DE GAULLE’S 1941 COUP
In the predawn hours of Christmas Eve 1941, four warships closed in on their target: a small archipelago of eight rocky islands off the southern coast of Newfoundland. While the United States and Great Britain at that moment were organizing a multi-national alliance against Nazi Germany and the empire of Japan, this was a different operation altogether. The target was French, the invaders were French, the enemy was French, and the isolated residents designated for liberation were French.
The ships—four Flower-class corvettes and a giant, one-of-a-kind cruiser submarine armed with twin 8-inch naval guns—were manned by 330 French sailors who had eagerly volunteered for the secret mission. Officially, they were a French component of the Royal Navy’s Western Approaches Command in Liverpool, a fleet of more than 300 escort ships responsible for protecting merchant convoys traveling between North America and the British Isles.
On this day, however, the warships were following orders from someone else: an exiled French army officer who had renounced his country following its surrender to Nazi Germany. Eighteen months after he announced the creation of les
Forces françaises libres—the Free French—in a broadcast from London on June 18, 1940, Brigadier General Charles André Joseph Marie de Gaulle had just launched his own war against the collaborationist government of Vichy France.
The news that French sailors were landing on the two islands exploded like a bomb.
Under the ruse of a routine training mission, Vice Admiral Émile Muselier, de Gaulle’s naval commander in chief, had traveled from London to Halifax, Nova Scotia, where he had ordered the warships to sea. Rather than carrying out routine U-boat tracking exercises, the force steamed steadily east-northeast on the 330-mile voyage into the Gulf of Saint Lawrence and toward the French territory they intended to liberate.
In the end, the mission to the archipelago islands of Saint Pierre and Miquelon—the oldest French possession in the Western Hemisphere—would have scant military impact on the wider global war. But the political consequences for the Western Alliance would be profound. The incident occurred as the critical Arcadia Conference between U.S. president Franklin D. Roosevelt and British prime minister Winston S. Churchill was entering its third day in Washington, D.C.
Less than three weeks after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor propelled the United States into World War II, Churchill had braved the German U-boats to cross the North Atlantic for a summit with Roosevelt. Arriving in Hampton Roads, Virginia, aboard the newly commissioned battleship Duke of York, Churchill and his staff had arrived in Washington on December 22, where they immediately met with Roosevelt and his commanders to wrestle with a host of difficult issues confronting the new wartime alliance.
The mood in Washington was dire. In the Pacific, Japanese troops had invaded the Philippines, Borneo, Thailand, Burma, Malaya, and the Chinese cities of Hong Kong and Shanghai and had taken U.S.-held Guam and Wake Island—all in less than three weeks. In western Europe, the swastika flew over the capitals of five conquered nations, and the German army at the six-month milestone of Operation Barbarossa had overrun most of eastern Europe and was entrenched at the outskirts of Moscow. At sea, German U-boats were hunting allied merchant ships from South Africa to the coast of Labrador.
The Arcadia Conference participants were
