Word: langere
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...VICHY GAMBLE (412 pp.)-William L. Langer-Knopf...
...Roosevelt-Hull policy toward Vichyfrance has been attacked with more fervor than it has been defended. This book is the most thorough and respectable defense the U.S. policy has had. William L. Langer, Harvard's Coolidge Professor of History and wartime chief of the OSS Research and Analysis Branch, concedes that U.S. Vichy policy may have been an unattractive long-shot gamble, but argues that it was "always substantially sound," judged by U.S. interests. And, he says, it paid...
Historian Langer has had access to such a wealth of unpublished material (State Department dispatches, OSS files, letters by Roosevelt, Hull, ex-Ambassador Leahy, et al.) that his book is of first importance in its field, even for those who do not share his outspoken conclusions...
...Willing Men. The point missed by most critics, says Langer, is that Vichy was not simply Pétain, Darlan and Laval. They got the headlines, but "at all times [were] more than counterbalanced" by other Vichyites, mostly nameless, who were loyal Frenchmen at the least, and at most, zealously pro-Ally. Example: as early as spring 1941 the Deuxième Bureau (intelligence service) secretly agreed to send military reports to the U.S. Army in Washington, right under Vichy Ambassador Henry-Haye's nose. According to U.S. diplomats at Vichy, French officialdom was 85% on the Allied side...
...Germans, trying to apply the new Nazi diplomacy with Teutonic thickheadedness, had made it not only possible but also profitable for the U.S. to work with Vichy, says Langer. Wooing the French, they had left a large part of France "unoccupied," left the French fleet and French colonies in French hands. Even such a timorous lot as Pétain & Co. could sometimes get surprising results by a little show of nerve...