It was the height of confusion for me. Where were our friends? Our allies? Whom could we trust? Who?
—A FOURTEEN-YEAR-OLD BOY WITNESSING FRANCE’S DEFEAT
Between September 1939 and May 1940, Europe’s belligerent and nonbelligerent nations warily watched each other. This cautious period, following Germany’s invasion of Poland, came to be known as the “phony war,” the drôle de guerre, or the Sitzkrieg. In April 1940, Germany succeeded in invading and occupying Denmark and Norway, thereby opening up German ports on the Baltic Sea so that its navy could roam the North Atlantic. There was little resistance from Britain and France, and what there was did not succeed. But France was not too worried; after all, Britain’s army might not be large or well trained, but its navy was the strongest in the world, and its air force had some of the world’s most agile fighters and bombers. And France had both a formidable navy and one of the largest standing armies in Europe. Hitler could certainly be contained if he dared attack either of these two nations or their colonies.
The wireless continued to assure the population that France was fully prepared for war, in any form. “Passive defense” became the general term for blackout shades, blue covers for automobile headlights, searchlights looking for German bombers, and admonitions to be frugal with foodstuffs. Prompted by the devastation that had been visited on Madrid and Barcelona in the late 1930s during the Spanish Civil War, air-raid shelters (abris) were created throughout France. Masterpieces were removed from the Louvre and other large museums to be hidden in the countryside. On newsreels at the cinema and on the radio, youngsters saw and heard of the relentless destruction of Warsaw by a merciless German invasion. As a consequence, they became anxious, searching their parents’ faces for signs of assurance amid the confusion. Their fathers, uncles, and older brothers had been called up to military service; households were disrupted as mothers tried to compensate for the loss of fathers. Yet there was still no panic. Young folks continued to rely on the assurances that the French had a massive army, the support of the British, and the incomparable Maginot Line.
But surprising all, on May 10, 1940, German forces simultaneously attacked Luxembourg, Belgium, the Low Countries, and France. Their strategy was to make a feint that would pull the French army and the British Expeditionary Force north to Flanders (where World War I had ended in a stalemate). The Allied armies fell for the plan, allowing the soon-to-be renowned panzer divisions to sweep westward toward the Channel in order to cut off their enemy from reinforcements. Rushing through dense Ardennes forests and valley-pocked terrain faster than anyone had predicted, the Wehrmacht had simply skirted the strongest parts of the Maginot Line, which stood immobile, guns facing eastward, waiting for a frontal attack that never came. Crossing the Meuse and moving with jaw-dropping speed, the Germans trapped the Allies, about 400,000 men, in a small pocket on the French-Belgian coast near the town of Dunkirk.*
Doubts resulted in an unfocused panic. Hundreds of thousands of French men, women, and children took to the roads of France, along with Dutch and Belgian refugees from the north, to escape the rapidly advancing Germans. The government had not given orders to evacuate, though only at the last minute had it declared Paris an “open city”—that is, one that would not be defended against military occupation in hopes that the conqueror would spare it from damage. Still, carts, wagons, automobiles, bicycles, and countless feet began an exodus toward an imaginary safe haven. (The term “exode,” describing this short period of mass collective panic, still resonates with older generations.) Families were dispersed, thousands of children were separated from their parents, and elderly people died on the trek. Malicious German pilots would strafe crowds, justifying their attacks as preventing the retreat and regrouping of Allied troops. Crisscrossing multitudes often came to a standstill as machinery and automobiles broke down. And French citizens noticed something even more frightening than streams of noncombatants moving impassively toward the Loire River: mixed in among them were French soldiers in uniform and hundreds of others in mufti fleeing too. Rifles, helmets, and other gear were being discarded along the way. The tension between the civilians and the troops often ended with shouts and more physical outbursts of anger.
Early concerted efforts to resist total defeat began during this period of unpredictable turmoil. Downed Allied pilots were hidden and secretly moved to neutral borders; arms discarded by retreating soldiers were collected and buried for later use; occasionally, isolated German soldiers were attacked and even killed. The chaos was a problem not only for the French but for the German invaders as well—their success stunned them as much as their adversaries. Units separated from the main force became disoriented, and German soldiers were taken prisoner by the French and made to flee south with their temporary captors.
