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Dr. Brandt
07-17-2004, 06:11 PM
HISTORICAL BACKGROUND TO D-DAY

Five Invasions of French Territory
(Including One by Germany)

By MICHAEL WALSH



“We are without exception the greatest robbers and marauders that
ever existed on the face of the globe. We are worse than other countries
because we are hypocrites also, for we plunder and always pretend to
do so for other peoples’ good.” —Henry Labouchere, Liberal MP



As the D-Day carnival draws to an end, it is a good moment to reflect
that between 1940 and 1945 French territory was attacked and invaded
no less than five times, with just one of these invasions courtesy of the
German nation.

The first invasion of French territory was by invitation only and occurred
when Germany invaded in May 1940. In fairness to the German leader,
he did so only eight months after France’s declaration of war against
his own country, throughout which time France had constantly attacked
Germany’s borders. This retaliatory action by the German armies served
the added purpose of forestalling Britain’s plans to invade Europe. A habit it refused to shake off.



Within a few weeks the German Army numbering just 100,000 defeated
the French Army consisting of 6 million men. Generally speaking the
German Army was welcomed in the Low Countries, and there was much
collaboration not only in France but in Holland and Belgium were people
were glad to be rid of the British and French standing armies.



The behavior of German troops in France was impeccable, and Jewish
author William L. Shirer (Rise and Fall of the Third Reich) conceded
as much. In his Berlin Diary he writes: “I noticed open fraternizing between
German troops and the inhabitants. Most of the Germans act like naïve
tourists, and this has proved a pleasant surprise to the Parisians. It seems
funny—every German carries a camera.”

Adolf Hitler even allowed the French to keep its own Navy, saying France
needed it to defend her empire.


THE SECOND INVASION

The British carried out the second invasion of French interests. Churchill
demanded that the French surrender their liberated fleet to the British.
When the French made it plain that they had no intention of doing so, the
British attacked the French fleet, which was then based at the Algerian
port Mers-el-Kebir. During the battle 1,200 French sailors were killed.
Survivors were machine-gunned in the water by RAF pilots.



THE DAKAR DEBACLE

The third attack on French territory was against the French Navy based
at Dakar, Senegal. This included the battleship Richelieu, which was
carrying £60 million of Belgian and Polish gold. Charles de Gaulle, who had
fled to Britain with the remnants of his defeated army, wanted to lead the
invasion of Dakar, but the French in Senegal made it quite clear that the
renegade general would be repulsed.

However, on September 23, 1940 as dawn broke, the Royal Navy attacked
the port of Dakar. David Irving the noted historian takes up the story.

“It was a humiliating fiasco. The British assault forces never got off their
troopships. Charles de Gaulle’s aviators landed on the airfield and were
promptly arrested by the gendarmerie. His emissaries were fired upon as
their boat entered the port, and they were turned back.”


The Richelieu opened fire through the gathering fog with her new 15-inch
guns, as did the Dakar fortress batteries, which hit the cruiser Cumberland
amidships and put her out of action.

The next day’s brawling off Dakar was equally messy. The British sank a
French submarine; the shore guns savaged the Barham. On the day after that, General Spears accompanying de Gaulle, radioed that the latter had thrown in the sponge and would proceed to Bathurst (Gambia), a British colony 100 miles further down the coast.

At 9.00 am a French submarine slapped a torpedo into the battleship
Resolution and she too beat an undignified retreat. Morale among the French
defenders was high. Churchill dithered, whilst his ministers demanded that
they cut their losses.

D-DAY

The fourth invasion was the D-Day June 6th 1944 Allied invasion, at which
point the French could be forgiven for echoing the sentiments of the Czech
people. They had rued that they could stand another war, but not another
liberation.

In point of fact, this was largely an American invasion, with a British-supporting cast. Back home in the U.S.A. the incredulous public was given the impression that their sons were a band of angels. (So what’s new?)

Covering these events much later, NBC anchorman Tom Brokaw fell into line
with real history and said, ‘The bloodied landscape of France (and) Belgium
was American made. The crimes committed by individual American soldiers—
rape, thievery and murder—surpassed the crimes of the ‘Nazis’ in every respect.”

Even American generals were stealing from French civilians. During one period, over 500 rapes a month were being reported. It got so bad that General Eisenhower threatened hangings, but it was an empty threat.

Before this fourth invasion the Allies dropped over 590,000 tons of bombs on
France—equal to almost half the amount of bombs dropped on Germany during the entire course of the war. Over 1 million French homes were destroyed by Allied bombing attacks, and some cities such as Caen, Saint-Lo, Carentan, Montbourg and Valgnes ceased to exist.



For every German who lost his life resisting the American invasion of Europe,
the lives of four Frenchmen were taken. Whereas German troops had wandered at will during their occupation of France, the British and the Americans were repeatedly confined to barracks or had their movements restricted because of the French resistance to their presence on French soil.

AND THEN THERE WAS THE FIFTH INVASION

Finally, there was the fifth invasion of France; this time an invasion by the vengeful led by Charles De Gaulle. As soon as the American forces had made it safe for the ousted French general, now supported by brigands and Communist gangs, they sought revenge for their humiliation.

