The French Navy, Vichy and the Second World War
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Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports 2016 Ordinary Sailors: The French Navy, Vichy and the Second World War Alexander John Upward Follow this and additional works at: https://researchrepository.wvu.edu/etd Recommended Citation Upward, Alexander John, "Ordinary Sailors: The French Navy, Vichy and the Second World War" (2016). Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports. 6852. https://researchrepository.wvu.edu/etd/6852 This Dissertation is protected by copyright and/or related rights. It has been brought to you by the The Research Repository @ WVU with permission from the rights-holder(s). You are free to use this Dissertation in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use. For other uses you must obtain permission from the rights-holder(s) directly, unless additional rights are indicated by a Creative Commons license in the record and/ or on the work itself. This Dissertation has been accepted for inclusion in WVU Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports collection by an authorized administrator of The Research Repository @ WVU. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Ordinary Sailors: The French Navy, Vichy and the Second World War. Alexander John Upward Dissertation submitted to the Eberly College of Arts and Sciences at West Virginia University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in History Robert Blobaum, Ph.D., Chair Steven Zdatny, Ph.D. Joseph Hodge, Ph.D. Katherine Aaslestad, Ph.D. Joshua Arthurs, Ph.D. Department of History Morgantown, West Virginia 2016 Keywords: French Navy, Vichy, Second World War Copyright 2016 Alexander Upward ii ABSTRACT Ordinary Sailors: The French Navy, Vichy, and the Second World War Alexander John Upward After the debacle of the Fall of France in 1940, the one organization that managed to maintain its discipline and functionality virtually intact was the French Navy. This is the story of how subsequently that navy was able to exert a disproportionate influence on the Vichy regime of Marshal Pétain. Such influence achieved its apogee between February 1941 and April 1942 when the navy’s Commander-in-Chief Admiral Darlan served simultaneously in several of the regime’s highest offices. During this period France continued to flirt with the possibility of actively engaging Great Britain in war on the side of Nazi Germany. It was also the period when Vichy introduced some of its most repressive measures against its own citizens and entered upon policies that led ultimately to active collaboration in the deportation of Jews to Auschwitz. iii CONTENTS INTRODUCTION 1 CHAPTER ONE Making a Navy 30 CHAPTER TWO The Great War and the Triumph of Conservatism 78 CHAPTER THREE From Victory to Defeat 118 CHAPTER FOUR Collaboration 166 CHAPTER FIVE Fighting for Germany, Fighting for France 209 CHAPTER SIX Vichy, the Navy, and the “Final Solution of the Jewish Question” in France 258 CONCLUSION 300 Bibliography 314 1 Introduction This is not a dissertation about the Holocaust, even if that is where the narrative of events leads it. It is a dissertation about the French Navy in wartime. The title is provocative and clearly an homage to Christopher Browning’s Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland. As with Browning’s “ordinary men,” no one pulled on the uniform of the French Navy with the liquidation of innocent civilians in mind. By the same token, however, it is unclear that anyone wearing that uniform did anything to inhibit the execution of policies that in the logic of a Nazi dominated Europe, certainly after January 1942, could lead nowhere else. The French Navy played a disproportionate and largely unremarked role in the formulation of the Vichy regime’s program and was overwhelmingly implicated in the policies of state collaboration that that regime embraced. Yet Ordinary Sailors is not a polemic against the French navy. Rather, it seeks merely to restore the navy to some position in the narrative of events in France during the Second World War, a narrative in which it has been mainly conspicuous by its near total absence. Furthermore it does so bearing in mind the opinions of two prominent Frenchmen. In his book Strange Defeat: A Statement of Evidence Written in 1940, noted historian Marc Bloch observed: In no nation is any professional group ever entirely responsible for its own actions. The solidarity of society as a whole is too strong to permit the existence of the sort of moral autonomy, existing in isolation, which any such total responsibility would seem to imply…The psychological conditions in which they lived were not altogether of their own making, and they themselves, through their members, were as their origins had moulded them. They could be only what the social fact, as it existed in France, permitted them to be.1 Bloch was referring specifically to the case of the French General Staff, but could equally have been writing about the French navy. 1 Marc Bloch, Strange Defeat: A Statement of Evidence Written in 1940 (New York: W. W. Norton & Co,1968), 126. 