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Successful attempt to liberate France from Nazi occupation From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The liberation of France (French: libération de la France) in the Second World War was accomplished through diplomacy, politics and the combined military efforts of the Allied Powers, Free French forces in London and Africa, as well as the French Resistance.
| Liberation of France | |||||||
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| Part of the Western Front | |||||||
 Resistance leader Charles de Gaulle speaking from the balcony at Cherbourg City Hall, 20 August 1944 | |||||||
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| Belligerents | |||||||
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 FFI (since 1944) PGFR (since 1944) United States United Kingdom Canada  Poland |
 Germany  Italian Social Republic Vichy Regime | ||||||
| Commanders and leaders | |||||||
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Dwight D. Eisenhower George S. Patton Bernard Montgomery Miles Dempsey Harry Crerar Guy Simonds Charles de Gaulle Jean de Lattre de Tassigny Stanisław Maczek Kazimierz Sosnkowski |
Adolf Hitler Gerd von Rundstedt Erwin Rommel Joseph Darnand | ||||||
Nazi Germany invaded France in May 1940. Their rapid advance through the almost undefended Ardennes caused a crisis in the French government; the French Third Republic dissolved itself in July, and handed over absolute power to Marshal Philippe Pétain, an elderly hero of World War I. Pétain signed an armistice with Germany with the north and west of France under German military occupation. Pétain, charged with calling a Constitutional Authority, instead established an authoritarian government in the spa town of Vichy, in the southern zone libre ("free zone"). Though nominally independent, Vichy France became a collaborationist regime and was little more than a Nazi client state that actively participated in Jewish deportations and aided German forces in anti-partisan actions in Occupied France as well as in combat actions in Africa.
Even before France surrendered on 22 June 1940, General Charles de Gaulle fled to London, from where he called on his fellow citizens to resist the Germans. The British recognized and funded de Gaulle's Free French government in exile based in London. Efforts to liberate France began in the autumn of 1940 in France's colonial empire in Africa, still in the hands of the Vichy regime. General de Gaulle persuaded French Chad to support Free France, and by 1943 most other French colonies in Equatorial and North Africa had followed suit. De Gaulle announced formation of the Empire Defense Council in Brazzaville, which became the capital of Free France.
Allied military efforts in north western Europe began in summer 1944 with two seaborne invasions of France. Operation Overlord in June 1944 landed two million men, including a French armoured division, through the beaches of Normandy, opening a Western front against Germany. Operation Dragoon in August launched a second offensive force, including French Army B, from the département of Algeria into southern France. City after city in France was liberated, and even Paris was liberated on 25 August 1944. As the liberation progressed, resistance groups were incorporated into the Allied strength. In September, under threat of the Allied advance Pétain and the remains of the Vichy regime fled into exile in Germany. The Allied armies continued to push the Germans back through eastern France and in February and March 1945, back across the Rhine into Germany. A few pockets of German resistance remained in control of the main Atlantic ports until the end of the war on 8 May 1945.
Immediately after liberation, France was swept by a wave of executions, assaults, and degradation of suspected collaborators, including shaming of women suspected of relationships with Germans. Courts set up in June 1944 carried out an épuration légale (official purge) of officials tainted by association with Vichy or the military occupation. Some defendants received death sentences, and faced a firing squad. The first elections since 1940 were organized in May 1945 by the Provisional Government; these municipal elections were the first in which women could vote. In referendums in October 1946, the voters approved a new constitution and the Fourth Republic was born 27 October 1946.
