Real World Stuff: The British general who planned to arm Vichy France

Something from the "real" world:

The British general who planned to arm Vichy France: BBC today

A British general kept Winston Churchill and Free French leader Charles De Gaulle in the dark about a top secret 1942 plan to arm Vichy France, recently discovered documents reveal.

Both Churchill and De Gaulle had made clear their contempt for Marshall Petain's regime, which controlled a large part of France thanks to a deal struck with Hitler.

Relations between Britain and France had been strained since July 1940, when Churchill, who was determined to stop French ships falling into German hands, ordered the Royal Navy to sink several French war ships off the coast of Algeria - 1,300 French sailors lost their lives in the action.
In retaliation, a furious Vichy not only broke off diplomatic relations with London but also bombed Gibraltar.

In December 1941, Winston Churchill made clear his distaste for the supposedly neutral Vichy regime and its often enthusiastic collaboration with Hitler.

Later, Vichy voluntarily deported Jews to Germany.

Charles De Gaulle was equally contemptuous. Vichy's leaders had accused him of being a traitor when he fled to London after the fall of France. At the time, Marshal Petain, a hero of World War I, was a more popular figure in France - many saw him as having shielded Vichy from the worst excesses of Hitler's forces and saved the region from German occupation.

But neither man had anything to say about a secret meeting in London in December 1941 between a senior Vichy military officer and a member of the British General Staff. That, it seems, is because nobody told them.

But documents dated six months later show that the meeting resulted in a decision that was both extremely significant and highly controversial.
General Alan Brooke's Most Secret memo of May 1942: "Plan to give support to the French Army in occupied territory"

A proposal discussed at the meeting was approved in May 1942 by General Alan Brooke, Chief of the Imperial General Staff. Under the top secret plan Britain was to arm Vichy troops and link up with them in an Allied landing at Bordeaux and La Rochelle.

At the time Britain had no official military links with Vichy and its forces were fighting Petain's troops in Madagascar.

Professor Eric Grove of the University of Salford, who discovered the papers, says he was astonished at what he found.

"My eyes widened," he says.
"Here we were having been fighting the Vichy French in Syria in 1941 and, indeed, in May 1942 we were actually fighting Vichy forces in Madagascar. And here we are talking about arming their colleagues in France itself."
What is even more shocking, in Grove's view, is the high-level backing the plan had, and not only in Britain.

"This plan has the support of the French Chief of the General Staff and General Weygand, who was a French general with a very high reputation significant support. They wanted us to arm eight French divisions to take part in the liberation of France," he says.

World War II historian Max Hastings believes that Winston Churchill, the undisputed leader of Britain's war effort, would not have taken kindly to being kept in the dark about a plan of this magnitude.
  • Particularly when one of those involved in it was General Alan Brooke, the man at the very top of Britain's military machine.
"There's no doubt that one of the most fascinating aspects of this document is that the Chiefs of Staff commit to paper the fact that it's not to be mentioned to the prime minister," says Hastings.

"If he'd known what they said Brooke would have had a very, very bad half hour indeed with the prime minister, because Churchill liked to know everything."

It seems likely that both Churchill and De Gaulle were not told because of fears about what would happen if they knew.

In Max Hastings' view, Churchill, "a man of passionate impulses", could have viewed the plan as iniquitous or as an opportunity.

According to Jean-Louis Cremieux-Brilhac, a senior intelligence officer with the Free French in London in 1942, De Gaulle's reaction was all too predictable.

"If we had known, it would have been something scandalous for us," he says.

But when American forces landed in Vichy-occupied North Africa in November 1942, the secret plan - which seemed to have been dropped quietly anyway - was well and truly dead.

The lack of Vichy resistance to Allied forces prompted the Germans to invade unoccupied France, and Marshal Petain's regime could no longer do deals with anyone.

But French historian and author Henry Rousso says these formerly secret papers make clear what might have happened had Vichy's General Giraud, and not General De Gaulle, taken over French forces in North Africa in 1943.

"It could have been possible that De Gaulle didn't win this political fight, and the history of France would have been, after the war, completely different. And this document reminds historians to be very cautious about the way we are writing history."

Document will be broadcast on Monday 19 March at 20:00 GMT on BBC Radio 4.
 
well, the US/british were willing to deal with stalin so vichy wouldn't have been that big of deal if it meant an easier time landing in europe.

Post WW2 continent would have been "interesting" to say the least though. There would be pressure not to push too much outside of germany to go after collaborators (for obvious reasons) and France would spend the next few decades trying to conciliate patainistes and fighting french.
 
Damn,

Real world overtaking all of us in creating an alternate universe.

It does sound out of character of Brooke to act outside of his constitutional obligations. Churchill was very much aware of all impications of acting outside the constitutions; hence he never over-rued his COS's. They would only have one option: resign.

But, how would France have looked without De Gaulle? EEC? After all, De Gaulle sabotaged the UK plans of joining EEC.

The immediate one as also said: pursuig revenge in France would be impossible.

Damn, this is a new spin on it. Has it ever been discussed here?

Ivan
 
The US toyed with the idea of supporting Vichy in North Africa while Weygand was in charge there, but they were a bit too public in talking about the possibility and the Germans forced Vichy to can him.

Vichy was a mixed bag, with:

- opportunists actively collaborating with the Germans because they thought the Germans were the winning side, or because they were fascists themselves,
- people who were aware of what Hitler was capable of doing and who genuinely tried to walk a tightrope, giving Hitler what they had to give him and he could take anyway
- people who were biding their time until the Allies got strong enough that France reentering the war wouldn't just mean the German occupying Vichy.

Elements inside Vichy did do some preps to reenter the war. They hid artillery, rifles, machine guns and dozens if not hundreds of fighter planes. They produced quite a number of a French anti-tank rifle grenade that had just missed the war. They produced 300 tracked 'forestry tractors,' along with the armor to turn them into improvised machine-gun armed tanks (some of which actually got used by the resistance), and the banned 47mm gun armed turrets for armored cars. They planned to produce armored cars on commercial chassis. They had plans drawn up to triple the size of the authorized Vichy army, and sent Vichy French teenagers into something that was officially sort of like the boy scouts, but actually toughened them up and gave them as many militarily useful but not obviously military skills as they could get away with. They clandestinely designed tanks derived from the B1 series, which apparently was the only tank being produced in the area that became Vichy, and even test-launched a rocket and executed any German spies they became aware of.

Most importantly, elements of Vichy did protect the Ultra secret and smuggled key cryptographers out of the country.

I don't want to overestimate the amount of clandestine rearming that went on. It was small-scale stuff, and by only some of the elements of Vichy, but it did happen and was an element of the Vichy regime.

One Vichy leader (I think it might have been Darlan) told a US official that if the US came with enough divisions the Vichy government would welcome them. If they came with too few Vichy would fight them.
 
Oddly enough I did look into the Vichy...

...In the latter part of HMS Heligoland, with the idea of Spain and France being turned (with their North African territories) into a kind of buffer zone against Allied invasion.

De Gaulle goes to Paris after Germany negotiates a peace - and is shot by the Vichy before they given in to the Allies and a LeClerc-lead Free French force.

Arming Vichy France with tankettes isn't a bad idea - the Universal (AKA Bren Gun) Carrier, was an amazingly-versatile chassis. Given AT grenades or a recoilless rifle, it would have been a fast mobile AT item.

Fact certainly is stranger than fiction...:rolleyes:
 
Looking back we tend to think of Vichy and the Free French as two very different "nations" but of course they were both representing France. Things would have been a lot less clear at the time.

Best Regards
Grey Wolf
 
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