On an icy morning in March 1941, more than four hundred British Army commandos, accompanied by several dozen SOE-trained Norwegians, landed on two remote Norwegian islands high above the Arctic Circle. In a matter of hours, they had forced the surrender of the islands’ small German garrisons, destroyed German and Norwegian ships in the harbors, and blown up four fish-oil factories.
The inhabitants of the snow-covered islands, in the rugged Lofoten chain off the coast of northern Norway, were overjoyed. They turned out en masse to welcome the raiders and guide them to their targets. According to one observer, many of the islanders were “almost ready to fight each other as to who should answer the British officers’ questions.” Several hours later, as the commandos prepared to return to England, more than a hundred young Lofoten residents, most of them fishermen, insisted on going along. The majority wanted to join the elite Norwegian SOE team that had participated in the raid. Officially called Norwegian Independent Company No. 1, it was commonly known as the Linge Company, after its tough, aggressive commander, Martin Linge, a former actor from Oslo who had fought in the 1940 battle for Norway.
Militarily, Operation Claymore, as the raid had been christened, was of no real significance. The starkly beautiful Lofotens were not strategically important, the German presence there was almost nil, and the destruction of fish-oil factories was hardly a major coup. Nonetheless, the British touted Claymore as a triumph, “a classic example of a perfectly executed commando raid.” It was left unmentioned that the British desperately needed a victory of some kind, regardless of size or significance.
The spring of 1941 was one of Britain’s lowest points in the war. Although it had survived the Battle of Britain, German bombs still rained down on its cities. Merchant shipping losses in the Atlantic had risen to astronomical proportions, and starvation for British civilians loomed as a distinct possibility. The British Army, meanwhile, had suffered one disaster after another. In the course of those dire months, Germany had conquered Yugoslavia and overpowered Greece, routing British forces there and on the island of Crete. In the Middle East, the early British triumphs over the Italians in Libya had turned to dust when German troops under General Erwin Rommel had rushed to the Italians’ rescue. In only ten days, the Germans had regained almost all the ground that the British had captured.
That melancholy string of defeats led to an upsurge of parliamentary criticism of Winston Churchill and his government. Acknowledging a sense of “discouragement and disheartenment in the country,” Churchill wanted action—any action—against the Germans to prove to the world that Britain was not defeated. “We are in that awful period when everything is going wrong, and those in authority feel they have to do something,” Alexander Cadogan, the permanent undersecretary of the Foreign Office, noted grimly in his diary.
Churchill had been the guiding light of the Lofoten raid. With his innate love of adventure and danger, he had been drawn all his life to such daring, flamboyant, unconventional enterprises. What’s more, Operation Claymore required only a relatively small attack force, with little or no risk of serious casualties.
In its self-congratulations over the raid’s success, the British government deemed it the “perfect example of Allied collaboration.” In fact, no such collaboration had existed: prior to the operation, the British had consulted neither the Norwegian government in exile nor the leaders of Norway’s nascent underground army, known as Milorg, which had been slowly and cautiously expanding since its founding shortly after Norway’s defeat. Milorg, made up of small, informal groups of young Norwegians who had fought against the Germans in 1940, had few weapons, little security, and no formal military training.
Although many Norwegians had engaged in acts of civil disobedience against their occupiers, most shied away from taking part in sabotage or other forms of direct resistance. To do so, they believed, would be suicidal. Because of Hitler’s unshakable belief that Britain planned to invade Norway at some point during the war (a fear that Churchill encouraged), the Germans had turned the country into an armed fortress, defended by formidable coastal batteries, warships, submarines, and aircraft. More than 300,000 highly trained, well-equipped Wehrmacht troops—one German for every ten Norwegians—were stationed there.
Acutely aware of its members’ lack of preparation and experience in clandestine activities, the Milorg leadership had only one aim: the gradual buildup of a secret army to take part in the liberation of Norway and the rest of Europe. That was not good enough, however, for a steady flow of impatient young Norwegians like Martin Linge, who, from the beginning of the occupation, had escaped to Britain by boat across the North Sea. Anxious to strike back hard against Germany, a good number of them had volunteered for the special SOE unit of Norwegian volunteers headed by Linge but operated under overall British command.
Both Milorg and the Norwegian government in exile were upset when informed of the Lofoten raid. At the very least, Norwegian officials told the British, they should have been consulted about an operation staged on their country’s soil and carried out by more than fifty of their own citizens. What angered them most, however, were the immediate German reprisals against the islands’ inhabitants. Several dozen homes were destroyed and more than seventy residents arrested and sent to a concentration camp. For its part, Milorg contended that the raiders’ destruction of factories and fishing trawlers had been far more damaging to the islanders’ livelihoods than to the German war effort.
