FRANCE: THE TRAGIC YEARS: 1939-1947

A testament from a newspaperman, (Christian Science Monitor) an Englishman who had adopted France is alert to the faults and virtues of his chosen home. But he also queries the deplorable steps and mistakes of Allied powers and treatment during the last war. Starting with the ""phony"" war of 1939, he measures his pace as he surveys the legality of Vichy after that; the French opposition to Churchill, the dismissal of Laval, the position of Darlan; castigates De Gaulle and upholds Petain. He considers the errors in North Africa, Petain's ""high patriotism"" in saving what could be saved by negation; the real and the false Resistance and the militia; the shattering of French unity and the effects of a material but not moral sense of recovery; the unnecessary concessions at Yalts. Then comes the liberation and its after effects -- the summary executions of the 1944-45 terror and the ineffectuality of the Fourth Republic. Here is an understanding but personal judge and jury reporting on the things he knew and saw, the figures he followed -- and the country whose tragedy he knew first hand. The dedicatory letter by Huddleston is to William C. Bullitt; the foreword is by Louis Guitard. This has faith and forbearance. Posthumous.