The Cost of Courage (6 page)

A
LTHOUGH
the German campaign in France lasts less than six weeks before the armistice is declared, the French still suffer enormous casualties. There are ninety thousand French soldiers killed and two hundred thousand wounded. Another two million soldiers are taken prisoner, and a million and a half of them are sent to Germany. These French prisoners will remain on the far side of the Rhine until the war ends, almost exactly five years later.

The same day Jacques Boulloche sends his farewell letters to his family, President Roosevelt rejects the Allies’ plea to America to enter the war against Germany at once. Meanwhile, French prime minister Paul Reynaud, who had been an early opponent of appeasement, informs the British that he intends to split his government and lead half of it abroad.

On June 16, Churchill makes a dramatic gesture to try to convince the French to continue the fight against the Germans. The new British prime minister proposes the merger of France and Britain into an “indissoluble” Franco-British union. A single War
Cabinet will direct the affairs of the new nation, to “concentrate its whole energy against the power of the enemy, no matter where the battle may be.”

But defeatist members of the French cabinet recoil at the idea of a union with their historic rival. They predict that within three weeks, England will “have her neck wrung like a chicken.”
*
A French minister of state even declares, “Better to be a Nazi province. At least we know what that means.”

Marshal Henri-Philippe Pétain, the eighty-four-year-old hero of World War I whom Reynaud had summoned out of retirement a few weeks earlier, leads the fight against a merger with Britain. When Reynaud is unable to convince his colleagues to embrace Churchill’s bold idea, the French prime minster resigns, and Pétain succeeds him as the head of the French government.

Charles de Gaulle had been wounded three times during World War I, and he spent almost three years in German prison camps. Since the 1930s, he has been a voice in the wilderness, warning of France’s unreadiness to confront the Germans. He has published a book advocating the mechanization of the army and the offensive deployment of tanks, but his fellow officers ignore his advice. A prescient Reynaud has been the only politician to support him.

De Gaulle has fought as long as he can to keep France in the war. But after Pétain becomes France’s new leader, de Gaulle finally slips away from his office in Bordeaux, on June 17, to be driven to a nearby airfield.

At nine
A
.
M
., he takes off for England in a plane provided by the British. Churchill observed that the solitary French general “carried with him in the small airplane the honor of France.”
^†

That evening, Marshal Pétain goes on the radio to tell the French Army to surrender. Christiane listens to Pétain’s broadcast with her aunt and five of her aunt’s six children. The young teenager feels like the sky is falling on her head. She is especially angry when her elderly uncle declares that England will never be able to continue the fight alone. She has no idea that he is echoing the majority view inside the French government.

Christiane considers her uncle appallingly defeatist: “In spite of everything, I never stopped believing in a miracle — that somehow our army would rise again.” But she is also aware of the state of the French Army: “Not defeated. Crushed.”

The following evening, Churchill allows de Gaulle to use the BBC to broadcast his first appeal to the French people. This time Christiane is mesmerized. The general’s words have a profound effect on everyone who still believes that the Germans may someday be defeated:
^‡

Has the last word been said? Must we abandon all hope? Is our defeat final and irremediable? To those questions, I answer No!… I ask you to believe me when I say that the cause of France is not lost.

And then the prickly iconoclast minted the phrase that made it possible for all unvanquished French citizens to continue to fight for the honor of their fallen nation:

Whatever happens, the flame of French Resistance must not, and shall not, die!

Christiane has never heard of de Gaulle before tonight. Although he had become undersecretary of state for war on June 6, he had only been a colonel before the war.

When he is introduced on the BBC, Christiane asks herself, “General of Gaul — what rank of officer is that?” As soon as she hears him, she immediately agrees with her male cousins: We must
all decamp to England! But none of them is old enough to cross the channel without an adult.

AT THIS POINT
, her older brother André really isn’t any more political than Christiane is. But he shares all of his sister’s instinctive patriotism.

On the night of June 17 — the same day de Gaulle decamps for London — André distinguishes himself by helping Lieutenant Jean-Pierre Berger blow up the bridge at Marcigny-sur-Loire, between Digoin and Roanne, which slows the German advance a bit.

As the French government is suing for peace, André retains an unquenchable appetite for action. He decides that he must leave France to avoid surrendering to the enemy. Together with ten of his comrades-in-arms, he sneaks onto a boat leaving Port-Vendres on the Mediterranean coast the day before the armistice is announced.

From the moment he heard Pétain on the radio saying, “We must stop fighting,” he categorically refused to accept defeat and had only one desire: “to continue and then to resume combat.” André doesn’t base his actions “on a critical analysis of the situation, or a particular political belief … but simply on an elementary conviction:
that dignity is incompatible with submission.
” Like so many of those who are praying that the Germans’ victory is only temporary, he blends optimism with fatalism. He thinks that “we [will] win in the end, and that it [is] the duty of all Frenchmen to fight for this victory” — but he also thinks it’s unlikely that he will live long enough to witness the German defeat himself.

