The war ended for the 1ère Armée more with a whimper than a bang. While Sixth Army Group had succeeded in eliminating the Colmar Pocket, morale in the 1ère Armée at the end of a tough winter campaign was low, especially as soldiers felt that the French population had disengaged from the war. Operation Cheerful saw the French army invading Germany as part of the Sixth Army Group, directed by de Gaulle to seize objectives to force the Allies to designate a zone d’occupation française. The liberation and occupation of Germany had witnessed a recurrence of violence inflicted on the civilian population by French soldiers as in Italy, earning for the French the nickname “Russians of the West.” De Gaulle’s post-Liberation celebration of victory sought to diminish the role of the Allies and the 1ère Armée, while celebrating that of the resistance and Leclerc’s 2e DB. None of this served either to repair French civil–military relations, badly damaged by the war, or to acknowledge the role played by the empire in France’s liberation, all of which stored up future tensions. Incorrigible to the last, de Lattre settled into an extravagant lifestyle at his headquarters in Lindau, which flouted the conditions of post-war austerity, and caused de Gaulle to recall him to France. Committed to the retention of empire as a symbol of French grandeur, de Gaulle insisted that France reclaim its Indochinese “balcony on the Pacific.” However, the fact that the French colonial infrastructure had been obliterated by the Japanese, allowing Ho Chi Minh’s Viet Minh, with Chinese complicity, to fill Vietnam’s political vacuum would have made it difficult in the best of circumstances for a debilitated France to reassert its sovereignty in Southeast Asia. France’s return to its far-away colony was hobbled by an absence of a viable policy for Indochina, a situation worsened by political instability in Paris following de Gaulle’s surprise January 1946 resignation, a dysfunctional command tandem in Saigon that yoked two headstrong commanders in d’Argenlieu and Leclerc, each with different priorities, and political concessions made by France’s negotiators led by Salan under pressure from Leclerc to catch the tides to launch Operation Bentré – the reoccupation of Vietnam north of the 16th parallel.

While the French longed for Liberation, they also feared its destructive and divisive potential. Given diminutive conventional French forces, de Gaulle counted on popular resistance to symbolize the participation of the French people in their own liberation. However, the fear that a “national insurrection” would cause great slaughter, and benefit the communists, caused planners to define down the concept. The STO crisis and emergence of the maquis phenomenon seemed to offer political opportunities to various players. However, the réduits maquisards played at best a marginal role in the Liberation, while their destruction offered another “black legend” of betrayal by the Gaullists and the Allies, one promoted by the PCF. The liberation of Paris served as one of the Second World War’s iconic moments, both as a milestone in the rollback of Nazi power and as a consecration of France’s republican resurrection. De Gaulle’s GPRF moved rapidly to assume the levers of national power, forcing a resistance that had consecrated, democratized, and legitimized him to step back into the ranks. De Gaulle’s acclamation removed any lingering reservations, even in Washington, that he was the legitimate leader of France. The levée was finished, the emergency over, and former FFI would henceforth fight the Germans “amalgamated” as soldiers in the regular army, not serve the political ambitions of resistance leaders and communists facilitated by the interface services.

As a mechanism of social control, the post-Liberation amalgame of l’armée d’Afrique and the FFI of the internal resistance might be considered a partial success, insofar as it formed part of a larger Gaullist strategy to reestablish a legal state and curtail the temporary anarchy of the Liberation. But it failed to repair French civil–military relations, further strained by defeat and widespread military support for Vichy. Some of the more politicized FFI rejected l’amalgame altogether, to remain politically active in Paris, Toulouse, and elsewhere. L’amalgame’s military utility is more debatable. In one respect, l’amalgame was the only option open to the GPRF to replenish its exhausted Anfa divisions desperate for replacements. Optics were also a factor, as one goal of l’amalgame, and its corollary the blanchiment – that is substituting FFI for Senegalese in de Lattre’s 1ère Armée – was to reinforce the Gaullist mantra that France had been liberated by its own people, not by empire and the Allies. But insofar as it was a product of military necessity, l’amalgame lacked means. In the straightened circumstances of the Liberation, training for France’s new soldiers was ad hoc and piecemeal, with weapons in short supply and logistics dependent on the Americans at the very moment the 1ère Armée was to face one of the most challenging campaigns of the war in Alsace. In this respect, l’amalgame might be considered a “semi-failure.” The experiment of amalgamating FFI units as distinct organizations had been completely abandoned by early 1945, as the CFLN transformed itself into a provisional republic (GPRF) that began the divisive process of purging Vichy aparatchiks from the government and military, and punishing French women who had fraternized with German occupiers. It remained to be seen in the invasion of Germany whether France could field only une armée en trompe l’œil. In the meantime, many of the Vichy loyalists were evacuated to Sigmaringen, accompanied by a rump of Francs-Gardes and their families. Few of the collaborators who evacuated to Germany to be integrated into what became the Charlemagne Division Germany survived.

