Second World War

The Second World War in Romain Gary’s memoir is at once a campaign against Germany and a reckoning with the meanings of France, duty, and inheritance. The war tests the patriotic world his mother had built around him, exposes the limits of his legal and military belonging, and carries him from an air-training post in France to combat service abroad and a return to a homeland transformed by liberation. Its final consequence is intimate: he discovers that his mother died years earlier, yet had arranged to sustain him through the remaining war by sending letters after her death.

From a Mother’s France to the War

When war was declared, Gary was serving as a gunnery instructor at the Air Force Academy (Salon-de-Provence). His mother made the five-hour taxi journey to bid him farewell and wish him success in the air. The journey was characteristically hers: she persuaded Rinaldi, the taxi’s former partner and current owner, to drive by invoking his patriotic duty, then waited in the cab with parcels of food for her son. Her visit joined maternal care to a larger mission. She had long imagined Gary becoming a distinguished representative of France, and the war gave their private hopes a national and military setting.

That attachment to France had begun well before he encountered the country itself. As a child in Lithuania, Gary learned its history and legends from his mother, who presented France with the imaginative force of a fairy tale. He later understood that this idealized vision could not be reconciled with every aspect of the country’s actual history. Still, it shaped his response when France fell: on 18 June 1940, the appeal of Charles de Gaulle reached him in the voice of the France his mother had taught him to love, and he rallied to the call to continue fighting. The memoir thus connects his decision not simply to a military appeal but to an inherited emotional allegiance.

Before the war, Gary had encountered a swastika-marked aircraft while in Sweden, but he had paid little attention to the political danger developing in Europe. He recalls being poorly prepared to hate, and having taken his mother’s confidence in France and its leaders as a kind of protective certainty. In retrospect, that upbringing helps explain both his initial failure to understand the threat and his later response: he could fight against the Nazis without accepting hatred as a satisfying or natural answer to war.

Military Service and the Test of Belonging

After France’s defeat, Gary continued the struggle in England. Yet military service did not automatically make him secure in the national identity he claimed. At flight school, he learned that he had failed because he was Russian-born and his naturalization was considered too recent. The rules also restricted eligibility for a flying-officer commission according to birthplace or the length of naturalization, despite public objections that such restrictions were discriminatory. Gary’s insistence that he was French met a response that treated his conviction as naïve. The episode makes belonging a concrete institutional question: patriotic commitment and service did not erase the distinction drawn against him.

The rejection had an unexpected effect. Gary later understood the injury as a turning point in his sense of assimilation. France no longer appeared to him as a nation of inherently superior beings; its people could be generous or unjust, admirable or ridiculous, like people elsewhere. To belong, he concluded, was not to accept a flag without scrutiny but to choose among the different faces and allegiances within the country. The war therefore altered the meaning of the identity his mother had bestowed on him: it became less an unexamined ideal and more a commitment he had to judge and renew.

His service brought both combat losses and prolonged illness. During the campaign in Libya, a sandstorm contributed to a fatal collision between French and English Blenheim formations taking off in opposite directions; Gary was not flying that day. At the time, he was gravely ill with typhoid in a military hospital in Damascus. Friends offered blood for transfusions, and Sister Félicienne cared for him through a long delirium. He survived, but recovery was slow and left lasting effects, including permanent paralysis in the lower left side of his face and continuing heart trouble. Even after doctors doubted that he would walk normally or fly again, he returned to operational flying several months later, hunting submarines over the eastern Mediterranean.

Combat, Writing, and the Mother’s Continuing Expectations

The war did not displace Gary’s writing; the two became interwoven forms of effort. By the time his squadron transferred to England in August 1943, half of A European Education was complete. At Hartford Bridge, he wrote through the freezing nights in a corrugated-iron hut shared with three officers, then rode his bicycle to the mess for tea before flying missions in a Boston bomber. The novel’s snow-covered Polish setting drew on an imagined landscape that could coexist with the immediate demands of service. On missions, crews were lost, sometimes in devastating numbers. Writing continued not apart from that danger but alongside it, as another attempt to find meaning in a life shaped by the war.

His mother’s ambitions remained present in that work. Gary pictured her pride in seeing her name on a book, and literary achievement became a way of answering hopes that had once centered on music, diplomacy, and public distinction. As Paris approached liberation, he arranged to parachute into southern France for liaison duties with the Resistance, impatient to return to his mother. At the same time, an official letter offered him a permanent diplomatic appointment as a First Secretary, citing his service to the cause of Liberation. The offer seemed to realize his mother’s longstanding ambition for him, though he suspected that she had quietly used her contacts to help secure it. The convergence of military recognition and diplomatic employment gave her dream a new form, but it could not restore the life she had imagined sharing with him.

Return and Aftermath

As Gary crossed into southern France, the prospect of reunion gathered force. He was returning through a landscape marked by the destruction of war, with his attention fixed on the familiar home and the mother he expected to find there. At the Hôtel-Pension Mermonts, however, no one was waiting. His mother had died three years and six months earlier, a few weeks after his departure for England.

The absence was not the whole story. In the final days of her life, she had written nearly two hundred and fifty letters and sent them to a friend in Switzerland, with instructions that they be forwarded to Gary at intervals. The letters had concealed her death and allowed her support to reach him through the war and beyond it. The revelation changes the meaning of his endurance: the maternal encouragement that seemed to accompany his return to France had been deliberately maintained by a correspondence planned in advance. The war ends in public liberation, but the memoir’s private ending is a delayed encounter with grief—and with the continuing force of a mother’s care.