The Free French take over Cameroon

Before dawn on 27 August 1940 dugout canoes carrying some twenty men drew up at the quayside in Douala, the largest port of French Cameroon. They were led by a man who introduced himself as Colonel Leclerc, an envoy of General Charles de Gaulle. His real name was Philippe de Hauteclocque, and a month earlier he had still been a captain. By about seven in the morning Leclerc was installed in the government building in Douala, and Cameroon announced that it was re-entering the war at Britain’s side. Not a single shot was fired. Over the next few days Yaoundé, the capital of the territory, went over to Free France, and at the same time so did Chad, Middle Congo and Ubangi-Shari. The French called these days the “Three Glorious Days” (Trois Glorieuses), after the July Revolution of 1830.

Many accounts say that the Free French “captured” Douala and soon afterwards “captured” the whole colony. The word is stronger than what actually happened. There was no fighting in Cameroon. It was a coup prepared over several weeks by local supporters of de Gaulle, in which Leclerc’s men gave the signal and lent the enterprise authority. The troops and officials for the most part accepted the change without resistance, and the last representative of Vichy in Yaoundé handed over power on the evening of 28 August.

A mandate without a master

Cameroon was no ordinary colony. Until the First World War it had been the German colony of Kamerun, and after the Treaty of Versailles the greater part of it, as French Cameroon, passed to France as a League of Nations mandate. A smaller strip in the west, along the border with Nigeria, became British Cameroons. The French territory was governed from Yaoundé by a high commissioner. It was not part of French Equatorial Africa (AEF), the federation of four colonies – Gabon, Middle Congo, Ubangi-Shari and Chad – with a governor-general in Brazzaville.

For the French in Cameroon the defeat of France had a particular dimension. In the 1930s the Third Reich had loudly demanded the return of its former colonies, and Cameroon was near the top of the list. The planters, merchants and loggers of Douala feared that the armistice with Germany would end in the return of a German administration. The economy mattered too. Cocoa, coffee, timber and palm oil went largely through British ports and to British markets. After the armistice of 22 June, once the Royal Navy began blockading ports under Vichy’s control, and especially after the attack on the French fleet at Mers-el-Kébir, trade came to a standstill. Neighbouring Nigeria was British, so in Douala the choice between London and Vichy was also a choice between exports and ruin.

The hesitations of the summer of 1940

After General de Gaulle’s appeal of 18 June the colony was in ferment. On 20 June the High Commissioner, Richard Brunot, called a meeting at which he declared that Cameroon would fight on, and he was backed by the commander of the troops, Lieutenant Colonel Bureau. Over time the enthusiasm cooled. The government of Marshal Philippe Pétain moved to Vichy and was granted full powers on 10 July, and Vichy’s emissaries toured Africa reminding officials and officers of their duty of obedience. The governors of North Africa and French West Africa sided with Pétain. Brunot could not bring himself to make the break, and Vichy, which did not trust him, recalled him on 15 August.

Meanwhile less cautious men were at work. In Yaoundé and Douala a network of de Gaulle’s supporters took shape, put by its members at some three hundred Europeans. On 15 August several dozen of them met in Yaoundé and agreed to act on 26–27 August, when de Gaulle’s envoy arrived. Some slipped across into Nigeria to settle the details with the British. The British colonial authorities at first looked askance at these border crossings, since London was still hoping for an understanding with the governors rather than for coups. In the end they quietly let them be.

Leclerc’s mission

De Gaulle needed territory. The British had recognised him on 28 June as leader of the Free French, and on 7 August he signed an agreement with Churchill on the status and financing of his forces. Yet he still did not govern a single square metre of French soil, and on 2 August Vichy had sentenced him to death in absentia. Land in Africa would give him what he lacked: territory of his own, men for his army, revenue, and an argument to put to the Allies that Free France was more than a group of émigrés in London.

On 6 August a small mission left Britain in a Sunderland flying boat: René Pleven, one of de Gaulle’s first civilian associates, Captain Claude Hettier de Boislambert, Captain André Parant and Captain de Hauteclocque, who had just adopted the name Leclerc and had been promoted by de Gaulle to major (chef d’escadrons) on 31 July. After a few days the mission reached Lagos in British Nigeria. At the same time Colonel Edgard de Larminat, who in June had refused to recognise the armistice in the Levant, was preparing a coup in Brazzaville from Belgian Léopoldville, on the opposite bank of the Congo River. The division of tasks was clear: Pleven and Colonel Jean Colonna d’Ornano were to fly to Chad, while Leclerc and Boislambert were to take over Cameroon.

In Lagos Leclerc concluded that a major was too junior to deal with the high commissioner and with the lieutenant colonel commanding the troops. He promoted himself to colonel and Boislambert to major. De Gaulle confirmed these self-awarded promotions only later, writing ironically that Leclerc had become a colonel “as if by magic”.

The night of 26/27 August

On the afternoon of 26 August Leclerc’s party set off by canoe for Douala from near Victoria and Tiko in British Cameroons. The number of men varies from account to account: from seventeen volunteers to twenty-two, not counting the commander himself and Boislambert. The journey across the bay and up the estuary of the Wouri River, in rain and darkness, took many hours. They reached the shore between three and five in the morning.

In Douala the conspirators were waiting for them. The most important of them turned out to be Captain Louis Dio, an officer of the camel units from Chad. Since June he had been stationed in Douala with a detachment of Senegalese tirailleurs from Chad, which was to have sailed to France as reinforcements, but the armistice had caught it still in port. Dio at once placed his soldiers under Leclerc’s orders and was the first army officer in Cameroon to join him. At dawn Dio’s men and local volunteers occupied the railway station, the post office and the most important buildings. Vichy’s representative, an inspector sent to Douala, was detained at the station. The director of public works helped by placing almost all his staff at their disposal. At about seven in the morning Leclerc took up his post in the town’s government building and proclaimed Cameroon’s adherence to Free France. The commander of the Douala garrison remained neutral.

