The Germans did not have it all their own way. Among French commanders who bloodied their nose more than once was Colonel Charles de Gaulle, France’s premier advocate of tank warfare. The success with which he practised what he had preached in books between the wars earned a citation from Weygand:
An admirable leader, daring and energetic, on 30 and 31 May he attacked an enemy bridgehead, penetrating more than five kilometres into the enemy lines and capturing several hundred prisoners and valuable materiel.1
However, in the chaos of the German breakthrough not even officers like de Gaulle could do much at the front, so he was recalled to Paris by Reynaud and appointed Under-Secretary for War in a government that was numbed at being abandoned by its only ally.
Reynaud still had 2 million men under arms in the area of conflict but, having taken losses of 92,000 dead and over 200,000 wounded in the brief campaign – against German losses roughly half as severe – his cabinet was irrevocably divided over the course of action to pursue. A minority of six ministers supported his plan to fight on and eventually withdraw to French North Africa and continue the war from there, but Reynaud’s political credit was all but spent. Exactly two months earlier, on 28 March 1940 he had signed an agreement in London under which both British and French governments undertook not to negotiate peace terms unilaterally. Renault had signed without first seeking the approval of his cabinet, which made his signature unconstitutional and not binding on the French government. In any case, as President Lebrun argued after the war at Pétain’s trial, Britain had unilaterally vitiated the agreement on two counts: she had never committed her air force to the common cause and she had withdrawn her ground troops from the conflict without consultation.
In Paris hardly anyone of consequence, inside the cabinet or elsewhere, believed it was still possible to stop the German advance. The great hero of 1914–18, Marshal Henri-Philippe Pétain, told the American Ambassador on 4 June that he firmly believed the British would shortly sign a pact with Germany.2 Although Charles de Gaulle was despatched to London on 5 June with the acting rank of brigadier, there was little he could do there at this stage.
A majority of thirteen ministers in Reynaud’s cabinet wanted to sue for terms immediately, never mind what pieces of paper had been signed with the British, who in their consideration had deserted France in her hour of need. Their position was strengthened by Marshal Pétain as vice-president of the Council of Ministers and General Maxime Weygand, who had replaced Gamelin as Commander-in-Chief of the army after the disastrous first week of the invasion. France’s two senior soldiers, they saw no alternative to an armistice, providing it ‘did not stain French honour’3 or involve handing over the intact French navy, built up and modernised by Admiral of the Fleet Xavier-François Darlan, despite the pacifist policies of inter-war governments.
With the army in full flight and no prepared positions to fall back on, there was nowhere the French army could stand and fight with any reasonable chance of holding a line against so fast-moving an enemy. There was also the question of morale. In the First World War, France and the British Empire each mobilised between 8 and 9 million men against the Central Powers, but the total French casualties had been twice as high as those for the whole Empire. From a population of 40 million, France lost 1,357,800 men killed, with 4,266,000 wounded and another 537,000 taken prisoner or missing in action. At the other end of the scale, the decisive but late entry of the USA into the war cost only a total of 323,018 American casualties, including 116,516 dead.4
So, by November 1918 one out of ten French citizens of all age-groups and both sexes was a casualty in one way or another, without counting the hundreds of thousands made homeless by the fighting and the concomitant disruption to family life. Coming as it did after the revolutionary wars, the wars of the two empires and the Franco-Prussian war of 1870–71, the First World War traumatised the whole nation. Long lists of names on war memorials in small villages all over France testify to the slaughter of all the adult males in many families. In the southern départements, telephone directories show as many Italian and Spanish surnames as French ones, thanks to the flood of landless younger sons who came from Italy and Spain between the two world wars to replace the dead youth of France by marrying local girls otherwise condemned to lifelong spinsterhood.
In addition to the demoralising scale of French casualties, there was another factor in the war-weariness of French soldiers by 1917 and 1918 that caused widespread and brutally repressed mutinies. For the British, Empire and American forces fighting on their flanks, the war was destroying a foreign land they would forget soon after returning home, whereas the poilus were fighting in a wasteland where formerly their farms, villages and cities had stood – but which was so torn and cratered by the bombardments that it seemed impossible for street lines to be traced with certainty, let alone homes rebuilt or fields poisoned with chemicals ever made fertile again.