In the course of 1943, London and Algiers gradually became aware of the scope of the STO crisis, and of the proliferation of mountain redoubts formed spontaneously by STO refugees known collectively as le maquis. While the Allied camp was keen to operationalize this maquis, everyone had different motives for doing so, both operational and political. These considerations caused Allied planners to minimize the military limitations of the maquis, that included the inviolability of “maquis redoubts” and the willingness and ability of Anglo-American conventional forces rapidly to reinforce them with arms drops and paratroops. The fate of the maquis at Glières should have served as a wake-up call. But too many players had too much vested in the maquis concept to submit their expectations to a reality check. One result was that the myth of an alleged “betrayal” of the maquis by the Gaullists and the Allies became the focus of a polemical debate in the post-war years pursued principally by the communists, but also a theme in films and novels.

This chapter revisits the arguments of the book concerning France’s experience of the Second World War – the debate over the Fall of France in 1940 that swings between “Decadence” and revisionist “Contingency,” and systemic collapse or “military misfortune.” The period after 1940 saw France struggle to recover its power and influence through two opposing strategies – Vichy through collaboration with Germany, whereas de Gaulle sided with the Allies. While de Gaulle proved the more strategically insightful, his struggle was, unfortunately, inhibited by diminutive numbers, which, to Eisenhower’s ire, contributed to a faltering French military performance in 1944–1945, emphasizing the fact that 1940 had reduced France to the status of a courtesy power in Allied eyes. Furthermore, like many leaders of France’s internal resistance, Franklin Roosevelt remained deeply skeptical of de Gaulle’s democratic intentions. Upon Liberation, de Gaulle maneuvered to restore the French state not only against the Americans, who refused to recognize the Gouvernement provisoire de la République française, but also against the chaos caused by resistance “feudals” with their own political agendas. Nor did l’amalgame of 1944 repair severely damaged French civil–military relations. The “resistance myth” underpinned France’s liberation narrative, one embraced by multiple actors led by de Gaulle, whose purpose was to minimize the pivotal role of the Allies and Africans in France’s liberation, exclude 1940, POWs, and Vichy collaboration from France’s wartime memory, and mask the fact that the “post-war” era found France in a weak position to reassert power over an empire where wartime mobilization had transformed mentalities, as the aftershock of wars of imperial independence was to prove. The mild punishments and blanket amnesties issued for wartime collaboration, the onset of the Cold War, which allowed former Vichy supporters to evoke a “lost cause” anti-communist “shield of France” alibi for their murderous conduct, and refusal to accept France’s role in the Shoah combined to undermine Gaullist promises of “renewal.” In fact, the post-war Fourth Republic resembled in essentials its pre-war predecessor.

Anfa had set French rearmament at eleven army divisions on a US model, as well as a French air force, and a refurbished French navy, all of which would prove difficult to accomplish with purely imperial manpower, so that a growing resistance on the French mainland might fill the manpower gap and bolster French clout in the alliance. This concept received a trial run with the September 1943 liberation of Corsica, a campaign which allowed de Gaulle to oust Giraud from the CFLN, while revealing both the military ineffectiveness of the resistance and the political agenda of the communists. As a consequence, de Gaulle began to put a structure in place to control events upon liberation of the hexagon, while beginning a purge of former Vichy elements in AFN, a task that would prove divisive in the middle of a war. The benefits of the Italian campaign for the French were two. First, the removal of much of l’armée d’Afrique from AFN allowed de Gaulle’s consolidation of power there. Second, the Juin-orchestrated May 1944 breakthrough at Monte Cassino allowed l’armée d’Afrique to recover its combat laurels in a very tough military environment. Unfortunately, the rapes carried out by some members of the CEF following the breakthrough on the Garigliano called into question the command climate and tacit complicity of the CEF hierarchy, while the fallout momentarily poisoned relations between the French and Italian governments.