Nazi Germany invaded France and the Low Countries beginning on 10 May 1940. German forces split the French from their British allies by striking through the lightly defended Ardennes, whose topography French strategists had considered prohibitively difficult for tanks.[citation needed]
The invaders forced the British Expeditionary Force to evacuate, and defeated several French divisions before they advanced to Paris, and down the strategic Atlantic coast. By June, the dire French military situation had French politics revolving around whether the Third Republic should negotiate an armistice, fight on from North Africa, or just surrender.[1] Prime Minister Paul Reynaud wanted to keep fighting, but was outvoted and resigned.[2] The government relocated several times ahead of advancing German troops, ending up in Bordeaux. President Albert Lebrun appointed 84-year-old war hero Philippe Pétain as his replacement on 16 June 1940.[3]
Within six weeks of the initial German assault, an overwhelmed French military faced imminent defeat. The cabinet agreed to seek peace terms and sent the Germans a delegation under General Charles Huntziger, with instructions to break off negotiations if the Germans demanded excessively harsh conditions such as the occupation of all of metropolitan France, the French fleet, or any of the French overseas territories. The Germans did not, however.[4]
Pierre Laval, a strong proponent of collaboration, arranged a meeting between Hitler and Pétain. It took place on 24 October 1940 at Montoire on Hitler's private train. Pétain and Hitler shook hands and agreed to co-operate. The meeting was exploited in Nazi propaganda for the civilian population. On 30 October 1940, Pétain made a policy of French collaboration official, declaring in a radio statement: "I enter today on the path of collaboration."[a]
General De Gaulle, sentenced to death in absentia by the Vichy régime, escaped and created a government in exile for Free France in London. Of the sentence, he said:
"I consider the death sentence by the men of Vichy entirely void, I shall settle accounts with them after victory. The sentence is that of a court largely under the influence and possibly under the direct orders of an enemy who will one day be driven from the soil of France. Then I will submit myself willingly to the people's judgment."[6]
Pétain signed the Armistice of 22 June. Its terms left the French Army under Vichy France a rump Armistice Army.[b] The naval fleet, although disabled, remained under Vichy control. In the colonial empire, the armistice terms permitted defensive use of the naval fleet. In metropolitan France, forces were severely reduced, armored vehicles and tanks prohibited, and motorized transport severely limited.
In July, the National Assembly of the French Third Republic dissolved itself and gave absolute power to Pétain, who was to set up a constituent assembly and constitutional referendum. The "French State" created by this transfer of power was commonly known after the war as the "Vichy régime". Pétain did nothing about a constitution however, and established a totalitarian government at Vichy in the southern zone.[7]
The Vichy régime nominally governed all of France, but in practice the zone occupée was a Nazi dictatorship and the Vichy government's power was limited and uncertain even in the zone libre. Vichy France became a collaborationist regime, little more than a Nazi client state.[8]
France was still nominally independent, with control of the French Navy, the French colonial empire, and the southern half of its metropolitan territory.[8] France could tell itself that it still retained some shreds of dignity. Despite heavy pressure, Vichy never joined the Axis alliance and remained formally at war with Germany.[citation needed] The Allies took the position that France should refrain from actively helping the Germans, but distrusted its assurances. The British attacked the French Navy at anchor in Mers-el-Kébir, to keep it out of German hands.
Charles de Gaulle had been since 5 June the Under-Secretary of State for National Defence and War and responsible for coordination with Britain. Refusing to accept his government's position on Germany, he escaped back to England on 17 June. In London he established a government in exile and in a series of radio appeals exhorted the French to fight back. Some historians have called the first, his appeal of 18 June on the BBC, the beginning of the French Resistance. In fact the audience for that appeal was quite small, but more and more listened as de Gaulle obtained Britain's recognition as the legitimate government of Free France and obtained their agreement to finance a military efforts against Nazi Germany.
De Gaulle also tried, in vain initially, to gain the support of French forces in the French colonial empire. General Charles Noguès, Resident-General in Morocco and Commander-in-Chief of the Army of Africa refused his overtures, and forbade the press in French North Africa to publish the text of de Gaulle's appeal.[9] The day after the armistice was signed on 21 June 1940, de Gaulle denounced it.[10] The French government in Bordeaux declared de Gaulle compulsorily retired from the Army with the rank of colonel, on 23 June 1940.[11] Also on 23 June, the British Government denounced the armistice and announced that they no longer regarded the Bordeaux government as a fully independent state. They also noted a plan to establish a French National Committee in exile, but did not mention de Gaulle by name.[12]
The armistice took effect starting at 00:35 on 25 June.[10] On 26 June de Gaulle wrote to Churchill about recognition for his French Committee.[13] The Foreign Office had reservations about de Gaulle as a leader, but Churchill's envoys had tried and failed to establish contact with French leaders in North Africa, so on 28 June, the British government recognized de Gaulle as the leader of the Free French, despite the FO's reservations.[14]
De Gaulle also initially had little success in attracting the support of major powers.[15] While Pétain's government was recognized by the US, the USSR, and the Vatican, and controlled the French fleet and military in all the colonies, de Gaulle's retinue consisted of a secretary, three colonels, a dozen captains, a law professor, and three battalions of legionnaires who had agreed to stay in Britain and fight for him. For a time the New Hebrides were the only French colony to back de Gaulle.[16]
De Gaulle and Churchill reached agreement on 7 August 1940 that Britain would also fund the Free French, with the costs to be settled after the war (the financial agreement was finalized in March 1941). A separate letter guaranteed the territorial integrity of the French colonial empire.[17]
The French Resistance was a decentralized network of small cells of fighters with the tacit or overt support of many French civilians. The various resistance groups by 1944 had an estimated 100,000 members in France.[18] Some were former Republican fighters from the Spanish Civil War; others were workers who went into hiding rather than report for the mandatory Service du travail obligatoire (STO) to work for German arms factories.[c][20] In the south of France especially, Resistance fighters took to the mountainous brush (maquis) that gave them their name, and conducted guerilla warfare on the German occupation forces, cutting telephone lines and destroying bridges.
