School of War - Ep 40: Michael S. Neiberg on Vichy France

Episode Date: August 9, 2022

Michael S. Neiberg, Chair of War Studies in the Department of National Security and Strategy at the U.S. Army War College, joins the show to talk American policy towards Vichy France. ▪️ Times  • 01:21 Introduction • 02:15 Vichy France - An Overview • 06:38 A Phony War • 09:16 American Assumptions Pre-war • 13:09 Isolationism No Longer Works • 24:30 Roosevelt’s Policy  • 28:45 Stress In The Anglo-American Alliance • 33:03 American Vision Of A Post-War World • 36:00 Vichy Unveiled  • 39:01 Chaos In North Africa     • 43:19 Vichy’s Shame • 51:57 de Gaulle

As we know, France fell to Nazi Germany in 1940, a shocking collapse that took the world and American policymakers by surprise, given the stalwart French defense of their country during the First World War. But when the Finland dies, but technically independent and neutral Vichy France emerged from the catastrophe, American policymakers faced difficult choices about how to manage this significant new player. It retained, after all, both France's substantial Navy and empire. What followed was moral compromise and often mass confusion. It is a prescription for war, this Iraqi invasion of the way. December 7, 1941, a date which will live in infamous.

The bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a state of. We continue to face a grave situation in Iran. We shall fight on the beaches. We shall fight on the landing grounds. We shall fight in the fields and in the streets. We shall never surrender. Hi, I'm Aaron McLean. Thanks for joining School of War.

I'm joined today by Michael S. Nyberg. He is Professor of History and Chair of War Studies at the U.S. Army War College is the author of numerous books. Most recently, When France Fell, the Vichy Crisis and the Fate of the Anglo-American Alliance. Michael, thank you so much for joining the show. Thanks very much for having me. It's pleasure to be here. So before we get to the heart of your book, which is really about the American policy response,

to Tavishi and to the fall of France and everything that comes next. Maybe we could just talk for a minute about France during the war, France after it fell. Because growing up, my view of this period of history in this place was basically shaped by a series of major motion pictures released in the 1960s and 1970s. And my impression of France and the war was, you know, France fell, the Nazis invaded, they occupied. And then basically everyone joined this plucky resistance that rescued our pilots and, you know, blew up railroad tracks and, you know, then we liberated the country. The reality seems somewhat

more complicated. Maybe you could give folks a quick overview. Yeah, it's a little bit more complicated than that. The fall of France in the spring of 1940 produced an armistice that divided France into multiple zones. The two most important are the occupied zone in the north, which includes Paris and includes Lyon, it includes the English Channel and Atlantic coastlines that is directly occupied by Germany. The southern third or so of the country, is a new country that is called Laetathe Francae, the French state, but more commonly known to us as Vichy France because of the small spa town where they set up the capital. What's crucial here, I guess three points that are really crucial here. The first is that the Vichy state is supposed to be neutral

in the ongoing war between the Germans and the British. The second thing that is of importance here is that Vichy France maintained control of the entire French empire. And I always try to explain to folks just how important that empire was to American security. It includes a basin Martinique in the Caribbean, which had France's aircraft carrier. It includes into China. It includes much of Africa. It includes what we today call Syria and Lebanon. So that's really important. And the third thing is that the Vichy estate maintains control of the French Navy. So while we think about France as having been completely defeated in World War II, and it was, nevertheless, this new independent Vichy state has a lot of power, a lot of worldwide reach, a lot of geography that it controls, a Navy that is not

defeated in the same way that the Army is. So it's a very strange, curious, odd political entity that's on the map that a lot of people have a hard time figuring out. The Americans aren't the only ones. There's questions about whether or not it can claim legitimacy. The French parliament in 1940 votes to give Vichy power. So by some interpretations of international law, it's a legal government. the British don't accept that argument, but the Americans kind of do it first. So it's this very weird state that a lot of people are struggling to figure out and struggling to figure out what role it's going to play in European security, both during the war and the expectation is in the post-war peace conference that will eventually come.

So for me, one of the reasons I wanted to write the book is just to explore all of the ways in which this weird political animal, which is an empire. It's not just a state, it's an empire, is affecting and changing and shaping the way that the Second World War is operating in every theater of the war. How is it that this, you know, class of French politicians, sort of segment of the French right, manages to, you know, on some level retain this level of, I think, sovereignty probably overstates the case, but power, certainly. You know, from the Nazi point of view, what is the Nazi interest in this arrangement?

How does it come about? What the Germans really want is a pacified France. What they don't want to have to do is occupy the entire country and fight a long-term kind of guerrilla war against a French resistance. That they don't want to do. So the more of this onus that they can pass on to the French, the easier it is for them and the more they can focus on the war, they really want to fight, which is in the east.

So the deal more or less is that Vichy will do Germany's bidding, which many of the Vichy officials want to do anyway. They want to go after the French left. They want to go after socialists. They want to go after Jews. Germany is in a sense just enabling them to do what they wanted to do anyway. In exchange, the Germans won't do to France what they're planning to do and have been doing to Poland. So in a nutshell, that's the arrangement, though it's more complicated than that.

And what begins to develop inside Vichy is really a contest, I think, between the French traditional right, led by men like Henri Philippe Petin, the head of state, and the kind of emerging French fascists that will come to power later in Vichy's history in 41 and 42. But the idea for people like Pétin, Pierre Laval, others that are running the Vichy state, is to use essentially co-op the power of Germany to remake the French state. And then once the war is over, they assume, they'll negotiate something where they might lose Alsace and Lorraine, they might lose Morocco. but otherwise things will go back to something more or less like normal once the war is over.

Let's step back for a bit and talk about the period before the fall of France. So war obviously breaks out across the continent in September of 1939. And then there's this period which comes to be known as the phony war. Tell us about the phony war. What was phony about it? And how long does it last? So remember that France had made this decision pre-rise of the Nazis to invest their defense dollars into a series of fortifications, which on its own is not a stupid decision.

