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THE TABLET A WEEKLY NEWSPAPER AND REVIEW PRO ECCLESIA DEI, PRO REGE ET PATRIA VOL. 183 No. 5431 PUBLISHED AS A NEWSPAPER LONDON, JUNE 10th, 1944 SIXPENCE THE RETURN Our Landing in the West and Our Responsibilities as Liberators ROME SET FREE The Words o f Pope Pius XII Before and After June 4th THE HOUSE OF SAVOY Its Part in the History o f Modern Italy. By Humphrey J . T. Johnson THE WORLD WEEK BY WEEK “The Second Battle of France” The opening phases of the immense, still unfolding sequence of landings on the Western coast of the European mainland have gone well. In particular, there have been successful mass landings by air-borne troops, which carry with them the very sobering reflection of how little security there will ever again be for this island. It is true that air-borne troops in the present stage of modern warfare need to be supported from the sea, and that German landings here could not have been so supported, but it is also clear that what ten years ago was being watched in manoeuvres as a daring innovation, what at the beginning of this war was still very much an auxiliary aspect, has grown to great dimensions. The German invasion of Russia afforded a great deal of proof of the possibilities in the aerial transport of troops, and we are plainly not at the end of this line of development. The sea and air parts of the invasion programme have so far gone auspiciously, as we take up again the policy of holding on to the north-western peninsula of France ; a policy seriously considered four years ago, and only narrowly rejected, as we had not then the armament necessary to hold a line between the Channel and the mouth of the Loire. The Second Battle of France opens four years after the loss of the first. They have been years of great trial for the French people ; not the trial of occupation only, as the Belgians, for example, knew that trial in the war of 1914, but a trial of French integrity, intellectual and moral ; a period in which it was very difficult for Frenchmen to know, with the information available inside France, what were the military prospects of an eventual German defeat. Little by little the picture has cleared, and it has become ever more and more a simple matter of history to Frenchmen that Marshal Pétain and his advisers were tragically wrong four years ago. They were wrong in large part from a military bias, widespread among continental Generals, which made them overestimate the decisiveness of military superiority in the professional sense of superiority in land forces. They underestimated the overwhelming material superiority which a country commanding the seven seas could assemble, provided it could hold its base through the period of preparation. They underestimated the likelihood and the effectiveness.of American participation. Many of them believed that if France stopped the war, the war would have to stop. There was even an element of competition in being the first to settle with Germany. Little by little these fallacies have become self-evident. The dream that France could be abstracted from the war, could become, like Eire, a place apart, in an enclave, was found to be inconsistent with the growing difficulties of the German Reich under whose protection the Pétain Government had chosen the place itself, acquiescing in the German domination of Europe. Year by year, the French learned painfully that they had not really contracted out of the war, they had merely exchanged their position inside it, and that the worse the war went for the Germans, the bigger became the share of the burdens that France had to carry. Very soon there will only be two authorities in France, and both will be military : the Allied and the German High Commands. It has been the achievement of Laval and Darnand to efface the line of distinction between the French authority at Vichy and the German authority in Paris, which was so carefully and genuinely maintained in the earlier phase of Vichy. As that French administration has become more and more a shadow and projection of German desires and policies, so a converse movement has taken place among the Frenchmen who never accepted the surrender, and made themselves the nucleus of the now great movement under General de Gaulle. General de Gaulle’s Claim These Frenchmen, little by little and step by step, have increasingly articulated their movement, and have distinguished it from the British and American Governments. They have successfully killed all the German propaganda about the venal dependence of General de Gaulle on Britain. They have advanced from being first the Free, and then the Fighting French, to styling themselves today the Government of France—for it was so that General de Gaulle spoke on Tuesday to France. Even the adjective “ Provisional,” which is part of the title now used in Algiers, has been dropped in these broadcasts. As the Government, General de Gaulle gave orders to gendarmes and officials in France, and told them to let the political prisoners out of the jails now. The disclosures of M. Louis Marin since he reached London—-that the last Reynaud Cabinet, of which he was a member when it met for its fateful session in Bordeaux, decided by fourteen votes to ten to go on with the war, and that this voting was falsified and announced to the world as having been thirteen to eleven in the opposite sense—invalidate all the Vichy legality, subsequently so carefully contrived when the French constitution was changed. Officials the world over, but rather particularly in France, where the security of the official salary and pension is so often the sole and over-riding consideration, will obey the legal authority, whatever their private views. It is, on the whole, much best that they should. By speaking to French officials as the Government, General de Gaulle need say nothing more explicit about rewards and penalties. He is in competition against wholly unscrupulous men, who have used this argument with great effect, to constrain to obedience key functionaries through these four years. No one can criticize him for this, or expect that he should have sought the open agreement of all the Allies to the tactics he is pursuing against our common enemies inside France. We, for our part, have made it plain that as we penetrate into France the civil administration will be transferred as quickly as possible to French hands, and that the men will be chosen in fullest agreement with General de Gaulle’s movement. There remains, however, a rather serious discordance between the ultimate powers which the Allies think should remain vested in General Eisenhower and the position that General de Gaulle is willing to allow to an Allied Commander-in-Chief, in supervising French internal affairs in the initial stage of the liberation. It ought to be more clearly understood that what is now widely termed “ President Roosevelt’s obduracy” is not due to any unworthy or superficial personal antipathies, to any unwillingness to recognize that General de Gaulle has, and

