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previous: Chapter 3 This webpage reproduces part of Giraud and the African Scene by G. Ward Price The Macmillan Company, 1944 The text is in the public domain. This text has been carefully proofread and I believe it to be free of errors. If you find a mistake though, please let me know! next: Chapter 5

 p65  Chapter IV

"Men Who Did Not Despair"

When France fell, in the tragic month of June, 1940, one of the immediate and dramatic consequences was the arrival in Great Britain of hundreds of French fugitives, who preferred exile, separation from their families, and often the loss of all their worldly goods to the humiliation of remaining in their own country at the mercy of the German invader.

The full story of the adventures of these resolute men and women will never be known. They came by all sorts of ways. The most fortunate were able to crowd on board steamers whose captains and crew shared their determination to remain free. Some were brought in British warships. Many crossed in fishing boats from the coasts of Normandy and Brittany. Others risked putting out to face the tides and fogs of the English Channel in small rowing craft.

At every port along the south coast of England refugees came pouring in. A number of them doubtless failed to make their goal. Swept out into the broad Atlantic, they met a miserable end by hunger and thirst; they foundered on the reefs of the iron-bound Breton coast, or amid the rocks and tide-races of the Channel Isles. Others were bombed or machine‑gunned by German aircraft as they struggled defenseless towards safety.

Even for those who managed to reach British territory their troubles were not over. They were certainly welcomed, but it would have been folly on the part of the British authorities to throw open the gates of their country without control. The German Secret Service would be sure to see to it that agents of theirs were mingled with the escaping throng.

The French refugees were accordingly received with what seemed to some of them unjustified suspicion, but was no more than reasonable caution. They were collected in immigrant stations and  p66 closely interrogated. British counter-espionage officials circulated among them in disguise, looking for dubious characters who might be enemy spies.

To the exiles, physically and mentally exhausted, broken-hearted by separation from all they valued in life, such precautions may have appeared harsh. They had given up everything for freedom; they had refused to despair of the Allied cause at its most desperate pass; they felt they were entitled to be received as friends whose courage vouched for their fidelity.

But this gloom passed away when they found that, once they had satisfied the British authorities as to their good faith, everything possible was done for them. Hostels were opened for their reception, schools were provided where their children could continue their education under French teachers in the country, safe from bombing-raids that were to be expected, and soon followed.

For all able to do war‑work, jobs were quickly found, and the lot of the French refugees in Britain became, in most cases, comfortable, sometimes even prosperous.

Those who had financial resources outside their own country generally passed over to the United States. Transatlantic transport was not then as difficult as it later became. The result was that the majority of the "intellectuals" among the French people who had escaped from their invalided land found a new home in America, where there was equal sympathy for their misfortunes, and greater openings for their talents.

To the American and British peoples, these undaunted men and women, who had chosen expatriation in preference to submission, seemed to embody the best elements of the French spirit which had survived the swift and startling collapse of a nation whose military capacity had long been rated as superb. When Americans and Britons spoke of the "Free French," they had in mind at that time only those who had chosen refuge in a foreign land rather than resignation to Nazism.

This conception was strengthened by the rapid enrolment, under the orders of General de Gaulle, of a small but gallant fighting force of French soldiers, sailors and airmen who added the Cross of Lorraine  p67 to the tricolour as a badge of their resolve to free their native land.

Yet there were other French hearts in which the flame of patriotism burned with equal ardour. It was impossible for all the courageous and loyal men and women in France to get away. So swiftly was the North and Westº of that country overrun, occupied and policed by the German forces that millions of French people found themselves prisoners before they could escape.

Even in Unoccupied France emigration was made difficult by the abject attitude of the Vichy Government, which took its directives from the German headquarters in Paris, and closed the frontier with Spain, the only neutral channel of communication with the Allies.

No one who has not shared the bitter experience that defeat and enemy occupation brought to France can pass judgment upon of those French citizens who were compelled, under duress, to give apparent acquiescence to the authority of the enemy. Soldiers on the field of battle, when surrounded and incapable of further resistance, incur no dishonour by surrender. That was the melancholy situation in which the French nation found itself as a result of the precipitous submission of its leaders.

But there was another section of the people of France whose condition lay midway between that of the inhabitants of the mother country and the freedom of action which the refugees in America and Britain had won by going overseas.