The message they're trying to send to Germany is, we don't want anything from you. We're going to put our money into defense. The problem with that is that when it comes time to support Czechoslovakia in 1939 or or support Poland, 1938 or support Poland in 1939, a purely defensive military cannot do that. So the droll de guerre is this period. That's what the French call the phony war, the droll de Gaer, the kind of funny war, odd war, is a period when the French military can't really invade Germany because it hasn't been postured to do that. It hasn't been built or designed to do that. So it's this strange period of

time between September 39 and spring 1940 when there's not a lot of combat going on. There's a lot of anticipation, there's a lot of anxiety, there's a lot of concern, obviously, but there's not a lot of active combat. There's a campaign in Norway that's a disaster. So it's this very strange period where people are trying to figure out what's going to come next. And there are people on the French right who are saying, look, the policy of trying to support Poland obviously didn't work. Why are we continuing to be at war with Germany? What's the point? What is it that we're trying to obtain? So there is this division. And this is, of course, the period of the Nazi Soviet pact as well, which means that the extreme French left doesn't want to push Germany either. So politically, it's a mess.

it's very difficult for French leaders, especially French military leaders, to figure out what it is you're fighting for and how much support you can expect to get out of the French political, social, cultural system if when maybe this thing turns into a shooting war. So it's a very bizarre period. I think people underscore just how weird the 1930s were in some ways, just how unusual, how strange, how constantly shifting the political winds of the 1930s were. I was so happy opening your book. And you mentioned A.J. Liebling, is one of my favorite. right on right on the first page of the book. And one of my impressions, you know, a few impressions of this period comes from, I think at least

one piece he wrote for The New Yorker at the time. And he comes back to the United States from the sort of bizarre situation in Europe. And is amazed that in America, people are just sort of going on about their daily lives without, you know, without taking much account of the looming disasters across the ocean. What was what was the American attitude in sort of 3940 to what was happening with respect to France specifically? And I guess more broadly, talk about the importance of France, of an independent France and of the French Empire to the American strategic picture. Yeah. If you look in a map, I mean, again, the French Empire touches so many American interests.

It touches Senegal, which controls the sea routes from the old world to the new. Indochina, which sits just to the west of the American colony in the Philippines. You know, the French Empire is just assumed to be this giant bulwark. Americans don't even really think about it. So the political science term of free riding is what the United States is doing. That is, we are assuming that France will do most of the work. And the assumption is that as long as the French empire is there, and as long as the French army is there, Americans don't have to think that much about the problem of Germany. If anything, it'll be like the last World War, where France will hold the Germans off long enough to let the Americans come in at a time of their choosing. When France falls, all of that change.

just disappears. And we have here in Carlisle the papers of Matthew Ridgway, who was in the War Plans Division, and the panic you can see in his memoranda where the United States had gone from this perfect security because the French Army and British Navy were taking care of the problem to, oh my God, what do we do now? And Ridgeway goes through this list of security issues that he sees for the United States. And he says, we can't really accomplish any of them. So when that ballwork, that, that element of security goes away. It's a Sputnik moment. It's, you know, it's a moment when Americans realize that the assumptions they had made about their security literally vanish in about six weeks. Can we, can we flesh out this, this worldview a bit more,

the view that you sort of ascribe to Ridgeway than others? Because I can imagine, you know, the non-interventionists, the isolationists at the time, the perspective on what's happening in Europe, even, even after the fall of France, the perhaps you'll correct me, perhaps there was more panic amongst even this group. You know, what does it really matter? Let the old world devour itself. We've got two big oceans. We can conduct a hemispheric defense. Got a little bit of warning, you know, to get ready at least if it ever came to that, but to be honest, it probably won't. You know, what's what is the big deal? What would, what would, you know, a serious defense professional of the time, like a Ridgeway say, say to an argument like that? Well, what they're worried about really

is they really have three oceans. They have to protect. They have to protect the Atlantic. They have to protect the Pacific. And they have to protect the Caribbean. So if you, if you, if you think about those as three kind of interrelated, interconnected spheres of defense. And France is integral to all three of those. So as long as you presume that France is at least a positive neutral, if you will, or is at least not hostile to you, then your defense choices open up a lot. You can afford to be isolationist or the phrase that I would prefer. You can prefer to be unilateral. That is not sign any treaties, not make any defense commitments like Britain and France had to make with Poland, you can leave yourself open because you don't have to really think about the problem so much.

Once France disappears, however, all of that logic just goes away. So what I argue in the book is that it really is the fall of France that starts America's Second World War. It's not Pearl Harbor. This is the moment when Americans have to rethink strategy. They have to rethink resources. They have to rethink everything that they had thought about defense because it simply goes away. So I think the answer to your question or the response to your to your comment is that until

the fall of France, it's certainly possible for a lot of Americans to say this isn't anything for us to worry about. After the fall of France, when you don't really know what Vichy is going to do, you don't know what that fleet is going to do, you don't know what that empire is going to do, you can create some pretty dark, pretty unpleasant scenarios with the French Navy being attached to the German or Italian navies and the French Empire being. springboards towards the Panama Canal, towards the southern half of the United States, towards Latin America, you can come up with some pretty deep, dark scenarios as people did, if Vichy decides to go to the Nazi side full force.

