Secret Flotillas: Clandestine Sea Operations to Brittany, 1940–44

By Brook Richards

As the fall of France took place, almost the entire coastline of Western Europe was in German hands. Clandestine sea transport operations provided lines of vital intelligence for wartime Britain. These "secret flotillas" landed and picked up agents in and from France, and ferried Allied evaders and escapees. This activity was crucial to the SIS (Secret Intelligence Service) and the SOE (Special Operations Executive). This authoritative publication by the official historian, the late Sir Brooks Richards, vividly describes and analyses the clandestine naval operations that took place during WWII. The account has been made possible through Sir Brooks' access to closed government archives, combined with his own wartime experiences and the recollections of many of those involved.First published in 1996, the original edition included descriptions of naval operations off French North Africa. The history has now been amended and expanded by Sir Brooks and is now published in two volumes. This first volume concentrates on the sea lines to Brittany.This authoritative publication by the official historian, the late Sir Brooks Richards, vividly describes and analyses the clandestine naval operations that took place during World War Two.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Jan 19, 2013
• ISBN: 9781783035700

Book preview

Foot

Acknowledgements to the First Edition

This book grew out of a chance encounter with Professor Guy Vourc’h in Paris in 1979. It was a name that awoke echoes: we had met soon after the Liberation. I knew that he and his three younger brothers had escaped in turn from Brittany to England during the Occupation and that he had been one of the first Frenchmen to fight their way ashore on D-Day. I told him that I had been involved in contacts with Brittany in 1941 and 1942: he knew more of the Breton side of my first operation than I did. And he sent me Roger Huguen’s Par les Nuits les plus Longues.

The book was a professionally researched account of wartime escapes from Brittany, which I found fascinating. It covered a number of British-organised evacuations by sea and he had had help from various British sources. But most naval and paranaval operations to Brittany did not concern evacuation of escapers and evaders and fell outside the scope of M. Huguen’s researches. I knew too that Brittany was not the only part of France to which sea lines had operated. I found myself regretting the lack of a comprehensive record of clandestine sea transport into and out of French territory during the war years. This lacuna seemed anomalous since Hugh Verity, who commanded the Lysander and Hudson Flight of 161 Special Duties Squadron in 1943 when it was at the peak of its activity, had long since published a history of the corresponding air operations. This had been translated and published also in France, where it evoked much interest. Unless a maritime counterpart were produced promptly, it would be too late to draw on the testimony of surviving participants to amplify any surviving official records. Since no-one seemed better placed to tackle the job, I decided to set about it myself.

My especial thanks are due to Gervase Cowell, SOE Adviser to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, for his help in enabling me to gain access to the essential records on the terms applied to Official Historians. He later helped me to surmount pitfalls on the way to publication. I am grateful to Professor M.R.D. Foot and John Debenham Taylor for helpful advice and briefing.

The records provided an indispensable armature of fact and chronology, but they contained important gaps and were too lacking in detail to yield a satisfactory narrative on their own. I have had help from many quarters in redressing these deficiencies.

Operations to the west coast of Brittany had to be carried out by fishing boats or a combination of submarines and fishing boats as the distances involved were beyond the reach of high-speed vessels such as motor gunboats. In dealing with the sea lines to this area I have received invaluable help from Daniel Lomenech, Steven Mackenzie, Patrick Whinney, Richard Townsend, Jean Le Roux, Roger Huguen, René Pichavent and Capitaine de Vaisseau Jean Pillet. Daniel Lomenech’s assistance extended beyond his own remarkable involvement to that of Hubert Moreau, his precursor, the first man to return to France on an intelligence mission. He found copies of an incomplete series of articles by Moreau published in the 1950s. Lt-Col. Moreau, Hubert’s son, who was approached on my behalf by Claude Huan, produced a most interesting unpublished article in which his father carries forward his account of the three missions he undertook in July, August and September 1940.

I am most grateful to Steven Mackenzie for allowing me to reprint his scintillating account of the MARIE-LOUISE operations, which appeared in Blackwood’s Magazine not long after the end of the war.

Operations on the north coast of Brittany by motor gunboats from Dartmouth or Falmouth enjoyed spectacular success from October 1943 onwards. In this field, papers in the possession of the late David Birkin, longest-serving of the specialist navigating officers attached to the 15th MGB Flotilla, are by far the most important supplementary source. Not only did he keep copies of 33 official reports of operations in which he was involved, but he and his widow, Judy, have allowed me to make use of two unpublished articles by David, track charts, diagrams and photographs from his collection. I am much indebted to them for their help.

I am also most grateful to Peter Williams, Charles Martin, Lloyd Bott, Tom Long, Michel Guillot and Derek Carter for help with this section of the book.

