After D-Day

The U.S. Army Encounters the French

Robert Lynn Fuller

• Publisher: LSU Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780807175156
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Zweiter Weltkrieg

After D-Day is one of a small but growing body of works that examine the Allied liberators of France. This study focuses on both the French experience of the U.S. Army and the American soldiers' reaction to the French during the liberation and its immediate aftermath. Drawing on French and American archival materials, as well as dozens of memoirs, diaries, letters, and newspapers, Robert Lynn Fuller follows French and American interactions, starting in the skies over France in 1942 and ending with the liberation of Alsace in 1945. Fuller pays special attention to French life in the war zones, where living under constant shelling offered a miserable experience for those forced to endure it. The French stoically withstood those travails—sometimes inflicted by the Americans—when they saw their sacrifices as the price of liberation and victory over Germany. As Fuller shows, when the French did not believe afflictions brought by the Americans advanced the cause of success, their tolerance waned, sometimes dramatically. Fuller maintains that the Allied bombing of France was an important yet often overlooked chapter of World War II, one that inflicted more death and destruction than the ground war still to come. Yet the ground campaign, which began with the Allied invasion of Normandy, unleashed enormous violence that killed, injured, or rendered homeless tens of thousands of French civilians. Fuller examines French and American records of the fate of civilians in the principal battle zones, Normandy and Lorraine, as well as in overlooked liberated regions, such as Orléanais and Champagne, that largely escaped widespread damage and casualties. Despite French gratitude toward the Americans for the liberation of their country, relations began to cool in the fall and winter of 1944 as progress on the battlefield slowed and then appeared to reverse with the German offensive in the Ardennes. Revealing in stark detail the experiences of French civilians with the American military, After D-Day presents a compelling coda to our understanding of the Allied conquest of German-occupied France.

1

THE AMERICANS, THE FRENCH, AND CHARLES DE GAULLE BEFORE D-DAY

In the wake of a heated dispute over lines of authority for French troops fighting in Italy, General Dwight D. Eisenhower met with the president of the French Committee of National Liberation, General Charles de Gaulle, in Algiers in December 1943 to discuss future military plans and the part to be played by the French. To his great relief, Eisenhower found de Gaulle to be uncharacteristically agreeable and reasonable. At the end of their meeting, he told de Gaulle, “for the approaching campaign in France, I will need your help, the cooperation of your officials, and the support of French opinion. I don’t know what theoretical position my government will insist that I take in my relations with you. But . . . I will not recognize any other authority in France than yours.” General de Gaulle had waited a long time to hear those words. However, General Eisenhower was stating clearly the policy of the U.S. Army toward their difficult ally, France, and not the position of the U.S. government in Washington, D.C., which had mulishly resisted recognizing de Gaulle as anything other than one of numerous leaders of the French resistance. Eisenhower had cooperated with de Gaulle since his own arrival in London in 1942 and found him preferable to President Franklin Roosevelt’s French favorite, General Henri Giraud, who would amply demonstrate his incompetence on many levels in Algiers and the Mediterranean Theater. General de Gaulle had struggled unsuccessfully to win recognition from Washington since 1940, when France collapsed under the Axis onslaught. The battle for acceptance was more important for de Gaulle than for the Americans. Nevertheless, General Eisenhower rightfully acknowledged that his forces would need the cooperation of the French people to win the war against Germany, and it was that need for French cooperation that ultimately forced the Americans’ hands. Initially, the struggle to win American approval of the Free French involved a small number of competing French appealing to the American public and their leaders. The contest between representatives of competing French authorities ultimately turned on the American requirement for bases and supplies, and neither Washington nor the U.S. Army cared much about who provided them. The competition among the French to be the sole authority to cooperate with the Allies was eventually won by parties loyal to Charles de Gaulle because of dynamics among the French and not because Washington particularly chose de Gaulle to be the one to help the Allies liberate France from Nazi rule.1

Americans watched with dismay as France suddenly collapsed before the German military in 1940. They wanted France to win the contest, but, despite the revulsion provoked by the Axis powers, most did not want it enough to embroil the United States in another European war. Desperate appeals by French premier Paul Reynaud for American planes, ships, and even troops to prevent the French catastrophe elicited only American bromides and best wishes for ultimate victory. When General Charles de Gaulle established his Free French committee in London in June 1940 to keep the war alive for the French beyond France, he did not bother appealing to Americans for help. He would not have received any had he done so. President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration firmly believed it could accomplish more good by maintaining friendly relations with the regime of Marshal Philippe Pétain in Vichy than by breaking relations and siding with the quixotic General de Gaulle in London. The supremely proud and cantankerous de Gaulle spent the next four years waiting for the United States to realize that he alone embodied true France. He expended little energy attempting to win over Secretary of State Cordell Hull and President Roosevelt like a common itinerant salesman. He, or rather, in his mind, France, was too proud to stoop to salesmanship, even if many talented and intelligent French did strive to convert American thinking about war-devastated France. While de Gaulle believed it would be necessary to rely on American soldiers to liberate France from Nazi occupation, he never thought that American acceptance of his leadership was crucial. He would lead with or without the blessing of the president. Roosevelt likewise thought the United States would crush Nazi rule in Europe with or without the cooperation of de Gaulle.2

