In November 1942 the classic movie Casablanca was released to war-time audiences. Casablanca was still in the theatres two months later when President Franklin Roosevelt and Prime Minister Winston Churchill met at the Casablanca Conference and tried to force a partnership between competing French leaders, Charles de Gaulle and Henri Giraud, but only managed to achieve a grim handshake between the two Frenchmen. Set in Vichy-ruled French Morocco, Casablanca stars Humphrey Bogart as a cynical American expatriate café owner and Ingrid Bergman and Paul Henreid as a couple on the run from the Nazis. Claude Rains was nominated for an Oscar as best supporting actor for his brilliant performance as Captain Louis Renault, a corrupt police official. From the opening scenes the movie is fervently anti-Vichy and ends with Bogart and Rains, having helped Bergman and Henreid escape, planning to escape Casablanca themselves to join the Free French garrison at Brazzaville. As Michael S. Neiberg describes in his excellent book When France Fell: The Vichy Crisis and the Fate of Anglo-American Alliance, American policy to France during the Second World War was much more muddled, and in retrospect embarrassing, than the anti-Petain and pro-Free French sentiment of Casablanca. It is a story, that, as Neiberg writes, “does not always reflect well on the behavior of the United States government.”
The Fall of France in June 1940 stunned the United States and entirely upended American grand strategy. While Churchill and Britain embraced and promoted de Gaulle as the leader of France, Roosevelt and the Americans choose a different path, which, as Neiberg notes, was “the wrong one, as it turned out.” With a “reflexive dislike” of the “obnoxious and difficult” de Gaulle, the Americans sought out virtually any alternative. In turn, Washington recognized and worked with Marshal Petain’s collaborationist Vichy regime, made a deal with the repulsive Admiral Jean-Francois Darlan, and supported General Henri Giraud as a rival to de Gaulle. It was only in July 1944 that de Gaulle was invited to visit Washington.
Disagreements over the policy towards France were a persistent irritant in Anglo-American relations during the war and led to a particularly bitter tempest in December 1941 over the Free French liberation of Saint-Pierre and Miquelon. American Secretary of State Cordell Hull’s reaction to the taking of the two tiny islands was “wildly out of proportion to the incident.” Churchill later wrote, “I was struck by the fact that, amid gigantic events, one small incident seemed to dominate his mind.” The American public, however, supported the eviction of Vichy from the islands.
When France Fell is a well-researched, insightful, and readable account of the American dealings with France in the Second World War.