Dan Snow's History Hit - The Fall of France 1940: How it Influenced the US

Episode Date: March 23, 2022

Shocked by the fall of France in 1940, panicked U.S. leaders rushed to back the Vichy government despite their Nazi sympathies. This policy caused instability at home whilst also driving a wedge between the allied nations.In this episode, Dan is joined by war historian Michael S. Neiberg to discuss this fateful decision that nearly destroyed the Anglo–American alliance.If you'd like to learn more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad-free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today! To download the History Hit app please go to the Android or Apple store.

Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. One of the things I've always found fascinating about the fall of France in 1940 is how the French state run by Pétain, based in Vichy, has been branded as Vichy France by subsequent history, but of course to many people at the time it was simply France. It was the French who then aligned themselves with the Axis powers, allowed Japan, for example, to use French Indochina for their assault into Southeast Asia at the end of 1941. Now, France presented a problem to neutral nations, non-combatant nations. What should relations with this France, is it Vichy France, France? How should they conduct relations with France? And few nations wrestle that question more than the United States of America. After France fell in 1940, the US government recognised the Vichy government, despite their Nazi sympathies. This was a source of

political disagreement in the US, and also drove a big wedge between the US and its potential ally, Britain. So in this episode, I'm joined by a friend of the podcast, Michael Nyberg. He is a very brilliant historian. We're lucky to have him on the podcast. He's been on before talking about US military history. He's the chair of war studies in the Department of National Security and Strategy at the United States Army War College. He is an absolute legend when it comes to US strategic and military history. And so it's great to hear him talking about how the US approached the problem of France. And particularly for this Brit, it was a useful corrective to the kind of Anglo-centric

view of France following its fall in 1940. If you wish to listen to more podcasts with Michael, you can do so at History Hit TV. It's like our digital history channel. It's like Netflix history. We've got TV shows on there, hundreds of TV shows on there, thousands of podcasts without the ads. So you can head over there and have your fill of history. You can drink deep from the bottomless chalice of history over at History Hit TV. And if you sign up today by following the link in the description of this podcast, you get two weeks free. And then for a very small amount of money, you get a monthly subscription.

You're going to love it. It's a proper history channel for proper history fans. So please do go and check out History Hit TV. But in the meantime, here's Michael Nyberg talking about France. Michael, great to have you back on the podcast. It's great to be here, Dan. Great to be talking with you. Here in the UK, we think so much about the fall of France and what it led to, the Battle of Britain, that famous summer in 1940, through a very British lens. It's so interesting to think about what the Americans were making of all this at the time.

What were American relations like with the French government before the catastrophic defeat by the German army? You know, it's really interesting. I was flipping through a used bookstore here in town, a wonderful bookstore here called the Midtown Scholar, and I found this book called Our Genial Enemy, the French. And I started doing a little bit more digging. And there was a sentiment in America in the late 30s that it was in France's interest to tie the United States to France as much as possible, to kind of have America in the background. And at the same time, there is this attitude the Americans have that as long as the French Navy is strong and as long as the French army is strong

and protected by the Maginot Line, the U.S. can wait to make any decisions it might have to make about Europe. So there is a very strange relationship going on between the two countries where each is kind of, I don't know quite what the right word is, indirectly or almost unknowingly relying on the other for some defense security. And then when all that goes away in 1940, of course, that whole foundation of America's defense architecture just disappeared. Yeah, the strategic space that the French gave the Americans in 1914 to 17 just disappears in the space of 10 days. Were American observers on the ground? How was this news broadcast through official channels to the American decision makers and to the American public in that catastrophic month of May 1940?