When I arrived in Gibraltar at the end of October 1942, a brilliantly successful run of operations by Polish-manned feluccas was just coming to an end. Little has appeared in print about them, but, on the advice of Professor M.R.D. Foot, I approached Dr Josef Garliński, who remembered seeing records of the Polish Naval Mission at Gibraltar in the Sikorski Institute. I am most grateful for that tip; the Institute possessed an almost complete set of operational reports and related correspondence in Polish, which I was able to sample thanks to the kindness of Dr Andrjez Suchcitz, who is in charge of the collection and who most helpfully summarised their contents. Full translations of all the key documents were needed, so I enlisted the help of Dr Keith Sword of the School of Slavonic and Eastern European Languages. I am most grateful for his translations, researches and background advice. I hope that we have between us rescued a small-scale epic from oblivion. Captain Marian Kadulski has added valuable personal details to the narrative represented by reports and correspondence that he wrote, under very great pressure, at the time. I am most grateful to the Sikorski Institute for permission to publish material of which they hold the copyright.

In relation to operations to and from Corsica, I am much indebted to Pat Whinney and Andrew Croft and Michael Lumby.

Throughout my researches, I received much help and advice from Capitaine de Vasseau Claude Huan, the well-known French naval historian. His knowledge of the French naval archives and his energy and skill in extracting information from them and other documentary and human sources only accessible in Paris helped my project forward very greatly. I am particularly grateful to him for compiling a list of the special operations undertaken by French submarines from Algiers in 1943 and 1944 for the French clandestine services and for obtaining from Capitaine Paul Paillole the names of more than 100 of the 150 passengers who travelled to or from France by this route.

The subject of operations by British submarines for SOE and SIS also required basic research. I am grateful to David Brown, Head of the Naval Historical Branch at the Ministry of Defence; to Commodore Bob Garson; to Commander Compton-Hall and Commander Jeff Tall, successively Directors of the RN Submarine Museum; to Gus Britten; and to Charles Beatty for their help in this connection. It was the last-named who kindly lent me Jean L’Herminier’s book.

I am much indebted to Roger Huguen for generous advice and help and allowing me to make use of maps prepared for his book; to Daniel Lomenech, Richard Townsend, Derek Carter, Pat Whinney, Judy Birkin, Andrew Croft, Charles Martin, Lloyd Bott, Mary Holdsworth, Hilary Rust, the Musée de la Marine and the Etablissement Cinématographique et Photographique des Armées (ECPA) in Paris for help over photographs. My thanks are due to Mrs E.A.G Davis for permission to use a painting of MGB 318 on the dust jacket; and to my brother Robin for resolving various problems of chart-work and nomenclature. It is to him and to Mrs. Honer that I owe the drawing of Seawolf by the late Eric Honer. My brother and his wife, Kate, kindly photographed and transcribed the panels in the museum on the Ile-de-Sein recording escapes by Breton vessels during the Occupation.

While the project was still trying to make its way, the Imperial War Museum gave it unconditional backing, whether publication ensued or not. On the strength of this the Leverhulme Foundation gave it an invaluable two-year grant. Without their generous help it could never have come to maturity.

At a critical stage, the interest of Admiral Sir Julian Oswald, the First Sea Lord, and of Kenneth Carlisle MP, Parliamentary Under-Secretary at the Ministry of Defence, were a great encouragement, as was that of Amiral Emile Chaline, historian of the Free French naval forces.

I owe an immense debt to Patricia Andrews, Head of the Historical and Records Section of the Cabinet Office; without her support the book would never have been published. I am most grateful to Margaret Russell, who undertook the task of putting the text on to word processor and seeing it through many revisions of detail.

I am much obliged to Ingrid Cranfield for her careful editing of the text; to Steven Carruthers and HMSO for further editing and proof-reading; and to my wife for critical advice and much practical help.

HMSO wishes to acknowledge with grateful thanks the following for their kind permission to reproduce photographs: Beken of Cowes, marine photographers for the photograph of S502; Mrs. Mary Collins, for the photographs of RAF 360 and Sunbeam II; Conway Maritime Press for the photograph of Minna, taken from Model Shipwright (Vol. II, No. 3, Spring 1974); M. le Capitaine de Vaisseau Jannot, director of the Service d‘Information et de Relations Publiques des Armées/Etablissement Cinématographique et Photographique des Armées (SIRPA/ECPA) of the French Ministry of Defence for the photographs of Capitaine de Frégate Jean L’Herminier and Admiral Darlan; the Musée de la Marine in Paris for the photographs of Capitaine de Frégate Jean L‘Herminier one taken in the wardroom of Casabianca and the other of Capitaine de Frégate Jean L’Herminier and Admiral Darlan; the Musée de la Marine in Paris for the photograph of Capitaine de Frégate Jean L’Herminier standing by Casabianca’s periscope and the photograph of Casabianca at Algiers; Universal Pictorial Press & Agency Ltd. for the photograph of Commander F.A. Slocum at his CMG investiture in 1953; Tom Maxted for the photograph of the Felucca Seawolf; M. Sebastien Briec for his painting used on the frontispiece. Extracts from Michelin Green Guide to Brittany, 1991 edition, are reproduced by permission of Michelin, authorisation no. 95-027.

The author and publisher have attempted to trace Gordon Ellis, the artist whose painting Mayflower has been used on the dust jacket for this publication. If the legal copyright holders of this (or other material not acknowledged above) wish to contact HMSO, we shall ensure that the correct acknowledgement appears in any future edition of this book.