Unmoved by the Norwegians’ complaints, SOE dismissed them out of hand. The agency’s Norwegian section contemptuously dubbed Milorg “a military Sunday school” and declared that sabotage was essential “to cause Germans in Norway as much trouble as possible and to force them to keep large garrisons there.” The Norwegians, SOE made clear, would have no say in the matter.
To prove the point, British commandos and members of Company Linge staged another, much larger raid on the Lofotens and nearby coastal towns in late December 1941, nine months after the first operation. Nearly 15,000 tons of shipping were sunk, German installations and gun emplacements were destroyed, and 150 Germans were killed, with 98 taken prisoner.
Assuring the local population that this time they had come to stay, the raiders received another warm welcome. Residents took the commandos into their homes, held public demonstrations of support, and helped identify local collaborators. But the joy over their sudden liberation vanished as quickly as it had appeared. The day after the raid, German planes bombed the Lofotens, and British intelligence warned that German troops were massing in northern Norway, apparently with the intention of staging a counterattack. After receiving that news, the expedition’s commander ordered an immediate evacuation of British and Norwegian personnel.
As the raiders marched back to their ships, the islanders cursed and spat at their erstwhile saviors, who were fleeing, as the Norwegians saw it, without so much as a fight. As an SOE report later noted, the local population was furious that the British once again had scored a major propaganda triumph with few casualties of their own, while Norwegian citizens were left facing “the horrors of German reprisals.” The vengeance was swift to arrive. SS squads descended on the Lofotens, destroying homes and businesses and dispatching hundreds of people to concentration camps, many of them relatives of the young men who had earlier escaped to Britain.
Once again, the Norwegian government in exile erupted. This time, its outrage was shared by more than twenty Linge Company members, whose leader, Martin Linge, had been one of the mission’s few Allied fatalities. Demoralized by Linge’s death and the latest reprisals against their countrymen, they declared that unless they received prior authorization from the Norwegian government, they would refuse to take part in any future operations. Faced with such insubordination, the British government realized it could no longer brush aside Norway’s disaffection.*1
NORWEGIAN OFFICIALS WERE HARDLY alone in feeling resentment toward the British. Accustomed to exercising power and command within their own countries, all the European governments in exile had a profoundly difficult time adjusting to their dependence on the nation that had given them refuge. For each government, its relationship with Britain, unequal as it was, was essential to its survival. For Britain, with its myriad problems and responsibilities, the relationship was just one among many.
Still trying to cope with the humiliation and trauma of defeat, the exile governments were also entangled in bitter, explosive battles within their own ranks. “Political émigrés are strange people,” Josef Korbel, Madeleine Albright’s father, later reflected. “Uprooted from their national environment and deprived of a political base, they struggle among themselves for power.”
Even before the war, the political scene in most of Europe had been highly fractious, reflecting each country’s social, economic, and religious divisions. European prewar governments, for the most part, were coalitions stitched together from several political parties with often widely divergent views. Such groupings tended to be fragile and short-lived, enduring frequent crises and behind-the-scenes machinations for as long as they existed.
These homegrown pressures and strains were exacerbated by the twin shocks of defeat and exile. “Intrigues flourished like toadstools in London’s hothouse atmosphere,” Erik Hazelhoff Roelfzema observed, “carried out by men with many personal and political scores to settle.” The backbiting and finger-pointing were especially evident in internal debates about which officials and political parties were most to blame for their countries’ defeat by the Germans.
For young Europeans who had managed to escape from German rule, the quarrels and animosities of their government leaders were a source of anger and disillusionment. Speaking of the Dutch government in exile, Hazelhoff Roelfzema remarked, “They lived in a world of jobs and salaries, promotions and raises, which to us escapees, after fifteen months of occupation, was as illusory as the cell and firing squad were to them….They were unaware that reality had left them behind.”
British officials, for their part, grew increasingly impatient with their European guests’ factions, feuds, and infighting. Few Britons were as empathetic as Mary Churchill, the young daughter of the prime minister, who later noted, “For the British, life had become very simple. We meant to fight; we thought we would win; but we would fight anyway. We were spared the [Europeans’] agonies of divided loyalties and complicated issues.”
INTERESTINGLY, DESPITE THE NORWEGIANS’ unhappiness over the raids on the Lofotens, their liaison with the British turned out to be the smoothest of all the wartime Anglo-European relationships. Thanks to its abundant resources, Norway was one of the few occupied nations able to pay its own way during the conflict. That was due largely to the income from its merchant fleet, which transported nearly 60 percent of Britain’s oil and half of its foodstuffs, thus also playing an invaluable role in that country’s survival.
Unlike other governments in exile, the Norwegians also made things easier for the British by not bringing a complicated political agenda to the table. Their main postwar goal, the liberation and independence of their country, never caused a problem for the strategic interests of Britain or the two other powerful nations that would soon join the alliance, the Soviet Union and United States.
