Since my ethnic, religious, lingual, educational and other personal attributes all point to a strong affinity with the thousand-year plus history of French kingdoms, governments, language, culture, cuisine, attitudes, understandings and misunderstandings, aspirations, scientific contributions and artistic zeal over the centuries, the tragic and sudden collapse of that democratic nation in May 1940 to Hitler’s mighty Wehrmacht still confounds and confuses me.
At the time, I was safe and sound, being nurtured, in my bedroom, by caring, working-class parents in a comfortable, second-story apartment (tenement) that my folks rented from Monsieur et Madame Poulain, the owners of the white, clapboard house located on Endicott Street in Pawtucketville, Massachusetts. The Poulains lived on the first floor of our domicile.
Fortunately, this married couple, in their late sixties, loved animals so that when we decided to adopt a male, German Shepherd puppy – we called Pal – we could further socialize together over the abundance of our living situation.
It really was many years later that I began to appreciate the sharp difference in living standards between my cozy home in Lowell and the dreadful and deadly scenes in France and in Belgium. Often, my mother reminded me that we had brothers and sisters, cousins, aunts and uncles all suffering under Nazi rules overseas.
Nine months after the fall of Poland on September 1, 1939, the so-called “drôle de guerre“, “das Sitzkrieg“, or the “phony war” came to a crashing start in Western Europe.
France 24 remembers
The 80th anniversary of the Fall of France was commemorated recently in several publications, which appeared on France 24 that I would like to highlight. This news source regularly publishes articles in French, English and Arabic to better inform readers throughout the French nation on important issues.
The reader is invited (below) to examine the factual, recorded history of the events that lead to the subsequent military debacle of May 10, 1940, and also to learn about the poignant, personal experiences of young children caught in the daily melee of exploding bombs, machine gun blasts, tanks, airplanes plus the fragmented remains of people and animals.
Two articles from France 24 follow on this debacle. See:
https://www.france24.com/en/20200516-why-did-france-lose-to-germany-in-1940 ?
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