Fighting Fragments

Like an eel chopped to pieces, fragments of the French Army continued to wriggle and resist all across France last week even after the nation's surrender was signed and sealed in a railroad car at Compiegne (see p. 20). In hate and despair many a Frenchman threw his life away--taking a German or so with him--a week after the war had been lost.

In the west, German armored columns thrust steel fingers around one seaport after another--St. Malo, Brest, Lorient, Nantes, St. Nazaire, La Rochelle--reaching for Bordeaux. German and Italian bombers repeated at Bordeaux their performance of last fortnight at Tours, dumping death into the overcrowded city to panic the populace and complete France's demoralization. This stopped only when white flags were flown in a wide circle around Bordeaux.

From the line of the Loire, which was pierced by German advance columns before defenders could form along it, four French armies retreated southward into the hilly Midi, still firing with the guns they had saved, and in fairly good order.

In the east, from the Vosges to the Rhone Valley, fresher French divisions yielded ground dearly. Surrounded by the German horde that swept through Verdun from the west and the Maginot Line from the east, 500,000 fortress troops stood in isolated squares and fought until the signing at Compiegne was announced to them.

Farther south, 50,000 troops of the eastern Maginot garrisons fought a fierce but losing fight on the Maiche Plain before retreating across the border into Switzerland. The onrushing German columns, their tanks and trucks beginning to break down after strenuous campaigning, pushed down through Lyon, "Pittsburgh of France," but a segment of fierce French resistance formed west of there at Clermont-Ferrand and with other French remnants from the Belfort district momentarily pocketed the German elements.

In the Rhone Valley 1,000 members of the Foreign Legion performed the most reckless "Beau Geste" of all at the fortresses of Joux and L'Ecluse. These strongholds, cut into shoulders of the Jura Mountains above Bellegarde near the Swiss frontier, dominate a series of narrow gorges where the Rhone boils under sheer rock cliffs. The Legionnaires' commander telephoned to the nearest German general, at Pontarlier: "Come and get us." The Germans came. They captured Bellegarde. When they stormed up to the forts, the Legionnaires threw them back, threw them out of the town. As fast as the Germans landed parachute troops on the Joux fortress, the Legionnaires picked them off. By night they foraged the countryside for barbed wire and cattle, swearing they would not surrender unless they got hungry. The Germans came back and retook Bellegarde, but found its bridges all dynamited, further progress dangerous under the fortress guns.

Hundreds of pilots of the French Air Force were reported flying their planes to Africa to continue the war from there.

When fighting officially ceased at 1:35 a.m. German summer time on June 25, Maginot Line troops, 150,000 strong, were reported making for Toulon, possibly to take ship for Africa also. The French Army of the Near East under General Eugene Mittelhauser, another 150,000, also repudiated the surrender.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.