Embers of War (12 page)

French authorities picked up on this schism in U.S. decision making and sought to exploit it. All too aware of the Americans’ preponderant power in the Western Pacific—“Nothing will or can be done in Indochina without their agreement, at least tacit,” one senior official reminded his colleagues—they stepped up their efforts in 1944 to reestablish France’s claim to Indochina, and to do so before Washington settled on firm policy. Most important, de Gaulle reasoned, would be to get French troops involved in the campaign to liberate Indochina. He recalled candidly in his memoir: “I regarded it as essential that the conflict not come to an end without our participation. Otherwise, every policy, every army, every aspect of public opinion would certainly insist upon our abdication in Indochina. On the other hand, if we took part in the battle—even though the latter were near its conclusion—French blood shed on the soil of Indochina would constitute an impressive claim.”
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Accordingly, de Gaulle and his aides set about organizing a force capable of fighting the Japanese. Beginning in mid-1944, Free French agents parachuted into Indochina to make contact with Gaullist sympathizers and to coordinate resistance. French diplomats also worked to get Allied assistance in sending fresh troops to Indochina and to convince the U.S. government to allow regular French units to participate in the broader Pacific War. Washington proved resistant, but the French kept pressing. In a series of midlevel bilateral meetings devoted to Indochina, they stressed their benevolent intentions toward the Indochinese population and their determination to grant them greater autonomy after the war. Indochina, they vowed, would enjoy “a new political status” involving new governing arrangements of a “liberal character.” For good measure, they also stressed the metropole’s success in promoting Indochina’s economic development earlier in the century, and they insisted that the
indigènes
were deeply grateful as a result. “The population of our colonies has always had confidence in us,” Minister of Colonies René Pleven told foreign journalists in October.
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The urgings of the conservatives in Washington, combined with the pressure from the British and French, chipped away at FDR’s resolve. But only partly. His dislike of French imperialism and of de Gaulle personally were undiminished, and he clung to the belief—or at least the hope—that the general would soon be a spent force. It mattered not that a growing chorus of voices in Congress and the press loudly proclaimed otherwise, insisting that de Gaulle was now the leader of the French nation and was not going away. Already in 1943, these observers reminded the White House, de Gaulle had assumed leadership of an Algiers-based Comité français de la Libération nationale (CFLN) to administer the liberated territories and coordinate military action; now, in the spring of 1944, the committee had assumed the functions and legitimacy of a Provisional Government of the French Republic.

When de Gaulle arrived in Washington in July 1944 for three days of meetings, Roosevelt made an outward show of respect and admiration, but behind closed doors he stuck to his position. In the postwar world, he told de Gaulle, France would be reduced to the status of a spectator. The Big Four of the United States, the Soviet Union, Great Britain, and China would be predominant, and Western Europe would recede in comparison to other parts of the world. The new United Nations organization would help contain Soviet ambitions, while on the Western side the United States would be supreme. De Gaulle cautioned against relying on China as an effective ally and said a regenerated France would again be a leading world power. To FDR’s claim that self-determination would be a guiding principle of America’s postwar policy, de Gaulle replied that France would be prepared to discuss the form of colonial relationships—dependent territories could thenceforth receive more autonomy—but would not surrender any part of her empire. Their conversations were, as the wonderful French expression has it,
dialogues de sourds
(dialogues of the deaf).
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De Gaulle, nevertheless, was impressed by what he saw on the trip. It was his first exposure to the great power center of official America, and he came away acutely conscious of the overwhelming self-confidence of the elite, and the dynamism of American society. From Washington, he traveled to New York City and was awed by what he saw.
“C’est énorme,”
he remarked while looking out the window of his suite at the Waldorf Astoria at the cars streaming by below. “This country has not built automobiles for three years and look at all the cars … what a capital they represent … and what a powerful country.” The United States was predominant among all countries, he went on, and would remain so for years to come: Her industrial might and her agricultural production gave her an enormous advantage over all others. “She will be the wealthiest and best-equipped country after the war is over,” he concluded, and she “is already trying to rule the world.”
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Shortly before his return flight to Algiers, de Gaulle told a packed room of reporters that his visit had been a success. “I am sure that, henceforth, the settlement of all the common problems we face, and will face … will be easier because we now understand each other better.” A reporter asked whether de Gaulle expected the French Empire to be returned whole. Yes, he replied, France “will find everything intact that belongs to her,” though France “is also certain that the form of French organization in the world will not be the same.” Did France regard herself as a great power? someone else asked. Too ridiculous a notion even to consider, he replied. As for the prospect of formal U.S. recognition of the committee in Algiers as the Provisional Government of France, de Gaulle said it had not been the purpose of his trip to gain such recognition but he hoped it would come.
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It was, an observer remarked, a serenely confident performance. And no wonder: De Gaulle knew he had British backing, both for his leadership of France and for the retention of the empire. He knew he had eclipsed all potential rivals for leadership of the French nation. It was a nation, moreover, that could expect to be liberated. The massive Allied cross-channel invasion of France had commenced a month earlier, and though it very nearly ended in disaster, the Normandy beachhead became the center of a massive buildup over the ensuing weeks. By the end of July, close to 1.5 million troops had been transported across the English Channel and were beginning to break out of the coastal perimeter. Even then Roosevelt half-expected some unknown leader to emerge from the liberated territories and claim the legitimacy of the government of the republic. But it was de Gaulle the French people wanted. General Dwight D. Eisenhower, Supreme Allied Commander, grasped this reality and moreover had none of Roosevelt’s personal dislike of the general. To FDR’s consternation, Eisenhower allowed de Gaulle’s Free French forces the honor of entering Paris first. On August 25, 1944, de Gaulle announced the liberation of Paris to an ecstatic crowd at the city’s Hôtel de Ville.

