Unlike the sovereigns of Norway and the Netherlands, King Leopold III of Belgium was not whisked away to safety during Germany’s invasion of his country. Instead, as commander in chief of the Belgian army, the thirty-eight-year-old king took charge of Belgium’s defense as soon as the Wehrmacht crossed the border.
Under the Belgian constitution, Leopold possessed more power and governmental responsibility than any other western European monarch: in addition to his role as commander in chief, he also acted as president of the Cabinet. When Hitler dispatched a note to him and his ministers warning that resistance to German occupation might well mean the destruction of Belgium, Leopold responded, “When it is a question of sacrifice or dishonor, the Belgian in 1940 will hesitate no more than his father did in 1914.”
Like Norway and Holland, Belgium had been neutral before the 1940 German attack, as it had been before World War I. Indeed, when the Belgians won their independence from Holland in 1831, they had been promised permanent neutrality and “inviolability of Belgian territory” by Europe’s great powers. That promise had not been kept; virtually from the day the treaty was signed, several of the powers had sought at one time or another to breach Belgian neutrality in order to promote and protect their own interests.
While Norway and Holland had been able to keep their neutral status during the Great War, Belgium was the first country invaded by Germany. In their August 1914 incursion, German troops were simply continuing the centuries-old tradition of warring powers using Belgian territory as a convenient passageway to reach whichever country was their main target at the time—in this case, France. When the Belgians put up a stubborn and surprisingly strong resistance, ending Germany’s hope of a quick victory over the French, the invaders were ferocious in their retaliation, launching a campaign of wholesale executions and destruction. The medieval city of Louvain, like a number of other Belgian towns, was pillaged; many of its buildings, including its world-famous university library, were burned to the ground. At the end of the war, much of the country was left in a state of devastation, with most of its roads, industry, and railway system destroyed.
Only twelve years old when the Great War began, Leopold was profoundly affected not only by its impact on Belgium but also by the widely lauded wartime actions of his father, King Albert I. One of the most admired military and political figures of the conflict, Albert refused numerous invitations from the Allies to flee to Britain or France. Instead, he rallied his vastly outnumbered troops in October 1914 to win the crucial Battle of the Yser, which halted the German advance in Belgium and gave the king and his forces control of a small sliver of Belgian territory on the North Sea coast for the rest of the war. That victory in turn allowed the Allies to maintain control of several key French ports nearby.
Thanks to his boldness and resolution, Albert did more than benefit the Allies; he also helped restore the reputation and popularity of the Belgian monarchy, which had been blackened by his predecessor and uncle, Leopold II. In the late nineteenth century, Leopold had acquired and exploited for his private gain what later became known as the Belgian Congo, arousing international outrage for his henchmen’s horrific treatment of Congolese workers, millions of whom had died as a result. When Albert assumed the throne in 1904, he instituted reforms in the Congo to try to ameliorate the human and physical damage wreaked by his rapacious forebear. Leopold III followed his father’s reformist example.
Modest and soft-spoken, the younger Leopold hero-worshiped Albert and, from early childhood, modeled his life on that of his father. When the Great War began, the crown prince was sent with his two siblings to England, where he was enrolled at Eton. But he persuaded Albert, who remained in Belgium throughout the war, to allow him to train and then serve as a soldier during his school breaks. For the war’s duration, Leopold led a curious life—a student at Britain’s most exclusive boys’ school for most of the year, coupled with stints as a private in the Belgian army during Eton’s vacation periods.
In 1934, Albert, still vigorous at the age of fifty-eight, was killed in a mountain-climbing accident, and the thirty-two-year-old Leopold assumed the throne. Blond and boyishly handsome, the new king and his pretty Swedish wife, Astrid, along with their three young children, brought youth and a touch of glamour to the monarchy. Just over a year later, however, the twenty-nine-year-old queen died in an automobile accident in Switzerland when her husband, who was driving, lost control of their car on a winding mountain road. Bereft by the back-to-back deaths of the two people to whom he was closest, the sensitive, reserved Leopold was also haunted by his own culpability in the accident that had killed his wife. Attempting to assuage his grief and sense of guilt, he threw himself into his kingly duties with a new intensity.
In leading the country, he closely emulated his father, particularly in foreign affairs. After the Great War, Albert had pursued two major foreign policy objectives: retaining Belgium’s neutrality while strengthening its defenses to allow it to put up a better fight against Germany or any other likely aggressor. During his son’s reign, Belgium spent almost a quarter of its budget on national defense, far more than any other European country except Germany. At the outbreak of World War II, more than half of all Belgian men between the ages of twenty and forty—a total of 650,000—were under arms. When the Belgian army was mobilized in May 1940, its numbers had swelled to 900,000, compared to 237,000 soldiers in the British Expeditionary Force in France.