It would have been surprising if, after only thirty-two years, the survivors of that carnage and their sons had wished to repeat the experience, once abandoned by their allies and having a totally justified lack of faith in their divided leaders, a disrupted command structure, virtually no working communications, outdated weapons and grossly inadequate air cover.
Paradoxically, to defend the country they loved, many foreign residents volunteered to fight for France. Accepted as combatants only in the Foreign Legion, they were formed into Régiments de Marche de Volontaires Etrangers (RMVE with numbering upwards of twenty), to distinguish them from the ‘old’ Legion, shipped over from North Africa in this hour of need. 22 RMVE listed men of forty-seven nationalities, but 25 per cent of them were Republican refugees from the Spanish Civil War. Both they and the east Europeans in these temporary regiments included a high percentage of communists, which made their officers consider them politically unreliable. Issued inadequate kit and weapons or none at all, they were held in reserve until after the invasion and then thrown into the line to sink or swim, poorly trained and ill-equipped. Yet their combat record was no worse than that of many regular regiments.5
In Alsace behind the Maginot Line, eminent Parisian surgeon and army reservist Joseph Gouzi worked day and night in a well-organised mobile surgical unit, moving from one pre-planned position to the next, but things were not like that in the centre of the line. Dennis Freeman and his friend Douglas Cooper enlisted in the French army as ambulance drivers and found themselves in the headlong rout, driving badly wounded men to improvised hospitals where doctors and patients were always on the point of being re-evacuated as the enemy pressed closer. On 7 June at Oigny, Freeman noted:
The villagers could not have left so very long before, for the little gardens looked well tended and there was an air of orderliness and well-being about the place. It was difficult to reconcile the ceaseless thunder of the distant guns and the busy movement of the doctors, infirmiers and stretcher-bearers with the rural scene. Cottages had been transformed into dressing-stations. The simpler operations were performed in the forge.6
From time to time, the two English volunteers crossed paths with compatriots. On 8 June near Troyes, Cooper noted: ‘Outside in the street I found several English soldiers [from] the Pioneer Corps, whose duty it was to follow the RAF around, making landing-grounds for them, and digging reservoirs for petrol. Now that most of the English airmen had left, they themselves were expecting to be moved any day:
The Germans had reached Forges-les-Eaux and were pressing on towards Rouen and the Seine. They seemed to be advancing everywhere. Weygand had issued a proclamation: Nous sommes en dernier quart d’heure [meaning, a quarter of an hour to go, with victory in sight] but the roads were horribly congested. The stream of refugees had swollen to considerable proportions in the space of an afternoon and there were not only lines of people on foot and in cars, but in addition a large assortment of barking dogs of all sizes, goats, cattle and poultry they were taking with them. Heavy military vehicles too were on the move and when I looked closer I saw petrol tankers, radio cars and the ground staff of airfields going south. It was an alarming sight.7
On 9 June Charles de Gaulle returned to his office in Paris after a meeting with Churchill in London in time to hear General Héring as military governor of the capital declare that the city would be defended street by street. The following day, Italy declared war on France and moved troops across the border, Mussolini intent on occupying as much of the country as possible before the inevitable armistice. Hearing the news in London, Churchill is said to have remarked maliciously, ‘It’s only fair. We had them on our side in the last war.’8
From Paris, the government fled south-west – away from the Germans – over roads choked with refugees. General Héring, ordered not to defend the capital after all, requested to be relieved of his redundant post and given a combat command. The art treasures of the Louvre Museum and the bullion reserves of the Banque de France had gone during the phoney war – the former to various chateaux in the Loire Valley and the latter spread far and wide in North America, Martinique and French West Africa. As it had during the German invasions of 1870 and 1914, the government continued its flight from Tours towards Bordeaux, with politicians and civil servants sleeping in their official cars by the side of roads lined with abandoned horse-drawn and motor vehicles. During the brief halt in Tours, Reynaud made a desperate appeal to the United States for air support, which fell on deaf ears.
On the night of 13 June the Parisian suburban hospital at Orsay was staffed by seven desperate nurses caring for eighty sick and elderly patients, plus refugee casualties. With no proper meal for days and only a few hours’ sleep, they asked a passing army major what to do about the patients who could not be moved when the time came to evacuate the others. ‘Give them a last injection,’ he replied. ‘Morphine or strychnine is best.’ Too exhausted to think any further, four of the nurses prepared the fatal doses and administered them, rather than leave seven aged patients behind. The intended act of mercy cost them between one and five years’ imprisonment when they were sentenced in May 1942.
