• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1227 0

those who made a different choice. Aboard the French mine-laying submarine Rubis a vote was held in which all but two of its forty-four crew opted to fight alongside the British. By contrast, in November 1940, 1,700 French naval officers and men exercised the right to repatriation which the British conferred on them. Their new friends the Germans responded uncharitably, torpedoing off the French coast the hospital ship carrying them home under the red cross. Four hundred drowned, but a survivor, Commander Paul Martin, wrote impenitently to a senior officer in Toulon: ‘Churchill’s policy makes me fear for a demagogic disaster. Thinking Englishmen fear for the future, being carried away as they are by democracy, international financiers and Jews. It is undeniable that the French corrective to this is envied.’

If this was an extreme view, French anti-Semitism ran deep. Vichy’s bureaucracy and enforcement agencies seized Jews and bearers of Free France’s symbolic Cross of Lorraine almost as readily as did the Germans. ‘My God, what is this country doing to me?’ Jewish writer Irène Némirovsky, who would later meet death in Auschwitz, wrote from her precarious French refuge in June 1941. ‘Since it is rejecting me, let us consider it coldly, let us watch as it loses its honour and its life.’ The Resistance until June 1944 engaged only a small minority of French people, and incurred the hostility of many more. After the liberation, service with de Gaulle became a badge of pride. Throughout the occupation, however, many French people treated his followers as troublemakers and traitors, and frequently betrayed them to the Vichy authorities or the Germans.

On 8 June 1941, Australian, British and Free French units advanced into Syria and Lebanon. British commandos landing on the coast met fierce resistance at the mouth of the Litani river, and suffered heavy casualties – forty-five dead including its commanding officer, and seventy-five wounded. Two French heavy destroyers bombarded the British positions, then turned their fire on a British destroyer flotilla, of which one ship was badly damaged. Vichy bombers joined the attack on the warships, and their escorting fighters shot down three Hurricanes. A defiant French NCO prisoner told war correspondent Alan Moorehead: ‘You thought we were yellow, didn’t you? You thought we couldn’t fight in France. You thought we were like the Italians. Well, we’ve shown you.’

It demanded courage for a man to separate himself from his country, home and family, to accept the status of a renegade in the eyes of his own people, in order to serve in the ranks of Free France. But many Poles made such a choice. Why did the French instead oppose Allied forces fighting their conquerors and occupiers? There was deep bitterness about France’s predicament, which demanded scapegoats. Many Frenchmen considered their country betrayed by the British in June 1940, a sentiment intensified by the Royal Navy’s destruction of French capital ships at Mers-el-Kébir. There was self-hatred, which bred anger. Overlaid upon centuries-old resentment of perfide Albion, there was now the fresh grievance that Churchill had fought on after Pétain succumbed. The German occupiers of France were disliked, but so too were the British across the Channel, especially by French professional soldiers, sailors and airmen.

‘France does not want to be liberated,’ former Vichy prime minister and prominent collaborator Pierre Laval told the New York Times. ‘She wants to settle her fate herself in collaboration with Germany.’ Many of his compatriots agreed: resistance became a significant force in France only in 1944, and made a negligible military contribution by comparison with the partisans of Russia and Yugoslavia. Few French defenders of Syria in 1941 found anything distasteful about killing British, Indian and Australian invaders. British troops advancing into Syria found graffiti on the wall of an abandoned fort: ‘Wait, dirty English bastards, until the Germans come. We run away now, and so will you soon.’

As the Allied forces advanced