At the same time, however, Leopold, like his father, insisted that the country remain neutral, much to the dismay of France and Britain, which had pressed Belgium hard in 1939 and early 1940 to enter into a military alliance that would permit their troops to enter Belgian territory before any fighting broke out. Leopold and his government suspected that the Western Allies’ eagerness for a military partnership was prompted by a desire to keep the war as far away as possible from their own soil. Indeed, France’s commander in chief, General Maurice Gamelin, acknowledged as much when he wrote in a confidential memo that the strategy behind sending Allied troops into Belgium at the start of the fight was to “carry the conflict out of our northern industrial provinces…and hold off the enemy threat from Paris.”
EVEN THOUGH IT WAS better prepared militarily than most of the other countries invaded by Germany, Belgium still found itself overwhelmed by the sheer ferocity of the enemy’s initial assault. By nightfall on May 10, seemingly endless waves of Luftwaffe bombers had wiped out much of the Belgian air force, and glider-borne troops had captured the linchpin of the country’s defense system, the strongly fortified Eben-Emael fortress on the Belgian-Dutch border.
Still, after the first shock, Belgium’s twenty-two divisions regrouped to mount what the American historian Telford Taylor called “a determined and well-directed defense,” retreating to the west while making the Germans pay for their gains. The Belgians “fought like lions, from house to house,” the CBS correspondent William L. Shirer wrote at the time. Telford Taylor later observed that “if the quality of the Belgian performance had been duplicated in other lands, the German march of conquest might have been shorter.”
Meanwhile, French and British forces, this time with the Belgians’ agreement, had crossed the Belgian-French frontier to take up positions behind a fortified defense line in the center of the country. During its strategic retreat, the Belgian army headed for the same defense line; there it would take its place alongside British troops, to help fend off what France and Britain believed would be the chief German offensive.
Instead, on May 13, the main enemy force, consisting of more than 1.5 million men and 1,800 tanks, thundered through the heavily wooded Ardennes Forest, farther south in Belgium. Outflanking the vaunted Maginot Line, France’s supposedly impenetrable chain of fortifications, the Germans smashed into the least protected sector of the French frontier, routing the ill-equipped reservists assigned to guard it and crossing the Meuse River into France.
In just three days, the German offensive had split the Allied forces in two, sealing off French, British, and Belgian troops in central Belgium from the bulk of the French army. With France’s defenses breached beyond repair and German armored columns now racing through the French countryside, a wave of panic enveloped the government and military. At that point, French premier Paul Reynaud picked up the phone to call Winston Churchill.
For the new British prime minister, May 1940 was filled with one nightmarish phone call after another, each bearing news of the latest military disaster. But none was as shocking as the one he received from Reynaud in the early morning of May 15. “We have been defeated!” Reynaud exclaimed as soon as his British counterpart answered the phone. When Churchill, still groggy from sleep, failed to respond, Reynaud, speaking in English, rephrased his dire message: “We are beaten! We have lost the battle!” Finally finding his voice, Churchill said he found that impossible to believe: though the Germans had certainly had the element of surprise, they would soon have to stop for supplies and regroup, giving the French forces the chance to counterattack. Reynaud went on as if Churchill hadn’t said a word. “We are defeated,” he said again, his voice breaking. “We have lost the battle.”
Churchill was dumbfounded. This was not one of the little neutral countries he had criticized so often: it was understandable that they would fall like a house of cards before the German blitzkrieg. This was France—Britain’s chief ally, supposedly the mightiest military power on the Continent! Yet when France’s turn had come for invasion, its army of 2 million men had proved as unprepared and overwhelmed by Germany’s new, stunningly fast style of warfare as had the smaller nations. How could anyone cope with tanks slicing through defense lines as if they weren’t even there or with clouds of aircraft bombing bridges, roads, and train stations, strafing troops and civilians alike?
AS ITS CLOSEST EUROPEAN NEIGHBOR, France had much in common with Britain. They shared similar liberal values and were the most democratic of the leading countries of Europe. In World War I, they had joined hands as allies against Germany and Austro-Hungary. That partnership, however, had masked deep rifts and rivalries. The difficulties Churchill and Reynaud had in communicating with each other during their traumatic May 15 conversation were emblematic of the misunderstandings, suspicion, and antagonism that had existed for centuries between these two once mighty imperial powers and hereditary enemies.
