CHAPTER 7
Soldiers of the Empire
The third-floor corner office that General de Gaulle moved into at St. Stephen’s House offered a splendid view of the Thames River and its embankment, but was otherwise austere and bleak, containing only a white-wood table, a telephone, and four chairs. His first act was to pin a map of France to the wall. Next to it he put a map of the world. Like maps adorning thousands of classrooms around the globe, it showed the vast expanse of the British Empire in red and the territories of the French Empire, the world’s second largest, in purple. The French Empire stretched across the midriff of Africa from Dakar on the Atlantic to the Gulf of Aden, filled much of the eastern shore of the Mediterranean, and spilled into the exotic lands of the Indochinese peninsula in Southeast Asia. These fabled lands, along with islands scattered around the globe — from St. Pierre off the coast of Canada to Tahiti in the South Pacific — were rich in resources and soldiers for the Empire. Metropolitan France was gone, but de Gaulle saw the road to Paris as running through these territories. To him, they were an integral part of France and he intended to rally them to the Free French cause. The French army commanded by Vichy, reduced to a mere corporal’s guard under the demobilization terms of the Armistice and with two million of its men in prisoner-of-war camps, no longer posed a threat to German supremacy. The French navy, anchored idly at Toulon, with Admiral François Darlan dithering on the question of where its loyalties lay, seemed more likely to become an agent of German intimidation than a shield against further aggression. In France, de Gaulle had as yet no great following and no solid reputation. It was in the distant lands of the Empire, he reasoned, that Vichy’s sway could be most readily challenged. If he could rally the Empire, that would change the end game in his favour.
For all his ability to detect profound shifts in the military and economic positions of France and the other countries of Europe, doubts about the future of colonialism would have been incomprehensible to de Gaulle. He was as anchored as Winston Churchill to the belief that empires won by stealth and struggle were the rightful property of their masters. It was only natural that those masters were whites, comfortably ensconced in handsome buildings in Europe — at least in peacetime — guided by God’s will, and certain that the destinies of distant lands were their proper province. It was for this reason he had insisted that Britain “guarantee the re-establishment of the frontiers of Metropolitan France and of the French Empire.”[1]
Churchill agreed only to the “restoration of the independence and greatness of France.” Coming from a man who would famously say he had not become prime minister to “preside over the dissolution of the British Empire,” this was the least that could be expected of him.
De Gaulle put his ambition for the Empire before one of the first meetings of his French National Committee at St. Stephen’s House on July 15, 1940. All the early converts and the key members of his staff were there: Lieutenant Geoffroy de Courcel, now de Gaulle’s chef du cabinet; Elisabeth de Miribel, who worked from a small table set up in a hallway; Captain Tissier, who de Gaulle had just made chief of staff; the priest Thierry d’Argenlieu, soon to go with de Gaulle on hazardous overseas forays; Captain Philippe de Hauteclocque, now using the name Leclerc to protect his family back in France; the jurist René Cassin, in charge of legal affairs and justice; Jean Monnett’s former aide René Pleven, who had taken charge of finances; Maurice Schumann, now making nightly broadcasts back to France; and André Dewavrin, who would never forget the icy reception he’d received from de Gaulle after he’d found his way to London.[2]
“Good day, I shall see you again soon,” de Gaulle had said after a two-minute grilling that ended with Dewavrin’s appointment as head of the Free French intelligence department. Dewavrin, or “Colonel Passy” as he would become known, was already sending agents into France. He recorded the general’s remarks:
If we wish to put France into the war, and if we wish tor represent our country’s interest adequately both with regard to our Allies and to the French in France and abroad whose eyes are upon us, it is of the very first importance that the seat of the French government that is carrying on the struggle should be on French soil. That is why I have decided — and the information I have tells me it is possible — to go to Dakar and there set up the capital of the Empire at war.[3]
Before de Gaulle could put such an ambitious scheme into action, he would need the support of France’s overseas administrators, mostly men of military background. They held office at the pleasure of the French government. The question was, where and what was now the French government? To men posted far from the precincts of Paris, the French government had to be that which had signed the Armistice with Germany and Italy and was now established at Vichy, under the leadership of Marshall Pétain. To de Gaulle, the État français that Pétain had erected was an illegitimate offspring of the Third Republic. The British agreed, declaring that France was no longer an independent country. De Gaulle sent out a stream of telegrams and letters to colonial administrators aimed at convincing them his Free French were the true heirs of the immortal France. “We are France itself,” de Gaulle told René Cassin in their discussions about the legal framework they were attempting to create.[4]
Not everyone in the French colonial system was won over to this view. Some saw de Gaulle as a tool of the British, and from the beginning the French governors of Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia resisted the blandishments of both him and the British, opting to stay with Vichy. One factor in their reasoning was the continued diplomatic recognition extended to Vichy by the Soviet Union, the United States, Canada, and the Vatican. President Roosevelt relied on the advice of long-time State Department functionary Robert Murphy in selecting an old friend, Admiral William Leahy, as successor to Ambassador Bullitt.
