Word: militia
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Make immediate contact with the Milice [militia of renegade Frenchmen], at once appointing Milice chiefs to their corresponding grades in the Waffen SS. . . . The Milice will be immediately mobilized. It will be supplied with food and ammunition from [German] Army sources...
Plainly Dev and Eire had not budged from their traditional Anglophobic bomb shelter. Having dispatched his note, Dev mobilized Eire's army (30,000 men), alerted the militia (200,000 men), ordered bridges mined, airfields double-guarded against an imagined invasion threat...
...Nazi demand that he revamp his government, throw out many of his closest advisers, replace them with stronger men who would not be squeamish about suppressing underground resistance. One of the new appointees was Joseph Darnand, a former carpenter who received full power over French police, gendarmerie, secret service, militia, and the private armies of ultra-collaborationists like Marcel Déat and Jacques Doriot. Also, in the event of Puppet Pierre Laval's absence (which, of course, can be arranged at any time), Darnand is automatically to become "acting Chief of Government." Mourning somewhere in the shadows...
...British officials had long since learned to use such episodes to press Franco further away from the Axis, squeeze valuable concessions from him. Last week the Falange, political core of Spain's Fascism, announced a program of general "relaxation" in domestic affairs, even dissolved the rambunctious Falangist Militia. The last elements of the Blue Division returned from Russia to be disbanded. A No.1 subject of current negotiations is the question of Italian merchantmen and warships held in Spanish ports...
Scorched Earth. In the Peninsular War Wellington reestablished the ancient Portuguese military law of Ordenanza. Under this, at the approach of the enemy, all civilian men became militia, all the people left their houses, destroying all food stocks. In this dress rehearsal for the scorched earth policy which, two years later, Napoleon met in Russia, the French troops discovered "with surprise at first, then with anger, and finally with something like dismay, that they were entering a devastated country whose inhabitants had vanished. Towns and villages and hamlets were empty and ominously silent; no obsequious mayors came forward to placate...