Janet Teissier du Cros, a Scottish writer living in France during World War II, observed that both nations were noted for their suspicion of foreigners and their feeling of superiority to other countries. “It is so much a second nature…to believe there is no one like them that the notion scarcely even reaches the level of conscious thought,” she wrote. “It is probably one of the reasons they find each other so oddly irritating.”
Far from bringing them closer together, Britain and France’s shared victory in World War I drove them further apart. Each had made huge contributions to that victory, but neither would give the other credit for its efforts, sacrifices, and achievements. “The real truth, which history will show, is that the British Army has won the war,” Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig, commander of the British Expeditionary Force in France, wrote in his diary after the November 1918 armistice. “I have no intention of taking part in any triumphal ride with [French commander Marshal Ferdinand] Foch, or with any pack of foreigners, through the streets of London.”
Although only twenty miles of the English Channel separated the two countries, the psychological and cultural distance between them was as vast as an ocean. Each was also indelibly marked by its own geography: Britain was an island nation that had escaped invasion for more than eight centuries, while France, with its vulnerable borders, had endured repeated invasions, defeats, and occupations. At the 1919 Paris peace conference, French premier Georges Clemenceau explained to British prime minister David Lloyd George and U.S. president Woodrow Wilson the rationale behind his country’s demands for draconian restrictions on Germany: “America is far away and protected by the ocean. England could not be reached by Napoleon himself. You are sheltered, both of you. We are not.”
As the historian Margaret MacMillan noted about the post–World War I period, “France wanted revenge and compensation, but above all it wanted security.” Between 1814 and 1940, Germany had invaded and occupied all or part of France five times. During World War I, in addition to turning much of France into a battlefield and charnel house, the Germans had pillaged the territory they occupied; in northern France, for example, most of the machinery and equipment of the country’s textile industry had been taken to Germany.
In the years following the 1918 armistice, British policy makers, showing little sympathy with or understanding for French security concerns, increasingly insisted that the Versailles Treaty had been overly punitive to Germany and that the new German republic should be conciliated and even strengthened. The French were fiercely opposed to any such tolerance, arguing that the resurgence of German militarism was still very much a possibility. They pressed the British hard for a new Anglo-French military alliance, to no avail. To the British, France was being paranoid and vindictive.
When Hitler seized power and began rearming Germany, the governments of prime ministers Stanley Baldwin and Neville Chamberlain persuaded themselves that the Führer was simply trying to correct the injustices of Versailles and must be placated. By the mid-1930s, France, having given up hope that Britain would stand firm, had accepted the British policy of appeasement. For both former allies, the idea of another war was unthinkable. It had been only twenty years since their young men had begun marching off to battle, the cheers of their countrymen ringing in their ears. Four years after that, more than 700,000 Britons lay dead. France’s battlefield losses were double that number—1.4 million men, the highest proportion of deaths per capita of any of the great power combatants. Still suffering from the war’s devastating psychological and economic toll, the French doubted they could survive another conflict.
When Hitler occupied the demilitarized Rhineland in March 1936, first Britain, then France, turned a blind eye. They did the same after German troops goose-stepped into Austria in March 1937. But when Hitler threatened Czechoslovakia in the summer of 1938, France showed signs of standing up to him. The French, who had a military pact with the Czechs, began mobilizing their forces; they told the British they would resist dismemberment of their eastern European ally. Yet when Neville Chamberlain declined to join them in confronting Germany, the French fell into line. Following Chamberlain’s lead at the Munich Conference, they ordered Czechoslovakia to give in to German demands for the Sudetenland, a vital area containing most of Czechoslovakia’s fortifications and major centers of industry.
At Munich, Hitler had promised the British and French that he had no further designs on Czechoslovakia; six months later, he seized the rest of the country. It was then that Chamberlain, his appeasement plan clearly in ruins, announced to Parliament one of the most dramatic reversals of foreign policy in modern British history: Britain, he declared, would go to the aid of Poland, next on Germany’s hit list, if it were invaded. It would also join France in a new military alliance, after years of scorning French fears of a renewed German threat.
The tables were now turned: the French, who had deferred to British diplomatic leadership throughout the 1930s, were unquestionably the senior partner in military matters. With an army less than one-fifth the size of France’s, Britain was now suffering the consequences of its leaders’ reluctance to rearm in the interwar years. During that period, its relatively small increases in arms spending had been used for the production of fighter planes to protect the country from possible German aerial attack. In early 1939, the British Army, which alone among the major European powers had no conscription policy, numbered only 180,000 men, with another 130,000 in reserve. Even those minuscule numbers were starved for adequate equipment, arms, and training.