The French North African territories remained outside the direct control of the enemy, though still under the rule of the collaborationist Vichy Government. They were subjected to no military occupation by enemy troops. Their situation resembled that of Unoccupied France, with the difference that instead of being separated from the invaders by an arbitrary line of demarcation they lay on the opposite shore of the Mediterranean at its broadest part.

These three overseas provinces — Tunisia, a Protectorate; Algiers, divided into two French departments and treated as an integral part of metropolitan France; and Morocco, another Protectorate — were indeed obliged by the Vichy Government to fulfil the disarmament clauses of the armistice. German and Italian military commissions  p68 came over to Tunis, Algiers and Rabat to supervise the surrender of the heavy equipment which the French forces were required to hand over to their conquerors. Apart from that, and from the unhappy but unavoidable incident at Mers-el‑Kebir on July 3, 1940, when the British Mediterranean Fleet attacked the French naval forces lying there in order to prevent them falling into the hands of the enemy, French North African territory was able to carry on a fairly normal existence.

Such a situation provided more favourable ground for the development of a spirit of resistance than did the depressing conditions prevailing in the mother country.

As the critical latter half of the year 1940 wore on, with Great Britain, though almost defenceless, still intact and defiant, hope began to take fresh root in the hearts of brave Frenchmen in North Africa.

They had by no means the freedom of action enjoyed by their fellow-countrymen, the Free French in England. These had been integrated into a war‑machine which was steadily, if slowly, developing strength. They benefited from the supplies of arms furnished by the United States. The wealth of the British Empire was being poured out as never before to make up for past neglect of national armaments, and on those resources, built up through many prosperous generations, General de Gaulle and his associates were allowed to draw freely. The French fighting forces were equipped, housed and paid as generously as if they had been natives of the country whose hospitality they enjoyed.

Quarters were provided for General de Gaulle in the Connaught Hotel, London, famous for its good food; his staff were lodged in houses re­quisitioned in the best parts of Mayfair and Belgravia. To many of them the benefit of diplomatic status was extended, bringing privileges denied to Britons in the way of extra gasoline allowances and clothing coupons.

The headquarters of the Free French Movement were established in Carlton Gardens, a terrace of big houses dating from the Regency period of early in the last century. Its own flag flew from the roof.  p69 Poilus in khaki uniform and French helmets mounted guard before the doors.

Tailors and hatters of Savile Row and Piccadilly set themselves to produce vareuses and képis, with special facilities from the clothing authorities for supplying the gold braid and buttons required to keep up the French officer's standard of military elegance.

As General de Gaulle walked daily across Berkeley Square, down Berkeley Street, across Piccadilly and down St. James's Street and Pall Mall to his headquarters, his tall figure was regularly saluted by the British officers he met in this quarter where the clubs of the various Services are concentrated. The troops under his command in Britain might number no more than 15,000 men — about the strength of a single British division — but he was accorded all the respect, prestige, and consideration that would have been given to the head of a foreign government on British soil.

Above all — and of far greater value to him and to the Allied cause than any formal compliments — his Free French organisation was allotted a regular daily series of radio-time for the purpose of keeping it in direct oral communication with the people of France.

Of this opportunity advantage was taken with all the resource, skill and intelligence of the French character. The propaganda put on the air by the broadcasting experts who undertook to make De Gaulle's movement known to their fellow-countrymen was better than that of any of the other refugee governments in England.

Its style was varied, alert, mordant, witty. To listen in to a Free French broadcast was a stimulating and entertaining experience; on the depressed and discouraged French these sparkling pep talks must have had the effect of sunbeams in a prison cell.

For General de Gaulle himself they provided not only a platform, but a springboard into the hearts of the French nation.

In the privacy of their apartments the townspeople of France listened to his stirring tones. On lonely farms the peasants would gather to hear the thrilling message that all was not lost — that all, indeed, would yet be won. At remote stations in the depths of the Sudan; under the palm trees of Equatorial Africa; on the slopes of  p70 Syria's Lebanon; in Madagascar and Réunion; among the fishermen of St. Pierre and Miquelon, secure in the Gulf of St. Lawrence from the disaster that had befallen the land of their origin — wherever Frenchmen and Frenchwomen, bond or still free, possessed a radio set, De Gaulle's magnificently phrased orations rekindled hopes, roused courage, and built up the conception of the General himself as the incarnation of the struggle for freedom.