In almost every other way, the Norwegians were low-maintenance guests. Although their officials always spoke up when they thought their interests were at stake, they committed themselves from the start to working closely with their British counterparts. In mid-1942, the cooperation paid off, with a resolution of the Lofoten furor. Agreeing to end all raids on Norway’s territory without its government’s approval, British officials announced that from then on, they would work with the Norwegians to create a partnership among SOE, the Norwegian high command, and Milorg. “In time, all realized that it was impossible to run two independent paramilitary underground movements side by side,” acknowledged the head of SOE’s Norwegian section. “Inevitably, it would lead to…the two cutting each other’s throats.” The new collaboration proved, in the words of one historian, to be “remarkably successful.”
In February 1943, that cooperation led to arguably the most dramatic and daring Allied sabotage coup of the war—the partial destruction of the Norsk Hydro electrochemical plant in Norway responsible for producing the heavy water used in making a nuclear bomb. After the French had spirited away all the existing heavy water from the Norsk Hydro plant in March 1940, the Germans, following their occupation of Norway, had greatly stepped up production there. In late 1942, workers at Norsk Hydro sent word to the Allies that their German masters were on the verge of sending large quantities of heavy water to the Reich.
On Winston Churchill’s orders, a small band of SOE-trained members of Linge Company were dropped onto one of the harshest, coldest, and bleakest terrains in Norway—the Hardanger mountain plateau near Norsk Hydro. Battling heavy snow, fierce winds, and below-zero temperatures, the Norwegians slogged their way to the factory—a seven-story building perched like a medieval castle halfway up a steep mountainside, whose apparent sole access was a heavily guarded seventy-five-foot suspension bridge spanning a gorge six hundred feet below.
The saboteurs chose a different route—rappelling down the sheer cliff to the gorge, crossing it, then climbing up the other side. Evading the factory’s many German guards, they overpowered two Norwegian watchmen and slipped inside, placing timer-operated explosive charges and fuses around the heavy water tanks. By the time the explosives detonated, the Norwegians had vanished, returning the same way they’d come. None was caught.
Although the explosion caused massive destruction and the loss of some 500 kilograms of heavy water, the Germans had the factory back in operation within a few months. Finally, an Allied air raid and another, smaller SOE sabotage operation ended Germany’s heavy water production altogether.
As it turned out, the Reich had never made much of an effort to produce a nuclear bomb—a fact that the Allies discovered only after the war. Certainly, the repeated attempts to deny heavy water to the Germans helped to discourage them in that endeavor.
THE SUCCESS OF THE Norsk Hydro mission contributed to the strengthening of ties between Norway and Britain, as did King Haakon’s popularity with the British people. The Norwegian monarch’s influence was enhanced by his intimate relationship with King George VI, who once told his daughter, the future Queen Elizabeth II, how much the “unshakable courage and resolution” shown by his uncle had “supported and uplifted him during those heavy days.” As the rallying point for his own people, Haakon also proved to be an essential link between those living under German domination in Norway and their compatriots in London.
As was true in every occupied country, a huge psychological divide existed between those who had left Norway at the time of its defeat and those who had been given no such alternative. Since 1940, many Norwegians at home had been vocal in their criticism of the government officials now in London for the deplorable condition of the nation’s defenses that had helped lead to the German victory.
At one point, considerable pressure was put on Haakon to push the government aside and take over leadership of the country. He emphatically rejected that idea, just as he had spurned the earlier proposal from Norwegian collaborationists that he abdicate. Both suggestions, he noted, were blatant violations of the Norwegian constitution. Proclaiming his solidarity with the current government, Haakon declared, “We are all in the same boat….Mutual trust is essential for Norway’s struggle for freedom.”
When Haakon turned seventy in August 1942, his subjects in Norway joined their compatriots in London in massive celebrations of the man who had emerged as their nation’s most important unifying figure. In cities and towns all over Norway, tens of thousands of people carrying flowers and wearing badges emblazoned with “H7” (Haakon VII) marched to honor their king. In London, more than five thousand Norwegians, including top government officials, paraded past Haakon and his son, all of them headed for a huge birthday party for the monarch at the Royal Albert Hall. It was the largest gathering of Norwegians to take place during the war.
LIKE KING HAAKON, Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands also became a major player in her nation’s wartime affairs. Highly respected by British officials and the British public, she, too, acted as a bridge between members of her government and her countrymen back home. But unlike Haakon, the combative Wilhelmina was no peacemaker, trying to ease and remain above fractious exile politics. Instead, elbows out, she charged right into the fray.
Wilhelmina’s struggle with her government ministers began almost as soon as they all had arrived in London in May 1940. Several members of the Cabinet, including Prime Minister Dirk Jan de Geer, had not wanted to come to the British capital at all. A fervent pacifist, de Geer was convinced that Germany would win the war, and he initially wanted the Dutch government to approach Hitler to seek a compromise peace. After losing that struggle, he argued that the government should move from London, which he feared would be invaded by the Germans or destroyed by bombs, to the Dutch East Indies, more than seven thousand miles away.