Brooks Richards, 1996

Acknowledgements to the Second Edition

Sadly my father died shortly after completing the text of the second edition of Secret Flotillas but I know that he would have wished to acknowledge again all those whom he thanked for helping him produce the first version and the extensive acknowledgements to the first edition are reproduced here unamended.

I am sure that he would also wish me to extend warm thanks to those who were in any way involved in helping him to get this updated and extended version prepared for publication. In particular he would have wished me to thank: Capitaine de Vaisseau Pierrick Roullet, the translator of the French edition of Secret Flotillas; Tessa Stirling, Richard Ponman and Sally Falk of the Histories and Records Unit of the Cabinet Office, without whose help and support the revised editions of Secret Flotillas would never have been published; Christopher Woods, who provided him with his research on SOE in Italy; Duncan Stuart and Mark Seaman, who gave valued help and support; and Geoffrey Hudson, who provided some of the photographs and diagrams for the new sections of the book.

An attempt has been made to trace the source of the photographs and diagrams which are reproduced in this edition, but not in every case successfully. I know my father would have wished to have thanked and acknowledged those who supplied the material. If the legal copyright holders of any of the material reproduced in this edition wish to contact the Cabinet Office, we shall ensure that the correct acknowledgement appears in any future edition of this book. And to anybody else - there must be a number - whose help deserved a personal acknowledgement but ignorance has prevented me from giving it, I can only express my gratitude and my apologies.

Francis Richards

March 2003

Introduction

The fall of France in June 1940, coming hard on the heels of Hitler’s seizure of Denmark, Norway and the Low Countries, left the whole coastline of western Europe from the North Cape to the Spanish frontier in hostile hands. It was as great a strategic threat to the British Isles as any since the Spanish Armada. Even the Channel Islands, whose seamen had so often over the previous two-and-a-half centuries kept watch for any concentration of enemy shipping in neighbouring French ports and far down into the Bay of Biscay, had been abandoned as indefensible in the face of air power.

The British clandestine services, hastily reorganised to meet the emergency, came under great pressure: there were urgent requirements for intelligence, of which timely warning of any attempt to mount a cross-Channel invasion was the most pressing. Agents needed to be landed and picked up. Commander F.A. Slocum, the officer charged with the task of establishing physical communications with enemy-occupied territory for the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), could find no relevant official records to help him.

What he was probably hoping to find was some form of report by Lt Augustus Agar VC, DSO, RN, who had between June and August 1919 used two of the then new 40-foot Thornycroft coastal motor boats (CMBs) to make nine trips from the small Finnish port of Terrioki into Bolshevik-held Petrograd, successfully landing or picking up couriers on six of these occasions. In doing so, he had re-established contact with Sir Paul Dukes, SIS’s agent ST25, who had been sent into the field 18 months previously to obtain political intelligence. Dukes had been living in Petrograd disguised as a workman, a soldier or a member of the Cheka (secret police). His reports had originally been sent out by couriers across the Finnish border. But Bolshevik counter-espionage had captured many of those working for him and nothing had been heard from him for some time before Agar’s arrival.

London’s plan had been that Agar should transport agents across the Gulf of Finland and land them on the coast of Estonia. Once he had taken stock of the situation, Agar decided on a much more daring course of action - to run agents directly into Petrograd through the chain of forts guarding the approaches. The forts mounted batteries of searchlights and guns, while between them ran a boom in the form of a chain, whose maximum immersion of three feet could be crossed even by a shallow-draught CMB with only a few inches to spare. There was also an ever-present danger from floating mines, but Agar succeeded in the hazardous enterprise he had set himself. On his last expedition, CMB 7 came under fire and crashed into the boom, losing both rudder and propeller shaft. He got back to base only after 12 hours at sea, with an improvised mast and sail and a cable streamed astern to steer the boat.

As though these risks were not enough, from an early stage Agar involved himself in offensive action when opportunity offered. It was for sinking the 6,000-ton cruiser Oleg on his second mission that he was awarded the Victoria Cross (VC). In August 1919, he was joined by a small flotilla of seven 55-foot CMBs. In a combined operation, they destroyed the whole of the Bolshevik battle fleet lying in the Kronstadt naval basin - an action for which Commander C.C. Dobson, RN, senior officer of the flotilla, and Lt G.C. Steele, his second in command, were each awarded the VC while Agar received the DSO (Distinguished Service Order).

It is hardly surprising that soon after this, Agar’s operations for SIS came to an end. In the Second World War motor gun boats carrying out operations for the clandestine services were strictly discouraged from indulging in heroics.

