World War II Day by Day

Washington, D.C. · December 24, 1941

On this grim date, Christmas Eve 1941, a tiny piece of Vichy France—the Atlan­tic islets of Saint Pierre and Miquelon, whose gra­nite out­crop­pings lay just 12 miles off the New­found­land coast adja­cent to Canada—fell to the forces of Free France. It was the first French territ­ory to be lib­er­ated in World War II. A force of three cor­vettes and a sub­marine under the com­mand of Vice Admiral Emile Henry Muse­lier, whose tiny flo­tilla had departed from Hali­fax, Canada, seized the islets at the direc­tion of Charles de Gaulle’s London-based Free French over the ob­jec­tions of the U.S. State Depart­ment, struggling at the mo­ment to pre­serve fragile rela­tions with Marshal Philippe Pétain’s col­lab­o­ra­tionist French regime based at Vichy and its siz­able fleet at the French naval base at Tou­lon on the Medi­ter­ra­nean coast. (Under terms of the Franco-Ger­man armi­stice of June 1940, the French fleet remained out­side Ger­man com­mand and con­trol.) A Christ­mas Day pleb­i­scite by the citi­zens of Saint Pierre and Miquelon, whose supply of food and other provi­sions from the Cana­dian pro­vinces had been cut off, voted 98 per­cent in favor of ad­hering to Free France and sacking their Vichy admin­i­strator. The one-star general de Gaulle had assumed for him­self the mantle of France-in-exile, and his auda­cious feat of arms off the North Amer­ican coast over Christ­mas 1941 was done, in Brit­ish Prime Minis­ter Winston Chur­chill’s words, “in bad faith” because it was an unautho­rized action launched from a British domi­nion. De Gaulle’s blood­less coup de main was also done to pre­empt a pos­si­ble joint occu­pa­tion of the islets by U.S. and Cana­dian forces (Canada had an­nounced its inten­tion to land troops on the is­lands to pre­vent Ger­man use of the islands’ radio trans­mitter), as well as to pre­vent the islands’ forced “neu­trali­za­tion.” Indeed, ear­lier in Decem­ber an envoy of Presi­dent Franklin D. Roosevelt had met with the Vichy High Com­mis­sioner for French pos­ses­sions in the west­ern hemi­sphere to dis­cuss terms for the neu­trali­za­tion of Saint Pierre and Miquelon, as well as Vichy’s Carib­bean colo­nies. De Gaulle’s coup off the North Amer­i­can coast under­scores why the French­man’s relation­ship with Roosevelt was never better than sour.

Le Grand Charles Infuriated U.S. and British Governments by Seizing Saint Pierre and Miquelon Islands

Above: Vichy France’s Saint Pierre and Miquelon Islands lay 12 miles off the Newfoundland coast of Canada and 2,373 miles from metropolitan France.

Left: Appearing first on the world stage in June 1940 as a recently pro­moted French briga­dier gene­ral now in Lon­don exile, Charles de Gaulle quickly angered his Eng­lish host, Prime Minis­ter (since May 1940) Winston Chur­chill, and the Presi­dent of the United States, Franklin D. Roose­velt. Chur­chill, who described de Gaulle in mid-1940 as “the man of destiny at the hour of reckoning,” came to view de Gaulle as selfish, vain, an oppor­tunist, unscru­pulous, “ambi­tious to the last decree,” a man he sus­pected of having “fas­cist ten­den­cies.” Roose­velt viewed de Gaulle as suffering from delu­sions of grandeur, labeling him “well-nigh intolerable” and doubting for much of the war period that de Gaulle enjoyed the sup­port of the French people that he claimed. Chur­chill and Roosevelt are alleged to have plotted to remove de Gaulle as leader of the French resis­tance at a critical moment in World War II. In May 1943 de Gaulle decamped from Lon­don to set up his Free French base in Algiers in North Africa, now finally freed of the Axis menace. Chur­chill and Roose­velt side­lined him in the planning for France’s libera­tion (Opera­tion Over­lord), but de Gaulle out­flanked his two West­ern oppo­nents when he entered Paris on August 25, 1944, set up a provi­sional govern­ment, and forced the Allied coalition to recognize him as France’s legitimate leader.

Right: De Gaulle fought a number of wars as the most pro­mi­nent leader of the Free French move­ment: a public war against Ger­many and its Vichy hire­lings and a pri­vate war against the Roose­velt administration, which pro­moted French Gen. Henri Giraud as a rival leader to de Gaulle, and Chur­chill and his British ministers. One of de Gaulle’s advisers remarked that “the General must con­stantly be reminded that our main enemy is Ger­many. If he would follow his own incli­na­tion, it would be Eng­land.” Before departing London for Algiers in 1943, de Gaulle said good­bye to Chur­chill’s for­eign secre­tary, Anthony Eden, who asked him: “Do you know you have given us more dif­fi­culty than all our European allies?” De Gaulle responded: “I have no doubt of it.”

Dramatization of an Exchange Between Churchill and de Gaulle in London on the Eve of the Fall of France, June 1940