Operation Anton

At seven in the morning on 11 November 1942, German armoured and motorised columns crossed the demarcation line that since June 1940 had divided France into the occupied zone and the so-called free zone governed from Vichy. The same day the Italian 4th Army entered France from the east, and on the night of 11–12 November the Italians landed on Corsica. By evening German tanks had reached the Mediterranean. Operation Anton lasted, in effect, a single day and met no resistance. Its consequences, however, were immense: the last part of France free of foreign troops ceased to exist, and the state of Marshal Philippe Pétain lost what remained of its independence.

Some chronologies place the event under 10 November and say that the Germans “invaded Vichy France”, breaking the 1940 armistice, in response to Admiral François Darlan having “signed an armistice with the Allies”. The dates need correcting: preparations were completed and orders issued on the evening of 10 November, but the troops moved off the following morning. The cause, too, was broader than Darlan’s step alone. A plan to occupy the whole of France had lain in German staff drawers for two years, and what decided its execution was the Allied landing in North Africa on 8 November.

A plan two years old

The Armistice of Compiègne of 22 June 1940 had left the French about two-fifths of their country, including Lyon, Marseille and the naval base at Toulon, together with the colonies, the fleet and a small army. For Adolf Hitler this was not an act of mercy but a calculation. As long as there was a French government that officials and officers regarded as legitimate, the fleet and the colonial empire would not go over to Britain, and Germany would not have to occupy the whole country. The government installed in the spa town of Vichy kept this balance and collaborated with the Reich, hoping for milder peace terms.

Yet Hitler never fully trusted the French. As early as 10 December 1940, in Directive No. 19, he ordered the preparation of Plan Attila in case Vichy tried to change sides: a rapid occupation of the unoccupied zone and the seizure of the fleet. The plan was later expanded to include the Italians and renamed Anton. The Italians prepared their own operation to occupy Corsica.

The American and British landings in Morocco and Algeria (Operation Torch) brought this whole construction down. Hitler needed Vichy France as the guardian of its own colonies, and within three days that guardian had proved powerless. Worse still, as Berlin saw it, the southern coast of France now lay open to the next Allied landing, and with it the entire southern flank of the Reich was under threat.

Laval in Munich

On 8 November, the day of the Allied landings, Hitler was in Munich addressing his old party comrades on the anniversary of the 1923 putsch. The next day he summoned the head of the Vichy government, Pierre Laval, who arrived there by car on 10 November. He found the Reich Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop already there, along with the Italian Foreign Minister Galeazzo Ciano, son-in-law of Benito Mussolini. The Germans demanded that France openly enter the war against the Allies and give the Axis powers free access to the ports and airfields of Tunisia, above all Bizerte. Laval prevaricated: he professed good will but argued that he could not take such a decision without the Marshal and without the consent of the French people.

The conversation no longer mattered much. The news that Darlan had ordered a ceasefire in Algiers convinced Hitler that Vichy could not hold on to its empire. On the evening of 10 November the final decision was taken and the orders went out to the troops. Laval learned of the German entry into the free zone only in the early hours of 11 November, from Ribbentrop, when it was too late to change anything.

A day’s march

The operation was commanded by the Commander-in-Chief West, Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt. General Johannes Blaskowitz’s German 1st Army set off from the Atlantic coast along the Spanish border towards the Pyrenees and the Mediterranean, while a second group advanced from central France through Lyon on Vichy, Marseille and Toulon. Armoured and motorised divisions that had been resting and refitting in France after the fighting in the east also took part. On the evening of 11 November German units reached the Mediterranean coast, and on 12 November they entered Marseille.

General Mario Vercellino’s Italian 4th Army crossed the border in the Alps and on the Riviera and occupied the area east of the Rhône, including Nice, Menton and Grenoble. On the night of 11–12 November Italian warships put troops ashore at Bastia, and then at Ajaccio and Porto-Vecchio; the island was taken without a fight by the 20th Infantry Division “Friuli”, later reinforced by further units. For Fascist Italy, which had for years laid claim to Nice and Corsica, this was a substitute for the spoils it had promised itself in 1940.

