A shabby episode

I read this afternoon in the piece at reference 1, that when the Allies had their victory marches in Paris in August 1944, black soldiers were excluded on orders from the US, although it is not made clear whether this was Washington or Eisenhower. The UK, went along, but perhaps as junior partners in the alliance we did not have much choice. However, it was a bit awkward for De Gaulle and his Free French, around half of whom were black, a lot of them drawn from Senegal. He had quite a job to make up a decent number of white soldiers for the parade and had to pack their ranks with Spaniards, north Africans and others. But De Gaulle had to be there to stop the all the lefties and commies in the resistance from taking over.

A story which is confirmed by the BBC at reference 2.

While the story from Wikipedia at reference 4 suggests that the Liberation of Paris generally was a rather complicated business, with the Allied agenda not aligning very well with that of De Gaulle, determined to present himself in Paris as the liberator of France.

Furthermore, it seems that the French went on to treat the Senegalese veterans rather badly after the war. I have no idea idea whether we did better for the veterans of colour from our colonies - much larger, I imagine, in numbers.

My rather cursory attempts at independent checking failed. Except to note that the DPLA, sometimes a useful source, was no use at all on this occasion. At least not in the short amount of time that I gave it. While according to reference 3, the chap with a sling to the right of De Gaulle in the snap above, something of a war hero, was removed by military police shortly after the snap was taken.

PS: it was interesting to read about Fanon, of whom I had not previously heard. Another rather shabby story.

References

Reference 1: Fanon the Universalist: Adam Shatz argues in his new biography of Frantz Fanon that the supposed patron saint of political violence was instead a visionary of a radical universalism that rejected racial essentialism and colonialism - Susan Neiman, New York Review of Books - 2024.

Reference 2: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/7984436.stm.

Reference 3: https://libcom.org/article/whitewashing-french-forces-liberation-paris-steven-johns.

Reference 4: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberation_of_Paris.

Reference 5: https://dp.la/.