Chapter 17: The Cruel Summer of 1941"Comrades! Citizens! Brothers and Sisters! Combatants of our army and our fleet!
I address you, my friends!
The perfidious military aggression of Hitler's Germany, which began on June 22, continues against our Fatherland.
In spite of the heroic resistance of the Red Army, and in spite of the fact that the best divisions of the enemy and the best units of his air force have already been defeated and died on the battlefields, the enemy continues to rush forward, throwing new forces on the front."
Stalin, excerpt from the radio speech of July 3, 1941.Faced with the state of war with Germany and its satellites, Stalin appointed General Tymoshenko as head of the General Staff, but he can not take important decisions without the approval of the dictator.
It was decided to recall the reservists born between 1905 and 1918 and to move the industries to the east, to the Urals.
Churchill, who had explained on the radio that he would support the Soviet Union unreservedly, said in private that "If Hitler invaded hell, I would get along with the devil".
In Algiers, Mandel, who had announced his "unconditional" support for the USSR, was secretly preparing to do everything possible to limit Stalin's influence in Eastern Europe... with the help of his ministers.
To achieve this goal, the General, thinks that it will be necessary to play both show his strength but also seduce the dictator.
Moreover, he hoped to be able to count after the war on the USSR to contain Germany and it was therefore necessary to put an end to the extreme tension between Algiers and Moscow.
The French air force, which was now well equipped and had a large number of valiant pilots, could be the famous diplomatic weapon that France could use to get closer to Stalin [118].
De Gaulle immediately spoke with Ambassador Bogomolov and quickly reached an agreement.
This was the genesis of the "Normandy-Niemen" squadron.
But the General wanted to go even further. He called for the incorporation of communist ministers into the Mandel cabinet along with the other members of the government! Similarly, he insisted on obtaining the release of the Communist deputies detained in the Sahara in order to reintegrate them into the Chamber!
This return in force of the Communists is from now on the obsession of the very stubborn de Gaulle because it is part of the vast project aiming at bringing closer the republican France of the USSR, pledge of peace for the post-war period, in a kind of revival of the oriental pact of the very regretted Louis Barthou...
Roosevelt, for his part, informed the American nation on the radio that he would send aid to the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.
But some preferred to help Germany. This is notably the case of Franco who, although neutral and wanting to remain so, authorized the creation of an Azulde Division of Spanish volunteers for the Eastern Front.
For its part, Germany sought to turn Europe against "Bolshevism". Thus, in occupied Norway, the Germans formed a Legion of volunteers called Den Norske Legion, the Nordic Legion.
Sweden, although neutral and democratic, accepted the transit of a German division from Norway to Finland.
At the end of June 1941, on the front itself, the German army was advancing rapidly in the north[119] and in the center, where the former Polish fortress of Brest-Litovsk was resisting.
On the other hand, it faced fierce resistance in the south, where it was confronted with better prepared Soviet forces.
In the Baltic States, the Soviets launched a violent armored counter-attack against the panzer flanks but it failed because many tanks broke down while others went into battle without ammunition! Nevertheless, after having reached Dvinsk/Daugavpils in Latvia, these same panzer columns received the order to stop their advance to wait for the infantry.
In the south, the counter-offensive of the tanks of General Kirponos gave the same result. Despite the fact that the Soviets had three times as many tanks as their enemies, their assault failed because of the German artillery and the Luftwaffe although their attack slowed down the Germans.
In response to the aid given to Germany by Finland, the USSR launched a series of air attacks against Finnish airports and several Finnish cities. The Finnish army took action against the Soviet Union while Germany launched an offensive in the extreme north of the country to take Murmansk.
The Luftwaffe was in control of the skies, but faced desperate resistance from the Soviet air force, while Moscow underwent its first aerial bombardments.
On June 30, a State Defense Committee, headed by Stalin, was formed, reinforcing the centralization of power. It was formed by Molotov, Beria, Malenkov and Voroshilov.
Thus, in July, the United States, taking note of the new situation, took several more steps towards its own entry into the war alongside the Franco-British Allies by sending Marines to relieve the British garrison that had been present in Iceland since the invasion of Denmark in April 1940.
At the same time, the US Navy was ordered to protect any ship going to Iceland and therefore British and French ships.
At the same time, the United States recognized the Czechoslovak government in exile in London as the sole legal representative of Czechoslovakia, while Roosevelt asked Congress to extend military service in the army and the national guard from one year to 30 months.
Finally, Harry Hopkins, an advisor to President Roosevelt, arrived in Moscow to prepare the shipment of materials to the Soviet Union, while the Sikorski government signed an agreement with the USSR to re-establish diplomatic relations between the two countries.
