The Battle of France, as recalled by Romain Gary, is both a military defeat and the collapse of a story he had trusted: that France would recover at the last moment and that its leaders would find a way to victory. In June 1940 he served as an airman amid retreat and confusion, initially acting on a false account of the political situation, then deciding to follow Charles de Gaulle to England. The fall of France left him facing not only the loss of his country’s immediate security but also the prospect of separation from his mother, whose expectations and support had long shaped his sense of duty.

The approaching defeat and an unshaken faith

On June 13, 1940, Gary returned from a bombing mission in a Bloch-210 and landed at Tours to refuel. German aircraft attacked the airfield while he was there, and he was wounded in the leg. He left the fragment in place and imagined that his mother would take pride in it when he next went on leave. Even as the front broke down, he read German advances through the assumptions that had sustained him: France, he believed, had a habit of restoring the situation at the last moment, and the enemy’s apparent success might be part of a French plan.

That confidence shaped his conduct as well as his private interpretation of events. At Bordeaux-Mérignac Airfield, he and two other crews were assigned low-altitude patrols over working-class districts. Their briefing described the mission as protection for Philippe Pétain, supposedly determined to keep fighting both Germany and a communist fifth column. Gary accepted that explanation and flew with his guns loaded, prepared to act on a signal from the base. Only in retrospect did he understand the patrols as part of a deception: he had been made to believe that resistance continued under Philippe Pétain, while the real political defeat had already taken hold. His recollection stresses how completely loyalty and faith in military authority could make a false account seem credible.

The last days at Bordeaux-Mérignac

Between June 15 and 17, Bordeaux-Mérignac Airfield became a disordered gathering place for aircraft and people trying to leave. Gary describes machines of many different types arriving and accumulating on the ground, giving the airfield the character of a hurried and improvised evacuation. In that confusion, a plan took shape: he decided to follow Charles de Gaulle to England with three friends in a Den-55, although none of them had flown that type before.

On the day France fell, Gary waited beside the hangar as the aircraft was being prepared. He and his three companions were sergeants, young and frustrated, carrying revolvers that expressed their anger and helplessness more than any experience of combat. Gary tried to direct his thoughts toward the silk pajamas he had left in his room in Bordeaux. The small loss offered a way to evade the larger ones: France itself, and the possibility that he might never see his mother again. Yet the attempt at emotional distance failed. Her face kept returning to his mind, and he struggled to conceal his tears from the men beside him.

The departure was interrupted just as Gary was about to board. An airman arrived by bicycle with an urgent telephone message for him. In the breakdown of roads, communications, and military organization, Gary immediately believed that the voice reaching him would be his mother’s. Earlier, he had tried to send her reassurance by invoking the celebrated French commanders she had often cited during moments of anxiety, including when she was suffering an insulin reaction. The new call seemed to him almost miraculous, but the account does not disclose its message. He told his companions to continue the trial flight without him and borrowed the airman’s bicycle to go to the control tower.

Flight, loyalty, and the unfinished escape

Gary’s decision to leave for England arose from his commitment to continue the war, but escape was neither simple nor assured. After the fall, his attempts to persuade other airmen to go with him met suspicion and hostility. At Bordeaux-Mérignac, he continued searching for a crew or an unguarded aircraft even while in pain from an assault and repeatedly sick. His account presents the physical strain as one burden among several: it partly displaced his attention from the defeat and from the prospect of losing contact with his mother, but it did not end his effort to find a way onward.

That effort eventually brought him to Casablanca, where he and two other flight-school trainees were still trying to reach England. With their prospects fading, they encountered a Polish corporal who told them that the British cargo ship Oakrest was about to sail with Polish troops. Gary and his companions used borrowed Polish uniform pieces and a shouted explanation to get past the harbor guards and aboard. The episode marks a practical turn in the story: the decision to continue the fight had to be carried out through improvised chances, help from others, and a departure from French territory rather than through the original flight from Bordeaux.

Illness, survival, and the cost of separation

The account places the French defeat within a longer pattern of illness and dependence. Years earlier, after scarlet fever, Gary had suffered acute kidney inflammation and believed that dying would leave his mother without support. He remembered her refusing an operation that doctors recommended, despite the arrival of a German specialist from Berlin. Her refusal preserved his kidney, and he survived. In another episode, he learned that she had diabetes when she collapsed after accidentally taking too much insulin. These memories clarify why separation during the defeat carried more weight for him than a change of address: he saw himself as responsible for a mother whose own health had long been precarious.

The same closeness recurs during his later wartime illness in Damascus. In 1941, typhoid left him near death, and friends gave blood while a nurse cared for him. He recovered slowly, with lasting physical consequences, but soon asked when he could return to battle. The earlier and later illnesses do not alter the military course of the Battle of France; they show how Gary’s account connects war’s danger to a personal resolve to survive and continue. The figure of the mother remains central to that resolve, even when she is physically absent.

When Gary returned to Nice after liberation, he learned that his mother had died three years and six months after his departure for England. Before her death, she had written nearly two hundred and fifty undated letters and arranged for them to be forwarded to him at intervals. He understood the letters as a plan to keep supporting him without letting him know she was gone. Thus the separation anticipated at the fall of France receives its full meaning only at the end of his account: he had continued to draw courage from her across the years of war, and returned to find that the support had outlasted her life.