Only a couple of ministers were opposed to leaving Britain. They were joined by the queen, who was appalled and outraged by the defeatism she saw in a majority of her Cabinet. Wilhelmina was determined to fight on in London. If Germany invaded, she planned to try to cross the Atlantic to join her daughter, Princess Juliana, in Canada. But if that should prove impossible, she had already ordered her private secretary to shoot her before the Germans could capture her. She told de Geer she would not go to the East Indies, that her health would not permit such a long, arduous journey. In an audacious and unprecedented move, she also informed the prime minister that she had lost all confidence in him. He promptly offered his resignation, which she just as promptly accepted.
Such a display of queenly displeasure would never have been successful at home in the Netherlands, where she had no real authority and the Cabinet and parliament ruled. But in London, there was no parliament. The Cabinet now had to take her views into account: any action it wanted to take required her approval. If she withheld her signature, there was no other government body that could overrule her.
For Wilhelmina, exile meant power, and she took full advantage of it. Having resigned as prime minister, de Geer expected that he would be allowed to stay on as minister of finance. The queen informed him otherwise, then named as prime minister the only member of the Cabinet she thought shared her fierce hatred of the Nazis and determination to fight them to the end. He was Pieter Gerbrandy, the minister of justice, who had recently entered politics after teaching law at the University of Amsterdam.
Outwardly, Gerbrandy was hardly prepossessing. Standing only four feet, eight inches, he had a luxuriant mustache that, as one friend put it, “dropped incongruously from his small, round face like the whiskers of a walrus.” His command of English left much to be desired: at his first meeting with Winston Churchill, he put out his hand and said, “Goodbye.” The amused Churchill, who became quite fond of the man he called “Cherry Brandy,” replied, “Sir, I wish that all political meetings were as short and to the point.” But as Wilhelmina knew and Churchill soon realized, Gerbrandy was no figure of fun. Fearless and tough, he believed that the war should be prosecuted with the utmost vigor, a conviction he backed up with all the resources of his country, including its merchant fleet and the riches of the East Indies.
Having helped keep the Netherlands in the war, Wilhelmina now sought to transform her own life. Thanks to her move to London, the doors to her hated “cage” had finally sprung open, and she was no longer cut off from the real world. In the British capital, she had been given what she had always yearned for: the chance “to meet people as they really were, not dressed up for a visit to the palace.”
Although she led an active social and official life in London, the queen’s main focus was on her people back home. She insisted on meeting every Dutch citizen who escaped to England, often inviting them to tea at her small house in Chester Square. The escapees, known as Engelandvaarders (“England farers”), told Wilhelmina how important her fiery BBC broadcasts had become to her compatriots and how she had emerged as the prime symbol of hope and freedom in the Netherlands.
“For the Queen, there was only one good Dutchman, the Engelandvaarder, the man who had risked his life to come and fight for freedom,” a Dutch writer observed. Erik Hazelhoff Roelfzema, perhaps the best-known and most defiant Engelandvaarder, noted, “The simplest sailor from Rotterdam commanded more of her attention than the highest functionary in the government-in-exile.”
Roelfzema had met Wilhelmina shortly after his escape from Holland in June 1941. Tall, blond, and good-looking, the former law student had been a rebel for much of his life against the rigidly structured society of Holland and the staid, conservative lifestyle of most of his countrymen. Shortly before the war began, he had traveled across the United States by hitchhiking and hopping freight trains, then written a bestselling book about his experiences.
When he arrived in London, he and Peter Tazelaar, another escapee, had ricocheted around various departments of the Dutch government in exile, trying to find a way to get into the fight. They were soon “suffocating in the porridge of bureaucracy,” Roelfzema said. “Whether it was me or my dirty clothes, the subjects I raised or the intensity of my arguments, I made everyone visibly nervous….If I used words like ‘Occupation’ or ‘secret contacts,’ they recoiled as if I showed signs of advanced leprosy.” When the Dutch war minister told Roelfzema that he was “really too busy” to see him, the frustrated young escapee smashed his fist on the official’s desk and upset his teacup. “Greatly alarmed, he hastily terminated the audience,” Roelfzema recalled, “by calling in the MPs and having me thrown out of his office.”
His and Tazelaar’s reception by the queen, however, was an altogether different experience: “Instead of unbalanced adventurers, we were suddenly treated as exceptional people. After…these last few weeks of humiliation by our own countrymen in London, we hardly knew any more how to accept respect, let alone admiration.”