In occupied France, the most pro-German faction of the collaborators created the LVF, Légion des Volontaires Français, to fight on the Eastern Front alongside the Germans.
However, Hitler was not happy with this help and did not want this army of volunteers to oblige him in any way whatsoever towards the government or rather the Laval clique. Moreover, he wanted to limit his numbers to 15,000 men.
In reality, the volunteers were very few in number, while the Germans, in addition to the reticence mentioned above, showed little enthusiasm for training men with no combat experience and little discipline.
Even better, Laval himself was disappointed to see the numbers of his "National Guard" melt away, as some of these traitors preferred to join the LVF rather than continue serving as a police force for the collaborating state.
Mussolini's Italy sent an expeditionary force under the command of General Messe to fight in the East.
On July 2, Emperor Hiro Hito of Japan convened a council of his country's top political and military leaders. It was decided that the country's future expansion policy would be at the expense of the West, while the war against the Soviet Union, despite Hitler's pressing demands in this regard, was postponed until later, depending on the success or otherwise of Barbarossa. It was the victory of the navy over the army.
However, the Americans, who knew how to decode Japanese messages, knew everything about the intentions of the Japanese government.
The next day, July 3, Stalin finally came out of his reserve and made a speech to the Soviet nation calling for resistance against the invader, as we have seen.
But it is not only by speeches that Stalin wishes to remotivate his troops. He once again assigned political commissars to the Soviet divisions, something that had been abolished in August 1940.
Although Finland had been at war since the Soviet bombardment at the end of June and the Germans had launched Operation Silberfuchs, "Polar Fox", in the direction of Murmansk from its territory on 22 June, it was not until July that the Finnish army launched its own offensive to recover Karelia, which had been lost at the end of the winter war.
In the North, the Soviets reorganized themselves. It is now Marshal Voroshilov who commands, assisted by General Vatounine, a brilliant officer. Their mission was to block the road to Leningrad for the Germans. Their intelligent counter-attacks on the flanks of the panzers put them in difficulty several times. The OKW orders once again the tanks to wait for the infantry before resuming their march towards the capital of the Bolshevik Revolution.
Worse, the logistic difficulties increase for the Germans while the roads are not sure because of the presence of debris of the Red Army on the back of the Wehrmacht. Moreover, Voroshilov can rely on the patriotic ardor of the inhabitants of Leningrad to compensate in part for the heavy losses suffered by the Red Army while the air force effectively supports the Soviet defenders and Voroshilov receives a large amount of equipment as reinforcements, including powerful KV tanks!
The fall of Leningrad before the end of the month appears as a chimera for the Germans ...
In the center, it is only after having resisted heroically for a month and suffered the fire of a German super mortar that the Soviet fortress of Brest-Litovsk capitulates.
However, the Germans were already attacking further west thanks to the daring assaults of the Hoth and Guderian panzers. Facing the Soviet commanders Eremenko and Timochenko, who reorganized their sector of the front, the Germans, after a hard battle, crossed the Dnieper on the 13th and entered Smolensk on the 19th.
But Guderian and Hoth only had eyes for Moscow and preferred to attack further east than to close off the pockets of Soviet troops they had managed to create.
Better still, Stalin ordered his generals to do everything possible to save their encircled troops and it was under the furious assaults of the Luftwaffe that they made their way east. This region of the front sees for the first time the use by the Red Army of the soon famous "Katyusha".
When on July 23, the Germans seized Elnya, on the Desna River, Stalin became afraid because it was the door to Moscow that was open to the Nazis. He immediately ordered Tymoshenko to retake the city. Certainly, it will be a failure, but the Germans are unable to continue their march to Moscow.
In the south, a war of attrition began and it was at the cost of severe difficulties that the Germans were about to close the Uman pocket at the cost of temporarily abandoning the objective of Kiev, the capital of the Ukraine.
At the same time, the Romanians have almost completed the reconquest of Bessarabia.
During the parade of July 14, 1941, a new war song came out of the lungs and hearts of the soldiers of the French Republic who were marching in Algiers, in front of the President of the Council, Georges Mandel, the Head of State, Albert Lebrun, and the members of the government (including General de Gaulle, who was seated next to the Head of Government) as well as the members of the General Staff.
Composed by Félix Boyer (evacuated from Metropolitan France in 1940, quite a symbol), it takes up a march of the Moroccan soldiers of the First World War but modifies the references to Morocco in favor of references to Africa in general.
I
We were in the depths of Africa,
Jealous guardians of our colors,
When under a magnificent sun
The victorious cry rang out:
Forward! Forward! Forward!