The shuffle of diplomatic cards included one dealt by Winston Churchill when he asked Canada to keep a chargé d’affaires, Pierre Dupuy, accredited to Vichy. He would become Churchill’s “window upon a courtyard to which we had no other access.” When Pétain told Dupuy that he might have to hand over the French fleet to the Germans — “if I am offered a satisfactory compensation” — the Canadian promptly reported this to Churchill, with the advice that the British should try to get de Gaulle to stop attacking the French who were faithful to Vichy. Churchill rejected the idea, telling Dupuy he “was not going to ‘card’ his friends and make them enemies in the hope of making them friends.”[5]
A week after speaking of his scheme to set up an Empire capital at Dakar, de Gaulle moved the Free French from St. Stephen’s House to larger and more comfortable premises at No. 4 Carlton Gardens, the one-time home of nineteenth-century British prime minister Lord Palmerston. The fact Palmerston had been a bitter enemy of France did not disturb the new occupants. De Gaulle took a main-floor corner office in the elegant four-storey house that filled a pleasant terrace overlooking St. James’s Park.
It was here he received word that General Georges Catroux, the governor general of Indochina, fired by Vichy after refusing to bow to Japanese demands, was coming to London to join Free France. De Gaulle and Catroux had shared a German prisoner-of-war camp in the First World War and de Gaulle anxiously awaited his old comrade’s arrival. As a four-star lieutenant general, Catroux was superior to de Gaulle, but, he said, his willingness to serve under him was “self-evident.” Another governor who switched to Free France — but who, like Catroux, was unable to carry his colony with him — was General Paul Legentilhomme of French Somaliland, in East Africa. More decisive results came from the Pacific where the New Hebrides, New Caledonia, and Tahiti quickly lined up on de Gaulle’s side. Their commitment buoyed his spirits and would have played a part in his decision to issue a new appeal: this time to the Empire. It was addressed to the governors of the colonies, but it was actually aimed at the white colonists who were in a position to persuade recalcitrant officials to part from Vichy. “If necessary I shall call upon the people,” de Gaulle declared, hinting broadly at revolutionary action.
The people he was speaking of did not include the native populations, yet it was from that source that most of the Empire’s soldiers would be drawn. De Gaulle was too late to recruit the two thousand black soldiers on duty in the Ivory Coast colony; they had been sent next door to Britain’s Gold Coast* where the commander of the British detachment so admired them that he integrated them into his own force.
The first big breakthrough had come from another black quarter: one Félix Eboué, a man highly trained in the French colonial system who had become the governor of the Central African colony of Chad.[6] He telegraphed de Gaulle from Fort Lamy to say he and his military advisors were rallying to Free France. By securing Chad, which shared a border with Italian-controlled Libya, de Gaulle now had a direct line of attack on the enemy.
