For Value Received

OUR VICHY GAMBLE (412 pp.)--William L. Langer--Knopf ($3.75).

The Roosevelt-Hull policy toward Vichyfrance has been attacked with more fervor than it has been defended. This book is the most thorough and respectable defense the U.S. policy has had. William L. Langer, Harvard's Coolidge Professor of History and wartime chief of the OSS Research and Analysis Branch, concedes that U.S. Vichy policy may have been an unattractive long-shot gamble, but argues that it was "always substantially sound," judged by U.S. interests. And, he says, it paid off.

Historian Langer has had access to such a wealth of unpublished material (State Department dispatches, OSS files, letters by Roosevelt, Hull, ex-Ambassador Leahy, et al.) that his book is of first importance in its field, even for those who do not share his outspoken conclusions.

The Willing Men. The point missed by most critics, says Langer, is that Vichy was not simply Petain, Darlan and Laval. They got the headlines, but "at all times [were] more than counterbalanced" by other Vichyites, mostly nameless, who were loyal Frenchmen at the least, and at most, zealously pro-Ally. Example: as early as spring 1941 the Deuxieme Bureau (intelligence service) secretly agreed to send military reports to the U.S. Army in Washington, right under Vichy Ambassador Henry-Haye's nose. According to U.S. diplomats at Vichy, French officialdom was 85% on the Allied side.

The Germans, trying to apply the new Nazi diplomacy with Teutonic thickheadedness, had made it not only possible but also profitable for the U.S. to work with Vichy, says Langer. Wooing the French, they had left a large part of France "unoccupied," left the French fleet and French colonies in French hands. Even such a timorous lot as Petain & Co. could sometimes get surprising results by a little show of nerve.

Under the circumstances, Langer argues, the U.S. would have been foolish to withdraw in a high-minded huff merely out of distaste for Darlans and Lavals. Langer says that Vichy's North African governor, General Maxime Weygand, "was just as intent as we on excluding the Germans from North Africa and blocking any program of collaboration." Nine months before the U.S. went to war with Germany, the U.S. agreed to ship Weygand limited supplies of coal, sugar, tea, etc. In return, Weygand let U.S. vice consuls work with French Resistance leaders and report in cipher to Washington. In this and other ways the ground was prepared for the military invasion (Operation Torch) the following year.

The Rambunctious Man. Historian Langer finds little good to say of De Gaulle. He admits that De Gaulle represented resistance of a different and bolder sort than Vichy's, but argues that he had no proved following in French territory until later in the war. Langer also echoes opinions widely held in wartime Washington and London: De Gaulle too had his share of "semi-fascist political and social views"; he was "personally vain and ambitious, self-centered and almost impossible to deal with."

Now & then mistaken or makeshift, the U.S. Vichy policy on the whole was shrewd, sensible, unsentimental, says Langer. "Possibly if we had treated De Gaulle differently, if we had thrown ourselves behind his movement, the man himself might have become less rambunctious. . . . But this is all purely speculative. . . . In the popular mind it all reduced itself to the choice between the authoritarian regime of Vichy and the heroic crusade of De Gaulle. But unless one can demonstrate that De Gaulle and his movement could have contributed more effectively to American interests . . . the whole argument against our policy falls flat."

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