This Day in WWII History (Churchill, de Gaulle Rally Demoralized Countrymen)

June 18, 1940—With France overrun and British forces only narrowly making it back across the English Channel, Winston Churchill and Charles de Gaulle appealed to their beleaguered countrymen to continue the fight against their Nazi foes. 

Their inspirational speeches became an essential part of their legends. Churchill’s address to the House of Commons especially echoes to the present day with its ringing closing: “Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that, if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, ‘This was their finest hour.’” De Gaulle’s “Appeal of June 18” is still taught to French schoolchildren as the birth of the Resistance movement.

The British Prime Minister had been a fixture in his nation’s politics for the prior four decades, so his speech in the House of Commons was heard and absorbed immediately by the electorate. But the French general at this point was still relatively little-known, so his words were not recognized as the official kick-off of the Resistance until well into the war.

In recent weeks, statues of Churchill and de Gaulle have been defaced by vandals who decried their racist attitudes. To be sure, both men were imperialists who did not regard colonials (often non-white) as equal to their rulers.

Speaking before the Peel Commission in March 1937, Churchill said: "I do not admit that wrong has been done to these people [Native Americans and blacks in Australia] by the fact that a stronger race, a higher-grade race, a more worldly-wise race, to put in that way, has come in and taken their place.” In 1959, while noting that the presence of Moslems testified to France’s tolerance, de Gaulle also warned against admitting them in mass numbers, scoffing: “Those who advocate integration have the brain of a hummingbird.”

But both acknowledged frankly that the survival of their countries depended on colonies that could help sustain the fight against the Nazis. Moreover, for all their paternalism towards subject peoples, their battle against Nazism was the most important victory over racism in the 20^th century.

In addition to paternalism, Churchill and de Gaulle exhibited swollen egos. But for all their large and real faults, they are remembered rightly as heroes to their countrymen. The desperate situation they faced in June 1940 brought their leadership into sharp focus. It is worthwhile recalling the several ways in which this quality manifested itself:

*Patriotism. Advocacy of imperialism was the negative side of Churchill and de Gaulle’s abiding faith in Britain and France. The positive side was their belief in the best parts of their nation’s heritage. De Gaulle was careful to distinguish between patriotism and the nationalism that fueled the rise of Fascism: “Patriotism is when love of your own people comes first; nationalism, when hate for people other than your own comes first.”

*Conservative, but not reactionary, politics. Churchill and de Gaulle were not only fierce anti-Communists but had little use for Socialism. But they refused to ally with the sizable far-right movements in their countries. Churchill spoke repeatedly throughout the 1930s against appeasement, which assured that he would remain without a leadership position among the Tories throughout the decade. A devout Roman Catholic, de Gaulle never became infected with the anti-Semitism displayed by so many French co-religionists in the wake of the Dreyfuss Affair of the 1890s. Unlike many in the French military, though de Gaulle scorned most politicians, he accepted the legitimacy of the French republic itself. As David Bell noted in a 2018 article in The Nation, he “never embraced the viciously intolerant reactionary nationalism so common among monarchists on the prewar French right.”

*Realism about their nations’ dire crises. Particularly in the case of Churchill, admirers have pointed to the hope the two leaders provided when little appeared on the horizon. But—unlike current leaders on both sides of the Atlantic—that did not mean that they sugarcoated, let alone denied, the catastrophic losses their nations’ armed forces had just sustained, nor what could happen if they lost. The very first line of Churchill’s address spoke of “the disastrous military events which have happened during the past fortnight.” He went on to spell it out: “Our Army and 120,000 French troops were indeed rescued by the British Navy from Dunkirk but only with the loss of their cannon, vehicles and modern equipment. This loss inevitably took some weeks to repair, and in the first two of those weeks the battle in France has been lost.” Similarly, de Gaulle acknowledged in his London radio address: “It is quite true that we were, and still are, overwhelmed by enemy mechanized forces, both on the ground and in the air.” Later, during his political career, he observed, "Politics is nothing else than the art of realities."

*Identification of their countries’ real sources of continuing strength. These frank admissions of losses bolstered the credibility of Churchill and de Gaulle when they explained how they thought Britain and France would defeat Adolf Hitler in the end. Churchill cited the many troops that had escaped the Nazis’ trap in France, the million and a quarter men currently under arms in Britain, the logistical difficulties that would face the Nazis during a cross-channel invasion, the powerful Royal Navy, and the cooperation of the British Empire’s self-governing dominions: Canada, Australia, South Africa, and New Zealand. De Gaulle pointed to the assistance of Great Britain, the support of France’s colonies, and the industrial strength of the United States.