When war broke out, neither France nor Britain sent troops to the aid of Poland. Instead, the British Expeditionary Force dispatched four divisions to France, a far smaller number than the French had expected; by the time of the blitzkrieg, there were ten. General Alan Brooke, who commanded two of the British divisions, morosely wrote in his diary that his troops were unfit for combat and that the Chamberlain government had probably sent them to France only as a public relations gesture, to show that some action, however minimal, was being taken. Concurring, the French ambassador in London snapped that “the English have such confidence in the French army that they are tempted to consider their military support as a gesture of solidarity rather than a vital necessity.”
As it turned out, both Brooke and the ambassador were right: the British did count on the French army’s eighty divisions, as well as its superior artillery and tank force, to counter German might. What the British failed to understand was that, despite its strength in numbers, France was as unprepared for the coming conflict as they were. In their planning for a new European war, French military leaders had envisioned a relatively bloodless version of World War I—a long slog beginning with an enemy offensive through the flatlands of Belgium. With that in mind, the French high command had sent its best troops and armored units, along with the ten British divisions, to central Belgium. If German forces managed to make it past the Allied troops, they would then wear themselves out attacking the Maginot Line, the French believed. No one had anticipated the German breakthrough at the Meuse.
In truth, Britain’s misplaced faith in France’s military strength was just another example of the two countries’ mutual obtuseness. On paper, their alliance had been renewed; in fact, no real partnership existed. “A genuine alliance is something that has to be worked at all the time,” observed the French historian Marc Bloch, a Sorbonne professor who fought in the 1940 battle. “It is not enough to have it set down in writing. It must draw the breath of life from a multiplicity of daily contacts which, taken together, knit the two parties into a single whole.”
In their dealings, British and French military leaders, few of whom spoke the other’s language, were often at cross-purposes, reflecting a mutual distrust, suspicion, and even personal dislike. The French generals treated their British counterparts with condescension, regarding them as “learners in the military arts.” The British commanders, for their part, were unhappy about the decision to send their troops into Belgium in the event of a German attack but, conscious of their country’s minimal military presence, made no complaint to the French.
By the time the Germans finally invaded the Low Countries and France, the Allies’ already dysfunctional military relationship had become toxic—as Winston Churchill discovered for himself when he traveled to Paris on May 16, the day after Paul Reynaud’s shattering phone call.
UNLIKE MOST BRITONS, Churchill had been head over heels in love with France since boyhood. An admirer of Joan of Arc, Napoleon, and other French historical figures, he had visited the country more than a hundred times and spoke its language, albeit in a highly idiosyncratic way. During World War I, he had spent several months in the frontline trenches of France as commander of a battalion of Royal Scots Fusiliers and had been greatly impressed by the courage and resolution of the French troops fighting alongside his men. “Ever since 1907, I have in good times and bad times been a true friend of France,” he would write in 1944.
Churchill’s support, however, was not quite as unequivocal as he made it seem. In the 1920s and early 1930s, like most British politicians, he had advocated conciliation of Germany and opposed new commitments to France, suggesting that the country be left to “stew in her own juice.” In 1933, he expressed the hope that “the French will look after their own safety” and that Britain would be free to stand aside from any new European conflicts. Churchill did support a vigorous rearmament policy for his own country but only to make Britain strong enough to defend its neutrality. Not until Hitler stepped up his march to war in the mid- to late 1930s did he push for a firm line against Germany and a close military alliance with France.
Much of the alliance’s appeal for Churchill lay in his belief in the superiority of the French army—“the finest in Europe,” he called it. His faith would remain unshakable until he arrived at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs on the Quai d’Orsay on the afternoon of May 16 and saw “utter dejection written on every face” of the officials with whom he met. In the gardens outside, clouds of smoke billowed up from bonfires stoked by official documents that government workers were heaping on the flames.
The French military leaders summarized for Churchill the disastrous news of the previous four days: the German breakthrough at the Meuse and the onrush of tanks and troops “at unheard-of speed” toward the northern French towns of Amiens and Arras. When Churchill asked about plans for a counterattack by reserve forces, General Gamelin shrugged and shook his head. “There are none,” he said. Churchill was speechless: no reserves and no counterattack? How could that be? Gamelin’s terse response, Churchill wrote later, was “one of the greatest surprises I have had in my life.”
The British prime minister’s shock and confusion, his failure to grasp the speed and immensity of the German onslaught, were no different from the dazed reactions of French and British officers and troops in the field. Years later, General Alan Brooke would write dismissively, “Although there were plenty of Frenchmen ready to die for their country, their leaders had completely failed to prepare and organize them to resist the blitzkrieg.” Brooke didn’t mention that he and his fellow British commanders were as guilty as their French counterparts in that regard—a point repeatedly made by General Bernard Law Montgomery, a subordinate of Brooke’s in France. In his diary of the campaign, Montgomery, who commanded a British division in the battle, was scathingly critical of General John Gort, the British Expeditionary Force commander. Later Montgomery would write, “We had only ourselves to blame for the disasters which early overtook us in the field when fighting began in 1940.”
