The Free French on Réunion

At 8.45 a.m. on 30 November 1942 the governor of Réunion, Pierre Émile Aubert, accepted the terms of capitulation and recognised the authority of a new governor appointed by General Charles de Gaulle. The French island in the Indian Ocean, which for two and a half years had remained loyal to the government of Marshal Philippe Pétain, went over to Free France. It was taken not by the British, as Madagascar had been six months earlier, but by the French themselves: a few dozen naval fusiliers from a single ship, supported by local opponents of Vichy. The liberation of the island – as French tradition calls it – cost a handful of lives.

An island loyal to Vichy

After the defeat of France in June 1940 there was no shortage of voices on Réunion in favour of continuing the war. On 23 June the president of the general council, Raoul Nativel, condemned the armistice on the radio in Saint-Denis, and the British consul offered to cover the governor’s administrative costs if the island fought on. Aubert, governor since the beginning of 1940, consulted local notables and remained obedient to the government at Vichy. De Gaulle’s supporters were removed from their posts. Aubert himself was regarded as a moderate, but his chief of staff, Jean-Jacques Pillet, zealously introduced Pétain’s “National Revolution” programme: censorship, propaganda, a special criminal court and a pro-government militia.

Resistance was modest. On 11 November 1941 some twenty women laid flowers at the First World War memorial in Saint-Denis and were fined for it. Small communist cells were active under Léon de Lépervanche from the town of Le Port. Even Duy Tân, the former Emperor of Vietnam, who was living in exile on the island and was a keen radio amateur, established radio contact with British Mauritius; he was detained for it and his equipment confiscated.

The island had practically nothing with which to defend itself. After the armistice of June 1940 the garrison numbered fewer than three hundred men, only a few dozen of them regular soldiers, and much of the coastal artillery did not work. The British blockade cut off supplies, and the island was short of food, especially rice, the staple of the inhabitants’ diet. When the British attacked Madagascar in May 1942, Réunion lost what remained of its sea links with Africa. On 8 May, on reports of a supposed British cruiser carrying a landing force, Aubert had a ship scuttled in the harbour entrance and Saint-Denis evacuated; some 9,000 people fled into the mountains, but no attack came. In September it was decided that in the event of a landing the defence would be merely symbolic; Saint-Denis was declared an open city, and the authorities moved to the spa of Hell-Bourg in the Salazie cirque.

De Gaulle feared that after the Battle of Madagascar the British or the Americans would also take Réunion and, as on Madagascar, keep Free France out of power. He had already shown that he could act alone: at the end of 1941 his ships had taken Saint-Pierre and Miquelon, and in May 1942 Wallis and Futuna. A ship for the Réunion expedition was assigned as early as June. It was the destroyer Léopard, which in July, however, after taking part in sinking the German submarine U-136 in the Atlantic, collided with a British sloop and had to undergo repairs. The events of November hastened matters: after the Allied landings in North Africa and the German occupation of southern France, the Vichy government no longer really ruled anything outside metropolitan France, and Admiral François Darlan in Algiers became a dangerous rival to de Gaulle in the contest for the loyalty of the colonies.

The landing at Saint-Denis

Léopard, a ship of the Free French Naval Forces, sailed from Mauritius during the night of 26–27 November (according to some sources on 27 November) with a force of about 74–80 men on board. She was commanded by Lieutenant Commander Jules Évenou, who used the nom de guerre Jacques Richard. Also aboard was André Capagorry, a colonial administrator whom de Gaulle had appointed as the island’s new governor.

The ship arrived off Saint-Denis at 11 p.m. on 27 November. Boats with a few men aboard went in to find a landing place, and at about 2.30 a.m., now 28 November, as the soldiers were climbing down into the boats, the ship was spotted by observers on shore. Even so, some sixty men under Lieutenant Moreau landed and seized the governor’s palace. By morning the whole of Saint-Denis was in Free French hands. Capagorry came ashore at about six, greeted by a crowd, and appealed to the inhabitants for calm over the local radio. Pillet fled to Hell-Bourg to organise resistance.

On the morning of the same day Lépervanche’s communists took over the town hall in Le Port and removed the mayor, who was loyal to Vichy. They also tried to seize the battery of 95 mm guns that defended the harbour. Its commander, Lieutenant Émile Hugot, a committed supporter of Pétain, opened fire on Léopard. The ship stood out to sea and returned fire, killing two people. The engineer Raymond Decugis, who had tried to persuade the gunners to cease fire, was shot dead. One of the communist fighters was also killed in the fighting, and Hugot was seriously wounded. The gunners, fearing an assault by regular troops, abandoned the battery, and Léopard was able to close the shore. The number of victims is given differently in the sources, but all speak of several killed.

Aubert’s capitulation

The governor was in a difficult position. He had been preparing for a British landing, and it turned out that it was Frenchmen who had come to the island. Despite repeated requests he had received no instructions from Vichy, which after the German occupation of southern France was hardly surprising. He therefore gave up even a symbolic defence. Évenou, worried about his ship, which was exposed to attack by any submarines that might be about, wanted to speed matters up and threatened to destroy the island’s industrial plants, which only complicated the talks. In the end Aubert agreed to surrender on condition that the ultimatum was formally repeated so that he could save face, that Vichy officials and officers would be allowed to leave the island, and that he and Pillet would be recognised as prisoners of war.

The capitulation was confirmed at 8.45 a.m. on 30 November. Capagorry announced on the radio that Aubert had given up a “hopeless and fratricidal struggle”, that he had done his duty with courage and would receive military honours, and he called on the inhabitants to forget local quarrels and unite around the government of Fighting France. 30 November is usually regarded as the day on which the Free French liberated Réunion from Vichy rule. The date is correct as the day of the capitulation, but the landing itself and the only fighting took place two days earlier, on 28 November.

Aftermath

On 2 December Pillet and the garrison commander quietly went aboard Léopard to escape the anger of the inhabitants, and a day later Aubert joined them. The ship took them to Mauritius, where Aubert was placed under house arrest. After the war he was tried before the High Court of Justice and acquitted. Decugis was posthumously made a knight of the Legion of Honour and a Companion of the Order of Liberation.

Capagorry won over the inhabitants above all with rice. Léopard brought several shipments of it from Mauritius, and the governor earned the nickname “papa de riz” – “rice daddy”. From April 1943 a special court overturned the penalties and dismissals of the Vichy period, while the officials of the former administration received at most mild punishment; only Pillet was dismissed. Capagorry governed the island until 1947 as its last governor, for in 1946 Réunion became an overseas department of France.

Place in the war

Militarily, Réunion was of little importance. Politically, its move to de Gaulle’s side came at an important moment. After the landings in North Africa the Americans had come to terms with Darlan, and it looked as though it would be he, not de Gaulle, who took control of the French empire. Réunion, like Wallis and Futuna and Saint-Pierre and Miquelon before it, was proof that Free France could win territories and govern them by itself, without Allied help. Other colonies soon followed: at the end of December 1942 French Somaliland went over to Free France, and at the beginning of 1943 the British handed over authority on Madagascar to the Free French. Léopard escorted convoys in the Indian Ocean until March 1943, and at the end of May, by then in the Mediterranean, she ran aground off the coast of Cyrenaica and was lost.