World War II

World War II enters Promise at Dawn as a conflict that remakes Romain Gary’s private and public life at once. It takes the young man raised on his mother’s confidence into military service, and later brings the danger, illness, and separation against which that confidence is measured. The memoir does not treat the war only as a sequence of campaigns: it shows how historical upheaval is lived through a mother’s acts of care, a son’s ideals, and the memories that survive the fighting.

Before the Fighting: Certainty and Omen

Before the conflict reaches him directly, Gary recalls how little he understood the political danger gathering in Europe. While in Sweden, he saw an aircraft bearing a swastika cross the sky, an encounter he later identified as his first meeting with the enemy. His account sets this moment against the sheltered confidence his mother had built around him. She believed in France and its military leaders so completely that her son had absorbed her patriotism as protection against doubt; even France’s defeat in 1870 had not entered his childhood understanding until he learned of it at school.

On the eve of the Munich crisis, letters from his mother reached him during his sentimental exile on Björkö. One declared her confidence that France would triumph because it was France. In retrospect, Gary sees the certainty as tragically out of step with the country’s lack of preparation for defeat in 1940. Yet he also reads her attachment to France as intimate rather than strategic: she loved the country without needing a specific reason, and her national ideal became part of the emotional world she had made for her son.

The War Reaches the Family

When war was declared, Gary’s mother undertook a five-hour taxi journey to Salon-de-Provence to say goodbye. He was then a gunnery instructor at the Air Force Academy there. The journey was characteristic of her forceful care: she secured the reluctant driver’s help and arrived with food for her son, framing the parting as a farewell to a heroic figure even as the war made the separation real. The scene makes the family’s private bond visible at the threshold of public service. Her confidence did not remove the danger; it gave him a language in which to meet it.

War also altered the life around the family’s home in Nice. Gary describes the Russian community there as dividing into opposing camps: some collaborated with Germany and supplied recruits to the Gestapo, while others took an active part in the French Resistance. At the Liberation, the collaborators were killed; those on the Resistance side were absorbed into French society. This local account places the conflict inside a community of exiles, showing how wartime allegiance could divide people who shared a background and a place of refuge.

Service, Defeat, and Continued Resistance

Gary’s military career developed within the crisis of France’s defeat. He entered the Air Force Academy after completing a law degree, then trained at Avord on aircraft and methods that he later regarded as inadequate to the coming war. He describes open-cockpit flying in the Potez-25 and cadets giving hand signals from aircraft, a training world whose limitations became stark in light of the later conflict. When France fell, he continued the struggle in England rather than treating defeat as the end of his commitment.

In 1941, while stationed in Bangui in Oubangui-Chari and in charge of three Blenheims, he and his squadron prepared a revue for Charles de Gaulle. The performance was meant to display high spirits during a period of military disaster. Its failure before the visiting leader became an absurd counterpoint to the gravity of the war: the men’s attempt to express morale could not control the effect one powerful audience member had on the room. The episode gives the memoir’s military history room for comedy without diminishing the stakes that surrounded it.

The war’s personal consequences were not confined to service. Gary learned that his father had died during the war under Nazi persecution. He had believed that his father died in a gas chamber, but a letter he received in 1958, when he returned from Bolivia to collect the Prix Goncourt for The Roots of Heaven, corrected that account: his father had died of fright on the way to execution. The news reached him only after the war and after his father’s death had already become part of his family history. Gary describes receiving the letter in the clothes made in London, bearing his diplomatic title and military decorations; the contrast between public distinction and private shock makes the belated knowledge an aftershock of the conflict.

Illness, Separation, and Survival

The war years also include a serious illness that left Gary close to death. After scarlet fever, an acute kidney inflammation led doctors to consider an operation. His mother refused it, despite the insistence of a specialist summoned from Berlin. Gary later understood that her decision arose from her beliefs about what the operation might mean for his future. He survived with the kidney intact, and the episode reveals how her care could become an intervention in the medical decisions made around him.

In Damascus, during the war, Gary contracted typhoid and was given little chance of recovery. His friends offered blood, and Sister Félicienne, an Armenian nun, nursed him. He eventually recovered, but the illness left lasting damage, including permanent paralysis in the lower left side of his face and continuing heart problems. Even in the aftermath, his first concern on regaining the ability to speak was when he and his companions could return to battle. Three months later, he was back in a Blenheim, hunting submarines over the Eastern Mediterranean. The return to service registers both his determination and the persistence of the war’s demands on a body already marked by illness.

The End of the War and Its Afterlife

At the end of the war, in England, Queen Elizabeth, the mother of the present sovereign, inspected Gary’s squadron at Hartford Bridge Airfield. When she asked where in France he came from, he answered Nice, then remembered the promise he had made to Mr. Piekielny, the neighbor who had asked him to tell the great people of the world that he had once lived in Vilna. Gary spoke the man’s name and address to the Queen. In that moment, the war’s military setting becomes the occasion for fulfilling a private obligation carried across years and countries.

Victory does not restore the life to which Gary expects to return. When he reaches the Hôtel-Pension Mermonts after the Liberation, his mother is absent; she died three years and six months earlier, shortly after his departure for England. Before her death, she arranged for nearly two hundred and fifty undated letters to be sent to him at intervals through a friend in Switzerland. Their continued arrival had concealed her absence and sustained him through the war. The memoir’s ending therefore makes the conflict’s duration personal: the son had carried on believing that his mother remained beside him, while her carefully prepared letters kept their bond active after her death. From the later solitude of Big Sur, Gary frames the war as both a historical ordeal and a period traversed by an enduring attachment that victory could not undo.