*Calls for collective action. With the crises facing their country so utterly grave, neither Churchill nor de Gaulle was foolhardy enough to say, as one Western leader proclaimed several years ago, “I alone can fix it.” Churchill consulted with his generals and the self-governing dominions, who agreed the fight could be continued. De Gaulle summoned “all French officers and men who are at present on British soil, or may be in the future, with or without their arms,” as well as “all engineers and skilled workmen from the armaments factories who are at present on British soil, or may be in the future.”

*Refusal to compromise with evil. Influential voices in both Great Britain and France contemplated giving up the fight against the Nazis. In May 1940, two members of Churchill’s Cabinet, Neville Chamberlain and Lord Halifax—who, before the outbreak of hostilities, had pursued appeasement of the Nazis—proposed negotiating peace with Hitler. Several weeks later, they had to be persuaded that De Gaulle, only recently promoted to Brigadier General, should be allowed to speak on the BBC for a Free France, rather than Marshal Henri Petain. (The latter would see the honor gained through his WWI service effaced by his leadership of the infamous Vichy collaborationist regime.)

*Refusal to break constitutional norms. Crises offer dictators the opportunity to seize total power. But unlike Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin, who exploited unrest in their countries to seize total power (or by current European and American leaders who have tried to do likewise), Churchill and de Gaulle continued to work, as far as possible, within the constitutional systems of Britain and France.

*Heightened eloquence. Churchill’s powers of rhetoric were such that he won the 1953 Nobel Prize for Literature. De Gaulle’s eloquence is less well-known to Anglophones, but his vision of his country called out the most unexpectedly romantic sentences from this hard-headed general and politician. His War Memoirs begins with this famous paragraph: "All my life I have had a certain idea of France. This is inspired by sentiment as much as by reason. The emotional side of me tends to imagine France, like the princess in the fairy stories or the Madonna in the frescoes, as dedicated to an exalted and exceptional destiny. Instinctively, I have the feeling that Providence has created her either for complete success or for exemplary misfortunes.” 

In calling fellow citizens to arms in their June 18 addresses, Churchill and de Gaulle marshalled the weapons immediately at hand to them: words that expressed truth--an appropriate response to a dictatorship that used propaganda to incite attacks on religious and racial minorities and to devastate an entire continent. 

De Gaulle invoked “the flame of the Resistance” against the enemy, while Churchill’s speech gave rise, in addition to “their finest hour,” this famous sentence that called for ending the hunt for scapegoats for Britain’s military calamity: “If we open a quarrel between the past and the present, we shall find that we have lost the future.”

De Gaulle’s arrogance and humorlessness alienated Franklin Roosevelt, and often he sorely tried the patience of Churchill. But in encountering de Gaulle for the first time in June 1940, the British leader was impressed by the lonely, courageous stance that this newly minted brigadier general and under secretary of state took as the only member of the French government willing to carry on the fight against Hitler from Great Britain. 

Churchill and de Gaulle may have been egocentric, stubborn and not always enlightened towards those who fell outside the whites they saw as integral to their countries' history and governance. But they also recognized in each other brilliance, fortitude and a sincere, steadfast devotion to their countries’ highest ideals—enough to sustain them through their subsequent stormy wartime partnership.

This Day in WWII History (French Celebrate Liberation of Paris in ‘Night of Truth’)

Aug. 25, 1944—After four years of a humiliating occupation by Nazis who traduced their national ideals, killed 150,000 and deported or made prisoners of war another 1.9 million, and turned more people than anyone wanted to admit into collaborators with the enemy, Frenchmen deliriously celebrated the liberation of Paris. 

In a post 10 years ago, I recounted Ernest Hemingway’s war dispatch about witnessing the return to freedom of “the city I love best in all the world.” (In short order, he did his part for the war effort by “liberating” the bar at the Ritz Hotel.)

Far more can be said—and has been said—about this emotional high point in the Allies’ destruction of Fascism. But I thought I’d focus on two Frenchmen who would play a major role in the postwar world.

The first is Charles de Gaulle. Long a burr in the side of the Allies whose support he needed to free his country, the general had helped shove the liberation decisively ahead of schedule. 

Only four days before the liberation, Gen. Dwight Eisenhower had told him that, instead of immediately supporting the Resistance fighters and striking government workers now pouring into the streets, the Allies would come back to the city later so that they wouldn’t use up resources needed to clear out the Nazis in the rest of the country.