Trained for static defensive warfare, the Allied military simply did not know how to react when the blitzkrieg—“this inhuman monster which had already flattened half of Europe,” in the words of an American observer—burst upon them. Coordination and communication between the French and British armies broke down almost immediately; within a few days, most phone and supply lines had been cut, and the Allied command system had virtually ceased to function. The only way army commanders could communicate was through personal visits.
While French and British units functioned without information or orders, their tanks and aircraft were running out of fuel and ammunition. An RAF pilot called the situation “a complete and utter shambles”; a British Army officer wrote in his diary, “This is like some ridiculous nightmare.” Back in London, Churchill told one of his secretaries, “In all the history of war, I have never known such mismanagement.”
With Allied losses escalating and French and British troops in retreat, Paul Reynaud and the French high command begged Churchill to send ten more RAF fighter squadrons to France, in addition to the ten already there, to counter the Luftwaffe dive-bombers that were decimating their forces. Churchill eventually agreed to the request, arousing the impassioned opposition of the RAF’s Fighter Command, which insisted that sending any more fighters abroad would pose a grave danger to Britain’s own security.
Just six days into his tenure as prime minister, Churchill was faced with an agonizing choice: whether to give France as much material assistance as possible to bolster its morale and resistance or to withhold such support so that it could be used in Britain’s own defense. As the French saw it, the British had nothing to lose by pouring all their resources into France, because if France went down, Britain would soon follow. The pugnacious Churchill did not share that view. Once the ten squadrons were dispatched, France would get no more, despite repeated appeals from Reynaud. And, unbeknownst to the French, on the day he returned from his May 16 trip, Churchill ordered plans drawn up for a possible evacuation of the British Expeditionary Force.
Increasingly doubtful of France’s will or ability to fight back and fearing the encirclement and annihilation of his troops, General Gort was also contemplating evacuation. By the last week of May, the British forces had begun their retreat toward the beaches of Dunkirk, pursued by German troops and strafed by dive-bombers as they fled down dusty roads and lanes leading to the port. Churchill renewed his appeals to the French to stand and fight, never telling them until after the evacuation began that his own troops were leaving the field of battle.
ALSO LEFT IN THE DARK was the Belgian army, which had borne the brunt of Germany’s aerial and tank juggernaut, shielding British and French troops in Belgium from much of its fury. Churchill’s failure to inform the Belgians of the British retreat was not an oversight; he was counting on them to help keep the German forces at bay while British troops boarded the armada of small boats and large ships now being dispatched to Dunkirk.
In fact, the Belgian army—pummeled relentlessly by German dive-bombers, tanks, and artillery for more than two weeks and running out of food and ammunition—was already in the throes of disintegration. When the British began their westward retreat toward Dunkirk, the Belgians agreed to guard their flank but repeatedly warned both the British and French commanders that their reserves were nearly depleted and that unless the Allies came to their assistance, they would soon have to surrender. In London, Churchill was given the same message by Admiral of the Fleet Sir Roger Keyes, a flamboyant British war hero and close friend of Churchill’s, who was serving as the prime minister’s personal liaison with King Leopold. But the Belgians’ pleas for help carried no weight with Churchill, who told the War Cabinet that “the Belgian Army might be lost altogether, but we should do them no service by sacrificing our own Army.”
When Colonel George Davy, the BEF’s liaison officer with the Belgian army, asked General Gort and his deputy, General Henry Pownall, if Belgian forces would be allowed to participate in the Dunkirk evacuation, Pownall scoffed at the idea. “We don’t care a bugger what happens to the Belgians,” he said. Seemingly oblivious to the stalwart defense being waged by the Belgians, Pownall wrote in his diary on May 15, “Belgian morale, already thoroughly bad from top to bottom. They are simply not fighting.” He later referred to them as “rotten to the core” and “lesser breeds.”
On May 26, the Belgian commander in chief sent his last request for aid to Britain and France. Like his earlier pleas, it went unanswered. Instead, Churchill instructed Roger Keyes to emphasize to Leopold the importance of his troops remaining in the field. Obviously, the Belgians would have to capitulate soon, Churchill told a subordinate, but only “after assisting the BEF to reach the coast.” He bluntly added, “We are asking them to sacrifice themselves for us.”