The Armée Secrète was a French military organization active during World War II. The collective grouped the paramilitary formations of the three most important Gaullist resistance movements in the southern zone: Combat, Libération-sud and the Franc-Tireurs.
Some organizations grew up around one of the many clandestine presses of the time, such as Combat, founded by Albert Camus, to which Jean-Paul Sartre also contributed. Stalin supported the effort[clarification needed] once Germany invaded the Soviet Union.
French prisoners of war were held hostage against the French government meeting their quota of workers. When the mass impressment of able-bodied civilians began, French railway workers (cheminots) went on strike rather than allow the Germans to use the trains to transport them.[21] The cheminots eventually formed their own organization, Résistance-Fer.
The French Forces of the Interior (FFI), as de Gaulle came to call Resistance forces inside France, were an uneasy alliance of several maquis and other organizations, including the Communist-organized Francs-Tireurs et Partisans (FTP) and the Armée secrète in southern France. In addition, escape networks helped Allied airmen who had been shot down get to safety.[22] The Unione Corse and the milieu, the criminal underground of Marseilles, gleefully provided logistical escape assistance for a price, although some such as Paul Carbone instead worked with the Carlingue, French auxiliaries to the Gestapo SD and German military police.
France's colonial empire at the start of World War II stretched from territories and possessions in Africa, the Middle East (Mandate for Syria and the Lebanon), to ports in India, Indochina, the Pacific islands, and territories in North and South America. France retained control of its colonial empire, and the terms of the armistice shifted the power balance post-armistice of France's reduced military resources away from France and towards the colonies, especially North Africa. By 1943, all French colonies, except for Japanese-controlled Indochina, had joined the Free French cause.[23][24][page needed] The colonies in North Africa and French Equatorial Africa in particular played a key role[25][26]
Vichy French colonial forces were reduced under the terms of the armistice. Nevertheless, in the Mediterranean area alone, Vichy had nearly 150,000 men under arms. There were about 55,000 in French Morocco, 50,000 in Algeria, and almost 40,000 in the Army of the Levant.
Refusing to accept his government's armistice with Germany, Charles de Gaulle fled to England on 17 June and exhorted the French to resist occupation and to continue the fight.[28]
Reynaud resigned after his proposal for a Franco-British Union was rejected by his cabinet and De Gaulle facing imminent arrest, fled France on 17 June. Other leading politicians, including Georges Mandel, Léon Blum, Pierre Mendès France, Jean Zay and Édouard Daladier (and separately Reynaud), were arrested while travelling to continue the war from North Africa.[29]
De Gaulle obtained special permission from Winston Churchill to broadcast a speech on 18 June via Radio Londres (a French language radio station operated by the BBC) to France, despite the Cabinet's objections that such a broadcast could provoke the Pétain government into a closer allegiance with Germany.[30] In his speech, de Gaulle reminded the French people that the British Empire and the United States of America would support them militarily and economically in an effort to retake France from the Germans.
Few actually heard the speech but another speech, heard by more people, was given by de Gaulle four days later.[31] After the war, de Gaulle's radio appeal was often identified as the beginning of the French Resistance, and the process of liberating France from the yoke of German occupation.[32]
De Gaulle's support grew out of a base in colonial Africa. In the summer of 1940, the colonial empire largely supported the Vichy regime. Félix Éboué, governor of Chad, switched his support to General de Gaulle in September. Encouraged, de Gaulle traveled to Brazzaville in October, where he announced the formation of an Empire Defense Council[33] in his "Brazzaville Manifesto",[34] and invited all colonies still supporting Vichy to join him and the Free French forces in the fight against Germany, which most of them did by 1943.[33][35]
On 26 August, the governor and military commanders in the colony of French Chad announced that they were rallying to De Gaulle's Free French Forces. A small group of Gaullists seized control of French Cameroon the following morning,[36] and on 28 August a Free French official ousted the pro-Vichy governor of French Congo.[37] The next day the governor of Ubangi-Shari declared that his territory would support De Gaulle. His declaration prompted a brief struggle for power with a pro-Vichy army officer, but by the end of the day all of the colonies that formed French Equatorial Africa had rallied to Free France, except for French Gabon.[38]
A series of organizing bodies was created during the war, to guide and coordinate the diplomatic and war effort of Free France, with General Charles de Gaulle playing a central role in the creation or operation of them all.