The time was ripe to grab for other colonies, and on August 7 a Free French mission that included René Pleven and Major Philippe de Hauteclocque Leclerc flew out of London bound for Lagos, in the British colony of Nigeria. Of all the African territories, the neighbouring Cameroon, a former German territory, offered the most promising prospect; a final victory by Hitler would bring back much detested German laws abolished at the time of the French takeover in 1918. Lerclerc took twenty volunteers inland in a convoy of three canoes and reached the key outpost of Douala in a driving rain. There, with Leclerc appointing himself a colonel and governor of the colony, the Free French took over the garrison. Lerclerc posted a proclamation asserting that the Cameroon was “determined to continue the struggle together with the Allies, under the orders of General de Gaulle.”[7] His takeover, coinciding with the shift of power in Chad and the rallying of neighbouring French Congo to the Free French cause, would take on legendary status as part of the Three Glorious Days of August 26–28, 1940, when the Gaullists won their first African territories. It was time to take aim at Dakar, the capital of Senegal. Capture it, and Free France would not only possess a great city facing out on the Atlantic, but a capital worthy of the Empire.
Moving men about the Empire like pawns on a chessboard was easier for de Gaulle than meeting the social and political prerequisites of life in a wartime London teeming with diplomats, politicians, high-ranking military officers, and refugees from all over Europe. It should not surprise us that his reserved manner and resolute sense of self would have ill served him socially. Winston Churchill recognized that while de Gaulle had been accepted by the British public, his image needed further polishing — if for no other reason than to underscore the wise choice the prime minister had made. As a keen observer of the press, Churchill knew the value of cultivating public curiosity about someone of the stature of de Gaulle. He arranged for a five-hundred-pound fee to be paid to Richmond Temple, one of the United Kingdom’s most skillful public relations men, to burnish the general’s image. De Gaulle growled that “Churchill wants to promote me like a brand of soap.”[8] He refused to have his children included in official photographs taken by Cecil Beaton, the photographer of the British royal family, but did accede to Temple’s request to write a short description of his purpose and aims. Later published in a Cairo newspaper, it offers a revealing insight into de Gaulle’s self-assessment of character:
I am a free Frenchman. I believe in God and in the future of my country. 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. I solemnly declare that I am not attached to any political party, nor bound to any politicians whatsoever, either of the right, the centre or the left. I have only one aim: to set France free.[9]
Mary Borden, the novelist wife of General Spears, did not need a publicist to gain access to de Gaulle. She financed a hospital for the Free French in the English countryside and saw de Gaulle often. She wrote that he was “like a man who had been skinned alive … the slightest contact with friendly, well-meaning people got him on the raw to such an extent that he wanted to bite, as a dog that has been run over will bite any would-be friend who comes to its rescue.”[10]
Always the soldier, de Gaulle paid a good deal of attention to his military wardrobe. For years, he had patronized the tailor shop of S.C. Johnson, an English tailor in Paris. Discovering that Johnson had gotten safely back to London, de Gaulle promptly ordered a new uniform. Johnson had to purloin three yards of khaki from a bolt consigned to high-ranking British officers.[11]
By now, something of a gastronome, although a light imbiber of wines, de Gaulle ate well during his London days despite food rationing. After a busy morning at Carleton Gardens, he would be driven to the Connaught Hotel where lunch was usually laid on for three or four guests. It was at these lunches that de Gaulle found relaxation. He commented jovially on the latest war developments and often digressed into the history of French food, jokingly asking how one could govern a country that made two hundred and forty-six different kinds of cheese. By three o’clock, cigars smoked and coffee finished, he’d walk the mile back to the office via Berkeley Square and Piccadilly. On other occasions, there was a meal with good company at the Royal Automobile Club, or perhaps the Savoy or Ritz hotels or the Cavalry Club. Weekends were often spent at Chequers, the country home of Prime Minister Churchill, where the entertainment sometimes consisted of fireworks displays using military rockets. One misfired and unleashed a twenty-three pound projectile that exploded within a few feet of General de Gaulle. Churchill promptly increased the budget to perfect the device.[12]
The summer of 1940 would be remembered for the Battle of Britain and the Luftwaffe’s intensive bombing of London. The first great air battle took place over the English Channel on July 10 and by September the Royal Air Force had vanquished the German attackers. If the air assault had been intended to destroy Britain’s morale or its ability to resist invasion, it was a complete failure.
