Vichy Military Plans

Can anyone describe, or refer to sources, for Vichy war planning against Germany. I have run across fragments of Vichy government actions aimed at Germany. Some fragments I've run across are: A secret radio signal intelligence unit was retained in violation of the armistice. A small group of automotive engineers were designing new armored vehicals. The Vichy military officials seem to have been playing hide and seek with caches of unauthorized weapons and transport.

Was there a organized plan for all this, and is there any evidence amoung the Vichy governments documents or leaders testimony for actual war plans for the Vichy army vs the German occupation force? Vichy was left with a small 100,000 man army in European France. Was there any organized thinking for using this force in other than internal security roles?

 

Since the "free French" came out on top, I suspect that they quietly disposed of any info that would put Vichy in a positive light. Still it is an intersting idea!

 

Sorry Carl, I can't help you much with this. I suppose that it would be easier to oppose the Germans from North Africa rather than Vichy , so considering the Empire was also administarted by Vichy I suppose that "official" opposition could have come from there first. Maybe Giraud would be a lead.

 

Read the book "Solders of the Night; The Story of the French Resistance" - David Schoenbrun,
He talks about French army officers caching weapons and such hoping to be reactivated. He doesn't give much detail, and it seems like he was talking about former officer who were working with the resistance groups, but I don't have or haven't heard of great detailed plans of the Vichy regime actually planning against the Germans.
Perhaps it happened early on in the occupation?

 

Have not come up with much else since posting the original question. A couple items I've run across, but not confirmed:

The US Ambassador is suposed to have had some discussion with Petain conerning the Vichy policy if the US & Britian invaded France in 1942. I assume this was Ambassador Leahey & the conversation occured in early 1942. Petain's response was If you come with twenty divisions we will join you, if you come with three divisions we will fight you. If correct then this would indicate Petains government was wiling to resume fighting the Germans, but not in a high risk gamble.

A second item concerns the actions of a French division commander in November 1942. One learning the US had invaded Morroco & Algeria he is suposed to have ordered his soldiers into the Central Massif uplands. After a few days the Vichy government persuaded him to march his regiments back to their barracks & turn over control of their arms to the Germans.

A third item which is more reliable, appearing in several sources, concerns General Barre the French commander of the Tunis garrison or division. When the Germans begain occupation of Tunis in November 1942 Barre withdrew his regiments into the Tunisian hills. Apparently he had already cached rations, fuel, ammunition, ect in the farm towns along the Medjeb River valley during the previous months or year.

 

I recall reading that the official Vichy policy was "anti-British and anti-German" so I guess that gives some view what it was all about. The secret policed took prisoners of spies from both sides and did not actually give a ... what the Germans were saying about that when the Vichy government was still there.

 

Remember they were a puppet state, I doubt they could "officially" afford to be anti-German, even if some of their members were . anti British propaganda was not only allowed but encouraged.

The civil servants were first cornered in a very subtle way. Their first step in 1940 was to make them swear a solemn oath to Petain . Not knowing what the old man would be prepared to do and remembering he was the hero of Verdun and defeated the Germans there, 99% of the state workers signed a document that would bind them , those who refused lost their jobs and /or were arrested, for instance Jean Moulin , the Prefet of Chartres . Then those who were Jewish lost their jobs , but others would keep it, the the free maçons, the Communists, the Socialists and the vicious circle had started turning many of them into dreadful collaborators, by the simple fact that they had signe dand ket their job and thus be par tof the Regime. This technique was also used by the Germans to trap Jews in the Ghetto. Those who had a blue Ausweiss were doomed, but getting a green one would save you , until the next week...... then a yellow one was required until they were almost all caught in smaller groups.

 

Got Simon Kitson: "The hunt for nazi spies" which has some info on the Vichy´s political interests.

"..there were daily dialogues between Vichy and the Germans, and help was extended to the Reich on numerous occasions. Logistic facilities were offered to Rommel´s Afrika Korps.During the summer of 1941, Darlan even raised the possibility of entering the war on the German side against the Allies, an option Laval had also discussed in passing in November and December 1940. Vichy thus negotiated collaboration on all levels: economic,adminstrative, and military.

As to the Americans, they put direct pressure on the Vichy government to limit German activity in the non-occupied territories- that was the price of the food aid offered following the Murphy-Weygand agreement of February 1941."

Also:

Simon Kitson´s exhaustive search of French military, police, and judicial archives found that between 1940 and 1942 Vichy police and counterintelligence officers arrested between 1,500 and 2,000 agents working for Nazi Germany. Some 80 percent of them were French nationals. About forty German agents were executed, though none of them appears to have been a German citizen; some German citizens were imprisoned, however.

 

Wow, Vichy arresting Nazi agents and executing them? That's interesting to say the least. I suspect many of these were mock executions though and Vichy possibly found it easier to get rif of potential "enemies" by calling them spies ,rather than political opponents who might threat them in the future. Some of these unfortunates may have been Spanish civil refugees (communists)

 

A lot of those were already interned in the refugee camps near Vernet. All packed up and ready for the Gestapo to inventory. The Germans also found that the French had convienently locked up most of the anti nazi Germans who had sought refuge in France. Rather than recruit them to fight, or let them flee.

