French children under the Allied bombs, 1940–45: An oral history

By Lindsey Dodd

Provides a unique perspective on the Allied bombing of France during the Second World War which killed around 57,000 French civilians. Using oral history and archival research, it provides an insight into children's wartime lives in which bombing often featured prominently, even though it has slipped out of French collective memory.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Release date: Jun 1, 2016
• ISBN: 9781784997854

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French children under the Allied bombs, 1940–45

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Cultural History of Modern War

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French children under the Allied bombs, 1940–45

An oral history

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LINDSEY DODD

Manchester University Press

Copyright © Lindsey Dodd 2016

The right of Lindsey Dodd to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

BBC copyright material reproduced courtesy of the British Broadcasting Corporation. All rights reserved.

Published by Manchester University Press

Altrincham Street, Manchester M1 7JA

www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data applied for

ISBN 978 0 7190 9704 1 hardback

First published 2016

The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Typeset by Out of House Publishing

Contents

List of figures

Acknowledgements

List of abbreviations

Introduction

1 Telling stories

Part I: Expecting bombing

2 Expecting war

3 Preparing for bombs

Part II: Experiencing bombing

4 Being bombed

5 An evolving response

6 In the aftermath

7 The consequences of bombing

Part III: Explaining bombing

8 Explaining bombing to the public

9 Explaining bombing to children

10 Friends, enemies and the wider war

Evaluating bombing: a conclusion

Appendix: biographical profiles

Bibliography

Index

Figures

1 Pre-war Défense Passive manual (n.d.): ‘French people – for your safety consult this brochure. The ABC of Défense Passive.’ Archives municipales de Boulogne-Billancourt, 6H3.

2 Interviewee Michel Jean-Bart survived the air raid of 10 April 1944 here, in his family home, rue Pierre Fosfer in the railway workers’ housing estate at La Délivrance (Lomme), near to Lille. Used with kind permission of the Jean-Bart family.

3 Interviewee Danielle Durville lived here in the rue François Garnier in Boulogne-Billancourt, until the building was destroyed in the air raid of 3 March 1942. Archives municipales de Boulogne-Billancourt, 2 Fi 4302.

4 The first convoy of children evacuated from Boulogne-Billancourt arriving in Guéret in the Creuse in April 1943 after a long train journey. Archives départementales de la Creuse, 987W.110.

5 Anti-allied propaganda denouncing the RAF. The babies’ dummies that the airman holds are described as the ‘scalps’ he has taken. Archives départementales du Nord, 1W.4696.8.

6 Memorial in Hellemmes, near to Lille. The inscription reads: ‘The commune of Hellemmes to the civilian victims of the bombing, 1940–1944.’ Author’s photograph.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank all of the institutions and individuals who have made the writing and the publication of this book possible.

Without the interviewees, who so generously allowed me to come to their homes and shared their memories with me, this research would not have been possible. I hope that, despite the linguistic boundary that comes from publishing in English, this is, to some extent, their book too. I will not thank each by name here. However, I am indebted to them, and have happy memories of the hours I spent in their houses, where they gave me a stronger sense of the value of this research with every cup of coffee and every biscuit offered: their stories matter, and it mattered to them that I wanted to listen.

Some of these interviewees have sadly passed away since I conducted this research. Some relatives have contacted me to say how pleased they are to have their stories, recorded and given back on CDs. I received an email in February 2012 from a relative of one interviewee telling me that his father-in-law

had a fond memory of your visit, and he mentioned you from time to time. He is now sharing that memory with other members of our family who were present of the time of that air raid [in March 1942]. You can be sure that you have a warm supporter watching over you from beyond.

This gives some indication of the value of doing research into the lives of ordinary people, not only for historians trying to understand the complexity of the past, but for those who lived through it and their families.

