Free Voices from the Dark Years by Douglas Boyd Page A

agency
FFI
Forces Françaises de l’Intérieur – Free French forces inside France
FTP
Francs-Tireurs et Partisans – left-wing Resistance movement
GFP
Geheime Feldpolizei – German Military Police
GP
Groupe de Protection – Pétain’s bodyguard
LVF
Légion des Volontaires Français contre le bolchevisme – French volunteers fighting in German uniform on the eastern front
MSR
Mouvement Social Revolutionnaire – a fascist movement
OKW
Oberkommandantur der Wehrmacht – German Army High Command
PCF
Parti Communiste Français – French Communist Party
PPF
Parti Populaire Français – Doriot’s extreme pro-German party
PQJ
Police aux Questions Juives – special anti-Jewish police force
RG
Renseignements Généraux – French equivalent of Special Branch
RHSA
Reichshauptsicherheitsampt – Himmler’s umbrella organisation running the SS and SD
RMVE
Régiment de Marche de Volontaires Etrangers – temporary Foreign Legion regiment of volunteers in 1940
RNP
Rassemblement National Populaire - Déat’s extreme right-wing party
SD
Sicherheitsdienst – Amt VI of RHSA covering external security
SNCF
Société des Chemins de Fer Français – French state railway system
SOL
Service d’Ordre Légionnaire – forerunner of the Milice
SPAC
Service de Police Anti-Communiste – anti-Communist police units
STO
Service de Travail Obligatoire – organisation of compulsory labour in the Reich
UGIF
Union Générale des Israélites de France – umbrella organisation by which the Germans organised the fate of the Jewish community

I NTRODUCTION
    The seed of this book was sown at a diplomatic reception in Bordeaux by an elderly Englishman, who confided to me out of earshot of the French guests that he first saw the city through the bombsight of an RAF Lancaster during the Second World War. When I asked whether he had been targeting the immense bomb-proof shelters, constructed by the Todt Organisation for the long-range German submarines that wrought havoc among the Atlantic convoys, he laughed: ‘With all that Jerry flak coming up at us, all I cared about was dropping my load and getting back home in time for breakfast.’
    Since befriending a French assistant from Normandy while at school in Canterbury, I had known that RAF strategic bombing raids killed thousands of innocent French civilians during the war and destroyed entire towns, but it was not until after meeting the bomb-aimer that this book took shape as an account of the occupation of France, not as seen from London and Washington, but as lived by the French people.
    President John Francis Kennedy observed that the great enemy of the truth is very often ‘not the lie ... but the myth, persistent, persuasive and unrealistic’. Due to the way the media were used for propaganda purposes in wartime, two contradictory myths became the accepted bases for the history of the occupation. In France, people said that Lord Gort’s British Expeditionary Force (BEF) had fought ‘to the last drop of French blood’ before running away in 1940. Conversely, standing alone against German-dominated Europe, Britain fortified itself with the counter-myth that the French army had cracked and run because our erstwhile allies lacked moral fibre.
    ‘It would never happen here,’ people boasted, forgetting how Britain’s cleverest and most privileged sons voted by 275 to 153 at the Oxford Union in 1933 that ‘this House would not fight for King and Country’. So it could well have ‘happened here’, but for the 20 miles of water between a largely unprepared Britain and her abandoned Continental allies.
    Similarly, it is easy to pretend that the British would never have collaborated if conquered, yet London in the 1930s saw street fighting between fascists and communists and window-smashing of Jewish-owned shops. Long into the Second World War many Britons of all social strata were both anti-Semitic and either supported Hitler or wanted an accommodation with him.
    On screen and in print,