The exhausted Belgians, however, believed they had done enough sacrificing. Abandoned and isolated by their allies, lacking everything they needed to keep fighting, they felt they had held off the Germans for as long as humanly possible. On May 27, the Belgian government, in an official communiqué, informed France and Britain of its imminent surrender to Germany: “The Belgian Army has totally exhausted its capacity for resistance. Its units are incapable of renewing the struggle tomorrow.” Leopold sent an envoy to the Germans, and early on the morning of May 28, a cease-fire was announced.
The Belgians’ surrender was a purely military act, a laying down of arms, but it was complicated by Leopold’s decision to remain in Belgium. His fateful choice followed more than a week of soul-searching discussions with his government ministers about whether to go or stay. Prime Minister Hubert Pierlot and his colleagues informed the king of their plans to escape to France and urged him to accompany them. As head of state, they argued, it was his duty to continue Belgium’s resistance in exile. Under no circumstances should he be taken prisoner by the Germans.
Leopold, however, saw his duty very differently. In that, he was guided by the example of his father. During the Great War, Albert, in his role as commander in chief, had repeatedly declared that he would never leave Belgium, even if the Germans conquered all of it. “Never would King Albert have consented to take refuge abroad,” leaving his troops to their fate, Leopold told his ministers. Like his father, he believed that his responsibilities as commander in chief trumped those of head of state.
Pierlot and the others contended that according to the Belgian constitution, it was Leopold’s duty to follow the wishes of the government. They added that if he stayed behind, the Germans would make political use of him whether he cooperated with them or not. The king rejected all their arguments. He would not, he said, become “an idle refugee monarch, cut off from the Belgian people as they bow under the invader’s yoke.” To abandon the army, he added, “would be to become a deserter. Whatever happens, I must share the fate of my troops.”
At the time of the surrender, Leopold pledged not to have any dealings with the enemy while his country was in German hands. “For the duration of the occupation,” he declared, “Belgium must not do anything in the military, political, or economic sphere which could harm the Allied cause.” He asked to be put in a prisoner-of-war camp, along with his captured troops, but Hitler confined him instead to his palace in Laeken, on the outskirts of Brussels.
Leopold had been scrupulously correct in his handling of the surrender, but the French and British erupted in fury, joining forces to whip up a campaign of violent verbal abuse against the Belgians and their king. “Defeat arouses the worst in men,” Irène Némirovsky noted in Suite Française, her posthumously published novel about the fall of France. As one historian put it, “When one is fighting a war and things are going badly, one cannot afford the luxury of being generous or even fair to an ally who has ceased to be of any use. If the only usefulness he retains is that of a scapegoat, then a scapegoat he must be.”
Seeing a way to evade responsibility for France’s looming defeat, French and British leaders put the onus on Belgium for all their troubles. To General Maxime Weygand, who had replaced Gamelin as French commander in chief on May 17, the capitulation of Belgium was actually a “good thing,” because “we now shall be able to lay the blame for defeat on the Belgians.”
In covering up their own ineptitude, the Allied commanders resorted to outright lies. Both Weygand and Gort made the patently false claim that they had been given no warning of Belgium’s impending surrender. Accusing the Belgian army of cowardice, Gort also charged that its withdrawal from the fight had endangered the lives of his troops in their flight to Dunkirk. In reality, as the British military historian Brian Bond wrote, “the Belgian Army, virtually without air cover, bore the brunt of the German…attack while the BEF had a comparatively easy withdrawal to the French frontier. Indeed, but for the prolonged resistance of the gallant Belgian Army, the evacuation of the BEF from Dunkirk would have been impossible.”
French premier Paul Reynaud went even further in his diatribes against Leopold and the Belgians. One of the few French politicians to oppose the appeasement of Hitler in the late 1930s, Reynaud, who had headed the government for just two months, was nearing the end of his emotional tether. In the early days of the German invasion he had aligned himself with Churchill, arguing that France should continue to hold out. But as the military situation worsened, he began yielding to the defeatist mood of many of his ministers, prominently including Marshal Philippe Pétain, the eighty-four-year-old architect of the failed Maginot Line strategy who was now deputy premier. Since Reynaud had vowed he would never agree to a surrender, he knew he would soon have to hand over power to Pétain—an act that would infuriate the British. In Belgium’s capitulation, he saw a golden opportunity to shift the blame from himself and his government to the hapless Leopold.
“There has never been such a betrayal in history!” Reynaud exclaimed to his ministers when he heard of the Belgian surrender. “It is monstrous, absolutely monstrous!” In a May 28 broadcast to the French people, he accused Belgium of capitulating “suddenly and unconditionally in the midst of battle, on the orders of its King, without warning its French and English fellow combatants, thus opening the road to Dunkirk to German divisions.”