Wilhelmina was charmed by the two young men’s dash and daring, by their thumbing their noses at Dutch officialdom, but, above all, by their determination to defy and defeat the Nazis. With her blessing, the Dutch government’s intelligence chief installed them in a mews house behind her Chester Square home and sanctioned their plan to establish better connections between the Dutch resistance and the English and Dutch intelligence services. Over the next few months, they and a couple of associates made several trips to deliver radio equipment, agents, and light arms to Holland; one mission, in which Tazelaar was put ashore to contact the underground, was particularly audacious.
Erik Hazelhoff Roelfzema (right) and Peter Tazelaar (left)
Early one morning in November 1941, a fishing boat quietly dropped anchor off a beach near The Hague. Tazelaar swam to shore, zipped off his wet suit—and revealed white tie and tails underneath. Removing a small bottle of Hennessy XO cognac from his pocket, he took a swig and sprinkled a few drops over his elegant evening clothes. Only then did he stroll nonchalantly past a luxury seaside hotel crawling with German officers and hop on a tram—just another tipsy young Dutchman on his way home from a long night of partying. (Tazelaar’s exploit inspired the opening scene in the James Bond film Goldfinger, in which Bond goes ashore wearing a tuxedo under his wet suit.)
Tazelaar and Roelfzema, as it happened, were less intimidated by the Germans than they were by their queen. When he first met Wilhelmina, Roelfzema recalled being totally dumbstruck. For his entire life, the remote, aloof monarch of the Netherlands had been “the focal point of my existence,” as she had been for other Dutch citizens. The fact that she was also a human being, he said, had never entered his mind. She, in turn, was initially shy and awkward with him, trying to reach out but having little experience in doing so. Ever since her childhood, Wilhelmina later noted, she had been afraid that “people would laugh at me if I showed too much feeling for them.” That feeling never quite left her, reinforcing her reserved demeanor toward others. But in London, she made a determined effort to unbend a little, especially with young Engelandvaarders such as Roelfzema.
As the months passed, he and the queen became closer, engaging in several discussions about wartime conditions in Holland. “I got the impression that she enjoyed our informal, democratic relationship,” Roelfzema observed, “and liked to experiment with the ways of common folks.” During one conversation, she took out a pack of English cigarettes and asked him if he’d like to smoke. Roelfzema was astounded. “Everyone in Holland knew of the Queen’s fierce antagonism to smoking,” he said. “Cigarettes were not even allowed inside any palace where she lived.” But she continued to hold out the pack, and he finally took a cigarette. As he did so, he realized the significance of her action: “That was the past; she had done with it. She knew how to behave like ordinary people now, and she would no longer inflict her personal preferences on them.”
WHILE WILHELMINA AND HAAKON came into their own during their London exile, the opposite was true for Czechoslovakia’s Edvard Beneš, whose sojourn in the British capital was, at least for the first two years of the war, an exercise in frustration and humiliation.
President of Czechoslovakia at the time of the Munich agreement, Beneš had resigned under German pressure five days after the pact was signed. He had traveled first to Britain and then to the United States, where he had taught sociology at the University of Chicago. When war approached in the summer of 1939, he had returned to London, arguing that because Germany had taken over the whole country a few months before, he should be reinstated as Czechoslovakia’s rightful leader.*2 While the Czech government that had succeeded his regime was initially legal, it had forfeited any legitimacy, he contended, by becoming a docile front for German rule.
Beneš and his associates, including Jan Masaryk, the former Czech minister to Britain, asked the British government to recognize them as their nation’s government in exile. Neville Chamberlain and his subordinates were appalled at the thought. Not only did they refuse the request, they told Beneš they would not grant him political asylum unless he promised to refrain from all political activity while in Britain.
The government then did its best to forget about the country it had betrayed and about Beneš, who was tucked away, out of sight and certainly out of mind, in a small redbrick house in suburban London. “The men of Munich had to find a scapegoat for what they had done, and Dr. Beneš was the obvious choice,” said Robert Bruce Lockhart, a former British diplomat and journalist who served as an unofficial liaison between Beneš and Whitehall. The government’s response, Lockhart added, was “a tragic illustration of the dislike that men feel for those whom they have wronged.” Having ordered Beneš not to fight at the time of Munich, British officials now blamed him for giving in to Hitler too easily.
For a veteran statesman like Beneš, this cold-shoulder attitude was both a shock and a personal affront. Along with Tomáš Masaryk, he had been instrumental in the creation of Czechoslovakia after World War I, convincing the victorious Allied powers to grant it independence. He then had helped transform it into the most industrialized, democratic, and prosperous state in eastern Europe.
The man who once had lived in an ornate fifteenth-century palace in Prague was now confined to a cramped bungalow in the London suburb of Putney. On the rare occasions when he and his associates were invited to official diplomatic dinners and other gatherings, they were given the least important seats and stood last in every receiving line. On Sunday evenings, when the BBC played the national anthems of the Allied nations whose governments were in London, the Czech anthem was omitted.
