was a lifeline – a chance for France to stay in the war. The following day, he planned to meet Churchill again and discuss the matter in greater detail, but first, after Spears had hurried away to get copies of the Declaration typed up, he promised to put the Declaration to the Council of Ministers. ‘It did not occur to us,’ wrote Spears, ‘that it might not be accepted.’
When he read it out, however, not one man spoke out in favour; rather, it was met with silence. Somehow, news of this offer of union had already reached them. ‘It was clear,’ wrote Reynaud, ‘that Pétain and Weygand had won the day.’ Reynaud became convinced that his phone lines had been tapped by Pétain and the defeatists, but Spears believed it came through another source: Reynaud’s mistress, Madame de Portes, who was a known Anglophobe. Roland de Margerie, First Secretary at the French Embassy in London, had told Spears, ‘She is ugly, dirty, nasty and half-demented.’ No one, it seemed, had a good word to say about her, and why Reynaud was so under her spell was a mystery to all. Whatever the truth, the Council had been forewarned by someone.
At any rate, with that ice-cold response, this last-ditch attempt to keep France fighting was over. Reynaud resigned and a few hours later Maréchal Pétain was asked to form a new government. He made his first broadcast the following day, 18 June. Watching him in Bordeaux were Eric Sevareid and a host of other journalists who had somehow made the long journey south. Stepping carefully into the studio wearing a belted raincoat, he announced to the French people that the war was over and that troops should lay down their arms. He was, he told them, making a ‘gift’ of himself. Sevareid was not impressed. ‘He seemed to regard it as a fair bargain for the nation,’ he noted. ‘Defeat, shame, and torture to be made palatable by his precious “gift” – a vain, doddering old man.’ Pétain, the saviour of Verdun in the last war, revered by almost every living Frenchman, had an authority no other in France could match, yet his order to troops to lay down their arms when no armistice had yet been signed only added to the confusion.
‘We learn by wireless that Pétain and Weygand have asked for an armistice,’ jotted Capitaine Barlone in his diary. He had sailed from Plymouth back to France two weeks earlier, and had then gone on a wild goose chase with other officers and troops trying to catch up with the front. Barlone decided there and then to try and get back to England and continue the fight, and first ten, then twenty of his fellows agreed to join him. Most troops, however, starved of information and confused by what was happening, had no idea what they should now do. Many had not even seen a German at this point. In the next few days, a further million French troops became prisoners of war. Had they known they would be sent to German prison camps for the next five years, they might not have acquiesced quite so readily.
As it happened, the Germans had not been expecting Pétain’s announcement either; Hitler was having talks with Mussolini, so the German armies pushed on, and with increasing ease. In the meantime, it was left to General Warlimont and his staff to try and draw up terms for the French.
These were eventually put to the French a few days later on 21 June, the same day that, across the Atlantic, René de Chambrun reached the White House. There he met Roosevelt, Harry Hopkins and others of the President’s inner circle. He had come to plead for arms and US support, but it was, of course, all too late.
Back in France, Paul Reynaud had, in the meantime, managed to speak to Pétain and urged him to tell Amiral Darlan to sail the Fleet to the United States. Pétain refused, arguing that the Germans would not hesitate to carry out fierce reprisals if the Fleet either sailed away or was scuttled. None the less, Reynaud followed up this conversation with a letter suggesting that Pétain could explain such an action to the Germans as being Darlan’s personal insubordination. The long-term benefit to France of helping the Allies, he argued, and gaining credit points with the Americans, could not be overestimated.
Pétain, however, was having none of it, and the terms of the armistice were unequivocal. The French Fleet would assemble in ports to be named later, and would be demobilized and disarmed under German or Italian supervision. ‘The German Government solemnly declares to the French Government that it has no intention of using the units of this Fleet in its own operations of war.’ As the Nazis had repeatedly shown, however, their promises counted for absolutely nothing, and with much of their own fleet now sunk or back in dockyards, the opportunity to absorb the world’s fourth-largest Navy at a stroke was an obvious temptation. Why on earth wouldn’t they? Pétain must have been all too aware of this.
In Paris, Andrée Griotteray felt sick at heart. She now saw Germans on the streets of her city every day. ‘They walk around as if they own the place,’ she wrote. ‘They are continually to be found in our cafés and our bars, where they sing and dance.’ Above, German planes buzzed and flew so low she was convinced they would hit a building. Through the streets, German officers could be seen speeding around in smart captured cars. She was disgusted beyond belief. Late on the 22nd she was at home, writing her diary and looking out of the window. ‘It is pouring,’ she noted. ‘Thunder and lightning are raging all over Paris and I am depressed. Why must I feel so broken-hearted every time I walk past a German soldier?’
The armistice was signed that same day in the same railway carriage in Compiègne in which the Germans had signed their surrender back in 1918. For Hitler, who was there to observe France’s humiliation, there could have been no sweeter moment of victory. He had told his disbelieving generals that Germany could destroy France and be masters of Europe, and so far he had been proved right. Next it would be Britain’s turn.