North of Paris, Freeman and Cooper in their ambulances were stopped in Sens by a general trying to rally some troops, who asked whether they had any maps he could borrow. A general without a map! It was unreal – as was their experience of driving into Sens with a naked, screaming, delirious wounded man being tended by a wounded African soldier, to find:
the café at the big crossroads full of people leisurely sipping their aperitif. Busy housewives laden with their baskets were completing their weekend shopping and in the courtyard of the Hôtel de Paris opposite the cathedral the tables with their chequered cloths and gay umbrellas were already laid for the evening meal.
The vast courtyard [of the hospital] presented an extraordinary spectacle. Hundreds of ambulances, parked without any attempt at order, were being loaded and unloaded at the greatest possible speed. Nurses, doctors, medics and stretcher-bearers … looked tired and bewildered by the unmanageable influx of new cases that had suddenly been flung upon them. Some drivers who had been waiting to unload for some time [and] had just been told that they were to go on to Auxerre, sixty kilometres distant.9
The German advance was so rapid that, no sooner had a hospital been set up than it had to be evacuated. Ordered back to Sens, Freeman and Cooper drove through the night without lights against the press of military and civilian traffic fighting its way southwards. The two Britons found what had been a calm provincial town the previous evening transformed:
Every available inch of space was occupied by some kind of vehicle … being loaded ready to leave. The food shops were besieged; everyone was scrambling to purchase as much as possible. One sensed a feeling among the people that they might not see food again for many days. There were no newspapers to calm their fears, no garages to attend to repairs, no petrol to help them on their way, and no police to control them. Desperate, they seemed unable to decide whether to fight for the food they needed now, or take a risk and escape before the arrival of the Germans. In the space of one hour, Sens had become a ville en panique.10
It was not the only one. While the driver of a van taking all the municipal records of the Paris suburb of Boulogne-Billancourt was desperately searching for petrol, two deserting soldiers hijacked the vehicle and disappeared with the registers of births, marriages and deaths.
Heading back the way they had come, Freeman and Cooper passed columns of African and Vietnamese troops, the latter carrying their kit on sticks over their shoulders. Unable to find a refuelling dump, the two Britons took the risk of filling up their petrol tank from a pump at a service station that was already blazing from a bomb. From time to time they met up with comrades from the same unit and a group of English women volunteers driving ambulances financed by a large American acting as their commandant.
On 14 June at 5.30 a.m. the first German units drove through the Porte de la Villette and into the heart of Paris beneath clouds of black smoke from fuel dumps set on fire by the retreating French army. The previous afternoon two French officers with a trumpeter had met the Germans at Sarcelles and confirmed that the city would not be defended. With most of the capital’s food supplies coming from the north, where the disruption to road and rail traffic was total, 700,000 Parisians who had not fled watched the enemy from behind closed shutters and drawn curtains, venturing out only when the sparkling clean mobile kitchens of the German Winterhilfe organisation began dispensing hot soup and bread for the asking. It would be well into the autumn before all the other 2.1 million residents returned, less the more prudent Jewish ones.
Inhabitants of Orléans who had defied orders to flee found it impossible to replace lost documents after the municipal records and Joan of Arc’s house went up in smoke during German air raids on 14 and 15 June. The telephone system was destroyed. Had it been working, there was no one in local government offices to deal with the problems of 3,000 families whose homes had been destroyed. The various departments were dispersed in Nontron, Tulle, Guéret, Millau, Bordeaux, Toulouse, Tonneins and Marmande – and would stay there until 17 July.
With water and gas mains ruptured, fires smouldered everywhere for the next two weeks, causing more destruction. Streets were blocked by collapsed buildings. There was no electricity and no food. The French army had blown up the Joffre and Georges V road bridges – which did not prevent the incoming Wehrmacht from using the intact Vierzon railway bridge to cross the River Loire, but the disruption for normal traffic was so great that clearing up by French prisoners of war and unemployed Parisians was to last eight months. In nearby Neuville-aux-Bois the only medical care for refugees streaming in was provided by the wives of generals Ecot, Berre and Velle, whose ambulance had run out of petrol there, Madame Ecot literally taking a hat round each morning to beg money for food.
