Sunday, April 12, 2009

BBC: Allied Liberation of France Was Drawn Up As A Whites-Only Affair




The BBC did some digging recently and unearthed some documents showing that officials in both the US and British governments were complicit in "whiting out" the armies that were going to take part in the formal liberation of Paris in 1944. The American official in question is General Walter Bedell Smith, a hard-scrabble career officer from Indiana who at that time was serving as Eisenhower's Chief of Staff and went on to become one of the most influential directors of the CIA. This is really about par for the course as far as the contemporary institutional mindset of the US government, which did not desegregate its own armed forces until after the war. The article does not specify the precise extent of de Gaulle's involvement in this particular decision.

It does note that the overwhelming majority of French-Africans who served in the Free French Forces were simply asked to go home after the war, and were eventually stripped of their pensions. This reminds me that I cannot recommend enough the 2006 film "Fields of Glory," which, besides receiving an Oscar nomination for Best Foreign Film and a nomination for the Palme d'Or at Cannes, moved Jacques Chirac to reverse French policy on withholding pensions from veterans from its former colonies.