One thing that was fascinating to me is the way in which Americans in 1940 just simply couldn't believe that the French army could have collapsed unless there was a fifth column or traitorous activity going on behind the scenes. And one of the things about this research that so surprised me is the way that so many themes in the early years of the Second World War came back to Vichy. So it's because of this belief that there was a fifth column or traitorous activity that President Roosevelt ordered the government to ignore the Supreme Court decisions on wiretapping. It's when the first ideas about maybe interring Japanese Americans, if it came to that, start to be discussed because of this belief that it has to be something internal because

the French army was too strong to have fallen simply externally. And so it's all part of this great quest by the Americans to figure out what the heck has just happened and what does it mean for us? I guess many of these American decision makers would have had literally personal experience of working with the French war machine in 1918 in particular. Yeah, absolutely. The American Secretary of the Interior was in France in 1914 when the first Battle of the Marne happened. And he makes a comment, something like, you know, God is going to have to give the French another miracle. So this kind of awareness that France came really close in 1914 to facing something like this. So it's not that the Americans couldn't conceive of a way in which this could have gone badly for the French. The bigger

crisis is what does it mean for us and all the years that we spent not taking defense seriously because of the presumption that France would do what it did in the first world war again, and buy us two, three, four years to figure out what we want to do. Well, what does happen, this is why I enjoy so much about your book, is you remind everyone about the massive rearmament program that America was undertaking before Pearl Harbor. And I've always, again, kind of naively thought it was kind of about the alliance between Britain and America, and it was the Battle of Britain. It's the French fiasco that kind of kicks this whole thing off. Yeah, I don't think it's too much to argue that it's

the fall of France that starts America's Second World War. And I cite James Burns, an American senator from South Carolina and later Secretary of State under Harry Truman, in which he's talking about before the fall of France, just days, weeks before the fall of France, the Senate can't pass a defense bill because too many senators think that it's too expensive. Then France falls and they can't throw money at the Navy and Army fast enough. They literally can't get money to the armed services in the industry that will support them fast enough. And it's this moment that Burns sort of realizes how quickly the world has changed around us and what we're going to have to do. So it's the Two Ocean Navy Act. It's the peacetime conscription, all of this stuff that

just happens in this mad burst of spending and legislation that happens in the couple of weeks that follow the fall of France. Well, can we just unpack, Michael, a little bit more of that peacetime conscription, Two Ocean Navy? Tell me about the scale of that reorganization. It's many times the size of the federal budget, which today with large debts and deficits not being an unusual thing, we sort of take for granted in the United States. But back then, balanced budgets were the norm. Defense spending was kept at the absolute bare minimum. The army was capped at about 200,000 soldiers. All of a sudden, they're talking about a four million man army with tens of thousands of airplanes built to support them. The four million man army concept gets scaled down to about two million

because that's what General Marshall thinks is doable at that point. But almost all the observers looking at Washington, the political scene then, think that if Marshall and Roosevelt had come out and said, no, we need four million men, that Congress would have backed it. And public opinion surveys are showing that the American public is firmly behind it. Spend whatever you have to spend, do whatever you have to do. Suddenly that massive barrier of the Atlantic Ocean no longer looks like a barrier. Now it kind of looks like a highway that might allow the Germans with the aid of the Vichy French fleet to start to threaten American interests. So it changes in a

flash. And what I like about this is it's not super contingent on what the Brits are doing, whether or not the Brits are successful or not in their battle of Britain. The Americans just forged ahead and assumed that the future might be one of German complete domination of the Western Eurasian landmass. Yeah, it's not at all clear to Americans in 1940 that the British are going to survive the onslaught either. There are some Americans who think it's going to be a matter of weeks. So the United States will now have to plan for its defense without the French army and French Navy, but maybe also without the British Navy. And of course, the nightmare scenario is that the Vichy French fleet and the British fleet end up part of the German fleet as part of some peace agreement. That's the real nightmare scenario.

