'All Honour to You' - the forgotten letters sent from occupied France

 

The remarkable discovery of a box of letters in the archives of the BBC is shedding new light on conditions and attitudes in France during World War Two. 

The letters - about 1.000 have survived - were sent to London from just after the French surrender to Germany in June 1940, through to the end of 1943.

They were addressed to the French service of the BBC, otherwise known as Radio Londres, which during the German occupation was a vital source of information and comfort for millions of French men and women.

Extracts from the letters were read out on Friday evenings on a programme called The French Speak to the French, whose aim was to build morale and stiffen civilian resistance to the Germans and Vichy.

After the war, the letters were put in storage and forgotten. That was until historian Aurelie Luneau stumbled upon them while researching her thesis on Radio Londres.

"I was in this tiny room in the BBC archives in Reading, and they brought me a box marked 'Letters from France'," she says. "One look inside and I knew it was one of those finds that historians normally only dream about."

Remarkably, for a good part of the war it was still possible to post mail from France and for it to reach London.

If you lived in the unoccupied Vichy zone - it was not until the end of 1942 that the whole of France was occupied by the Germans - you simply affixed the correct stamp and took it to the post office.
Many of the letters and cards have the most basic of addresses, such as "BBC, London".


The post had to pass through the Vichy censors' office which checked some 360,000 letters every week but evidently there were sympathetic members of staff because during 1941 and 1942 around 100 letters a month got through.

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The letters come from people in every walk of life”

Some letters even had messages appended in the censor's own hand, saying things like "I agree".

Letters from the German zone could easily be smuggled through to the unoccupied zone and then sent on. Others came via friends in Switzerland or Portugal, or the US consulate in Lyon.
Once in Britain, the letters were first read by military intelligence before being passed on to Radio Londres. Many still bear the annotations of British intelligence officials.
Most of the letters were sent anonymously or signed with pseudonyms or initials - only occasionally is there a full name. The risk was great, if the writers were identified.
"The letters come from people in every walk of life - workers, intellectuals, farmers. And they deal with every kind of subject - the hardships, the shortages, the arrests, denunciations of collaborators, small acts of resistance," says Luneau. "Some even give maps showing the RAF where to bomb."

In March 1941 a correspondent signing himself N.S. writes from Nantes to describe what happened in the local cinema when a newsreel came on showing a meeting between Hitler and Mussolini.
"Oh you should have heard the din! Everyone was whistling and shouting and stamping their feet, cursing these two old cronies with words that I dare not repeat.

"In the next seance, the audience was told that during the newsreel there must be silence… so when the moment came, the whole of the auditorium succumbed to a sudden and noisy cold! Everyone was coughing and sneezing!"

And here is another small act of defiance, sent from Alsace.

"In Saverne a huge Swastika was hoisted above the castle ruins. But it was torn down and replaced by a French tricolour.

"The heroes who did this carried it out to perfection, because they also entwined the flagpole with barbed wire and removed the crampons that were used for climbing up the tower.
"The next day the population enjoyed the ridiculous scene of the Wehrmacht attempting to shoot the flag down with a machine gun!"

The control room at BBC Bush House, 1943

 

Other letters convey the changing mood in France. At first correspondents are reluctant to criticise Marshal Petain, the World War One hero who ruled from Vichy. But gradually their patience with him is eroded.

In July 1941, a woman signing herself The Stenographer writes: "While continuing to respect the Marechal - because it is impossible to believe him capable of treachery - the French people no longer believe in him. He has become a mere figurehead, a facade."

And in December 1942, a letter signed 22 Mother Hens reads: "You should see the cinemas when the news come on and they show the Marechal. Total silence. Not one person claps."


From mid-1942 the persecution of Jews in the occupied zone is stepped up, with the compulsory wearing of the yellow star. A regular correspondent calling himself William Tell, who gets his letters out via Switzerland, describes the scene in Paris.

"In Belleville and Menilmontant (working class areas) there are many Jews, small artisans for the most part. They get together in little groups and anxiously discuss the news from the night before. It is very distressing to see the women and the children of six or seven years of age."

