VICHY TACTICS

Wairarapa Times-Age, 25 May 1942, Page 4

VICHY TACTICS

THE NEUTRALITY BLUFF.

WEYGAND’S SUPPOSED PART.

Numbers of Frenchmen are asking how long Vichy will keep up her neutrality bluff, in an effort to deceive British and American opinion. All must realise, they say, that Darlan and his small band of henchmen are now in such a position that their lives depend on a German victory. These few false Frenchmen, defying the great mass of the French people, are continually seeking to help the Germans, and their protests to Berlin, when they do rarely protest, are hypocritical trickery. The Germans use them when and how they like and count on their blind submission.

The well-known writer, Georges Bernanos, at present in America, puts forward an interesting theory. Germany, he says, showed cleverness in allowing France a show of liberty at the time of the armistice and in not insisting on complete occupation of the country, which Germany at the time was in. a position to exact. To have occupied the whole of France would, says Bernanos, have driven opposition into North Africa. Instead, the apparent liberty left to the Vichy Government effectively neutralised opposition not only in French North Africa but throughout the French colonial empire.

For Bernanos there never was a “Weygand mystery,” only a “Weygand dupery.” Weygand, he maintains, was given a role to play and played it extremely well, namely to keep vigorous British and Free French action quiescent by pretending to be opposed to German interference in Africa. In support of this attitude he fostered a legend of his possibly throwing in his lot with the Allies. AU the time, behind this cloak, a veritable gestapo was at work making short shrift of any officers' showing sympathy for de Gaulle and Britain. When this work was completed, Weygand went to Vichy, received the thanks of Petain and the Germans and retired. Thus the Wilhelmstrasse kept North Africa and the French Empire out of the war without having to use a single soldier; more, they got Vichy to give away French Indo-China to the Japanese, just as they will probably be giving away chunks of North Africa to Italy and Spain.