The Last Battle (6 page)

It was, of course, a period fraught with political intrigue and the real possibility of war. German forces had marched into Austria less than a month earlier, and Adolf Hitler was making increasingly strident demands regarding the Czech Sudetenland. Though Daladier was personally opposed
to negotiating with Hitler—believing that to do so would only whet the Nazi leader’s appetite for further expansion—his vivid memories of the butchery he’d witnessed in the trenches during World War I and his belief that France was not ready for war led him to join British prime minister Neville Chamberlain in signing the September 1938 Munich Agreement that gave the Sudetenland to Germany. Though the French people lauded Daladier as a peacemaker on his return from Munich, he—unlike the gullible Chamberlain—had no illusions that the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia had prevented war. His intent, he later said,
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was to use the “reprieve” provided by Munich to strengthen both France’s defenses and its national resolve.

Though Daladier set about improving his nation’s military power—especially in terms of combat aircraft—the process was far from complete when Germany’s September 1, 1939, invasion of Poland sparked the general European war the French premier had long believed to be inevitable. While several members of his government—including his Conservative Party justice minister, Paul Reynaud—urged him to take swift and decisive action following France’s declaration of war, Daladier sought to minimize French losses and continue the military buildup he felt was absolutely necessary if France was to have any chance of successfully engaging the German juggernaut. Unfortunately for Daladier, his caution was widely seen as weakness, and support for his policies soon began to erode both within his government and among his increasingly bellicose people, and, on March 21, 1940, he resigned as premier and was immediately replaced by Reynaud.

Despite stepping down from the premiership, Daladier remained in government as Reynaud’s minister of national defense and war. This was an act of political pragmatism on the latter’s part, for the two men were poles apart ideologically and were in the first stages of a personal enmity that would eventually grow to epic proportions.
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Their personal differences notwithstanding, Reynaud realized that Daladier was well versed in the intricacies of defense procurement and military reform and kept him in the cabinet. It was a rocky relationship at best, for in addition to their clear distaste for one another, Daladier was a supporter of General Maurice Gamelin, the elderly chief of the French army’s General Staff, whom Reynaud believed to be too old and inept to properly defend France against a German assault. Daladier had appointed Gamelin to his lofty position and took personally any criticism of the army chief.

Even after Gamelin’s bungling failed to halt the German invasion of France that began on May 10, 1940—ineptitude that led Reynaud to replace him just eight days later with the even older and arguably more hidebound General Maxime Weygand—Daladier continued to defend Gamelin as a brilliant military leader brought low by the incompetence and cowardice of others. This attitude helped ensure that the antagonism already existing between Daladier and Reynaud flared into outright hatred. Reynaud made it increasingly difficult for Daladier to carry out the duties of his ministry, and that situation, coupled with the certainty that the appallingly swift collapse of the French army would soon lead to a German occupation, prompted Daladier to join several other prominent politicians who believed they could carry on the struggle from Morocco, a French colony.

The group—which in addition to Daladier included former interior minister Georges Mandel, former secretary of state for finance Pierre Mendès-France, and former minister of marine Caesar Campinchi
⁷
—sailed for Casablanca on June 21 aboard the steamer
Massilia
, arriving four days later to a decidedly chilly reception. France had capitulated the day after the ship left Le Verdon-sur-Mer,
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and General Charles-Auguste Noguès, the commander in chief of French forces in North Africa and governor-general of Morocco, was waiting to see which way the political wind was blowing in Paris. Though he personally believed that France was capable of carrying on the fight against Germany from North Africa, he did not want to seem overly welcoming to the politicians aboard
Massilia
—this despite having been appointed to the Moroccan governorship by Daladier. Noguès therefore ordered Daladier and several others detained on the ship under guard.