The most appalling massacres of civilians began to take place whilst American troops stood idly by. Generally, the British media ignored these awful events, but one English journalist, among others of various nationalities, recorded these desperate tragedies.

“There has never been, in the history of France, a bloodier period than that which followed the liberation of 1944-1945. The massacres of 1944 were no less savage than the massacres of Jacquerie, of St. Bartholomew, of the revolutionary terror, of the Commune, and they were certainly more numerous and on a wider scale.
The American services put the figures of ‘summary executions’ in France in the first months of the liberation at 80,000. A former French Minister, Adrien Tixier, later placed the figure at 105,000.” —Huddleston, op. cit., pp. 243 & 245-46.

Note: (Under the Reign of Terror 18,000 fell in the frightful butchery that followed the Franco-Prussian War and insurrection of 1870–71).



Footnote: Fewer than 1% of the French people had anything to do with the
‘Resistance’. From this we can deduce that 99% accepted or supported the
German occupation, which in any case was confined only to those territories that precluded Allied invasion.

—A Michael Walsh Contribution to the War Effort


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And I would like to add the sixth Invasion which is currently going, carried out by the floods of non-european "immigrants". This Invasion should be the final one and was planned by the very same people, that are responsible for the previous four!

FadeTheButcher
07-17-2004, 06:17 PM
Yes. The extent of the French Resistance was grossly exaggerated after the war by de Gaulle and his revisionist clique. See Julian Jackson's France: The Dark Years, 1940-1944 (2001) and Robert O. Paxton's Vichy France 1940-1944: Old Guard and New Order (1972) for more on this.

"In France, the period between 1940 and 1944 is known as the 'Dark Years'. The prosecutor at the post-war trial of Marshal Pétain, André Mornet, entitled his memoirs 'Four Years to Erase from our History'. There was a lot to erase. In 1940, after a battle lasting only six weeks, France suffered a catastrophic military defeat. An armistace was signed with Germany, and half of France, including Paris, was occupied by German troops. In the other half, a supposedly independent French government, headed by Marshall Pétain, installed itself in the spa town of Vichy. The Vichy government liquidated France's democratic institutions, persecuted Freemasons, Jews, and Communists, and embarked on a policy of collaboration with Germany. . . .

André Mornet's desire to erase these years from history was widely shared. De Gaulle tried to do the same. In August 1944, his provisional government issued an ordinance declaring that all Vichy's legislation was null and void: history would resume where it had stopped in 1940. When de Gaulle was asked in liberated Paris to announce the restoration of the French Republic, he refused -- on the grounds that it had never ceased to exist. This legal fiction became the foundation of a heroic reinterpretation of the Dark Years. According to this reinterpretation, most of the horrors inflicted on France had been the work of the Germans alone; de Gaulle and the Resistance had incarnated the real France; and the mass of the French people, apart from a handful of traitors, had been solidly behind them, whether in thought or in deed. Even Mornet contradicted the title to his own memoirs, by stating in the epigraph that the Resistance had made the period between 1940 and 1944 'years to inscribe in our history'. This Resistance myth reached its apogee in the 1960s when de Gaulle was president of the Fifth Republic. In 1964, the remains of Jean Moulin, who had been de Gaulle's envoy to the Resistance, were transferred to the Panthéon where France's national heroes are buried.

The heroic myth ignored too many inconvenient realities to survive for ever -- during the Occupation Monet himself offered his legal services to the prosecution at the Riom trial where Vichy had put its political enemies in the dock -- and it started to crumble in the 1970s. A catalyst in this process was Marcel Ophuls's documentary film The Sorrow and the Pity. Arguably one of the most important historical documentaries ever made, Ophul's three-hour film, released in 1971, was a craftily constructed work which presented the French population during the Occupation in an unprecedently unfavourable light, depicting them as predominantly selfish and attentiste. Ophuls delighted in capturing on screen people's attempts to rewrite their past. The film had been made for television but it was so iconoclastic that the authorities refused to broadcast it, and it was not televised in France until 1981. The Sorrow and the Pity was part of the 1968 mood of youth rebellion: de Gaulle was president, and it was his version of the past that was being challenged. A second film with great impact was Louis Malle's Lacombe Lucien (1974), the story of an adolescent peasant boy who becomes a collaborator by chance not conviction. Returning on his bicycle from an attempt to join the Resistance, he has a puncture, stumbles upon some Germans, and ends up working for them instead. The film depicts an amoral world without heroes where destiny is arbitrary.

From the 1970s, the French were increasingly reminded in films, books, and newspapers that millions of people had revered Marshal Pétain; that Vichy laws, not Germans ones, had represented the 'true' France and discriminated against French Jews and French Freemasons; that French policemen, not German ones, had arrested Jews and Communists; that the resisters had been a small minority; and that most people had been attentistes not heroes. The myth was turned on its head. Films now treated the Resistance in a debunking mode: Vichy, not de Gaulle or the Resistance, now seemed to represent the 'true' France."

Julian Jackson, France: The Dark Years, 1940-1944 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp.1-2