Word: dakar
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Back to London after his fiasco at Dakar and his coup in Gabon went General Charles de Gaulle last week. Tired but still brisk, he went straight to No. 10 Downing Street to report to Prime Minister Winston Churchill. Later he broadcast an appeal to Frenchmen in France to hold out against the Vichy Government. "Free France," said its leader, "now has 35,000 trained troops under arms, 20 warships in service, 1,000 aviators and 60 merchant ships at sea." In a phrase reminiscent of Dakar (where De Gaulle forces withdrew rather than fight other Frenchmen) General de Gaulle...
...will provide stations from which the Navy can patrol the eastern entrances of the Caribbean. At Antigua the Navy will have the use of about three square miles on Parham Sound and also of a site on Crabs Peninsula across the harbor. St. Lucia, 2,600 miles west of Dakar and 1,150 miles from the Canal, will house a 120-acre seaplane base at Gros Islet Bay, and possibly other facilities not yet decided...
...Africa, which are British. North and west of Gabon lie the Cameroons (French), Nigeria (British), Dahomey and Togo (French mandate), the Gold Coast (British), the Ivory Coast (French), Liberia (free), Sierra Leone (British), French Guinea, Gambia (British, with the harbor of Bathurst) and Sénégal (with Dakar, the French base on Africa's westernmost shoulder-point). Gabon is about equidistant (2,000 mi.) from Dakar and Cape Town...
...Gaulle's efforts to nail down French colonies on Africa's west coast is that, in Axis hands, those colonies could base raiders to prey on Britain's supply line to Cape Town, Australia and around through the Red Sea to Egypt. Having failed at Dakar, the De Gaullists were pressing their luck elsewhere, as much as anything to keep colonists from succumbing to Axis pressure and Vichy subservience. The distance is too great, through too country, for Gabon or the Cameroons to serve as an alternative point of ingress to the Sudan. But some...
...been squeezed into silence by pressure from Whitehall, which was, they said, alarmed at his forthright pleas for more democracy in Britain. Declared the New Statesman: "He tells us he was not stopped. But . . . that these broadcasts should stop is a national calamity which may matter more than Dakar...