Did De Gaulle Wear Wings?

IN the March Atlantic I discussed a number of books dealing with the North African campaign in general and with “de Gaullism” in particular. I thought, at that time, that the books reviewed and the memoirs published in American magazines, to say nothing of the course of recent French history, had provided ample material for a proper understanding of the men and events connected with an episode grievously misrepresented by propagandists and woefully misunderstood at home. But even with de Gaulle retired to his tent, the subject will not down.

The month has produced three volumes, one of which is partly, another largely, and the third wholly concerned with North Africa and de Gaulle. These are This House Against This House, by Vincent Sheean (Random House, $3.50); Casablanca to Katyn, Volume III of The Secret History of the War, by Waverley Root (Charles Scribner’s Sons, $5.00); and I Accuse de Gaulle, by Henri de Kerillis (Harcourt Brace, $2.75). Three men of varied experience and background discuss the same personalities and events and arrive at three totally different conclusions.

What are we to think? Did General do Gaulle wear wings or walk on cloven hoofs? Were the American Slate and War Departments honorable or vicious, wise or foolish, liberal or reactionary? Certainly, few people could answer such questions merely from a reading of these volumes, if equal authority were conceded to each author.

Mr. Sheean in This House Against, This House writes, as always, with clarity, with feeling, and with considerable distinction. His book is like Gaul, divided into three parts — the first is a meditation on the period after World War I; the second is called “Glimpses of the War” — World War II; and the third is “Shadows of the Peace.” In the first and last parts, Mr. Sheean deals with hopes and fears, with memories and deceptions, with the dreadful possibilities of the not too distant future, and he handles these matters with the genuine emotion of a thoughtful and honest man.

I found more comfort and satisfaction, however, in “Glimpses of the War” than in the other sections. Here Mr. Sheean, admirable and sympathetic reporter that he is, describes his experiences as an officer of Aviation Intelligence serving in North Africa, Sicily, Italy, Europe, and in the China-Burma-India theater. Major — as he was then — Sheean was more aware than most field officers of the dangers involved in our North African landings, and during the campaign he lived through the touch-and-go period in Southern Tunisia when nothing was sure — except mud, C rations, and being bombed. This is firsthand stuff written by an experienced observer. Mr. Sheean’s sound common sense is evidenced in his comment on the hullabaloo occasioned by thq American support given General Giraud as head of the French Army and the provisional military government in French Africathe hullabaloo which continues to this day. Mr. Sheean writes: —

This [our policy in North Africa toward the French] was assailed by all the pundits of the press, who, from a safe distance, thought it monstrous of us not to dislodge the established French authorities, flout the opinion of the vast majority of Frenchmen, and by main force install the dictatorship of a group of exiles who clustered around the person or name of General Charles de Gaulle.

When the clouds and smoke have all cleared away this will surely appear to have been one of the oddest fancies of ill-informed quixotic liberalism in our time. We were at war with the most formidable of all military powers. . . . De Gaulle had no position whatever in the constitutional or legal sense: he was merely an officer who felt and said that in him — outside of France — reposed the true soul of France. . . .

But aside from the military necessities, it would have been a political blunder to force de Gaulle on the French. They did not want him. Many units of their regular forces would have fought us with passion if we had attempted to bring him in. . . . When we first landed in Africa it never occurred to me that anybody could consider our course wrong. It seemed to me so obviously right — more than right: the only conceivable course under the circumstances — that I never debated the matter. The Gaullistes I knew understood it then (that is, those who were on the spot), and their whole problem was to contain themselves in patience for a few months until we were ready for them. It was only afterwards, in sheer amazement, that I saw the American newspapers and periodicals . . . and discovered that by some occult reasoning the press considered us to have been doing a great wrong. When I first saw some of these press articles I was mystified, as it did not seem to me that any reasonable adult could take such a point of view, and some of those who signed the articles (Freda Kirchwey, Edgar Ansell Mowrer and others) were known to me for years as sensible persons. I could only conclude what is, clearly, the truth, that these critics had no real knowledge of the situation

This greatly abridged quotation does not do justice to Mr. Sheean’s argument but it is typical of his temperate and considered opinion, which refused to be stampeded by excited people. It represents sensible American thinking as opposed to the hysteria which swept French and American de Gaullists into a crusade which gave little thought to actuality. There was a gallant and inspiring quality in General de Gaulle’s revolt in 1940; but too quickly his position assumed mystical properties in his own eyes and in those of his followers. He became a kind of sacred vessel, the recipient — in some obscure way — of the soul of France. As an almost divine leader, he became arrogant and truculent, hypersensitive to criticism, aloof from reality — a dictator in the making. It was quite impossible for ordinary Americans, going about the hard business of fighting a war as best they could, to sympathize with a position which seemed to them preposterous, or with a personality which struck them as too difficult and egocentric for workable relations. This, I think, is Mr. Sheean’s attitude and it is a fair one.