On 26 June 1940, four days after the Pétain government requested the armistice, General de Gaulle submitted a memorandum to the British government notifying Churchill of his decision to set up a Council of Defense of the Empire[39] and formalizing the agreement reached with Churchill on 28 June. The formal recognition of the Empire Defense Council as a government in exile by the United Kingdom took place on 6 January 1941; recognition by the Soviet Union was published in December 1941, by exchange of letters.[40]
Winston Churchill suggested that de Gaulle create a committee, to lend an appearance of a more constitutionally based and less dictatorial authority and on 24 September 1941 de Gaulle created by edict the French National Committee[41] as the successor organization to the smaller Empire Defense Council. According to historian Henri Bernard, [fr] De Gaulle went on to accept his proposal, but took care to exclude all his adversaries within the Free France movement, such as Émile Muselier, André Labarthe and others, retaining only "yes men" in the group.[41]
The committee was the coordinating body which acted as the government-in-exile of Free France from 1941 to 1943.[42][full citation needed] On 3 June 1943 it merged with the French Civil and Military High Command headed by Henri Giraud, becoming the new "French Committee of National Liberation".[43]
De Gaulle, began seeking the formation of a committee to unify the resistance movements. On January 1, 1942, he delegated this task to Jean Moulin. Moulin achieved this on May 27, 1943, with the first meeting of the Conseil National de la Résistance in the 6th-arrondissement apartment of René Corbin[44] on the second floor of 48, Rue du Four, in Paris.
The French Civil and Military High Command[45][46] was the governmental body in Algiers headed by Henri Giraud following the liberation of a portion of French North Africa following the Allied Operation Torch landings on 7 and 8 November 1942.
François Darlan had been named by Pétain to oppose the Allied landings in North Africa in November 1942. Following the landings, Darlan supported the Allies.[47] On 13 November, Eisenhower recognized him and named Darlan "High Commissioner of France residing in North Africa".[47] Henri Giraud, a French patriot loyal to Vichy but opposed to Germany and who had been the Allies choice, became commander of the military forces in North Africa. First called the "High Commission of France in Africa", the French authority was rocked when on 24 December 1942, Darlan was assassinated by a Monarchist.[48] Giraud took over and the name "Civil and Military High Command" was adopted by 1943. Giraud exercised authority over French Algeria and the French Protectorate of Morocco, while the Tunisian campaign against the Germans and Italians continued in the French Protectorate of Tunisia. Darlan having previously won the support of French West Africa, the latter was also in Giraud's camp, while French Equatorial Africa was in de Gaulle's camp.[49]
By March 1943, North Africa began to distance itself from Vichy. On 14 March, Giraud delivered a speech that he later described as "the first democratic speech of [his] life", in which he broke with Vichy. Jean Monnet pushed Giraud to negotiate with de Gaulle, who arrived in Algiers on 30 May 1943. On 3 June, the Civil and Military High Command in Algiers merged with the French National Committee in London to form the French National Liberation Committee.
The French Committee of National Liberation was a provisional government of Free France formed by generals Henri Giraud and Charles de Gaulle to provide united leadership, and organize and coordinate the campaign to liberate France. The committee was formed on 3 June 1943 and after a period of joint leadership came under the chairmanship of de Gaulle on 9 November.[50] The committee directly challenged the legitimacy of the Vichy régime and unified the French forces that fought against the Nazis and their collaborators. The committee functioned as a provisional government for French Algeria (then a part of metropolitan France) and the liberated parts of the colonial empire.[51][52][53]
The committee was formed on 3 June 1943 in Algiers, the capital of French Algeria.[53] Giraud and de Gaulle served jointly as co-presidents of the committee. The charter of the body affirmed its commitment to "re-establish all French liberties, the laws of the Republic and the Republican régime."[54] The committee saw itself as a source of unity and representation for the French nation. The Vichy regime was decried as illegitimate over its collaboration with Nazi Germany. The committee received mixed responses from the Allies; the U.S. and Britain considered it a war-time body with restricted functions, different from a future government of liberated France.[54] The Committee soon expanded its membership, developed a distinctive administrative body and incorporated as the Provisional Consultative Assembly, creating an organized, representative government within itself. With Allied recognition, the committee and its leaders Giraud and de Gaulle enjoyed considerable popular support within France and the French resistance, thus becoming the forerunners in the process to form a provisional government for France as liberation approached.[54] However, Charles de Gaulle politically outmaneuvered Gen. Giraud, and asserted complete control and leadership over the committee.[53]
In August 1944 the Committee moved to Paris following the liberation of France by Allied forces.[54]
In September, Allied forces recognized the committee as the legitimate provisional government of France, whereupon the Committee reorganized itself as the Provisional Government of the French Republic under the presidency of Charles de Gaulle[54] and began the process of writing a new Constitution which would become the basis of the French Fourth Republic.[53]
The Provisional Consultative Assembly was set up in September 1943 in Algiers to advise the committee and to help provide a legal basis to the institutions being set up to represent the French people, at a time when the country itself and its laws represented the enemy. After the liberation of Paris in August 1944, the Committee moved to Paris and was reorganized as the Provisional Government of the French Republic under the presidency of Charles de Gaulle. The Provisional Government guided the French war and diplomatic efforts through liberation and the end of the war, until a new Constitution was written and approved in a referendum, establishing of the Fourth Republic in October 1946.
