The Free French on Saint-Pierre and Miquelon

Before dawn on Christmas Eve 1941, three corvettes and a submarine flying the flag with the Cross of Lorraine entered the harbour of Saint-Pierre, capital of the French archipelago of Saint-Pierre and Miquelon off the south coast of Newfoundland. Several hundred armed Free French sailors went ashore. They seized the administrator’s office, the post office, the telegraph office and the radio station, disarmed the handful of gendarmes and arrested the administrator, who was loyal to Vichy. According to participants’ accounts the whole thing took twenty to thirty minutes and not a single shot was fired. The expedition was led by Vice Admiral Émile Muselier, commander of the Free French Naval Forces, acting on the orders of General Charles de Gaulle but against the wishes of the United States and Canada.

It is usually written that the Free French “liberated” the islands from Vichy rule. Most of the inhabitants did indeed greet the sailors with cheers for de Gaulle, and the next day they declared for Free France in a vote. Yet this bloodless operation on a few rocks in the Atlantic provoked one of the sharpest crises in de Gaulle’s relations with Washington.

Islands with a radio station

Saint-Pierre and Miquelon were the last remnant of old New France in North America. Their few thousand inhabitants lived by cod fishing on the Grand Banks of Newfoundland. After the fall of France in June 1940 the administrator, Gilbert de Bournat, swore allegiance to Marshal Philippe Pétain, although sympathy for de Gaulle was strong on the islands, especially among veterans of the First World War. Bournat answered to Admiral Georges Robert, Vichy’s High Commissioner in Martinique. Cut off from France, the islands lived on aid paid for out of French funds frozen in Canada and the United States.

What worried Canada above all was the powerful radio station on Saint-Pierre and the transatlantic cable. U-boats were appearing ever more often around Newfoundland, and the Canadians feared that the station might pass the Germans information about convoys leaving Halifax and St. John’s. On 29 October 1941 the Canadian War Cabinet decided to send four civilian radio operators to the islands by corvette to monitor all messages. If Bournat refused, a party from the ship was to land and dismantle the transmitters. Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King, however, decided first to seek the views of London and Washington. The British preferred the islands to be taken over by the Free French, since that would not change their sovereignty. The Americans agreed to the dispatch of technicians but firmly opposed the use of force. They stood by the Act of Havana of 1940, under which the status of European possessions in the Americas could not be changed, and at the same time they were negotiating a new agreement with Admiral Robert on the neutralisation of the French Antilles and the Vichy warships lying there. Mackenzie King postponed the operation, and after 7 December, with Canadian soldiers fighting in Hong Kong, the question of the islands slipped down Ottawa’s agenda.

De Gaulle’s order

De Gaulle held that foreigners could not decide the fate of French territory. Muselier arrived in Halifax (PL) in mid-December, officially to inspect the Free French warships escorting convoys from Newfoundland: the Flower-class corvettes Mimosa, Aconit and Alysse, lent by the British, and the large submarine Surcouf. He was also to prepare the operation against the islands. Despite instructions to keep it secret, on 15 December he presented the plan in Ottawa to representatives of Canada, Britain and the United States. The American minister in Canada, Pierrepont Moffat, declared that his government was opposed. On 17 December Admiral Robert signed an agreement with the American Rear Admiral Frederick Horne on maintaining the status quo in the French Antilles. Muselier assured the Americans that he was abandoning the operation.

De Gaulle thought otherwise. He learned from the British that the Canadians, with Washington’s consent, intended to neutralise the radio station themselves, and on 17 December, and again on 18 December, he ordered Muselier to act. “We know from a reliable source that the Canadians intend to destroy the radio station at Saint-Pierre themselves,” he wrote. “In these circumstances I order you to carry out the rallying of Saint-Pierre and Miquelon by your own means and without saying anything to the foreigners. I take full responsibility for this operation.” Muselier, though reluctantly, obeyed. On 23 December the ships left Halifax, officially on their way back to St. John’s; at sea they changed course and on the morning of 24 December lay off Saint-Pierre. On board was Ira Wolfert, a reporter for the New York Times, thanks to whom America learned of everything at first hand.

The plebiscite

Sources put the number of sailors who went ashore at anywhere from about 230 to more than 350. Bournat and his wife were taken under guard aboard the corvette Aconit, and in the town hall Muselier read a proclamation announcing that the inhabitants would choose in a free vote between Free France and “collaboration with the Axis powers, which are starving, humiliating and torturing our homeland”. He appointed his aide-de-camp, the 23-year-old naval officer Alain Savary, as administrator of the islands.

