The Pursuit of Laughter (36 page)

To hold the balance, to keep the life of the country going, defending its interests in every sphere and ensuring that a maximum of sovereignty remained in French hands was the difficult and ungrateful task performed with admirable skill by the brilliant Pierre Laval. That his efforts on behalf of France should have cost him his life was due to the fact that he was a great opponent of communism, and at the end of the war it was the communists who ran France (and indeed all Europe) for a time. The
surprising
thing is that communist politicians and leaders of the resistance should have found non-communist Frenchmen willing to work with them. General de Gaulle’s first act was to bring Thorez back from Moscow to a seat in the government.

These three large volumes of documents, collected and published by the Hoover Institute, contain the testimony of hundreds of men who worked for the Vichy Government, and in particular for Laval, between the armistice and the German retreat in 1944. Soldiers, politicians, diplomats, police, businessmen, all agree that Laval’s tireless efforts spared his country the worst rigours of an oppressive occupation. His policy was to endeavour to save France from the harsh treatment meted out to Poland. One of his hardest struggles, of which there is massive evidence in these volumes, was to limit as far as possible the number of French workers sent to Germany. His method here, as
elsewhere
, was to prevaricate, argue and delay, and the difference between the numbers asked for and the numbers sent represents the success of his design.

Almost all the witnesses speak of Laval’s love of country, and many end their
testimony
by saying that, had he had a trial, this is the evidence they would have given. Because he had no trial, the Hoover Institute, in the interest of history, has published this lengthy
book. One of the witnesses thus sums up Laval’s attitude: ‘
Chez lui, le patriotisme c’était l’amour de son pays et non pas, comme chez la plupart des Français, la haine de celui des autres. Il voulait le bonheur des Français et comprenait que celui-ci ne pouvait être réalisé que dans la paix par une large compréhension européenne
.’ [For him patriotism meant the love of his own country and not, as with most of the French, the hatred of others. He wanted the best for France and he understood that this couldn’t be realised except through peace and a greater European understanding.]

Laval, one of the first Europeans, had always worked for peace: he thought it a grave error for France to declare war in 1939. But in the hour of defeat he set himself to do whatever was possible, in the difficult circumstances, for his country. Forty million Frenchmen could not all find rooms in London’s Connaught Hotel, somebody had to help them through dangerous, hard, disagreeable years.

Although
La Vie de la France sous l’occupation
is immensely long it is far from dull—a great deal of it is of extreme fascination: small wonder it has been a best seller in France this winter.

The Hoover Institute should follow it up with an account of the collaborators—the Déats, Doriots and Darnands. Then the picture of these years would be complete.

La Vie de la France sous l’occupation
, Hoover Institute (1957)

Allies of a kind indeed. After Britain and France declared war on Germany, Roosevelt gave us as much help as he dared, but he had to keep an eye on the presidential election in 1940. In order to be re-elected he was obliged to make various pledges; American boys (a politicians’ expression meaning soldiers) should not be sent overseas to fight in an European quarrel. Once elected, his hands were free.

Harold Ickes, Secretary of the Interior, wrote in his diary: ‘For a long time I have believed that our best entrance into the war would be by way of Japan… which will inevitably lead us into war with Germany.’

Roosevelt increased the ‘pressure on Japan by denying her vital raw materials, notably scrap metal in the autumn of 1940 and above all oil at the end of July 1941.’ To this threat of strangulation the Japanese riposted violently; in December they attacked Pearl Harbor, precipitating war in the Pacific.

Christopher Thorne’s interesting book deals with the resulting British/United States alliance, and shows what an uneasy alliance it was. The common policy of war with the Axis powers was sometimes almost lost sight of in the general acrimony which resulted from the totally different war aims of the Allies. Churchill was concerned to defeat Germany and Japan and yet to preserve the British Empire intact, while Roosevelt was
pushing towards the dismemberment and destruction of the Empire. Mr Thorne
continually
feels bound to remind his readers (and perhaps himself) that in spite of the recriminations the Allies did work together and they did defeat Japan. Soon after the death of Roosevelt the British Empire disappeared, but by then the war had been won.

The episode which best illumined the whole enterprise was the devising and signing of the Atlantic Charter. Under its terms there was to be ‘freedom’ for peoples
everywhere
in the world. Mr Churchill, who had light-heartedly signed, seems to have been surprised and chagrined when the Indians and Burmese asked if their turn for freedom would soon come. To him, they were lesser breeds without the Charter; he had not had them in mind when he signed it. He was thinking, so he said, of countries under the Nazi yoke. Mr Roosevelt on the other hand meant every word of it; there were to be no more colonies, and no more military bases like Singapore. Panama, Hawaii, and the
various
bases the Americans acquired (for ‘the President still had a keen eye for the
possible
acquisition by the US of bases that would enhance her strength at sea or in the
development
of new air routes’ says Mr Thorne) were a different matter. It is wonderful to see the workings of Anglo-Saxon hypocrisy under the strong light shed here.

