Churchill in Paris

On 16 May 1940, six days after taking office as prime minister, Winston Churchill flew to Paris to see with his own eyes what was happening to his ally’s army. At the French Foreign Ministry on the Quai d’Orsay he met the prime minister, Paul Reynaud, the minister of national defence, Édouard Daladier, and the Commander-in-Chief, General Maurice Gamelin. He was told that the Germans had torn open the front across several dozen kilometres and that their armoured columns were driving deep into France. When he asked where the strategic reserve was, Gamelin answered in one word: “Aucune” – none. Outside the windows, in the ministry garden, officials were burning the archives. Churchill returned to London convinced that France might collapse within a few weeks, and that conviction shaped his conduct of British policy for the rest of May.

The departure of the Belgian government from the country “to Bordeaux” is sometimes also recorded under the same date. Hubert Pierlot’s government did indeed leave Brussels on 16 May, but it first moved to Ostend, and only over the following days did most of the ministers go on to France. The Belgians reached Bordeaux in June, together with the fleeing French government, and Prime Minister Pierlot did not get to London until October 1940.

Six days that changed the war

When the Germans attacked in the west on 10 May, the Allies did exactly what was expected of them. Under the Dyle Plan the best French armies and Lord Gort’s British Expeditionary Force moved into Belgium to stop the Germans on the line of the River Dyle. Meanwhile the main blow, delivered by seven panzer divisions, came through the Ardennes. On 13 May General Heinz Guderian’s corps forced the Meuse at Sedan, and General Erwin Rommel’s division did so at Dinant. The French Ninth Army disintegrated within two days. On the evening of 15 May German armoured cars were seen at Montcornet, some hundred kilometres behind the former front line.

On the morning of 15 May Reynaud telephoned Churchill and said in English: “We are beaten; we have lost the battle.” Churchill told him that in 1918 the Germans had also broken through, and that an offensive always ran out of steam in the end. Reynaud kept repeating himself. The British prime minister promised to come. That same day the War Cabinet in London turned down French requests for more fighter squadrons, but agreed instead to bombing raids on the Ruhr.

On the morning of 16 May Paris was gripped by what Weygand later called “the great fear”. Reports were coming in from Gamelin’s headquarters at Vincennes that the German spearheads were approaching Laon and might turn on the capital. Reynaud summoned the ministers and the presidents of both chambers to the Quai d’Orsay. The government’s departure from Paris was discussed, and the Foreign Ministry began destroying documents that must not fall into enemy hands. In the afternoon, when it became clear that the German columns were turning west, towards the Channel, rather than towards Paris, Reynaud spoke in the Chamber of Deputies, denied the rumours that the government was fleeing and gave assurances that the cabinet would remain in the capital. That same day the high command ordered the armies in Belgium to withdraw from the Dyle line in three stages, as far as the Scheldt. For the Belgians this meant giving up Brussels.

“Aucune”

Churchill took off from London at about 3 p.m. in a government de Havilland Flamingo airliner. He was accompanied by the Vice-Chief of the Imperial General Staff, General John Dill, and General Hastings Ismay, his chief of staff as Minister of Defence. After a little over an hour they landed at Le Bourget. There, officers were already telling Ismay that the Germans might be in Paris within days. After a short stop at the British embassy, Churchill drove to the Quai d’Orsay, arriving at about 5.30 p.m.

In the room into which he was shown, no one was sitting down. Reynaud, Daladier and Gamelin stood at an easel bearing a map on which a black line marked the Allied front, with a small but ominous bulge at Sedan. According to Churchill’s memoirs, Gamelin spoke for perhaps five minutes, explaining what had happened. On a stretch of fifty to sixty miles north and south of Sedan the Germans had broken through the front. The French troops in their path had been destroyed or scattered. A mass of armoured vehicles was advancing at unheard-of speed towards Amiens and Arras, probably making for the coast near Abbeville, though it might also turn on Paris. Behind it came eight or ten motorised divisions, which were covering their own flanks.

When Gamelin had finished, there was a long silence. Churchill asked: “Where is the strategic reserve?”, and then, in his poor French: “Où est la masse de manœuvre?” Gamelin shook his head, shrugged and answered: “Aucune.” After the war the general claimed that what he had said was rather “there is no longer any”, meaning that the reserves had been used up in the first days of the battle. Either way, France had no mass of divisions at hand that could be thrown against the flank of the German wedge. The Seventh Army, the best mobile reserve formation, had gone off on 10 May to the extreme left wing, as far as Breda in the Netherlands, and three armoured divisions had been smashed or scattered in the fighting in Belgium and on the Meuse.

Churchill later wrote that this was one of the greatest surprises of his life. It had not occurred to him that commanders defending five hundred miles of front could have no reserve – and the Maginot Line had, after all, been meant to economise on troops precisely so that such a reserve could be kept. He went over to the window. In the ministry garden great bonfires were blazing, and elderly officials were wheeling more bundles of files to them in barrows. The evacuation of Paris was already being prepared.