Later there are signs of impatience with the Allies, as the French wait helplessly for the long-announced second front. But by 1943, and especially after the German surrender at Stalingrad in February of that year, morale is rising.

Around this time N.S. (again) recounts a scene from the Paris metro.
"There were two German soldiers in our wagon as well as a navy officer. Then an old French wounded veteran from the First War got on, wearing all his medals, and when he saw the Germans, he launched into this diatribe - You Germans, kaput! Your women, your children kaput! Soon you'll see how things are and there won't be one of you left!

"The three Boches didn't say a thing. But the navy officer, who was standing there impassive and slowly nodding his head, had tears running down his cheeks."

Charles de Gaulle broadcasting from the BBC studios in London, 1941

 

The stories told in the letters were of vital importance to De Gaulle's Free French in London.
They allowed the movement - and indeed British intelligence - to gauge opinion in France and also to judge the impact of their propaganda effort conducted via the BBC.

It is estimated that some 70 per cent of French households with a radio set turned in to the BBC during the war - and even today the reputation of the BBC in France owes much to the collective memory of those days.

Throughout all the letters, the one constant theme is gratitude for keeping alive the cause of freedom.

In December 1944, a teacher called Monsieur Godard - it was after the Liberation so he could use his real name - sent a poem of thanksgiving to the BBC, written by his daughter.

The last couplet reads: "Le Monde entire tournant les yeux vers vous / Crie, Merci, BBC, Honneur a vous!"

The Whole World turns its eyes on you / And shouts, Thank You BBC, All Honour to You!

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Lions and donkeys: 10 big myths about World War One debunked

No war in history attracts more controversy and myth than World War One.
For the soldiers who fought it was in some ways better than previous conflicts, and in some ways worse.

By setting it apart as uniquely awful we are blinding ourselves to the reality of not just WW1 but war in general. We are also in danger of belittling the experience of soldiers and civilians caught up in countless other appalling conflicts throughout history and the present day.

1. It was the bloodiest war in history to that point

F ifty years before WW1 broke out, southern China was torn apart by an even bloodier conflict. Conservative estimates of the dead in the 14-year Taiping rebellion start at between 20 and 30 million. Around 17 million soldiers and civilians were killed during WW1.
Although more Britons died in WW1 than any other conflict, the bloodiest war in our history relative to population size is the Civil War which raged in the mid-17th Century. It saw a far higher proportion of the population of the British Isles killed than the less than 2% who died in WW1. By contrast around 4% of the population of England and Wales, and considerably more than that in Scotland and Ireland, are thought to have been killed in the Civil War.

2. Most soldiers died
 
In the UK around six million men were mobilised, and of those just over 700,000 were killed. That's around 11.5%.

In fact, as a British soldier you were more likely to die during the Crimean War (1853-56) than in WW1.

 3. Men lived in the trenches for years on end
 

Front-line trenches could be a terribly hostile place to live. Often wet, cold and exposed to the enemy, units would quickly lose their morale if they spent too much time in them.

As a result, the British army rotated men in and out continuously. Between battles, a unit spent perhaps 10 days a month in the trench system, and of those, rarely more than three days right up on the front line. It was not unusual to be out of the line for a month.


During moments of crisis, such as big offensives, the British could occasionally spend up to seven days on the front line but were far more often rotated out after just a day or two.

4. The upper class got off lightly
 
Although the great majority of casualties in WW1 were from the working class, the social and political elite was hit disproportionately hard by WW1. Their sons provided the junior officers whose job it was to lead the way over the top and expose themselves to the greatest danger as an example to their men.

Some 12% of the British army's ordinary soldiers were killed during the war, compared with 17% of its officers. Eton alone lost more than 1,000 former pupils - 20% of those who served. UK wartime Prime Minister Herbert Asquith lost a son, while future Prime Minister Andrew Bonar Law lost two. Anthony Eden lost two brothers, another brother of his was terribly wounded and an uncle was captured.

5. 'Lions led by donkeys'

This saying was supposed to have come from senior German commanders describing brave British soldiers led by incompetent old toffs from their chateaux. In fact the incident was made up by historian Alan Clark. 