The hardest conversation was with Lieutenant Colonel Bureau, who arrived by train from Yaoundé on the night of 27/28 August, summoned by a letter from Leclerc. According to one account, Leclerc greeted him with the words: “Colonel, it is you who should have brought Cameroon over.” In the end Bureau did not object.

Yaoundé

The capital lay more than 200 kilometres inland, linked to Douala by railway. On the afternoon of 28 August a detachment of about forty men set out for it by train, among them Lieutenant Raymond Dronne, who in 1944 would command the first of Leclerc’s vehicles to enter Paris. In Yaoundé the situation was more tense. Some officers pressed Brunot to resist, and one company occupied the buildings of the military camp. Brunot, however, refused to issue ammunition and forbade the use of arms. The company gave way after brief negotiations, the second camp was occupied without incident, and the mayor of the town and the secretary-general of the administration were removed. Brunot handed over power with the words “Make way for the young!” In the evening a telephone call went through to Leclerc: “Operation completed.”

Leclerc himself arrived in Yaoundé on 29 or 30 August (accounts give different dates) and was welcomed enthusiastically. He took the title of Commissioner-General of Cameroon, combining civil and military authority. When de Gaulle received the news, he cabled: “Cameroon has taken a fine decision and set a splendid example. The whole Empire will follow it.”

Three glorious days

Cameroon was not the first. A day earlier, on 26 August, in the town hall at Fort-Lamy (today N’Djamena), the Governor of Chad, Félix Éboué, and the commander of the troops, Lieutenant Colonel Pierre Marchand, proclaimed the colony’s adherence to de Gaulle in the presence of Pleven and Colonna d’Ornano. Éboué, born in French Guiana and the first black governor of a French colony, had written to de Gaulle as early as 3 July. Chad was the most important strategically, because it bordered Italian Libya and lay on the air route by which the British ferried aircraft from the Gulf of Guinea to Egypt.

On 28 August it was the turn of Brazzaville, the capital of the AEF. The Governor-General, Pierre Boisson, had left for Dakar in July as Vichy’s High Commissioner for Africa, and his deputy, General Louis Husson, remained loyal to Pétain. At noon the army doctor General Adolphe Sicé and Major Delange carried out a bloodless coup: Husson and his staff were arrested. In the afternoon Larminat crossed the river from Léopoldville and took power as the representative of de Gaulle, who had promoted him to brigadier general the day before. Larminat became head of the administration of Free French Africa. On 29 August (according to some sources a day later) the Governor of Ubangi-Shari, Pierre de Saint-Mart, joined de Gaulle after a brief dispute with a pro-Vichy officer in Bangui.

Only Gabon broke ranks. On the night of 28/29 August Governor Georges Masson announced that the colony was joining Free France, but he backed down under pressure from some of the French residents of Libreville, the navy and the influential Bishop Louis Tardy. De Gaulle’s supporters were arrested or deported to Dakar.

Aftermath

September brought Free France a setback. On 23–25 September the Anglo-French expedition against Dakar (Operation Menace) was repulsed by the fire of Vichy’s batteries and warships, and the success in Equatorial Africa was not repeated in West Africa. Boislambert, sent there to prepare a coup, ended up in a Vichy prison. Cameroon, however, became a base. On 8 October de Gaulle came to Douala, and on 27 October in Brazzaville he issued a manifesto challenging the legality of the Vichy regime and set up the Empire Defence Council, the first governing body of Free France. Columns set out from Cameroon and Middle Congo which, in the Battle of Gabon between 27 October and 12 November, took control of the last colony of the AEF. Libreville capitulated on 10 November, and Masson committed suicide. On 12 November Éboué became Governor-General of the AEF, and on 16 November de Gaulle instituted the Order of Liberation in Brazzaville.

Leclerc did not stay long in Cameroon. At the turn of 1940 and 1941 he took command of the troops in Chad, and on 1 March 1941 his small column captured the Italian fort at the oasis of Kufra in south-eastern Libya. There he swore an oath that his soldiers would not lay down their arms until the French flag flew over the cathedral in Strasbourg. From these men, and from the tirailleurs of Chad and Cameroon, grew the later 2nd Armoured Division.

Place in the war

The adherence of Cameroon and the AEF changed de Gaulle’s position more than any other event of the summer of 1940 apart from the appeal itself. Free France acquired a territory several times the size of France, its own administration, export revenues, the port of Douala and a capital at Brazzaville, which remained its capital until 1943. It could recruit soldiers: from Equatorial Africa and Cameroon came the marching battalions that fought in Eritrea, Syria, at Bir Hakeim and in Tunisia. For the British, Chad mattered too: through Fort-Lamy ran the air route from Takoradi and Lagos to Khartoum and Cairo, by which thousands of fighters and bombers reached the army fighting the Italians and Germans in North Africa.

For Vichy it was a blow to the principle on which Pétain’s state rested: that the empire would remain intact and loyal. The Vichy government responded with sentences. Leclerc was stripped of his citizenship in June 1941 and in October sentenced to death in absentia, as de Gaulle and Larminat had been before him. The rift in the empire did not end in August. Frenchmen fired on Frenchmen at Dakar, in Gabon and, in 1941, in Syria and Lebanon.

After the war Cameroon remained under French administration as a United Nations trust territory. It gained independence on 1 January 1960, after years of bloody insurrection led by the Union of the Peoples of Cameroon. On 27 August 1940 the Cameroonians were not asked their opinion at all: the decision was taken by French officials, officers and merchants. Yet it was soldiers from Cameroon and Chad, not from France, who formed the core of the first Free French units.