The Second Fall of France

The Second Fall of France The people of the United States can hardly believe that the present Government of France could be brought to lend itself to a plan of voluntary alliance implied or otherwise which would apparently deliver up France and its colonial empire, including French African colonies and their Atlantic coasts with the menace which that involves to the peace and safety of the Western Hemisphere.

So said Franklin Roosevelt last week in an appeal to the French people. Yet obviously he believed it, Washington believed it. Petain's announcement of new French collaboration with Germany (see p. 27) meant that Hitler's legions would soon be at Dakar, eyeing the Western Hemisphere across the narrowest part of the Atlantic.

If this belief were true, as it appeared to be, the second fall of France was the worst defeat that the democracies had suffered since the summer of 1940. The President's appeal to the French people over the heads of their Government, his sending Coast Guardsmen aboard French ships--15 of them including the great Normandie--in American harbors, did not redress the situation.

In the President's appeal to the French there was a hint that the U.S. might go considerably further. In that he said: "We have had assurances given by the head of the French State . . . that it did not intend to agree to any collaboration with Germany which went beyond the requirements of . . . [the] armistice agreement. This was the least that could be expected of a France which demanded respect for its integrity. ..." If the U.S. no longer felt called upon to respect the integrity of France, there were steps that could be taken. Interventionist Senator Pepper emerged from the White House and declared that the U.S. should seize Dakar and the French possessions in the Caribbean and South America as a measure of hemispheric defense. These, he said, were his own views.

Like Senator Pepper, Military Pundit George Fielding Eliot declared: "We have ample forces available for [the seizure of Dakar] . . . and the scale of resistance to be expected now is far less than it will be if we wait until the Germans are there in force. . . . But we must act now, while there is time. Tomorrow is certainly going to be too late. . . ." If the President even thought of taking Dakar with the weak U.S. Atlantic Fleet (see p. 22) he gave no sign of it. At his first press conference in two weeks, showing no signs of his illness except in his paleness and his testy answers, the President dodged questions about France, about the possibility of the U.S. taking over Martinique, about convoys.

But he answered at length when asked if the U.S. would respect the German warning that the Red Sea (which the President had declared open to U.S. shipping) was now a zone of warfare. The U.S., he said, had fought undeclared wars for the freedom of the seas. He mentioned the Barbary pirates and the commerce raiders of the West Indies with which the infant U.S. Navy had fought something like 101 separate engagements before U.S. shipping was safe.

If either Hitler or the President was bluffing, it seemed certain that the bluff would be called, for last week U.S. ships bearing supplies for Britain were preparing for their journey into the Red Sea--ships that would be plainly lighted, painted with the U.S. flag--and if Adolf Hitler should sink them, by submarine, by raider, or from his newly acquired air bases in Syria, the issue of the freedom of the seas would be joined.

But as yet there was no sign that the second fall of France would push Franklin Roosevelt to action.

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