South Yorkshire Times, August 26th 1944
France Rises Again
This is France’s great week. Everywhere the grip of the German tyrants is being loosened. On all sides the Master Race is engaged in a mad scramble to get away, or to surrender safely into Anglo Saxon hands. Paris is free, gloriously liberated by its own people and Hitler is finding just what a Tarter he caught when he thought he had conquered France for good and all and danced a puerile jig to celebrate the event. In 1940 France was distraught and humbled. She could have kept the Tricolour flying in North Africa but there was no one to rally her beaten army to to exalt the spirit of her dazed people to attempt a last defiant stand across the sea.
On the other hand, there were not lacking poltroons and faint hearts only too ready to collaborate with the Germans to accept defeat lying down, and to make their peace with the Nazi conquerors in the hope of getting most of the crumbs which they anticipated would fall from the table of their new masters. These dreary defeatists eventually constituted themselves as a ramshackle pettifogging government. This travesty of a government never represented the real France. In England a few Frenchmen began to work for the salvation of their national heritage. They had little but hope and an abounding faith to sustain them. Britain herself was hard pressed, and for a long time could do little to help these patriots. Fortunately, the few in exile soon found they could count on the many who remained in France biding their time under a yoke which galled them with unutterable bitterness.
Thus it was that the underground movement was born. Soon it had regular liaison with those outside France who had greater freedom of movement. French North and West Africa were liberated; and then came D-Day, the day these gallant Frenchmen had lived for so dangerously. In the meantime, they had progressed from the status of an underground service which helped Allied airmen to safety and kept alive the tradition of resistance by printing and circulating clandestine newspapers to the more positive phase of the Maquis, in open conflict with the Nazis wherever opportunity presented itself. D-Day gave them the full standing of a guerilla army and as the French Forces of the Interior they have played a sterling part in the clearing of their country. There is no doubt that but for the dash, daring and wonderful organisation and self-discipline of the F.F.I. The brilliant outflanking move executed by the American half of General Montgomery’s force could never have succeeded as it has done. As the American armour swept southwards across the base of the Britanny peninsula and swung East along the Northern bank of the Loire in headlong pursuit of the broken German formations of the F.F.I., not only smoothed the way by harassing and ham-stringing German opposition but also secured the communications of the racing tank columns. Town after town was ripe for capture as the American armour rolled up to it. The Germans found to their cost just what kind of volcano they had been sitting on. In the South the story was repeated, and there the men of the Maquis had the added joy of preparing the way for their own compatriots.
The wresting of Paris from the enemy has set the seal on a notable record of self-redemption. As they help to win back their country, the French are not only regaining their self-respect but are nobly reaffirming their right to a proud place in the counsels of liberated Europe.