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and How to Do It’. This began confidently enough, stating that if the Germans arrived ‘They will be driven out by our Navy, our Army and our Air Force,’ but because the civilian populations of Poland, Holland and Belgium had been ‘taken by surprise’ and ‘did not know what to do when the moment came’, certain instructions were laid down. (Of course the Ministries also meant French civilians too, but since France was still nominally in the war they could not be mentioned by name.) The first instruction was: ‘If the Germans come, by parachute, aeroplane or ship, you must remain where you are. The order is “Stay Put”.’ The High Command wanted to avoid the scenes of millions of refugees clogging the roads, as had happened on the Continent. ‘Do Not Believe Rumours and Do Not Spread Them’ was the next invocation, although identifying a rumour was left to the individual: ‘Use your common sense.’ Some of the other instructions amounted to just that – common sense – such as ‘Do Not Give Any German Anything.’

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Dunkirk fell on 4 June to General Günther von Kluge, who marched in under a massive pall of acrid smoke from burning ships and oil installations, and the next day the Germans put Fall Rot (Plan Red) into operation, with Army Group A swinging south to try to break Weygand’s line of forty-nine divisions along the Somme and Aisne rivers. Despite their still healthy numbers, the French were in a hopeless situation. The BEF had disappeared, leaving only one infantry division and two armoured brigades on the Continent; the Belgians had surrendered; the French had lost twenty-two of their seventy-one field divisions, six of their seven motorized divisions, two of their five fortress divisions and eight of twenty armoured battalions.52 Furthermore, Air Chief Marshal Sir Hugh Dowding of RAF Fighter Command adamantly refused to send over any more Hurricanes or Spitfires to the battle of France, correctly assuming that the forthcoming battle of Britain would require every plane he could deploy. He had already committed the Advanced Air Striking Force squadrons at the start of the battle of France, but with Hurricanes being lost at the rate of sometimes twenty-five per day – when the factories were producing only four or five – he was right to threaten to resign rather than sacrifice any more.53

On Monday, 10 June, Mussolini declared war on the Allies, which seemed more serious at the time than in retrospect, coming at a bad moment psychologically. The Italian armed forces comprised 1.5 million men, 1,700 aircraft and a navy of six capital ships, nineteen cruisers, fifty-nine destroyers and 116 submarines.54 It was nonetheless an opportunistic and short-sighted move that was to cost Italy dear. That same night the French Government quitted Paris, with Weygand declaring it a demilitarized ‘open city’. Three million of the city’s five million inhabitants also fled, amid terrible scenes. Nurses gave lethal injections to patients who could not be moved; babies were abandoned; a tank commander preparing to defend a bridge across the Loire was killed by local inhabitants who wanted no bloodshed.55 Mayors were particularly desperate that the French Army should not make stands in their towns.

Churchill made the fourth of five trips across the Channel during the battle of France for a meeting of the senior Allied decision-making body, the Supreme War Council, on 11 June at the Château du Muguet near Briare, south-east of Orléans. Reynaud, Pétain, Weygand, the British War Minister Anthony Eden and General Charles de Gaulle were all present, as was Churchill’s personal representative to Reynaud, Major-General Louis Spears. Spears recorded in his autobiography Assignment to Catastrophe that ‘The Frenchmen sat with set white faces, their eyes upon the table. They looked for all the world like prisoners hauled up from some deep dungeon to hear an inevitable verdict.’ (By the end of the war, Reynaud, Weygand and Pétain had indeed all been imprisoned by one side or the other.) For relief from the woeful sense of defeatism emanating from Pétain and