De Gaulle is a natural orator, especially through the medium of the microphone. His voice, rather high-pitched in ordinary conversation, acquires resonance on the air. He has an instinct for the telling phrase, and uses the incomparable language of France with a mastery that a successful politician might envy.

Such military chiefs as Foch or Weygand — both men of few words, of whom the former, especially, used to express himself in staccato phrases, which often needed to be eked out by explanatory gesture — could never have achieved De Gaulle's success as an animator of French national feeling, or equalled him as an exponent of the part which France, though temporarily defeated, could yet take in the world's fight for freedom.

It was too much to expect that De Gaulle would prove to have every gift required for the task which lay before him as the leader of a semi-independent army, navy and air force based on foreign, though Allied soil. In the quality of diplomacy, the General has sometimes seemed somewhat lacking. To this were traceable the misunderstandings which afterwards arose between him and the Allied governments, as with other sections of his compatriots.

There can be no more interesting study in human character than the comparison between those two protagonists of French liberties, Giraud and De Gaulle.

Both are idealists as well as men of action. Their personal character is of the highest. With all its ingenuity and unscrupulousness, the German propaganda service has never ventured to impute even the shadow of a stain to their brilliant careers.

The difference between them is a distinction common in human  p71 nature — the one being of the phlegmatic type, the other of the dynamic.

This is the reason for their failure to run well in double harness. Both are thoroughbreds, but of different breed. It is difficult to couple a powerful Percheron with a restive race horse.

To understand the friction between them that persisted throughout the year 1943, it is necessary to have in mind a clear picture of their personalities.

In physique, they are unusually tall. Their stature alone must have served them during their military careers by singling them out among French soldiers whose average height is lower than that of most other armies.

There exists an appreciation of De Gaulle, made by one of his close associates which might well be an extract from a confidential report about to him by one of his seniors. It reads as follows: "Tall, slow-moving, sparely built, of quick intelligence, great power of distinguishing essentials from non‑essentials, and with the gift of clear expression."

Charles André Joseph Marie de Gaulle was born in his grandmother's house at Lille on November 22, 1890. He is thus twelve years, all but two months, younger than his fellow-general.

De Gaulle's father was Professor of Physiology and Literature at the Jesuit College in the Rue de Vaugirard, Paris. He grew up in a scholar­ly atmosphere among a family of three brothers and one sister. He is described as having been a tall, clumsy, high-spirited boy. After attending a Jesuit school, he entered the Military College of St. Cyr in 1911. He passed out high twelve months later, and joined the 33rd Infantry Regiment, which was then commanded by Colonel Philippe Pétain.

According to his biographer, Philippe Barrès, he chose that regiment because he had a special admiration for Pétain's character. This increased with closer association. When De Gaulle married, he gave his first-born the name of Philippe in honour of the future Marshal, who became the child's godfather. This link between two men who were later to become bitter antagonists is not without precedent in  p72 history. Lenin and Kerensky were born in the same Russian town of Simbirsk, and had close early associations in youth which, as in the case of De Gaulle and Pétain, were to be transformed into acute political hostility.

De Gaulle's record of service in the last war equals that of Giraud in distinction. He was wounded on the Belgian frontier at its outset, wounded again six months later during heavy fighting in Champagne, where he was promoted captain and won the Croix de Guerre; wounded for the third time in March, 1916, at Verdun. The Germans picked him up on the blood-stained slopes outside Fort Douaumont.

No sooner were his wounds healed than, like Giraud, he tried to escape. Lacking the baraka of his "opposite number," he was recaptured and sent to punitive internment in fortress, where he first met Catroux, now his close associate.

When the war ended and De Gaulle returned to France, his old military patron Pétain, then Commander-in‑Chief, of the French Army, got him the appointment of Professor of Military History at St. Cyr.

De Gaulle left this post to go with General Weygand to Poland, when the French sent help to their allies against the Bolsheviks. From that campaign he returned to be an instructor at the Ecole Supérieure de Guerre from which Pétain took him onto his own staff as A. D. C. During the whole period between the two wars he was in the inner circle of the élite of the French Army — whose atmosphere was mainly conservative, Catholic and nationalist.