If anyone in 1940 had had leisure to look for even earlier precedents in the age when sail and oar were master, they would have found that when war broke out with Revolutionary France in 1793, Jersey became a main base for collecting intelligence about the situation on the mainland. Its importance was enhanced when Royalist revolts occurred in the Vendee, Brittany and Normandy. The central personage in what became known as ‘the Channel Islands correspondence’ was a Jersey-born Royal Navy post-captain named Phillippe d‘Auvergne, Prince de Bouillon, who had French émigré connections. From a hut below the ramparts of Gorey Castle d’Auvergne commanded a small flotilla of fast-sailing local craft, some manned by Royalist Frenchmen. These vessels carried secret agents to and from the French coast. Intelligence collection was their primary task and they were allowed to engage in offensive action and join in the defence of the islands only when this responsibility had been discharged. D’Auvergne had a dispatch vessel standing by to carry his reports to England. He addressed them directly to William Wyndham, Secretary at War, rather than to any naval authority. In addition to the intelligence that his own flotilla brought him, a procession of Royalist small craft arrived from French ports with information and collected arms and ammunition from stocks held by him.

By the time counter-revolutionary resistance had collapsed, in 1797, fear of a French invasion of the Channel Islands, Ireland or England lent fresh importance to Jersey as a base for intelligence collection. D’Auvergne, a key figure as spymaster and local naval commander, was promoted to Commodore in 1801 and Rear-Admiral in 1805. He retired from the Navy only in 1812.

For nearly 20 years, d‘Auvergne provided a centralised control, which had been lacking earlier in what has been well called the Second Hundred Years’ War with France. At that period a swarm of small privateers, mostly based on Guernsey, preyed on French coastal shipping, ranging deep down into the Bay of Biscay and, posing as local craft, ventured far enough into French harbours to look for strategically threatening concentrations of vessels. Though this combination of free enterprise and self-defence had previously been effective in detecting any build-up of French forces in the neighbouring harbours of Granville, Saint-Malo, Tréguier or Morlaix, it failed spectacularly to prevent a French invasion of Jersey in the winter of 1781. The Governor was surprised in his bed and forced to order all British forces in the island to surrender. The situation was redressed only by the action of one regular officer of the garrison, Major Pierson, who refused to obey the Governor’s order and attacked the French. In a short, sharp action both Pierson and de Rullecourt, the French commander, were killed, but the French were defeated and the island was saved. This episode may have had something to do with the institution of more systematic intelligence arrangements in Jersey under d’Auvergne when France and Great Britain were next at war.

Notwithstanding the advent of the internal combustion engine, aircraft and radar, fishing vessels and craft which could pass as such played an important part in clandestine sea transport in the Second World War. One big difference from previous occasions when a line of war separated England and France was that parachuting from aircraft and the clandestine landing of aircraft by moonlight now provided alternatives to infiltration and exfiltration by sea. Air landing and pick up of agents had been pioneered by the French intelligence services in the First World War, but the Royal Air Force (RAF) was not ready for a first such operation to France until October 1940. Only five took place in 1941. The build-up of the RAF’s Special Duties squadrons was swift thereafter, but, as weather not infrequently bedevilled flying, clandestine operations to France by sea retained their importance until the Liberation.

When the French edition of Hugh Verity’s We Landed by Moonlight was published in 1982, Jacques Maillet, one of General de Gaulle’s Compagnons de la Liberation, wrote in a preface that it was surprising and regrettable that the subject of clandestine air landings in France during the Occupation had before then been treated only incidentally in accounts of the clandestine struggle. Group Captain Verity’s record of these operations was an extraordinary adventure story, but the author had also striven to achieve meticulous historical accuracy. He had drawn on official RAF records and a great deal of evidence from British and French participants: his book was therefore a valid contribution to historiography. Moreover, these operations had exercised a profound influence on the course of French history. The flights were few in number: no more than a few dozen pilots had been involved and passengers amounted to a few hundred at the most. But their historical importance was immense.

They were significant, firstly, for military reasons. It was essential that those responsible for radio communications and for intelligence and those designated to take charge of the secret army should be able to report back to London. In the fighting that led to the Liberation, the excellent cooperation between the French Forces of the Interior and the armies that had landed owed much to the contacts thus established.

But, above all, Maillet pointed out, one must not forget that these were the links that made it possible to unite French internal Resistance and General de Gaulle’s Free France in a single combat force. Without them the Jean Moulins, the Brossolettes and the Morandats could not have built the structures by which the French Resistance movement organised itself under General de Gaulle’s command. If France was able, notwithstanding the armistice of 1940 and the Vichy regime, to reclaim its status as a great power, it was because de Gaulle was, and had in the end to be recognised as, the man who spoke for all of France. That was possible only because men who had come out of France had been able to unite around him.

Without clandestine air operations, the Free French would have remained a group - unquestionably a heroic and admirable group - of combatants, but one isolated from evolving attitudes in France. The air operations, however, enabled men and ideas to be exchanged between London and Algiers on the one hand and the French Resistance on the other. He might well have added that France was thereby spared the fragmentation and confrontation of internal and external resistance that embittered the liberation of, for example, Greece and Yugoslavia.

It was, Maillet concluded, no exaggeration to say that clandestine air operations had modified the course of French history. Those associated with the Special Duties squadrons were equally deserving of Sir Winston Churchill’s tribute to the airmen of the Battle of Britain: ‘Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.’

As head of SOE’s (Special Operations Executive) North African French country section in 1943 and 1944, I was a customer of the RAF’s Special Duties squadrons and my admiration of them is as great as that of Maillet. But from two years’ earlier service in SOE’s Naval Section, I know that their seagoing counterparts, the Secret Flotillas, made a far from insignificant contribution to the historic process he describes. It is high time that their story be recorded, not as a series of incidental episodes, but as a subject in its own right.