Refrain
It is us Africans
Who come back from afar,
We come from the colonies
To save the Fatherland (to defend the country)
We left everything
Our parents, our homes
And we keep in our hearts
An invincible ardor
For we want to carry high and proud
The beautiful flag of our whole France
And if someone should touch it,
We would be there to die at his feet
Beat drums, to our love,
For the country, for the fatherland, to die far away
It is us Africans!
II
For the salvation of our Empire,
We fight all the vultures,
Hunger and death make us smile
When we fight for our loves,
Forward! Forward! Forward!
Refrain
III
From all the horizons of France,
Grouped on the African ground,
We come for the deliverance
Which by us will be done tomorrow.
Forward ! Forward ! Forward !
Refrain
IV
And when the war ends,
We will return to our caves,
The joyful heart and the proud soul
To have liberated the Country
Shouting, singing : forward !
Refrain
This song was sung by all the hearts, by all the men who would one day liberate France, whether they came from Metropolitan France, Algeria or the rest of the Empire. This new song moved, it is said, General de Gaulle who, usually, never let his emotions show while the Algerian crowd, Muslim or Blackfoot, celebrated with great cheers its heroes who protected it from the fury of Germany and who had already defeated the Italians the previous year.
The "Chant des Africains" became the symbol of the France of Algiers, the "Chant du Départ" of 1941. Moreover, didn't the Collaborators contemptuously call the men of Algiers "Africans"? A nice nose-thumbing gesture to the traitors.
The lavalistic propaganda hastened to try to divert the meaning of the song once again by making it an act of submission by Mandel to the colonized, but the French, who were suffering every day under the German boot, obviously saw it as an act of hope. First of all, the hope of a forthcoming liberation and, even, the hope of the possibility of building a better world after the war. A world where the motto "Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité" (Liberty, Equality, Fraternity) would take on its full meaning, whether in France or elsewhere.
However, since the defeat, and even before, there has been an important return of the religious domain within the French Republic. Priests, pastors, rabbis and imams blessed military equipment and men at the beginning of the July 14 parade, while religious services and prayers in favor of the victory multiplied. We even see the vice-president of the council, Louis Marin, participating in the name of the government, and not in a personal capacity, in the masses given at Notre-Dame d'Afrique! This is the last straw for a secular republic!
This at least had the gift of rallying the most hesitant of French Catholics to the cause of freedom...
And it reinforces the choice of those who have been patriotic since the beginning.
The Primate of the Gauls, Mgr Gerlier, dared to defy the Lavalist authority on the same day by having his faithful read a letter in which he wrote that "The rights of the State have limits..." in relation to the persecution of the Jews in occupied France. Moreover, from the beginning of 1941, did he not organize escape routes to Spain for Jews and resistance fighters? It is true that Bishop Gerlier's last misgivings were overcome thanks to Pastor Marc Boegner, president of the national council of the new Reformed Church of France, who, in June 1940, organized the evacuation of Jacques Helbronner, president of the Consistoire central israélite de France, and Isaïe Schwartz, Grand-Rabbin of France, to the AFN.
In captive France, the hitherto peaceful and symbolic resistance was replaced by violent action.
On August 21, 1941, after the German invasion of the USSR, Pierre Georges, alias Colonel Fabien, a member of the Communist Party, shot a German soldier in the Paris subway[120], leading to a violent German reaction.
Indeed, the Nazis threatened to take 100 hostages, to execute half of them and then to expose their bodies at the Place de la Concorde (!) if the Laval government did not institute a special tribunal to judge the communists and the anarchists and did not accentuate the repression against these two movements, which they considered too soft!
Laval, taking the lead to satisfy the Germans, sent large reinforcements of national guards to Paris. But the Resistance fighters then retreated to the provinces, in this cat-and-mouse game between them and the occupiers/collaborators.
Mandel, fearing that the sudden enthusiasm of the communists for resistance would lead to a massacre, asked Blum, who was in Moscow for an inter-allied conference in September, to ask Stalin to order the French communists to reduce the scale of their anti-German attacks, out of an obvious concern to spare the lives of French citizens in the occupied Metropole, who were increasingly threatened by the Reich's hostage policy.
Stalin retorted that he could do nothing, that Algiers itself would have to ask the French communists to limit their actions to intelligence. He "suggests" that to obtain the rallying of the communists in Algiers, the French government will have to make concessions to them.
Blum obviously understands what Stalin is getting at, and on his return to Algiers, he will ask Mandel for the release of the Communist deputies still detained in the Sahara, permission for them to sit in the Chamber of Deputies again and even the appointment of several of them to his government.