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THE TABLET A WEEKLY NEWSPAPER AND REVIEW

PRO ECCLESIA DEI, PRO REGE ET PATRIA

VOL. 183 No. 5431

PUBLISHED AS A NEWSPAPER

LONDON, JUNE 10th, 1944

SIXPENCE

THE RETURN

Our Landing in the West and Our Responsibilities as Liberators

ROME SET FREE The Words o f Pope Pius XII Before and After June 4th

THE HOUSE OF SAVOY

Its Part in the History o f Modern Italy. By Humphrey J . T. Johnson

THE WORLD WEEK BY WEEK “The Second Battle of France”

The opening phases of the immense, still unfolding sequence of landings on the Western coast of the European mainland have gone well. In particular, there have been successful mass landings by air-borne troops, which carry with them the very sobering reflection of how little security there will ever again be for this island. It is true that air-borne troops in the present stage of modern warfare need to be supported from the sea, and that German landings here could not have been so supported, but it is also clear that what ten years ago was being watched in manoeuvres as a daring innovation, what at the beginning of this war was still very much an auxiliary aspect, has grown to great dimensions. The German invasion of Russia afforded a great deal of proof of the possibilities in the aerial transport of troops, and we are plainly not at the end of this line of development.

The sea and air parts of the invasion programme have so far gone auspiciously, as we take up again the policy of holding on to the north-western peninsula of France ; a policy seriously considered four years ago, and only narrowly rejected, as we had not then the armament necessary to hold a line between the Channel and the mouth of the Loire.

The Second Battle of France opens four years after the loss of the first. They have been years of great trial for the French people ; not the trial of occupation only, as the Belgians, for example, knew that trial in the war of 1914, but a trial of French integrity, intellectual and moral ; a period in which it was very difficult for Frenchmen to know, with the information available inside France, what were the military prospects of an eventual German defeat. Little by little the picture has cleared, and it has become ever more and more a simple matter of history to Frenchmen that Marshal Pétain and his advisers were tragically wrong four years ago.

They were wrong in large part from a military bias, widespread among continental Generals, which made them overestimate the decisiveness of military superiority in the professional sense of superiority in land forces. They underestimated the overwhelming material superiority which a country commanding the seven seas could assemble, provided it could hold its base through the period of preparation. They underestimated the likelihood and the effectiveness.of American participation. Many of them believed that if France stopped the war, the war would have to stop. There was even an element of competition in being the first to settle with Germany. Little by little these fallacies have become self-evident. The dream that France could be abstracted from the war, could become, like Eire, a place apart, in an enclave, was found to be inconsistent with the growing difficulties of the German Reich under whose protection the Pétain Government had chosen the place itself, acquiescing in the German domination of Europe. Year by year, the French learned painfully that they had not really contracted out of the war, they had merely exchanged their position inside it, and that the worse the war went for the Germans, the bigger became the share of the burdens that France had to carry. Very soon there will only be two authorities in France, and both will be military : the Allied and the German High Commands.

It has been the achievement of Laval and Darnand to efface the line of distinction between the French authority at Vichy and the German authority in Paris, which was so carefully and genuinely maintained in the earlier phase of Vichy. As that French administration has become more and more a shadow and projection of German desires and policies, so a converse movement has taken place among the Frenchmen who never accepted the surrender, and made themselves the nucleus of the now great movement under General de Gaulle. General de Gaulle’s Claim

These Frenchmen, little by little and step by step, have increasingly articulated their movement, and have distinguished it from the British and American Governments. They have successfully killed all the German propaganda about the venal dependence of General de Gaulle on Britain. They have advanced from being first the Free, and then the Fighting French, to styling themselves today the Government of France—for it was so that General de Gaulle spoke on Tuesday to France. Even the adjective “ Provisional,” which is part of the title now used in Algiers, has been dropped in these broadcasts. As the Government, General de Gaulle gave orders to gendarmes and officials in France, and told them to let the political prisoners out of the jails now. The disclosures of M. Louis Marin since he reached London—-that the last Reynaud Cabinet, of which he was a member when it met for its fateful session in Bordeaux, decided by fourteen votes to ten to go on with the war, and that this voting was falsified and announced to the world as having been thirteen to eleven in the opposite sense—invalidate all the Vichy legality, subsequently so carefully contrived when the French constitution was changed. Officials the world over, but rather particularly in France, where the security of the official salary and pension is so often the sole and over-riding consideration, will obey the legal authority, whatever their private views. It is, on the whole, much best that they should. By speaking to French officials as the Government, General de Gaulle need say nothing more explicit about rewards and penalties. He is in competition against wholly unscrupulous men, who have used this argument with great effect, to constrain to obedience key functionaries through these four years. No one can criticize him for this, or expect that he should have sought the open agreement of all the Allies to the tactics he is pursuing against our common enemies inside France.

We, for our part, have made it plain that as we penetrate into France the civil administration will be transferred as quickly as possible to French hands, and that the men will be chosen in fullest agreement with General de Gaulle’s movement. There remains, however, a rather serious discordance between the ultimate powers which the Allies think should remain vested in General Eisenhower and the position that General de Gaulle is willing to allow to an Allied Commander-in-Chief, in supervising French internal affairs in the initial stage of the liberation.

It ought to be more clearly understood that what is now widely termed “ President Roosevelt’s obduracy” is not due to any unworthy or superficial personal antipathies, to any unwillingness to recognize that General de Gaulle has, and

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