Looting and vagabondage increased during this period as youngsters discovered ways to find more food for themselves and those they sought to protect. Abandoned apartments and homes were robbed, in both cities and the countryside; even small thefts at shops and post offices occurred, not as a sign of opposition to the changed political atmosphere, but in reaction to the penury that had suddenly fallen on this previously wealthy country. (The massive scale of this juvenile delinquency would preoccupy the new Vichy government and result in strict regulations to control such unlawful activities, soon to become more serious than just looting.) Thousands of children simply disappeared, whether taken in by solicitous strangers, kidnapped, murdered, or killed along the way; newspaper ads and posters appeared throughout France, asking for news of missing children. Those adolescents who stayed close to their families suddenly became providers, protectors, and comforters well before they would have grown into these roles in normal times. It would take months for French citizens to return to their homes, even with the state’s help, and more time still to forget the terror and embarrassment of suddenly being without leadership, home, or protection.
On arriving in any but the smallest villages, the Germans required mayors to accompany their officers to schools, pharmacies, rectories, and police stations in order to make clear to the populace that the Occupation had begun. School buildings were often requisitioned by the German army; they were ideal for dormitories, mess halls, and communication centers. Sometimes the Occupiers would allow classes to be held while the soldiers were in residence; most of the time, teachers and students were ordered to teach and learn elsewhere. For some youngsters, it was at first an adventure to have classes in barns or warehouses or large public halls. When the weather was clement, they learned their history and math outside—every student’s favorite classroom. But they knew at the same time that their home lives and other habits had been interrupted by a foreign army that was stronger than their own and relentless in its imposition of order.
Évelyne Sullerot, a résistante and later a sociologist, compiled interviews with those who were children during the great exodus. Several of them commented on the weight of the memory of World War I as they found themselves confronting yet another invasion but two decades later.
The war [World War I] was often evoked in my family. More than a few times, I heard about the “Boches,” heard “Courage! We’ll beat them!,” and “They shall not pass!”* In a six-volume work on the Great War that my father had bought, I had been able to see photographs of the destruction visited by the “Teutonic hordes,” of trench warfare, of bayonet combat. Yes, at 13, I had been warned of “German barbarism.”1
Still, it often took a specific act of separation or of German violence to bring out the sudden courage that would be the hallmark of so many young résistants. A bomb falling nearby, Germans demanding the use of one’s home, seeing someone struck or shot by Germans, watching one’s parents break down in frustration, anger, and humiliation—such events often stunned youngsters, who would swear revenge. Of course, many were more cautious, trying to keep their lives—and their family’s—whole in this unpredictable tempest. But the ones who had had enough began almost immediately hooting and giving uniformed Germans the finger when they passed them. Still, remembered one of Sullerot’s sources:
The triumph of the German war machine had terrorized me; I couldn’t see how England—a secondary military power—would ever be able to undertake, even if it escaped an invasion, the re-conquest of a continent. The United States was far away, and little disposed to intervene. . . . I began then thinking of a very long German occupation, where I would have to inscribe my own life. I would have to work stubbornly, to fool them, to stand quietly, to submit while grinding my teeth, and perhaps to perish.2
Time was being adjusted as this young man’s world turned upside down. “When will this all end?” would be one of the determining factors of youthful participation in the Resistance. As another interviewee remembered: “The violent entrance of History into our familial atmosphere was starting to upset our whole system of values.”3
The rapidity of the Wehrmacht’s maneuvers dumbfounded those who had believed years of propaganda about how well protected France was from invasion from the east. Suddenly, without announcement, the French government moved southward from Paris to Tours, at the Loire River, the historical geographical divider of France, and then much farther south to Bordeaux. Such precipitous action startled the British. Winston Churchill, who had just become prime minister on May 10, could not believe his ears when French leader Paul Reynaud called to tell him that Britain’s key ally was in retreat. He flew over to France five times between mid-May and mid-June—not insignificant actions—to check for himself, only to find each visit that the situation had worsened even more than he had imagined. The success of the Dunkirk evacuation probably saved Churchill’s premiership, which in turn would later provide Charles de Gaulle with an important political ally and a base for his Free French armed forces.