For some months during the French occupation of the Rhineland he commanded a battalion there. He was also sent on military missions to Irak, Iran, and Egypt.

At the age of forty‑two, his association with Pétain, combined with his own outstanding qualities, brought him to the key‑post of Secretary-General of the Conseil Supérieur de la Guerre — the National Defence Council of France. This was in the year that Hitler came to power.

De Gaulle read the signs of the times aright. He saw that the cult of fierce nationalism of which Hitler was the prophet would bring  p73 about another European war. He was well placed to take an inside view of those political and military influences which eventually brought about the downfall of his own country. The façade of the French military system was formidable, and hung with the laurels of great achievement, but the structure behind it was crumbling into decay. Political pipe-dreams, financial graft, and selfish cynicism in public life were preparing the ruin of France.

In 1934 De Gaulle published a remarkable book which has been translated under the title "The Army of the Future. "​a It urged the complete transformation of the French military organisation of defence. De Gaulle wanted a highly trained and completely mechanised professional army of 100,000 men, ready to strike with similar vigor to that which six years later the German Army displayed. He perceived that the conscript mass-army which had hitherto been the instrument of French strategy could be relied upon only as a second line of defence.

He further analysed the geographical weakness of France for resistance to mechanised invasion, which was facilitated from the east by the river valleys of the Meuse, Sambre, Scarpe and Lys. While giving due value to the strength of the Maginot Line, he pointed out that the northern land-frontier of France was still unfortified, and that a restored and aggressive Germany might pour her armoured forces, at unprecedented speed, across the Belgian lowlands into the heart of the country.

Paul Reynaud, as Minister of Finance, was the only leading French politician who came forward in support of De Gaulle's revolutionary doctrines. He urged them in vain upon the Chamber of Deputies.

At the outset of war, De Gaulle, now a general, was given command of the Fourth Armoured Division, which he handled with the skill that might be expected of a man who had so thoroughly thought out the principles of mechanised warfare.

Soon after the German attack on France began, Reynaud, now Prime Minister, appointed De Gaulle Under-Secretary of State for War — but it was then too late to set back the clock of French destiny.

 p74  On June 18, 1940, a week before the armistice, De Gaulle flew to London on a military mission. In England he was almost unknown outside the small circle of military students who had read his book. Fortunately for him and for France, the British Prime Minister was of their number.

Mr. Churchill received De Gaulle and, with that enlightened impulsiveness which is characteristic of him, suggested that he should stay on in London and form a "Free French" fighting force to represent France as an element in the continued resistance of the Allies.

The instant success of this project was the best proof of its inspired character. De Gaulle at once became a rallying-point for all the best elements among the French refugees, and a guardian angel to save the vanquished French nation from despair.

Such French colonial territories as were still free enrolled themselves under his leader­ship. Within three months he was the accepted head of nearly one‑third of the French Colonial Empire, which covers •seven-and‑a‑half million miles in four continents, and is inhabited by sixty-five million people.

At the same time, other Frenchmen in North Africa were beginning to feel a similar longing to reverse the defeats suffered by their country. Their aspirations were no less strong for being necessarily concealed.

Unlike remoter French possessions, they could not openly proclaim their sympathies with De Gaulle. The least sign of a renewal of a spirit of independence would have brought upon them military occupation by the enemy. As it was, they were placed under close control by the Gestapo, which dispatched five hundred agents to Algiers alone.

The patriots of North Africa were consequently obliged to work in the dark. They had no resources beyond those which their own ingenuity and self-denial could provide. In contrast to the freedom and favour enjoyed by the Free French leaders in London, they staked their liberty, if not their lives, together with the welfare of their families, upon every step they took in preparing to support Allied action against the common enemy.

The root of this French North African under­ground movement  p75 lay in the youth association known as the Chantiers de la Jeunesse. This was an organisation created by the Pétain Government after the fall of France for the purpose of occupying and controlling the activities of young Frenchmen who had not yet reached the age of military service.

Its members wore a green uniform, of semi-civilian type — windbreaker jacket and golf knickers. At the head of this body was a veteran of the Foreign Legion, Colonel van Heck. He is a Fleming from the Belgian border, about fifty years old, who, as a youth, ran away from home to join the Legion, and won the Médaille Militaire, the highest French decoration for gallantry in action, at the age of sixteen, fighting against rebel tribes in Morocco.

