[This text is produced by computer-aided translation with minimal post-editing]
Yet another book on 1939-40.
..
Yes, and it will probably not be the last.
With each new book, a new image appears, based on
new documents and especially another manner of viewing the old.
Concerning France, recent research projects validate a certain number of
traditional judgements.
With Jean-Louis Crémieux-Brilha, one learns that the country
prepared and fought, but in the two cases a bit late, and that it
kept in its military and civil functions, in spite of reform,
a lot of old habits that were fatal.
With Philippe Simonno, one discovers that the pursuit of the war in
North Africa was not fully excluded, and that this choice had to do
with a singular plot to prevent it.
These works, and some others, invite one to examine the phoney war to discover
there the establishment of the motives that entered in action in the
months of May and June, determinant as much the lot of arms as the new
configuration of belligerents.
I have myself described, with the assistance of the general Doumenc whose
secret papers I published, the pangs of commandment, those of the government
and those that connected these two authorities, between the negotiations of
Moscow (August 1939) until the armistice.
Concerning Winston Churchill, a real historiographique earthquake is
underway, that the present book aims both to present and to continue.
It began in the United States in 1990.
That year, analyzing "The Churchill-Hitler duel between 10 May and 31 July
1940", John Lukacs put his finger on the essential, up to there
unseen:
the major role that Churchill played to put England first, United States
second, to oppose the insolent victory achieved by Germany in the battle of
France.
The same year, the historian Rusbridger, in collaboration with the ex-
intelligence officer Nave, asserted in "The treason of Pearl Harbor"
that Churchill was informed of the planned Japanese attack and omitted to
warn Roosevelt, so as not to reveal that England was
more advanced in the decrypting of codes, doubting that without
this attack the United States would not enter the war.
In the same spirit, he dismantled the defenses of Singapore so as to
attract the danger provided by the Japanese empire.
John Costello finally published on 10 May 1991 "The ten days that
saved the Occident", which analyzed for the first time the flight, occurring a half
- century earlier, of Rudolf Hess to Scotland, not as an impulse but
as a deliberate mission ordered by Hitler, intended to take contact with
British milieux favorable to peace in view of favoring the German attack
against the USSR.
The success presupposed the downfall of Churchill, who doubted seriously
on that date the solidity of his ministry such that he preferred
to impose on all a pious silence rather than to jeer these Nazi illusions,
These works do not found a new orthodoxy, just by reason of their divergences.
But they have raised some seals from the official truth on the second
world conflict.
History is written by the victors.
To this banal phenomenon have been added several others, specific to the war of
1939-45.
The conquered hardly inspire sympathy.
Churchill and the English ministers formerly favorable to an agreement with
Germany were members of the same conservative party and consequently
sought to moderate their disagreements before the eyes of the public
during and after the war;
better, the affirmation a hundred times repeated of the national unanimity
had been, for Churchill, the surest means to suffocate discordant voices.
Other than England, the truth was not the interest of either of the two main
victors, the United States and the USSR, because they had taken a long time
to be committed in the conflict;
spreading then the fable that they intended to become engaged since the
beginning but wanted to
earn the time to prepare the state of public opinion, as well as
arms,
they could only blur in their postwar propaganda the miraculous survival
of England and of its chief in the year following the defeat of the French.
The cold war then coagulated, as an abrupt glaciation, the propaganda.
The United States and the USSR found themselves each at the head of a
coalition, integrating victors and the conquered, and if their
confrontation put doubts as to their committment to the
alliance anti-nazi, it rendered impossible a
debate on the subject, that had dangerously divided the two camps.
It is certainly because they no longer feared to appear as apologist for
Moscow or
Washington, that writers have begun to be daring at the end of the 1980s.
This boldness has not always produced happy results.
John Charmley, since the debut of 1993, made a scandal in England with a
new biography that, from the title, tends to a radical criticism of Churchill's
form of resistance.
Consciously or not, it repeats a very old thesis:
that it would have been better to leave Hitler and Stalin
to do each other in.
But it does an original and useful service when it shows to what extent
Churchill weighed personally on the course of events.
He is the first to restore the political atmosphere of May-June 1940,
moment where English leaders feared or hoped an early fall of the cabinet,
"a government presided by Churchill, but not the government of
Churchill.
Churchill, according to this author, persisted in "creating an état d'esprit
that he claimed, later, to have only represented.
John Charmley unveils with much zeal how the
prime minister employed half-truths to prevent all discussion on
conditions of peace that Germany proposed at the period.