The French Third Republic was disintegrating. On May 17, a week after the invasion, hoping for a miracle, Prime Minister Paul Reynaud named Maréchal Philippe Pétain to his government, calling him from his ambassadorship in Madrid, the capital of Franco’s Spain. (Also named to a subordinate defense post was an unknown brigadier general named de Gaulle.) The news was met with relief in the newspapers and on the air waves, which were attempting to keep up with the rapid progress of major events. The prospect of relief from what seemed a disaster abounded. After all, Pétain was the hero of Verdun.* Surely, he would know how to contain and defeat the Germans. The hard-liners’ argument was simple: if we fight, we will send a message to Hitler and Mussolini that they had better not try to export their ideologies by force, that France would stand forcefully against them. But well before joining the government, Pétain had decided that the war was lost; he believed that the politicians’ lack of focused preparation had bored like termites into the French army, leaving a hollowed-out military. For weeks Pétain pleaded with Reynaud’s cabinet for a temporary cessation of hostilities, but to no avail.*
Then, on June 14, the “open city” of Paris was occupied, without a shot being fired in its defense. Finally, Reynaud resigned his government, and Philippe Pétain was named, in his place, président du conseil des ministres, or prime minister. The day after, on June 17, on the radio, the eighty-four-year-old marshal announced to his nation that hostilities must cease, and ordered the French armed forces to stand down:
It is with a heavy heart that I tell you today that we must stop fighting. I spoke to the enemy tonight to ask whether he is ready to search with me, soldier to soldier, after this struggle, and honorably, the means to put an end to hostilities. Let all French citizens group around the government I preside over during these hardships, and silence their anguish, obeying only their faith in the destiny of their country.
Commentators on all sides remarked that he spoke with the vocal tremor of an elderly man, a grandfather assuring his grandchildren that all would work out, for now he was in charge. The public’s reaction ranged from exhausted relief (“Thank God, our men can come home now, and the bombing and strafing will stop”) to hesitant acceptance (“He seems like an old-timer, but he does know the military”) to deep anger (“How could he stop fighting when our army is still holding off the Germans?”).
But all was illusion, and as the Germans rolled into Biarritz, not far from the Spanish border, in the late spring of 1940, young communists immediately went into action to undermine the new Vichy regime. Wrote Jean Lajournade in his unpublished journal:
We decided to print tracts . . . against Pétain and his government, who were fooling people, and pushing them to collaborate.
We had found an old mimeograph machine, in bad shape, but good enough to print somewhat readable leaflets. We hid it in the Anglican church’s sacristy, which was no longer in use. . . . We distributed them any way we could. We took bikes to the exit gates of the Boucau foundry [the area’s biggest employer]. As the workers left, we would mix with them, and then throw our leaflets in the air before disappearing.4
Thus was French resistance almost simultaneous with the defeat of their nation.
* * *
One of the most compelling contemporary reports we have of this massive defeat comes from Marc Bloch, who served in several French military headquarters as French forces maneuvered through northern France and Flanders. Written in 1940, just months after the German victory, L’Étrange défaite (Strange Defeat) was not published until 1946, two years after Bloch had been executed by the Germans for his resistance activities (and his ethnic background). It offers a remarkable account of these events and of the reasons for the quick defeat of the French armies by the German Wehrmacht. Bloch’s argument is simple, and supported by dozens of anecdotes he heard and conversations he had with other officers after the armistice: France lost because of the lack of imagination of its officer class—“the incapacity of command.”5
The French military establishment had not forgotten 1914–1918, and were confident that they could win as they had then: through a persistent toe-to-toe confrontation, preferably in Belgium. They had not understood, as Bloch so aptly noted, that “the Germans conducted a war for today, under the sign of speed. . . . We did not want to know or did not want to understand that [this new rhythm], due to the vibrations of a new epoch, was theirs.”6 In Bloch’s view, far too many French senior officers held memories that were too vivid, and too rigidly fixed, of the successes and failures of the Great War. Yet, most of the younger soldiers on the line knew only the misty tales of those sacrifices that had been passed down. Bloch believed that this disconnection between the generations was a major reason for the rapid disintegration of the French army’s tactics. (Such an observation was, of course, verified in the subsequent appointment of an eighty-four-year-old military man, Pétain, to be leader of the new French state.) For Bloch, a combination of arrogance, intellectual laziness, and organizational rigidity made the defeat of the French military effort predictable.