Before he made the broadcast, the premier bullied the Belgian government officials who had just arrived in France to support him in his attack upon their king. If they didn’t, Reynaud said, he couldn’t answer for the safety of the more than 2 million Belgians who had fled to France after the German invasion.
The Belgian ministers, who apparently feared that Leopold was thinking of establishing a new government in cooperation with the Germans, gave in to Reynaud’s blackmail. In doing so, they made far graver and equally false accusations against Leopold, charging him with “treating with the enemy”—in effect, accusing him of treason. Instead of preventing acts of violence against their countrymen, their denunciation only added to the French fury against Belgian refugees, who were jeered at, spat upon, beaten up, and ejected from restaurants and hotels. A number of Belgian pilots who had escaped to France were handcuffed and thrown into jail, while several thousand young Belgians undergoing military training in France were imprisoned in their barracks.
Kept in the dark about the ineptitude of the British and French military response to the German blitzkrieg, public opinion in Britain readily accepted as truth the accusations against Leopold and Belgium. In London, the Daily Mirror ran a front-page cartoon depicting the Belgian king as a snake wearing a swastika-topped crown; the Evening Standard called him “King Quisling.” One British newspaper columnist wrote that no child would be christened Leopold in Britain or anywhere else for the next two hundred years. Mollie Panter-Downes, the New Yorker’s London correspondent, told her American readers that “for the space of a day, Hitler had to give up his title of most-hated man to Leopold III of the Belgians,” who apparently “would rather be a live Nazi than a dead Belgian.”
In the midst of all the vituperation, only a few lonely voices spoke up for Leopold. “The king’s capitulation was the only thing he could do,” the U.S. military attaché in Belgium reported to his superiors in Washington. “Those who say otherwise didn’t see the fighting, and they didn’t see the German Air Force. I saw both.”
Admiral Keyes and Colonel Davy, the two British liaison officers assigned to the king and the Belgian military, also strongly defended the actions of Leopold and his army. Both were appalled when they returned to Britain on May 28 to find that Gort and his staff were heaping blame on the Belgians for their own incompetence. Particularly galling to Keyes and Davy was the fact that Gort himself was guilty of what he falsely accused the Belgian king of doing—withdrawing from the fight without warning his allies that he was going to do so.
Both officers, however, were forbidden by the British high command to make any public statements about their mission in Belgium. Furious at being muzzled, Davy wrote an account of what actually occurred there and gave copies to Keyes and the War Office for use in preparing the British official history of the war after it had ended. In a cover letter, he declared that the “savage and lying attacks” made on Leopold by “prominent military persons who found in him a profitable and unresponsive scapegoat” (i.e., Gort and Pownall) had prompted him to act. He added that “the truth should not be suppressed forever.”
Keyes, for his part, mounted a passionate defense of Leopold in a letter to Churchill, urging him to put a stop to British officials’ “vilification of a brave king.” At first, the prime minister seemed to heed his friend’s admonition, telling Parliament at the end of May that the Belgian army had “fought very bravely” and that the British should not pass “hasty judgment” on Leopold’s surrender.
His forbearance was short-lived. Annoyed that Leopold had chosen to remain in Belgium, Churchill was still riding his hobbyhorse of anger at the European neutral countries for not joining Britain and France in preinvasion military alliances. Refusing to acknowledge that the neutrals might have had valid reasons for shying away from such ties, he repeatedly made statements blaming their alleged cowardice for Germany’s military successes. He told Keyes privately that Leopold’s surrender had “completed the full circle of misfortune into which our Allies had landed us while we had loyally carried out our obligations and undertakings to them”—a comment that could not have been less true.
Churchill’s already strong prejudice against Leopold was exacerbated by growing pressure on him from Paul Reynaud to join France’s scapegoating of the king. Reynaud accused the British of being too subdued in their expressions of outrage against Leopold and the Belgians, and Churchill, desperate to keep France in the war, finally gave in to the French premier’s arm-twisting. On June 4, in a speech announcing the success of the Dunkirk evacuation, Churchill employed all his formidable rhetorical skills in a fierce denunciation of Leopold. “Suddenly, without prior consultation…he surrendered his army and exposed our whole flank and means of retreat,” the prime minister thundered, as the MPs around him cried “Shame!” and “Treachery!” “Had not this ruler and his government severed themselves from the Allies, had they not sought refuge in what has proved to be a fatal neutrality, the French and British armies might well at the very outset have saved not only Belgium but perhaps even Poland.”