Brooks Richards

21 March 1995

Blandford Forum, Dorset

I

The Lost Battle for France: May-June 1940

Hitler’s long-awaited attack in the west began at dawn on 10 May 1940, barely a month after his swift occupation of Denmark and pre-emptive descent on Norway.¹ He had assembled 136 divisions for the new Blitzkrieg campaign - a force that gave him a substantial numerical ascendancy. The first thrusts were into neutral Holland and Belgium. Hitler knew from intercepted signals of the French High Command that this would draw three French armies and most of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) forward in support of the Belgians. Then seven German Panzer divisions advanced through the Ardennes forest, outflanking the northern end of the Maginot Line defensive system, and crossed the Meuse into French territory near Sedan, the third such invasion in 70 years.

The French General Staff had discounted the risk of a major German attack in this sector: Pétain, the victor of Verdun, had in 1934 described the Ardennes as ‘impenetrable’. To a questioner, who had expressed concern about the fact that the Maginot Line stopped short of the Ardennes, he had said that, if the Germans were imprudent enough to get entangled in that forest, the French forces would seize them as they emerged.² But General Heinz Guderian’s³ Panzers stood Pétain’s prediction on its head: they smashed the small French force that guarded the pivotal point between the Maginot defences and the Allied Northern Armies. By 13 May, they had established a substantial bridgehead across the Meuse on French soil.

Within 24 hours, this German lodgement had expanded considerably and, with the Allied field armies heavily engaged in Belgium, there was little to prevent Generals Guderian and Kleist, who could count on overwhelming Luftwaffe support, from breaking out on a narrow front in whatever direction best suited overall German strategy. The French High Command called for RAF (Royal Air Force) support, which was promptly given, but the German bridges across the Meuse were so heavily defended that by nightfall on 14 May more than half the 70 bomber aircraft engaged had been destroyed.

By seven o’clock next morning, 15 May, a hastily improvised French counter-attack had also failed. Paul Reynaud, the French Prime Minister, telephoned Winston Churchill - called to office only five days previously as a result of the disastrous Allied campaign in Norway - to say that the road to Paris lay open to the Germans and that the battle was lost. Paris was not in fact the immediate objective of Guderian’s and Kleist’s Panzers: they struck westwards towards the mouth of the Somme with a view to cutting the Allied armies in two.

Colonel Charles de Gaulle was at Le-Vésinet forming the French Fourth Armoured Division, which he had been appointed to command. Still unknown outside professional military circles, he was notorious within them as a heterodox military intellectual. His pre-war campaign to persuade France to adopt a strategy of attack and movement using massed armoured fighting vehicles, such as it now faced at German hands, had been a public challenge by a serving officer to the French General Staff and its preoccupation with defence. This was an outlook born out of the carnage of the First World War battlefields and embodied in the Maginot Line fortifications. Though de Gaulle had managed to assemble only a third of his division’s planned armoured strength, he was ordered forward to Laon on 15 May to delay the Panzers’ advance. He was under no illusion as to the gravity of the situation, and advised his wife to seek a place of safety for herself and their children as ‘anything may be expected’.

The full ignominy of the disaster struck de Gaulle on the following day. As his division probed forward of Laon, he ran into routed French troops whom the Blitzkrieg thrust had put to disorderly flight. Overtaken by the enemy’s motorised formations, they had been ordered to throw away their rifles and hurry away southwards so as not to block roads needed by the German advance: the enemy’s vanguard simply could not spare the time to take them prisoner. Writing about these painful memories 15 years later, de Gaulle identified that traumatic day as the turning-point, when he realised the war in Europe had begun so unspeakably badly that the only hope was to continue the struggle elsewhere. If he lived, he would fight on wherever it was necessary and as long as was necessary, until the enemy was beaten and the nation’s stain was washed away.⁴

De Gaulle’s division was in action the next day (17 May) and again, after a march of 200km (125 miles), on 28 May, when they struck at a bridgehead which the Panzers had established across the Somme near Abbeville. It was a last, though vain, attempt to prevent the complete encirclement of the Allies’ Northern Armies. In these two engagements de Gaulle had the sour satisfaction of demonstrating that counter-attack by massed tanks, if given appropriate air support, was the only way to defeat a Panzer onslaught and prevail in the new form of warfare, whose prophet and passionate advocate he had been. His efforts, though doomed then to failure for lack of back-up and air cover, earned him promotion to the rank of two-star general and, on 6 June, a summons to join the government of his friend Paul Reynaud as Under-Secretary of State for War. This transition from soldier to politician was, in the view of his biographer Jean Lacouture, fundamental to all that followed.