As one who has seen the Foreign Legion on active service, I can appreciate the sternness of the school in which young van Heck spent his early manhood. When not fighting against a determined and merciless enemy, he would be kept hard at work on road-making, or penned up under the deadly tedious conditions of garrison life in an isolated mountain fort. All the time he would have to hold his own with some of the roughest characters of almost every nationality on earth. No better training-ground would have been found for the development of the energy, courage and self-reliance needed in the part that van Heck, in the prime of middle life, found himself called upon to play.

How strong was the character that he developed during his service with the Legion is evidenced by the fact of his winning the French War Cross a dozen times over. When his fifteen years as an enlisted man were ended, he was given officer's rank, and soon added the Rosette of the Legion of Honor to his other decorations. After working for the success of the Allied landing he went to the front with a regiment of armoured cars.

To say that van Heck was tough, determined and energetic is an understatement. He belonged to the best type of soldier of fortune, the man who loves danger for the thrill of facing and overcoming it. He was of the breed that built up the French Colonial Empire, often without recognition or reward. To van Heck it fell not only to build but to restore. He was an ideal leader for the young Frenchmen  p76 of North Africa, who, though full of self-confidence, ardent in spirit and feeling the first strength of their manhood, had been obliged, being below the age for military service, to remain inactive while their country was overwhelmed, occupied, humiliated and oppressed.

The Germans showed less than their usual cunning when they allowed that war‑hardened veteran to have close, constant, and confidential contact with these youths of Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco. In that region, boys and girls, like the crops, ripen early. It is perhaps another consequence of the long, hot months of the North African summer that most of them have an impetuous temperament, quick both to smile and to strike.

The Chantiers de la Jeunesse was in fact, a dump of political dynamite which the Gestapo never detected, and they left it under the most efficient detonator in North Africa. To the German agents in Algiers van Heck seemed just the sort of person they would wish to see in charge of the students and young employees whom the Pétain Government had conscripted into the ranks of this organisation — a retired professional soldier, therefore a strict disciplinarian; a middle-aged family man, with a wife and three children living in the villa suburb of El Biar, therefore one who had given "hostages to fortune," and might be presumed unwilling to risk his domestic security in dangerous political activities.

The Germans consequently looked with favour upon the Commissaire-en‑Chef des Chantiers de la Jeunesse. His functions seemed to resemble closely those which the Führer had prescribed for the control of German youth.

Every facility was therefore permitted to Colonel van Heck. While ordinary citizens were forbidden the use of motor cars, he was accorded all the permits, passes and fuel allowances he required for the supervision of his young adherents, scattered as they were from the Libyan frontier to the coast of the Atlantic. What more natural than that and his fellow-leaders of French youth should be constantly on the move between Algiers and Bone, from Bone to Bizerta, from Bizerta to Biskra, Oran, Casablanca, Rabat and Marrakesh? "Glückliche Reise, Herr Oberst!"

 p77  Van Heck naturally took pains to encourage the belief that he was in fact attempting to bring into being something akin to the Hitler Jugend and Arbeitsdienst of Nazi Germany. He requested to be supplied with the organizing schedules and handbooks of these key Nazi creations. "Aber natürlich, Herr Oberst! Sehr gern. Wird sofort gemacht!" And the Gestapo agents, as they gathered round the tables on the terrace of the Hotel Aletti in the evening, would assure each other that the head of the Chantiers was a first-rate guy — "ganz prima."

Of course van Heck did not initiate his young followers into his ultimate intentions. They were employed, according to the regulations, on tasks of public utility, and were told that their whole duty as patriotic Frenchmen consisted in patiently working for the restoration of the material welfare of their country after the great misfortunes that had befallen her.

But gradually, as time went on, hints were passed to the more serious-minded and reliable among them that perhaps, after all, the day might come when they would have an opportunity to show what they could do for France in other ways than by manual toil. It was no more than a vague suggestion, a platonic aspiration which, even if it had reached the ears of the omnipresent and ever-suspicious agents of the Gestapo, might well have been dismissed as a platitude used to keep bored young men up to their jobs.