But were the sort of the hardcore isolationists or non-interventuals? Like the Lindbergs, you know, moved by that kind of argument at the time, or did they stick it out, mostly until Per Harvard? A few stick it out. A lot of them, though, come to the realization that isolation and disarmament can, no longer go together, that the old logic, the Gerald Nye argument, that building weapons makes you less safe, that argument goes away. And now it's how fast can we build these things, a little bit like the German argument today, right? How fast can we overcome a decade or more

of just not spending on anything? Because we didn't think we had to. Somebody else was there to protect us. Somebody else was there to assure that security. Now, how fast can you raise that money and how quickly can you spend it? Why was there so much confidence, given what we know now, given what we knew by the summer of 1940, with the rapid collapse of France. Why was there so much confidence in France's ability to defend itself? It's the French Army. I mean, it is understood in the 1930s to be the finest army in the world. Hands down, no question about it. Add into that the combat multiplying effect, I guess the army would say today of the Maginal line, add in the support from the French Empire, add in the support from the British. The assumption

is France is not in danger. It may not be capable of. marching to Berlin, again, because it has been postured for defense for so long. But the idea that France would be conquered, the idea that it would be, that it would fall in six weeks is unimaginable to almost everybody. There are a few folks in the American diplomatic corps who can see some of the political problems. They can see some of the social problems in France in the 1930s. But the notion that that's going to translate into the collapse of the French army is unimaginable. That nobody at the time is saying it. There are people who say later, well, yeah, I saw the problems all the long, but that's different from the prognostications in the 30s.

I always understood the problems at the time, if you asked me afterwards. Oh, right? Everybody knew Russia was going to invade Ukraine, right? I mean, you know, the same thing. Well, actually. You know, there's a couple of people who are saying this. Robert Murphy is one of the ones saying, look, this is really a country facing more problems than it knows how to solve. But the idea of the French army collapsing in six weeks, unimaginable. Yeah. Well, so let's talk about that then. So what to what do we attribute the rapidity of the collapse? Is it, is it, where would you put the balance of, of causality? Is it, is it German

military excellence? Is it you've alluded and you talk extensively in the book? Is it French weakness, whether that's military, whether it's political or almost social? Like, what, what happens and why? Well, the enemy always gets a vote. So the Germans make wise decisions that sickle cut maneuver that they do. You know, I had a colleague of mine once described this as a little bit of a rock paper scissors game that the Germans just guess right with that sickle cut and the French guess wrong with the dial plan so that the basic strategy is wrong. I think there's still a lot in the old arguments of people like Alistair Horn and others who argued that France in the 1930s is just so bitterly divided and is so internally divided that there are people like Marcel Gondeau and

others who are actually arguing that we might be better off working with the Nazis to get rid of the enemies we have inside France, that France in the 30s is just this terribly brutally rivened society. I think there's some logic to that. I think you can also place much of the blame on Maurice Gamelan, although there's a new book I'm looking at on my desk here that's trying to paint him in a slightly better light, the commander of the French army, who just appears to have been consistently a step or two behind where he should have been. So there's a lot of reasons for a massive event like this. There are some French historians who would blame the slow, non-committal response by the British, which I just did this yesterday for a group I was talking to.

The French memorial to Dunkirk does not mention the British, and there is no British flag there. So in the French imagination, this is the moment when the British give up a fight that they should have committed to. So there's a lot of reasons going in. I'm still convinced by the 1930s argument that France is simply not in a position, as Liebling understood and others, France is in a very difficult position in the 1930s because of the political division inside it. And, you know, this is one of those moments that kind of gives you pause as we look at our own political moment in the United States right now, that a society that is seeing enemies inside its own borders. That's a tremendous complication in trying to figure out military strategies going forward. Yeah, no, I mean, it's a clear echo, isn't it?

Yeah, no doubt. I mean, certainly with the pro-Russian elements, in particular in the American right, and the argument is something like what, you know, we're, we're, we're, we're, we're. We're going woke. Right. I'm a conservative. I personally object to the same things domestically that this class of commentators objects to. But then because Putin is somehow pro-woke, we have some sort of natural access of cooperation

with Moe. And by the way, he's invading Ukraine to somehow protect Russia from wokeness is an argument I've heard made in recent weeks. And there's a weird, there is a weird echo of the French right in all of that. Yeah, it's definitely an echo. And, you know, but there were people, I was just going through. some of this material yesterday for another project I'm working on, where there are people in the French right saying exactly this, that I hate Hitler, but Hitler's over there. I hate Leon Bloom,

the Jewish prime minister of France in the late 1930s. I hate him even more because he's here. So, you know, there is this sense that bringing some among the French extreme right, that bringing in an element of national socialism, bringing in an element of authoritarianism, will be good for France. And this is what Peyton and Laval, the leaders of Vichy, represent to some folks on the far right in France. They even use the phrase like cure of purity and things like that to play on the notion of Vichy as this spa town that's going to somehow purge France of its bad elements and, you know, all of these these metaphors that they use. So, you know, it's, I don't think you can ignore the problems in France in the 1930s, but, you know, there is clearly an operational element in this, too,

where the German military plan is hitting the French at their weakest spot and the French war plan is defending in the wrong place. And just to put a little bit more detail on that, where is the weakest spot? Why do the French, it seems for the second time, discount the geography to their north in Belgium and the low countries? Like, how do you make that mistake?

Yeah, I don't think they did. The problem is, if you think of France and you think of Alsace and Lorraine as this kind of two sides of a triangle that jut into Germany, that's where they build the Maginol line. The initial plan is to extend the Maginol line into Belgium to help defend Belgium. The Belgians, however, dither on this and they delay and they

cause trouble. And then in the end, they say, no, we want to be neutral again. We don't want any fortifications. Well, that means that the French Belgian, that border is completely wide open. So the criticism that's leveled at Gamalan is that his response to this was actually to put too many people in the Maginal line to defend the line. In other words, he didn't trust it enough to do what it was supposed to do. But then to create a mobile force that would, move north of the Maginal Line and would advance into Belgium to the Dio River. So it's called the Dial Plan. So if you think of this, what's happening is that the French army and the British with it

are advancing into Belgium as the Germans are kind of coming around behind it. So it's certainly not true that the French didn't know that that was possible. The problem is the basic strategic one of what to do about that unguarded Belgian frontier because the expectation is the Germans will not attack the Maginal line. that's a perfectly reasonable one that turns out to be accurate, by the way. But memories of World War I are such that the French don't want to fight another war on French soil if they can get away with it because the northern one-third of France was completely devastated by the First World War.