As for the psychoanalyst Nata Minor, she has just published a full
volume to
demonstrate who had written "Mrs. Solario", anonymous English novel of
1956, and attributes it to our man, whose retirement dated a year before
- while
raising on the last page the idea that the author could have also been his
wife, Clementine.
The historian would like a more rigorous demonstration;
in the meantime, he retains a symptom:
to our time, Churchill appears as a complex being, far from having
delivered all his secrets.
Churchill and French:
no book has ever carried this title.
Because nobody has judged interesting the question.
It must be said that he has himself simplified the question:
he would never have had but ingenuous thoughts, and the English people, from
simple soldier to minister, would have followed him without hesitation
or afterthought, once past the disastrous attitude of appeasement
"by which, 1933 to 1939, leaders well intentional but lacking in perception
had fed the illusions and passivity of the citizens".
If one accepts this version, the relationship between Churchill and the
French would not merit deep investigation.
It is of a simplicity, literally biblical:
they have either received the light, or they haven't;
at the very most one can distinguish between the blind, the consequential
disciples such as de Gaulle, and some inconsequentials such as Reynaud or
Mandel, who see well what it would be necessary to do but who do not do
it.
The period just finished has been characterized by a
lack of transnational studies.
The historians have worked each on his own country and, if conferences or
journals have allowed a compilation of results, it has been necessary
to wait long in order that works of a single researcher could examine relationships
between several powers.
It is all the more remarkable in the French case that Pierre
Renouvin has been, on the subject, a pioneer, precisely because he
calls into question some of the narrow national views that prevailed
in France in his youth concerning the conflict of 1914-18.
His disciples have, from the 1960s, accumulated theses but all have
avoided, until now, the period 1939-40 or have at most simply nibbled at it.
Around 1980 finally arrived some works looking resolutely into the affairs
of at least two countries together:
Kersaudy, Bédarida, Vanwelkenhuyzen, Watt, Schumann are the authors.
If, with John Charmley, one falls into a narrow British vision, to the
point of finding in his writings an interpretation of nazism and
its objectives, Lukacs and Rusbridger cross indefatigably frontiers, and
even more so does John Costello.
But his masterwork, that mobilizes the archives of ten of the largest and
not so large capitals, reveals a vein but does not exhaust it.
It is susceptible to multiple layers, whose analysis of the relationship
between Churchill and the French is not the less interesting.
Winston Churchill was distanced from power during the decade 1930-39,
partly because he reproached the leaders of his country for their politics
regarding the French - or, if one prefers, their politics regarding Germany,
too unfavorable to France.
This attitude did not go unnoticed on the other side of the Channel.
Generals and politicians had become his regular partners in conversation.
Many others have been interested in his positions, having based on him their
hopes.
But there where the affair becomes really interesting, is in its outcome.
The tree does not produce the fruit that one had hoped.
Indeed, shortly before the war ceased to be "phoney" and to become dramatic,
the French politician reputed most churchillien, Paul Reynaud, is
carried to power, and so is Churchill this same 10 May when Hitler
releases his attack.
But it is thus, the cooperation of the two country left much to desire,
and it finished in a bitter rupture, by the armistice that Reynaud has not
known or wanted to prevent, then by the cannonade of Oran, known also as
Mers-el-Kébir, an initiative of Churchill entailing the death of more of
thousand defenseless French sailors.
Even more surprising, the old guard French friends of Churchill
were replaced in extremis by a pleiad of youth led by a little-known
officer, who was to assert himself as one of the most prominent statesmen of the
century.
The collapse of peace hopes the 1st September 1939 - while having let
Germany rearm itself in order to subsist, then its victorious assault
of the French
defenses in mid-May 1940 that made it mistress the continent - did not
bring ruling circles in England as in France to recoil in an attitude of
refusal, but well to search, increasingly actively, a compromises with
Germany while solliciting the support of the United States and Italy.
Then rises the reciprocal suspicion:
is not the ally preparing to indulge the enemy, to ready ways of
an accomodation with it, perhaps even to negotiate?
Ambiguous during the phoney war, this état d'esprit assumes all its
virulence and maximum effect on events from 15 May.
Churchill then succeeds with a rare performance:
He must triumph with a very minority viewpoint, not by concealing it at any
moment but by using patient pedagogy, without neglecting the
political games that divide and neutralize these that don't think as he.
He goes along with governmental hesitations without sharing them, trying
little by little to change the lead into gold.
..
and in the end he succeeds.
