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America’s entry into the war made no immediate impression on the French. American soldiers were not invading France, and no American planes were bombing the Germans. Having lost much of its fleet at Pearl Harbor and training an inexperienced army to fight in both the Asian and European theatres of the global war, the United States needed time. In early February 1942, the Royal Air Force dropped three million leaflets over occupied France stamped with three Victory Vs, one each in red, white and blue. The pamphlets quoted Franklin Roosevelt’s goals for America’s first year of war: to produce 185,000 planes, 120,000 tanks and eighteen million tons of shipping, quantities of arms unprecedented in the history of warfare. Roosevelt’s words were designed to encourage all peoples under Axis occupation: ‘Our overwhelming superiority in armament must be adequate to put weapons of war into the hands of those men in the conquered nations who stand ready to seize the first opportunity to revolt against their German and Japanese oppressors and against the traitors in their own ranks, known by the already famous name of Quislings. As we get guns to the patriots in those lands, they too will fire shots “heard round the world”.’ Roosevelt was promising to help the partisans in German-occupied Europe to liberate themselves. Slowly and cautiously, the French were listening. But convincing the majority that resistance was not hopeless called for more than American leaflets dropped from British planes. The French had to know that, as in 1917, the Yanks really were coming.

The RAF opened its air offensive against occupied Paris on the night of 3 March 1942, when 200 bombers demolished factories in the suburbs. Bombs weighing 2,000 pounds hit the plants, some of which supplied the Nazis with weaponry, and killed 400 people. Maréchal Pétain called the bombardment ‘a national catastrophe’. When Vichy Ambassador Gaston Henry-Haye protested to Washington, Under-Secretary of State Sumner Welles called it ‘an entirely legitimate bombing’. Despite Allied attacks on French soil, Washington and Vichy preserved their diplomatic relations. Life magazine offered a succinct explanation: ‘The U.S. is polite because Vichy owns some very strategic colonies and a vital fleet. Vichy is polite because the U.S. may win the war and Vichy may lose the rest of her empire.’ Vichy politesse extended to American citizens in the Unoccupied Zone, who were still not interned like some of their compatriots in Paris.

TWENTY-THREE

The Vichy Web

THE AMERICAN LAW FIRM SULLIVAN AND CROMWELL, the world’s largest, closed its Paris offices. This left American lawyer François Monahan unable to practise. Like his friend René de Chambrun, Monahan had dual American–French citizenship and belonged to the New York Bar Association. But he was not licensed to plead in the French courts. To speed up the process to qualify, he sought help from René. René explained the origin of their friendship: ‘His father-in-law, Captain [Charles] de Marenches, had been an aid to my father, then Colonel de Chambrun. The two together, from 1917 on, directed the liaison between Pétain and Pershing, the commanders of the French and the American armies.’ Charles de Marenches, like Aldebert de Chambrun, was married to an American. Together, they wrote a book, The History of the American Army during the European Conflict, with the cooperation of Pershing and Pétain. Alexandre de Marenches, François Monahan’s brother-in-law, supplied the American Hospital at Aldebert’s request with vegetables from his land near Paris. Monahan was on the board of governors at the American Hospital of Paris and occasionally served as its secretary. An official at the Palais de Justice had suggested his admission to the French bar would be accelerated if he inserted in his file a copy of his father-in-law and General de Chambrun’s book, signed by Maréchal Pétain. The bureaucrats would take the hint. Monahan asked René to obtain Pétain