Van Heck had trusty and able helpers in his self-ordained, secret patriotic task. There was Lemaigre-Dubreuil, a rich business man. The Germans, of course, knew all about him, too. In the eyes of the Gestapo he was an eminently suitable type to share in the control of the youth of this important overseas territory of conquered France, an element always liable to cause trouble. For Lemaigre-Dubreuil had been rated in peacetime France as a Fascist.

Imagination is one of the qualities in which the German mind is lacking. It did not occur to the Nazi officials detailed to keep watch upon French North Africa that a man who, recognising the glaring defects of the French democratic system, had aspired to replace corruption and intrigue by discipline and efficiency, might none the less be an ardent patriot. The fact that Lemaigre-Dubreuil had  p78 urged the adoption of some of the beneficial features of a totalitarian regime did not signify that he was prepared to acquiesce in the imposition of the same system upon his country by a foreign conqueror.

Dubreuil had married the daughter of the wealthy head of the French oil‑concern known as Huiles Lesueur, and succeeded his father-in‑law in the control of that prosperous business. He was the founder of the Ligue des Contribuables, an association whose aim was to defend the interests of the French taxpayers against the graft which prevailed in the Chamber of Deputies. He also owned the Right Wing newspaper Le Jour.

Abetz, the vain and stupid former foreign-language teacher whom Ribbentrop sent to Paris before the war for the purpose of spying out the land, had no doubt noted Lemaigre-Dubreuil's name as gutgesinnt, or favourable to Nazism. It is a defect of the system of files, secret reports and dossiers on which the Nazi Government depends that human nature is difficult to classify. The Gestapo certainly got Lemaigre-Dubreuil's name into the wrong category.

For the purpose of the French Liberation Movement in North Africa that was all to the good. To have as second man in charge of the Chantiers de la Jeunesse a rich industrialist, who was regarded by the Nazis with indulgence, favoured the secret plans which were beginning to form in the heart of the organisation.

So great was the favour extended to Dubreuil that the Nazis even allowed him to remove the plant of his oil refineries from Occupied France to North Africa, where he carried on business as before, and provided the financial resources without which no political enterprise has much hope of success.

Moreover, as a leading manufacturer, it was natural that he should need to be constantly travelling between France and North Africa. Permits and air transportation were his for the asking, and he was thus able to serve as liaison officer between the French Liberation Movement in Algiers and various leading personalities in France whose aid and advance it needed.

Associated through Lemaigre-Dubreuil with the Chantiers de la Jeunesse was M. Rigault, a Parisian journalist. He had left the Paris Soir to become secretary of Lemaigre-Dubreuil's Ligue des Contribuables,  p79 and also of his newspaper Le Jour. His work in North Africa was to serve as a link between the various centres of the youth organisation, and to instil into them the will to resume the war when the chance came.

M. Tarbet de St. Hardouin had been an official of the Quai d'Orsay, the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs. He was a member of the Diplomatic Service, and his function in the movement was to conduct its negotiations. It was he who made the secret contracts for supplies that would be required when the time for action came. As a trained intermediary and a man of discretion, he was well-fitted to carry on these under­ground activities.

Captain Henri d'Astier de la Vigerie played an important part in the Liberation Movement, for he was in charge of its security organisation. Under him were the "strong‑arm squads" which put into operation the more forceful measures sometimes required to protect the French patriots and the Allied interests for which they were working from the machinations of the Gestapo. It was his department which carried out two actions referred to in the next chapter — the capture of a boatload of rifles sent to Algiers for the use of the pro‑Nazi organisation known as the Parti Populaire Français, and the elimination of a German spy who had got hold of the Allied plans for a landing.

Captain d'Astier had come over to Algiers immediately after the French armistice in 1940. He is a modern D'Artagnan, of bold and adventurous nature.

After the Allied landing, to whose success he had considerably contributed, misfortune overtook Captain d'Astier de la Vigerie. His work during two years as security officer had brought him into contact with many people of varying degrees of respectability. Among them was the young man, Bonnier de la Chapelle, who killed Admiral Darlan. It so happened that two or three days before the murder took place, Bonnier de la Chapelle had been in contact with D'Astier. The French judicial method of detaining for interrogation everyone with whom an accused criminal has been in contact led to this officer's arrest. Captain d'Astier's associates in the French Liberation Movement were convinced from the first that he  p80 had had no knowledge of Bonnier's intention, and they regularly visited him in gaol until he was ultimately released by the magistrate in charge of the investigation.