The Dragoon landings succeeded at relatively little cost largely because Hitler ordered German forces in the south of France to retreat. Controversy over the seizure of Toulon and Marseille revealed command tensions at the summit of l’Armée B that would simmer for the remainder of the war. Despite considerable efforts to arm resistance in France, its military contribution to liberation disappointed expectations. Nevertheless, various personalities and political factions in France, beginning with de Gaulle, attempted to exploit resistance as a source of political legitimacy and/or to further personal ambition. While the BBC kept captive populations informed, and propaganda helped to discredit collaboration, inspire hope for liberation, and encourage certain forms of resistance, it succeeded neither in transforming resistance into a mass movement nor in triggering a national insurrection. In the end, the Germans were defeated by military force, not propaganda. Nevertheless, the image of popular resistance helped to rehabilitate France’s image tarnished by 1940 followed by Vichy collaboration, as well as to legitimize de Gaulle, all of which smoothed the transition of power from Vichy to the GPRF while dodging civil war. France’s popular mobilization also testified to republican renewal, which helped to rehabilitate France’s status as a minor ally. Beyond its negligible operational impact, historians struggle to calculate the influence of resistance activity, in part because intangible psychological and morale factors are impossible to quantify. France would have been liberated in any case without the resistance, but perhaps not on the same terms. Despite the momentary disorder, even anarchy, of the Liberation, ultimately the resistance helped to smooth the transition from Vichy to the GPRF. But its memorial image was conflicted by political infighting and violent acts that brought down retribution on the French population. Furthermore, the post-war mythification of national “resistance” not only distorted its nature and contribution to victory. It also exiled from France’s wartime memory other victims of war and occupation to include POWs, STO, Jews, and even les forces françaises libres.

One of de Gaulle’s great successes in the Second World War was to allow France to punch above its weight in the Alliance. However, the French army struggled to match in military proficiency de Gaulle’s lofty aspirations for French power and influence. The Vosges campaign proved yet another punishing trial for the French army. Its professional cadres seriously attrited in Tunisia, in Italy, and in the march from the Mediterranean coast, distant from its North African base, utterly dependent on the Americans for supplies, the command echelon riven by rivalries of a political, doctrinal, and personal nature, the poorly equipped First French Army was forced to endure a bitter campaign in the harshest of winter conditions, while simultaneously “amalgamating” clusters of poorly trained and disciplined FFI and volunteers. While the reconquest of Alsace and that of the “Atlantic pockets” were symbolically important to de Gaulle and the French, they were low priorities for the SHAEF commander, whose mission for Sixth Army Group was to “hold the flank” while advances were to be made further north. Eisenhower’s personal rivalry with Jacob Devers, combined with a lack of confidence in the volatile de Lattre and a rebuilding French army, possibly caused him to “miss opportunities” for an early crossing of the Rhine in late November 1944, and the disruption of the German Ardennes offensive, which caught him by surprise on 16 December. While Eisenhower blamed Devers and de Lattre’s timorousness and lack of mastery of armored warfare for the persistence of the Colmar Pocket, and pressured Sixth Army Group to eliminate it, he constantly diverted resources which might have allowed them to do so to Patton. Tensions between de Gaulle’s political agenda and Eisenhower’s operational focus, apparent since Algiers in 1942, exploded with the Strasbourg crisis of January 1945, which was successfully resolved only after Churchill’s intervention. However, the Allied failure to clarify the French role in the post-war occupation of Germany created conditions for further clashes between Eisenhower and the French during the culminating invasion of Germany.

The Allied bet that they could reach Tunis ahead of Axis forces fell victim to hesitancy, delay, and confusion at the top of the French command, that communicated downward to subordinates. In a situation that combined uncertainty with pusillanimity in the French leadership, Axis forces flowed into Tunisia. The Allies viewed the resulting campaign as both costly and unnecessary. That said, the decision by the Axis leaders to defend Europe from Tunisia arguably made “Tunisgrad” more consequential than Stalingrad. It also marked an ambiguous entry of the hitherto Vichy French forces into an Allied coalition, that, in the view of French commander in chief Alphonse Juin, “erased the memory of Dunkirk.” Nevertheless, quickly exasperated by infighting between Gaullists and “Giraudists,” the Allies continued to suspect both the loyalty and the military potential of poorly armed French forces.

The Tunis victory parade, followed by the “fusion” of the Free French and l’armée d’Afrique, symbolized a transition between the old and new French army, rearmed as the result of the Anfa conference, so that French troops might take part in the liberation of their country. For France to assume its “place among the democratic nations of the world,” the French exile movements of de Gaulle and Giraud needed to cooperate, while a third resistance army was mobilizing within the hexagon. How to coordinate, “fuse,” and “amalgamate” these three forces would preoccupy French and Allied leaders for the remainder of the war. Resurrecting French military power in an impoverished and fractious French North Africa would prove problematic. De Gaulle’s 30 May 1943 appearance in Algiers launched his struggle with Giraud for control of the CFLN. The two factions competed to recruit the trickle of évadés de France to Casablanca via Spain, as well as women to fill non-combatant roles, a rivalry, tinged with rancor, that would linger until the war’s end, and become even more complex when the internal resistance was added to the mix. These minor “crises” highlighted just how diminutive French forces actually were in the larger context of the war. They also signaled that French and Allied goals would diverge, as the French leader prioritized the preservation of empire; the restoration of order and the State upon liberation; and securing France’s post-war interests in Germany.