The Vichy army, the so-called Armistice Army of some 100,000 men, offered no resistance. Its commanders obeyed the order of the war minister, General Eugène Bridoux, to remain in barracks. Only one general on active service broke ranks: Jean de Lattre de Tassigny, commander of the military district of Montpellier, who tried to lead his troops into the mountains to make a stand there. Nobody followed him, and the general himself was arrested by the French authorities and later sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment; in September 1943 he escaped from prison in Riom and made his way to London.

The Marshal’s protest

Early on 11 November the German representative in Vichy delivered a letter from Hitler to Pétain. The Reich Chancellor explained that German and Italian troops were entering only to defend the coasts of France against an expected Anglo-Saxon landing, that they were not acting against the Marshal or his government, and that they would leave the country once the danger had passed. In reality this was the open liquidation of the 1940 settlement, and Berlin said as much: it was the French, it claimed, who had broken the armistice first, by failing to defend Africa with sufficient determination.

Pétain replied by radio. He announced that he had received the Führer’s letter during the night and solemnly protested against decisions incompatible with the terms of the armistice. There it ended. The Marshal did not fly to Africa, although some of those around him, among them General Maxime Weygand, urged him to; he judged that his place was with the French people and that leaving would put the country at the mercy of the Germans. On 12 November Weygand was detained by the Germans and taken to the Reich, where he remained until the end of the war. The Germans nonetheless took care to preserve the appearance that the Vichy government still exercised authority over the whole country, because they needed its administration and police.

The irony of the date was not lost on the French. 11 November was the anniversary of the armistice that ended the First World War, a celebration of victory over Germany. In several towns of the southern zone the commemorations turned into demonstrations against the occupiers.

Toulon and the end of the Armistice Army

There was one place the Germans spared for the time being: Toulon, the main base of the French fleet, where the battleships Strasbourg, Dunkerque and Provence, several cruisers and dozens of smaller vessels lay at anchor. The commander of the High Seas Fleet, Admiral Jean de Laborde, and the maritime prefect, Admiral André Marquis, undertook to defend the port against the Allies and against anyone else who tried to seize the ships, and Hitler agreed to leave the fortress to the French. De Laborde rejected Darlan’s calls for the fleet to sail to North Africa.

The promise lasted two weeks. On the night of 26–27 November the Germans began an operation to seize Toulon and the fleet, and the French crews scuttled their ships. The same day the Germans disarmed and disbanded the Armistice Army. All that remained of Vichy’s military were small guard detachments.

Place in the war

Operation Anton closed the chapter that had opened in June 1940. The fiction of a “free” France, on which Pétain had built his policy since the meeting at Montoire, ceased to exist: the Vichy government carried on, issuing laws and persecuting its opponents, but ever more plainly as an instrument of the occupier. The free zone was renamed the southern zone, and the German Security Police began operating there too, where round-ups of Jews – including the mass arrests of foreign Jews in August 1942 – had until then been carried out by the Vichy administration itself. Mounting German demands, above all for forced labour in the Reich, drove thousands of young Frenchmen into the Resistance and the guerrilla bands in the mountains.

Militarily Hitler gained direct control of the whole Mediterranean coast of France, but lost what mattered to him most. The colonial empire in North and West Africa went over to the Allies, and the fleet at Toulon, instead of falling into Axis hands, went to the bottom on 27 November. At the same time as they occupied the free zone, the Germans began moving troops and aircraft to Tunisia to stop the Allies advancing from Algeria; so began the Tunisian campaign, which ended in May 1943 with the capture of some quarter of a million Axis soldiers. The Italian occupation zone survived until Italy’s capitulation in September 1943, after which the Germans took it over; Corsica was then liberated by French troops from Algiers together with the Corsican Resistance, with the help of some Italian forces. The occupation of the whole of France lasted until the Allied landings in Normandy and Provence in the summer of 1944.