Read Fighting on all Fronts Online
Authors: Donny Gluckstein
24
L Lewis,
Echoes of Resistance: British Involvement with the Italian Partisans
(Tunbridge Wells, 1985), p25.
25
Tito, quoted in A Donlagic, Z Atanackovic and D Plenca,
Yugoslavia and the Second World War
(Belgrade, 1967), p138.
26
J Hart,
New Voices in the Nation: Women and the Greek Resistance
(Ithaca,1996) p24.
27
H Michel and B Mirkine-Guetzevich,
Les idees politiques et social de la Resistance
(Paris, 1954) p52.
28
Michel and Mirkine-Guetzevich, p156.
29
Michel and Mirkine-Guetzevich, p157.
30
R Battaglia,
The Story of the Italian Resistance
(London), p186.
31
A Calder,
The People’s War
(London, 1971), p609.
32
J P Narayan,
Selected Works
, vol 3 (New Delhi, 2003), p131.
33
www.marxists.org/history/international/comintern/dissolution.htm
.
34
W Borodziej,
The Warsaw Uprising of 1944
(Madison, 2007), pp33-34.
35
B Davidson,
Scenes from the Anti-Nazi War
(New York, 1970), p106.
36
Atlantic Charter, p4.
37
W Churchill,
The Second World War
, vol 4 (London, 1954), p198.
38
Quoted in W Deakin, E Barker and J Chadwick (eds),
British Political and Military Strategy in Central, Eastern and Southern Europe in 1944
(Houndmills, 1988), pp131-132.
39
P Auty and R Clogg (eds),
British Policy Towards Wartime Resistance in Yugoslavia and Greece
(London, 1975), p187.
40
Churchill, vol 6, pp115-116 and p118.
41
Lewis, p25.
42
T Behan,
The Italian Resistance
(London, 2009), p211.
43
L Longo,
Sulla via dell’insurrezione nazionale
(Rome, 1971), p25.
44
Quoted in C Tillon,
Les FTP
(Paris, 1962), p318.
45
Tillon, p348.
46
Quoted in J Springhall, “Kicking out the Vietminh”, in
Journal of Contemporary History
, vol 40, no 1, January 2005, p119.
47
Quoted in D Sassoon,
The Strategy of the Italian Communist Party
(London, 1981), p22.
48
Q Hogg, Hansard, 17 February 1943.
49
Quoted in
The Times
, 10 September 1941.
50
M Hastings,
Bomber Command
(London, 1979), p116.
51
G Aly, “The Planning Intelligentsia and the “Final Solution”, M Burleigh (ed),
Confronting the Nazi Past
(London, 1996), pp145, 147.
52
R Schaffer,
Wings of Judgment
(Oxford, 1985), p147.
53
Quoted in B J Bernstein, “Truman and the A-Bomb”,
Journal of Military History
, vol 62, no 3, July 1998, p559.
54
www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1915/junius/ch01.htm
Frank Renken
The most usual perception of the US Army’s contribution to the War in Europe brings to mind images of the Normandy Landings in 1944. After landing on the beaches of France, American soldiers, with the support of the Western Allies, then pushed on against German troops until they finally shook hands with Soviet soldiers at the River Elbe near Torgau on 25 April 1945, a scene which more than any other symbolises the myth of the anti-Hitler coalition.
Practically absent from historical memory is the landing of Allied troops in North Africa. This is despite the fact that it took place one and a half years earlier, and was the springboard for US intervention in the European theatre of war. On 8 November 1942 American and British troops under the code name “Operation Torch” invaded Morocco and Algeria. At the time Algeria was under occupation by France’s Vichy regime, which was collaborating with the Nazis. Were the Allies about to bring down the symbols of fascist domination, as they did later in 1945 when they blew up the Nazi swastikas in Germany? Would they assert the right of peoples to self-determination?
