Anglo-French Supreme War Council
At both meetings, discussion centred on Italy and whether it would be possible to deploy military force at Salonika or Istanbul without provoking Benito Mussolini.
With their huge army mobilised but idle, the French feared an ebbing of military morale and were accordingly bellicose and impatient for action; Britain, on the other hand, shrank from such measures.
[8] At this and the two further meetings in 1939, on 17 November[9] (in Paris) and 19 December,[10] the French turned down a British scheme to bomb industrial targets in the Ruhr if the Germans were to invade Belgium.
[6] The meeting of the SWC held in Paris on 5 February 1940 was the first to be attended by Winston Churchill, who, as First Lord of the Admiralty, had been invited to participate by Neville Chamberlain.
[11] Here, the British rejected France's proposal for an expedition to Petsamo in Finland to help the Finns in the Winter War for fear that this would provoke the Soviet Union.
[12] The sixth meeting of the SWC was held in London on 28 March 1940 with Britain represented by the Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, Lord Halifax, Winston Churchill, Oliver Stanley and Sir Kingsley Wood.
The French agreed to what later became known as Operation Royal Marine, the floating of mines up the Rhine to damage bridges and disrupt barge traffic.
[15] In Paris, on 5 April, at a meeting not of the SWC, Churchill pressed for Operation Royal Marine, but, fearing German reprisals, the French refused to countenance any mining of the Rhine.
Not only did it prove impossible to stop the export of iron ore from Scandinavia to Germany but also the troops had to be evacuated, in what was known as Operation Alphabet.
A further meeting of the council took place in Paris on 22 and 23 April, when it was agreed that the Allies would stand fast in Norway; Trondheim and Narvik would continue to be the main objectives.
[19] At 7.30 on the morning of 15 May, Winston Churchill, who had been prime minister for just five days, received a desperate telephone call from Paul Reynaud announcing that "the French were beaten ... that they had lost the battle."
However, the same evening, Churchill warned his War Cabinet that more aircraft should be committed for fear that French resistance would crumble as swiftly as that of the Poles.
Reynaud pressed for more British air support and warned that if the Battle of France were lost, Pétain would urge strongly for an armistice.
However, it seems that Reynaud did not directly ask Britain to release France from its promise made on 28 March not to enter into a separate armistice with Germany.
The latter involved the coast of French Somaliland, Djibouti and the Addis Ababa railway; another concession would be the internationalisation of Malta, Gibraltar and Suez.
[22] On 31 May 1940, Churchill flew again to Paris for a meeting of the SWC, this time with Clement Attlee and Generals John Dill and Hastings Ismay.
Speaking to Pétain, Spears pointed out that such an event would provoke a blockade of France by Britain and the bombardment of all French ports in German hands.
Reynaud and his cabinet had been forced to leave Paris and the meeting took place at the chateau which was HQ of General Maxime Weygand.
Spears found the atmosphere quite different from that at Briare, where Churchill had expressed goodwill, sympathy and sorrow; now, it was like a business meeting, with the British keenly appraising the situation from its own point of view.
He acknowledged that the two countries had agreed never to conclude a separate peace at a meeting of the SWC London on 28 March 1940, but France was physically incapable of carrying on.
[28] When the composition of the SWC was decided, the commander-in-chief of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF), Lord Gort was not a member; yet his French counterpart, General Maurice Gamelin, was.
In the view of General Edward Spears the failure to include the British C-in-C was a mistake: "No government should ever lose effective touch with the commander of its army.
The latter, announced in The Times on 28 November and set up in December 1939 was chaired by Jean Monnet; it was responsible for joint economic planning and oversaw ten executive committees which were created in January of the following year.
[33] That led to absurd situations, as when an American correspondent asked for the text of a leaflet dropped by the Royal Air Force over Germany.
[36] There was a suggestion that "La Marseillaise" be played in cinemas after "God Save the King" and another that the two languages be made compulsory for pupils in each country.
A committee was established under Lord Maurice Hankey to examine the possibilities of such a union, thus presaging the proposal made by Britain on 16 June 1940, an attempt to prevent the French from seeking a separate armistice with Germany.