The Battle of France was already lost and the new minister’s main concern was to enable the government and a maximum of French troops to withdraw by sea to Algeria, as the only alternative to abject capitulation. He immediately asked Reynaud to give him responsibility for arranging the necessary shipping, and flew to London to enlist British help to that end. Churchill received him on 9 June. The Prime Minister left no record of that first meeting but General Sir Edward Spears, Churchill’s personal representative to Reynaud in his role as Minister of War, who was present, recorded that de Gaulle listened to Churchill’s reasons for rejecting his plea for more RAF support in France and then said, ‘I think you are right’ - a remark that no doubt made an impact. Admiral Odend’hal, head of the French Naval Mission in London, who was also present, confirmed that de Gaulle greatly impressed Churchill.⁵ De Gaulle said that the situation in France was very serious and the French Cabinet was divided: some, such as Reynaud, Mandel and Campinchi, were determined to continue the fight; others, above all Pétain and Weygand, insisted on negotiating at any price. De Gaulle’s pen-portrait of Churchill at this point in his war memoirs reveals that the British Prime Minister made an immediate and profound impression on him also.⁶ The two men met again at Briare a couple of days later. Churchill, who had begun to fear that a collapse of France might lead to a reversal of alliances, with the French fleet at Hitler’s beck and call, was convinced by de Gaulle and saw his as the only French hand outstretched towards him.

Churchill had flown out to Briare with Anthony Eden, then Secretary of State for War, to try to stiffen the resolve of the French government, which had left Paris during the previous night. Churchill arranged to have de Gaulle seated next to him when dinner was served at the conference table and listened with rapt attention and warm approval as de Gaulle expounded his idea of carrying on guerilla warfare after France had been overrun. De Gaulle’s relentless determination to carry on the fight was in striking contrast to the defeatism of Pétain, Weygand, Baudouin and a growing number of other members of the French government, who were already pressing for an armistice. When reporting to the War Cabinet next day, the Prime Minister mentioned de Gaulle as a young and energetic minister who had made a very favourable impression on him.

By the time Churchill and Eden flew back to England on the morning of 12 June, the German vanguard was poised to outflank the refugee French administration by crossing the Loire to the north-west of them, ministers therefore took to the roads again and headed west across the mainstream of the civilian exodus into Touraine, where historic châteaux afforded them temporary lodging.

Pressure was mounting on Reynaud from those in favour of an armistice, among them his mistress, the Comtesse Hélène de Portes. Churchill had to fly out once more on 13 June, this time to Tours, accompanied by Lord Halifax, the Foreign Secretary. Reynaud asked them what would be the attitude of the British government if an armistice were obtained. Churchill’s reply, delivered in his idiosyncratic Franglais, was wilfully misconstrued by Baudouin to advance the defeatists’ cause. Late that night, de Gaulle wrote a letter of resignation; but Georges Mandel, Minister of the Interior, warned by a member of the General’s staff, persuaded him that he still had great duties to fulfil and that he had the advantage of being an untarnished man.⁷

The situation was deteriorating so fast that further retreat became imperative on the morning of 14 June. Reynaud decided they should head for Bordeaux rather than Quimper in Brittany, as de Gaulle had wished.

According to Lacouture, de Gaulle was, like Churchill, until the middle of June an ardent supporter of the idea that Brittany might be held as a redoubt open to the Atlantic. He had gone up to Rennes on 12 June to discuss the idea with General Altmeyer, the regional military commander, and his own family had taken refuge at Carentec, a fishing village on the north coast near Morlaix. De Gaulle made no mention of this expedition in his memoirs, however, as though he wished to forget it.⁸ He must have known by 13 June that Weygand, who was already demanding an armistice, would never have provided the resources to mount a successful defence of the peninsula. His advocacy of Quimper, as he went out of his way to explain in his memoirs, was based on a conviction that, if the government took refuge there, it would within a matter of days be obliged to put to sea and head for North Africa, if only to avoid capture.

De Gaulle, unable to find a plane at Bordeaux, went to Brittany again by road on 14 June on his way to London for a second attempt to seek shipping for this planned evacuation. At Brest he paused to arrange for the embarkation of as many troops as possible. He stopped briefly at Paimpont to see his mother, who died not long afterwards; and he made a detour to Carentec to see his wife and family. He arranged for passports to be issued for them and for his mother before boarding the French destroyer Milan, which was evacuating a team of French nuclear scientists and their stock of heavy water to Plymouth.⁹

With Churchill’s support, the General’s request for British shipping was rapidly granted. This business concluded, he was on the point of leaving London when he found himself drawn into a desperate last bid to prevent the French government from suing for peace. A scheme for a Franco-British Union had originated at a meeting between Jean Monnet, René Pleven and Sir Robert Vansittart a couple of days earlier. In more normal circumstances, such a project would probably not have been espoused by de Gaulle, who was a highly sensitive nationalist and whose Action Française background was scarcely Anglophile, but he played a leading part in selling the idea to his new friend Churchill; Churchill sold it to the War Cabinet that afternoon, 16 June; and de Gaulle flew off to Bordeaux shortly thereafter in an RAF aircraft which Churchill placed at his disposal. Their hope was that the proposed Union would tip the balance within the French Cabinet in favour of continuing the war from North Africa.