De Gaulle urged him to reconsider. Retaking Paris wouldn’t be a problem, he said. If Eisenhower insisted on withholding forces, de Gaulle would order General Jacques-Philippe Leclerc’s 2nd Armored Division anyway. Oh, yes—and if the Allies didn’t act, they ran the risk of Communists taking over the city.

In the early stages of the war, in an attempt to preserve French autonomy, de Gaulle had used Communists as part of the Free French movement. Now, though, he demonstrated why a college professor of mine termed him “perhaps the first Cold War” with this hint of a Marxist takeover of the City of Lights.

The play worked. The Nazi forces in the city were crushed between Leclerc’s 2nd Armored Division and the Allies’ 4^th Infantry Division. In his victory speech, de Gaulle hailed the former but offered not a word about the latter. Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt had long since come to consider such slights as typical of the man. 

The two leaders had to deal with him, however, because by this point in the war, he was the one leader with both credibility and widespread support from the public. He was the focal point the next day in leading a victory march down the Champs d’Elysees. As can be seen in the accompanying photo, at six feet and a half, he made for an easy assassination target.

Indeed, for a short bewildering but terrifyingsecond, shots from a rooftop sniper rang out, disrupting the parade and raising fears that de Gaulle had been hit. But the general’s scoffing at death (“Mosquitoes do not bite General de Gaulle,” he had joked to aides who urged him to take precautions against malaria) seemed borne out once again, as he survived the attack.

The other figure who played a notable part in the day—not by participating in it, but by witnessing to it—was Albert Camus. A young journalist, novelist and playwright with a strong interest in philosophy, Camus had attempted to join the Resistance as a soldier but could not serve because of recurring bouts with tuberculosis. Instead, he became editor of the clandestine newspaper Combat.

While Hemingway couldn’t help writing about himself in chronicling the liberation of Paris, Camus submerged his own personality in conveying the impact of “The Night of Truth” for Combat.  His eloquent editorial celebrating the event represented a touchstone in the 20^th century’s struggle against totalitarianism, and established his own striking voice in witnessing to that clash:

“While the bullets of freedom are still whistling throughout the city, the cannons of the liberation are entering the gates of Paris amid shouts and flowers. In the most beautiful and hottest of August nights, the eternal stars over Paris mingle with the tracer bullets, the smoke of fires, and the colored rockets of a mass celebration. This unparalleled night marks the end of four years of monstrous history and of an unspeakable struggle in which France came to grips with her shame and her wrath.”

This Day in WWII History (FDR Signs Japanese-American Internment Order)

February 19, 1942—Disregarding even some of his closest advisers, Franklin D. Roosevelt committed one of the worst violations of civil liberties in American history by signing Executive Order 9066, which authorized the U.S. military to forcibly remove Japanese-Americans from their homes on the West Coast as a matter of wartime necessity.

At one stroke, more than 120,000 people—none of whom were ever found to have committed treason or similar acts against the United States—were interned in 10 concentration camps, losing their jobs, then prevented by barbed wire, sentry towers and gun-toting guards from leaving—all without trial or even charges levied against them that they could contest. When the executive order was lifted and the camps closed three years later, this massive population—both “Issei” (resident immigrants)—and “Nisei” (native-born Americans with Japanese parents) —emerged to find, in many cases, that they couldn’t reclaim their property.

In times of war, Presidents have, more often than not, curtailed the rights of some Americans. (Historian Garry Wills has noted that James Madison, during the War of 1812, was the one conspicuous exception.) But it is hard to think of a more egregious infringement of wartime civil liberties than Roosevelt’s—not only in terms of the number of people affected, but also because of the blatant zenophobia involved.

That zenophobia was not solely—or even mostly—a product of the shock and anger over the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor three months earlier. It was an unfortunate byproduct of the circumstances in which Japanese first came to the United States in the late 19^th century.

Among other things, Japanese immigration was blamed for undercutting demand for American workers and even for threatening American womanhood. So much agitation grew for legislation to exclude the race that in 1908, the Japanese and American governments came up with a "Gentlemen's Agreement," by which Japan restricted emigration to the U.S., while the U.S. admitted wives, children, and other relatives of immigrants already resident.

The racism lingered and, in one sense, blinded the American military to the nature of the dangers presented at Pearl Harbor. The commanders there believed that sabotage or espionage by Japanese agents posed a greater threat than external air attack. (In fact, some carriers were bunched together to prevent the chance of sabotage, leaving them more vulnerable to Admiral Yamamoto's daring dawn attack from the air.) 