That detention lasted until June 27, when Daladier was able to travel to Noguès’s headquarters in Rabat. Though the two men agreed that French forces in North Africa had both the will and the wherewithal to continue the fight against Germany, Noguès refused to act without clear instructions from the rump government in Bordeaux. As Daladier later recalled, the general “was seeking government authorization to break with official policy and fight on, even if the government had to disavow its involvement in the process.”
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Noguès’s first few cables had gone unanswered, but on June 28 the general received a very definite reply: he was to abstain from any military action. Further, he was to detain Daladier and the other politicians in Morocco until after the scheduled July 10 vote in the National Assembly
that was expected to ratify the Franco-German armistice and grant “full and extraordinary powers” to Marshal
¹⁰
Philippe Pétain to form a new government to administer that part of France not yet occupied by German forces.

Having determined that cooperation with the new order was the better part of valor, Noguès immediately ordered that Daladier and the others not be allowed to board ship for the return passage to Bordeaux until after the crucial July 10 vote. When that balloting was over—and with Pétain confirmed as the new master of unoccupied France and his capital established at Vichy, a resort town about seventy miles northwest of Lyon—Noguès permitted Daladier to take ship for Bordeaux. He was not arrested upon his August 10 arrival, but he was immediately informed that the Vichy government intended to prosecute him—along with Blum, Gamelin, Mandel, Reynaud, former air force minister Guy La Chambre, and former army comptroller general Robert Jacomet—for their “responsibility” for France’s defeat by Germany. It was, of course, a political witch hunt intended to find scapegoats rather than the truth, but Daladier approached the trial as an opportunity to put Pétain and his collaborationist regime under the spotlight.

The trial was to be held in the town of Riom, some twenty miles southwest of Vichy, and the prospective defendants were told to stay in the vicinity. Daladier lodged with various friends in and around Vichy until September 6, when he was taken into custody and placed under house arrest at the Château Chazeron, a medieval castle-turned–country house a few miles outside Riom. He was eventually joined by Blum, Mandel, Reynaud, Gamelin, and the others. The defendants stayed in the drafty, poorly maintained chateau until October 15, 1941, when on the orders of Pétain they were transferred to the Fort du Portalet, an even more austere fortress in the rugged mountains of the Pyrenees near the Spanish border. Three months later Daladier, Blum, Gamelin, Jacomet, and La Chambre were transferred yet again, this time to a dilapidated country house at Bourassol, a few miles south of Riom. Reynaud and Mandel did not accompany the others, for Pétain had decided to withdraw the charges against the two. This did not gain them their freedom, however, for both remained in Vichy’s custody until they were turned over to the Germans.

At Bourassol, Daladier and his codefendants continued preparing their defense. When the trial finally began at Riom’s hurriedly renovated Palace
of Justice on the afternoon of February 19, 1942, it must have been something of a relief for the five men to actually be able to answer the charges against them. They were under no illusions, of course, that their defense, however spirited, would actually prevent them from being found guilty. Indeed, four months earlier Pétain had made it perfectly clear how he expected things to go when he publicly announced the defendants’ guilt. The Vichy government intended the Riom Trial, as it became known, to be a blistering indictment of those it loudly proclaimed to be the “men who betrayed France.” And the fact that some two hundred French and foreign journalists would be permitted to observe the trial was a clear indication that Pétain and his supporters also meant the event to be a propaganda victory for Vichy, one in which Daladier and the others could be properly humiliated, discredited, and disgraced.

The details of the Riom Trial—as fascinating and historically important as they are—are outside the scope of this volume. Suffice it to say that things did not go at all as Pétain and his collaborationist government had intended. While Gamelin refused to recognize Vichy’s authority to try him and sat silent throughout the trial, Daladier and Blum mounted what can only be called a brilliant defense. Daladier’s knowledge of the events that transpired between the Popular Front’s electoral victory in 1936 and the French capitulation in 1940 was encyclopedic, and he was able to categorically refute virtually each point made by the poorly prepared and far less articulate prosecutors. And Blum’s eloquence and legal acumen—he was, after all, an extremely skilled lawyer as well as a brilliant politician—allowed him to conduct withering cross-examinations of government witnesses that soon revealed Vichy’s case against the five defendants to be nothing more than a politically motivated sham.