At the same time, De Gaulle instructed D'Estienne d'Orves to make contact with the Communist networks and to integrate their representatives into the CNRI.
The following month, in October 1941, D'Estienne d'Orves began negotiations for the integration of the communist movements into the unified Resistance. But the Communists in Metropolitan France demanded, as a prerequisite for all discussions, that the Communist deputies be reinstated in their positions and that the PCF be represented in the Mandel government.
The same conditions that Stalin had spoken to Blum about the previous month...
Mandel, who every week saw the Germans execute 50 hostages for each of their soldiers killed by a communist militant, was obliged to give in but appointed communists to secondary posts. Maurice Thorez, back from the USSR, was appointed Minister of Telecommunications, Ambroise Croizat, Minister of Health, while Jacques Duclos joined the preparatory commission for the great political and social reforms planned for post-war France[121].
With their deputies reinstated and Party members appointed to the government, the Communists agreed to join the CNRI and to respect its instructions.
It was Pierre Villon who was initially intended to represent the PCF within the CNRI, but D'Estienne d'Orves, because of his own opinion but also on the orders of Algiers, asked that Charles Tillon be appointed in his place. Algiers had not forgotten the fact that Tillon had called for the Resistance as early as June 1940!
If de Gaulle had been listened to the day after the outbreak of Barbarossa, French lives could have been spared... Mandel, who was aware of this, began to get used to the idea of the need for a sincere Franco-Soviet rapprochement...
On August 1, the Sikorski-Bogomolov agreement was signed in Algiers concerning the reconstitution of a Polish army in the USSR. This one will be quickly transferred to the West, via Iran, because of the lack of mutual trust.
Why Iran?
The Allies, who decided to support the Soviet Union while being aware that supplying it from Vladivostok was impossible because of the Japanese threat and that maintaining a communication axis from Murmansk and Arkhangelsk, in the Arctic, would be very difficult, were looking at Iran. An ultimatum was sent to the Shah to accept the passage of Allied convoys through his country and to expel the Axis citizens present in his country.
Besides, why spare a country with Axis sympathies?
After the Shah rejected the ultimatum, the Soviet Union and the British army invaded Iran and swept it away in less than two weeks.
Emperor Reza Shah abdicated in favor of his son, Mohammed Reza Shah Pahlavi.
Despite the clear advantages of the operation, France only paid lip service to it.
Indeed, although Mandel clearly saw the vital interest of supplying the USSR and knew the pro-axis sympathy of the Iranian sovereign, the attack of a neutral state had everything to displease him, he who did not forget that his country had been invaded precisely because he was defending the independence of another state...
And to those who retorted that Clemenceau had not hesitated to violate Greek neutrality after the Dardanelles, he replied.
"I am not the Tiger. And, besides, our intervention had the approval of the majority of the Greek people, the venizelist faction! Here, I doubt that the Persians support a Western intervention, they who are so proud of never having been colonized, at least officially... "
The General knows better than anyone else Mandel's intentions for the Levant as the French call it, Middle East as the British call it. Indeed, shortly after Herriot's ouster, the President of the Council had decided to share with the General the project he had been maturing since April, when the coup d'état of the Golden Circle had partly turned his attention to this region.
A grandiose project, which would surely have revolted Herriot, and which would provoke the ire of Churchill and the English.
But which, as the head of the government explained to the General, is the kind of project that "gives France its reason to exist!"
"General, I intend to go to the Levant to meet with representatives of local elites. The society of nations had entrusted us with the mission, through the mandate it granted us over Syria and Lebanon, to lead its peoples to independence.
Well, let us be the first to keep our commitments to those we betrayed in 1920[122].
Once the terms of our withdrawal have been accepted by the local authorities, I will make a solemn speech in Damascus to announce that the Republic grants full sovereignty to these two nations.
Just as Léon Blum and his government had promised.
General, I know that your first thought is to think of a capitulation, but the events in Iraq show that the world has changed.
The Arabs want their freedom. Well, let's give it to them. Let's accompany them on the road to autonomy. I know they will be grateful.
I will go even further. A Balkanized Levant will not allow the Arabs to flourish. I also intend to meet with representatives of the Hashemites to discuss with them the constitution of a kingdom of Greater Syria, which would include not only the two Hashemite monarchies of Iraq and Transjordan, but also Syria, Lebanon, and Mandatory Palestine.
As for those who object that we are attacking British interests, I would reply, and you know this, General, that London has already betrayed our friendship in the region by sending agents to Syria, two of whom have already been arrested, to negotiate with the local nationalists in order to prepare riots against our presence there.
