Word: darlan
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...character portraits of soldiers who go to war are more than likely to be drawn quite differently before and after the fact. Prior to the fall of France, very little was made known about Admiral Darlan to the Allied press save that he was colorless but competent. The archives of London and Washington now reveal France's No. 1 sailor as quite a different personality...
Fifty-nine-year-old Jean Francois Darlan is a spruce, magnetic little figure from his flattish bald head, edged with grey hair, to his impeccably polished shoes. He has the eyes of an amused gambler and his career, as now presented, exhibits him as having the principles of a cat. Two centuries of Darlan merchant mariners (supposedly English long ago) preceded the Admiral's father, who, the Admiral says, "went wrong and became a Minister of Justice." The Admiral was born in the grey old town of Nérac, Gascony, where Darlan père was once Mayor...
...Laval, whose program differed from the Marshal's only in its outspokenness, it was widely interpreted as an anti-Nazi gesture. It was also commonly said that the Marshal had ousted the only French emissary with whom the Nazis would deal. But in Vice Premier Admiral Jean Frangois Darlan the old Marshal picked a successor to Laval who has made himself superbly persona grata at Berchtesgaden and who is, in addition, much less unpopular in France than the scheming M. Laval...
...Young Darlan's school record at the Paris Lycee St. Louis was only average and his teachers there were astonished when he began to shine in his second year at the Ecole Navale (France's Annapolis). A connection has often been suggested between his luster and the fact that his sister had just married Capitaine de Vaisseau Keraudren, then Aide-de-Camp to the President of the Republic. At school Darlan's wild arm-waving while he talked earned him the nickname "The Bass Drummer," upon which he often capitalized by standing on a chair to exhibit...
...Darlan career has been chiefly a triumph of political luck and wangling. During World War I he obtained the command of 25 mobile naval guns ashore, fighting at the Somme and Verdun. He later explained that he had wanted the job because as a Navy officer under Army officers he would get more attention, attract more patronage...