Paris After the Liberation_ 1944 - 1949 - Antony Beevor [119]
For all his intolerance and impatience, de Lattre was undoubtedly a great military leader. A brilliant mimic, he was excellent company, and his wife was universally admired and respected. He got things done quickly, sometimes with spectacular fits of anger. But the theatrical side of his character probably had something to do with his bisexual nature. A number of officers referred to him as ‘cette femme’. General du Vigier, when asked by the Canadian military attaché how he got on with de Lattre, replied: ‘Very well indeed. I know how to handle women.’ Yet Pastor Boegner said: ‘The severe judgements made of him do not stop him from being prodigiously interesting.’
The fears of conservative French officers and the Allies centred on de Lattre’s ambition and political promiscuity: he had moved from the extreme right before the war to being a suspected fellow-traveller after it. And his resentment at having been deprived of his command in Germany to be given the empty appointment of Inspector-General seemed to magnify the risk. At a dinner in Strasbourg in November 1945, he had complained angrily to the British ambassador that he was ‘unemployed’ and did not even have an office. ‘I said, half in fun,’ Duff Cooper wrote in his diary, ‘that I heard he got on very well with the Communists these days. He didn’t deny it, and said that with the Communists one at least knew where one was.’ A high official in the Ministry of the Interior told the American Embassy that de Lattre had officially joined the Radicals, whom the Communists were trying to take over. There was a rumour that Thorez had offered de Lattre the Ministry of War, but that General Revers had warned him off. In December 1945, the Canadian military attaché told his British colleague that ‘the Communist Party had paid de Lattre’s debts, amounting to some 2 million francs. He said de Lattre was wildly extravagant and had got into serious financial difficulties.’ The rumours gathered pace after de Gaulle’s departure. On 20 March, de Lattre called on the British ambassador to say that word was going round Paris that the embassy had in its possession a Communist Party membership card in his name. Duff Cooper assured him that no such rumour had emanated from the embassy and that he would contradict it.
Like many political affairs, this one was more heavily influenced by a clash of personalities than of ideologies. Generals Juin and Lattre had loathed each other since they were at the École de Guerre together, and de Lattre wanted Juin’s job as chief of the National Defence General Staff. The two rivals, on the other hand, did agree about fighting the proposed budget cuts to the army. De Lattre told Brigadier Daly how proud he was at having ‘kept all the solid furniture in the military house, despite having lost some carpets and good pictures’. During the same meeting, there was a telephone conversation with the commandant of Saint-Cyr military academy: ‘How many pupils do you have at your school now?’ De Lattre demanded. ‘1,800 you say. Reduce them at once to 1,200. Ultimately I intend to have only 600 of the very best students, and they will be reduced gradually fromnow on. Get rid of 600 at once and explain to the boys that it’s in their best interests that they should go now. You didn’t quite hear me, you say. Well, get rid of your telephone officer for having such a bad telephone.’
General de Lattre proved that he was not in the Communist Party’s pocket by vigorously opposing their demands for a popular militia led by a very small regular cadre. Yet the wild rumours about him confirmed SHAEF in its reluctance to trust the French with intelligence. The ‘thirteenth card’ – Ultra intelligence based on intercepts of German signals traffic – had been kept from them, even though they had been closely involved in the original attempts to crack the code with an Enigma machine.*
Following de Gaulle’s departure, the spring of 1946 was a time of deep unease.