So if you can stop this attack in Belgium and then send the German army running back into Germany, that's far preferable. So that's to say that the French aren't cowardly, they aren't afraid to fight. They aren't, you know, they're dealing with serious problems of strategy. culture, politics, history, I would argue, remembrances of history that are playing into this as well. So France Falls, the Vichy regime is established. What is the initial American response? Panic, absolute panic. So there is a flurry of legislation that's passed in the summer of 1940 that includes the Two Ocean Navy Act, the single largest expenditure of funds in federal history up to that point.

the introduction of peacetime conscription, all of these things that happen in a flurry that are all talked about in the U.S. Congress pre-fall of France and go nowhere. Now they can't put enough money into these bills to make everybody happy. So it's a complete reordering. This is the moment when President Roosevelt tells the Justice Department to go ahead and ignore Supreme Court decisions on wiretapping. Roosevelt argues that the wiretapping decisions were about revenue fraud cases. This is espionage. The country's at risk now. So just go ahead and ignore it. We'll deal with the problems later. All of these things. The attitude in the United States changes overnight. This doesn't mean that Americans want to get involved in the war. It doesn't mean that the Americans

want to send a military force to Europe. But it does mean that Americans now realize, again, I think the analogy with Germany today is not terribly off the mark, that they had trusted another state to allow them to free ride. And now they had a decade or more of not spending money where they need to spend money. And so there is this absolute flurry of legislation. Destroyers for Basis Agreement with the British, which is really designed to give the United States access to British bases so we could keep an eye on Martinique and other French possessions in the Western Hemisphere. Again, this sense of absolute, what do we do now? Asking for a friendly superpower in the year 2022, you will go unnamed. How did they go about then building this two ocean name with a defense industrial base

that presumably was strapped by the lack of investment in the years leading up to this moment? Yeah, it's going to take time. It's going to take time. What they do is a lot of very creative, so-called cost plus accounting, which guarantees profits to these corporations that are going to, that are going to take part in this. We are fortunate in a sense that we have perversely fortunate in a sense that we have a lot of unemployed people looking for work. So there's not a great resignation problem. As you know, during the war, we do things like bring in Mexican American, Mexican labors under something called the Bracero program to help with agriculture. We consciously will make a decision to go to a smaller army, the so-called 90-division

gamble, to make sure that we can put more people into industry. A very carefully thought-out plan by the Roosevelt administration that I think works pretty well to make sure that industrial conversion of industry can happen pretty quickly and can happen pretty effectively. It, it, works pretty well. It takes time, but it works pretty well. So the Roosevelt administration overall comes off pretty well in the Second World War, but of course your book is about decisions made with respect to Vichy that in retrospect are, we'll just say questionable. How is it that the administration and Roosevelt in particular comes around to a policy of recognition and, I mean, accommodation? I mean, how would you describe the policy? I guess the first question, and then how do they come about to it?

Yeah, I think it also comes out of fear. What the United States needs to figure out is who, Who are these people who are running the Vichy state? There's a lot of trust and a lot of faith in Marshall Pétain, who was the leader of the French Army in World War I, a well-known, well-liked, well-regarded face in the United States. Restaurants in New Orleans had dishes named after him in the 20s and 30s. I mean, he's on the cover of American magazines. Any reasonably informed American would have known who he was and thought very highly of him. So there is faith that maybe this Vichy system will not operate against American interests. There is some hope that if the United States plays its cards right, it can keep Vichy neutral, it can keep that fleet neutral. There is also the moment

I talk about in the book when a very interesting guy by the name of René Des Chambraun, who is the son-in-law of the new French prime minister, the Vichy prime minister, Pierre Laval. He's also a direct descendant of the Marquis de Lafayette and related to the Roosevelt's by marriage. There's a flag in my building here in Carlisle that he gave to the United States Army War College. So a very interesting guy about whom nobody knows anything, except that he defended Coco Chanel after the war on charges of her collaboration. Anyway, Shembron comes to the United States and convinces a lot of Americans from President Roosevelt all the way on down that Vichy is a system they can work with, that the fall of France notwithstanding. Vichy will be pro-American. It will be anti-communist. It will be neutral.

It will not harm American interests in any way. And I think his argument was persuasive to American leaders who were in a panic about what to do. The problem is the British are saying into American ears, look, you're out of your mind if you believe this guy. Vichy is going to become a whole bought and sold German client state. Nevertheless, Roosevelt's decision is to recognize Vichy to send Admiral Leahy, one of the most talented administrators in the United States government, out to Vichy to be the American ambassador and to see what what the United States can do to a figure out what this weird political animal is and B, see what instruments the U.S. has to pull it and push it in the directions that we want it to go.

And early on, which is to say, you know, let's say prior to the German Declaration of War on the United States after Pearl Harbor, what is this political animal? Are the Brits correct from the start? Is this simply a German client state, a Finland dies, you know, perhaps more entity under of the control of the Nazis, or does it have something to say for itself in terms of some sort of quasi-independence? Well, there's little doubt that it doesn't have the power to really speak for itself. I mean, the Germans are sitting in Paris. That fact alone makes it very difficult for Vichy to operate with any kind of sovereignty or any kind of power of its own.

