A
bit of fun came through facebook the other day:
It's funny, isn’t it? The French customs have always been
friendly to us and they respond positively to our RAF sailing association
ensign (the biggest flag on the boat), and we don’t just walk through a gate –
they enter our home. I just don’t recognise even the possibility of this sort
of behaviour from such a professional service. I have been privileged enough to
have met men who went ashore on those beaches, and they wouldn’t have whispered
those words to any lady, French or otherwise.
There are memorials to foreign forces everywhere in France (mostly American
admittedly), and also many holocaust memorials. The entire Island of Sein, on a
really nasty part of the Breton coast (trust me – the currents are scary, the
waves are enormous and the gales just sweep through unless you have modern
weather forecasts, electronic charts and gps to babysit you) is exempt from
income tax after every single man on the Island got into fishing boats and
sailed to Britain to join de Gaulle and the free French forces after his famous
radio broadcast. Let me repeat that – every single man old enough to fight.
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| Memorial to American WWI troops at St Nazaire |
Then there was the family that protected and fed the remains
of Major Blondie Haslar’s team on their way to raid Bordeaux. Not resistance members, just
ordinary farmers who would have been shot on the spot for what they were doing.
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| German built submarine pens at St Nazaire |
France
was completely overrun by the German army, having been persuaded by the UK government to go along with appeasement and then surprised by new and terrifying tactics.
More recently the country has been accused of talking up the efforts of the
free French forces and resistance fighters in order to maintain some national
pride. But those people did exist and the ones that fought on did so with
family and friends living in a country occupied by a ruthless army. In a
country which contained people who might sacrifice someone else’s family in
order to save their own.
I have been touched as I walked through the fields of stones
marking graves for American soldiers who would never come home. I have been
saddened as I walked through cities which have been flattened by that war. I
was impressed by the architecture of the church in Royan which took the
materials of bunkers and gun emplacements and turned reinforced concrete into
something curved, dramatically folding and reaching for the sky. I have walked
through the submarine pens of St Nazaire, the only things left standing by the
RAF in that city, now turned to positive use – because how do you demolish
something that turned out to be indestructible? My sons have played in craters
and run through trees still scarred by gunfire. I have been fortunate enough to
sail, in safety, the treacherous waters braved by those few free French
fishermen who would leave their country in the hope of returning to fight and
free it. Among the countless Avenues de Charles de Gaulle I have stopped to
read the road signs named after local resistance fighters, often with dates of
death between 1940-44. The latest such was named after Doctor et Madame de la
Marnierre, who helped rescue at least 40 Allied airmen and French Resistance
workers who were being sought by the Gestapo.
 |
Memorial to cockleshell heroes at the mouth of the Gironde estuary
(google them, there is a great documentary on youtube) |
Probably before I left British shores I may have laughed at
the joke above, but not now. It’s based on a prejudice with no real grounding,
in the Second World War the French paid for Chamberlain’s policy of appeasement
in the worst possible way. We had the English Channel
(Le Manche, peut-etre?) and then Churchill, the RAF and some very important
errors on the part of the Nazi leadership during the Battle of Britain. During
the First World War the French lost more lives than any other nation with the
exception of Russia
(they had a bloody revolution as well).
There has been a long history of Francophobia in the UK, mainly
because we seem to have spent quite some time at war with them. The fact is
though that the current rise of it has spread from across the Atlantic,
and to join in with the taunting of a dignified and grateful former ally should
be beneath us.
Still, it’s only a joke, isn’t it.
I wrote this sat in
our boat just outside the French naval base in Brest, where this happened at the end of the
war:
Almost the entire city
was flattened in the siege.
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| One of the few really old buildings left in Brest city |