Later the conversation broke up into small groups. Churchill argued that the armies in the north should not retreat but counter-attack. Ismay, who was at his side throughout, maintained after the war that the prime minister put forward no considered military plan, but simply tried to stem the panic, repeating that the situation was bad but not hopeless. Gamelin spoke of bringing eight or nine divisions from the Maginot Line, of several divisions from Africa, and of General Henri Giraud having taken command north of the breach. When Churchill asked when and from where the general would strike at the flanks of the bulge, he was told: “Inferiority of numbers, inferiority of equipment, inferiority of method” – and once again saw that helpless shrug.

The fighters

All evening the French kept returning to one subject: air power. Gamelin asked for more RAF fighter squadrons to cover the troops and stop the tanks. Churchill replied that it was the artillery’s job to stop tanks, while the fighters were to “clean the skies” over the battlefield. In London this was the most sensitive issue of all. The head of Fighter Command, Air Chief Marshal Hugh Dowding, argued that the defence of Britain required 52 squadrons and that he now had only 36. On 16 May he sent the Air Ministry a letter warning that if the country’s home defence forces were drained away in desperate attempts to save France, defeat in France would bring with it the final and irretrievable defeat of Britain.

That morning, before he flew out, the cabinet had authorised Churchill to promise the French four more squadrons. At the embassy, after talking to Dill, the prime minister decided that more had to be risked. Ismay telephoned London to ask the cabinet to meet at once. He spoke in Hindustani so that no outsider would understand him, and at the other end an officer of the Indian Army was waiting. At about 9 p.m. Churchill sent his telegram. He wrote that the situation was “grave in the last degree”, that the next two, three or four days would decide the fate of Paris and probably of the French army, and that in his view the six fighter squadrons the French were asking for should be sent and heavy bombers thrown against the German columns crossing the Meuse. “It would not be good historically if their requests were denied and their ruin resulted,” he added.

At about 11.30 p.m. the cabinet’s answer came: yes. Churchill went with Ismay to Reynaud’s flat. The French prime minister came out of his bedroom in his dressing gown and was told that he would get ten squadrons in all. Churchill persuaded him to send for Daladier as well. Daladier, as his visitor remembered, did not say a word, but simply rose and shook his hand. Churchill got back to the embassy at about two in the morning and on the morning of 17 May flew back to London.

The promise turned out to be smaller than it sounded. French airfields lacked space, ground crews and communications, and the Air Staff did not want to keep fighters where they might be cut off. It was therefore agreed that six new squadrons of Hurricanes would fly over France from airfields in south-east England, taking turns during the day. A few days later, when the German tanks reached the Channel, the British cabinet decided that no further fighters would leave the island. The dispute over air power came back at every subsequent meeting of the two countries’ leaders until the fall of France.

Two realities

The Paris conference of 16 May was the first collision of two realities. The British, who had only ten divisions on the Continent and the sea and their own island at their backs, thought in terms of a war that could be lost on the Continent and still carried on. The French high command, according to Churchill, was already convinced that day that all was lost. The British prime minister wrote that his presence in Paris was a response to that despair, but he admitted that the French had been right in their assessment of the situation and that a rapid retreat southwards was inevitable.

That same day, a few dozen kilometres north-east of Paris, Colonel Charles de Gaulle, for the past few days commander of the hastily formed 4th Armoured Division, was preparing for battle. On the roads near Laon he saw crowds of refugees and French soldiers whom the Germans had disarmed and ordered to march south, because they had no time to take them prisoner. In his memoirs he wrote that everything he did afterwards he resolved upon that day. The next day, 17 May, he led a counter-attack on Montcornet, into the rear of Guderian’s corps. His tanks reached the little town and inflicted losses on the Germans, but without air support, artillery or infantry they had to withdraw in the evening. According to French figures, the division lost more than 20 of its roughly 85 tanks. It was one of the few moments in the campaign when the French forced the Germans to give ground, and it meant more for morale than for the course of the battle.

Significance

The visit to Paris determined how Churchill viewed France over the following weeks. Gamelin’s answer convinced him that the French high command was not in control of the battle. On 16–17 May Reynaud decided to dismiss the Commander-in-Chief and to summon General Maxime Weygand from Beirut and Marshal Philippe Pétain from the embassy in Madrid. On 18 May he took over the portfolio of national defence himself, and on 19 May Weygand replaced Gamelin. Both appointments, meant to put fresh heart into the country, opened the way for the men who in June demanded an armistice.

In London the dispute over the fighters ended in victory for Dowding. Although on the night of 16 May Churchill had secured additional squadrons for France, he soon agreed himself that the core of Fighter Command had to remain on the island. Thanks to this, in the summer of 1940 the RAF had the means to defend Britain in the Battle of Britain. The French, however, remembered this decision as proof that their ally had left them on their own. They remembered the evacuation from Dunkirk, which began ten days later, in the same way.

The Belgian government, which had left the capital on 16 May, broke with King Leopold III at the end of May, when he capitulated and decided to remain in the country. After the fall of France the ministers wavered for several months over whether to continue the fight, and only in the autumn of 1940 was a Belgian government-in-exile established in London. Charles de Gaulle was made a general after the battles of Montcornet and Abbeville, joined Reynaud’s government in June and on 18 June called on the French from London to fight on. His road to that decision began, as he himself maintained, on the crowded roads near Laon on the same day that Churchill heard the word “Aucune” in Paris.