The de Gaulle family did not escape the consequences of the nightly bombings. Anne huddled in her bed, hands clapped over her ears, as bombs fell on the aerodrome near their Pettswood home. The scream of sirens, the barking of dogs, the shudders of exploding bombs, and the smell of smoke from a burning cottage at the end of the street terrified the little girl. She was twelve, but her mother knew she could not count her age in years. Yvonne de Gaulle insisted the family move to a safer location, and when she found a place for rent near the convent of the Sisters of Zion, where Elisabeth was attending school, she eagerly packed everyone up for the long haul almost to the Welsh border. Their new home consisted of three rude brick cottages, lacking indoor sanitation or electricity, known as Gadlas Hall in the village of Ellesmere, halfway between Birmingham and Liverpool. But it was quiet and safe, although the fact it was eight hours’ from London by train meant de Gaulle could visit no more than once a month. He took a small apartment at 15 Grosvenor Square. It was one of the choice locations in Mayfair and he continued to eat most of his meals at the Connaught Hotel. General and Lady Spears had de Gaulle to their home that Christmas. She later wrote that he so charmed their young son that the boy wanted to volunteer to fight by the general’s side.[13]
The Free French successes in Africa set off alarms in Vichy and sent warning signals to Dakar. The Vichy loyalist Pierre Boisson, who had been governor of Equatorial Africa, was moved to Dakar to organize its defences. Boisson found a city protected by several aircraft squadrons and a naval flotilla that included the battleship Richelieu, recently escaped from France. De Gaulle knew Dakar would not be an easy target. He planned to land an invasion force some distance away and march on the city, gaining recruits as he moved forward. When he talked over the plan with Winston Churchill in the Cabinet room in Downing Street, the prime minister made it clear he thought the scheme far too cautious. Churchill “paced up and down, talking with animation.” He had a more daring idea, and imagined for de Gaulle a drowsy Dakar awakened at dawn by the sight of an immense fleet gathered in its harbour: A small ship bearing de Gaulle envoys would be sent to parley with the governor. He might “for honour’s sake” fire a few shots while British and Free French planes flew over the town dropping leaflets. “But he will not go further. And that evening he will dine with you and drink to the final victory.” It was an eloquent appeal, and de Gaulle bought into it on one condition: that the general go there himself to lead the assault.[14]
Operation Menace began August 31 with the sailing from Liverpool of a dozen vessels, including the British aircraft carrier Ark Royal and two old battleships. De Gaulle, General Spears, and Commander Thierry d’Argenlieu were on board the Westernland, a Dutch transport now flying the French Tricolour. Miraculously, the Vichy French had no inkling of the operation, despite almost non-existent security. De Gaulle himself had shopped in Simpson’s in Piccadily for tropical outfits “for a trip to West Africa” and a British officer had wandered into a London map shop requesting a map of Dakar. British intelligence was hardly more effective. A squadron of Vichy ships from Toulon slipped through the Straits of Gibraltar without being challenged and succeeded in reaching Dakar.[15]
When the Anglo-French force anchored off Dakar on September 23, the scenario was hardly as Churchill had forecast. An unseasonable fog made the fleet invisible from shore; there would be no intimidating sight confronting Dakar’s defenders. At six o’clock, de Gaulle addressed the city by radio, declaring his “friendly intentions.” French planes sent aloft from the Ark Royal to drop leaflets attracted unexpected fire from the ground. Despite this, de Gaulle sent a launch bearing d’Argenlieu and several other officers to shore with a letter for Governor Boisson. When the port officer on duty told them he had orders to arrest them, they returned hurriedly to the launch. Before they had gone more than a few metres, they were raked by machine-gun fire. It caught d’Argenlieu in the leg, and he and the others were hauled back aboard the Westernland, bleeding and in shock. An attempt was made that afternoon to send a landing party ashore, but it was beaten off with heavy casualties. De Gaulle passed the night “on tenterhooks.”[16] In the morning, a telegram from Churchill was filled with “astonishment and irritation” that the attack had not gone forward. De Gaulle sent a fresh demand for surrender which was turned down. Vichy shore batteries, joined by the Richelieu, opened fire with deadly accuracy. By the end of the day, the Anglo-French flotilla was in serious trouble. The battleship Resolution was severely damaged and had to be taken in tow. Four aircraft had been lost and a destroyer and two submarines sunk. The force retreated to the British colony of Freetown, its mission to take Dakar a failure.
