Vichy France was a society so shattered by the defeat out of which it was born that it teemed with informers, men and women who were ready to testify against their own neighbours to the police; the police were not slow to follow up every denunciation, and knew which secret service to call on if there turned out to be anything in it. Many informers, believing their new government to be pro-German, tried to go direct to German authorities with what they had to say; down on them French administration came like the proverbial ton of bricks. One of Vichy’s proudest boasts till November 1942 was that it preserved French sovereignty; one of the objects of setting up both TR and BMA was to centralise complaints to the Germans through Vichy-approved channels, and to stifle any attempt by ordinary citizens to show private initiative. This was a mark of Vichy’s dictatorial tendency, which Kitson does not seek to disguise.
The British hardly appear in this picture. Ian Garrow, who started up an early escape line in Marseilles, having evaded from the besieged 51st Division at St Valéry, was mis-identified by an Indian under arrest as an MI6 agent. There are traces of MI9, the escape service: one of the spies sentenced to death by the French, who was not at that stage executed, was the notorious Harold Cole, a British army sergeant who had deserted, joined the nascent ‘Pat’ escape line, and after arrest betrayed over 50 of its helpers to the Germans. (He came to his well-deserved sticky end in Paris after the liberation, when he was shot by a gendarme on whom he pulled a pistol ‘while resisting arrest’.) There are traces of jealousies between the French and the British secret services; just as, within the French services, there are traces of petty office squabbles and inter-departmental boundary clashes. Kitson does not mention SOE at all.
He does give his readers plenty to think about by presenting an informed view of Vichy France quite different from the usual stereotypes.
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