De Gaulle had telephoned the text of the draft agreement through to Reynaud before leaving London. Reynaud’s initial reaction had been enthusiastic, but when he laid the proposal before a hastily summoned meeting of the Council of Ministers half an hour later he found himself outmanoeuvred by those who wanted an armistice: Madame de Portes, who haunted his outer office, had forewarned her ally Baudouin of what she had seen being typed. He in turn told Pétain and Weygand, so that Reynaud, instead of achieving the dramatic and positive impact for which he had hoped, fell into an ambush. Full of confidence, he read the text of Churchill’s offer to his colleagues, only to be engulfed in a derisive uproar. When President Lebrun, who was in the chair, managed to quell the tumult, Reynaud reread the proposal slowly in the hope that its historic import would rally support, adding that he would be meeting Churchill off Concarneau to carry the matter forward. Someone shouted that there was no need for him to go: they didn’t wish to become a British dominion. When Mandel, his friend, interjected that it would be better to be a British dominion than a Nazi province, Ybarnégaray shouted back, ‘Yes, it would be better to be a Nazi province. We at least know what that means.’

Reynaud found himself deserted by both his Vice-Presidents and not even Mandel and Campinci were prepared to speak in favour of the idea. No vote was taken but Reynaud drew a line down a sheet of paper, listing, on one side, the names of those who favoured asking for the terms of an armistice and, on the other, those who wished to continue the war from Algeria. There were 14 of the former and only 10 of the latter. He adjourned the meeting and placed his resignation in the hands of the President of the Republic, fully expecting to be called upon to form a new administration.

Such was the situation when de Gaulle landed at Mérignac. It was to Reynaud and to him alone that the General owed his 11-day political career; and Reynaud still remained his only hope of preventing an armistice. He went straight to see his friend and patron in the office he was using on the Rue Vital-Carlès. When he arrived, he was told that President Lebrun had asked Pétain to form a government. Pétain had there and then produced from his pocket a list of his intended ministerial appointments and had handed it to the President.

Pétain had been de Gaulle’s first commanding officer and thereafter his chief, patron and protector, though they in fact represented antithetical schools of military thought. Relations between them had cooled well before the war, as de Gaulle had increasingly asserted his independence as a thinker and writer on military matters. Now, however, an unbridgeable gulf opened up between the two men over the burning issue of whether to fight on from North Africa or seek an armistice. De Gaulle apparently decided to leave France as soon as he knew that Pétain had formed a government intent on abandoning the struggle.¹⁰ He found Reynaud exhausted, but clinging to the hope that the German terms for an armistice would prove so unacceptable that he would be recalled to office; and unwilling for this reason to leave Bordeaux, though it was clear that the city must fall to the Germans within a matter of days. De Gaulle seems not at that stage to have told even Reynaud of the decision he had just taken to return to England.

Sir Edward Spears, had arrived in Bordeaux with Sir Ronald Campbell, the British Ambassador, only half an hour after Reynaud on 14 June. Spears wrote a scintillating account of the events that took place in the hours following Reynaud’s resignation and of de Gaulle’s escape to London the next morning. Some French historians have treated this record with suspicion, for Spears, though an ardent and effective supporter of de Gaulle at the time, fell out with him a year later over policy in Syria. His account may indeed be coloured by a desire to emphasise how much de Gaulle owed to him at that decisive juncture; certainly de Gaulle was in very real danger of arrest at the hands of Weygand that night. Weygand had never been his friend: he had strenuously opposed de Gaulle’s proposals for reform of the army and was reliably reported to have said, only a few days previously, that he would like to shoot the recently promoted, very junior general who had suddenly become his ministerial superior. On arrival in Bordeaux, Weygand, convinced that he was about to be relieved of office, had made plans to use the French air force cadets under training at Mérignac to arrest and depose Reynaud by force if necessary. The plot had come to light by the merest chance and the cadets had been disarmed at Mandel’s behest.¹¹ There is therefore no doubt that Weygand, with Pétain’s backing, would have done whatever was necessary to prevent the departure for England of the man who had been a leading proponent of continuing the war from Algeria.

De Gaulle, no doubt warned by his staff, had therefore every reason to keep his departure a secret. He had, however, the assistance of his personal staff headed by Jean Laurent, who had been Director General of the Banque d’Indo-Chine and was not quite the cowering foundling that Spears perhaps implied.¹² However, de Gaulle urgently needed the help of the senior British representative in Bordeaux, whoever that might be, to make sure that the aircraft that had brought him from London would be available to fly him out next morning, and he cannot have known where to find such an authority in a town packed with refugees; indeed, it would have been dangerous for him to be seen, or known, to be looking for such help. But luck - or destiny - smiled upon him as he was making his way down the unlit hall that led from Reynaud’s office into the street. Two figures entered it on their way to see the ex-Prime Minister: they proved to be Campbell and Spears. A hurried consultation in the hall, where he had waited for them to re-emerge from Reynaud’s office, was later continued at the Hotel St Mandé, where Campbell was staying. De Gaulle made his way there on foot, since it would have been highly imprudent for him to have been seen in the Ambassador’s car.

