HEROES ALL? by Donal Kennedy

In 1940 German forces overran France. But they did not outrun the British Expeditionary Force nor those French Forces who accompanied them across the Channel to England. Neither those French forces remaining in France, nor those who had fled to England, nor the former British Expeditionary Force were in any condition to put up a fight on French soil.

The vast majority of French Parliamentarians, with the support of the French Forces and population, chose to make the best of a bad job and to cooperate with their conquerors. The German conquerors, for their part, generally behaved well, as they were ordered to do. In Poland, Russia and other places the Germans followed their orders and behaved with unspeakable inhumanity.

At the head of the collaborationist French State was the country’s most popular and respected hero, Philippe Petain, Marshal of France, who had commanded the defence of Verdun in the Great War. In fact when Patrick Pearse read the Proclamation of the Irish Republic on 24 April 1916, Petain was celebrating his 60th Birthday while conducting that defence.Most French people continued to support Petain until after D-Day in 1944, and French soldiers and sailors remained under his command and fought determinedly against those who attacked it.

It would be a foolish person who would assail the patriotism or doubt the heroism of Charles de Gaulle, but borrowing a microphone from  the BBC in London, to call for heroic resistance to the Germans from his compatriots on the other side of the English Channel, somehow fails to move me. And it moved few of his compatriots at the time, as de Gaulle himself remarked. “Only the ‘wogs’ answered his call” is the translation usually given for his remark. And when at long last he returned to France, a woman moved by the excitement cried “Vive le Marechal” thinking Marshal Petain had aroused it. “There’s a woman who doesn’t read the papers!” quipped de Gaulle. And this was some four years after his BBC rallying call.

I can’t help comparing that broadcast from London with Pearse’s reading on the pavement outside Dublin’s GPO whilst the Irish Republican Tricolour was being unfurled above it. Right in the very centre of Dublin in its newly refurbished and modernised communications centre. Qualified insurgent telegraph  and radio operators were at hand and the message “To the Nations of the World -Greeting! The Irish Republic was proclaimed in Dublin at Noon today” was broadcast over the ether. In less than three years after that broadcast the democratically elected Parliament of the Irish Republic met in Dublin, in defiance of the British Empire which had emerged enlarged after its great war.

It is fashionable today to sneer at Pearse and his comrades and even to condemn them for the slaughter of civilians by British artillery, machine-guns and other weapons, whereas, when not one insurgent garrison had been overrun by the British, they surrendered to put an end to such slaughter.

The leaders surrendered knowing full well that they would face British firing squads, but also trusting, correctly, that Ireland’s democracy would resume the struggle.

On D-Day in 1944 some 5,000 French civilians perished, mainly at the hands of the Allies, and a great many more died before the defeat of Germany.

You won’t hear a bleat from RTE, the Irish Times, The Sunday Independent concerning the unnecessary and excessive carnage which accompanied the liberation of France.