Russia at war 1941-1945

think of France and Russia— as he had already done in 1941—as the two great future

military Powers on the Continent of Europe which could keep Germany down, and whose

points of view and interests were different from those of the "Anglo-Saxons". It was precisely on this point that, in 1944, Stalin was unable to see eye-to-eye with de Gaulle—

for the simple reason that, in purely military and economic terms, France was totally insignificant compared with Britain and America. So, much to de Gaulle's

disappointment, Stalin refused to take France seriously at that stage as a military ally.

Instead, Stalin tried to use de Gaulle as a means of breaking Western unity over the Polish question. De Gaulle, for his part, tried to force the hands of Britain and America by getting Stalin to accept the annexation of the Rhine-land by France. In the end, de Gaulle refused to recognise the Lublin Committee, and Stalin refused to recognise the Rhine frontier, and de Gaulle finally "triumphed" by taking back to Paris a Franco-Soviet Treaty of Alliance, on the lines of the Anglo-Soviet Pact of 1942. But this was by no means everything that either de Gaulle or Stalin had originally hoped to achieve.

There was something slightly comic about the whole de Gaulle-Bidault visit that

December. The Russians treated the French with a good deal of condescension, and the French, at the time, felt this very keenly, though there is not the slightest suggestion of that in de Gaulle's Memoirs.

Travelling via Baku and Stalingrad, de Gaulle, Bidault, General Juin and a handful of diplomats arrived in Moscow on December 2. First de Gaulle dropped a brick at

Stalingrad where there was a reception in his honour at which he presented the city with a memorial tablet from the people of France. In his speech he referred to Stalingrad as "a symbol of our common victories over the enemy", a description of the defence of Stalingrad which the Russians did not much relish, especially coming from a Frenchman.

At the Kursk Station in Moscow two days later, the French party were met by Molotov

and a guard of honour. The Diplomatic Corps were also there in force, and a large crowd had gathered outside the station, attracted by the numerous official cars. Emerging from the station, de Gaulle looked at this big crowd in the square: and the crowd looked back, not quite sure who he was, and nobody even murmured "Vive de Gaulle!" or anything.

So he drove off, wondering what a queer country this was.

[In his Memoirs, de Gaulle writes: "A considerable crowd had gathered, from which rose a hum of sympathetic voices." Op. cit., p. 68; I was there, and was totally unaware of any kind of "hum".]

In 1944, de Gaulle was a very great man in France, and it shocked him not to be treated as such anywhere else.

The minutes of the three Stalin-de Gaulle meetings on December 2, 6 and 8, as published by the Soviet Foreign Ministry in 1959, as well as the minutes of the Molotov-Bidault talks are of the greatest interest, since in substance and especially in their overtones they differ considerably from de Gaulle's rather glib account of what happened.

[ Sovietsko-Frantsuzskie otnosheniya, 1941-45. (Moscow, 1959).]

The minutes are also one of the few first-hand accounts we have of how Stalin conducted negotiations during the war.

During de Gaulle's first meeting with Stalin the General started by saying that the real trouble with France was that she did not have any alliance with Russia, and, also, that her eastern frontier was very vulnerable.

Yes, said Stalin, the fact that Russia and France were not together had been a great misfortune for Russia, too. He then asked de Gaulle whether French industry was being restored.

De Gaulle: Yes, but very, very slowly. There are terrible transport difficulties and a coal shortage. In order to equip her army, France has to appeal for arms from the Americans and, for the present these won't give her any. It will take France two years to restore her industry.

Stalin expressed some surprise at this, and said that Russia was not finding the restoration of industry such an insuperable problem. The south of France had been liberated without difficulty, and there had not been much fighting in Paris, so what was the trouble?

De Gaulle said that most of the French rolling stock had been destroyed and that much of what was left was being used by the British and Americans.

Rather with the suggestion that it was these who were doing most of the fighting in

France, Stalin then asked how France stood for officer cadres.

De Gaulle replied that in 1940 the Germans had captured nearly the whole French Army and most of the officers. Only a small number were left in North Africa, and these were now fighting in France. Some had betrayed their country by collaborating with Vichy. So a lot of new officers now had to be trained.