Remarkably, Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox  still claimed, in the hours after Pearl Harbor, that the attack resulted through the work of Japanese-American fifth columnists.

Naked prejudice became the order of the day, starting with influential columnist Walter Lippmann, who provided the kind of hysterical wartime justification for curtailing liberty that thoughtful people often regret later: “Nobody’s constitutional rights include the right to reside and do business on a battlefield.”

But the reigning sentiment was given its bluntest form by Lt. Gen. John DeWitt, head of the Western Defense Command. “The Japanese race is an enemy race,” he wrote. “And while many second- and third-generation Japanese born on United States soil, possessed of United States citizenship, have become ‘Americanized,’ the racial strains are undiluted.”

Yet the movement toward incarceration was hardly universal. It might be expected that James Rowe, an aide in the Justice Department, and his boss, Attorney-General Francis Biddle, might object to the measure. 

More surprising was the opposition of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, hardly a champion of civil liberties. Not only did he immediately refute Knox’s claim of a fifth column, but he opposed mass internment. "The necessity for mass evacuation is based primarily upon public and political pressure rather than on factual data," he wrote Biddle in early February.

The decision, then, came down to one man: Roosevelt. For a long time, his defenders claimed that he acceded to unstoppable public opinion. But Greg Robinson’s By Order of the President (2001) put this matter in a different light by examining the President’s long-held belief that the Japanese-Americans were biologically "incapable of being true Americans," making him more prone to accepting the worst assumptions about their possible conduct.

It would be three and a half decades before Congress established a commission whose final report, concluding that the internment resulted from “race prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of political leadership,” recommended reparations of $20,000 to each surviving internee, and several years more before both Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush issued formal apologies for the policy.

Incredibly, the internment of Japanese-Americans is not being viewed universally these days as an object lesson in the dangers of wartime hysteria, but as a possible precedent for tough if “necessary” steps that might be taken today. As far back as December 2015, Donald Trump gave an interview to Time reporter Michael Scherer that should have alarmed voters. He might not “make America great again” (who said it ever stopped being great?), but he sure is making history unexpectedly relevant.

Asked at that time if he would have supported the internment in WWII, Trump responded: “I would have had to be there at the time to tell you, to give you a proper answer. I certainly hate the concept of it. But I would have had to be there at the time to give you a proper answer.”

The then-candidate followed with one of his redundant, ridiculous non-sequitur rants that still reveal much—admittedly nauseating—about his mind: “It’s a tough thing. It’s tough. But you know war is tough. And winning is tough. We don’t win anymore. We don’t win wars anymore. We don’t win wars anymore. We’re not a strong country anymore. We’re just so off.”

As it happens, there are more similarities between the Japanese-Americans of 1942 and immigrants from Muslim countries than might meet initially the eye. Those similarities do not redound to Trump’s favor.

First, in both instances, the bans were targeted at very specific groups, though the language in the executive orders (or the statements of the Presidents) might indicate otherwise. FDR’s order never specifically used the word “Japanese,” but he allowed army personnel in “military areas” to remove “any or all persons” from this area of the West Coast. Similarly, government lawyers claimed in court that Trump’s Muslim ban was not directed at the religion, but public statements by Rudy Guiliani, describing his part in framing the legislation, indicated otherwise

Second, the scope of the restrictions was, in one sense, oddly limited. The most logical source for relocated Japanese-Americans should have been on Hawaii, as this was where the original attack occurred. But Japanese-Americans on the island were deemed too important to be deal with in this way. Moreover, Americans of German and Italian ancestry did not fall under the purview of this order, even though those countries were also at war with the U.S. Trump’s executive order was similarly blinkered. The 9/11 plotters, for instance, came from Saudi Arabia and Egypt, but neither of those countries are covered by the plan. By an amazing coincidence, neither is any Muslim country where The Trump Organization does business.

Third, the restrictions tarred entire groups indiscriminately. More than a hundred thousand Japanese who had never done anything wrong were regarded with suspicion. Government lawyers were similarly hard-pressed to cite how Muslims from the seven countries constituted a unique threat.

“Take a look at what FDR did many years ago and he’s one of the most highly respected presidents,” Trump has said. But FDR is esteemed for other aspects of his Presidency, not this exclusionary policy. Presidents such as Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson and Woodrow Wilson have seen their stock fall in recent years for failing to protect the rights of minorities. What makes Trump think that the same thing might not happen to FDR—not to mention himself?