So you can let your head go wild in 1940 with the idea of German naval bases at Martinique in the Caribbean, at Dakar in Senegal, in Morocco, in Ireland, all of them, Bermuda, all of them controlled by German or pro-German governments, with the United States really being in no position to do anything about it in 1940. Michael, His Majesty's Royal Navy was never going to fall into Germany. They were always going to be in Halifax flying white incense. Don't you worry about that. There are plenty of Americans making that case too, but enough had changed in the world since September 1930 to make people worry. What if that's not the case? And you know this story

full well, but there are British officials coming to the United States to plead exactly that case. And there are several Americans saying, well, look, that's all good for you to come and brag about, but show us what you're willing to do. Yeah, for sure. Let's talk about alongside that, the Americans have to come up with some diplomatic stance towards France. Now, Michael, I got an interesting little social media fight the other day by calling Vichy France France. It's kind of an interesting bit of historical spin that we now call it Vichy France as a result of its capital being moved to the southern French town. In terms of Roosevelt, in terms of the US, that was France, right? Yeah, correct. I mean, as far as the international law goes, Secretary of State Cordell Hull said, look, Vichy has as much title to the French government

as anybody else. It was voted in by the French parliament before the French parliament dissolved itself. Hall's argument is this is the legal government of France. Therefore, we don't have a choice but to recognize it. Obviously, Charles de Gaulle has a different take on it, arguing that this is a government that's formed under foreign pressure, therefore it's illegitimate. But at least in the early years, Cordell Hall's argument was that this is the inheritor of all of the elements of the government of France. And if it barks like a dog and they are in charge of overwhelming majority of what remains of the French army, navy, air forces, right? I mean, diplomatic stations around the world. I mean, it's a French state, isn't it?

Correct. And the assumption in 1940 is that sooner or later, probably sooner, the Germans are going to host a peace conference similar to the Paris Peace Conference of 1919. And things are going to host a peace conference similar to the Paris Peace Conference of 1919. And things are going to go back to normal. And it's going to be this Vichy state that's going to take over what will become of France. And the official name of the Vichy government is l'Etat Francais, the French state. So even rhetorically, they're not speaking of it the way that you and I do today. They're speaking of it as if it is the state. So the assumption is that sooner rather than later, it's going to go back to France being France, and those Vichy officials will be the ones running it. And

it's one of these lovely things you find when you're doing research in the archives. The Vichy officials didn't even request that central heat be put in the government buildings they were going to use in Vichy, because the assumption was they would be back in the main government buildings in Paris before it got too cold to have to worry about it. So again, it's this problem sometimes for all of us to realize that things didn't have to happen the way that they happened. This is before the German invasion of the Soviet Union. This is before the decision by the British to fight on and Marizel Kabir and all of that.

There is an assumption that you're going to get to a peace conference and France will be France again. And when that happens, Charles de Gaulle will just be this renegade one-star general living somewhere in the British countryside. You're listening to Darren Snow's History Hit, talking about France, Vichy France, more coming up. How can toilet training cows help save the planet? Should we start renting our clothes? And why on earth is beds from the Happy Mondays now keeping bees? I'm Jimmy Doherty, TV presenter, farmer and conservationist.

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Find out who we really were. By subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit. Wherever you get your podcasts. What about diplomatic relations? That must have been weird. In Washington, D.C., Roosevelt would have had to meet with representatives of the Vichy, the French state. And what was the British ambassador doing? I mean, he was probably sabotaging those meetings. Right. This is exactly the problem. The United States recognized Vichy, which meant that Vichy officials were fully accredited in the United States. Roosevelt didn't meet with them very often, but he also had an agreement not to meet

with Charles de Gaulle's representatives at the same time. So there are actual State Department documents I found from Roosevelt telling people, keep de Gaulle's people away from me. This is a diplomatic problem. Our diplomatic relations are with l'Etat français or with Vichy. Britain did not send an ambassador to Vichy France, obviously, because Britain didn't recognize it. But the United States did. They sent a very powerful and very important person in the person of Admiral William Leahy. So there were issues right from the beginning of the United States and Britain taking very different approaches to the problem of what the new France was going to look like. And in the years between, or in the year or so between, before formal entry into the war, what did the US and France, how did they collaborate, compete? What's the headlines there?

