Word: tain
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Shifty Admiral Jean Francois Darlan, ex-collaborating Premier, heir-designate of Marshal Pétain and Commander in Chief of all French sea, land and air forces, had come to Algiers some time before the invasion, ostensibly to visit his sick son. In the Allied attack, the first step toward his country's liberation under Allied colors, Darlan the opportunist saw the great chance of his career...
...ordered the surrender of Algiers, followed this up with the "cease fire" order to all French troops in North Africa. Then, in an announcement broadcast by the Algiers radio, he took over the civil administration of the colonies in the name of Marshal Pétain-and with the approval of the U.S. authorities. He set up his own military command under the stanch old soldier and escapist General Henri Honoré Giraud (TIME, Nov. 16). Still in the name of Marshal Pétain, a virtual prisoner now in his own capital of Vichy, still with the approval...
Pierre Laval and Marshal Pétain tried to keep up the illusion that there was food in France. Frenchmen knew that French food, like French heavy industry and French labor, was being transferred to Germany. Hitler was following Machiavelli's preachment: "He who becomes master of a city accustomed to freedom and does not destroy it may expect to be destroyed by it, for in rebellion it has always the watchword of liberty. . . ." In France last week the sound of the watchword was growing louder...
France seethed with indignation. The Laval-Pétain duet was conking out. Its collaborationists' burbling was drowned by the rattle of machine guns outside hostage camps. Laval fired arch-collaborationist Jacques Benoist-Mechin from his job as Secretary of State, on the ground that Naziphile Benoist-Méchin had conspired against him. In the next breath Laval told newspapermen that his "Government was based on "solid foundations," remarked that rumors of its fall were "laughable...
...Pierre Laval did not laugh. He knew that ballyhooing Pétain would not win over the French people as long as their country was ground under the Nazi boot. He knew that all France's workers could not sate Hitler's rapacious appetite. If Hitler won, Laval would probably disappear, like Austria's Schuschnigg, in favor of a German Gauleiter. If the Allies won, Laval could expect to be hanged at least, possibly drawn & quartered by Frenchmen...