His comment on the Italian campaign is equally pointed. For the first — and happily for the last — time our strategy wobbled. How far Mr. Roosevelt and Mr. Churchill — rather than the Joint Chiefs of Staff — were responsible for the ups and downs of this unhappy campaign, we do not know as yet. Both the campaign and its aftermaths are sour notes in the triumphant chorus of our war effort. Mr. Sheean’s comments on India and China are interesting reading in the light of current events. The whole book is constructive and stimulating, and if the author is left at the end anxiously scanning the skies of the future, aren’t we all?

In reviewing Mr. Waverley Root’s The Secret History of the War, Volume III, I am confining myself to the chapters dealing with the North African episode.

Mr. Root and I part company very early in his chapter “Giraud in North Africa.” It is almost instantly apparent that in Mr. Root’s opinion only one point of view is possible — that of the out-and-out de Gaullist. Consistently he follows the method of the Daily Worker editorial-reporter, or of Pravda. Everything that our side does is right. Everything the other side does is a work of darkness; it is immediately suspect, it is inherently sinister. For any Frenchman who did not utterly support de Gaulle, he employs the general term “Vichyite,” with the tacit implication that every Vichyite was a collaborationist if not a pro-German, a reactionary, a totalitarian, an economic royalist, and probably a traitor and a crook. I object to this assumption most strongly.

I do not believe that any American has the right to condemn any Frenchman for the decision he made in 1940, either to support what he conceived to be the legal government of France or to break his oath of allegiance and take refuge abroad. It was a cruel choice. Men of the nicest honor and the purest patriotism divided sharply on this issue. A somewhat similar and equally agonizing problem confronted American civil and military officials at the outbreak of our Civil War. George H. Thomas and Robert E. Lee were both Virginians, both officers in the United States Army, both men of unquestioned honor and integrity. Their decisions as to the action they felt compelled to take were diametrically opposed. It is not hard to do your duty. It is often incredibly difficult to know where your duty lies. Good men followed de Gaulle and good men followed Pétain, and sorry scoundrels followed the lines of least resistance into both their camps. Mr. Root cannot make the Vichyite stigma stick to many of the French soldiers and sailors whom I knew, whose only thought was how best could they serve their country.

Mr. Root goes so far as to state that the choice by the American authorities of General Giraud to head French resistance in North Africa must have had the enthusiastic commendation of “the German political strategists.” At another point, quoting Secretary Hull’s words, “General Giraud, like a true soldier,”Mr. Root indulges his editorial opportunities by inserting a mean, smirking little question mark, so that the passage, with Root, reads: “General Giraud, like a true soldier [?]. . .”There is ample testimony from all the soldiers who knew him that General Giraud was just that: a true soldier and a gentleman, too simple and straightforward and too honest to understand or combat the kind of men and the kind of intrigue which brought about his removal and pursued him with a vicious malignity that has few equals in our day.

It does not seem to occur to Mr. Root that our State Department and military leaders chose General Giraud because he was an honest man and a patriot whose one ambition was to fight the Germans and liberate France. It does not occur to him that they did not choose de Gaulle because they lacked confidence in his stability, discretion, and character; because they did not wish to become embroiled in political intrigue and French civil war; because de Gaulle was hated and despised in North Africa; and because no secret or confidential communication was considered secure in de Gaulle’s headquarters. These reasons are too simple for Mr. Root.

Mr. Robert Murphy and the State Department, he says, looked forward to a post-war France which could be kept at heel. He quotes from a letter of advice he wrote to Mr. Wendell Willkie: “The difficulties and dangers of the State Department policy appear to result from the fact that the Department actually does not want a post-war democracy in France.” A sweeping statement, one of Mr. Root’s opinions presented as a fact.

He spends pages to bolster up an assumption, his own, that Giraud was backed because our government thought he could be persuaded to yield French sovereignty — and bases — to the United States and England: Dakar, Bizerte, Martinique, New Caledonia, and so on. It was a Machiavellian plan. De Gaulle, we knew, would consent to no such squandering of the French Empire; therefore we opposed de Gaulle. He thinks it was shameful not to tell de Gaulle when and where we were going to invade North Africa. This paragraph is typical: —

The Fighting French had accepted with the best grace possible the combined insult and injury which the Allies had imposed upon them by invading French territory without their participation or their knowledge, and delivering its government over to the political enemies whom they had been fighting on behalf of the Allies for two and a half years, while those enemies had been aiding the Axis.

As for the insult, General Eisenhower and his colleagues undoubtedly considered the life of a single GI of far greater importance than de Gaulle’s hurt feelings; the “injury” listed typifies the vice in Mr. Root’s thinking. De Gaulle had been engaged in fighting his political enemies, not in fighting Germany. The de Gaullist efforts were concentrated on taking over defenseless odds and ends of the French Empire, in building up in them and in England and the United States a political machine destined to take over France when she was liberated by the Allies. Such sections of the French Empire as were not defenseless — Syria, West Africa, and Madagascar — were attacked in turn, and de Gaullists showed little hesitation in shedding the blood of Frenchmen who were their political enemies, although they sought few opportunities of attacking the Axis direct. The military achievements, — against Germany, — with the exception of the Resistance in France, which can be credited to de Gaulle and his followers, were negligible. It was exactly because the Allied campaign in North Africa could not be complicated by warfare between de Gaulle and his political enemiesthe existing government — that he was not invited to participate in the initial stages.