There's not too much going on directly. The biggest issue of, how did they collaborate, compete? What's the headlines there? There's not too much going on directly. The biggest issue of disagreement is over the empire, which Franklin Roosevelt was increasingly anti-imperial and increasingly anti-the French empire. And supposedly his trip to Casablanca for the conference after the torch invasion finally turned him completely anti-French and anti-empire. So most of the arrangement, as I said, is informal, it's tacit. And the idea being here that the security arrangements will be done the way that they were done before World War I, with the two sharing common interests, but with no formal alliance between them. Some French government officials anyway would have loved to have had

something in the 1920s or 30s that would have been a collective security agreement between the United States, Britain, and France. This was Fauch's idea at the end of World War I. American officials are absolutely uninterested in something like that. So the relationship remains tacit rather than kind of treaty-based. And does France in this period try and wriggle out, and does the US try and help it, give it a kind of channel to wriggle out a little bit from under German domination? Is there anything like that going on? This is the argument that some Americans used. I frankly think the argument falls completely flat. The argument that defenders of America's policy towards Vichy used was that this was a way to help the French people who were themselves victims of the Vichy

government. I just don't think it holds water historically. Leakey himself wrote back to the United States saying, look, I'm not doing any good here. This is useless. Send me home. This isn't working. Other Americans were deeply, deeply critical. Some critical journalists, people like Walter Lippmann and Edward R. Murrow,

who just couldn't believe that the United States was dealing with these Vichy officials who were so obviously pro-German. So I think it's an argument that the American government officials were trying to use to figure out a way through this. I really can't find too many people other than those government officials who had a clear interest in saying this, who believe that America's relationship with Vichy was doing anything positive at all. You're quite critical of

American decision-making in this period towards Vichy, including after the outbreak of the war, of the American entry into the war in Europe and North Africa? Yeah, I think Americans got this wrong. There was a moment shortly after the fall of France, actually before France had even fallen, when Pierre Laval, the new prime minister at Vichy, sent his son-in-law, a man by the name of René de Chambrun. Chambrun was a statutory American citizen. He was descended from the Marquis de Lafayette. He was related by marriage to the Roosevelts. So Laval rushed him tofayette. He was related by marriage to the Roosevelt. So Laval rushed him to the United States. He met with Roosevelt on the presidential yacht on the Potomac River for a weekend while France is falling apart. And Chambrun sold this vision

of France that it would remain pro-American. It would remain anti-communist. It would remain a force for stability in Europe. And I think given the craziness of 1940, Roosevelt and his close advisors bought into that vision, and it took them a long time to come off of that vision. And I think that was a mistake. The evidence was there right in front of them that this government was going to be certainly not democratic, certainly pro-German, certainly anti-American interests, even if their rhetoric remained pro-American, but they couldn't get off of their initial biases and they couldn't get away from their intense hatred of Charles de Gaulle. Well, they weren't alone in that. He seemed to rub people up the wrong way.

Yeah. I mean, it's clear he did things that seemed to be intentionally rude to FDR. Many of Roosevelt's closest officials never forgave de Gaulle for what they saw as snubs from de Gaulle. The difference is British officials eventually came to figure out that however unpleasant de Gaulle was, British interests and de Gaulle's interests, in fact, overlapped. The Americans were never able to make that jump. And that was the real problem, the real point of friction between the Americans and the British who were saying, look, we know how unpleasant he is. We know how arrogant he is. We know how much power he wants to keep for himself, but he's by far the best of the options that are in front of us. And the Americans just couldn't get there until, I would argue, really

the very end of 1944, early 1945. I found some documents in the National Archives out at Kew there where Anthony Eden himself is writing in the margin notes that, you know, the United States is still looking for a figurehead and that figurehead might be pay 10 to run the government as late as late 44, early 45. Is that anything to do with the thing you just raised earlier, which is this difference between perhaps Britain and France and the US over empire, like legacy colonies and things? Is that a complicating factor here? Absolutely. Again, the Nishi connects to everything. And one of the things that so fascinated me as I was beginning to sit down to write this book, I had just come back from Ethiopia and the campaign in Ethiopia connects

