THE TRAIL OF VICHY

Evening Post, Volume CXXXIV, Issue 99, 23 October 1942, Page 4

THE TRAIL OF VICHY

When General Smuts, in his London speech, described the fall of France as "the most deadly catastrophe of all" the Allies had suffered, he enunciated a truth that history is almost sure to confirm. The consequences of that catastrophe have beset the Allies at almost every step in a long, uphill struggle since. The injury to the Allies lay not so much in the military defeat of France as in the capitulation, against the true will of the French people, of a regime that seized office in the crisis and concluded an armistice that placed France- not only at the mercy but in the service of the conquerors. Other countries of Europe had been occupied, but all refused to surrender and nave continued the fight from exile. They form now an important part of the United Nations fighting against the Axis. France, under the control of the "Men of Vichy," has been forced to work for the Axis, and Frenchmen, under the command of Vichy officers, have fought against the jellies, and so for the Axis, in Syria and at Dakar, and are fighting now in Madagascar. These petty campaigns—petty compared with the conflicts elsewhere —are the least harm Vichy has done to the Allied cause. After the fall of France, said General Smuts, the Vichy regime opened the door to Japanese IndoChina and the flood poured into Siam, Malaya, and Burma, and had been stopped just short of the shores of Australia and New Zealand. The situation, he added, was the logical consequence of the downfall of France and nothing else. If Vichy let down .the barriers to Japan in the Far East, it kept them-up not against the Axis, but against Britain and the Allies, in the Mediterranean and the Middle East. Most of our troubles there have been due to the attitude of Vichy.

It is not a purely neutral attitude. If it were just that, there might be less complaint, if a certain disappointment, that Fiance could be forced into such a course. But Vichy, in the person, above all, of Laval, who does not even bother now to use the venerable Marshal Petain as a mouthpiece for his policy of "collaboration" with the "new order," has been actively working for the Axis. Occupied France has long been an arsenal for the i^xis^-but. the.raid&T r noLbe£ore their

time—of the R.A.F. on works manufacturing war material for the Axis have forced a concentration of Axis munition works further east and south beyond the reach of Allied, aircraft. For the manning of these the Nazis, with their own man-power drained into the Russian shambles, have' called on the occupied countries to supply their quotas. France is asked for 150,000 workers. And Laval, the active agent of Hitler, is trying to overcome the natural reluctance of the French worker to work in Germany for the Germans by cajolery and threats. He has openly on several occasions expressed a hope that Germany would win and the opinion that France should be on the winning side. This week, in a broadcast appealing for more workers to go to Germany voluntarily, before they are compelled by force, he said:

France cannot remain passive and indifferent before the immensity of the sacrifices which Gei-many has consented to make to build a Europe in which we can take our place.

What a horrible mockery this must sound to the oppressed peoples! With the "Men of Vichy," who would ''collaborate" with the Axis, not only industrially, but militarily, by obstructing the Allies at every point, Allied patience cannot last much longer. But for ihe people of France in their present tragic plight, with all their poignant memories of former greatness among the nations, there can be nothing but sympathy. We cannot forget the France of the last war, and believe, with General Smuts, that, "like Lazarus, she is not dead but only sleeping, waiting for the dawn of her deliverance."