André and his compatriots decide that North Africa is the best place to continue the battle against the Germans. But when their cargo freighter reaches Oran in French Algeria, the welcome they receive from the French colonial authorities is not at all what they expect. Instead of being greeted as heroes, they are treated practically like traitors.

That is because, between the time they leave France and the time they reach North Africa, the new government headed by Pétain has discarded Reynaud’s idea of sending some officials abroad to wage the war in exile, as Belgium, Holland, Poland, and Norway already have — to continue the fight against the Germans from London. Mostly because the Pétain government wants to rid itself of some unwelcome dissenters, on June 21, twenty-four deputies and one senator are allowed to sail away from France to North Africa on an armed auxiliary cruiser, the
Massilia.

When news of the armistice is picked up on the
Massilia’s
radio two days later, the anti-Nazi legislators on board plead with the captain to change his course for England. But the captain is taking his orders from the new French government, and he continues on to Morocco. When the
Massilia
reaches Casablanca on June 24, the whole party of government officials is put under ship arrest for nearly three weeks, while Pétain’s cronies debate what to do with them. Finally, they are sent back to France.

“I embarked on the
Massilia
never dreaming the
Massilia
would become a trap,” remembered Pierre Mendès-France, a French prime minister in postwar France. “But quite soon the politicians who had remained in Bordeaux realized they could exploit this and present the departure of the
Massilia,
with a number of politicians on board, as a sign of panic — an escape, a surrender … And paradoxically a certain number of them — Viénot, Jean Zay and myself — were charged with desertion, when our idea had been to go on fighting.”

Churchill noted with disgust that these patriots were “disposed of as the Vichy Government thought convenient to themselves, and agreeable to their German masters.”

By now the new French government has accepted the terms that Hitler’s generals have dictated to them in a railway car at Rethondes, near Compiègne. With revenge at the heart of his brutal campaign, Hitler chooses the exact spot where French General
Ferdinand Foch had accepted the surrender of the Germans at the end of World War I, just a quarter century earlier.

To encourage their rapid acceptance by the French in 1940, the Germans do not make the terms especially harsh. The southern portion of the country will be left unoccupied while the Germans are granted an occupied zone in the north that includes Paris. (The unoccupied zone will also free up more German troops for the expected invasion of Britain.) The French Army will be demobilized, except for a force of one hundred thousand to ensure internal order. The fleet will be disarmed and the ships will be docked in their home ports, and the Germans promise they will not touch them. One and a half million French prisoners will remain in captivity until a peace treaty replaces the armistice (which never happens). The cost of keeping German troops in France will be paid for by the French government.

THREE DAYS
after the armistice is declared, Hitler sneaks into Paris for an early-morning visit. He flies into Le Bourget airport with a small entourage that includes Albert Speer, the Third Reich’s official architect. The civilians accompanying him all wear borrowed uniforms, because Hitler has demanded that they dress as soldiers for the trip.

Thirteen years earlier, a hundred thousand Parisians had mobbed Charles Lindbergh at the same airfield to celebrate his triumphant arrival from New York.
^§
But today, there are no crowds to greet the Führer.

Three large Mercedes sedans whisk his party to the ornate Paris Opera House. This is the German leader’s favorite building in the French capital. As a student he even studied its architectural plans, and his French guide is impressed when the dictator asks him what has happened to a particular room. The guide explains that it no longer exists, because of a renovation.

Fascist sympathizers show their enthusiasm inside the French Chamber of Deputies after the rebroadcast of a speech by Hitler in July 1940.(
photo credit 1.7
)

At the end of the opera tour, one of Hitler’s aides offers the guide a 50-mark tip. Albert Speer watches as the Frenchman quietly refuses the gift — twice.

Choosing the obvious tourist stops, Hitler continues on to the Tour Eiffel, the Arc de Triomphe, and Les Invalides. Inside the monument to the French emperor, he stands for a long time gazing silently at Napoleon’s tomb. Perhaps he is already contemplating a Russian invasion — and vowing to make his more successful than Napoleon’s.

Hitler poses in front of the Eiffel Tower, but he never gets to the top, because the French have cut the cables to the elevators before his arrival. The elevators will remain out of commission until the end of the war.

Three hours after he lands, Hitler climbs back onto his plane to return to Germany. He has spent less than half a day inspecting his most glorious conquest.

He will never enter the City of Light again.

ANDRÉ AND HIS COMRADES
reach Algeria the same day Hitler visits Paris. They are disgusted when they are greeted like deserters instead of patriots. Two of them make contact with the British consul. But when they ask the diplomat for help to get to England, he urges them to wait out the war in Morocco instead.

André is completely baffled by his predicament. He is desperate to continue the fight, but he has no idea how to do that. Should he stay in Morocco until the war is over? Or should he return to France to confront the enemy?

On July 6, 1940, the twenty-four-year-old lieutenant sits down at his desk to describe his anguish in a letter from Rabat. The letter smolders with his devotion to duty.