That month, a record 1,212 million francs were withdrawn before the savings banks put up their shutters. The Finance Ministry, finding itself stuck at Avoine near Saumur with the Germans approaching, paid a street-cleaner to burn banknotes to the value of 25 million francs. The prefect of the Nord département having demanded several million francs for the immediate needs of his population cut off from the rest of France by the German advance, the government loaded the money aboard two Glenn-Martin aircraft that were shot down as unidentified by a British ack-ack battery near Lille. Of the six crewmen, only one managed to parachute to safety through the clouds of whirling banknotes. Millions were lost, the Prefect eventually signing a receipt for only 240,000 francs.11
South of Orléans, the remaining inhabitants of Poitiers dismantled the makeshift barricades erected by men of 274th Infantry Regiment and sent the mayor out with a white flag to inform the approaching Germans that the town would not be defended. A few miles away at Le Blanc, veterans from the First World War beat up sappers trying to destroy the bridge over the River Creuse and stamped out the sputtering fuses before the charges blew. At St-Benoît-sur-Loire, 54-year-old surrealist poet Max Jacob refused to flee because St-Benoît had neither bridges nor factories meriting German bombardment. The decision to stay put was to cost this long-term friend of Picasso his life.
In Paris, apart from an ordinance prohibiting listening to non-German radio stations in public places, there seemed nothing to fear, just the curious sight of a swastika flag atop the Arc de Triomphe. Next day, as the government straggled into Bordeaux, the cinema Pigalle reopened its doors in Paris. On Sunday 16 June the faithful in many northern parishes, whose priests had fled, had the bizarre experience of hearing Mass read for them by Wehrmacht chaplains.12 With the litany in Latin, only the celebrants’ accents were different.
Also in the north, near Abbeville, British POW Terence Prettie managed to escape from a column of prisoners being marched from Dunkirk towards captivity in Germany. In the several days while he was on the run before recapture, he experienced the gamut of civilian attitudes. One Belgian refugee told him to give himself up because the Germans would treat him well; other homeless Belgian refugees insisted on sharing their precious last chocolate bars with the escapees; a French farmer fed and sheltered Prettie and his companions despite a foraging party of Wehrmacht men politely but insistently requisitioning supplies at the same time; a priest procured for them charts and tide tables in the hope they could find a seaworthy boat that had not been confiscated by the Germans.13
The Académie Française met by tradition every Wednesday, but on 12 June the only académicien who turned up was the aged Cardinal Baudrillart, who sat alone beneath the cupola working on the great dictionary. To him, as to many right-wing Catholics, the incoming Germans were welcome as an alternative to the godless communists of Stalin’s USSR. It was on this day that Churchill had his last meeting, before flying back to Britain, with Admiral of the Fleet François-Xavier Darlan. When the British bulldog growled at the man who controlled the fourth largest navy in the world, ‘Darlan, you must never let them get the French fleet’, Darlan promised he would not.14
The government’s temporary home 700km to the south-west, Bordeaux had its peacetime population swollen by a half-million refugees. In every restaurant and on the café terraces were to be seen famous faces from the world of politics, literature, entertainment, journalism. Every lapel seemed to sport the Légion d’Honneur. Politicians went through the motions of governing the country by meetings held in hotel corridors and on street corners. High functionaries were reduced to sleeping in corridors or in their cars. Even so august a figure as Marshal Pétain could at first not find a bedroom until offered one in a private home, whose concierge raided her ‘bottom drawer’ to find a set of linen for the marshal’s bed. In the corridors of their temporary accommodation ministers discussed mobilising all male school-leavers and throwing them into the battle against the panzer spearheads advancing at a rate of 50km and more a day. The only thing that stopped such lunacy was the non-availability of uniforms and weapons with which they would have got themselves killed.
All over France, in churches and before war memorials, the mothers, wives and fiancées of soldiers prayed and wept, holding the hands of young sons and daughters terrified by the corpses of men, women, children and animals by the roadside after Stuka attacks. Other planes emblazoned with the swastika bombarded the half-empty cities and the military units still fighting with leaflets reading:
The English warmongers want the war to last another three or five years. People everywhere, however, want peace. EACH OF YOU WILL BEST SERVE HIMSELF AND THE INTERESTS OF HIS COUNTRY IN LIVING FOR FRANCE, RATHER THAN DYING FOR ENGLAND!