When Winston Churchill succeeded Chamberlain in May 1940, Beneš and the Czechs in London had high hopes that, as an outspoken opponent of Munich, the new prime minister would help them. The following month, Churchill did acknowledge Beneš and his ministers as the provisional government in exile, but he failed to grant the full recognition that would give them equal status with the other European exile governments.
Thus the Czechs’ humiliation continued. At the first inter-Allied conference, Czechoslovakia was ranked last because of its government’s provisional status. On the country’s Independence Day in 1940, the only Allied government officials to attend a reception at the Czech government offices were Robert Bruce Lockhart and the Norwegian chargé d’affaires.
As the provisional government embarked on a long, arduous struggle for full recognition, the reserved, austere Beneš stayed in the background, giving way to Jan Masaryk, now the provisional foreign minister, who launched a masterful campaign to publicize the Czech cause. In his relentless lobbying of British officials, several of whom were his close friends, Masaryk cajoled, wheedled, and argued. He claimed that Beneš’s resignation as president had been invalid because it had been coerced by the Nazis. He contended that the Munich agreement was illegal because it had been signed without Czech approval. Pointing out that his country’s pilots and troops were now fighting under British command, he sardonically asked if the deaths of several Czech fliers during the Battle of Britain should be considered as provisional as their government.
Czech president Edvard Beneš speaking with Czech airmen in Britain.
When Churchill inspected Czech troops at their training camp near London in April 1941, Masaryk took full advantage of his visit. Knowing that Churchill was in the depths of gloom over recent British military setbacks, he suggested that the soldiers learn several British patriotic songs before the prime minister came. After the inspection, as Churchill stepped into his car to return to London, the troops broke into a rousing rendition of “Rule Britannia.” That stirring paean to British imperial might had its desired effect: Churchill, his eyes welling with tears, left his car and sang along. That day, when Beneš again brought up the matter of full recognition, Churchill declared, “This must be put right. I’ll see to it.” Three months later, with the strong endorsement of Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden,*3 Britain formally recognized Beneš and his ministers as Czechoslovakia’s official government in exile. In August 1942, the British government withdrew its signature from the Munich Agreement, thus declaring it invalid.
Although Beneš had finally got what he wanted, he never lost what associates called his “Munich complex.” Haunted by the British and French betrayal of his country and by his own humiliation, he became increasingly obsessed with gaining prestige and influence for himself and Czechoslovakia—aims that were understandable but that would nonetheless lead to short-term tragedy and a disastrous long-term future for his nation.
FOR CHARLES DE GAULLE, prestige and influence were key goals, too. More important, however, was independence. Even though de Gaulle and his men could never have survived without British support, financial or otherwise, de Gaulle was determined not to give in to his hosts’ various wishes and demands. His unofficial motto, in the words of one observer, was “Extreme weakness requires extreme intransigence.” Two months after he arrived in Britain, he declared, “I am no man’s subordinate. I have one mission and one mission only, that of carrying on the struggle for my country’s liberation.”
As difficult as the British found the Czechs and other European exiles on occasion, none infuriated them more than the Free French and their haughty leader. Throughout the war, de Gaulle’s headquarters was the scene of constant, often violent intrigues, rivalries, and power struggles. United only by their allegiance to de Gaulle, his followers in London came from all points of the French political spectrum, reflecting the deep political and social divisions that had plagued France for generations.
“All the French émigrés are at loggerheads,” Harold Nicolson, then a junior minister in Churchill’s government, wrote in his diary in September 1940. “All of them come to see me and say how ghastly everyone else is.” As one of de Gaulle’s colleagues put it, “One had to be a little mad to be Free French.”
With his aloof, autocratic manner, de Gaulle only added to the polarization of the tens of thousands of French exiles in London—the comparative few who had escaped there after France’s fall and a much larger group that had been there since well before the war. The prewar French community, which contained numerous bankers, industrialists, and merchants, tended to be pro-Pétain and Vichy. But even those who wanted their country to stay in the fight had little faith or confidence in this obscure general, who, though never having been elected to anything, insisted he was the sole leader of undefeated France. “We were constantly being surprised by the ill will, the distrust that he aroused among the most outstanding members of the French community in London,” remarked one British official. “In our country it was not with the British but chiefly with the French that he had trouble.”
Several leading French political figures, meanwhile, decided to go to the United States rather than put up with the prickly general. They included Jean Monnet, a top economist and diplomat who had worked to promote economic cooperation between Britain and France before the French defeat. Shortly after arriving in London in the summer of 1940, Monnet left for Washington, where he became a key economic adviser to President Roosevelt.
Even de Gaulle’s most loyal supporters were put off at times by his notorious rudeness and arrogance. Not infrequently, a subordinate recalled, those who wanted to join the Free French ranks “were received and interviewed in such a way that they came out with their confidence shattered.” One French naval officer was so disillusioned by his icy reception at Carlton Gardens that he returned to France and eventually became a top leader of the resistance.