A great deal can be forgiven a forensic journalist in the height of a debatable issue. I knew Edgar Mowrer and many others who felt and wrote like Mr. Root, during the North African episode. Even Drew Middleton joined in the chorus of denunciation heaped on Robert Murphy and General Eisenhower. I thought they were wrong then and I hope they know now that they wrote without full information. But Mr. Root, who quotes freely from Mr. Middleton’s dispatches of 1942 and 1943 to bolster up his opinions in 1946, is certainly lacking in historical perspective. The honorable imprimatur of Charles Scribner’s Sons certifies this document as “History.” I am sorry that this is so.

Mr. Henri de Kerillis was a pilot in the last war, a journalist, a member of the Chamber of Deputies who consistently attacked German sympathizers and denounced the policy of appeasement. He opposed the Armistice of 1940, threw in his lot with de Gaulle, escaped to England and later to the United States. Heart and soul in sympathy with de Gaulle, in New York he edited with Mme. Tabouis the de Gaullist journal, Pour la Victoire, and was considered one of the chief supporters and publicists of that cause. His disillusion was gradual but profound. The continual growth of political as against military de Gaullism disturbed him increasingly. Repeatedly he urged his leader to take the field, to fight alongside the British and Americans, to cease hating and opposing Churchill and Roosevelt, to stand as a Frenchman for the liberation of France, not as a political Führer, the head of a party. The final break came at the time when the Richelieu and the Montcalm were in New York Harbor and their crews were being solicited to desert their ships to enlist in the ineffective private navy of de Gaulle. Mr. Waverley Root pooh-poohs these desertions as he does the efforts to make soldiers desert from the French Army in Africa — in time of war and in face of the enemy.

Mr. Root thinks nothing of Mr. de Kerillis. He deserted de Gaulle and is therefore a scoundrel. Mr. Root assumes that Mr. de Kerillis was bought by that ogre and villain, M. Lemaigre-Dubreuil. Mr. de Kerillis, whose son was a martyr of the Resistance, does not, to my way of thinking, write like a hired scribe. He writes as one betrayed by a leader whom he had served with devotion and confidence. His book, I Accuse de Gaulle, which has just appeared in an English translation, was written in French for Frenchmen and was published in Canada.

Such an author goes much further than an American could properly go in denunciation of de Gaulle. He follows the de Gaullist expanding political intrigue with growing distaste and dismay. He comes back again and again to de Gaulle’s complete preoccupation with politics and his denial of his duties as a soldier. He describes in detail the actual sabotaging of the French Army in Africa because of de Gaulle’s needless fear that it would be used against him. He tells how that army — the part of it equipped by the Americans — was hustled into the Italian campaign and kept busy dying there; how the de Gaullist army of one division led by General Leclerc, hero of a bloodless desert march, was held in reserve until American blood and armor had cleared the way to Paris - to march in there as conquerors, a praetorian guard to make Paris safe for de Gaulle. He does not forget the fine performance of French divisions in the invasion of Southern France and of Germany. These were a part of a much larger North African Army which would have been equipped and trained by Americans but for de Gaulle’s backing and filling.

He repeats the story of de Gaulle’s contribution to the Normandy invasion, the withholding of all but a handful of the trained liaison officers who were to accompany our troops. He recounts with horror the cruel malevolence with which “ the political enemies” of de Gaulle were pursued, the vile treatment of General Boisson of French West Africa, the tribute by de Gaullists at the tomb of Darlan’s assassin, the brutality of the de Gaulle Gestapo, headed by the infamous Colonel “Passy.” Of the treatment of General Giraud he says: “The elimination of Giraud was carried out with a cold and meticulous hatred, a fierce and ruthless animosity. He was the rival in De Gaulle’s path. . . . Step by step he was driven from his ‘co-presidency of the Committee of Liberation’ — he was demoted from his position as head of the Army — a Commissioner of War was set over him — he was supervised by civil inspectors and by commissions — his close associates were attacked — he was humiliated, threatened, watched by the police — he was ignominiously kicked out of the Army — and finally an attempt was made to assassinate him.”

Chiefly, however, Mr. de Kerillis accuses de Gaulle of seeking and achieving power and place through false promises and illegal means.

Well, he succeeded and became for a time the Leader of Liberated France. Soon enough his instabilities, his “faults of character” caught up with him; unable to endure opposition, he resigned in a fit of petulance after a short reign in which he gave France what has been recently described as “the most authoritarian regime since Napoleon I.”

It is not a nice story, but it should be told, if only that our old friendship for France shall not be wrecked through misrepresentation and propaganda. Here are two “histories,”that of Mr. Root and that of Mr. de Kerillis. You pay your money and you take your choice. As for me, if I cannot go all the way with Mr. de Kerillis, I can still prefer his story to Mr. Root’s. It makes more sense. It is nearer the record. It is more generous. It squares with human values and with known performances. It is not pervaded with that dreadful pathological quality which inspired the de Gaulle mystique, that strange disequilibrium which sometimes prevails in periods of revolution and despair. All of us can be deceived. We need not deceive ourselves.