My doctoral research, on which this book is based, was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council as part of a project which ran between 2007 and 2010: ‘Bombing, States and People in Western Europe, 1940–1945’. I am enormously grateful for the many opportunities this funding brought. I would like to thank all members of the project team, particularly Richard Overy, Andrew Knapp, Claudia Baldoli and Marc Wiggam. I was lucky to work with such a creative and talented group of scholars as part of my induction into this profession.

I could not have asked for a better PhD supervisor than Andrew Knapp, whose support, encouragement and enthusiasm still endure, as well as his faith in my ability and my methods. I learnt an enormous amount from him, and am also very grateful for the generosity with which he shared his own research with me. I owe my second supervisor Martin Parsons a great deal too; his insistent advocacy for the plight of children in war introduced me to this important area of research, in which I continue to work. I would also like to thank Robert Gildea and Hilary Footitt, who examined my thesis and gave me the confidence to believe that it was publishable.

I thank the Department of French Studies at the University of Reading, where I spent three happy years conducting this research, as well as the History subject area in the School of Music, Humanities and Media at the University of Huddersfield, where I have worked since 2012. My colleagues are dedicated and impressive in so many ways, and I have learnt a lot from them all. I should also make mention of the enthusiasm of the undergraduates I have been teaching at Huddersfield who make this job much more enjoyable.

My interest in the Vichy era began during my A-Levels through the wonderful teaching of Sylvia Mills at Charters School. This accounted in part for my choice of the University of Sussex for my undergraduate degree, where, like so many others, I was inspired by Rod Kedward’s ‘Fall of France’ module. While writing my undergraduate dissertation on the École Nationale des Cadres d’Uriage, I became intrigued by the complexity of oral evidence, and as a result took the MA in Life History Research: Oral History and Mass-Observation at the University of Sussex. Under the dynamic supervision of Al Thomson and Dorothy Sheridan, I developed a genuine excitement for the subtlety, warmth, depth and scope of oral history.

I would like to thank the anonymous readers of this manuscript, as well as Joanna Bornat for her insightful suggestions and for sharing unpublished work with me. Special thanks go to my colleague Rebecca Gill who gave me constructive criticism and sensible advice about my writing. This is a better book because of her.

I am grateful to the team at Manchester University Press for taking on this project, and for providing guidance and help. My appreciation also extends to the helpfulness of archivists at municipal and departmental archives in Boulogne-Billancourt, Lille and Brest; in particular, un grand merci à Françoise Bédoussac at the Archives municipales de Boulogne-Billancourt whose interest in my research across the years has remained constant and most encouraging. Thanks are also due to the BBC for permission to publish extracts from the wartime French Service radio scripts and to Miriam Cendrars for permission to make use of her radio scripts. I also thank Hervé Cadiou and Henri Descamps for their invaluable assistance finding interviewees in Brest and Lille.

For friendship and much-needed light relief during the years spent conducting this research, my thanks go to Harper Ray, Melanie Duarte, Rachel Callender, Julia Suffield and Daniel Cummins; and for good friendships that have sustained me more recently, Janette Martin and Duncan Stone. Heide Kunzelmann and Valeska Hass have given wise and warm counsel and good breakfasts. I also thank my very dear COBs wholeheartedly: Rhian Hepple, Sarah Hillier, Stephanie Irwin, Ali Kurn, Emma Reddy, Andrea Saunders and Wendy Shepherd. And I could not have done this without Clare Forder’s constant friendship and advice.

Finally, I thank my family. My doctoral thesis was dedicated to my grandmother, Winifred Grimes, who also knew what it was like to be bombed. She sadly died before this book could appear. Since childhood, my brother Antony Dodd has had a big influence on me; I thank him and admire his work enormously. I have dedicated this book to my parents, Ann and John Dodd, who have been unfailingly supportive of everything I do and have done, and gave me the means to achieve happiness in my life. I am profoundly grateful for their conversation, creativity and curiosity, as well as their love. To conclude, my heartfelt thanks go to Benjamin Bâcle, who just makes everything better.