The Provisional Consultative Assembly was a governmental organ of Free France that was created by and operated under the aegis of the French Committee of National Liberation (CFLN). It began in north Africa and held meetings in Algiers until it moved to Paris in July 1944.[55] Led by Charles de Gaulle, it was an attempt to provide some sort of representative, democratic accountability to the institutions being set up to represent the French people, at a time when the country itself and its laws were dissolved and its territory occupied or coopted by a puppet state.
The members of the Assembly represented the French resistance movements, political parties, and territories that were engaged against Germany in the Second World War alongside the Allies.
Established by ordinance on 17 September 1943 by the CFLN, it held its first meetings in Algiers, at the Palais Carnot (the former headquarters of the Financial Delegations), between 3 November 1943 and 25 July 1944. On 3 June 1944 it was placed under the authority of the Provisional Government of the French Republic (GPRF), which succeeded the CFLN.
In his inaugural speech, de Gaulle gave the body his imprimatur, as providing a means of representing the people of France as democratically and legally as possible under difficult and unparalleled circumstances, until such time as democracy could once again be restored.[56][57] As an indication of the importance he attached to the body, de Gaulle participated in about twenty sessions of the Consultative Assembly in Algiers. On 26 June 1944, he came to report on the military situation after the D-Day landings, and on 25 July, he was present at its last session on African soil before its move to Paris.[57]
Restructured and expanded after the liberation of France, it held sessions in Paris at the Palais du Luxembourg between 7 November 1944 and 3 August 1945.
The GPFR served as an interim government of Free France from June 1944 through liberation and lasted till 1946.
The PGFR was created by the Committee of National Liberation on 3 June 1944, three days before D-day. It moved back to Paris after the liberation of the capital in August 1944.
Most of the goals and activity of the GPFR are related to the post-Liberation period, so this subtopic is covered in more detail in the Aftermath section below, in section Provisional Government of the French Republic.
The first military forces brought to bear in the liberation of France were the forces of Free France, made up of colonial regiments from French Africa. The Free French forces included 300,000 North African Arabs.[58] Two of the Big Three Allies, the United States and the United Kingdom, were next with Operation Overlord, with Australian air support and Canadian infantry in the Normandy beach landings.
Individual civilian efforts such as the Maquis de Saint-Marcel helped to harass the Germans. An OSE operation hid Allied servicemen. The many scattered cells of the French Resistance gradually consolidated into a fighting force after the Normandy landings and became known as the French Forces of the Interior (FFI). The FFI made major contributions, assisting Allied armies pushing the Germans east out of France and past the Rhine.