On 14 August 1941, before the US had entered the war, President Roosevelt and prime minister Churchill proclaimed the Atlantic Charter. The Charter laid out the Allies’ goals for the end of the war, and designated not only Hitler’s regime in Germany a “danger to world civilisation” but also its “associated governments”, for example the Vichy regime in France. The prospective victors announced they would “respect the right of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they will live; and they wish to see sovereign rights and self-government restored to those who have been forcibly deprived of them”.
1
The hopes of the oppressed in Algeria and the other French colonies in North Africa ran high. They were under the control of a government in league with Hitler and which denied them any rights to national independence. But the Allies did not come as liberators. When the war finally came to an end on 8 May 1945, it wasn’t a moment of great joy for
the people of Algeria. Instead the war ended with a barbaric massacre of the Algerian Muslim population. How could this have happened?
Algeria was France’s oldest colony on the African continent. Nowhere else was the penetration of a conquered country and the destruction of domestic society more thorough. In contrast to its neighbours Tunisia and Morocco, which as “protectorates” were dominated only indirectly via local regents, Algeria was ruled by a governor-general appointed by the government in Paris. Formally Algeria was simply an extension of metropolitan France on the other side of the Mediterranean, divided as France proper into “Départements” with French prefects at their head. It was a settler colony—a set up similar to the apartheid regime of South Africa—with almost a million Algerian French of European descent confronted by approximately 8.5 million Arab and Berber Muslims.
From 1830, when the French soldiers first set foot on Algerian soil, the “Algerian French”—which included naturalised Spaniards, Italians and Maltese—grabbed large swathes of fertile land. However, by 1939 a large majority of Algerian French did not own any land but lived in the towns. The standard of living of these “petits blancs” (small whites) was lower than that of workers in metropolitan France, although this did little to challenge the rampant racism of many petits blancs towards Muslims, who had no citizen rights at all and were systematically discriminated against in the economic sphere.
2
Algeria’s fortunes during the Second World War were closely tied to those of metropolitan France, which had suffered a traumatic defeat at the hands of Nazi Germany in the summer of 1940. The government of Marshal Philippe Pétain capitulated on 17 June and signed a truce whose terms included the occupation of Northern and Western France by German troops. The South East of France retained formal independence under Pétain, who governed from his seat in Vichy. His regime remained nominally neutral during the war, but sought close cooperation with Hitler and at home installed a dictatorship in the name of a “National Revolution”, effectively establishing a military regime under which a mass fascist movement which advocated entering the war on Germany’s side rapidly developed.
When the war ended the French ruling class did its best to downplay the rampant anti-Semitism of the Vichy regime, pretending that the policies of the National Revolution had been forced on it by Nazi Germany.
Yet Robert Paxton’s seminal research gives the lie to this narrative, proving conclusively that the Vichy governments under Laval and Darlan actively and unsolicitedly sought cooperation with Hitler.
3
The regime was hoping to compensate for its loss of power on the European continent by expanding its colonial empire at the expense of Great Britain, which was militarily isolated between 1940 and 1941 before the US’s entry into the war and as long as the Hitler-Stalin pact remained in vigour. Vichy was speculating on a speedy military defeat of Great Britain in its war with Germany.
The first military confrontations between France and Great Britain were soon to play out. British warships attacked the French naval base in Algerian Mers el-Kebir on 3 July 1940. One thousand three hundred and eighty French sailors died in the course of the battle, generating a wave of anti-British feeling in France and Algeria which made the signing of a truce with Germany more palatable. An attempted landing by British forces in West African Dakar in September 1940 was fiercely beaten back by forces loyal to the Vichy government.
Against this background the Nazi leadership shelved its plans for a joint intervention in North Africa together with Italian forces. Addressing the Italian dictator Mussolini, who was claiming Tunisia as well as Constantine in Eastern Algeria for himself, Hitler said that “the best solution was for France to defend French Africa herself. This evolution gave some substance to the Vichy gamble that order was best maintained in the empire with Germany rather than against her”.
