Churchill and De Gaulle

"The relationship between Churchill and de Gaulle began just before the fall of France, when Churchill went over on two trips to see the French government, trying to get France to stay in the war. Then on 17 June 1940, de Gaulle flew to London and went to see Churchill in the garden at Downing Street. Churchill said: ‘Welcome to London. I will give you the facilities of the BBC.’ And the next day, on 18 June, de Gaulle made his famous call for the French to resist. It was really the first big statement against surrender to the Germans, and one interesting element, which is not often told, is that the British actually tried to veto the speech. They still wanted to try to reach an understanding with the government in France. But eventually de Gaulle got his way and went ahead and did it. Kersaudy charts the relationship thereafter between Churchill and de Gaulle which was one of the more extraordinary relationships ever between any wartime leaders, then or since. Churchill identified de Gaulle as the man who would represent France – although the British went on for some time trying to find other people. Because he was just a little-known Brigadier-General, a junior minister. De Gaulle depended on Churchill’s help because he had nothing when he came to London. So there’s a mutual respect between them. But they were two very strong-willed people, so they kept having the most tumultuous rows all through the war, and Kersaudy charts that. It’s a very well-based book in terms of the documentation and the evidence. I n a very serious historical way it recounts the often volcanic relationship between the two men. At one point Harold Nicholson says to Churchill: ‘De Gaulle is a great man,’ and Churchill replies: ‘No he’s not, he’s impossible, he’s unbearable,’ and goes on and on denouncing de Gaulle. But then, at the end, he says: ‘Hmm, you’re right – he is a great man.’ When they had had one of their biggest rows – at the Casablanca conference – Churchill watched de Gaulle leaving his villa and said: ‘There he is, the representative of a defeated nation. But he acts as if he had as many armies as Stalin, the last of a great warrior race.’ So Churchill had this kind of human admiration for de Gaulle. De Gaulle, throughout the war, stood up for French interests, and that often got him on the wrong side of Churchill. In part it was also because Roosevelt disliked de Gaulle a great deal. He thought de Gaulle was a kind of crypto-fascist dictator. He put pressure on Churchill to drop de Gaulle and Churchill sometimes gave way to this, because he wanted to keep in Roosevelt’s good books. So it was always a testy relationship, but in the end a very important one. Because in June 1940 he made these two trips to France, once to a place near Orléans and once to Tours. The French government had left Paris and was fleeing down to the south of France as the Germans advanced. The Prime Minister Reynaud wanted to go on fighting, but an increasing number of his government didn’t, and he was struggling to hold things together. In the circumstances, it was de Gaulle, who was his defence minister and his deputy, who was the one person who said, ‘We must go on fighting, we must not surrender. If we are defeated in France we must go to North Africa or wherever and keep going.’ There is this line in Churchill’s memoirs about the second of these meetings in Tours. De Gaulle hadn’t been invited but he heard about it, and hurried and got there. As they passed, Churchill said of de Gaulle: ‘Ah, l’homme du destin.’ I’m not sure – that may have been a bit of Churchill rewriting history later on – but he saw de Gaulle as this great man. But then de Gaulle would, of course, stand up to Churchill and that infuriated him. Yes. On one occasion de Gaulle had gone over and established the Free French in West Africa, and he made a lot of anti-British statements while he was there. And he came back to London and Churchill was absolutely incandescent with him. He called him around to Downing Street and Churchill rehearsed how he was going to humiliate de Gaulle before the meeting with his private secretary, John Colville, who was going to act as interpreter. And Colville found interpretation absolutely impossible because Churchill corrected him the whole time to be as insulting as possible. So Colville left and a Foreign Office interpreter came in, and he left the room after five minutes saying, ‘Those two men are completely mad.’ So Colville waited outside, wondering, ‘Are they killing each other?’ And after a decent amount of time he pushed the door open and looked in, and they were sitting beside each other in armchairs smoking cigars. Also, the morning of D-Day at about one in the morning, Churchill gave an order that de Gaulle, who was being very obstreperous as the British saw it – he was standing up for French interests – should be flown out of Britain in chains if necessary. His secretary did not act or pass on that order. The Kersaudy book is a serious, sober account of that relationship, but it’s got all that material in it."