The Zinn Reader (36 page)

...A whole family is imprisoned in a cave, the water mounts. The rescuers lift their heads—this humming, yet, it is another wave of planes. This achieves the complete destruction of Royan and its inhabitants. Royan has gone down with the civilized world, by the error, the bestiality, the folly of man. (Royan a sombre" en meme temps que le monde civillise, par l'erreur, la betise et la folie des hommes.)

* This is repeated as late as 1965 in Dr. J.R. Colle's book,
Royan, son passed ses environs
(La Rochelle, 1965), who summarizes the incident in his chapter, "La Resistance et La Liberation."

** The periodical in which the article appeared is no longer available, but the article, along with many others to which I will refer, was collected in a remarkable little book, produced by a printer in Royan, a former member of the Resistance (Botton, Pere et fils) in 1965, entitled:
Royan
—
Ville Martyre.
The translations are mine. A bitter introductory note by Ulysse Botton speaks of
"la tuerie"{the
slaughter) of January 5, 1945. There is a picture of the rebuilt Royan, modern buildings instead of ancient chateaux. "Our visitors, French and foreign vacationers, should thus learn, if they do not know it, that this new town and this moder n architectute proceed from a murder, to this day neither admitted nor penalized..."

Eight days after the attack, an article appeared in
La Liberation
appealing for help: "American friends, you whose Florida beaches have never known such hours, take charge of the reconstruction of Royan!"

In 1948, General de Larminat, who was in charge of French forces in the West (that is, the Bordeaux region) for the last six months of the war, broke a long silence to reply to bitter criticism of both the January and April bombings by local leaders. He exonerated the French military command at Cognac, saying they were not responsible for directing the English planes to Royan. It was, rather, a "tragic error" by the Allied Command; the whole episode was one of the unfortunate consequences of war:*

Will we draw from this an excuse to attack our Allies, who gave countless lives to liberate our country? That would be profoundly unjust. All wars carry these painful errors. Where is the infantryman of 1914-18, and of this war, who has not received friendly shells, badly aimed? How many French towns, how many combat units, have suffered bombings by mistake at the hands of allied planes? This is the painful ransom, the inevitable ransom of war, against which it is vain to protest, about which it is vain to quarrel. We pay homage to those who died in the war, we help the survivors and repair the ruins; but we do not linger on the causes of these unfortunate events because, in truth there is only a single cause: War, and the only ones truly responsible are those who wanted war.

(Compare this with the explanation of the Dresden bombing given by Air Marshal Sir Robert Saundby:

It was one of those terrible things that sometimes happen in wartime, brought about by an unfortunate combination of circumstances. Those who approved it were neither wicked nor cruel, though it may well be that they were too remote from the harsh realities of war to understand fully the appalling destructive power of air bombardment in the spring of 1945...

It is not so much this or the other means of making war that is immoral or inhumane. What is immoral is war itself. Once full-scale war has broken out it can never be humanized or civilized, and if one side attempted to do so it would be most likely to be defeated. So long as we resort to war to settle differences between nations, so long will we have to endure the horrors, the barbarities and excesses that war brings with it. That, to me, is the lesson of Dresden.)

collection. This is of course, a widely held view: Vest la guerre" —a resigned, unhappy surrender to inevitability. We find it again in
Le Pays d'Ouest,
a postwar periodical, now defunct, which published an article, "Le Siege et Attaque de Royan," saying: "Whatever the reason, the bombardment of Royan on January 5, 1945, must be considered among the regrettable errors that unfortunately it is hard to avoid in the course of the extremely complicated operations of modern war."

Some important evidence on the January bombing appeared in 1966 with the publication of the memoirs of Admiral Hubert Meyer, French commander in the Rochefort-La Rochelle area (the two Atlantic ports just north ofRoyan). Meyer, in September and October 1944, when the Germans, having fled west from the Allied invasion in northern France, were consolidating their pockets on the Atlantic coast, had begun negotiation with the German commander of La RochelleRochefort, Admiral Schirlitz. In effect, they agreed that the Germans would not blow up the port installations, and in return the French would not attack the Germans. Then the Germans evacuated Rochefort, moving north into the La Rochelle area, to lines both sides agreed on.