The Germans kept about a million French prisoners of war. They guarded the so-called demarcation line between Vichy and occupied France. They limited the French army to about 100,000 people. that number's not a coincidence. So Vichy is not really in a position to operate with as much sovereignty or as much power as it would like. That's obvious for anybody that wants to see it, that no matter even if Pétan, even if Vagand, another one of the supposedly pro-American French leaders, even if they wanted to act in American interest or work with the United States, they simply weren't independent

enough, sovereign enough, whatever, to do what they wanted to do. And there are a couple of points later, 1942, where that's perfectly obvious, where the Germans push Vichy to do something. And Vichy just almost agrees without any objection whatsoever. So it's clear that they're not a completely independent thing. What you don't want them to do is declare war on Great Britain or sign a formal alliance with Nazi Germany. So that's really the challenge that Leahy has when he heads to Vichy. You know, again, the sort of broad-bresh history memory of the time is, you know, brave Winston Churchill standing against Nazism with Franklin Roosevelt, unable to directly help him because of the restrictions of American politics, but sort of doing everything within his power to be a supporter of British policy short of war. And yet we have this enormously, enormously significant, at least, disagreement.

What is the cost to, well, two questions. First, why, why are the Brits, so persuaded instantly of what, you know, in retrospect appears to be an accurate assessment of the status of the Vichy regime. So why do they get it right when the Americans seem to get it wrong? And two, like, what is what kind of stressed is this place on the U.S. Anglo relationship? Well, part of it, I think, is gets back to national interests, right? No matter how tight an alliance is, nations still look after their own interests. I think, you know, we can start from that. So one of the things that really struck me as I was just beginning to work on this book, a couple of of years ago, I had the opportunity to go to Ethiopia. And one of the things that the War

College was doing was teaching something the Ethiopians had not taught in their professional military education, which was the Second World War in Ethiopia, because under the communist regime, that was that was forbidden to teach. And one of the kind of aha moments, a lightning bolt moment I had, is that early on, this is the first major successful Allied campaign against the Axis. And it is Winston Churchill and the British, working with Charles de Gaul to eliminate the Italian regime in Ethiopia and the pro-Vichy regime that's in French Djibouti, French Somali Lam, which is now Djibout. So this lightning bolt moment, this flash I had, is that, you know, right from the very beginning, the British and the

free French, read Charles de Gaul, have a shared strategic interest in common that is running counter to American interests. So the Americans are perfectly okay if the British control that Red Sea coastline because then it's safer to move land lease supplies through a little bit later in the war. But at the outset, the Americans are adamant that whatever we do in the Second World War, we're not putting American blood and treasure toward the expansion or maintenance of the French and British empires. So right from the beginning, De Gaul and Churchill have a shared interest in common that is running against American interests. And I think that's very important. The other thing that's playing in here, of course, is that there is actual kinetic activity between

Vichy and the British, when the British attack the French fleet at the French fleet at Merzel Kabir in Algeria. So there is an immediate shedding of blood between the two. And Robert Paxton, the great American historian of Vichy, found documents saying that there was a discussion in Vichy about declaring war on Britain that they later back off of. That doesn't affect the United States directly. It only affects the United States indirectly. So right from the beginning of this relationship, there is a strategic imperative for Winston Churchill that simply isn't there for Franklin Roosevelt. And I think our miss of the special relationship and all of this stuff notwithstanding, I think it's pretty clear. And historians have shown this pretty clearly that Frank and Roosevelt was

looking out for American interests first and foremost. If that meant he could help the British, that's great. But first and foremost, he was going to look out for American interest, which is, there's nothing unnatural about that. Your second question about the way that this affects America and Britain twice during the war, the American Secretary of State Cordell Hall at least considered in one case he wrote a letter of resignation in opposition to the way that Britain was treating with Charles DeGal and the way that the two policies were different. So there's obviously something here that is really getting under American skins and something that's really getting under British skins. And it's Vichy that is doing it. For the Americans, I think it is the British choosing a leader that

that has no claim to power whatsoever. De Gaulle is the junior most brigadier general in the French army. That's it. That's not a claim to statehood to being a chief of state. The Americans, I think, are also looking at DeGal as a potential foe in the post-war world. And again, they're not entirely wrong about that. Charles de Gaul has a vision for France that in many ways runs counter to the vision that the United States wants for France. Nobody in the United States, I don't think could have guessed just how long Charles de Gaul would remain in power.

and just how much of a thorn in the side he could be to the Americans when he wanted to be. But the Americans aren't interested in supporting a movement that's going to put to Gaul as the president of France. For reasons, I can get into more if you'd like. But to them, he's an unelected, unreliable, unpredictable element that the British have all but made the chief of the French state. Well, let's get into it a little bit. So what is the American post-war? It seems odd to talk about this in 1940. but what is the American post-war vision?

What is the role of France in that vision? And why is DeGal going to be a thorn in the side of that vision? Yeah. So as it develops, the Americans have a question to answer. And it gets answered pretty quickly because Charles DeGal answers it. But the question is, when this is over, do we treat France like a liberated country, the way we plan to treat, say, Holland and Norway? Or do we treat it as an occupied country, the way we plan to treat Italy and Germany?

What is it? And there are elaborate plans for the occupation of France. elaborate plans for the occupation of France. The concerns about de Gaulle are myriad and multi-fold. There are two in particular that worry Americans. One is that he'll turn into a strong man and a dictator along the lines of a Franco or a Salazar or sometimes even compared to Hitler himself. That once de Gaul gets in power, he'll destroy French democracy and France will go into dictatorship, which is not a good idea for the United States. The other fear, and it's a World War I memory for those who were studying and thinking about this, they call, sometimes they call DeGal

the next Kerensky. And the reference is to Alexander Kerensky, who takes over in Russia after the fall of the Tsar and creates this provisional government, but then quickly gets out maneuvered by the Bolsheviks and is kicked out of Russia. He actually comes to Stanford of all places in the United States, where one of my mentors had lunch with him in the 1960s. So the fear is that, yeah, it works out better than Fretzky. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And it really wasn't that long ago is the point of all this. But for de Gaulle, the fear is he'll take over a provisional government of France, and then the communist will outmaneuver him, and France will end up being a communist country. Neither of those are in America's post-war interests. So what De Gaul, sorry, what Roosevelt really wants