Abbreviations

Introduction

Édith Denhez: My mother had to go out. We didn’t live in the countryside, so although we had ration cards we had very little bread, very little of anything. So she took her bike, and she said ‘I’m going to get us some food’. My older brother, he went to a Catholic school in the town centre. It was a Thursday, the air raid (because for us, there’s only one air raid, that one on the Thursday). So it was Thursday, and there was no school, but there was a tea party organised by [my brother’s] school, and my brother wanted to go, but my mother didn’t want him to. She said to Jacques, ‘You can’t go to the tea party. I don’t want you going out like that, all alone’. And she rode off on her bike. And then Jacques, he sneaked out. And I ask myself even today, and I ask myself often, it’s a question I ask myself all the time: did he leave while my mother was still at home, and we hid it from her? It’s a question I ask myself all the time, I don’t know if my sister asks herself, because I feel really very guilty, and that’s not right, to feel guilty because Jacques went out when he shouldn’t have done. But I wish I knew. He wasn’t allowed to go out, and I should have said to Mum ‘Jacques has gone out!’ If she was still there. But I don’t remember now.¹

Édith Denhez’s older brother Jacques was killed in April 1944, one of around 60,000 civilians in France to lose their lives under the Allied bombs during the Second World War.² Jacques was just twelve years old. The family’s home town of Cambrai in northern France was bombed as part of the Transportation Plan of spring 1944, which targeted the rail network. This preventative campaign was intended to hamper German reinforcements when the Allies landed on D-Day, but it also caused a large number of French civilian bombing casualties. Churchill was rightly concerned: Allied success depended on a friendly French population. While the Transportation Plan proved the severest test of civilian morale under aerial attack, bombs had been falling on France since 1940. North and south, east and west, coastline, town and village: so many places knew the sound of sirens, the whistle of bombs; so many people understood their impact. Although this impact was violent and deadly, it was also evidence that the Allies fought on, that the bombers grew stronger and that liberation was coming.

Édith can only partially remember the sequence of events leading up to the moment Jacques left the house. She has replayed them in her mind for 65 years, sharing them only with her sister. Her husband Jean heard them with me for the first time in our interview in April 2009. Historian Jean-François Muracciole has described the Allied bombing as ‘the last black hole in French collective memory of the Second World War’.³ While bombing is prominent and meaningful in private memories of childhood survivors, and in family and local memory, he rightly notes that its victims have been ‘largely ignored’ at a national level. This stands in stark contrast to the British experience of the Blitz, which acts as a lieu de mémoire and the backbone of national identity emerging from the Second World War. In France, five times more people were killed by bombing than were shot in German reprisals for acts of resistance, yet les fusilés are commemorated in plaques and statues across France. Resistance and collaboration have dominated versions of ‘the dark years’ in France for so long that bombing has, in many cases, slipped out of view. Bombing neither acts a lieu de mémoire nor exists inside those ‘vectors of memory’ – the ‘conduits’ of performed memory, such as film, commemoration or public debates – which carry memory forward into the present.⁴ The uncommemorated victims of bombing are not just its dead. They include those injured or made homeless, or those bereaved like Édith and her family. Yet the absence of a public, national discourse on the Allied bombing of France has left people like Édith with unresolved memories: how can she find comfort, reason or public respect for Jacques’ death and for events that blighted her childhood if they are scarcely acknowledged? National commemoration can help heal wounds, and the wounds of bombing are only now beginning to be dressed.