Captain d'Astier de la Vigerie has two brothers, of whom one, Emmanuel, who escaped from France only in October, 1943, became Commissioner for the Interior in the Committee of National Liberation. The remaining brother is a general attached to the French organization in London.

Working under Captain d'Astier de la Vigerie in the security organisation of the Liberation Movement was a French priest, the Abbé Cordier, who had been mobilised as a soldier at the beginning of the war, and was sufficiently imbued with martial spirit to undertake the dangerous work of leading one of the organization's troupes d'assaut. He, too, is a character reminiscent of the sixteenth century, when the French clergy not infrequently exchanged the cassock for a coat-of‑mail.

He combined his clerical with his military duties, and on the morning of November 8th, when the Allies were landing and the counter-espionage work was done, he celebrated Mass as usual. The congregation noticed that the Abbé's figure beneath his vestments was of unusual outline. It was only after the Mass, when he was disrobing in the vestry, that he discovered that he had forgotten to remove two large pistol-holders, each containing a Colt revolver, which he had strapped round his waist in the small hours of that morning, to go on duty with his fellow-patriots giving aid to the Allied landing.

Another prominent figure in the Liberation Movement was Commandant François de Clermont-Tonnerre, of the French Air Force. This member of a family of French aristocrats with estates in the North of France had been an airman when quite young, but gave up flying to work for two years as an archaeologist in Syria, where he achieved fame by being the first man after the mid‑nineteenth century German excavator, Schliemann, to find tombs containing golden burial-masks dating from the third millenary B.C.

He returned to aviation in 1933 and, with his wife as passenger,  p81 distinguished himself by being the first airman to fly unescorted from France over the Sahara Desert to Lake Chad.

In 1936, at the age of 29, he was elected to the Chamber of Deputies, winning for the Agrarian Party what was regarded as a sure Socialist seat in the industrial district of Amiens.

At the outset of the war De Clermont-Tonnerre was in command of an armoured‑car reconnaissance unit, but he later rejoined the French Air Force.

One of the most active figures, and certainly the most romantic, in that compact of brave men who set themselves to cooperate with the Allied forces of freedom for the purpose of liberating French North Africa was Captain Lindsay Watson, of the 5th Chasseurs d'Afrique.

If the Allies had been allowed to choose their own representative among the French patriots in Algiers they could not have made a better selection than this son of a Scots father and a French mother, who had not only served as a regular officer in a crack French cavalry regiment, but had played Rugby football both for Scotland against England and for the French Army against the Australian forces in the last war.

Lindsay Watson is equally at home as a Briton among Frenchmen or as a Frenchmen among Britons. He speaks both languages with the same fluency, and was educated at a famous Scottish public school, Edinburgh Academy, before going to live in Paris, where he entered the Military College of St. Cyr, the West Point of France.

Though today he has the appearance of a man of no more than thirty-five, he was in the last war, and afterwards continued on active service in the Near East, where the French were involved in hostilities against the Turks. No one would suppose, looking at his robust figure and healthy complexion, that he had been desperately wounded there, losing a kidney and spending two years on his back in consequence.

He was invalided out of the army, with a hundred-per‑cent disability pension. His father, a banker in Paris, with interests all over the world, then sent him to the Far East and the United States on  p82 the firm's business. In the intervals of these journeys he distinguished himself as an automobile racer in international events on the tracks at Brooklands, England, and Le Mans, France.

He became so popular in the financial circles of the world's chief capitals, that Lloyds, the great international organisation of England, asked him to represent them as a travelling agent for the settlement of foreign claims. Few men have had more worldwide experience.

Watson's patriotism was proved when, directly the present war started, though turned forty years of age, he at once renounced his disability pension, and applied to rejoin his regiment. He fought against the German invasion of May, 1940, was wounded and taken prisoner, but managed to escape and make his way to Algiers.

There he became the right-hand man of Colonel van Heck, who recognised both the influence which this international athlete could exercise upon young Frenchmen and the value of his intimate associations with Great Britain.

This, then, was the human framework of the organisation which steadily developed throughout North Africa during 1941 and the early part of 1942, for the purpose of aiding an Allied landing in these French territories.