The days that followed were among the cruelest in de Gaulle’s life. “I went through what a man must feel when an earthquake shakes his house brutally and he receives on his head the rain of tiles falling from the roof.” To make things worse, from London he heard “a tempest of anger” and from Washington, “a hurricane of sarcasms.”[17] The fiasco squelched any hope of healing the breach that had developed with the United States. President Roosevelt looked on Vichy as the rightful government of the defeated country, and he now saw de Gaulle as an ineffective bumbler, a mere pretender for power. Geoffroy de Courcel saw a man “deeply disturbed.”[18]
De Gaulle told General Spears he would reflect on his future overnight. He would either continue to work with the British, or in view of the catastrophic failure at Dakar, retire to Canada as a private citizen.[19] He also, according to one authority, considered “blowing out my brains.”[20] The night was long, de Gaulle‘s narrow cabin was stiflingly hot, and he got little sleep in a bunk that was too short for his long legs. By daybreak he had reached his decision. He was convinced he still had the support of the Free French and that everyone had been “hardened by the hostile attitude of Vichy.”[21] His choice was clear: “The game continues … we shall see how it turns out.”[22]
De Gaulle stayed with the convoy only as far as Duala, the port capital of the Cameroon. After being acclaimed by an aroused crowd of settlers and natives, he set out for Fort Lamy, the capital of Chad, where he luckily escaped injury in the crash landing of his airplane. He had a meeting with Felix Éboué and at last met General Catroux, who had come from Hanoi to put himself at de Gaulle’s disposal. Then it was on to Brazzaville in the French Congo, where de Gaulle set up the Council for the Defense of the Empire. The soldiers of Free France were on the march; the Empire would live again. Somewhere on that trip, de Gaulle contracted malaria, a recurrent illness for which his doctor would prescribe a diet of soft boiled eggs.
In a letter to his wife, de Gaulle put the best face he could on things. He admitted Dakar “was not a success” and explained that he did not want to fight a “pitched battle” between Frenchmen. “I withdrew my forces in time to prevent it. For the moment everything is upside down. But my faithful followers remain faithful and I have great hopes for the future.”[23]
On his return to London in mid-November, de Gaulle faced a discouraging mess. Recruitment had fallen off again, and the British press, normally friendly to de Gaulle’s efforts, was in full cry. One of London’s shrillest papers, the Daily Mirror, wrote of “gross miscalculation, muddled dash, hasty withdrawal, wishful thinking and half-measures.” Winston Churchill delivered a carefully rehearsed speech in French over the BBC, reminding Frenchmen that Hitler’s goal was “nothing less than the complete wiping out of the French nation and the disintegration of its whole life and future.” Yet he now had his own doubts about de Gaulle. Churchill told General Catroux during a stopover in London that “the Free French movement needs to be led, and I believe you ought to assume its leadership.”
