Poul Anderson's and Gordon R. Dickson's Hoka character, Hector, referred to Sassenach guile. This led to a combox discussion of "Perfidious Albion." Dornford Yates refers to "Perfide Albion" in As Berry And I Were Saying. However, Yates attributes this view of Britain to the French. In his opinion:
the French expected the British to follow their lead in surrendering to the Germans and were put out when they did not;
then they expected the British to be conquered and were put out when they were not;
winning the war put an end to Frenchmen profiting on the black market;
very few French resisted the German occupation;
the occupation would have been impossible if more had resisted it.
I do not subscribe to Yates' sweeping nationalistic generalizations. He loathed Germans.
For black marketeering immediately after WWII in a Poul Anderson novel, see Post-War Crime.
3 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
My possibly un-nuanced, off the top of my head recollection was that as France was collapsing to Germany in 1940, many people in both France and the UK expected the latter to at least make peace with Hitler. One UK politician I've seen suggested as a successor to Chamberlain as PM who would make such a deal with Germany being Lord Halifax. Fortunately, this scenario did not come to pass!
And there were sound military reasons for Germany not trying to invade the UK. As long as the Royal Air Force and Navy survived as effective fighting forces, it would have been dangerously costly and risky to attempt a sea borne invasion of Britain.
Btw, Churchill's massive six volume history of WW II is one of those works the back of my mind keeps telling me to reread!
Sean
Albert Speer was interviewed in the 1960's about the trouble that partisans in Yugoslavia and other parts of Eastern Europe had caused the German occupation authorities and war effort, and went into detail.
Then he was asked about the French Resistance and replied: "What resistance?"
This is cruel, but not inaccurate. In point of fact Vichy had overwhelmingly greater support than de Gaulle, and this remained the case until a) Germany occupied all of France, and b) it became obvious that Germany was going to lose the war.
France provided more in the way of economic resources for Germany than the whole of the occupied Soviet Union. Partly because it was so much richer, of course(*), but mostly because it was easier to coerce.
(*) as the old joke goes, Robin Hood robbed from the rich because that was where the money was.
After the war, it suited everyone in France to blame everything on a few "collaborationists" like Petain and Laval, and pretend that everyone else had been an active or passive resister -- leaving out inconvenient facts like the Communists being full-throated collaborationists until the attack on the USSR, for example. In fact, most of the population was collaborationist until quite late.
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