Until the United States joined in the war, no such enterprise was possible. The man‑power and military resources of Britain were all required for the defence of the vital world-junction of Egypt, •12,000 miles away from the home source of supplies. They had already been heavily depleted by the unsuccessful attempt to save Greece from German invasion. Britain was in no position to undertake singlehanded another enterprise of vast scope and uncertain risk in the Western Mediterranean.

But the entry of America into the Allied confederation at the end of 1941 opened up fresh and far‑reaching horizons. The war‑potential of the cause of liberty was increased, and the British and American governments began to discuss how best it could be employed against what was recognised by both of them as their most formidable common enemy, the German forces in Europe.

For many reasons, French North Africa at once took a prominent  p83 place in these deliberations. Its geographical situation singled it out as a natural and easy gateway for the penetration of the forces of the United States into the European theatre of war. The traditional sympathies existing between the American and French peoples justified the expectation that the landing of American troops in French North Africa would be favourably received by the population of that territory.

The strategic advantages to be expected from a successful occupation of North Africa were also great. In the first place it would threaten the rear of the German and Italy armies which had pushed so perilously near to the Suez Canal. And if the invasion of North Africa were to have the ultimate result of freeing the whole of the southern shore of the Mediterranean from the control of the Axis powers, it would again become possible to use that sea as a line of supply to the Middle East, thereby effecting a gigantic economy in the shaping hitherto required to carry war material and stores to Egypt from Britain and the United States by way of the Cape of Good Hope.

Material advantages thus singled out the French territory on the southern shore of the Mediterranean as the place to go for. Psychological factors of a favourable kind might also be found in operation there. Right along from the fall of France, Washington had acted on the assumption that the Frenchmen exercising authority in North Africa — and indeed the members of the Vichy Government itself — were good patriots at heart, who had followed Pétain's lead in accepting the armistice terms because they believed at the time that they were acting in the best interests of France. In the view of the State Department, it would have been unjust to condemn these French politicians and government officials for accepting the hard fact of their military defeat at a time when neither Russia nor the United States was in the war against Germany, and when Britain, still far from fully armed, seemed likely to be invaded by the victorious German forces.

The American Government, therefore, based its policy on the view that, if the leading Frenchmen in North Africa were given armed support, they would be ready to repudiate their collaborationist  p84 past, and to seize the opportunity of liberating themselves from the German yoke. Events have proved this to be an accurate and statesmanlike appreciation.

The British Government, on the other hand, was equally impressed with the potentialities of the De Gaullist movement. The "Free French" were profoundly suspicious of any of their compatriots who had had dealings with the Germans. They claimed for themselves and their adherents in France, who were undoubtedly numerous, a monopoly of the spirit of patriotism.

Until the landing in North Africa was an accomplished fact, all negotiations and preparations for it were transacted solely by the American State Department. The United States Government had all along maintained an ambassador at Vichy, though he had been recalled "for consultation" at the time the expedition was launched.

After the landing had been made, Secretary of State Cordell Hull gave an account of the motives which had influenced the United States Government in maintaining these diplomatic relations with France and with French North Africa.

He justified them as having served the following ends:

1. They provided opportunities for getting information from inside German-controlled territory.

2. They encouraged French opposition to Hitlerism.

3. They helped to keep alive the concept of freedom among French people.

4. They stimulated French resistance against collaboration with Germany.

5. They paved the way in the most effective manner possible for the planning and sending of a military expedition into the western Mediterranean area.

The British Government were, of course, kept informed of the State Department's activities and plans. They did not pass this information on to General de Gaulle. The reason for this was that experience in Syria had proved the inclusion of "Free French" troops among the forces of liberation to have the effect of stimulating the resistance of the local French garrisons. Furthermore, the incident  p85 of the ill‑starred expedition against Dakar had shown that secret plans were best kept secret from everyone whose knowledge of them was not essential.

The conduct and control of the enterprise of occupying French North Africa were in the hands of the American Government. As Mr. Winston Churchill said in his speech at the London Guildhall immediately after the landings took place:

"The President is the author of that mighty undertaking. In all of it, I have been his active and ardent lieutenant."

---

Thayer's Note:

a Vers l'armée de métier.

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