Never mind dying for anything, the young and old were dying of exhaustion en route. Children, and even babies, had become separated from their parents in the panic of machine-gun attacks by Stuka dive-bombers swooping on the columns of refugees with sirens screaming. Pathetic advertisements in shop windows and those newspapers that still appeared asked for information about a lost child or infant last seen hundreds of kilometres away, or appealed for whoever had stolen a car, a wallet or a handbag to contact the advertiser for a reward. Outside the mairies and town halls, crowds gathered for news about food distribution or a roof over their heads, and scanned the boards used for election posters, on which were pinned thousands of requests for news of loved ones. By the end of 1942 the French Red Cross had managed to return nearly 90,000 children lost during the panic of the defeat.
One of the few positive forces in the maelstrom was made up of the courageous women volunteers of the Service Sanitaire Automobile. Using their own vehicles when no official ones were available, they rescued orphaned infants found by the bullet- and shrapnel-torn corpses of their parents. They moved with and against the flood of terrified civilians, convoying bandages, dressings, plasma and blood to hospitals overflowing with injured and sick people, before returning to the dangerous highways and byways to transport the exhausted, the dying and the newly wounded to those hospitals still manned. Often without food for themselves and sleepless for nights on end, they stacked up mileages all the more incredible when one considers the impassable state of many roads and the hundreds of bridges that had been pointlessly blown up by retreating engineer units.
Other women led to safety through the lines the elderly, the infirm and the insane. Others still did what they could for the dead also. Medically trained women pilots of the IPSA15 flew badly wounded soldiers to safety almost from the front line. One of them, Germaine L’Herbier Montagnon, logged all sightings of downed aircraft, and spent months afterwards defying the transport chaos, the heat of summer and the snows of winter to trace 500 crash sites on the ground and arrange burial for what remained of the crews.
On 16 June in Bordeaux Reynaud was persuaded by the Comtesse de Portes to resign and seek appointment as ambassador to the US – whether to escape or in an attempt to enlist help from Washington, is unclear. His aides Lecca and Devau had been named Financial Attaché in Washington and Head of the French Purchasing Commission to enable them to travel with a diplomatic bag, whose contents were known to few. Confronted with Reynaud’s resignation, Albert Lebrun, the debonair moustachioed polytechnicien President of the Republic, called the leaders of the Senate and the Chamber of Deputies to a consultation. All three men were personally in favour of continuing the fight, but Lebrun resisted the house leaders’ urging that Reynaud be invited to form another cabinet, because there was nothing to be gained by it and further indecision would only cost more lives.
In accordance with French tradition, whereby outgoing Prime Ministers suggested likely successors, a few days earlier Reynaud had tentatively put forward the name of Pétain. Lebrun therefore summoned the 84-year-old marshal, who arrived in civilian clothes looking like a stern but benign grandfather. Accustomed during his eight-year term as President to lengthy negotiations in such situations, Lebrun was enormously relieved when Pétain opened his wallet after a couple of minutes and took out the handwritten list of names he proposed including in his cabinet. They were all men with whom he had worked in previous administrations because the marshal had a horror of new faces.
After two hours and with a minimum of wheeling and dealing – in which the 57-year-old wheeler-dealer Pierre Laval was at first in, then out of, the government – all was agreed. At twenty minutes before midnight, Pétain’s cabinet included all thirteen of Reynaud’s ministers who were in favour of an armistice. Among those out of favour was Georges Mandel, who had been arrested while dining in a restaurant with his mistress. Released, he confronted Pétain and received a written apology, which he still had in his pocket when murdered in July 1944 by the marshal’s Milice.
When Pétain called the first meeting of his cabinet, although the short notice and general confusion meant that many were absent, it was agreed and minuted to ask the Germans for an end to the conflict. The urbane and imperturbable Spanish ambassador to France, Señor José-Maria de Lequerica made the ideal neutral channel to relay the cabinet’s decision to the German government. Over an open telephone line, he passed it to St-Jean-de-Luz, where two of his staff forwarded it to the Foreign Ministry in Madrid via Irun, and thence to Berlin.
At 1 a.m. on 17 June, Pétain retired to bed exhausted. An hour later, his Foreign Minister Paul Baudouin personally conveyed the decision to British ambassador Sir Ronald Campbell and Mr Biddle, the US chargé d’affaires – in the absence of Ambassador Bullitt, who had remained in post at the Paris embassy, where the Germans had by now been settling in for three days.
