Free French Forces

The Free French Forces represent the wartime choice to continue fighting under Charles de Gaulle after France’s defeat, rather than accept the armistice as the end of resistance. In the memoir, their formation is seen through the decisions of individual airmen: they leave for England, join forces gathering under de Gaulle, and prepare to serve in Africa. Their story also tests the narrator’s belief that devotion to France would be enough to make him French in the eyes of its institutions.

Continuing the War Under Charles de Gaulle

The narrator recalls that his mother had taught him to imagine France as a heroic, almost legendary country. After the fall of France, hearing Charles de Gaulle’s call to arms on June 18, 1940, brought that childhood ideal into wartime action: he rallied not only to the general’s appeal but also to the voice of his mother, who had long insisted on France’s greatness. That inheritance helps explain why he chose to continue the fight even as the country moved toward an armistice.

He decided to follow Charles de Gaulle to England with three friends in a Den-55, a new aircraft none of them had piloted before. The airfield at Bordeaux-Mérignac during June 15–17 was crowded with aircraft and passengers arriving by whatever transport they could find. Amid that disordered movement, the intended destination was a continuing French war effort, not simply escape from France.

Airmen and Routes of Commitment

The memoir presents adherence to the Free French Forces as a series of choices made under pressure. Sergeant Dufour, who had blocked telephone lines so that rebels could say goodbye to their families, told the narrator that Brossard was leaving for England to carry on under Charles de Gaulle. Dufour offered the narrator the same opportunity. The contrast between these farewells and the silence surrounding the generals and politicians negotiating the armistice makes the decision to leave a personal act of allegiance as well as a military one.

A French destroyer offered another route. After swimming to the ship, the narrator learned that it was bound for England with twelve Air Force sergeants joining Charles de Gaulle. He and the sergeants agreed that, although the British attack on the French fleet was indefensible, England’s determination to keep fighting was decisive. The narrator declined an invitation to remain aboard and help with potato duties, then continued his journey by sea. His account thus distinguishes anger at an ally’s action from the decision to join the continuing war.

Training, Service, and Frustrated Recognition

After reaching England, the narrator was transferred to Andover for training and posted to the Free French Lorraine Squadron, which was preparing to leave for Africa under Astier de Villatte. He describes French airmen fighting alongside young English pilots during the Battle of Britain, while he himself remained on the ground, wearing a colored scarf as his small contribution. His account presents service as a mixture of comradeship, waiting, and a desire to take part in combat; the squadron’s preparation for Africa marked a later step toward active operations.

That commitment did not erase the obstacles attached to his origin. At the French Air Force flying school, he learned that he had been failed because he was Russian-born and too recently naturalized. A rule restricted appointment as a flying officer to those whose parents were French or who had been naturalized for more than ten years, although he was told the rule had not always been applied. The rejection exposed a conflict between his conviction that he was French and the institution’s willingness to treat nationality as a formal qualification.

Belonging and the Meaning of Service

The narrator later understood the rejection as a painful turning point: it made him feel truly French, not because the institution had welcomed him, but because it revealed that French people, like everyone else, could be unjust and ridiculous. He came to see France as made up of many different kinds of people and to choose his loyalties by judging those who carried its symbols, rather than trusting the symbols alone. In this account, belonging becomes an ethical decision as much as a national inheritance.

The Free French Forces are therefore more than the destination of the narrator’s wartime journey. They embody the possibility of acting on a French identity that official rules had questioned, and they bring together people who chose to continue the war despite defeat, separation from family, and uncertainty about their country’s future. The later transfer to the Lorraine Squadron gives that choice an organizational form, while the narrator’s experience of exclusion keeps its meaning unsettled: service could affirm his allegiance without making the institutions of France consistently recognize it.