Americans in Paris_ Life and Death Under Nazi Occupation - Charles Glass [26]
De Gaulle’s ‘Appeal of June 18th’ calling for resistance to the Nazis infuriated Clara de Chambrun, who denigrated the rebel general. At the same time, the countess promoted her son, 34-year-old René, as a more suitable national hero. It was Count René, after all, who had convinced Ambassador Bullitt at the end of May that Britain would stand fast against German bombardment and invasion. While leaving for England from Dunkirk in May on a mission for the French general staff, Captain René de Chambrun–who had been a reserve officer since studying at the military academy of Saint-Cyr in 1927–observed the superiority of the Royal Air Force over the Luftwaffe:
And then, just as we were leaving the shores of France, three squadrons of Heinkels, twenty-seven planes in all, converged upon the city [Dunkirk] from three different directions, and, as if they had had some secret rendezvous with the Germans, six small British planes appeared almost at the same moment, flying at very high altitude. The Germans began to pour their bombs just as the British fighters swooped down upon them. The sound of the British engines was unlike any plane I knew, and their guns sounded strange too, but they did the most deadly job of dogfighting I have seen. I counted within a few minutes nineteen trails of smoke as Heinkel after Heinkel dropped and the six little fighters took control of the sky.
Back in Paris, René de Chambrun had convinced Bullitt that the RAF would stop Germany from winning the war. At Bullitt’s request, Prime Minister Paul Reynaud dispatched René to Washington to intercede for Britain with his cousin, Franklin Roosevelt.
Clara wrote, ‘It is historically interesting to note that his [René’s] assurances that England would inevitably win the war were made in New York twenty-four hours before Charles de Gaulle launched his radio broadcast from London.’ In Clara’s eyes, de Gaulle, who had only just been promoted to one-star general, possessed neither breeding nor compassion:
That any man of military training should have attempted to make hay in the political sunshine of the colossal falsehood FRANCE HAS LOST ONLY A BATTLE NOT A WAR shows how far the speaker had already flown from the grim realities of total disaster in the midst of which we found ourselves. It must be supposed that an officer who seeks shelter far from the tragic situation that he himself has abandoned, who is clothed, fed and financed by a Government [Britain’s] which has seldom throughout history manifested affection toward his fatherland, is hardly in a position to judge the conditions from which he himself has escaped.
Clara applauded Pétain’s decision to give up a struggle that was bleeding France of its young men. Without the Armistice, she wrote, ‘nothing would have been left but capitulation and unconditional surrender. What would then have become of all those who had taken refuge in the ever-dwindling free zone, and of those who laboriously made their way to England, America, or North Africa, had the entire south, east and west been overrun?’ She admired her husband’s old commander, Maréchal Pétain, as ‘the very symbol of integrity and glory’ and compared Pierre Laval to Abraham Lincoln. ‘Both of them were sometimes called ugly,’ she wrote, ‘but in the President of the United States as in the great French statesman there was strength and beauty of soul which shone in their eyes and placed them above other mortals.’ Her in-law, Laval, had been instrumental in making Pétain premier, but had not himself been included in the cabinet of 17 June. Meanwhile, along with other citizens and expatriates, Clara and Aldebert waited for the Battle of France to end.