He had seen his astonishing claim of June 1940 vindicated by Allied forces and by resistance inside and outside France: The war had not been lost. The humiliating defeat of 1940 had been retrieved. The following day the general led a triumphant, solemn promenade up the Champs-Élysées, the procession reaching Notre Dame at four-thirty in the afternoon. “The effect was fantastic,” Malcolm Muggeridge, then a British intelligence official, recalled of the scene. “The huge congregation who had all been standing suddenly fell flat on their faces.… There was a single exception: one solitary figure, like a lonely giant. It was, of course, de Gaulle. Thenceforth, that was how I always saw him—towering and alone; the rest, prostrate.”
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Eisenhower would not have put it in those words, but he grasped the essential point: This was de Gaulle’s moment. But if the Allied commander’s tact and diplomatic skill in handling the Frenchman won him admiration from observers at the time and historians since, this also placed Roosevelt in an embarrassing position. The new secretary of state, Edward Stettinius, along with army generals Eisenhower and George C. Marshall, told the president there was only one way to go: He had to accept de Gaulle as president of the Provisional Government of France. The State Department drew up plans for formal recognition. Roosevelt let them sit on his desk for several weeks before finally relenting and signing on October 23.

CHARLES DE GAULLE WALKS DOWN THE CHAMPS-ÉLYSÉES, FROM THE ARC DE TRIOMPHE TO NOTRE DAME, AUGUST 26, 1944. ON HIS IMMEDIATE LEFT ONE STEP BEHIND IS GENERAL PHILIPPE LECLERC, WHO WILL LATER COMMAND FRENCH UNION FORCES IN INDOCHINA AND CONCLUDE THAT MILITARY VICTORY IS UNACHIEVABLE.
(photo credit 2.2)

VI

BY MIDAUTUMN OF 1944, THEN, ROOSEVELT’S PLAN FOR POSTWAR
Indochina was in trouble. The turmoil in China and the growing weakness of the Chiang regime, the mounting concerns about Soviet ambitions in Europe and elsewhere, and the ascendancy of de Gaulle with his commitment to maintaining the empire—all these served to diminish the chances that France would be kept from reclaiming control of her Southeast Asian territories.

Roosevelt had begun to lose control of events. In August, London officials had helped Gaullist agents to enter Indochina. Some weeks later Churchill allowed French military personnel to participate in activities of South East Asia Command (SEAC); he should have sought Roosevelt’s approval before doing so but was content to merely get the okay of American military officials.
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Although FDR disavowed Churchill’s action when he learned of it, and also rejected a plan to provide materials to resistance groups inside Indochina, the mere presence of the French personnel had great symbolic importance. SEAC commander Lord Louis Mountbatten provided extensive air support for Free French operatives in Indochina in late 1944 and encouraged cooperation between Britain’s intelligence apparatus in the Far East and its Gaullist counterpart, the Direction générale des études et recherches. In December alone, British forces carried out forty-six air operations and succeeded in establishing a radio network among resistance cells in Indochina, building up stores of military equipment for use in a possible future campaign against Japan and occasionally transporting French agents into and out of the region. “I do not think the Americans realize anything like the extent to which our penetration of French Indo-China jointly with the French has already progressed,” one diplomat exulted to the Foreign Office in January 1945.
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Perhaps not, but some of Roosevelt’s senior advisers had begun singing a new song on Indochina, one with a decidedly British sound. That same month Harry Hopkins told Stettinius and the secretary of war, Henry Stimson, that there was a need “for a complete review not only of the Indochina situation but of our entire French approach,” for the French felt “we were opposing their regrowth.” Stimson indicated his support by observing that “France has become a great military base.” The same month Joseph Grew of the State Department told Australian officials that he believed Indochina would stay French.
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These officials may have taken their cue from the president. Over the final weeks of 1944, his steadfastness on the issue of France’s return to Indochina had begun to falter, due mostly to British intransigence and perhaps also to his own rapidly failing health. London officials wanted explicit presidential approval for a new plan to use French commandos for an operation inside Indochina aimed at destroying Japanese communications. Roosevelt at first denied the request, but on January 4, 1945, he agreed to look the other way while the saboteurs were deployed. He may have believed that the operation would yield a significant payoff in the war effort, and that the French deployment was too small to make a meaningful difference to the French effort to reclaim control over Indochina. But it’s also possible he had shifted his position and was now prepared to entertain the possibility that France could return to Indochina if she promised to implement sweeping reforms and set a firm timetable for independence. He strenuously denied any such change—in the first half of January, he told both a State Department official and a British diplomat that Indochina must not be turned back to the French—but some softening likely took place.
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At the Yalta conference in the Crimea in February 1945, Roosevelt backed off his insistence on enforcing an international trusteeship over colonial areas; except in the case of Japanese-mandated territories, he now said, such internationalization would happen only with the consent of the colonial power. At Yalta, he informed Stalin that he would not allow U.S. ships to be used to carry French troops to Indochina, but he also recommended to the Soviet leader that they not raise the Indochina matter with Churchill. “It would only make the British mad,” FDR rationalized. “Better to keep quiet just now.”
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