For people who take the Hollywood pictures as gospel the Second World War was essentially one “set of good guys”, being the allies, versus one “set of bad guys”, being the axis. The reality was far more interesting. Alliances were not as static as is what has been portrayed in such simplistic Hollywood war film formulae or the stories we all enjoyed in our childhood comics.
Not quite standing alone
At no point was Britain alone in facing the Axis threat from the European continent. From the beginning the combined forces of the Dominions and Commonwealth were present but Britain also had two other principal allies that joined and left at various stages. These were France and the Soviet Union. The former was an ally that that became for all intents an adversary and the latter started the war in collaboration with the Nazis to be later courted by the British.
France
By the middle of 1940 the allies were in full retreat. A month after the Dunkirk evacuation France had signed an armistice with Nazi Germany that would establish a “new order” and new political climate in France and her overseas territories. This new order saw a shift to an Anglo-phobic attitude and the establishment of pro-German authoritarian regime under Petain.
Britain and France: The pre-war alliance
There was always underlying tension in Franco-British relations. As recent as the 1890s both nations almost come to blows over the Fashoda incident due to colonial rivalry. However, the Entente Cordiale of 1904 and the World War I alliance managed to put a plaster of sorts over such differences, but there still deep down remained the old suspicions as demonstrated in 1925 in the Treaty of Lausanne and disagreements over the treatment of Weimar Germany.
However, these differences did not prevent these two nations from collaborating again in the face of a growing and repeat threat from Germany. Britain and France were to form a military alliance to contain German aggression in 1939 but by June 1940 this came to an end with French defeat and subsequent armistice.
Tensions already existed and were growing even before the allied armies were awaiting evacuation from Dunkirk and considering surrender terms. During the life of the allied alliance, as France saw herself contributing most of the land forces compared to a smaller British contribution who had, by the time of Dunkirk, only contributed less than ten divisions, one tenth of the allied force. Further reluctance to commit the RAF fighters as events turned even more impossible meant France saw Britain as only looking out for her own interests and not fully committed to the alliance. The actions and the clumsy rhetorical manner of some of the British high command, primarily Lord Gort, did little to persuade the French that the British had no other reasons than self-preservation.
French soldiers were repatriated from British shores back to their home soil less than a week after the mass evacuation, with no commitment of significant British forces. It was very much now seen as a separate battle of France and a separate battle of Britain with France being left to her fate. Churchill, to restore faith and confidence, offered a union of the two nations but Petain likened it to being “fused with a corpse” and senior ministers considered “better a Nazi province at least we know what that means”. To say it was a non-starter would be an understatement and so the Vichy Government was formed.
Life after the French Surrender - Vichy
Once the armistice was signed a defeated France adopted an Anglo-phobic stance and established a near fascist state seeking parity with Germany and a part in the New Order. British and French forces would soon clash in various areas of the globe.
The British were concerned that the French Navy and the French colonies would be utilized by the axis against Britain. Churchill feared the Nazis would demand the surrender of the French Fleet. Unbeknown to Britain, Germany at the time did not require the surrender of the fleet but German intentions offered no reassurances and so the British warned the French to surrender or face destruction of their fleet as a last resort, which the British navy high command were loathe to do. The French refused to surrender the fleet and so hostilities commenced.
Fighting with the French – “an old and new adversary”
The first clash in July 1940 was in very limited scale and saw four casualties with three deaths (British) from small arms fire in Devonport, Plymouth as the Royal Navy boarded the destroyer Sarcouf which was docked in British waters. A wider scale operation named Operation catapult a few weeks later saw the destruction of a large part of the French Fleet and the deaths of 1,300 French sailors at Mers-Al-Kebir, Algeria. The political damage was more severe and the propaganda value to the Nazis was invaluable. The French were in an unforgiving mood.
In September 1940 the loyalty to Vichy and unforgiving attitude to the British had reached the far reaches of the French Empire. The British and a Free French force were repulsed at the French colony in Dakar, Senegal. What was apparent was not only hatred for the British but also dislike for the De Gaulle’s Free French movement whom his countrymen seemed to largely view as a traitor. In retaliation to this attack French bombers flew two sorties over Gibraltar, again causing limited damage. This was enough to find favor with the Germans but minimal enough not to cause any British reprisals.
Dakar presented many oddities and revelations. It tested the resolve of Vichy and the real level of support of De Gaulle and his Free French movement. It was set apart from the main theatre in Europe - French fought fellow countrymen and Vichy forces used US planes to fight French and British counterparts. Nowhere in this were the axis forces, the principal enemies. The British would fail in this operation.
Britain would find herself in conflict in Syria and the Middle East against significant Vichy French Forces. Admiral Darlan wanted to assist the Germans by offering the territory to oust the British from Iraq and take the Iraqi oil and resources, but the Germans had other ideas and both objectives were nevertheless unsuccessful. Meanwhile, in Europe, Petain, like Darlan would continue to win German favor to achieve equal status with Germany in the European New Order.
France’s behavior was not helped by British actions like Dakar and Mers-El-Kebir, but on balance was understandable for the time in the face of nefarious Nazi intentions. Admiral Darlan however alludes to a deep distrust he held to his former ally - in December 1941 he was quoted as saying “I worked with the English for fifteen years, they always lied to me. I’ve negotiated with the Germans for 3 months, and they have never misled me.” It is said that Darlan was finding excuses retrospectively, however flimsy, to account for his collaboration tendencies. On close inspection of De Gaulle’s Free French army and the domestic resistance forces, several sources say this contribution and effectiveness has been inflated and exaggerated over time to hide the shame of collaboration by Vichy France, who had become effectively a co-operative and willing German vassal.