Competing theories regarding the brief Battle of France have continued to be published for almost eight decades as military historians attempt to explain a defeat that was due as much to human failure as to the strategic performance of the Wehrmacht. Yet Bloch’s thesis remains compelling. For instance, the American military historian John Mosier has worried for decades over this apparently incongruous conflict—how had a powerful and well-mechanized French army failed so remarkably and so quickly before a newer, still-developing German force? He writes, in line with Bloch’s thesis, that the defeat was not caused by Germany’s superiority in mechanized vehicles, especially tanks, nor by a superior air force. France had both, and many of its armaments were better designed. But “Germany possessed a much larger cadre of experienced officers and noncommissioned officers than did its opponents, and its methods of training were much more efficient. . . . The German army was . . . the least mechanized of the major armies, but it was the most mobile, not because of its vehicles but because of its brains.”7
The failure of leadership would be a dominant preoccupation of the French during the entire war. One of the reasons for the obscure Charles de Gaulle’s quick rise to the top of public attention was the determined leadership he exuded. His strong, incomparably confident voice soon became an antidote to the repeated bromides of the older general, Pétain. And the stories told in this book are, in many ways, tales of young persons seeking, defining, and eventually obeying strong voices, no matter their military heritage, their political experience, or their age. Bloch’s L’Étrange défaite remains one of the few on-the-spot analyses by a professional historian whose reasons for the resounding defeat of France in six weeks in the spring of 1940 still have the ring of certainty.
De Gaulle wanted desperately and quickly to establish a unified command of all French citizens who opposed the Occupation of his nation. This included those living in the French colonies of Africa, Asia, and the Middle East, as well as those who managed to get to England to join his nascent military forces. Eventually, he became identified as “Free France,” and by using his personality and a diplomacy supported by Winston Churchill, he slowly built the idea of a nation that had never surrendered. This was a remarkable achievement. The reigning monarchs and elected leaders of other occupied countries—Poland, the Netherlands, Norway, Czechoslovakia—had left their nations and settled in England, “the last island” refuge. By contrast, de Gaulle, cashiered and condemned to death by the Vichy government, was a mysterious figure to many French, barely on the horizon of much better known politicians and military leaders.8 There were those who at first saw him as a weak reflection of Pétain, his mentor: conservative, Catholic, military, arrogant, hierarchical. Why should he be speaking in the name of a defeated nation when the Maréchal had selflessly offered to lead France through this awkward time?
The word of an armistice, based on reports from retreating soldiers, had spread quickly by radio—more quickly even than communications within the military. Before an official agreement had been signed with the Germans, units of the French army had already been preemptively surrendering. The day following Pétain’s speech, on June 18, de Gaulle, still a member of the last cabinet of the Third Republic, gave his own radio address from London; though heard by few, it would often be repeated in print and on the air over the next few months. De Gaulle rejected the armistice signed by Pétain and called on all “free” Frenchmen to continue to fight the Nazi war machine. “Whatever may happen,” he said, “the flame of French resistance must not go out; it shall not go out.” A few days later, on another broadcast, he reiterated that “honor, common sense, patriotism demand that all free Frenchmen continue the struggle wherever they are and however they might.”9
We must recall that events were moving so fast that the French did not know how decisively their army had been routed, and many believed there that was still time for a number of options. Just as there was a strong pacifist element that thought an armistice was a good idea, there was an equally strong belliciste contingent who thought that the war should be continued, all the way to the Mediterranean and beyond. Other questions were repeated throughout France. Should the Republic continue as it was, or should a new, Fourth Republic be established? What about abandoning the whole idea of a republic and turning to a monarchical or authoritarian form of government? Was Pétain to be trusted? Yes, he was France’s greatest living war hero, but he had signed an armistice agreement that handed three-fifths of the country over to the Germans. Was that a brilliant tactic or the decision of a mentally weakened old man? The armistice had not resolved doubts into certainties.
Recalling years later his reaction as a teenager to the immediate fact of France’s sudden military incapacity in May 1940, Jean Fragne struggled to explain how soul-shattering it was. Standing alongside a road leading away from the front—which was changing more rapidly than even the wireless could keep up with—he saw a large column of French troops, unarmed, moving along slowly, while guarded lackadaisically by a few German soldiers who were only a few years older than he. With a friend, he shouted at the exhausted prisoners, “Run! Escape!” But with a few hand gestures, the French officers signaled the boys to keep it down: they did not want to alert the guards, so as to avoid reprisals. “Go home,” they soon shouted at the youngsters. Fragne continues: “That spectacle of giving up [was] incomprehensible for us adolescents, but it did clarify something. We had lost everything. . . . The wound I felt will never heal. And we were only in the first half of 1940!”10
* * *
The armistice, initialed by a joyful Hitler outside of Paris in the same rail car where the 1918 armistice ending World War I had been signed, had left much unclear. What type of government would Pétain permit? Who was de Gaulle, and what were his chances?* 11 France’s morale was in the doldrums as returning soldiers—those who had not been captured—limped home, disconsolate, embarrassed, living witnesses of France’s failures. To add insult to a great injury, almost two million French POWs had not been released. From the earliest days of the armistice agreement, their continued incarceration would infect the collaboration between the new French state and the Third Reich. As well, another question kept the French up at night: who and where were their allies? The nation felt an acute sense of abandonment. Had not the English first taken their own troops away from Dunkirk before loading the French soldiers? Had not the British fleet attacked the French navy at Mers-el-Kébir in Algeria in early July, killing 1,300 French sailors?* Where was the United States? Did the Americans not see what was happening?
