“De Gaulle attaches enormous importance to Cologne for strategical reasons which he recently explained to me with the aid of a map,” Duff Cooper informed the prime minister in a diplomatic cable from Paris. Having complained about a less than cordial note from De Gaulle about the future of Syria, a point of contention between the UK and France, Palewski informed Duff Cooper that “the general was in an unhappy mood yesterday as he had just been informed by the United States ambassador that the French zone would not include Cologne”. Photograph: Roger Viollet/Getty Imagesĭespite the end of six years of war in Europe, a separate document detailing a conversation between Britain’s ambassador to France, Alfred Duff Cooper, and the French diplomat managing De Gaulle’s cabinet in London, Gaston Palewski, reveals a possible cause of De Gaulle’s initial awkwardness. The National Archives, in Kew, London, has closed during the coronavirus pandemic but it has made its digitalised documents free to access and download online.Ĭhurchill and De Gaulle in Marrakech, Morocco, in January 1944. The war in the Pacific against Japan was continuing to rage with no apparent prospect of the country’s surrender. He instead gave his address at the same moment as Churchill on 8 May, when the prime minister informed the British people that “we may allow ourselves a brief period of rejoicing, but let us not forget for a moment the toils and efforts that lie ahead”. If, however, he was unwilling to accept this advice no further pressure could be brought to bear on him.”ĭe Gaulle did at the last moment agree to postpone his evening broadcast. “It was agreed that General de Gaulle should be informed of the plans for synchronising the announcements by the governments of the United Kingdom, the United States and the USSR and advised to postpone his announcement until a corresponding hour on 8 May. “The war cabinet were informed that General de Gaulle was intending to announce the German surrender in a broadcast at 8 o’clock that evening ”, the official minutes record. According to minutes of a meeting of the cabinet held in Downing Street at 6.30pm that day, a protracted negotiation between the US president, Harry Truman, and the Soviet leader, Joseph Stalin, settled on an official announcement of the end of the war in Europe being made by the “three great powers” on 8 May at 9am in Washington, 3pm in London and 4pm in Moscow.īut there was one potential problem in the figure of the increasingly irascible leader of free France.
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