4 July, after Oran, he has more or less enough elbow-room, which was
far from being the case on 10 May when he became prime minister.
Costello and then Charmley have revealed all that, while leaving almost
untouched the question:
and the French?
What do they understand of this game?
In which they collaborated consciously?
In which they were pawns?
The major role played by the English war chief justifies that one studies,
on the
French side equally, some individuals who events have caused to meet
often with Churchill and to react to his initiatives.
The choice is self-evident:
Daladier and Reynaud for political leaders, Gamelin, Georges and
de Gaulle for the military side.
Of course, it will also be a question of Weygand, late comer to
the military command, whose
portrait is more closely examined in the preceding work.
This step will oblige us, in the first part of the work, to frequent flashbacks
to the inter-war years, destined to show how individual paths finally
cross between March and June 1940.
A chronology (p. 795) will help the reader to orient himself.
Concerning military operations of May-June 1940, the present volume
confines itself to the account of events.
One will find all desirable demonstrations in the Journal of the GHQ
of general Doumenc, and in comments which I have added.
One will find there also all details which I can not enter into here.
The new research conducted for this work have confirmed the main intuitions of the
first.
Only the passage on relationships between Churchill, Halifax and
the English military chiefs on 23 to 25 May 1940 is to be modified appreciably,
because I didn't have the audacity to postulate that the minister and some
generals could knowingly hide things from the chief of the government.
That reinforces me in my mission:
It's a matter of taking risks, to make documents tell their story,
and in this area,
aside from some subjects of very circumscribed polemics, the history of 1939-40
has suffered a large delay.
By tallying up the most honest books, one knows almost hour by hour,
the deeds and gestures of the main actors.
But they are presented in such disorder, in such chronological confusion
and with such little sense of the relative importance of the deeds and
events that the lay reader can gain no clear idea of it all,
as Winston Churchill wrote concerning the official history of the
battle of the Dardanelles.
When one has brought them out into the open, then the historical work
as such remains to be done.
It is necessary to bring alive the matter, to give it a sense, to try to
see the motives of each and his inner workings.
A profusion of documents exhumed in the 1980s beckon:
Journals of Colville and Daladier, souvenirs of Doumenc, Palewski
and Girard de Charbonnières, new depositions of archives uncovered by
Crémieux-Brilhac, Paillat, Costello, Dutailly, Martin Gilbert,
Elisabeth du Réa, interviews collected by William Manchester and
Jean Lacouture.
I add here some nuggets due to the writings of Daladier and de Gaulle, as
well as to the military counselor of Reynaud, Villelume.
I use archives of the British war cabinet, especially for the months of May and
June 1940, in a more systematic and detailed manner of all I have
been able to read.
I deliver finally the product of interviews with personalities who have
played a role in the shadow of the great:
Elisabeth de Miribel, Claude Gruson, Jean Daridan.
All three have well wanted to get to know this work, and have strongly
contributed to improve it, either by expressing agreement that gave confidence,
or by criticizing things that then stimulated reflection.
I have a particular mention to Pierre Dhers, professor of history and
député of the Assemblée Nationale from 1945.
In this double title, he has played a growing role, annoyingly belated,
in the parliamentary inquiry Commission on these events.
He wrote to me after publication of the first book and I have
made the acquaintance of
a lively and honest spirit, aware of many things had been hidden
from him, and conscientious at present in digging out the maximum.
It has been pages that require a demanding reader.
His memory and files have helped me to enrich them.
However the most important is not, in the occurrence, to find documents or
new testimonies, but to embrace a new look of the totality of materials, to
discern a truth that, if it is rarely simple, is at least not multiple.
Besides the witnesses I've encountered and the authors whose books
I've quoted, it is time to give thanks of those who have
supported me, both in finding the French meaning as well as
the English meaning of the term, personnel of libraries and archives, as well as the seven university specialists who have
accepted to read the manuscript and discuss it with me:
my thesis directors Guy Pedroncini and Jean-Claude Allain, as
well as Madeleine Rebérioux, Elisabeth de Réau, Jean
Vanwelkenhuyzen, François Kersaudy and Robert Frank.
Thanks finally to René Girault, for his teaching and remarks, to
Danielle Tartakowsky, Jean-Louis Crémieux-Brilhac, Claude
Nicolet, Germaine Willard, Claude Paillat, Pierre Rocolle,
Henri-Christian Giraud for precious information, to Dominique Herpin
and Marie-Josiane Cittanova for checking some translations and
to Laurent Theis for his competent and active literary direction.
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