Paris, Occupied France • September 28, 1941 On this date in 1941, in the wake of the first public assassination of a German officer in France, the German military authorities issued a Code of Hostages to the French people. Pools of Frenchmen, whether detained by French authorities or by the German Wehrmacht (armed forces) or…
Paris, Occupied France • August 21, 1941 On this date in 1941 in Paris, well over a year after the hardstepping German Wehrmacht (armed forces) and Gestapo (Germany’s sinister secret police) had entered the French capital and settled in, a 22‑year-old Communist member of the French Resistance named Pierre Georges (noms de guerre, Frédo and Colonel…
Falaise, Northern France • August 18, 1944 Two and a half months had passed since the initial landings of U.S., British, and Canadian forces in Northern France (Operation Overlord). On the British flank the Canadian First Army, Second Division, II Corps entered Falaise on August 16, 1944 (see map below) and engaged the Germans in bitter street…
Côte d’Azur on the French Mediterranean • August 15, 1944 The Allied assault on German-occupied Southern France originally was to have kicked off simultaneously with the Allies’ June 6, 1944, invasion of Northwestern France (Operation Overlord)—the intent being that the Germans would think twice before sending reinforcements from Southern France to the Normandy beachheads and that, with…
London, England • July 22, 1940 On this date in 1940 British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, encouraged by future Prime Minister Winston Churchill, signed the founding charter of the Special Operations Executive (SOE) organization. For security purposes the SOE’s “cloak and dagger” operations was concealed behind the name “Inter-Service Research Bureau.” (At the time the…
Mont Mouchet, South-Central France • June 20, 1944 During the Allied invasion of France (Operation Overlord), the Maquis and other French resistance groups played a vital role in delaying the arrival of German reinforcements to the Normandy beachhead as well as in the eventual Allied victory in France. The FFI, or Fifis (Forces Françaises de…
London, England • June 18, 1940 Four days after the fall of Paris to German invaders, Charles de Gaulle, a tall (66 ft., 5 in./196 mm), young (49), relatively unknown French brigadier general who had escaped to England on June 17, 1940, addressed the French people in a radio broadcast from the BBC in London on this date in…
RAF Fairford, England and Blida near Algiers, Algeria • June 9/10, 1944 In planning the successful June 6, 1944, sea- and airborne invasion of German-occupied Normandy, France, Supreme Allied Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force, Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, fully appreciated the necessity of coordinating French Resistance actions with the Allies’ strategic and tactical plans…
London, England • June 2, 1944 In June 1943 in Algeria, North Africa, the Free French founded the Comité Français de Libération Nationale (CFNL). Much political maneuvering was needed to merge the Free French, whose nucleus consisted of Frenchmen who had escaped German capture at Dunkirk, the Channel port in Northwestern France (May 26 to June 4,…
Paris, Occupied France • March 27, 1942 On May 10, 1940, Adolf Hitler, having ended Poland’s existence in September 1939, turned his wrath on the democracies in the West. The Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg capitulated to his war machine in May. Representatives of 84‑year-old Marshal Philippe Pétain, who had recently been named president of the…