4
Charles de Gaulle, who as junior government minister had fled to London during the chaotic days of June 1940 and urged, on the BBC, for a continuation of the war against Germany, turned the argument round. He said that French domination over its colonial empire must indeed be defended, but in alliance with Great Britain, not Germany. The colonies were to be a springboard for the fight against the German armed forces and the reconquest of metropolitan France. In his first broadcast on 18 June de Gaulle argued: “Is the defeat final? No! Because France is not alone!… It has a vast empire backing it. It can form a bloc with the British Empire, which controls the seas and is continuing the fight”.
5
De Gaulle’s strategy was to attempt to win over the governor-generals and leading officers in the colonies and get them to carry on the war on Great Britain’s side. “Gaullism” was initially a spontaneous reaction of a tiny minority in the officer corps of the defeated French army who rejected collaboration with Germany.
6
It wasn’t out of democratic conviction that this group rebelled against Pétain’s line. Indeed, as a group it
initially had no specific politics at all. De Gaulle himself had had disagreements with his military superiors and Pétain in the 1930s because of their military-strategic conservatism, but at the same time shared their aversion towards the communist-supported Popular Front government of 1936 and towards the parliamentary system of the Third Republic in general: a system whose instability aroused fears of social revolution among the conservative middle classes and more particularly in the officer corps.
This protracted conflict, from June 1940 until November 1942, between the Vichy regime and the “Free French” forces under de Gaulle over who controlled the colonies set the scene in Algeria and other overseas territories. In 1940 the balance of forces was clear-cut. The Free French had indeed managed by the end of the year to win over the governors and colonial troops in Chad, Congo-Brazzaville, Cameroon and finally Gabon, but North and West Africa and the other colonies remained firmly under Vichy’s control.
This led to a paradoxical situation as the empire carried on while metropolitan France was under foreign domination. The Vichy regime installed a new governor-general in Algiers in July 1940 who ensured Vichy laws were implemented in Algeria, intensifying the persecution of Jews, Communists, Free Masons and Algerian nationalists. Day-to-day life for the Muslim majority and the barracked troops, on the other hand, changed very little. The governor ruled on just as if France had never capitulated to the Nazis.
Underneath the surface, however, nervousness gripped ruling circles. They were worried that any sign of weakness might encourage the Arabs to revolt. They hadn’t forgotten 1871, when, following France’s defeat by Prussia, over 250 tribes, a third of the whole Algerian population of the time, revolted against colonial rule. The jumpiness of the weakened French colonial masters became obvious when the Vichy government, in the spring of 1941, agreed to German armistice inspection teams visiting neighbouring Morocco. They insisted that the Germans keep a low profile: “Once there, they were kept under surveillance and required to remain in civilian clothes. Their Arab contacts were arrested and even shot by French police. The natives must not be allowed to see the victors in uniform”.
7
Gaullism wasn’t able to really take root as a political current in Algeria until after the Allied landing. US diplomat Kenneth Pendar claimed:
“when our State Department asked André Philip [in 1942], the Head of de Gaulle’s underground, if he could put us in touch with Gaullist groups in North Africa, Philip was forced to answer that they did not have a single ‘cell’ there”.
8
One of the reasons was the relentless pursuit of dissidents, another the prevailing anti-British sentiment. Just listening to BBC radio, over which de Gaulle’s speeches were broadcast, was made a punishable offence. The local newspapers were full of spite, the
Echo d’Oran
, for example, painting de Gaulle as a “miserable creature, traitor and assassin”.
9
When in May 1941 the police came across an anti-German conspiracy centred around the officers Léon Faye, André Beauffre and Georges Loustaunau-Laucau, Algerian papers were quick to blame the Free French. In reality Loustaunau-Laucau emanated from an anti-communist secret society and in the 1930s entertained ties with the fascist Parti Populaire Français. In German occupied France he cooperated with the British secret service, but separately from de Gaulle. As for Beauffre and Faye they had been conspiring with the Americans for several months already. They were concerned about a possible German invasion from Spain, against which they hoped to be able to organise a revolt in the French African army with the help of the Americans. So they shared de Gaulle’s aim of entering the war on the side of the Allies, without, however, entertaining any contact with him.
10