De Gaulle, apart from producing his books, spent the twelve pre-war years first as a light infantry battalion commander in Trier, the Moselle city in which Karl Marx was born, then as a staff officer in Beirut, then for nearly six years in Paris with the French equivalent of the Imperial General Staff, until in the summer of 1937 he was promoted to full colonel and given command at Metz of one of the very few fully armoured regiments. It was the first time he had been in charge of troops for eight years. It was a crucial test of his soldiering qualities, for he had written so much about the deployment of tanks that if he could not make a success of handling them himself he was going to look fairly foolish.
There is considerable dispute about how good he was at this practical task. In any event he was promoted in May 1940 and given command of a newly formed armoured division. He engaged it with the enemy in the last weeks of May and is claimed by his biographers to have inflicted one or two dents on the advancing Germans. There is also a view, however, that he was essentially a theoretical and political rather than a tactically competent fighting general, and it is adduced in support of this view that not a single one of his officers of that armoured division subsequently joined the Free French. What is certain is that he did not have to exercise his command for long. On 5 June he was recalled to Paris and made under-secretary for National Defence in the Reynaud Government. It sounded a junior political assignment, but as Reynaud combined the National Defence portfolio with the premiership de Gaulle was in effect in charge of the department and was close to the centre of the crushing chain of events that unfolded between then and the surrender on 18 June.
He was next to Churchill at the dinner on the evening of the conference at the French High Command on 11 June, and fortified the favourable impression that he had made on the British Prime Minister when they had first met in Downing Street two days before (de Gaulle was on a six-hour mission to London to persuade Churchill to commit more resources to France, but was already being converted to the contrary doctrine that it was crucial for Britain to retain the capacity to fight on alone). He appeared to Churchill like a lofty island of calm resolution sticking up out of a sea of defeatist confusion. This was of determining importance for the reception that de Gaulle received in London when he left France on 17 June. Without this strongly positive personal impression he would have been an unknown two-star general. As it was, he was received by Churchill within hours of landing, allowed to broadcast in the name of France on both the second and third evenings of his exile, officially recognized by the British Government as the leader of the Free French on 28 June, given a subsidy of £8 million a year, and showered with Churchill invitations to Downing Street luncheons and Chequers weekends during the next desperate two months (de Gaulle left for eleven weeks in Africa on 28 August) when Britain’s fate hung in the balance.
De Gaulle as an allied leader was thus very much Churchill’s creation, and at a certain level of consciousness he knew this perfectly well, and even felt persistent stirrings of subterranean gratitude. But he believed that gratitude had no place in the relations of statesmen. And although his early resources of 7000 scattered men entitled him to be no more than the commander of a motley brigade, it was a statesman that he was determined to be - on his own behalf and on that of France.
The display of nerve by which he achieved this remains awe-inspiring. His position was far more difficult and dangerous than that of the groups of Homburg-hatted gentlemen who constituted the half dozen or more other allied governments in London. They clustered together for comfort, mostly had the legitimacy of their sovereign’s support and had left nothing with any claim to be an indigenous government behind them. De Gaulle was alone. He was also a soldier subject to the harsh discipline of the still extant even if defeated French army, in which he had spent his whole life. His old commanding officer and patron-general had become head of state, was cosseted by Roosevelt, who alone could lead the free world to full victory, and was recognized by the Vatican, the Soviet union and even Britain. De Gaulle was recalled to duty by Weygand on behalf of Pétain in July, and was condemned to death for desertion by a Vichy military court in August. It required great self-certainty to stand against the military hierarchy and the French state, which even in degradation had a continuing centralized tradition. But what rendered the performance breathtaking was that at the same time he bit the British hand which fed him and defied the latent power of American leadership before which even Churchill almost prostrated himself.