Nonetheless, for all the political Sturm und Drang swirling around de Gaulle, young Frenchmen continued to enlist in the Free French military, with more than 7,500 in uniform by the end of August 1940. The movement acquired even greater momentum when three French colonies in Equatorial Africa—Chad, the Cameroons, and the French Congo—abandoned Vichy and joined de Gaulle. Although thinly populated and lacking in natural resources, those colonies provided him with a territorial base outside Britain—the first step on the long and extraordinarily difficult road to becoming an independent government entity.
Winston Churchill took notice. Unlike many in his administration, the prime minister remained a stalwart champion of de Gaulle and his followers throughout most of 1940. The prime minister was particularly grateful to de Gaulle for his subdued public reaction when, under Churchill’s orders, the British destroyed much of the French fleet in the North African port of Mers-el-Kebir to keep it out of German hands. More than 1,200 French sailors were killed in that July 3 attack. Although privately sharing the shock and outrage of his countrymen, de Gaulle told the French in a BBC broadcast that while he decried the assault, he understood the need for it.
Shortly after de Gaulle acquired his foothold in Equatorial Africa, Churchill demonstrated his support for him by decreeing that it was time to bring the Free French into the war. The move was inspired by a telegram in midsummer 1940 from the British consul general in Dakar, the Vichy-held capital of French West Africa. The consul argued that a British–Free French show of force in Dakar might well prompt an anti-Vichy uprising by French troops stationed there.
For Churchill, it was a tempting idea. He wanted—and needed—a successful Allied military offensive as soon as possible, and this one might be relatively easy to pull off. Moreover, if it succeeded, it would ensure that Germany would be denied Dakar, with its strong fortress and important naval base. A port city on the far west coast of the continent, Dakar was the closest point in Africa to the Americas. In the view of the nervous Franklin Roosevelt and his top military leaders, it was like “a loaded pistol pointing across the Atlantic”—a possible staging area for the transportation of German troops to the east coast of Brazil and then northward to the Panama Canal.
As Churchill envisioned the operation, the Royal Navy would transport British and Free French troops to Dakar, where de Gaulle would be installed “to rally the French in West Africa to his cause.” But when he proposed the idea to de Gaulle in August 1940, the general was initially reluctant, noting the lack of any concrete evidence that French officers and troops in Dakar were in fact inclined to support him. He finally succumbed to Churchill’s insistent cajoling, but with one caveat: if his men met any opposition there, “he would not consider going on with the operation.”
Once de Gaulle had signed on, however, he was given no say in the operations’s planning, which turned out to be as botched, in the words of one historian, as “the worst muddles of the Norwegian campaign” five months earlier. The British had acquired almost no intelligence about Dakar, its coastal defenses, or the strength of the Vichy forces there. The expedition’s commanders had no experience in working with the troops assigned to them, who in turn had been given no training in landing operations. The great flotilla of ships envisioned by Churchill was whittled down to two old battleships, four cruisers, and a few destroyers and transports.
There were also several major security leaks. French officers had been overheard offering toasts “to Dakar” in several restaurants in London and the expedition’s embarkation point at Liverpool. British intelligence officers had talked openly about the operation’s destination when gathering information about Dakar at London travel agencies; so had Liverpool dockworkers when loading the expedition’s ships. Assault landing craft had been trucked across England and then loaded onto transports, with no effort to disguise them.
The mission’s chance of success, hardly auspicious to begin with, became even slimmer when, a few days after the troops had sailed from Liverpool on August 31, five Vichy warships steamed from the southern French port of Toulon to Dakar, undetected and unchallenged by the British fleet at Gibraltar. When Churchill and his military chiefs were informed of this latest difficulty, they wanted to cancel the undertaking at once, but de Gaulle and the expedition’s British commanders, now close to their target, strongly objected. The War Office reluctantly gave them permission to proceed.
As the expedition neared Dakar on September 23, de Gaulle broadcast an appeal to its military forces and other inhabitants to rise up against Vichy and join the Free French cause. In response, the shore batteries of the fortress and the guns of the warships in the harbor opened up on the Anglo-French fleet, seriously damaging two cruisers. Less than forty-eight hours later, after it had become abundantly clear that the French at Dakar had no intention of switching sides, de Gaulle and the British naval commander scrubbed the mission.
Bungled from beginning to end, the Dakar expedition proved to be yet another humiliating military fiasco. It was ridiculed by Vichy and German propaganda and lambasted by the British press: the Daily Mirror declared that it marked “the lowest depths of imbecility to which we have sunk.” Yet although British officials were almost entirely to blame for the failure, much of the condemnation was aimed at de Gaulle and the Free French, largely because of their indiscreet security breaches before the mission was launched. In fact, the breaches, both Free French and British, played no part in what happened at Dakar; Vichy officials did not know about the expedition until it approached the port. That, however, made no difference to de Gaulle’s many critics in Whitehall and elsewhere.