is to win the war, ideally with the French having played some important symbolic role, and then to go to open, fair, and free elections that will hopefully produce something like an updated, more effective third republic, which is, in fact, what happens, because the The truth is de Gaulle's interest is in keeping the Americans and British guessing. But in order to make sure that he has support inside France, he has to tell fellow Frenchmen, when this is over, we're going to have open, free, and fair elections, which he does, to be fair. They're done in a way that favors de Gaul. The Fourth Republic Constitution is written in a way that favors de Gaul, and then he tears that one up

and goes to one that makes him even more powerful. But, you know, that's all in the future. Yeah, yeah. No, I want to, in a minute, we should talk about further echoes of all this for the present to your point that some of this was just not that long ago. I was just reading a book that pointed out that Heidegger dies in 1970, I believe, six, which is, you know, moments before I was born essentially. This is not, this is not as far ago as it might seem. Yeah, I was born in 69, and that's about, you know, that's about when de Gaulle dies. So, you know, it's just not that

long ago. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, either that or we're much older than we like to contemplate, but I prefer. I'm not going to, no, no, no, that's not it. That clearly can't be it. Okay. Okay. So How does American thinking about Vichy evolve? What are the major inflection points? You know, is the German Declaration of War an inflection point? Like, how does this thing play out? I think probably the most important inflection point is a gradual one, and that is Leahy's reports back to Washington that we really can't expect to get very much out of these people. They are either becoming pro-German in their own ideology or they are just powerless to do anything that the Germans don't want them to do. The German invasion of the Soviet Union is a major inflection point too, because it's at that moment that a lot of people inside Vichy come to realize Germany might not win this thing. We have to start thinking about other options. Germany might not survive. And the third major inflection point, I would argue, is when the Germans start to turn the screws on Vichy, which in turn starts to turn the screws on the French people, through things like mandatory labor schemes, an increasingly harsh pro-fascist turn in the French government, the Vichy French government, that creates a real resistance movement.

The final inflection point, though, I think, is the awareness among Americans that Vichy itself might be on the verge of collapsing. If that happens, then it's entirely likely that the Germans will just occupy everything that Vichy had, including Morocco, including Senegal. And there are intel reports that I managed to find in which the Americans are afraid of just this, reports of, you know, German agents showing up in Morocco. of airfields being built in Senegal that are too big for French planes, but they're perfect for German planes and all of this panic.

So what I argue at the end of the book is the timing for Operation Torch is really driven by American fears that if we don't get into Vichy first, the Germans will just take everything over. And that will make any cross-Atlantic operation orders of magnitude more difficult. And the other factor that's playing in is the fact that it, from December 41 to November 42, the Roosevelt administration doesn't have a single success in Europe that it can point to. So there's a lot of public pressure coming on to Roosevelt to get a win somewhere.

And attacking Vichy France seems to be a logical place to do that. Yeah. So let's talk about Torch then. And again, in terms of people's broad brush memories of the war, American fighting with France or the potential of fighting with France and the complications that it's true for that, I honestly don't think occupies, you know, a place in the American imagination. I can remember, you talk about your aha experience, I can remember reading Liebling in college porting on torch and talking about the complications of the French.

And I mean, I mean, I had this naive response. Like, what do you mean? Yeah, what do you mean? Fighting the French Navy? What's going on here? You know, so what is going on here? Like what, you know, how is it that this campaign to begin an American footprint on the other side of the Atlantic plays out amidst French imperial territory and French imperial assets, you know,

where and how did the French fight if they fight? Is it a total collapse? Like, tell us, tell us what happens. Yeah, it's a mess. And it would take a long time to explain the whole thing. But what the Americans try to do is get as accurate an intelligence picture of Vichy as that they possibly can, the North African Vichy as they can. And they fail at that. They made contact with a man named Charles Mast, who is one of the senior French officials in North Africa. Mark Clark goes in a midget submarine, incredibly brave, courageous, whatever else one wants to say about Mark Clark, this took a lot of guts, meets with Mast, but Clark's not really authorized to tell Mass that an invasion is coming, and Mass is not really authorized to tell Clark certain things.

And so they leave not really sure what it was that they had agreed upon. So it's very confused. There's an intel operation. The Americans are trying to run Ian Fleming's involved from the British side. It's pretty amateurish. But the bottom line is what the Americans are hoping is the United States and Britain will show up in North Africa. the French will realize that this is the beginning of liberation and they won't resist the landings. The problems with that are, A, the British are involved and the British have already once attacked the French in North Africa.

So you can reasonably expect the French to want to shoot back. And B, the two French leaders, the Gaul and Girot, this other guy, Henri Girot that the Americans have been working with, neither one of them wants to help out unless they're going to be in command. So it's a mess. The whole picture is a gigantic, just heaping mess. What the Americans never did figure out the big piece of intel that everybody except Robert Murphy missed, Murphy's one of the State Department people in North Africa, the senior State Department person, is that the main interest of the French in North Africa was to keep North Africa under French control when the war was over. That's what they wanted.

Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia should remain French. That's all they really care about. If they can do that by working through the Germans, they'll do it. If they can do it by working through the French or through the Americans, excuse me, they'll do that too. So when this operation begins, naturally enough, an enemy force approaches your territory. You defend your territory. That's what you do. Then there's about a 48-hour period where the Americans are trying to get to senior French officials.

The French are trying to figure out what's going on in North Africa. And de Gaulle and Giro are back in Gibraltar and London alternatively brooding and yelling and screaming. and it's a very, very confused picture. What ends up happening is that a man named Jean-Francois Darlant, who is the head of the French, the entire French military, a guy that hated Algeria and did not really want to be in Algeria, happens to be there because his son is recovering from the exact same strand of polio that FDR has. And Algeria is where he's gone to convales.

