From a review by Jonathan Fenby of the book by Henrik Bering titled The General: Charles de Gaulle and the France He Saved, Hoover Institution, Stanford University, Policy Review 177, February 1
De Gaulle seemed to be permanently involved in a two-front war: “a public war against Vichy and the Germans, and a private war against the British Admiralty, the Air Ministry, the War Office, the Intelligence Service, the Foreign Office, the Prime Minister, the U.S. State Department, and the president of the United States.”
One of his advisers noted “the General must constantly be reminded that our main enemy is Germany. If he would follow his own inclination, it would be England….”
Much less indulgent than Churchill, Roosevelt saw him as a dictator type – “There is no man in which I have less confidence” – and was keen to replace him with General Henri Giraud, but Giraud proved politically inept and lacked popular support. So they were stuck with de Gaulle.
After the invasion, Roosevelt had wanted to place France under military administration but, typically, de Gaulle presented the Allies with a fait accompli by immediately setting up his own administration in Bayeux. And when the Paris insurrection forced Eisenhower to liberate the city rather than bypass it, de Gaulle ordered General Leclerc to rush his tanks to Paris, making it look like the French had liberated themselves.
With some major unacknowledged help from Churchill at the Yalta and Potsdam conferences, to which de Gaulle was not invited, France came out of the war with a permanent seat in the U.N.’s Security Council, its own occupation zone in Germany, and a seat in the Allied Council of Foreign Ministers in Europe, a pretty impressive result.