These idiots do not know that contrary to our plan, a British domination of the Levant would be of little interest to the locals.
Besides, the Hashemites, our allies in the previous conflict, are honorable warriors. Their attitude towards our soldiers during the 1920 revolt proved it. Only their benevolent tutelage will allow the establishment of a parliamentary regime and prevent the wind of the future revolt against the Western presence from leading to the establishment of nationalist dictatorships crushing the Christian, Kurdish and, you know what I am going to say, Jewish minorities.
My co-religionists have every intention of founding a "Jewish national home" in Palestine. They are already working on it, provoking the fury of the local Arabs.
It would be a permanent war, perhaps an alliance between Arabs and Nazis before the inevitable fall of Hitlerism.
Already, that Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Amin al-Husseini, allied with the Iraqis, took refuge in Berlin with Hitler.
In conclusion, I am not betraying the interests of my country. It is even in its interest that I act. By accompanying the people towards independence, it fulfills its mission."
De Gaulle is stunned. He understood the arguments of the president of the council. But he is not yet quite ripe for the new world that the president of the government predicts.
But he follows the path of obedience, and, no doubt, of clairvoyance. He immediately prepares Georges Mandel's trip to Syria.
With Hitler massively engaged in Russia, the Westerners, eager to prevent a Soviet collapse and to return to the Balkans, began to plan Operation Battleaxe[123], a landing in Greece!
Moreover, the German army began to face "maquis" in Yugoslavia, at first exclusively royalist, under the leadership of Colonel Draza Mihailovic, who had escaped captivity during the invasion, and then, from 22 June, also communist, under the leadership of Josip Broz, soon to be known by the pseudonym Tito.
The atrocities committed by the Ustasha militia of the independent Croatian state made the Serbian population rise up against the occupier.
The uprising was so massive that the Italians were forced to intervene to contain the genocidal enthusiasm of their Croatian "allies.
Some high-ranking officers even managed to tell Mussolini of their disgust at the Ustasha atrocities. The Duce thus authorized his officers to grant amnesty to Serbs who stopped fighting. In exchange, the Italian army would protect the villages.
Secretly, and Tito would soon seize this opportunity to accuse him of collusion with the occupiers, Mihailovic made a secret agreement with General Ambrosio, commander of the Italian occupation forces, and undertook not to attack the Italian troops if they kept their promise to defend the Serbian villages against the Croats.
Moreover, anxious to limit Nazi reprisals against Yugoslav civilians, Mihailovic limited his actions to intelligence.
Tito, on the other hand, did not care, and multiplied his attacks against the occupier. What did it matter to him that civilians were shot, because the more the Nazis massacred, the more the revolt grew, which allowed him to swell his numbers...
Thus, when a meeting between Tito and Draza Mihajlovic took place in September 1941 in Struganik, Yugoslavia, the differences between the two movements appeared too deep and no agreement was reached. The main difference was what the post-war Yugoslavia should be.
A federation, as the Communists wanted?
Or a centralized state, as the monarchist wants?
Soon, the divergence will give way to hatred and the two groups will go so far as to fight each other!
Nevertheless, Algiers, mainly, decides to support thoroughly the monarchist resistants faithful to the government of Peter II by sending them supplies as well as military advisers. The Mandel government will also do everything to prevent some of them from joining the Axis forces to fight the Partisans.
German troops in Minsk (Byelorussian SSR)
Source: German Federal Archives.
[118] It should be noted that De Gaulle had initially envisaged sending ground troops, but that Mandel, several ministers and Noguès were virulently opposed.
[119] In which it took advantage of the Lithuanian uprising against the Red Army before taking measures against the Lithuanian National Council.
[120] Barbès-Rochechouart station
[121] Where he was the only communist representative
[122] To be perfectly objective, Mandel is mistaken. The first mandate, a British one, to obtain its "independence" was Iraq.
[123] Originally, the British had named the operation Crusader, which the French had considered a poor idea, while in this country the memory of the Frankish treason of 1204 is still so vivid... (Cf:
)
Emille Ollivier's notes: Mandel's idea is very similar to the text of Thomas' contest. In fact, I was inspired by "The Reign of Napoleon IV" where the emperor supports the creation of a vast Arab empire, to the fury of London.
For the nobility of the Hashemites towards our troops, I am simply telling a family story. In 1920, my great-grandfather got lost while on patrol in Syria. He was picked up by Bedouins who showed him the way to the French post. During his debriefing, the officers explained to him that he had come across nothing less than the leader of the Arab revolt himself!
