1AlliesThank God for the French Army. —Winston Churchill, March 23, 1933
As was typical of that fateful spring, the day began in glorious sunshine. Walking through central London, the chaff from the plane trees floating in the breeze, the Senior Assistant Secretary to the War Cabinet, Colonel Leslie Hollis, marveled at the serenity of the city: clerks and civil servants on their way to work, typists in gay frocks, shoppers, and soldiers—all stepped brightly about their business, oblivious to the danger that hung over them. When he reached Hendon aerodrome, however, Hollis learned of the storm raging on the other side of the Channel. The Royal Air Force wanted to postpone the trip but the Prime Minister was adamant: “To hell with that . . . I am going, whatever happens! This is too serious a situation to bother about the weather!”
The weather was, indeed, the least of Churchill’s concerns. Not only had the Luftwaffe bombed the airfield at which he was due to arrive the previous evening but the French Prime Minister, Paul Reynaud, when summoning his ally to this urgent and impromptu conference, had mentioned both the time and the location of the rendezvous over an open telephone line. Churchill was furious. Convinced that the Germans would have been listening in on the call, he ordered his Assistant Private Secretary, Jock Colville, to ring up Reynaud’s Chef de Cabinet and cancel the meeting, as a deception, before being persuaded that this would cause unacceptable chaos at the other end.
As it transpired, it is hard to imagine what further mayhem could have ensued. Landing on the pockmarked airfield near Tours shortly before 1 p.m. on June 13, 1940, the Prime Minister and his party were disconcerted to find that there was no one to meet them. “One sensed the increasing degeneration of affairs,” recalled Churchill, who walked across the wet, dilapidated airfield toward a group of idling French airmen and requested “une voiture.” Eventually, the Station Commander’s Citroën was commandeered and the British set off, in considerable discomfort, toward the Préfecture.
Refugees clogged the route—a fragment of the 6 to 10 million French men, women, and children fleeing the advancing enemy—and it was with difficulty that the car reached the temporary headquarters of the French Government. There, in keeping with the theme of the day, the British found no one to welcome them, nor any clue as to the whereabouts of the French Prime Minister. Churchill, who had arrived in France looking as if he were “trying to chew a mouthful of nuts and bolts,” took charge. It was already after 2 p.m., he declared, and before anything further was attempted he was going to have some lunch. The British made for the Hôtel Grande Bretagne, where, after some forceful negotiations with the proprietor, they were furnished with a private room, some cold chicken, and several bottles of Vouvray.
Presently, the Secretary of the French War Cabinet, Paul Baudouin, arrived and ruined the meal by seasoning it “with an outpouring of oily defeatism.” Resistance, he maintained, was futile. The Germans were pouring over the Seine bridges and were, at this very moment, on the outskirts of Paris. If the United States agreed to declare war on Germany immediately, there was, perhaps, the possibility of continuing the struggle but otherwise the situation was beyond retrieve. Responding to this “Niagara of doom,” Churchill was imperturbable. Certainly, he hoped that America would enter the war, he told Baudouin, but Britain would fight on regardless.
At last, Reynaud arrived at the Préfecture. There, the British delegation, consisting of the Foreign Secretary, Viscount Halifax, the newly appointed Minister of Aircraft Production, Lord Beaverbrook, the Permanent Undersecretary of the Foreign Office, Sir Alexander Cadogan, and the Military Secretary to the War Cabinet, Major General Hastings “Pug” Ismay, met Churchill’s personal liaison with the French Prime Minister, Louis Spears, and the British Ambassador to Paris, Sir Ronald Campbell. On the French side, only Reynaud and Baudouin were present. Although the French Cabinet had invited Churchill to attend their session later that evening—an invitation Reynaud, inexplicably, failed to relay—the absence of the French Commander in Chief, General Weygand, or the Deputy Prime Minister, Maréchal Pétain, was an ominous sign.
Reynaud informed his British visitors that, at a Cabinet meeting the previous evening, Weygand had described the military situation as completely hopeless. The French armies were at their “last gasp.” France had been defeated by the “God of Battles” and had no choice but to plead for an armistice, to prevent the country from descending into anarchy. Reynaud had insisted that all was not lost. If French forces had suffered great losses, then so had the enemy. If the Army could withstand the German invader for just a few more weeks, he had told the Commander in Chief, then they would receive more help from Britain and, eventually, the United States. With rising emotion, Reynaud had spoken of the need to save French honor and, although he did not repeat this to his British guests, accused Weygand of critically misjudging their adversary: “You are taking Hitler for Wilhelm I, the old gentleman who took Alsace and Lorraine from us [in 1871] and that was that. But Hitler is a Genghis Khan.”
The French Cabinet had fallen in behind Reynaud. What significance had public order when the honor of France was at stake? What of the agreement signed with Britain not three months ago proscribing a separate peace? And what of the French Empire, from which it would be possible to continue the war? Only Pétain had supported Weygand’s proposal. And yet Reynaud now told Churchill that he would not be able to persuade his colleagues to continue the struggle without an immediate declaration of war by the United States. He was compelled, therefore, to ask how the British Government would respond to a French request to repudiate the agreement the two allies had signed on March 28 and seek an armistice with the Germans.
This was the turning point. The moment the British had feared but rarely spoken of for three weeks. An occurrence so shocking that it would have been unthinkable only a couple of months earlier: the defeat, after just six weeks of fighting, of the second largest army in Europe. The end of a political and military partnership that had lasted just ten months.
Copyright © 2025 by Tim Bouverie. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