The sheer absurdity of Churchill’s statement—that Belgium’s neutrality, not Germany’s military prowess, had been responsible for the defeat of Poland and other European countries—registered with Roger Keyes but with few others in Churchill’s parliamentary audience. An MP himself, Keyes listened to the prime minister’s diatribe with mounting anger and disbelief. Instead of praising the Belgians for having protected the BEF from the worst of the German onslaught, Churchill was echoing Reynaud in accusing them of having endangered the British evacuation, as well as causing the encirclement and surrender of thousands of French troops.
Yet, in retrospect, Churchill’s harangue, though unjustified, is understandable. Prime minister for only four weeks, he considered his political position at that point to be extremely tenuous. Many Conservative MPs, whose party dominated Parliament, had not yet reconciled themselves to his succeeding Neville Chamberlain; indeed, a fair number were openly hostile to him. “Seldom can a prime minister have taken office with the establishment so dubious of the choice and so prepared to have its doubts justified,” noted John Colville, one of Churchill’s private secretaries.
With his country now facing the greatest challenge in its history, Churchill was eager not only to fortify his own position but also to draw a veil of secrecy over the incompetence of his top generals as well as the other grave shortcomings of the British military’s performance thus far in the war. What better way to do so than to pin the blame on a smaller ally whose king and commander in chief was unable to defend himself?
Roger Keyes, however, refused to fall into line. In early June, he filed a libel suit against the Daily Mirror for a story accusing him of abetting what the Mirror called Leopold’s treachery. Determined to exonerate himself as well as the Belgian king and his military, Keyes pressed for a public trial. Before the case was finally heard in March 1941, the Mirror acknowledged that it had erred in its statements about Leopold and Keyes and agreed to apologize to both. Declaring that “the public interest would not be served” by publicizing the matter, Churchill and his government pressured Keyes to accept an out-of-court settlement rather than go to trial. Keyes agreed, but, in settling the case, his lawyer outlined in open court what had really happened in Belgium the previous May; in the same hearing, the newspaper’s attorney conceded that the Mirror had done the king “a very grave injustice.”
The story of Leopold’s vindication made front-page headlines in Britain. K.C. CLEARS KING LEOPOLD’S NAME: LONDON TOLD OF SURRENDER PLAN, one blared. Another noted, KING LEOPOLD WARNED BRITAIN OF SURRENDER. But the BBC, under pressure from the War Office, suppressed the news of the king’s exoneration; it remains relatively unknown to this day. In the seventy-plus years since 1940, many if not most historians who have written about the battles in France and Belgium have accepted as true the charges made by the British and French against Leopold and his country.
Yet even during the chaos of May 1940, there was one celebrated Briton who knew better and who refused to participate in the mudslinging. King George VI was said to be furious at the campaign aimed at the Belgian sovereign, who was a distant cousin of his and whom he had known and liked since the teenage Leopold had attended Eton during the Great War. When British officials proposed that Leopold be dropped from the Roll of the Knights of the Garter, Britain’s highest order of chivalry and one of its most prestigious honors, George, who keenly understood the excruciating dilemma faced by his fellow monarch, rejected the idea.
As George’s biographer, the historian John Wheeler-Bennett, has pointed out, the choice confronting the heads of state of German-occupied countries was “one of hideous complexity, [with] little time for calm consideration. To leave their homeland and follow their Governments into exile leaves them open to the charge of desertion by those who remained behind; yet to remain [in their countries] involves the risk of their being held hostage for the submissive conduct of their peoples.”
The day before Belgium surrendered, Leopold wrote a fond letter to George, whom he addressed as mon cher Bertie—a diminutive of his given name, Albert, which was used only by members of the British king’s family and a few others close to him. In the letter, Leopold explained his rationale for staying in Belgium, declaring that his overriding duty was to share the ordeal of German occupation with his troops and the rest of the Belgian people and to protect them as much as possible. “To act otherwise,” he told George, “would amount to desertion.”
As it happened, King George did not agree with Leopold’s choice. When Harry Hopkins, Franklin Roosevelt’s closest aide, visited London in early 1941, George told him he thought that Leopold had gotten his two jobs—king and commander in chief—“mixed up.” In a memo to FDR, Hopkins observed that George had “expressed a good deal of sympathy for the King of the Belgians and had little or no criticism of him as C-in-C of the Army, but as King…he should have left the country and established his government elsewhere.” Yet while questioning the wisdom of Leopold’s decision, George never doubted that his cousin was following his conscience and keen sense of duty in staying behind.
Ironically, George himself had taken the same vow made by Leopold: under no account, he said, would he leave his country if it were invaded by Germany. Fortunately for him and for Britain, he was never called upon to make that choice.