So the bottom line is Murphy helps to work out this deal between Mark Clark, Darlon, and Murphy, in which the deal they cut is, Darlane will order the French forces to stop shooting at the Americans and British. In return, the Americans will turn over all domestic affairs to Darlon. Darlon is one of the nastiest guys in this history. He is anti-democratic. He's anti-American. He's anti-British. He's anti-Semitic. He's everything that you would find distasteful if you were American. Yet the U.S. gives him the gold key to all of North Africa. And it is in incredibly unpopular as a decision, even if it does bring to a halt the combat in North Africa. So it is incredibly complicated and in ways that kind of make your head spin,

de Gaulle is awakened and told that the Americans have landed in North Africa with nobody informing de Gaul. And de Gaul says something like, Very Good, I hope Vichy throws them back into the sea, right? Really complicated stuff. I love the phrase Alan Brooke, the British Chief of the Imperial General Staff, Alan Brooks says to him, I understand your bitterness now overcome it, which is a great line. And to his credit, DeGal does. Let's talk about why this would be distasteful, you know, from 40 to 41 to 42.

I'm interested in these reports. Leahy is sending back. What is the evolution of policy within Vichy? Let's say with respect to the Jews, for example, what's going on inside France under the stewardship of the Vichy regime? It's getting worse and worse and worse and worse. So the longstanding debate inside French, historiography is, did Vichy do what it did to the Jews because it was forced to do it, or did they do

it because of native French anti-Semitism? And the bulk of the evidence is now the latter. So just about a month ago, I was at the new Liberation of Paris Museum, which they opened it to the Plaston Faire Rochreau. And one of the exhibits they have is an order for the deportation of French Jews, certain classes of French Jews. And then in the margin, in Peyton's own handwriting, extends the number of Jews that they're going to take and who they're going to take. Pierre Laval personally ordered that Jewish children be included in the deportations. Also in Paris, between the city and Charles de Gaul airport, there's a place called Jean-C, which is where Jews were collected before being shipped off to Auschwitz.

The new museum that's there, you could go through that museum and almost not know that Germany was a part of it. In other words, the argument clearly now, I think the overwhelming bulk of the evidence, is that it's Vichy's own native anti-Semitism that is driving what happens to French Jews. This is complicated because French Jews actually survive at a greater percentage than those in most other countries, in part because Vichy is an independent country, and in part because it is such an inefficient and ineffective country for governance, that there's ways that people can slide through the cracks. So it's extraordinarily complicated.

But what's happening is an intensification of antisemitism, an intensification of fascism, an intensification of fascism and an intensification of authoritarianism inside Vichy. What Leahy is saying is, look, if Peyton were still young enough and healthy enough, I could have some faith in this regime. But if it's Darlon and if it's Laval and if it's these other people that they're bringing in, there's no chance that this is simply never going to work. So it's not that people were unaware of it. And in the book I cite the very first time that an American senior official acknowledges

that the Germans are committing genocide, not sending Jews out to ghettos or work camps in the East, is because of reports that are coming out of Vichy, France, where the censorship and the media control is not as tight as it is inside Germany. And so Cordell Hall has to admit, yes, we have evidence coming out of France that these people are being shipped not to war camps

and not to ghettos and not to farms in the east. They're being sent to death camps. And we now know that. And it's, again, it's because of Vichy that we know this. So, again, the ways in which Vichy is, Fishi ties to all of these various elements of the Second World War was one of the things that so fascinated me as I was doing this research. Yeah. Meanwhile, we're cutting deals with these guys in North Africa.

Right. Not only are we cutting deals with them, the deals we're cutting, allow fascist political clubs to stay open. They allow this thing called the Kremiulah, which Vichy suspended the rights of Jews in North Africa. That doesn't change. The banning of Jews from employment, the banning of Jews from even going to the movies. all of those things stay in place. That's nuts, right? And plenty of Americans who were there in North Africa are saying, what's the point?

Like, what are we going to do next? Like, are we going to make up with Hitler himself? Like, what are we doing here? What is the point? I believe Lee Blin, not to keep talking about AJ Lee Blaine, but I believe he's disgusted by Darlawn and writes it some length about it. Every reporter who's there is disgusted. Ernie Pyle is disgusted.

Edward R. Murrow is disgusted. Everybody who's in North Africa is disgusted. If this is what the Atlantic Charter means, if this is what the Four Freedoms means, if this is what we were doing this for all along, how do you explain this deal? How do you justify this? What level of armed resistance is there within Vichy to the regime? Is it mostly communists, you know, prior to German reoccupation and kind of the endgame of everything? What French resistance is there to speak of?

It's not much inside Vichy. It is the great French phrase is atontiste, which means kind of basically sitting around waiting to see what happens. It is, the communists are organizing. French resistance cells are certainly organizing. And they organize first in the unoccupied zone because it's easier to do there. There's less kind of government pressure. And then after 1942, many of those resistant cells leave Leon, they go to Paris. They leave the south and they go to the capital. But the resistance is not, is not great, in part is not yet great, in part because it's difficult to get materials and resources to them. And in part, it's not exactly clear what it is you're resisting against. What exactly are you

going to do when if you're able to get Vichy out of power? And again, it's hard for people in this day and age to, it's hard to explain. It's hard for me to understand. But the cult of personality that had built around Pétan was so intense that resistance to Vichy became resistance to this great hero, this old man who was sacrificing himself for the great. greater good of France, such that even at the end of the war, the United States had not yet given up the fact that maybe Peyton will come to Paris in 1945 and he'll open up a new French assembly, that he'll be the guy that has that authority. And you can imagine the reactions of someone like Charles de Gaulle when he finds out about that. So how does it all end? What is the endgame for Vichy?