The complicated game of leading a cause that was not yet a government was becoming bogged down in intrigue and strife between three factions — those who had chosen to stick with Vichy, those who had declared for de Gaulle, and a critically important element that refused to align with either side. In this group were such figures as the celebrated author André Maurois, and economic policy maker Jean Monnet. “You are wrong,” Monnet wrote to de Gaulle, “to set up an organization which might appear in France as though created under the protection of England.”[24]
More often, the biggest damage stemmed from conspiracies within the Free French camp, caused by petty jealousies and rival ambitions. Then came the first row between de Gaulle and Churchill, over the arrest by the British of Admiral Muselier, accused of having betrayed the Dakar mission by leaking details to Vichy. De Gaulle was convinced it was a frame-up and was ready to cut off relations with Britain if the admiral was not released. Before he could do that, the British realized they had acted on forged documents (presumably prepared by the admiral’s enemies at Carleton Gardens), and Muselier was freed. Churchill apologized to de Gaulle the next day, but it was not something that could be easily forgotten. De Gaulle continued to accept invitations for weekends at Chequers, however, and he was there when Churchill awakened him at dawn on March 9, 1941, “literally dancing with joy,” to tell him the Americans had passed a Lend-Lease Act that would speed the delivery of war material to Britain.[25]
By now, it was clear to Charles de Gaulle that his Free French did not figure highly in President Roosevelt’s calculations about the future course of the war. Roosevelt was well-acquainted with French culture and spoke the language passably well, but he had lost faith in France’s ability to survive as a world power. Still committed to keeping America out of the war, he saw the Vichy government as the legitimate inheritor of French authority and believed the United States would be best served by restraining Marshall Pétain from falling further into Hitler’s clutches. All his advisors, from Ambassador Bullitt to his new ambassador to Vichy, Admiral Leahy, and Robert Murphy, the other chief American diplomat to the French, agreed that de Gaulle was a minor figure of dictatorial ambition, backed by only a ragtag rabble with little or no support in France. Sumner Welles, the American assistant secretary of state, would put it this way: “De Gaulle’s authority is based upon a small group of followers who sometimes fight each other, and on some territories overseas.… Eighty-five percent of the Frenchmen living in the United States are not for de Gaulle.”[26] Roosevelt’s entrenched anti-colonialism gave him another reason to disdain de Gaulle’s attempts to wield the French Empire as a weapon against Vichy. In Washington, the new Vichy ambassador Gaston Henry-Haye, a member of the French Senate and the mayor of Versailles, was warmly received in the capital’s diplomatic circles. He waged a well-financed anti-Gaullist campaign, drawing liberally on funds from a $250 million stock of gold that France had deposited in the United States before the war. His staff tracked the activities of pro-Gaullist French and sent reports back to Vichy that led to the cancellation of citizenship and seizure of property of those not toeing the Vichy line.
De Gaulle couldn’t understand why the United States was inclined to favour “the apostles of defeat” over those who continued to fight the Nazis. His response was to launch a counter-offensive. In May 1941, while overseeing meetings of the Empire Defense Council in Brazzaville, de Gaulle sent a telegram to René Pleven in London instructing him to lead a special mission to Washington: “In view of the almost belligerent attitude of the United States toward the collaboration between Vichy and Germany which is becoming more apparent each day, and the special economic conditions of our colonies in Africa and the Pacific, the moment has arrived for us to establish relations with the United States.”
Pleven tried to enlist the former French ambassador to Washington, Alexis Léger, but Léger refused to serve “a general, however heroic, who had not received a mandate from the people.”[27] Jean Monnet offered the same excuse. Pleven managed to scratch together “five French patriots of varying backgrounds, tradition, training, and political conviction who would join forces to help their country in a time of national disaster.” Among them was Jacques de Sieyès, manager of the New York branch of Patou Perfumes and already de Gaulle’s personal delegate to the United States. Their efforts to gain economic and financial support met with only limited success.
A similar effort was underway in Canada, led by Elisabeth de Miribel, who had gone there at de Gaulle’s behest in August 1940. She was supporting herself with a part-time job as a translator at McGill University in Montreal. Mlle de Miribel was distressed to learn that opinion in the French Canadian population of Quebec strongly supported Marshall Pétain, although the Canadian prime minister, Mackenzie King, would become a staunch admirer of de Gaulle. Mlle de Miribel found French Catholics still clinging to traditions harkening back to the time of New France before the British conquest of 1763. They looked to Vichy to “remove the slightest trace” of the French Revolution and the Republic. “We regret that he (de Gaulle) is surrounded by leftists and Jews who will try to take over the country,” she was told.[28]
The attitude of English Canadians was quite different, and Mlle de Miribel encountered a warm response in Ottawa where she set up a Free French Information office.[29] For a time, she was joined by Commander d’Argenlieu, the Carmelite priest turned naval officer and survivor of the attack on his motor launch at Dakar. De Gaulle had told de Miribel by telegram that d’Argenlieu wanted to be received as a Free French naval officer, not as a religieux.[30] On d’Argenlieu’s return to London, he telegraphed de Gaulle in Brazzaville: “Canadian mission happily completed. Perfect relations established.”[31]
For Elisabeth de Miribel, the best part of the assignment was the time it allowed her to spend with the former Canadian minister to France, Georges Vanier, and his wife, Pauline. Elisabeth had met Pauline when they’d worked at the same hospital as Red Cross volunteers. Colonel Vanier was now in charge of the Quebec military district. Elisabeth’s friendship with the Vaniers became so warm it seemed as if they had adopted her. “They loved the same France as myself and served the same cause.”
