• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 2400 0

been implemented over years rather than months. Bedaux went to Britain, where he urged the military to pool resources with France and to standardize equipment to fight effectively with the French army on the battlefield. The British, who distrusted him over his involvement with the Windsors, ignored him. French Armaments Minister Raoul Dautry, himself an industrialist, sent Bedaux to Francisco Franco’s Spain to obtain steel for the manufacture of French weapons. The French Ambassador in Madrid, Maréchal Henri-Philippe Pétain, who had known Bedaux since 1926, afforded him introductions to Spanish politicians and businessmen. When Bedaux discovered that Spain lacked sufficient coal to fire its steel furnaces to meet French demand, he travelled to French Algeria to see whether the Kenadsa coal mines could make up the shortfall. On 7 June 1940, he flew back to Paris from Kenadsa to persuade Armaments Minister Dautry to make coal deliveries to Spain a government priority. With Spanish steel, France could produce the weapons it needed to match the Germans. But, by the time he was due to see Dautry on 12 June, the French army barely existed. That was when his brother, Gaston, called and persuaded him to leave Paris.

The Charles Bedaux who returned to the Château de Candé in June 1940 as host of France’s American community had redeemed his reputation after the Windsor affair. The embassy, in leasing Candé and granting him diplomatic status, had effectively given him US government approval. And the French government had shown its trust by assigning him to enhance France’s fighting capacity. His standing with the German occupiers had yet to be measured.

At the end of June, German officers invaded the Château de Candé and requisitioned it for the Wehrmacht. Charles Bedaux’s diplomatic protection and his neutrality as an American citizen did not save his chateau from becoming, like many others, a German barracks. Maynard Barnes and other embassy personnel retired to Paris. German officers replaced the Americans in the main bedrooms and at the dining table. Charles and Fern displayed the same hospitality to their new guests as they had to the old.

From the beginning of the Armistice, Bedaux organized local businesses, civil servants and labourers to rebuild the battle-damaged and fire-ravaged city of Tours and its nearby factories with assistance from the American Red Cross. Bedaux oversaw much of the work himself with Marcel Grolleau, a former lumberjack whom he had hired in 1927 after seeing him at work in a forest near Candé. Grolleau, 22 when he met Bedaux, had since become a Bedaux engineer and, unbeknownst to Bedaux, was active in the nascent resistance to German occupation. German privations impeded reconstruction. Not only did the Germans seize heavy equipment, they took most of France’s petrol supply for their army. Bedaux and Grolleau turned wood from the forests of the Loire Valley into charcoal for gazogene to run cars and machinery. Gazogene, less efficient and smokier than petrol, fuelled the few French cars that the Germans allowed on the roads.

Bedaux in the late summer went to Paris, where he discovered that the German Stadtkommissar’s Office of Locations had seized the Hôtel Ritz on the Place Vendôme. Having lost their permanent suite to the Germans, Charles and Fern were reduced to a smaller hotel nearby. Most of its other guests were German officers. The German army also evicted Bedaux company engineers from their homes in Paris to make room for soldiers. A few of the engineers went to Candé, and others moved with their families into Bedaux’s offices at 39 avenue de Friedland, between the Arc de Triomphe and rue du Faubourg Saint Honoré. Bedaux had once again to placate the Nazis, this time to reclaim his employees’ houses.

Early in September, Bedaux chanced upon his old friend and former employee, the Austrian Count Joseph von Ledebur, in his hotel. Ledebur, now a Wehrmacht Rittmeister, or cavalry captain, had served in Poland. In the more desirable posting of Paris, he was delighted to see Bedaux. Bedaux was