The disastrous French military campaign of May–June 1940 saw 1.5 million French soldiers taken prisoner, and the upheaval of perhaps eight million Belgian and French civilians fleeing invasion. The eighty-four-year-old war hero Marshal Philippe Pétain became leader of an authoritarian, undemocratic French State after the Third Republic committed suicide on 10 July 1940. The Armistice with Hitler that withdrew France from combat also fixed extortionate reparations payments, vastly restricted military capacity and divided the country into the northern Occupied Zone and the southern ‘Free’ Zone. While the Germans plundered French industry and agriculture, from the spa town of Vichy Pétain began his National Revolution. Met enthusiastically in conservative quarters, Pétain’s project, with its home-grown anti-Semitism, would progressively draw France deeper into collaboration with Germany. Key to occupation and collaboration was economic exploitation: infrastructure, industry and seaboard were harnessed to the Nazi war machine and thus became targets for bombs. As Pétain lost control at the helm, France was steered by others, with an increasing ideological commitment to fascist and Nazi ideals resulting in the deportation of around 76,000 Jews from France, most of whom were murdered. Alongside collaboration, resistance developed: equally home-grown, and equally a mixture of the pragmatic and the ideological. Whether fighting against occupation, authoritarianism, collaboration, forced labour, anti-Semitism or combinations thereof, both the internal resistance in France and Charles de Gaulle’s Free French, acting first from London and then from Algeria, developed piecemeal, but grew in the latter years of the period. Collaboration and resistance continue to form the dominant narratives of understanding war in France, although new works such as Daniel Lee’s study of Jewish youth in Vichy France explicitly seek to loosen the historiographical ties that these narratives have bound around versions of the past.⁵

With continental Europe overrun by the Wehrmacht, bombing became the sole means for Britain to continue offensive warfare. The Allied bombing of France is little discussed in France, and it is no better known in Britain or America. The complex moral choices involved in attacking a non-combatant nation and the ambiguous nature of the Allies’ relationship with France have clouded over this aspect of the war in the air. The first targets in France from July 1940 were German barges amassing on the coast in preparation to invade Britain, and airfields in northern France. Throughout the war, RAF (Royal Air Force) Bomber Command bombed a range of French targets in line with campaigns taking place elsewhere. For example, the Battle of the Atlantic led to attacks first on German surface raiders docked at Brest until February 1942, and then heavy raids on the Atlantic ports of Brest, Lorient, Saint-Nazaire, La Pallice and Bordeaux in early 1943, which intended to destroy the U-boat bases. The RAF and the United States Army Air Forces (USAAF) attacked industrial targets across France, including the southern zone from November 1942, which were manufacturing or subcontracting for the Third Reich. A fifth of the bombs that fell on France were aimed at V-weapon launch sites in northern France. Rail installations were attacked throughout the war, and the campaign intensified in advance of D-Day as the Transportation Plan made its mark. Bombers also provided support for ground troops on and after 6 June 1944, striking towns and villages across Normandy. Finally, during the period of liberation, massive air raids were used to force the surrender of ‘nests’ of Nazis, ferociously holding onto the port towns. Eighty per cent of all raids on France took place during 1944. Yet for some, bombing had been part of daily life since 1940.

The study of everyday life in France during the Vichy years is a field still growing. For example, recent work by Shannon L. Fogg, Nicole Dombrowski Risser and Julia S. Torrie is testament to a growing interest in the political dimensions of everyday life. Torrie’s work in particular shifts the discussion significantly towards civilian rather than daily life: it recognises that much of the French population lived in a war zone for part or all of the period. All three historians concern themselves with the ways in which the French population acted when confronted with the repercussions of the continuing war: agency existed and mattered, and civilian demands for protection and aid demonstrate a growth in popular consciousness of individual and family rights vis-à-vis their government at war. In studies of daily life that also include Dominique Veillon’s Vivre et survivre en France, 1939–1947 or Hanna Diamond’s work on the 1940 exodus, fear is omnipresent, but so are coping, ingenuity, persistence and adaptation: those living the experience are actors in its evolution.⁶ Robert Gildea rightly noted that French civilians were ‘more than traumatised souls lining up for bread or dodging bombs’.⁷ His mention of bombs here is important: in all these studies of civilian life, bombing serves as a backdrop, but has never been at the centre of scholarly analysis.