Charles de Gaulle was in another corner of the French Empire — the protectorate of Syria — when he received word in Damascus on June 22, 1941, that Adolf Hitler had flung his troops into the Soviet Union, thereby extending the war to two fronts. It came as no surprise to de Gaulle. He had told Maurice Schumann a year earlier that “Hitler is thinking of the Ukraine.… He will not resist against his longing to deal with Russia and that will be the beginning of the end for him.”[32] Here was a chance for Free France to garner another ally, and de Gaulle sent René Cassin to see the Soviet ambassador in London, Ivan Maisky. As a result, the Russians withdrew their ambassador from Vichy and assigned him to the Free French, and formally recognized de Gaulle as “Leader of all the Free French.”
De Gaulle now had a new card to play and he would not hesitate to use it when the time came to offset Roosevelt’s refusal to treat the Free French as full-fledged Allies. Even the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, failed to change this. But it filled de Gaulle with confidence that the war was as good as won. He heard the news at Rodinghead House in Berkhamstead, after a walk in the woods with the Free French spy chief, André Dewavrin, “Colonel Passy,” a weekend guest of the de Gaulles. This was a more comfortable home than Gadlas Hall, and much closer to London, allowing de Gaulle to be with Yvonne and Anne more often. Listening to the excited voices on the radio tell of the Japanese attack, de Gaulle declared, “The war is finished since the outcome is known from now on.”
Yvonne rushed to the kitchen, leaving the men alone. She began to pray. “If Charles is right, then please God spare my son and all our family.” And what about after the war? “He’s always been a soldier, if he wants to stay as a leader he’ll have to become a politician. Something he’s always hated.”[33]
Just as de Gaulle feared, America’s entry into the war did little to move President Roosevelt to a more favourable view of the Free French. They were allowed to benefit from Lend-Lease arrangements, but when the United Nations (as the Allies had become known) proclaimed its Declaration vowing “complete victory,” France was not among the twenty-six nations invited to sign it. Neither had France been a signatory to the Atlantic Charter of the previous August, signed by Churchill and Roosevelt aboard a ship anchored in Placentia Bay off the coast of Newfoundland.
Something that did change as a result of the Japanese attack was the further expansion of the Japanese influence through Southeast Asia. Hong Kong, defended by unprepared and ill-equipped Canadian detachments of the Royal Rifles and Winnipeg Grenediers, fell on Christmas Day. By spring, the Japanese held the Phillipines and were threatening Australia. French Indochina had been lost even before Pearl Harbor, when Vichy had given in to Japanese demands in the fall of 1941.
One tiny corner of the French Empire that remained in dispute was the archipelago of St. Pierre and Miquelon, some four thousand kilometres from France but just twenty kilometres off the coast of Newfoundland. The islands were under the control of Vichy, and the British feared the Germans might seize its powerful radio station and use it to alert their U-Boats to the movement of Atlantic convoys. The United States, more concerned about keeping European powers from encroaching on the Western Hemisphere, had signed an accord with Vichy to maintain the status quo of the islands. General de Gaulle sided with the British and decided “to act at the first opportunity.”[34] That came when Admiral Muselier sailed with a flotilla of corvettes to Halifax to inspect the Free French submarine, Surcouf. De Gaulle intended, if he could get the approval of Winston Churchill, to send Muselier on a secret mission to seize the islands. “We would see no objection; indeed we would prefer it,” back came the answer. Churchill deplored Vichy’s use of the St. Pierre radio to spread “lies and poison.”
