It can never be overstated how close Europe actually came to negotiating peace in May 1940, during the so-called ‘War Cabinet Crisis’, recently covered by the movie Darkest Hour.
What course might history have taken had Chamberlain been replaced Lord Halifax instead of the discredited Churchill, who had been “lobbying” very heavily with the other side of the House? The none-too-loyal Churchill had twice treacherously crossed the floor of Parliament, in 1904 and 1924. If a peace treaty had been ironed out, there could simply never have been a second world war with over 60 million dead. It was not inevitable.
When Germany first struck at the allied forces on May 10, 1940, Italy was still neutral, as were the US and Japan. The Italian ambassador in London immediately contacted Lord Halifax informing him that Italy would intercede to broker a peace settlement in Europe agreeable to both sides, in exchange for Britain not interfering with its African colonies, or hemming in its maritime through its control of the mouths of the Mediterranean in Gibraltar and Suez.
Italy sought a broader balance of power in Europe and did not relish the thought of either Britain or Germany becoming too dominant. It also wanted to hang on to the Austrian South Tyrol, which had been renamed Alto Adige, and which the Allies had agreed would be annexed by Italy in 1918.
British historian Robert Crowcroft wrote that on May 25, 1940, just before the evacuation at Dunkirk, Churchill had informed colleagues that if the British Army were allowed to evacuate, and Germany did not use France as a spring board to attack Britain, he would “accept” a peace offer. Not consider, but “accept”.
After accompanying the French forces for eight months during the “phoney war”, the war started on the May 10, the same day Churchill succeeded Chamberlain as prime minister. His first major decision was to immediately abandon the French and the Belgians, pull out of Europe and flee the continent after just a few days of combat, long before France had fallen.
In one of the most secret and explosive documents of the entire war, Churchill telegrammed Lord Gort, “you are to advance (strange word to use for retreat) to the beaches. You are not to inform the French or the Belgians what you are doing”. So much for ‘fighting on the beaches’ alongside your allies. This telegram of retreat and deceit has ‘vanished’ from the British archives, but a copy of it was unearthed in French Prime Minister Paul Reynaud’s archives in Paris. It took nine whole days to evacuate the British Army, leaving France and Belgium in the lurch.
The British call Dunkirk a show of gallantry and a miracle, not a German response to their request to allow their army to abandon their allies and retreat back home after just two weeks of fighting, in exchange for peace. So are we to believe that the German army that subsequently defeated France and the Benelux countries in six weeks through June was incapable of knocking out the British army stranded at Dunkirk for nine whole days with its back to the sea, or of destroying the flotilla of private boats sent out to “bring the boys home”? Yeah, sure, go tell that to the marines! The panzer generals had been chasing the retreating British forces like blood hounds before they were ordered to halt for at least two days.
While the British had the audacity to question French courage in the spring of 1940, it was the British Forces that had on Churchill’s instructions actually fled the battlefield at the very outbreak of hostilities, having lost 4,206 soldiers. The French went on to lose over 100,000 men in their six-week battle up to the armistice of June 22. Would France have even fallen had the British stayed, regrouped and counter attacked, like the Prussians under Marshall Blucher had done to save Wellington at Waterloo? We will never know.
Some 40,000 other French troops who had been holding off the German assault on Dunkirk while the British were fleeing, were taken prisoner. While British propaganda lauded Dunkirk as a victorious evacuation, the French people saw it as a British betrayal. Most of the British losses in those fateful opening days of hostilities in fact did not even take place in direct combat with the Germans, but during the actual retreat at Dunkirk.
Records confirm that on the evening of May 24, Hitler ordered Field Marshall Von Rundstedt to halt his advance on Dunkirk, when they were just 15 kilometres away. The flotilla of hundreds of private boats crossing the channel to stage the evacuation could have easily been destroyed by the German Luftwaffe, which instead busied itself dropping leaflets on the British soldiers telling them that they were surrounded and to put down their arms.
The British call Dunkirk a show of gallantry and a miracle, not a German response to their request to allow their army to abandon their allies and retreat back home in exchange for peace
Once the British Army was safely ensconced back home, with its tail between its legs, like pharaoh of old in the Exodus, Churchill’s heart hardened, and Halifax’s negotiations for peace were suddenly broken off on Churchill’s insistence. The betrayal hit not just France and the Benelux countries, but the entire cause of peace in Europe. Italy, that had been an ally of Britain and France in WWI, seeing the volte face after Germany had spared the British Army, heard Churchill’s fiery speech on fighting on the beaches, and having got no positive response from Britain on its colonies and maritime mobility, entered the war on Germany’s side just two weeks later, when it might well have stayed out, or actually brokered a peace deal. Many Italians were bewildered, having fought on the British and French side against the Austrians in the trenches 22 years earlier.
Having just abandoned the French and Belgians at Dunkirk, and misleading the Germans with fake promises of peace to buy time for a retreat, on July 3, Churchill committed a second act of treachery against France when he ordered the destruction of its fleet in Algeria. He insisted on this despite Germany having granted France the right to retain its fleet in the armistice agreement; despite assurances by the head of the French Navy Admiral Darlan to Churchill that he would never surrender his fleet to Germany if it tried to take it; and despite his fleet commander showing the British fleet written instructions from the admiral to set sail for the United States if Germany attempted to break the agreement and demand possession of it.
The British attacked anyway, and sunk three French battleships. Only one battleship and five destroyers managed to escape Churchill’s wrath. With friends like these, who needs enemies?
In WWI, Kaiser Wilhelm II had been convinced that Britain had wanted to go to war for the first time against Germany, its traditional ally, because it did not want it to have a fleet competing on the high seas. Twenty years later, regardless of whether peace might have been negotiated with Germany, France was suddenly left with a smashed fleet of its own, destroyed not by the Germans, but by its own ‘ally’ that had abandoned them across the channel.
In his diaries, Harry Butcher, General Eisenhower’s aide-de-champ reveals how the British Governor of Gibraltar Mason-Macfarlane had offered to dispose of French General Giraud in a little airplane accident, stating that “we have a good body disposal squad if needed”. Yet more treachery against the French.
General De Gaul, leading France’s Resistance, and who had himself narrowly escaped death when his British Liberator plane was sabotaged, had written: “Never did the Anglo Saxons really treat us as real allies… they sought to use the French forces for their own goals, as if these forces belonged to them.”
These facts explain the animosity between the British and the French, whose feelings that the British were playing a double game and betraying their allies is supported by unearthed documents and credible eye witness accounts.
Who was it in Mission Impossible who said: “There are no allies in statecraft, only common interests”?
Obviously in WWII, the so-called allies often had very different interests, where rivalry reigned supreme.
Rodolfo Ragonesi is a lawyer and researcher in international affairs.