The absence of American intervention particularly dismayed the French. Prime Minister Reynaud had written several times to President Franklin Roosevelt, asking for counsel and, especially, material aid. Roosevelt, in the midst of his third campaign for the presidency, did not want to run as a war president, so he put off any suggestions of intervention in the European war. In addition, the pro-German and anti-European war movements in America were vibrant and loud. The president of the America First Movement, Charles Lindbergh, had made well-publicized trips to Germany, where he became convinced that the Third Reich was the side to be on, or at least to be neutral toward. This was also an especially difficult time for America’s closest ally, Great Britain, as it anxiously counted the days until a German invasion after Hitler’s expected victory over Europe’s largest army. Only after the passage of the Lend-Lease Agreement in early 1941, a year after the German attacks on France, did the United States become more involved in helping the British. The agreement permitted the shipment of matériel, including destroyers, to the United Kingdom (and to the Soviet Union and, later, Free France) in exchange for bases in British-held territories in Canada and Bermuda. From then on, Roosevelt fulfilled his promise that the United States would be the “arsenal of democracy,” but it was too late for France and Britain in the late spring of 1940.
Confusion paralyzed what remained of the French government. According to the well-designed armistice agreement, France would be divided into seven zones; parts of its northern provinces would be joined to Belgium; its whole Atlantic seacoast would be forbidden to civilians, though the Mediterranean coast would remain in the hands of the Vichy government; the Italians would control small sections of southeastern France, while the rest was demilitarized; and in the east, Alsace and Moselle, part of Lorraine, would return to German control, having been rejoined to France after World War I. There would be no French standing army, only 100,000 lightly armed troops, but the fleet and the colonies would remain under the umbrella of the Vichy government.*
* * *
On October 24, 1940, only four months after the Occupation had begun and L’État Français had been in power, an event occurred that would mark the rest of the war, in ways completely unintended and unexpected by the participants. At the urging of Pierre Laval, both Hitler and the elderly Maréchal Pétain agreed to meet in a train station at Montoire, in central France, a small town on the rail route between the southwest and Germany. Hitler may have agreed in part because he would be returning from a meeting with Francisco Franco, near Spain.*
When he descended from the train to meet Pétain, Hitler politely smiled, but rather than salute another soldier, he offered his hand. This handshake was minutely analyzed by nervous European leaders when it was reported on radio and in newspapers (with photos). Here was a Maréchal of France, the victor of Verdun, shaking hands with Corporal Hitler, a member of Kaiser Wilhelm’s defeated army. The moment was endlessly examined by French citizens: how could Pétain have recognized such a petit homme, who should have saluted, not offered his hand? Pétain assured his nation, after the news had spread, that “I went freely to the meeting, at the invitation of the Führer. I was under no ‘Diktat,’ no pressure. A collaboration was planned between our two countries. I accepted the principle of it.”12 Many thought this was a good sign. The term “collaboration” had not yet attained its highly negative connotation of moorless morals, greed, and warped patriotism. Most French, including pacifists, read the encounter as a brilliant tactical move, as Pétain diplomatically outsmarting Hitler. Such an agreement meant that POWs might be coming home soon, that France would become whole again, and that the nation had been fortunate to have had such a wily leader assume the position of chief of state. But there were others who felt the opposite; they believed that Pétain and his entourage had been duped, and that the Vichy government’s obsequiousness was repellent. “Collaboration” soon came to be seen as collusion with the very forces that had humiliated a proud nation. Those who had held on to the idea that Pétain could withstand the demands of the Germans were profoundly affected by this event, in which the hero of Verdun had appeared to be a supplicant. The Montoire spectacle, as with another one that Laval would orchestrate two months later—the return to Paris of the ashes of Napoleon’s son from his burial vault in Vienna—would haunt Vichy for the remainder of the war.13 Adolescents saw this panoply of subservience as yet another reason to look elsewhere for leadership.