It is interesting also that twenty thousand servicemen chose to join the SS Charlemagne and were one of the last divisions to hold out tenaciously in 1945 in Berlin. On top of the forty thousand personnel in Vichy Syria and West Africa, 200 Vichy airmen in Europe, a significant French force, had opposed their former ally. The numbers even suggest that France was truly a co-operative German Vassal.
There were to be more twists and turns. In another bizarre yet tragic twist of fate, the French themselves in November 1942 scuttled their own fleet in Toulon when the Nazis attempted to take the French feet and hand it over to Italy. At the same time Darlan, conveniently forgetting his Anglophobia, also defected to the allies.
The USSR “Supping with the devil” – the unlikely alliance
In June 1941, a year after the French surrender, Britain entered an alliance with the USSR after the German invasion, Operation Barbarossa. There were pre-war efforts to bring the Soviets on the allied side, but Polish objections and allied deliberations derailed this.
It was a curious pairing when looking at the recent history of the USSR at the time, which was anything but reassuring. There are few who could argue with Churchill’s analogy about “supping with the devil” to achieve victory as the USSR was a totalitarian state equally as barbaric and ruthless as Hitler’s Germany. The more divisions that were used on the Eastern Front, the fewer there would be on the Western Front. The strategy for the west was simple - the human cost would be borne by the Soviets. Stalin saw through this, under no illusion and prepared to pay this. It was more an alliance of expediency and it would barely endure the end of the war itself. Suspicion between the Allies and the USSR was present throughout.
British minds had been wary of Russia since as far back as the Crimean War, with an only a brief respite in World War One. Despite royal family ties there was still an abhorrence of the “Russian Bear”. The communist revolution in 1917 and the subsequent events did little help this.
During Stalin’s purges in the 1930s Britain managed to ignore the fact that some her own subjects in the Soviet Union had become victims of the purge. On the economic front the USSR’s five-year plans had advanced her industrial capacity, becoming a rival for the Western industrial powers which at the same time inspired international supporters of communism. The involvement of the USSR in the Spanish Civil War was also interpreted as a Soviet communist regime trying to impose itself on the Western sphere of influence.
Throughout the 1930s the Germans had been broadcasting venomous propaganda against the USSR. Then something very unexpected happened. Stalin in August 1939 signed the infamous Nazi-Soviet pact, which gave Hitler the open door to begin World War Two because he was no longer contained and fearing a war on two fronts.
As the Nazis invaded the West of Poland, Stalin took full advantage of the recent pact and invaded the Eastern Part and imposed a Soviet form of brutality that was not dissimilar to the Nazis’. Soviet territorial ambition was not limited to Poland. In December 1939, Stalin began a bitter four-month Winter War with Finland where eventually the USSR took 11% of Finnish territory. After worldwide condemnation, the USSR followed the example of other aggressor states such as Germany, Italy and Japan and left the League of Nations.
Not only had the USSR allowed the war to happen at this stage, they also violated further sovereign states by annexing Bessarabia, Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania to their territorial gain, thus re-acquiring newly independent territories that she lost after the First World War.
Clearly a deal with the Nazis was more beneficial to the USSR and the excuse that these acquisitions offered a buffer against German strength was a weak one used in hindsight, as the USSR was a co-operative ally in all areas and cut from the same cloth as the axis powers. There was little threat from the East due to a Neutrality Pact signed in 1941 between Japan and the USSR, freeing Japan to wage her own war. The USSR was in every event an Axis ally. It is interesting to note that the two very pacts the USSR signed with Japan and Germany were highly instrumental in allowing both a European War and Pacific war to happen. Was appeasement’s failure the only reason for the start of World War Two?
Curiously the pretext that drove Britain to declare war on Germany, namely the invasion of Poland, was not strong enough to provoke a similar action against Russia who did the same thing. Interestingly the West at an early point in the war considered the USSR an enemy and considered military action in two arenas. Whilst the Winter War with Finland was in progress Britain and France considered bombing areas of Russia such as the oil fields of Baku. Also, during the Nazi’s Norwegian Campaign in 1940 the motive was not only to deprive Germany of Iron Ore from Scandinavia; it was also to assist the Finns by creating a supply route in their fight against the USSR.
Katyn and Iran
This alliance, until close to the war’s end, would center only on Europe, with Britain and later America taking on Japan with minimal Soviet help. The benefit in this alliance meant the Soviet-Japanese Neutrality Act enabled Stalin to move military resource from the eastern reaches of the USSR to the western theatre of war.
The British would deliberately overlook Soviet perfidy as displayed with the discovery of a massacre of twenty thousand Polish officers in the Katyn Forest. They would help propagate lies that placed the responsibility on the Germans rather than the Soviets for the sake of the wartime alliance. They would at the same time pressure another ally, the Polish Government in exile, to accept these falsities.
The first military act with the USSR was a joint invasion of Iran to deny the axis powers access to the Middle East and allow an alternative corridor to supply the Soviet Union. This would not be to the Iranians’ benefit. Indeed, what the Soviets and British were prepared to do in other sovereign states show what the British would conveniently overlook once again.
Both occupying powers commandeered much of Iran’s grain supplies for their own troops, which caused hyperinflation and starvation in Iran. After the war the Soviets reneged on the promised withdrawal after Hitler’s defeat, and continued to occupy the country until 1946 after trying to set up two short-lived separatist and destabilizing republics on Iran’s border.
Conclusion
The period of history from the beginning of the war until the German invasion of the USSR was an ever-changing political landscape of alliances and allies becoming foes and foes becoming allies. This period has many other interesting oddities, peculiarities, and different perspectives but that is for another time.
What do you think of Britain’s World War Two alliances with France and the Soviet Union? Let us know below.
Now, you can read Steve’s article here on “Britain and the 1920 Iraq Mandate: Signs of the British Empire’s Decline?”
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