The vote took place on 25 December. As in France at the time, only men had the right to vote, but from the age of 18. The ballot papers offered only two options: “rallying to Free France” or “collaboration with the Axis powers”. According to press reports of the time, in Saint-Pierre 650 people voted for Free France and 10 for collaboration with the Axis, while about a hundred ballots were declared invalid. On the smaller islands voting took place over the following days, on Miquelon with a large number of spoilt ballots. The Free French announced that about 98 per cent of valid votes had been cast in their favour. The question was framed so that the result surprised no one, and the islands’ Apostolic Prefect, Father Poisson, publicly refused to recognise the new authorities, calling them an occupation.

Hull’s anger

The news reached Washington while Winston Churchill was there, having arrived two days earlier for a conference with President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Secretary of State Cordell Hull saw the operation as a blow to his policy towards Vichy, the aim of which was to keep Pétain from handing the fleet and the bases in Africa over to the Germans. On 25 December the State Department announced: “Our preliminary reports show that the action taken by three so-called Free French ships at St. Pierre-Miquelon was an arbitrary action contrary to the agreement of all parties concerned and certainly without the prior knowledge or consent in any sense of the United States Government.” Washington also asked the Canadian government what steps it intended to take to restore the status quo on the islands.

The Canadians replied that they were not responsible for Muselier’s actions. The Vichy government expressed satisfaction with the American attitude and demanded the restoration of its authority, and in Washington and London there were fears that Admiral Robert would send a cruiser from Martinique. The American press, however, sided almost unanimously with the Free French. The phrase “so-called Free French” was ridiculed, with papers writing of the “so-called State Department”. In a country that for two weeks had heard nothing but bad news from the Pacific, the story of sailors who on Christmas Day, without firing a shot, had given Frenchmen a free choice was one of the few good ones. On 13 January 1942 Hull explained to journalists that the words “so-called” had referred to the ships, not to the Free French themselves.

In conversations with Roosevelt and Mackenzie King, Churchill admitted that he had earlier agreed to such an operation, but now criticised de Gaulle for acting in secret and against the Americans. In public he behaved differently. On 30 December, in a speech to the Canadian Parliament in Ottawa, he praised the Frenchmen who under de Gaulle’s leadership had refused to “bow the knee”, which irritated Hull still further.

A compromise never announced

For several weeks a way out was sought. Roosevelt proposed that the islands be neutralised and placed under joint American, British and Canadian supervision, with the radio station under Allied control. Muselier declared in conversations with journalists that “no power on earth” would remove him from the islands alive, and remarked ironically that if the opponents of Vichy had to be evacuated, the Americans should send the Normandie for them, since no smaller ship would hold them all. On 14 January 1942 the Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden, asked de Gaulle what he would do if American warships arrived. According to the general’s memoirs, he replied that they would stop at the limit of territorial waters, and that if they crossed it the Free French would have to open fire. Roosevelt had no intention of sending warships against an ally. On 22 January Churchill and de Gaulle agreed that the Free French would remain on the islands, that power would pass to a consultative council of inhabitants, that the Allies would be given oversight of the radio station’s work, and that the ships would return to convoy escort duty. The promised joint communiqué was never issued. On 2 February Hull suggested to the President that the matter be shelved until the end of the war. The islands remained with Free France.

Place in the war

For Muselier, success marked the beginning of the end of his career in de Gaulle’s movement. As early as September 1941 he had clashed sharply with the general over the leadership of the movement, and an operation carried out in breach of the word given to the Americans deepened their mutual distrust. After returning to London in March 1942 he resigned from the French National Committee and lost command of the naval forces. On Saint-Pierre and Miquelon hundreds of volunteers joined the Free French forces. According to local tallies, several hundred men served in the army and navy, and several dozen women in the navy’s women’s volunteer corps. After the war Savary became the islands’ first deputy in the French parliament. De Gaulle visited the archipelago as president in 1967.

The Christmas Eve raid had consequences larger than the islands themselves. Roosevelt, who had already suspected de Gaulle of dictatorial ambitions, came to regard him as a man who did not keep his word and disregarded his allies. Hull remained one of his most implacable opponents to the end. The United States kept an embassy in Vichy until November 1942 and, when preparing the landings in North Africa, backed General Henri Giraud and kept de Gaulle away from the plans. A few weeks after Lend-Lease aid was extended to the Free French, the Saint-Pierre and Miquelon affair showed how fragile Washington’s understanding with de Gaulle was. The general, for his part, learned that he could gain from faits accomplis, and more than once he would again present his allies with them. The distrust between him and Roosevelt, of which these December days became an important source, weighed on France’s relations with the United States until the President’s death in 1945.