Spears had a lively eye for detail, which de Gaulle, with his mind on loftier matters, did not. Spears’s version of those epic events records that in the ensuing conversation de Gaulle said it was essential he should return to England without delay. The fate of the French Empire was at stake: there was no one in France who would, or could, rally it now that Pétain and a team of defeatists had taken over. The call to continued resistance must be made at once, before any statement accepting defeat was sent out from Bordeaux. He would give that call himself; let anyone join him who would.

The circumstances were so altered by Reynaud’s resignation and the fact that de Gaulle was no longer a member of the French government that Campbell and Spears telephoned Churchill to persuade him to allow de Gaulle to use the aircraft to leave France and return to England; and to agree that Spears should accompany him. Churchill, roused from sleep, understood the danger de Gaulle faced and the advantage of getting him out of the country, though he was somewhat reluctant to accept that, with Reynaud’s resignation, Spears’s mission was at an end and that he could do nothing useful by staying on in Bordeaux. This conversation must have taken place on an open telephone line but things were in such turmoil that neither the new French government nor the Germans could have been in a position to benefit thereby.

The plan was that de Gaulle and his ADC, a young English-speaking diplomat named Geoffroy Chaudron de Courcel, should accompany Spears to the airport next morning, ostensibly to see him off. Spears left the meeting to attempt to persuade Georges Mandel, who had been Clemenceau’s éminence grise in the darkest days of the First World War, to fly to England too. Mandel felt it was impossible for him, as a Jew, to leave French territory in the hour of catastrophe; and that he must carry on the fight from French soil in North Africa. It was a courageous decision that was to cost him his life.¹³

Someone, probably Jean Laurent, had found the General a room at the Hotel de Normandie. It was only when he had made his escape plan that de Gaulle sent Laurent with a message to inform Reynaud of his intention. From the secret funds he had in his office, Reynaud sent him the equivalent of £500: this was all the General had with him on arrival in England.

De Gaulle and de Courcel were half an hour late arriving at the Hotel St Mandé next morning, which caused Spears to fear the General might indeed have been arrested. They had brought rather more luggage with them than the ‘two small suitcases’ of popular legend and Spears thought a trunk had been sent on to Mérignac in advance. De Gaulle took the precaution of calling at his office and, without leaving the car, made various appointments for later in the day to give the impression that he planned to remain in Bordeaux.

The aerodrome was filled with more aircraft than Spears had seen before or since: they were parked wing to wing and stretched away into the distance. Every machine capable of flying had been assembled in readiness to leave for Morocco, but none was taking off. They soon found the RAF aircraft but the congestion was such that it proved difficult to get Spears’s car close to it in order to conceal the transfer of the luggage.

The pilot, who had slept in the aircraft, went on foot to reconnoitre for space to take off, so closely were the planes parked. Then a new problem arose: the pilot insisted that de Gaulle’s luggage, some of which was heavy, should be lashed down. De Courcel was sent off at the double to find a ball of string: he was gone for some ten minutes and the wait was very trying to both Spears and de Gaulle. The boxes contained important documents and Spears gathered that there could be no question of leaving them behind to be investigated by Weygand’s people. De Courcel eventually returned with the indispensable string and quite soon the engines sputtered into life. The story goes that the plane had actually started to move before Spears, with hooked hands, hoisted de Gaulle’s considerable bulk aboard; Lacouture discounts this version as another case in which Spears projected himself as rescuer. It is hard, however, to see how anyone wearing the uniform of a French two-star general could have boarded the plane earlier or with more dignity without giving the whole game away. De Courcel, future French Ambassador to the Court of St James, had proved more nimble: he was up in a trice and no doubt helped haul his master on to the aircraft.

The plane taxied out and found space to take off. Within a few minutes they were flying north over the sea between the Ile-d’Oléron and La-Pallice. Spears had spent a pleasant sailing holiday on that coast two years before and was busy identifying remembered coves and landmarks when he beheld a terrible sight: a great ship was lying on her side sinking and hundreds of tiny figures could be seen in the water. It was the liner Champlain, which had 2,000 British troops aboard.

As they cut across the Breton peninsula, flying low, the whole countryside seemed to be on fire, for there was smoke everywhere. Spears supposed the Germans had set fire to villages but he was told later that the fires came from the destruction of British Army supply dumps: there must, he commented, have been very many of them in the abandoned Breton redoubt. De Gaulle reflected on his dying mother at Paimpont and the family he had left at Carentec.¹⁴

The plane touched down to refuel in Jersey, where Spears asked de Gaulle if he wanted anything to drink, neither of them having breakfasted. De Gaulle said he would like a cup of coffee. Spears handed him one in the canteen. De Gaulle, took a sip, and in a voice which indicated that, without implying criticism, he must nevertheless proclaim the truth, said this was tea. It was, Spears wrote, the General’s introduction to the tepid liquid that in England passed for one or the other.

As he watched de Gaulle with a sense of contrition deepening into self-reproach, Spears felt more vividly than before that there was nothing but this man’s courage to kindle into flame the tiny spark of hope he had brought with him - all that was left of the spirit of France. It was a deserved tribute, but events were to prove that the same spirit and hope were still alive in the hearts of a number of other French men and women, mostly of even more modest status than that of the most junior general of the French