Inferno - Max Hastings [82]
Vichy’s meddling in Iraq, and a growing German presence in Syria, convinced Churchill that Britain could not risk Nazi dominance of the Levant. He ordered Wavell to dispatch another force to occupy Syria, ruled by France since 1920 as a League of Nations “mandated territory” joined with Lebanon. Churchill and his commanders hoped that the defenders, outnumbered and outgunned, would offer only token resistance. Instead, however, in June 1941 Vichy forces fought hard. Their conduct highlighted the division and confusion of French loyalties, which had been apparent since the 1940 surrender and persisted until 1944. During the ill-fated British and Gaullist attempt on Vichy Dakar in September 1940, the submarine Bévéziers torpedoed the British battleship Resolution, which suffered serious damage. Churchill enraged the French by insisting on the award of a DSO to Commander Bobby Bristowe, who led a volunteer naval party in a launch alongside the brand-new Vichy battleship Richelieu, laying four depth charges below its hull. In retaliation for Dakar, Vichy aircraft bombed Gibraltar.
A farcical exchange took place when Hitler met Marshal Pétain at Montoire-sur-le-Loir on 24 October 1940. Germany’s Führer said: “I am happy to shake the hand of a Frenchman who is not responsible for this war.” His words were not translated, and Pétain supposed that he was being asked a polite question about his journey. He responded: “Bien, bien, je vous remercie.” Even if the marshal did not intend to sound so slavish, his regime pursued policies and adopted a propaganda line strongly hostile to the British. Adm. René Godfroy, commanding a French squadron interned at Alexandria which resolutely resisted the Royal Navy’s blandishments to join its struggle, wrote to the Mediterranean C-in-C on 26 June 1940: “For us Frenchmen the fact is that a government still exists in France, a government supported by a parliament established in non-occupied territory and which in consequence cannot be considered as irregular or deposed. The establishment elsewhere of another government, and all support for this other government, would clearly be rebellion.”
Frenchmen everywhere took sides, displaying bitter animosity towards those who made a different choice. Aboard the French mine-laying submarine Rubis a vote was held in which all but two of its forty-four crew opted to fight alongside the British. By contrast, in November 1940, 1,700 French naval officers and men exercised the right to repatriation which the British conferred on them. Their new friends the Germans responded uncharitably, torpedoing off the French coast a hospital ship carrying them home under the red cross. Four hundred drowned, but a survivor, Cmdr. Paul Martin, wrote impenitently to a senior officer in Toulon: “Churchill’s policy makes me fear for a demagogic disaster. Thinking Englishmen fear for the future, being carried away as they are by democracy, international financiers and Jews. It is undeniable that the French corrective to this is envied.”
If this was an extreme view, French anti-Semitism ran deep. Vichy’s bureaucracy and enforcement agencies seized Jews and bearers of Free France’s symbolic Cross of Lorraine almost as readily as did the Germans. “My God, what is this country doing to me?” the Jewish writer Irène Némirovsky, who would later meet death in Auschwitz, wrote from her precarious French refuge in June 1941. “Since it is rejecting me, let us consider it coldly, let us watch as it loses its honour and its life.” The Resistance until June 1944 engaged only a small minority of French people, and incurred the hostility of many more. After the liberation, service with de Gaulle became a badge of pride. Throughout the occupation, however, many French people