Muselier, a stickler for protocol, thought he should discuss the scheme with the Canadians first, and after docking in Halifax, he took the train to Ottawa. The Canadians referred the issue to Washington and when President Roosevelt heard about it, he exploded. The American Secretary of State, Cordell Hull, was livid. Such an action, he would write, “might seriously interfere with our relations with Marshall Pétain’s government.”[35] The British Foreign office duly took notice and asked de Gaulle to call off the operation.
The tangled web of inter-state communications, never humming smoothly at best, broke down at this point — either accidentally or by intention. De Gaulle insisted in his Mémoires de guerre that he ordered Muselier to take possession of St. Pierre only after having learned that Canada was preparing to seize the island’s radio station. “He (Muselier) did so on Christmas Eve, in the midst of the greatest enthusiasm from the inhabitants, without a shot having to be fired. A plebiscite gave Free France a crushing majority.”[36] De Gaulle could never understand why this “small operation,” involving only three hundred sailors, could stir such a fuss. Cordell Hull, filled with spite, fired off a communiqué deploring the “arbitrary action” taken by the “so-called” Free French force. The turn of phrase caused howls of laughter in the American press and Hull was inundated with letters addressed to the so-called Secretary of State.
The fact Churchill was visiting Washington at Christmas gave him a chance to try to heal the breach. “You take care of Vichy, we’ll take care of de Gaulle,” he joked to Roosevelt. In a speech to the Canadian Parliament, Churchill castigated “the men of Vichy … prostrate at the foot of the conqueror,” for their prediction that “England will have her neck wrung like a chicken.” His response: “Some chicken; some neck.” The members of the House of Commons roared with laughter. Churchill went on to laud de Gaulle’s Free French. “They have been condemned to death, but their names are being held in increasing respect by nine Frenchmen out of every ten throughout the once happy, smiling land of France.”[37]
Listening to the speech, Prime Minister Mackenzie King, by now a strong advocate of de Gaulle and the Free French, thought it was not as good as the one Churchill had made in Washington. Like de Gaulle, it was important to King that he not show himself too much under the influence of England; Canadians no longer regarded their country as a colony. King had stood up to the British when they demanded he let them have the $400 million in gold that the French had shipped to Canada. That would be a “betrayal of trust” to which he would not agree, he had told the Treasury official making the demand, Sir Frederick Phillips. Agitated with his visitor, King wrote in his diary that Sir Frederick “himself looks like a thug.”[38]
When Admiral Muselier returned to London, he was hailed by both the British and the Free French as a hero, but he was no longer a satisfied follower of de Gaulle. He unleashed ferocious verbal assaults on the general, hoping to set the stage for a coup d’état. De Gaulle ordered him to take a thirty-day rest. Muselier resigned from the French National Committee, intending to stay on as commander-in-chief of the Free French Navy. The tactic failed to gain him support, and although the British protested Muselier’s leaving, within a month he was out as head of the navy and no longer a player.
Muselier’s defection was seen by the officers who had remained loyal to the Vichy government as reinforcement for their view that it was they, and not de Gaulle, who were upholding the principles of France. They chose to obey the orders of their government, rather than opt for what they saw as desertion. They thought, as General Dwight D. Eisenhower would later write of them in Crusade in Europe, “If de Gaulle were a loyal Frenchman, they had to regard themselves as cowards.”[39]
Although North Africa still remained out of de Gaulle’s grasp, the rallying to Free France of other colonies throughout the Empire enabled him to fulfill his first aim: to bring French forces back to the battlefield. Given his certainty of an ultimate Allied victory, de Gaulle now had to face the question of what France’s role would be in the rest of the war. There was also the question of what its authority would be after the war. One thing was clear: from now on, he told himself, he would have to “play a cautious game.”[40]
*Now the Republic of Ghana.