Charles de Gaulle was a graduate of the French war colleges, Saint Cyr and l’École supérieure de guerre—the French war college for staff officers. After service in the First World War under General Pétain, he wrote books and articles on “the lessons of the war” that differed dramatically from most orthodox thinking. He argued that France should organize its conscripted military around a core of highly trained professional soldiers adept at utilizing the modern machines of war—especially tanks. Some journalists, politicians, and military professionals saw the merits of de Gaulle’s arguments, but most did not. Paul Reynaud, a center-right deputy from Paris and future premier, was one of the few men of public affairs to endorse and argue the merits of de Gaulle’s plea for a reformed French military. Unfortunately, de Gaulle’s patron Pétain retained his faith in the power of artillery and fixed defense, and vigorously disputed de Gaulle’s conclusions. Dismissed by high-ranking officialdom, de Gaulle pushed all the harder to mobilize support for his ideas. In doing so he made many enemies. His haughty manner, dismissive tone, and narcissistic sense of righteousness served him poorly in his quest. His classmates at Saint Cyr mockingly dubbed him “the constable”—in medieval France, the head of the king’s armies—in honor of his pretensions and inflated self-regard. As future British ambassador to France Duff Cooper put it, “[he] had no gift for acquiring friends.” Again and again his personal faults proved to be handicaps in winning friends, supporters, and allies, and guaranteed that the road to the reestablishment of Free France after 1940 would be rough. His prickly personality and bloated ego alienated many Britons, Americans, and Frenchmen and women whose help he would need in setting France upon her feet again.3

The day after his arrival in London, de Gaulle broadcast his appeal over the BBC for Frenchmen and women everywhere to rally to his standard of defiance, not just against the Germans, but against the Vichy regime of Marshal Pétain. The following day, 19 June, de Gaulle broadcast again “in the name of France” calling on all French military personnel everywhere to continue the fight and not accept the armistice, “a crime against our country.” He entreated the French governors of North Africa in particular to keep up the fight. Most French who wanted to continue the war from the empire looked to General Auguste Noguès, governor-general of Morocco, for leadership. He, however, was unwilling to commit in public until he knew not only which way the wind was blowing, but how hard. De Gaulle’s radio appeals and letters to French military and political leaders in French North Africa elicited no positive response. On 27 June, Britain’s Prime Minister Winston Churchill officially accepted de Gaulle as the leader of “Free France” in London and recognized him as the leader of all French who chose to continue the fight alongside Great Britain. De Gaulle proclaimed that the French Republic lived on in him a bit prematurely. Pétain, with the blessing of the National Assembly, did not declare it dead until 10 July. In mid-July, de Gaulle received a notice from the French embassy in London that he was under arrest and should turn himself in to a prison in Toulouse, France. When he failed to arrive in Toulouse in August, de Gaulle’s sentence was changed to death.4

A diffident Gaullist diplomat, Raoul Aglion, pointed out in his memoirs that had de Gaulle not declared himself the incarnation of France, but instead announced he would lead a “French Legion” to fight alongside the British, he would have avoided many problems and been more easily accepted by not only Frenchmen and women, but by foreign leaders. Jean Monnet, who had served as a procurement liaison for both Britain and France within the United States, decided to stay in the fight as a supply expert working for the British as a Frenchman, but he served what remained of “the Allies” and not France. De Gaulle’s presumptuousness and willingness to arrogate to himself authority that few were willing to recognize annoyed and repulsed many (probably most) French outside of France. The highest-ranking diplomat in the French embassy in London, counselor and chargé d’affaires Roger Cambon, resigned rather than serve Vichy, but he was aghast at the prospect of aligning himself with de Gaulle. Cambon had warm relations with many other diplomats in London and waged a campaign to convince them—especially the Americans—that de Gaulle was simply a fascist who wanted to set himself up as an alternate dictator to Pétain. By claiming to be the government of “Free France” de Gaulle had carried out a bloodless coup, placing a brigadier general at the head of an unelected government that answered to no one. Thus, it is easy to understand why so many, especially in the American press, insisted that de Gaulle was a “fascist” or a “dictator.” Many of his political ideas indeed ran close to fascism, though he was never a fascist. His father was an overt royalist with no affection for the Republic. He loyally read the neo-royalist newspaper, L’Action Française, which was obsessively anti-British, anti-Semitic, and accused by many of being a fascist mouthpiece. De Gaulle himself imbibed the social-Catholicism popular among the bourgeois of Lille, where he grew up, and he absorbed the Anglophobia normal to French nationalism that informed his worldview. There was little to recommend him as the embodiment of republican France.5