The military forces involved in the liberation of France were under the command of General Dwight D. Eisenhower, commander of the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF).[59] General Bernard Montgomery was named commander of the 21st Army Group, which comprised all of the land forces involved in the initial invasion.[60] On 31 December 1943, Eisenhower and Montgomery first saw the outline plan the Chief of Staff to the Supreme Allied Commander (COSSAC) had prepared for an invasion, which proposed amphibious landings by three divisions, with two more divisions in support. The two generals immediately insisted on expanding the scale of the initial invasion to five divisions, with airborne descents by three additional divisions, to allow operations on a wider front and to speed up the capture of the port at Cherbourg. The need to acquire or produce extra landing craft for the expanded operation meant delaying the invasion until June 1944.[60] Eventually the Allies committed 39 divisions to the Battle of Normandy: 22 American, 12 British, three Canadian, one Polish, and one French, totalling over a million troops,[61] all under overall British command.[62][e]
Despite de Gaulle's call to continue the struggle, few French forces initially pledged their support. By the end of July 1940, only about 7,000 soldiers had joined the Free French Forces in England.[63][64] Three-quarters of French servicemen in Britain requested repatriation.[65]: 80
France was bitterly divided by the conflict. Frenchmen everywhere were forced to choose sides, and often deeply resented those who had made a different choice.[65]: 126 One French admiral, René-Émile Godfroy, voiced the opinion of many of those who decided not to join the Free French forces, when in June 1940 he explained to the exasperated British why he would not order his ships from their Alexandria harbour to join de Gaulle:
Equally, few Frenchmen believed that Britain could stand alone. In June 1940, Pétain and his generals told Churchill that "in three weeks, England will have her neck wrung like a chicken".[66] Of France's far-flung empire, only the 43 acres of French territory of the British island of St Helena (on 23 June at the initiative of Georges Colin, honorary consul of the domains[67]) and the Franco-British ruled New Hebrides in the Pacific (on 20 July) answered De Gaulle's call to arms. It was not until late August that Free France would gain significant support in French Equatorial Africa.[68]
Unlike the troops at Dunkirk or naval forces at sea, relatively few members of the French Air Force had the means or opportunity to escape. Like all military personnel trapped on the mainland, they were functionally subject to the Pétain government: "French authorities made it clear that those who acted on their own initiative would be classed as deserters, and guards were placed to thwart efforts to get on board ships."[69] In the summer of 1940, around a dozen pilots made it to England and volunteered for the RAF to help fight the Luftwaffe.[70][69]: 13 Many more, however, made their way through long and circuitous routes to Spain or to French territories overseas, eventually regrouping as the Free French Air Force.[69]: 13–18
The French Navy was better able to immediately respond to de Gaulle's call to arms. Most units initially stayed loyal to Vichy, but about 3,600 sailors operating 50 ships around the world joined with the Royal Navy and formed the nucleus of the Free French Naval Forces (FFNF; in French Forces Navales Françaises Libres: FNFL).[64] France's surrender found her only aircraft carrier, Béarn, en route from the United States loaded with American fighter and bomber aircraft. Unwilling to return to occupied France, but likewise reluctant to join de Gaulle, Béarn instead sought harbour in Martinique, her crew showing little inclination to side with the British in their continued fight against the Nazis. Already obsolete at the start of the war, she remained in Martinique for the next four years, her aircraft rusting in the tropical climate.[71]
Many men in the French colonies felt a special need to defend France,[citation needed] and eventually made up two-thirds of de Gaulle’s Free French Forces. Among these volunteers, influential psychiatrist and decolonial philosopher Frantz Fanon from Martinique joined de Gaulle’s troops at the age of 18, despite being deemed a ‘dissenter’ by Martinique's Vichy-controlled colonial government for doing so.[72]
The contribution to France's liberation made by African colonial soldiers, who comprised 9% of the French army, was long overlooked. The North African units, dating from 1830 and grouped into the XIX Army Corps in 1873, formed part of the French Metropolitan Army.[73] De Gaulle made a base in African territory, from which he launched the military liberation. African troops who made the largest contribution by colonial troops to the liberation.[74][75]
On the eve of the Second World War, five regiments of Tirailleurs Sénégalais were stationed in France in addition to a brigade based in Algeria. The 2e division colonial senegalaise was permanently deployed in the south of France due to the potential threat of invasion from Italy.
The Armée d’Afrique (Army of Africa) was formally a separate army corps of the French metropolitan army, the 19th Army Corps (19e Corps d'Armée) so named in 1873. The French Colonial Forces on the other hand came under the Ministry of the Navy and comprised both French and indigenous units serving in Sub-Saharan Africa and elsewhere in the French colonial empire.
De Gaulle set up his Free French intelligence system to combine both military and political roles, including covert operations. He selected journalist Pierre Brossolette (1903–44) to head the Bureau Central de Renseignements et d'Action (BCRA). The policy was reversed in 1943 by Emmanuel d'Astrier, the interior minister of the exile government, who insisted on civilian control of political intelligence.[76]
The "Big Three" Allies of World War II, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom and the United States, all fought Germany in World War II, but Soviet Union fighting on the Eastern Front played no direct role in the liberation of France, but the second front contributed to Nazi defeat.
The United Kingdom and the United States fought on the Western Front, with contributions from Canadian and Australian soldiers who landed in Normandy on D-Day, as well as Australian air support.[77]
French Forces of the Interior was the formal name given by General de Gaulle to French resistance fighters in the later stages of the war; the change occurred as France, the occupied nation, became France, being liberated by the Allied armies. Regional maquis became more formally organized into FFI light infantry and served as a valuable additional manpower for the regular Free French forces.
