VICHY AND FREE FRENCH

Greymouth Evening Star, 23 May 1942, Page 5

VICHY AND FREE FRENCH

MADAGASCAR REPORT.

RUGBY, May 21. Free French authorities have published extracts from a report by a senior French officer who escaped from Madagascar. He said that Vichv pursued a policy of repression arid violent anti-British propaganda which, however, failed to stifle the French sympathies of the majority of the French colonists. The officer added that most of the French military personnel on the island supported General de Gaulle and the Allies. High administrative officials guilty of revealing their proAllied feelings had been imprisoned, and a large number of natives had been imprisoned for the same reason. To stamp out resistance the Vichy policy was to send back to France the more important civil servants and army officers. General Abadie, the Commander-in-Chief until jhe middle of last year, who had defended his officers when they were accused of de Gaullist sentiments, was thus recalled to Vichy. t “Immediately after the armistice the whole island was determined to continue the fight, ’ said the officer. “However, the indecision of the governors of the other French colonies, coupled with the subsequent activities of the special Vichy envoys, prevented any effective action, faun in the Allied cause was kept alive by French broadcasts Irom London and Brazzaville. Attempts to escape to join the Free French forces were 1 reorient, but the penalties, for the unlucky ones were severe.” GEN. SMUTS’ ESTIMATES. (Recd. 10 a.m.) LONDON, May 22. Interviewed at Nairobi, while returning to Pretoria, General Smuts said that the Madagascar action removed all likelihood of a Japanese frontal attack on South Africa. EXPLOSIONS IN PARIS. GENEVA, May 21. Twenty Germans have been killed by two fresh dynamite explosions >n the Paris headquarters of the German Occupation Authorities.