In late December 1944, Meyer was asked to travel south along the coast from Rochefort to Royan, where the second German coastal pocket was under the command of Admiral Michahelles, to negotiate a prisoner exchange. In the course of these talks, he was told that the German admiral was disposed to sign an agreement to hold the military
status quo
around Royan, as had been done by Schirlitz at Rochefort-La Rochelle. Meyer pointed out that Royan was different, that the Allies might have to attack the Germans there because Royan commanded Bordeaux, where free passage of goods was needed to supply the Southwest. The Germans, to Meyer's surprise, replied that they might agree to open Bordeaux to all but military supplies.

Conveying this offer to the French military headquarters at Saintes and Cognac, Meyer received a cool response. The French generals could not give a sound military reason for insisting on an attack, but pointed to
"l'aspect moral."
It would be hard, said General dAnselme, "to frustrate an ardent desire for battle—a battle where victory was certain— by the army of the Southwest, which had been champing at the bit for

* This is Meyer's recollection of the conversation, in his chapter "Royan, Ville Detruite par erreur." Meyer tends to glorify his own activities in this book, but his account fits the other evidence.

Meyer said the morale of the troops was not worth the sacrifice of a town and hundreds of lives for a limited objective, when the war was virtually won, that they did not have the right to kill a single man when the adversary had offered a truce.*

Further discussion, he was told, would have to await the return of General de Larminat, who was away.

Meyer left that meeting with the distinct impression that the die was cast for the attack ("
l'impression tres nette que les jeux etaient faits, que Royan serait attaquee').
This was January 2. Three days later, sleeping at Rochefort, he was awakened by the sound of airplanes flying south toward Royan. Those were the British Lancasters, three hundred and fifty of them, each carrying seven tons of bombs.

Meyer adds another piece of information: that about a month before the January 5 bombing, an American General, Commander of the Ninth Tactical Air Force, came to Cognac to offer the Southwest forces powerful bombing support, and suggested softening the Atlantic pockets by massive aerial bombardment. He proposed that since the Germans did not have aerial defenses for Royan, here were good targets for bombercrew trainees in England. The French agreed, but insisted the targets be at two points which formed clear enclaves on the ocean, easily distinguishable from the city itself. No more was heard from the Americans, however, until the bombing

As it turned out, not trainees, but experienced pilots did the bombing, and Meyer concludes that even the American general (sent back to the U.S. after this, as a scapegoat, Meyer suggests) was not completely responsible.

* Three other pieces of evidence support Meyer's claim of German readiness to surrender:

A.
A dispatch in
Samedi-Soir in
May, 1948 (reproduced in part in the Botton collection) tells a strange story which goes even further than Meyer. It reports, on the basis of a document it clams to have found in the Ministry of the Armed Forces, that a British agent, with the code name of "Aristede," parachuted into France to join the Resistance, reported later to his government in London that the Germans in the Royan area had offered to surrender if they would be given the honors of war, but that the French General Bertin said a surrender to the British would create a "diplomatic incident." This was, allegedly, September 8, 1944.

B.
An open letter to General de Larminat by Dr. Veyssiere Pierre, a former leader of the Royan Resistance (reproduced in the Botton collection) says: "Now we are sure that in August and September, 1944, the German high command—the commander of the fortress of Royan—made proposals of surrender that, if they had come about, would have prevented the worst; we know that on two occasions, he made contact with Colonel Cominetti, called Charly, commander of the Medoc groups; we know also that these attempts at negotiations were purely and simply repulsed by the French headquarters at Bordeaux, in order, no doubt, to add to the grandeur of military prestige."

Some blame devolved, he says, on the British Bomber Command, and some on the French generals, for not insisting on a point DeGaulle had made when he visited the area in September—that aerial attacks should only be undertaken here in coordination with ground assaults. Meyer concludes, however, that the real responsibility did not rest with the local military commanders. "To wipe out such a city is beyond military decision. It is a serious political act. It is impossible that the Supreme Command [he refers to Eisenhower and his staff] had not been at least consulted." In the event, he says, that the Allies are shocked by his accusations, they should open their military dossiers and, for the first time, reveal the truth.

If by January 1945 (despite von Rundstedt's Christmas counteroffensive in the Ardennes), it seemed clear that the Allies, well into France, and the Russians, having the Germans on the run, were on the way toward victory—then by April 1945 there was little doubt that the war was near its end. The Berlin radio announced on April 15 that the Russians and Americans were about to join forces around the Elbe, and that two zones were being set up for a Germany cut in two. Nevertheless, a major landair operation was launched April 14 against the Royan pocket, with over a thousand planes dropping bombs on a German force of 5,500 men, on a town containing at the time probably less than a thousand