After the invasion of Normandy in June 1944, at the request of the French Committee of National Liberation, SHAEF placed about 200,000 resistance fighters under the command of General Marie Pierre Kœnig on 23 June 1944[78] who attempted to unify resistance efforts against the Germans. General Eisenhower confirmed Koenig's command of the FFI .
The FFI were mostly composed of resistance fighters who used their own weapons, although many FFI units included former French soldiers. They used civilian clothing and wore an armband with the letters "F.F.I."
According to General Patton, the rapid advance of his army through France would have been impossible without the fighting aid of the FFI. General Patch estimated that from the time of the Mediterranean landings to the arrival of U.S. troops at Dijon, the help given to the operations by the FFI was equivalent to four full divisions.[79]
FFI units seized bridges, began the liberation of villages and towns as Allied units neared, and collected intelligence on German units in the areas entered by the Allied forces, easing the Allied advance through France in August 1944.[80] According to a volume of the U.S. official history of the war,
In Brittany, southern France, and the area of the Loire and Paris, French Resistance forces greatly aided the pursuit to the Seine in August. Specifically, they supported the U.S. Third Army in Brittany and the Seventh U.S. and First French Armies in the southern beachhead and the Rhône valley. In the advance to the Seine, the French Forces of the Interior helped protect the southern flank of the Third Army by interfering with enemy railroad and highway movements and enemy telecommunications, by developing open resistance on as wide a scale as possible, by providing tactical intelligence, by preserving installations of value to the Allied forces, and by mopping up bypassed enemy positions.[81]
As regions of France were liberated, the FFI provided a ready pool of semi-trained manpower with which France could rebuild the French Army. Estimated to have a strength of 100,000 in June 1944, the strength of the FFI grew rapidly, doubling by July 1944, and reaching 400,000 by October 1944.[82] Although the amalgamation of the FFI was in some cases fraught with political difficulty, it was ultimately successful and allowed France to re-establish a reasonably large army of 1.3 million men by VE Day.[83]
Approximately 2,000 British and 3,000 American airmen downed in western Europe evaded German capture during the war. Airmen were assisted by many different escape lines, some of them large and organized, others informal and ephemeral. The Royal Air Forces Escaping Society estimated that 14,000 volunteers worked with the many escape and evasion lines during the war. Many others helped on an occasional basis, and the total number of people who, on one or more occasions helped downed airmen during the war, may have reached 100,000. One-half of the volunteer helpers were women, often young women, even teenagers.[84]
Escape and evasion lines created by the Allies specifically to assist their men, such as the Shelbourne or the Burgundy lines or those created by servicemen at large in occupied territory, such as the Pat O'Leary Line, usually focused on helping Allied servicemen. Other escape lines, grass-roots efforts by civilians to help those fleeing the Nazis, such as the Comet, Dutch-Paris, Service EVA or the Smit-van der Heijden lines, also helped servicemen but also compromised spies, resisters, men evading the forced labor impressments, civilians who wanted to join the governments-in-exile in London, and fleeing Jews.[85][86]
In the uplands and forests, considerable numbers of resistance fighters gathered, known as maquisards because of the maquis shrubland that sheltered them. These "redoubts" of FFI fighters initially kept a low profile, since overt acts of sabotage resulted in savage reprisals by German forces, or direct military action on a large scale. On 26 March 1944, the Maquis des Glières in Haute-Savoie were defeated by more than 3,000 troops followed by shootings and burnings of farms amongst the local population.[87]
Excluded from the planning for the Normandy Landings, de Gaulle and his staff devised an operation called Plan Caïman in which French paratroopers would join the maquisards of the Massif Central to liberate the surrounding area and from there establish contact with the invading British and US forces. The Allied planners rejected the plan on the grounds that they would not have the resources to support it. On 20 May 1944, the Maquis du Mont Mouchet in the Massif Central staged an open uprising on its own initiative and was crushed within three weeks with the usual reprisals.[88] Despite this, on 6 June, de Gaulle broadcast an impassioned call to arms to the French people on the BBC, which the maquisards interpreted as a signal for overt action; a lower-key message from Eisenhower to avoid a "premature uprising" was widely ignored.[89] As a direct consequence, in July the 4,000 FFI on the Vercors Plateau near Grenoble were attacked by a German force of 10,000 including paratroopers and troops in gliders. In the Battle of Vercors, the lightly armed French defences were overwhelmed, despite assistance from Allied agents, air-drops and special forces.[90]