While the marshal slept, in the depopulated cathedral city of Chartres, 41-year-old prefect Jean Moulin was agonising over the best way to kill himself after refusing to sign a German document blaming a unit of French Moroccan infantry for some civilian deaths in St-Georges-sur-Eure resulting from enemy action.16 If he signed, innocent men would be shot for the crime. If he refused, he would have to pay the price. Moulin was a handsome debonair divorcee, an accomplished sportsman and talented cartoonist, whose playboy lifestyle disguised a rare breed of courage. Despite being in German custody, he managed to slash his throat with a broken glass, but was resuscitated by his guards.
Sporadic fighting under conditions of total confusion had now reached within 300km of Bordeaux. The German spearheads were at Le Mans, Cherbourg, Rennes and Angers. Near Saumur, the whole promotion of cadets from a military academy were pointlessly killed as they attempted to halt a Panzer column in their parade uniforms. In the east of the country an entire army of 400,000 men was encircled and cut off from resupply.
Just after noon on 17 June, Pétain sat down at a microphone hastily rigged in the Préfecture building in Bordeaux, pince-nez perched on his nose, and read a prepared speech to the nation in the voice of a tired old man:
At the request of the President of the Republic, I have taken over as from today the government of France. Confident of the support of our wonderful army, which is fighting with a heroism worthy of its long traditions against an enemy superior in numbers and equipment, I can say with certainty that its magnificent resistance has acquitted all obligations towards our allies. Confident also of the support of the ex-servicemen I have had the honour to command and of the trust of the entire nation, I dedicate myself to the task of resolving France’s misfortunes.
At this painful hour, I send my compassion and my caring to all the unhappy and destitute refugees thronging our roads. It is with a heavy heart that I say to you today that the fighting must stop. Last night, I contacted the enemy to ask soldier-to-soldier whether he can find an honourable way to put an end to the hostilities. May all Frenchmen17 rally to my government in these testing times, forgetting their anguish and placing all their faith in the destiny of the Fatherland.
When he heard the news that France was surrendering, King George VI remarked to his mother that it was a great relief not to have to be polite to his foreign allies any longer. She had been born German, as Princess Mary of Teck, and the House of Windsor had only changed its family name from Saxe-Coburg-Gotha after three long years of the First World War. Was that really all Britain’s king-emperor felt about the suffering of his Czech, Polish, Belgian, Dutch and French allies?
At that moment four German officers were in the crypt of Les Invalides, recovering the German regimental banners captured during the 1914–18 war. Outside, Parisians were looking at notices warning that they were now forbidden to drive a motor vehicle in the capital. These, however, were minor drawbacks. Virtually 100 per cent of the listening population heaved a sigh of relief that the Saviour of Verdun was now in charge. For them, the war was over – or so they thought.
1. W. Thornton, The Liberation of Paris (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1963), pp. 91–2.
2. P. Burrin, Living with Defeat (London: Arnold, 1996), p. 8.
3. P. Bourget, in 1940: La Défaite (Paris: Tallandier, 1978), p. 285.
4. US War Department, February 1924. US casualties as amended by the Statistical Services Center, Office of the Secretary of Defense, 7 November 1957, quoted in Encyclopaedia Britannica 2002 Deluxe CD-Rom edition.
5. For greater detail, see D. Boyd, The French Foreign Legion (Hersham: Ian Allan Publishing, 2010), pp. 335–50.
6. Freeman and Cooper, Road to Bordeaux, p. 90.
7. Ibid., pp. 112–3.
8. May, Strange Victory, p. 450.
9. Freeman and Cooper, Road to Bordeaux, pp. 176–7.
10. Ibid., p. 189.
11. H. Amouroux, La Vie des Français sous l’Occupation (Paris: Fayard, 1961), Vol. 1, pp. 15–16.
12. Kernan, France, p. 177.
13. The Escapers, ed. E. Williams (London: Collins/Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1953), pp. 270–88.
14. S. Berthon, Allies at War (New York: Carroll & Graf, 2001), p. 11.
15. Infirmières Pilotes, Secouristes de l’Air.
16. H. Noguères in 1940: La Défaite, p. 555.
17. The masculine form français then also included French women.