As the trial dragged on, Vichy’s German masters became increasingly frustrated with both the tribunal’s slow pace and the foreign press’s increasingly sympathetic portrayal of the defendants. Hitler himself expressed outrage that the court seemed incapable of shutting Blum and Daladier up, much less proving their culpability for “forcing” Germany to attack France in 1940. In order to avert any further excoriation of the Vichy regime—and, by extension, his own—in the world’s newspapers and to halt what was quickly becoming a public-relations nightmare, Hitler ordered the trial to be halted. On April 14, 1942, the president of the court, Pierre Caous, dutifully announced that the proceedings were to be “temporarily
suspended”—after twenty-four public sessions—so that prosecutors could gather “further information.”

The temporary suspension of the Riom Trial lasted until May 21, 1943, when the proceedings were officially terminated. By that time, however, much had changed for both Daladier and France. Operation Torch—the November 8, 1942, British-American invasion of French North Africa—had prompted Hitler to order his forces into unoccupied France. Within days the entire country was firmly under German control, the Vichy regime was reduced to a true puppet government, and the position of Daladier and his fellow Riom defendants had become far more precarious. Though Jacomet and La Chambre were sentenced to continuing house arrest at Bourassol, Heinrich Himmler had ordered Daladier, Blum, and Gamelin moved to “secure locations” in Germany to prevent their “kidnapping” by Allied agents.
¹¹

The three men began their melancholy journey on March 31, 1943, when they left Bourassol under police guard in a five-car convoy. Their first stop was the small airport in nearby Clermont-Ferrand, where they were joined by labor leader Léon Jouhaux. By April 3 the four were at Paris’s Le Bourget airport, where they and their Gestapo escorts boarded a Luftwaffe transport bound for Mannheim and, ultimately, Frankfurt. From there the Frenchmen and their minders again traveled by road, and just after dawn on April 4 they arrived at their destination: the sprawling Buchenwald concentration camp
¹²
near Weimar.

Compared with the horrific conditions endured by most of Buchenwald’s inmates, Daladier and the other French VIP prisoners lived in relative comfort. They were assigned individual rooms within the SS compound, which was separated from the main camp and surrounded by pine trees.
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Though the windows in their rooms were barred and their doors locked at night from the outside, the Frenchmen were well fed, were allowed to walk around the compound’s fenced perimeter (with guards, of course), and could write and receive letters. Perhaps just as important for these gregarious and once-powerful men, they were allowed to gather for a few hours each evening after dinner to share a bottle of German-provided cognac, smoke hand-rolled cigarettes of cheap Croatian tobacco, and dissect—often heatedly—the causes of their nation’s defeat.

Daladier’s sojourn at Buchenwald did not last long. On April 29 the camp’s commandant, Hermann Pister, told Daladier that he, Gamelin, and
Jouhaux were to be transferred the following day to a “special facility” in the northern Tyrol, not far from Innsbruck. Ominously, Léon Blum would not accompany them; as a Jew, he was destined for “special detention,” Pister said. So, too, was Georges Mandel, who was to arrive at Buchenwald within a few days. Daladier was deeply troubled that his friend would be staying behind at the concentration camp, but Blum himself made light of it, saying that he and Mandel would “turn the place into a ghetto.”
¹⁴

Just after dawn on April 30, Daladier, Gamelin, and Jouhaux said their good-byes to Blum and then were escorted by SS troops to the compound’s main gate. The plan soon changed, however, for Buchenwald’s assistant commandant arrived with news that their departure for Tyrol had been postponed, though he gave no reason. Finally, on the morning of May 2, Daladier and his companions stepped into a Mercedes staff car and, with their SS escort, set off for Munich and, ultimately, Schloss Itter.

The drive south was an eye-opening experience for the three Frenchmen, for even after nearly four years of war the roads of central and southern Germany were alive with military traffic. Several times field police soldiers
¹⁵
waved the staff car and its escorts to the side of the road so long convoys of troop trucks, interspersed with vehicles towing artillery pieces and multibarreled rocket launchers, could move past unimpeded. Despite clear evidence of Allied air attacks—destroyed and damaged buildings, downed bridges, and vast stretches of heavily cratered landscape—it was depressingly obvious to the Frenchmen that Germany was far from beaten.