After de Gaulle repeatedly took to the airwaves on the BBC, Vichy labeled him a traitor and began a concerted propaganda effort to counter his radio appeals. Paradoxically, Vichy’s attempts to denigrate de Gaulle and shout him down brought him only more attention. In the minds of many—not least the British government—de Gaulle increasingly became the symbol of anti-Vichy resistance. Thus, Churchill agreed on 7 August to recognize his French National Committee as the sole representative of fighting France, and to supply de Gaulle with armaments and money to keep his campaign alive. The Treasury extended credit to the committee, and any French ship that might fall into British hands was to be handed over to them. However, French soldiers and sailors that rallied to de Gaulle would ultimately be under British command. In return, Churchill agreed to do all in his power to restore France to the position of power and prestige she had known before 1940. By 14 July, when the Free French staged a small military parade in London, de Gaulle had adopted the Cross of Lorraine (the symbol of Joan of Arc) as the symbol of the Free French and his small force was received in review by King George VI. De Gaulle insisted that any monies advanced to his committee by the British government were simply loans to be repaid when possible. Churchill had given up hope of finding anyone more prestigious or influential to take the place of de Gaulle, and thus accepted de Gaulle as the best he could get—for the moment.6

From mid-July de Gaulle had temporary quarters in London on Carleton Gardens—not even the French embassy in Knightsbridge. The Free French committee was denounced by Vichy authorities as “a handful of mercenaries grouped around a [British] microphone.” He claimed to speak “for France” and yet he exercised control over only rented accommodations on The Mall across from Saint James Park. No government can claim to be a state without exercising sovereignty over real territory. The New Hebrides Islands in the Pacific Ocean were the first French possessions to rally to de Gaulle on 23 July, soon followed by the French ports in India (completely surrounded by British India), Tahiti, and New Caledonia. Baron Louis de Benoist, the head of the Anglo-French Suez Company that owned and operated the Suez Canal, saw that the canal was entirely hostage to British indulgence and thus opted for General de Gaulle despite the pro-Vichy sentiments of almost the entire French community in Egypt. The military commander of French forces in Indochina, General Georges Catroux, refused to accept the armistice, but it cost him his post. The governor-general of Chad, Félix Eboué, opted to align with de Gaulle in late July, but declined to do so publicly until Free French agents in Africa were ready to spring into action.7

De Gaulle’s overtures in Africa paid dividends quickly. French Cameroon rallied to de Gaulle early and easily for several reasons: it was closely linked to British Nigeria through trade and colonial officials there were inclined to align with the British colony. More importantly, French Cameroon had been German just 22 years earlier and most residents of Cameroon assumed if Germany won the war, it soon would be German Cameroon once again. Much of French Equatorial Africa was seized by Gaullists in a series of coordinated bloodless coups at the end of August. Gaullists operating from Nigeria and the Belgian Congo, which remained outside of the German orbit, and coordinating with Governor Eboué, struck at French colonial administrative centers throughout the region and gained cooperation—sometimes reluctantly—at most posts. A Free French coup failed at Gabon due to the presence of French naval units in Libreville; French naval officers proved the least susceptible to Gaullist blandishments and most loyal to Vichy. Dakar remained outside Free French control and was assumed by all to be the key to dominating not only the region but the Atlantic sea lanes off Africa. Thus, Churchill determined to use de Gaulle and his modest Free French forces to seize Dakar for the Allies. When the attack was met with resistance and failed miserably, many assumed the plan had been leaked by de Gaulle’s people, who talked too much. The fiasco at Dakar and the seeming hostility that met de Gaulle’s forces convinced Roosevelt and many American editorialists that de Gaulle had poor judgment and was a potential liability to the Allied cause.8

Early moves by de Gaulle may have repulsed some Americans and their leaders, but actions taken by the Vichy regime within France were equally repellent to most Americans. The Vichy State taking shape in France looked a lot like many such regimes forming in imitation of Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. That might have pleased Mussolini—Hitler probably did not care—but it disgusted the overwhelming majority of citizens of Britain and the United States. In Britain, as Vichy repelled, de Gaulle appeared more attractive, regardless of his faults. That was true for much of the public in the United States as well, who were offered increasingly flattering views of de Gaulle in much of the press. While many columnists came to admire de Gaulle and his movement, the U.S. government retained its commitment to Pétain and Vichy. President Roosevelt retained a good deal of sympathy for Marshal Pétain, whom he had met and liked, while de Gaulle continued to be dismissed by the president and Secretary of State Cordell Hull as a presumptuous and arrogant nobody. Nevertheless, from June 1940 until November 1942, Vichy and de Gaulle’s London committee waged propaganda warfare to win the support of the American public and the cooperation of the U.S. government. As Vichy drifted toward fascism, de Gaulle made positive moves to convince the world that he was committed to freedom and democracy. While on an inspection tour of Free French territories in Africa, de Gaulle laid out the organization of the Free French regime and proclaimed in the Brazzaville Manifesto (in October) the “organic charter,” which declared the movement’s purpose and goals. It denounced the Vichy regime as unconstitutional and under the control of the Germans, and asserted that the Gaullist regime was the only legitimate French government. The charter also affirmed France as a “Republic” that would freely choose its legislative representatives as soon as proved possible.9

After Chad, Cameroon, and other African territories opted to join the Free French, the Vichy regime became more concerned about the security of French possessions in West and North Africa. Thus, on 9 September Pétain dispatched General Maxime Weygand to buttress Vichy’s hold on North Africa. His mission was t...