 

Official Secrecy release published today:

British General Alan Brooke, Chief of the Imperial General Staff, kept Winston Churchill and Free French leader Charles De Gaulle in the dark about a top secret 1942 plan to arm Vichy France, recently discovered documents reveal.
cont... at BBC News - The British general who planned to arm Vichy France

 

Text from above:

A British general kept Winston Churchill and Free French leader Charles De Gaulle in the dark about a top secret 1942 plan to arm Vichy France, recently discovered documents reveal.


Both Churchill and De Gaulle had made clear their contempt for Marshall Petain's regime, which controlled a large part of France thanks to a deal struck with Hitler.
Relations between Britain and France had been strained since July 1940, when Churchill, who was determined to stop French ships falling into German hands, ordered the Royal Navy to sink several French war ships off the coast of Algeria - 1,300 French sailors lost their lives in the action.


In retaliation, a furious Vichy not only broke off diplomatic relations with London but also bombed Gibraltar.
In December 1941, Winston Churchill made clear his distaste for the supposedly neutral Vichy regime and its often enthusiastic collaboration with Hitler.
Continue reading the main story [h=2]“Start Quote[/h]

Here we were having been fighting the Vichy French... and here we are talking about arming their colleagues”
​

End Quote Professor Eric Grove University of Salford

"The men of Vichy, they lay prostrate at the foot of the conqueror, they fawned upon him," he said, in a speech to the Canadian Parliament in Ottawa.
Later, Vichy voluntarily deported Jews to Germany.


Charles De Gaulle was equally contemptuous. Vichy's leaders had accused him of being a traitor when he fled to London after the fall of France. At the time, Marshal Petain, a hero of World War I, was a more popular figure in France - many saw him as having shielded Vichy from the worst excesses of Hitler's forces and saved the region from German occupation.


But neither man had anything to say about a secret meeting in London in December 1941 between a senior Vichy military officer and a member of the British General Staff. That, it seems, is because nobody told them.


But documents dated six months later show that the meeting resulted in a decision that was both extremely significant and highly controversial.




General Alan Brooke's Most Secret memo of May 1942: "Plan to give support to the French Army in occupied territory"

A proposal discussed at the meeting was approved in May 1942 by General Alan Brooke, Chief of the Imperial General Staff. Under the top secret plan Britain was to arm Vichy troops and link up with them in an Allied landing at Bordeaux and La Rochelle. At the time Britain had no official military links with Vichy and its forces were fighting Petain's troops in Madagascar.


Professor Eric Grove of the University of Salford, who discovered the papers, says he was astonished at what he found.




Alan Brooke (right) took a risk by keeping Churchill out of the loop


"My eyes widened," he says.

"Here we were having been fighting the Vichy French in Syria in 1941 and, indeed, in May 1942 we were actually fighting Vichy forces in Madagascar. And here we are talking about arming their colleagues in France itself."


What is even more shocking, in Grove's view, is the high-level backing the plan had, and not only in Britain.


"This plan has the support of the French Chief of the General Staff and General Weygand, who was a French general with a very high reputation significant support. They wanted us to arm eight French divisions to take part in the liberation of France," he says.


World War II historian Max Hastings believes that Winston Churchill, the undisputed leader of Britain's war effort, would not have taken kindly to being kept in the dark about a plan of this magnitude.



Particularly when one of those involved in it was General Alan Brooke, the man at the very top of Britain's military machine.


"There's no doubt that one of the most fascinating aspects of this document is that the Chiefs of Staff commit to paper the fact that it's not to be mentioned to the prime minister," says Hastings.


"If he'd known what they said Brooke would have had a very, very bad half hour indeed with the prime minister, because Churchill liked to know everything."
It seems likely that both Churchill and De Gaulle were not told because of fears about what would happen if they knew.




Marshal Petain (left) and Adolf Hitler (right) in 1940


In Max Hastings' view, Churchill, "a man of passionate impulses", could have viewed the plan as iniquitous or as an opportunity.
According to Jean-Louis Cremieux-Brilhac, a senior intelligence officer with the Free French in London in 1942, De Gaulle's reaction was all too predictable.
"If we had known, it would have been something scandalous for us," he says.


But when American forces landed in Vichy-occupied North Africa in November 1942, the secret plan - which seemed to have been dropped quietly anyway - was well and truly dead.


The lack of Vichy resistance to Allied forces prompted the Germans to invade unoccupied France, and Marshal Petain's regime could no longer do deals with anyone.
But French historian and author Henry Rousso says these formerly secret papers make clear what might have happened had Vichy's General Giraud, and not General De Gaulle, taken over French forces in North Africa in 1943.


"It could have been possible that De Gaulle didn't win this political fight, and the history of France would have been, after the war, completely different. And this document reminds historians to be very cautious about the way we are writing history."


Document will be broadcast on Monday 19 March at 20:00 GMT on BBC Radio 4

 

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Damn just realised that I have missed it - any idea how I might find out what was said?