I'm not sure it does end, but I mean, those who follow French politics will know that Vichy was very much a part of the last round of the French presidential election. But Darlane gets power over North Africa. There's a lot of controversy, as we talked about. And then a young member of the French resistance, a man named Ferdinand Bonnier de la Chappelle, shoots him on Christmas Eve. Mark Clark says it was like the lancing of a troublesome boil. Anthony Eden, the British Foreign Secretary, says that he had not felt so relieved by any event in his entire life. And my favorite one American who attended the funeral said there wasn't a wet eye in the room, which I just love. With Darlane gone, the path really is open for Degal, who is now the most talented, most devious, most clever

politician that's left to just begin to accrete power around himself. The fascinating thing about this, and I have to give my friend Brooke Blower at Boston University credit for this, was a conversation with Brooke that brought this to me. You know, she and I were talking about, let's say Bonnier misses or the gun jams or whatever. It's entirely possible Jean-Francoe d'Arlon becomes the dictator of France at the end of the war in the same way that the U.S. was willing to live with Franco and Salazar in Spain and Portugal. That's an entirely plausible scenario. It's also possible that Tagos would have found a way to get rid of Darnon, but it's entirely possible.

Nevertheless, with Darnoan gone, there is nobody in France who can challenge Charles de Gaul for political acumen, for reputation, for, you name it. He is the guy, which the United States, after D-Day, finally comes to recognize that like him or not, we got to deal with him. But as anybody that follows French politics and French history and French society will know, Dishi never really goes away. And it remains this kind of ever-present shadow and nightmare that France is still trying to deal with.

Talk about the sort of the post-war. period in terms of the American assumption of the mantle that Britain and I think your book clarifies very well in the American pre-war vision, France hold as sort of guarantors of a kind of global stability or global security. You have the whole French empire, which for much of the war is controlled, but we haven't even talked about the Pacific. And I want to be respectful of your time. But the American succession over time to sort of the British role, I think, is something, again, that occupies a place to some extent in the American imagination. How does this play out with the French Empire and the American assumption of what role the French

were playing? Well, it's another kind of what if if Roosevelt had lived, would this policy have been any different than it was under Truman? But the American assumption is that once the French people vote for Charles de Gaulle, that is, once the French people have demonstrated that they want him, then it's a legitimate government whether you like it or not, right? I mean, you kind of have to accept de Gaul. And the empire, of course, for France, the key here is in the Pacific. It's in Indochina, where Roosevelt had said he wanted Indochina and a kind of international trusteeship. He didn't think that France should be allowed to continue to control it. For Cold War reasons, for other reasons, Truman's decision is to back the French in their attempt to reconquer Indochina. But again, as anybody that knows France knows, it's not the war in Indochina that rips France apart. It's the war in Algeria that begins in 1954.

that really rips France apart because Algeria is not considered a colony. It's considered a part of France. And again, this is the critical, critical thing that Americans never really do get, that they, that they, the French, don't see Algeria as part of their overseas empire. And this to me, I think I was more alert to this, and I have to give her credit. One of my first French teachers, Madame Rosenwasser, her family was kicked out of Alsace in the 1870s, moved to Algeria, then kicked out of Algeria. and came to Pittsburgh where she was my French teacher. So from very early on, you know, she talked a lot about that. We read a lot of Albert Camus, another one of these French, you know,

in Algeria. That's something the Americans never really did figure out. So whatever else the United States was going to do, opposing the French Empire would have been very difficult in Cold War times. And I think would have been very difficult, you know, kind of full stop. And again, I think there were Americans in the 1950s recognizing how complicated all this was in the 1940s. and simply not wanting to get ourselves sunk into that again. So you teach Army officers, their trade, you help them think about strategy. What is the value in 2022 of the kind of study you've engaged in here? What would you ask them to have as it were takeaways?

Well, the very first thing I like to talk to students about is to just understand how complex strategy is and how complex it has always been. One of the things we do here in the United States is somehow we have constructions. the Second World War as this period of time when decisions were easy, everything was sort of black and white. Nothing about Vichy is black and white. Nothing about this time period is actually black and white. There's some black, I guess, but it's just not simply that clear. So the first thing I want people to understand or my students to understand is the number of factors that are playing in here, American public opinion, journalism, something that's happening in France is impacting what's

happening in Africa. It's impacting what's happening in Indochina. It's impacting the independence of Lebanon and Syria. I mean, all of this stuff is linked together. In strategy, everything is connected to everything else. And the other point that I like to point out to them, it's a Henry Kissinger, originally Kissinger observation, where Kissinger said something like justice and justice and peace run at counterpurposes. You can get one, but usually it means you're moving further away from the other. So which one do you want to pursue? Which one can you pursue? In this case, the attempt to get to peace meant that you had to postpone justice. So that's another theme that I like to talk about with students. And I guess the other one is that other people get a vote, getting back to the HR McMaster

point about not falling into this concept of strategic narcissism, that the U.S. had a vision for the way it wanted this to go. But actually, the most powerful person I would argue in this whole picture is Charles de Gaulle, who by the time we get around to realizing it, he's holding all the cards. It just takes the United States a while to get over their own biases and hatred of him to realize how good he was at what he was doing. So there's a lot, I think, to dig into here. I'm just scratching the surface here. But when I talk to students, I want them to understand not so much the history as I want

them to understand what we call here the historical mindedness, the way of thinking about the past and the way of looking for ways in which, as Mark Twain said, it may not be the same thing, but it rhymes. It may not repeat, but it rhymes. And so there's ways in which we can treat these historical case studies a little bit like laboratories. We can't change variables in the experiment, but we can certainly kind of tinker with the dials of strategy a little bit. Why did the U.S. government do what it did? Why did the French respond the way that they did? These are things that, as we've already talked about, have that goes through Ukraine,

through Vladimir Putin, through European security, through Germany, through all of that in the time period we're living in. Michael Nyberg, author of When France Fell. It's a really fascinating conversation. I appreciate you joining us. My pleasure. Thanks. Thanks very much.

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