THE AMERICAS: Incident at St. Pierre

The U.S.. State Department trembled last week for fear that the still great fleet of Vichyfrance would be handed over to the Axis. And all its fears were occasioned because a handful of Frenchmen who despise Vichy and all its works had landed in very Gallic fashion on the little American islands, St. Pierre & Miquelon.

One night four steatopygous corvettes waddled along off the coast of Newfoundland, ostensibly bound for Britain. But at dawn they hove to off the salmon-pink igneous rockland of St. Pierre & Miquelon, last island remnants of the once-great French Empire in North America.

As the tiny flotilla moved in battle line toward the still-sleeping village of St. Pierre, a lone bristle-bearded Breton sailor ran down to the quai to greet it, his wooden sabots clattering and slipping on the icy streets. In the still morning air the whole harbor could hear him bilingually swearing: “Pétain, le sacre bleu cochon, le old goat!” . . .With trembling hands he lashed the first corvette line to a bollard. “Vive De Gaulle,” he shouted. “At last I can say it. Vive De Gaulle!”

“Vive De Gaulle!” Like a voice in a dream the cry rang up the Quai de la Roncière. Sleepy St. Pierrais tumbled out of their steep-roofed plaster houses: women in shawls and white petticoats, fishermen pulling striped shirts over their tousled heads, hastily tying their crimson sashes. Geese honked. Dogs barked. From windows suddenly fluttered homemade De Gaulle flags.

Steel-helmeted, fortified with tommy guns and flasks of vin ordinaire, landing parties took over the village in less than half an hour. Eleven brass-buttoned, picture-postcard gendarmes shrugged their shoulders, helped round up their superior officers. Most administrative officers were told to stay at their posts, but suave Parisian Baron Gilbert de Bournat, Administrator, was called to account before the flotilla’s commandant, Vice Admiral Emile Henri Muselier, Commander of the Free French naval forces.

De Bournat had kept the islands alive since France fell, dispensing a $60,000 monthly credit wangled from frozen Vichy funds to feed the one-third of the islands’ population on chÓmage (relief). But faithful to Vichy and Marshal Pétain, De Bournat had defied the pro-De Gaulle Societe des Anciens Combattants, amused or confused the islands’ totally Aryan population by faithfully publishing Vichy’s anti-Jewish decrees, tried to organize a Vichy “Patriotic Youth” movement while 150 of St. Pierre’s sons were slipping away to join De Gaullists in Canada. Crowds on the pier cried “Vive De Gaulle” as De Bournat passed. “Vive Pétain” he said.

No less in the Alexandre Dumas tradition was Muselier. He “regretted exceedingly” having to hold a rich merchant, Henri Moraze, as an admitted “Vichy agent,” graciously allowed M. de Lort, pro-Vichy manager of St. Pierre’s big wireless station, to remain at home with his sick daughter, offered a gift of his own medicinal remedy for the child’s bronchial pneumonia. As Vichy’s radio station spouted claims that De Bournat had been shot, Muselier granted Madame de Bournat’s request to share her husband’s cabin aboard the flotilla flagship.

Jeanne d’Arc, I, Axis, 10. These amenities concluded, Admiral Muselier ordered part of his “fleet” to the even more sparsely populated Miquelon Islands, announced a plebiscite for the following day —Christmas. Islanders poured into the village, many in long wooden sledges drawn by black Newfoundland dogs. They celebrated the mass of the Nativity in hushed excitement, cheered parading sailors, but voted quietly and secretly on plebiscite ballots with only two lines:

“Ralliement á la France Libre

Collaboration avec les Puissances de I’Axe.”

One man plaintively wrote on his ballot: “I want the France of Jeanne d’Arc.” Only ten men voted for collaboration with the Axis, 650 for Free France. The vote was taken by some as an indication of how the Motherland would vote, if it could. Free French in London used the vote to fortify their claims that Muselier acted only to allow a democratic expression of opinion, noted that there was only one De Gaulle electioneering poster.

Dash of Garlic. Though delighting all Allied nations by its Gallic dash, Muselier’s abrupt action nevertheless dropped St. Pierre & Miquelon, like overripe garlic cloves, smack into a delicately flavored international potage being cooked up in Washington.

With only 93 square miles of rock and its population of 4,321 gripped by poverty, the islands themselves are not important. They never were except as a great codfishing center in the 1880s and as a lush rumrunners’ rendezvous in Prohibition days. But lying close to convoy lines from Halifax to Britain and with an uncensored wireless station able to send weather reports and other information straight to Europe, they have a nuisance value, may possibly have been an espionage center.

Aware of this, Washington was negotiating a wireless-observer agreement, but was acting as warily as it had in establishing the recent status quo agreement with Martinique. Besides having to worry about the Monroe Doctrine and swallow its embarrassment while Allied leaders were mapping out integrated grand strategy, Washington had a more pressing reason to be anxious. At the last tally the French Navy, not counting ships being built, consisted of four battleships, 14 aircraft carriers, 53 destroyers and 59 submarines which, so far as is known, have not yet been turned over to Germany. With the U.S. Pacific Fleet damaged, this was no time to risk giving Pétain an excuse to go completely over to Hitler’s camp. Accordingly Washington tartly described the coup as “arbitrary,” tacitly approved when Vichy Ambassador Henry-Haye announced he had “no doubt that the French [Vichy] sovereignty would be reestablished and maintained.”

But Muselier, only male member of his family to escape death in World War I, is no appeaser, no matter what the pawn. At week’s end from St. Pierre he decreed that no warship would be allowed near the islands “except under special permission previously asked for and granted,” similarly forbade air travel overhead, threatened to blackout all lighthouses, organized a home guard, in effect told Washington as well as Vichy to go to hell.