To begin with, the Japanese were ridiculously underrated. President Roosevelt was full of strange theories: ‘the evil-doing of the Japanese might be due to the less-
developed
skulls of their basic stock’ he thought. (He told Stalin at Yalta that the Vietnamese were ‘people of small stature… and not warlike.’) Mr Churchill also had wishful thoughts. He sent two warships to the Far East in order to stabilize the situation and impress the enemy, rather in the same way as a gunboat in an African river might impress the local tribe. The Prince of Wales and the Repulse, with no air cover, were sunk by the Japanese. Singapore fell and many thousands of prisoners were taken. For Churchill, this was the blackest day of the war.

If the Japanese were underrated, China ‘was built up in Roosevelt’s imagination into a great power whose mighty inexhaustible armies were to help defeat Japan.’ General Chiang Kai-shek accepted money, arms and flattery but he did not move. He well knew that his own particular enemy was Mao Tse-tung.

Determined that India should be freed from British rule, Roosevelt suggested to Stalin, when Churchill was not present, that he felt the best solution would be reform on the Soviet line. ‘To this ingratiating observation Stalin merely replied that the matter was a complex one, and that reform from the bottom would mean revolution.’ Roosevelt and Churchill vied with one another in their courting of Stalin and there was a certain jealousy between them. ‘Poor Neville Chamberlain believed he could trust Hitler’, announced Churchill. ‘He was wrong. But I don’t think I’m wrong about Stalin.’

Just as the war in the Far East was coming to a successful conclusion the atom bomb was ready for use and the Allies dropped one on Hiroshima. They then dropped
another
on Nagasaki. To its credit, the Far Eastern Department of the Foreign Office, which had not been informed that the bombs were to be used, wrote a strong protest:

Something on these lines is what most people who thought about it considered should have been done, but Mr Churchill agreed with the American plan to drop the bomb on a crowded city ‘without a moment’s hesitation’ as he himself put it. Soon afterwards there were war crimes trials in Tokyo, but only Japanese were in the dock. General MacArthur was sent to Japan with full powers and thousands of bibles. We know the outcome. The clever, hard-working Japanese turned their attention from the arts of war to the arts of peace, and the yen, like the mark, soars into the empyrean.

Allies of a Kind
is scholarly and thorough, but it is not a page too long. It is a book that even the most ignorant layman will read with deep interest.

Allies of a Kind: The United States, Britain and the War against Japan
, Thorne, C.
Books and Bookmen
(1978)

‘No charge, no trial, no term set.’ Yes, regulation 18B was certainly odious in the highest degree. Cast into prison with no charge, hence no trial, by the Home Secretary, for as long as he pleased, for years, was exactly like being kidnapped. Useless to count the days, as there had been no sentence. Actions by 18B prisoners for habeas corpus all failed, the judges showing themselves in a poor light as the creatures of the executive.

The 18Bs appeared before an Advisory Committee chaired by Norman Birkett KC. In Mosley’s case his house, flat, safes and even bank account were carefully searched; as there was nothing sinister to find, nothing was found. He was interrogated for hours by Birkett, and convinced he would be released. Instead, I was arrested as well. I left four children, the youngest eleven weeks old.

Having a naive belief in British justice, I considered Birkett dishonest. He should have advised Mosley’s release, and if his advice was rejected by the Home Office, he should have resigned. By the time he interrogated me, my opinion of him was very low.

The excuse for all this? Summer 1940 was a time of panic; German armies swept west, the Low Countries and France fell. Stories of fifth columns in defeated countries were believed, though subsequently found to be fantasies. The British Union was hardly a
candidate
for suspicion; it was super-patriotic.

But it had campaigned during the phoney war for negotiated peace, and hundreds of loyal men and women were arrested. This was quite a popular move; the Government was seen to be ‘doing’ something. Hitherto, there had been only defeats.

A new criminal offence was invented: the spreading of alarm and despondency. The great disseminator of alarm and despondency was the BBC, which had only bad news to give. Anyone but a traitor who might be pleased at the turn of events in 1940 was bound to feel a certain alarm when Churchill, with his record of failure, recently added to by the tragic farce in Norway, became Prime Minister.

Busybodies had the time of their lives, seeing strange lights in neighbours’ houses, or marks on telegraph poles, or a man in a pub doubting a swift and final victory. All was reported to the police, and led to prison. It was one way of aiding the war effort.

MI5 is the villain, and the clown, of the book. Professor Simpson’s story is a good one, but its results were sad and horrible. MI5 invented a huge fifth column, but when required to produce evidence of its existence was unable to do so; it was a figment of its
imagination
. Yet men and other women were imprisoned, families broken, businesses ruined, dependants left with no means of support, health undermined.

Since the riots and publicity of recent times people are probably fairly familiar with the degraded vileness of prison life, but in those days the public knew nothing. The grimy filth was incredible, since prisons dispose of plentiful slave labour. The lavatories, the kitchen and eating utensils coated with grease, were indescribably disgusting. The cold, even in summer, was piercing; no ray of sun could penetrate the small heavily barred windows encrusted with London soot. The lights, turned out in air raids, were too dim to read by.