Anyone wishing to understand the tortuous, love-hate relationship between David Cameron and Nicolas Sarkozy today will find all they need to know in Peter Mangold’s gripping study of the wartime Anglo-French relationship, which is really the story of Winston Churchill and Charles de Gaulle. Not that today’s pygmy politicians can measure up to their titanic forebears, but the dynamics of the cross-Channel partnership — brutally exposed here by the strains of war — remain essentially the same. Neither of these proud, ancient nations can stand the other — but they cannot do without each other either.
De Gaulle’s rise to power in the war is one of the most extraordinary transformations in 20th century history. In May 1940 this untypical Frenchman — tall, aloof, cold, unpopular with his military and political peers — was a mere under-secretary in a doomed French cabinet fleeing the German conquerors. Unlike his former mentor, Marshal Philippe Petain, this junior general was no revered war hero — having spent most of the Great War in a German PoW. In May 1945 De Gaulle, with Petain as his prisoner, was the unquestioned master of his traumatised patrie, and busy creating the myth that an unbeaten France, after liberating itself, was an equal partner with the three powers — the USSR, the US and Britain — who had fought and won the war. How on earth did this miraculous reversal of fortune occur?
As Mangold makes clear, De Gaulle played a laughably weak hand with consummate skill. But however well he placed his meagre cards, his rise from obscure soldier to world statesman was owed entirely to the support of Churchill who — or so he later claimed — instantly recognised the General as a fellow ‘ homme du destin’ as soon as he met him during one of the futile flying visits the newly appointed PM made to France in his effort to shore up the failing French will to resist the German invaders. Amid a sea of defeatism, De Gaulle was the one Frenchman who, as Churchill realised, wanted to fight on. When the time came for De Gaulle to flee his beloved homeland it was Churchill who extended the hand of help. And it was De Gaulle — an unbending Anglophobe if ever there was one — who unhesitatingly grasped it.
De Gaulle arrived in London with his ADC and virtually nothing else. Without money, troops, prestige or a country. Nevertheless, Churchill immediately swung the BBC and all the resources he could behind this haughty yet indomitable fellow spirit. And yet, all was not as it seemed. A ruthless realist behind his Francophile sentimentality, Churchill, while backing the Free French movement De Gaulle set up, was careful to keep diplomatic and other lines open to Vichy France — the regime of Marshal Petain, which had capitulated to Hitler — but been permitted to go on governing the bulk of French territory (including its far-flung Empire ) in return. The triangular relationship between Britain, the Gaullists and Vichy managed to survive the storms of war, although the partners often came to blows, and if Churchill never said ‘Every man has his cross to bear — and mine is the cross of Lorraine’ [the Gaullist symbol] the anecdote perfectly expresses his increasing exasperation with de Gaulle.
No crisis put more strain on the fraught relationship than the one which swiftly followed the Armistice between Vichy and Germany: Churchill’s decision to keep the French fleet out of German hands by the use of force. Mangold — a Foreign Office product turned academic and over-prone, as the FO often is, to see the viewpoint of a foreign power before that of Britain— is critical of Churchill for making this move, especially the one-sided bombardment of the French squadron at Mers-el-Kebir in Algeria which killed 1,300 French sailors for the loss of two British lives. Mangold argues that the destruction was unnecessary as the French had no intention of gifting their ships to Hitler (as was eventually proved in 1942 when the Germans occupied Vichy France and the French scuttled their fleet at Toulon).
Hindsight, however, is a wonderful thing and Churchill had every reason to distrust the fleet’s Commander-in-Chief, Admiral Darlan, a bitter Anglophobe given to making the point that his great-grandfather had died at Trafalgar. More positively, Operation Catapult, as the seizure/destruction of the French fleet was known, demonstrated to President Roosevelt that Britain would go to any lengths — even risking war with its late ally — rather than submit to Hitler, and that its struggle — contrary to the advice of his defeatist London ambassador, Joseph Kennedy — was worth supporting. De Gaulle, too, shared Churchill’s and FDR’s faith in ultimate Allied victory, which allowed him to swallow his rage at the humiliation of Catapult (though he stored up his bile for future use).
Although outright war with France after Oran was narrowly averted (Darlan contented himself with a token bombing of Gibraltar) the two nations were involved in armed clashes throughout the war: at Dakar in west Africa, when the British and Free French made an abortive attempt to seize the port; in the conquest of the French island of Madagascar; and most seriously in Syria, where the Vichyite General Dentz put up a spirited resistance to a British-Gaullist invasion. Relations were further exacerbated by turf wars over the French resistance, which De Gaulle wanted to run without Britain, and by French casualties caused by British bombing. Mangold tells the tale of these thorny events with great verve and readability, and though his sympathies appear to lie more with the French, he is never less than fair and measured.
The murkiest crisis of all in the tangled web that linked the once and future Allies was the assassination of Admiral Darlan in Algiers on Christmas 1942. The slippery little admiral, an eager collaborator with Hitler and Petain’s right-hand man, found himself in Algiers visiting his sick son when the Anglo-American invasion, Operation Torch, landed Allied armies on Algeria’s beaches. Seeing which way the wind was blowing the old sailor changed tack and, with US support, nailed his colours to the Allied mast — much to the Gaullists’ fury.
Though cautious in pointing the finger, Mangold is inclined to believe that Britain’s SOE, possibly in cahoots with the Gaullists, set up Darlan’s killer (who was conveniently executed before the Admiral himself was buried). If he read Anthony Verrier’s carefully forensic book Assassination in Algiers, which he cites in his bibliography but not in his notes, Mangold would be much less cautious. Darlan’s killing is an obvious refutation of the belief that, in extremis, Britain’s secret services never carry out ‘wet jobs’. We did — and in Darlan’s case (though Mangold would not agree) the elimination of this embittered enemy of Britain and arch-fascist was fully justified as an act of war.
De Gaulle never forgave Churchill for the humiliation of having saved him in 1940, even to the extent of getting the nationalistic general to agree to a formal union of the two nations, and he never forgave FDR for branding him a would-be dictator and backing Darlan and General Giraud as alternatives to his rule. This goes a long way toward explaining France’s post-war hostility to the ‘Anglo-Saxons’. When De Gaulle, in his second coming as French leader, withdrew from NATO in 1966 and demanded that all American forces quit France, President L.B Johnson asked ‘Does that include the dead ones?’ This book, written with exemplary brio and clarity, does much to explain the complexities of our rocky relationship with our near, not-so-dear, Gallic neighbour.
Britain and the Defeated French by Peter Mangold is published by IB Tauris
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