to all of this. There's a governor of the French empire and what is today the Central African Republic, Félix Éboué, who declares his loyalty to Charles de Gaulle, the first part of the French empire to do so. That opens up an opportunity. Anthony Eden, a lot of British officials, a lot of free French officials like Philippe Leclerc, they rushed to Sudan and they planned this whole campaign to liberate Ethiopia, kick the Italians out, secure the Nile River Valley, secure the southern approaches to Egypt. All of that fits in the interests of both the free French and the British. So immediately it gives them something they can work toward together. It makes them realize that however bad the personality disagreements are going to be, they can work together. The United States is involved in none of that, of course, and sees the empire in a very

different way than the British and Free French do. So again, it was just this way. The same thing kind of happens in the Middle East. There's an issue in Syria. There's an issue in Iraq, in which the British and Free French share common interests. Those are things the United States did not want to be thinking about. How do you think scared the US got this drive to rearm? Is this an important episode for the rest of the 20th century, do you think? Oh, I don't think there's any question about it. The reason we have Leahy's papers here at the U.S. Army Archives where I work is because a future general, James Gavin, became the U.S. ambassador to France under Kennedy. And Gavin wanted a full and complete copy of everything that the U.S. had discussed with France in World War II

before he went off to be the ambassador in 1961. He was fully aware of the way that these legacies continued to deal with American relations. And on the French side, de Gaulle never did forget that the United States had backed Vichy. It had then backed Henri Giraud, this kind of other renegade French general who's very conservative and right-wing in his politics. And then they turned to an actual Vichy admiral, Jean-Francois Darlan, before they reluctantly accepted de Gaulle. So the French had not forgotten how many right-wing, pro-Vichy, pro-collaborationist French figures the United States was perfectly willing to embrace. And at the end of the book, I argue that had Darlan not been assassinated on Christmas Eve 1942, it's entirely likely the United States

would have let Darlan run post-war France the same way that it acquiesced in Franco being in Spain and Salazar being in Portugal. That is an amazing thought, isn't it? I like that counterfactual. It really is. And Charles de Gaulle and the folks around de Gaulle were perfectly aware that the United States was willing to do that, that from the time they settled on Darlan until his assassination, the Americans had come to accept that Darlan, I think it was Harold Macmillan, one of the British officials, maybe it was Cadogan, who said once bought, he stayed bought, that Darlan would work for the Americans just as he had worked for the Germans. Admiral Darlan. Well, listen, thank you so much for coming on

the podcast and talking about it. Tell us what the book's called. It's called When France Fell, The Vichy Crisis and the Fate of Anglo-American Relations. And I guess we talk about a lot on this podcast, but the great power wars being started by people who think war is inevitable, but who see the balance slipping away from them. So in the same way that the Germans think they can beat the Russians in 1914, but aren't sure about later in the 20th century. Again, Hitler thinks he can beat the Soviets in 1941. The Japanese see this massive rearmament and think we need to strike fast against the US. So the fall of France indirectly has a pretty important impact on the war in the Pacific as well. Absolutely. Also the French colony in Indochina, which the French give

Japan access to bases there. The United States lodged a protest against Vichy and said, look, we don't want you to do this. This is going to work against our interests. And of course, Vichy says, well, we have to do it anyway. We don't really have a choice here. So again, it's the way that Vichy just tied back to everything, including the first public mention that I can find of a senior American official that the US government knew that the Germans were committing genocide. That happens indirectly because of Vichy as well. So Vichy ties back to everything. So one of the things I didn't set out to do in the book, but I certainly did by the time that I was done,

is again, recenter this story with France at the center of it, not at the margins of it after it fell. Well, Michael, thank you for coming, not at the margins of it after it fell. Well, Michael, thank you for coming on the podcast and re-centering it with us today. It's a useful corrective for a podcast many of whose listeners are based here in the UK. So thank you very much indeed. Wonderful to talk to you.

I feel we have the history on our shoulders. All this tradition of ours, our school history, our songs, this part of the history of our country, all were gone and finished. Thanks, folks. You've reached the end of another episode. Hope you're still awake. Appreciate your loyalty. Sticking through to the end. If you fancied doing us a favour here at History Hit, I would be incredibly grateful if you would go and wherever you get these pods, give it a rating, five stars or its equivalent. A review would be great. Please head over there and do that. It really does make a huge difference. It's one

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