Since 2007, Andrew Knapp’s meticulous documentation of the Allied bombing of France, its mechanisms, intentions and consequences in French society has led the new turn towards understanding events that had previously seemed peripheral to the main action. His analysis, both overarching and minute, of archives across France provides a framework in which to situate individual experience.⁸ In this book, I examine the Allied bombing of France as experienced on the ground to understand its impact on the lives it touched, particularly children’s lives. Total war brought children into contact with war’s aggression and violence as never before. How were children in France during the Second World War affected by bombs? How has it marked the adults they became? What was the nature of this bombing? Were people prepared for it? How did they adapt to it? How did people tolerate and survive the chaos devastation brought? Which children understood why it was happening to them? How do survivors view bombs and bombers today? And why does this subject have such a low profile in public discourse on the Second World War in France, and yet a strong place in personal and local memory? To answer these questions, I examined archival material from municipal and departmental archives from the towns of Boulogne-Billancourt, Brest and Lille. These archives, full of reports, circulars, letters and posters, reveal the administrative framework within which events occurred and illuminate the responses and actions of municipality, département and state. But they contain few voices of bombed people, and none of children. In 2009 I interviewed thirty-six French people who were bombed as children, most of them from the three case-study towns and some from elsewhere; these interviews provide a way into micro-level responses to and retrospective interpretations of bombing in the lives of ordinary people.

Édith Denhez’s story shows us that every one of the 60,000 deaths was meaningful: a real person, a real family and a real, very powerful and lasting impact. She and her sister sheltered in terror from the heavy air raid in a neighbour’s cellar. In the shock of the aftermath

We waited for Mum, my sister and I. And when she came back, she said ‘Where’s Henri?’ Well, Henri was with the neighbours, so she went to fetch him. ‘And Jacques?’ We didn’t know. Evening came, and Jacques didn’t come home. My dad was away at that time, I can’t remember why. My mother took her three remaining children, and she took us, oh, I don’t know, about two or three kilometres from home, to my Aunt Lucie’s. On the road, she stopped everyone – and this is etched on my memory – ‘Have you seen a little lad, blond with glasses?’ She said that to everyone we met. Well, we didn’t really understand. We stayed one night with our aunt, and then she took us to her sister-in-law’s house, who agreed to look after us. She took us three there, and still no Jacques. Then one of the priests from the school, he was helping to clear up the bombed houses near the railway depot and he recognised Jacques, who’d been killed there. He was with thirteen other people. And after, I heard that – I didn’t know at the time, not straight away – his fingertips were all cut because he’d been trying to scrabble through a gap into the cellar of the house next door.

Jacques died, a child fighting to survive; Édith survived, a child whose life was irrevocably changed, and a woman whose memories haunt her. But why should this study prioritise children? First, bombing brought offensive warfare directly into the home, and it affected children in specific ways, not least when they were evacuated alone. Second, children are absent from a great deal of research on wartime France, in contrast to elsewhere; this study is thus a step towards a better understanding of their experiences. And third, these war children are still alive today and affected by what happened. They carry the memory of this war, and are sometimes vocal, but have often remained silent about a formative period of their lives made shameful through the acts of adults in the past.

Children, bombing and France

During the Second World War in France, children comprised just over a quarter of the population.⁹ I have taken ‘children’ to mean those aged sixteen and younger. Until 1941, the E, J1 and J2 ration categories only covered those up to and including thirteen-year-olds; fourteen and older was categorised as A (adult). From 1941, as a result of ongoing nutritional research, the new J3 ration category was introduced for those aged fourteen to twenty-one. While wartime rationing as well as compulsory school attendance ended childhood at fourteen, some youngsters remained in education, in apprenticeships, or in low-paid work that kept them at home. They were tied into family finances as dependents or contributors to a group budget. The age of penal majority was eighteen, but a person was considered ‘responsible’ for their actions from sixteen. ‘Child’ is not a simple category, but shifts according to class, geography and gender, as well as over time.