Military strategy for the war as a whole was discussed among the Big Three powers, and especially among the United Kingdom and the United States, who were especially close, with numerous calls and meetings held between U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill. In addition, the leaders of the Big Three met at conferences during the war to decide on overall military strategy.[91]
The Arcadia Conference held in Washington, D.C. from December 22, 1941, to January 14, 1942, followed the American and the British declarations of war on Japan; Japan's allies, Germany and Italy, had just declared war on the United States. The main policy decisions of Arcadia included the "Germany First" (also known as "Europe first") policy that the defeat of Germany had higher priority than the war with Japan.[92][93]
The Second Washington Conference in June 1942 confirmed a decision not to open a second front in France but to first invade French North Africa as part of a joint Mediterranean strategy for an attack on Italy (described as the "soft under-belly" of the Axis).[94]
The decision to undertake a cross-channel invasion in 1944 was taken at the Trident Conference in Washington in May 1943. General Eisenhower was appointed commander of SHAEF and General Bernard Montgomery was named as commander of the 21st Army Group, which comprised all the land forces involved in the invasion. The coast of Normandy in northwestern France was chosen as the site of the invasion.[95]
The Tehran Conference (28 November to 1 December 1943) a strategy meeting of the Big Three leaders Joseph Stalin, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill held at the Soviet Union's embassy in Tehran had numerous objectives, and led to the commitment of the western Allies to open a second front in the war in the west.[96]
After the Fall of France, the battle to retake France began in Africa in November 1940. By September 1944, after the liberation of Paris and the southern France campaign and taking of Mediterranean ports in Marseille and Toulon, the country was largely liberated. The Allied Forces were driving into Germany from the west and the south. The liberation of France didn't finally end till the elimination of some pockets of German resistance along the Atlantic coast at the end of the war in May 1945.
Militarily, the liberation of France was part of the Western Front of World War II. Other than scattered raids in 1942 and 1943, the reconquest began in earnest in the summer of 1944 in parallel campaigns in the north and south of France. On 6 June 1944, the Allies began Operation Overlord, the largest seaborne invasion in history, establishing a beachhead in Normandy, landing two million men in northern France and opening another front in western Europe against Germany. American forces broke out from Normandy at the end of July. At the Falaise Pocket the Allied armies destroyed German forces, opening the route to Paris. In the south, the Allies launched Operation Dragoon on 15 August, opening a new military front on the Mediterranean. In four weeks, the Germans retreated from southern France to Germany. This left French ports in Allied hands, resolving earlier supply problems in the south. Under the onslaught from both directions, the French Resistance organized a general uprising in Paris on 19 August. On 25 August 1944 Paris was liberated. The Allied forces began to push towards the Rhine. Initial rapid advances in the North stretched lines of supply in the autumn, and the advance slowed. German counteroffensives in the winter of 1944–45 such as the Battle of the Bulge slowed but did not stop the Allied armies, some crossing the Rhine in February, with heavy German losses. By late March several Allied armies had crossed and began advancing rapidly into Germany, with the end of the war not far away. With France mostly liberated, a few pockets of German resistance remained until the end of the war in May 1945.
The Battle of Gabon resulted in the Free French Forces taking the colony of French Gabon and its capital, Libreville, from Vichy French forces. It was the only significant engagement in Central Africa during the war.[citation needed]
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Operation Torch, the invasion of French North Africa, was carried out to trap Axis forces in North Africa between two Allied armies – an Anglo-American one in the west and a British and Commonwealth one in the east; this would also permit an invasion of Italy and free the Mediterranean for shipping. It would be the first ground combat operations for American troops in the west. In a three-pronged Allied assault against Vichy régime targets in French North Africa, the landing forces of Operation Torch came in at Casablanca, Oran and Algiers. Following Case Anton, French colonial governors had found themselves taking orders from the German military administration, and did so with varying degrees of enthusiasm. The American consul in Algiers believed that Vichy forces would welcome American soldiers.
A Western Task Force (aimed at Casablanca) was composed of American units, with Major General George S. Patton in command and Rear Admiral Henry Kent Hewitt heading naval operations. This Western Task Force consisted of the U.S. 3rd and 9th Infantry Divisions, and two battalions from the U.S. 2nd Armored Division — 35,000 troops in a convoy of over 100 ships. They were transported directly from the United States in the first of a new series of UG convoys providing logistical support for the North African campaign.
The Center Task Force, aimed at Oran, included the U.S. 2nd Battalion,
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