During the war more than 200 generals were killed, wounded or captured. Most visited the front lines every day. In battle they were considerably closer to the action than generals are today.
Naturally, some generals were not up to the job, but others were brilliant, such as Arthur Currie, a middle-class Canadian failed insurance broker and property developer.

Rarely in history have commanders had to adapt to a more radically different technological environment.

British commanders had been trained to fight small colonial wars, now they were thrust into a massive industrial struggle unlike anything the British army had ever seen.

Despite this, within three years the British had effectively invented a method of warfare still recognisable today. By the summer of 1918 the British army was probably at its best ever and it inflicted crushing defeats on the Germans.

6. Gallipoli was fought by Australians and New Zealanders 


Far more British soldiers fought on the Gallipoli peninsula than Australians and New Zealanders put together.
The UK lost four or five times as many men in the brutal campaign as her imperial Anzac contingents. The French also lost more men than the Australians.

The Aussies and Kiwis commemorate Gallipoli ardently, and understandably so, as their casualties do represent terrible losses both as a proportion of their forces committed and of their small populations.

7. Tactics on the Western Front remained unchanged despite repeated failure
 
Never have tactics and technology changed so radically in four years of fighting. It was a time of extraordinary innovation. In 1914 generals on horseback galloped across battlefields as men in cloth caps charged the enemy without the necessary covering fire. Both sides were overwhelmingly armed with rifles. Four years later, steel-helmeted combat teams dashed forward protected by a curtain of artillery shells.

They were now armed with flame throwers, portable machine-guns and grenades fired from rifles. Above, planes, that in 1914 would have appeared unimaginably sophisticated, duelled in the skies, some carrying experimental wireless radio sets, reporting real-time reconnaissance.

Huge artillery pieces fired with pinpoint accuracy - using only aerial photos and maths they could score a hit on the first shot. Tanks had gone from the drawing board to the battlefield in just two years, also changing war forever.

 8. No-one won
 

Swathes of Europe lay wasted, millions were dead or wounded. Survivors lived on with severe mental trauma. The UK was broke. It is odd to talk about winning. 

However, in a narrow military sense, the UK and her allies convincingly won. Germany's battleships had been bottled up by the Royal Navy until their crews mutinied rather than make a suicidal attack against the British fleet.

Germany's army collapsed as a series of mighty allied blows scythed through supposedly impregnable defences.

By late September 1918 the German emperor and his military mastermind Erich Ludendorff admitted that there was no hope and Germany must beg for peace. The 11 November Armistice was essentially a German surrender.

Unlike Hitler in 1945, the German government did not insist on a hopeless, pointless struggle until the allies were in Berlin - a decision that saved countless lives, but was seized upon later to claim Germany never really lost.

9. The Versailles Treaty was extremely harsh

The treaty of Versailles confiscated 10% of Germany's territory but left it the largest, richest nation in central Europe.

It was largely unoccupied and financial reparations were linked to its ability to pay, which mostly went unenforced anyway.

The treaty was notably less harsh than treaties that ended the 1870-71 Franco-Prussian War and World War Two. The German victors in the former annexed large chunks of two rich French provinces, part of France for between 2-300 years, and home to most of French iron ore production, as well as presenting France with a massive bill for immediate payment.


After WW2 Germany was occupied, split up, her factory machinery smashed or stolen and millions of prisoners forced to stay with their captors and work as slave labourers. Germany lost all the territory it had gained after WW1 and another giant slice on top of that.

Versailles was not harsh but was portrayed as such by Hitler who sought to create a tidal wave of anti-Versailles sentiment on which he could then ride into power.

10. Everyone hated it
 
Like any war, it all comes down to luck. You may witness unimaginable horrors that leave you mentally and physically incapacitated for life, or you might get away without a scrape. It could be the best of times, or the worst of times.

Many soldiers enjoyed WW1. If they were lucky they would avoid a big offensive, and much of the time, conditions might be better than at home.


For the British there was meat every day - a rare luxury back home - cigarettes, tea and rum, part of a daily diet of over 4,000 calories.

Absentee rates due to sickness, an important barometer of a unit's morale were, remarkably, hardly above peacetime rates. Many young men enjoyed the guaranteed pay, the intense comradeship, the responsibility and a much greater sexual freedom than in peacetime Britain.