2 On the other hand, Edgar Faure, French counsel for the prosecution at the Nuremberg Trials and future French premier, was less forgiving. Writing on the subject of France and trials for crimes against humanity, Annette Wieviorka demonstrated Faure’s frame of reference at Nuremberg: ‘“Every crime,” he explained, implies a chain of transmission; it matters little to an executive that his signature appears on a document. That executive’s responsibility is established “by the fact that a criminal act was perpetrated administratively by a department whose hierarchy ends with that executive.” And, he explained, “In all hierarchical state departments there exists a continuous network of authority which is at the same time a continuous network of responsibility.”’ 2 The French navy was not a criminal organization in the terms laid down, with the support of a French judge, for the Nazis at Nuremberg. It was, however, a “professional group” in Bloch’s terms and a “hierarchical state department” in Faure’s and it was so at a time after the Fall of France in 1940 when, as Admiral Darlan’s Chief of Staff would put it: “Sardonic critics complained that two thirds of France was overrun by the Germans, and the remaining third by the Navy.”3 It is clear that activities that would now be considered criminal were perpetrated at that time and equally clear that someone was responsible. It might be inferred from the fact that because the worst depredations of the war years were committed after the return to power of Pierre Laval, the navy’s responsibility was limited. In this context, Jean-Marc Berlière’s observation in his work on the French police during the Occupation that “[Laval] replaced incompetent admirals and the fanatical amateurs of the collaborationist parties with experienced, 2 Annette Wieviorka, "France and Crimes Against Humanity," in Lives in the Law ed.Austin Sarat, Lawrence Douglas and Martha Umphrey (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006), 218. 3 Rear Admiral Paul Auphan and Jacques Mordal, The French Navy in World War II (Annapolis MD: United States Naval Institute, 1959), 149. 3 high-level civil servants…”4 seems exculpatory. Yet charges of incompetence scarcely amount to an exoneration. The problem for the navy, and for the Vichy regime at large, was that it achieved the summit of its influence at a time when two assumptions were widely prevalent. The first was that Germany was going to win the war. The second was that Hitler was a man who operated within the framework of the accepted norms of international diplomacy. Politicians in France were not alone in thinking the latter. Although he may have changed his mind by 1940, in 1938 Neville Chamberlain had concluded that “in spite of the hardness and ruthlessness I thought I saw in his face, I got the impression that here was a man who could be relied upon when he had given his word.”5 This view was challenged by Paul Reynaud in a riposte to General Weygand’s assertion in June 1940 that the war was lost: “[Y]ou are taking Hitler for Wilhelm I, the old gentleman who took Alsace-Lorraine from us, and that was that. But Hitler is Genghis Khan.”6 Reynaud’s was not the general attitude of the authorities in Vichy, however, and the result was described by Tony Judt: “The political irresponsibility of the rulers of Vichy France is well documented now, depending as it did upon a willful refusal to look honestly at their own weakness, the true aims of the occupiers, or the increasingly predictable consequences of their initiatives and concessions.”7 The navy had its part in this. In 1940 the navy emerged from the debacle of the fall of France as the only organ of state that remained functionally intact. In the vacuum left by the collapse of parliamentary government and the destruction of the French Army it was natural that the new regime should 4 Jean-Marc Berlière, Policiers français sous l’Occupation (Paris: Perrin, 2009), 36. 5 David Faber, Munich, 1938: Appeasement and World War II (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2008), 300. 6 Julian Jackson, The Fall of France: The Nazi Invasion of 1940 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 103- 104. 7 Tony Judt, The Burden of Responsibility: Blum, Camus, Aron, and the French Twentieth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 13. 4 turn for support to the only French organization capable of military action and one which was intimately involved in the protection of the French Empire, France’s only other available bargaining asset in the new relationship with a victorious Germany.