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France set to remember African role in WWII Provence landings
It took decades for post-war France to highlight the crucial role of non-white soldiers in the fighting
Goumiers, auxiliary soldiers supplied to the French army by Algerian or Moroccan tribes, march in Paris on July 14, 1945. — AFP File
France on Thursday remembers the 1944 Allied landings in Provence, an event overshadowed by the Normandy landings two months prior, but key to the World War II endgame in Europe.
On August 15, 1944, some 100,000 American, British and Canadian troops landed on the beaches of the Var region on the French Riviera.
They were followed by 250,000 Free French soldiers, recruited mostly from French overseas colonies in Africa with the aim of recapturing key port cities Marseille and Toulon from the German occupiers.
They met their objectives within two weeks, having encountered only limited resistance from an underequipped and exhausted German army.
The lack of wartime drama comparable to the bitter prolonged fighting in Normandy earlier that summer explains why the southern French invasion never captured the collective imagination, historians say.
Nor did it inspire any Hollywood movies like Normandy did with Saving Private Ryan or The Longest Day.
Efforts to mark the Provence landings with major events like those seen for the Normandy landings have, meanwhile, been hampered by the large presence of French and foreign holidaymakers on France's Riviera beaches in August who are rarely in the mood for solemn commemorations.
The Provence landings gave French fighters a chance to prove their worth, and added weight to France's subsequent claim to a seat at the table of World War II victors, despite its lightning-fast defeat in 1940.
"The invasion of southern France on August 15, 1944, is one of the least celebrated yet most important combat operations by the Allies in the summer of 1944," author Steven J Zaloga wrote in a 2009 book about the invasion codenamed "Operation Dragoon".
The attack "succeeded far beyond the wildest dreams of its advocates", he wrote.
President Emmanuel Macron, who will lead the commemorations on Thursday, is expected to single out the contribution of Operation Dragoon soldiers recruited — often forcibly — in French overseas colonies, notably in Africa.
The army, commanded by general Jean de Lattre de Tassigny, included 84,000 white French settlers based in Algeria, 12,000 Free French troops and 12,000 Corsicans, but also 130,000 soldiers known as "the Muslims" from Algeria and Morocco, and 12,000 members of the colonial army, including marksmen from Senegal and infantrymen from France's Pacific and West Indies possessions.
It took decades for post-war France to highlight the crucial role of non-white soldiers in the fighting.
Political leaders from North Africa and sub-Saharan Africa were first invited to commemorate the landings only half a century after the war.
Macron's 2019 call to name streets in France after African combatants has largely gone unheeded, although many French towns remember the African contributions in their own way, including on monuments and memorial sites.
"At the local level they are not forgotten," said Jean-Marie Guillon, a historian.
This year, Macron's office said, there will be "a high-level African participation" at Thursday's international commemoration in Boulouris near Saint-Raphael on the coast where close to 500 soldiers who died for France in 1944 lay buried.
Confirmation of attendees was still pending on Tuesday.
Relations between the colonial power France and its African recruits were fraught, with many still remembering December 1, 1944, when French forces opened fire on African marksmen who demanded backpay for their time on the frontline. More than 35 were killed that day.
Among Thursday's military displays will be a landing of parachutists on the beach in honour of the 5,000 Britons who landed there in the night of August 14 to 15, 1944, and who suffered the worst casualties, mostly because of accidents.
Overall, Allied forces lost some 1,000 men that day, which compares to around 10,000 Allied casualties in Normandy.
In the evening, fighter jets from the "French Patrol" squadron will fly over the site, followed by a fireworks display in Toulon.
Already on Wednesday, France's Minister for Veterans Affairs Patricia Miralles will attend the unveiling of a statue of Robert Tryon Frederick, the American commander of the airborne troops in Operation Dragoon, in La Motte, the first Provence village to be liberated.
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