The history of childhood and the history of children in the past are different, but related. Childhood is a cultural construction of a period of the lifecycle. It is more accessible for historians as it leaves traces through which the external elements that shaped children’s worlds can be discerned, such as education, children’s literature, child health policies, toys and games, childrearing guidance and so on; all are created by adults for or about children. They show the place of children within society; indeed, childhood is often used to comment on adult society, politics and ideology.¹⁰ Yet studying being a child in the past presents many obstacles, largely because children leave few written traces of their own. I have gathered versions of childhood through oral history, but the people I interviewed were, of course, adults.

The twentieth century’s total wars thrust their way into the domestic space, affecting children as never before. Bombing is just one potentially traumatising trigger in war. Trauma has a number of symptoms specific to children, which alter according to the child’s stage of development. In children under five, traumatic events may provoke anxious attachment behaviour and a loss of recently learnt behaviours, such as toilet training or speech. From around five or seven years old to about twelve, other responses begin to show. These children can identify with physical pain in others, and are more likely to have psychosomatic responses. Eth and Pynoos remark upon the ‘devastating consequences on personality of trauma’ during the adolescent years, where feelings of rage, shame and betrayal can lead to self-destructive behaviour.¹¹ Trauma has far-reaching consequences in children’s lives, and war is a mass of traumatising possibilities.

The historical study of children in war has developed more fully in countries other than France, covering different angles, often determined by national war experiences. In Britain, for example, evacuation looms large. Other forms of displacement and separation, child health and welfare reforms, and the fate of children of collaborators or children born of occupation are common themes in war child studies.¹² Tara Zahra’s transnational study of children in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War provides a useful analysis of the impact of that war on Europe’s children.¹³ It joins the growing body of work on child-saving in the twentieth century, with an emphasis on children in ideological relation to family and nation.¹⁴ A great deal of research has been undertaken into child survivors of the Holocaust. Yet it is in Germany, with a complicated relationship to its own history, where Jewish children suffered excessively, and gentile children were part of the perpetrator society, but also suffered from bombing, displacement, deprivation, parental separation and/or fatherlessness, that ‘war children’ have had most exposure. Subjects for psychologists and historians, and popular with publishers, the Kriegskinder have had a public presence over the past twenty-five years.¹⁵ Yet French children also lived through bombing, persecution, displacement, separation and deprivation, but their experiences are less visible.

Sometimes historians have used policy towards young people to shed light on the ideology and policies of the Vichy regime. Women’s history has provided insight into the structures of childhood, although children then feature as secondary to their mothers, the concern being rather with gender roles or the impact of child-bearing and rearing on women’s political status.¹⁶ Studies of Vichy and youth policy have been conducted by Halls, Giolitto and Dereymez, and most recently Lee, yet we must be wary here, as ‘youth’ is that group between children and adults.¹⁷ Nicholas Atkin’s work has taught us about Vichy’s education policies and Rémy Handourtzel’s about school, while Judith Proud illustrated some of Vichy’s literary propaganda for children, and Penny Brown sketched out the main themes of children’s literature during this period.¹⁸ These studies tell us about adults’ intentions not children’s actions. Laura Lee Downs’ work on children’s holiday camps includes some qualitative material but concentrates more on structure and policy; she has also used the 1939 child evacuation in France to reveal attitudes towards childrearing.¹⁹ Similarly, given the broad scope of her work, Torrie’s comparison of civilian evacuation in Germany and France limits treatment of French children’s experience to a few pages that hint at the complexity and range of schemes set up for children, but cannot be comprehensive.²⁰

Throughout, we learn what was done to children, not what children did. Very few scholarly studies have treated the subjectivity of individual experience, although one exception is Sarah Fishman’s The Battle for Children.²¹ While her emphasis is on the continuities in juvenile justice policy between Vichy and the post-war era, a biographical and case-study approach focuses attention on unknown historical actors themselves, and suggests the ways in which individual children and adolescents experienced defeat and war in France. Children’s agency within society is limited; clearly they do not make policy. Yet scholarship across the disciplines, including history, recognises now that children are agents. Although their life-worlds are limited by lack of knowledge or experience, their activities, culture and voices make a valid and useful contribution to our understanding. As