Churchill, however, remained steadfast. In response to calls from several British lawmakers to cut off ties with the Free French, he declared to the House of Commons that his government had “no intention whatever of abandoning the cause of General de Gaulle until it is merged, as merged it will be, in the larger cause of France.” De Gaulle, for his part, refrained from casting any public blame on the British. Thanks to his restraint and Churchill’s vigorous support, the attacks died down, and the furor eventually faded away.
Nonetheless, the collapse of de Gaulle and Churchill’s first joint military venture had highly damaging long-term consequences. De Gaulle was devastated. Both he and his movement desperately needed a success to prove themselves to their critics; instead, this highly public failure only reinforced the naysayers’ skepticism. It was a profound personal humiliation for the proud, thin-skinned general, and some of those around him feared he might try to kill himself. “After Dakar, he was never entirely happy again,” recalled one of his top lieutenants.
De Gaulle’s detractors in the British government, meanwhile, claimed that the Free French’s indiscreet toasts about Dakar proved that they couldn’t be trusted with secret information. The security lapse became a pretext for not informing de Gaulle and his men about future military operations on French territory. The failure of the mission also gave added impetus to the efforts of those in Whitehall who were still eager to establish closer ties with Vichy.
Indeed, secret discussions between Britain and Vichy had begun just a few months after the fall of France—a fact revealed by the American newspaper correspondent Helen Kirkpatrick in late 1940. The talks were sanctioned by Churchill, who, for all his efforts to further de Gaulle’s cause, was unwilling to give up hope of persuading Vichy to abandon its subservience to Germany and transfer its military forces and empire to the Allies.
De Gaulle was deeply upset, of course, when he learned of the talks. It was obvious to him that his efforts to establish himself and the Free French as a political as well as military entity had failed, at least for now. He warned Churchill and his government that the discussions were bound to collapse, as they ultimately did.
General Edward Spears, Churchill’s liaison to de Gaulle, took note of how “the intolerable strain of constantly recurring rebuffs and disappointments” was worsening the general’s already formidable temper and sharpening his suspicions of the British. “During those days, he was like a man who had been skinned alive,” another observer remarked.
“I do not think I shall ever get on with les Anglais,” de Gaulle stormed to Spears. “You are all the same, exclusively concentrated upon your own interests and business, quite insensitive to the requirements of others….Do you think I am interested in England winning the war? I am not. I am only interested in France’s victory.” When a shocked Spears replied, “They are all the same,” de Gaulle shot back, “Not at all.”
By the end of 1940, de Gaulle’s close relationship with Churchill was beginning to fray—a deterioration that accelerated throughout the difficult days of 1941. The British prime minister knew perfectly well why de Gaulle behaved as he did: “He felt it was essential…that, although an exile, dependent upon our protection…he be rude to the British, to prove to French eyes that he was not a British puppet.” Churchill’s insights into de Gaulle’s personality, however, did not make it any easier for him to bear the Frenchman’s escalating outbursts.
He finally reached the end of his patience in the summer of 1941 when de Gaulle gave an interview to an American newspaper correspondent in which, for the first time, his complaints about Britain included a personal disparagement of Churchill himself. Deeply hurt by de Gaulle’s seeming lack of appreciation for all he had done for him and his cause, the prime minister erupted in rage, writing to Anthony Eden, “He has clearly gone off his head.” He ordered members of his Cabinet to cut off all relations with de Gaulle and the Free French and barred them from making BBC broadcasts. “De Gaulle’s attitude is deplorable and his pronouncements, private and public, are intolerable,” John Colville, one of Churchill’s private secretaries, wrote in his diary. “The PM is sick to death of him.”
After De Gaulle claimed he had been misquoted in the interview, Churchill calmed down and rescinded his bans against the general and his supporters. But neither leader ever fully forgave the other, and their conflicts would take on increasingly operatic dimensions until the war’s end.
AS THE CONFLICT BETWEEN the British and de Gaulle deepened, the other exile groups paid close attention. Since their escape to Britain, the various European governments, with their separate and unique interests, had contended with one another for their host country’s favor. But as the war ground on, they also began to see the advantages of forging tighter bonds. Haunted by their countries’ prewar powerlessness and by the failure of neutrality, a number of European officials in London set out to explore the idea of gaining greater security and strength for their small nations through a possible European union. “A genuine feeling of solidarity developed between the governments and their heads of state,” Queen Wilhelmina recalled.
The Europeans’ need for greater unity was underscored in 1941 by the addition of two powerful countries—the United States and the Soviet Union—to the antifascist alliance. With those titans now committed, the early closeness between Great Britain and occupied Europe gave way to great power politics.