The War Memoirs by Charles de Gaulle

Author:Charles de Gaulle [Gaulle, Charles de]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2024-11-19T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Fifteen

BATTLE

But how short France found her sword to be, at the moment the Allies launched their attack upon Europe! Never had our country, on so crucial an occasion, been reduced to forces relatively so limited. Those who struggled for her liberation were often embittered to recall the might of her great past. But never before had her army been of better quality—a recovery all the more remarkable in that it had taken its start in an abyss of submission.

For fourteen centuries, military power had been second nature to France. If our country had on many occasions neglected her defense, misprized her soldiers, lost her battles, she had nonetheless appeared at all times eminently capable of the greatest military actions. The vicissitudes of the contemporary period had not proved an exception to this rule. Whatever our weakness after the Napoleonic conquests, however cruel the defeat of 1870, we retained the psychology and the means of a strong people. Principal artisans of the victory in 1918, we had led the others toward it. That our army should outstrip every other army in the world, our fleet be one of the best, our air force of the first order, our generals the most able—that, for us, was only natural.

Hence the collapse of 1940 and the capitulation that followed seemed to many monstrous and irremediable. The image of themselves the French had always had, the world’s opinion of them, the testimony of history itself, had suddenly been abolished, annihilated. There was no opportunity for France to recover her dignity in her own eyes and in others’ unless she took up arms again. But nothing was to help her re-create her unity and recover her prestige as much as this astonishing fact: that she could find in her scarcely mustered Empire, in her persecuted nation, enough conviction and military valor to reconstitute an army—and an army that would fight extremely well. After Sedan and Dunkirk, the capitulation of Rethondes and Turin, Vichy’s acceptance of military defeat and the subjection of the state, it was to be an amazing reversal that would bring our forces to take an important and brilliant share in the victory, though the enemy was occupying the whole of our territory, when two million Frenchmen were prisoners in their hands, when the “legal” government persisted in punishing the combatants.

There were enough men in Africa who could be mobilized to reach the strength of a campaign army. The restrictions, however, were many; for if it was possible to draw on the native populations of Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia, Equatorial Africa, and Madagascar for as many soldiers as we wished, the number of active military men and of reserves prepared to serve as officers and specialists was, on the contrary, very low. Generally, only those of French origin supplied these categories, so indispensable to the formation of large-scale modern units. Yet the population of French origin totaled no more than 1,200,000 persons in these territories. Of course, by calling up all classifications as far

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.