Macron to honor colonial forces, Allies who helped liberate France on ‘other D-Day’

HYERES, France (CN) — On Thursday, French President Emmanuel Macron and heads of state will gather in Provence to commemorate the 80th anniversary of the "other D-Day" Allied invasion of France, which came roughly two months after troops stormed the beaches of northern France.

Operation Dragoon is largely overshadowed by Normandy in the collective memory about Word War II. But experts argue its impact shouldn’t be overlooked, from both tactical and symbolic perspectives. The operation was lauded as a gleaming success, changed the power dynamic between the Allies and saw a majority-French force help free the country.

Beginning on the morning of Aug. 15, 1944, roughly 100,000 Allied troops and 230,000 members of “Army B,” the designated French force tasked with liberating the country, landed on the southern shores.

Over half of the soldiers in Army B came from French colonies — including Senegal, Algeria and Morocco — and many were forcibly recruited, a fact overlooked for decades. Macron is expected to highlight their service in the ceremony in Boulouris Military Necropolis on Thursday.

African heads of state — including Cameroonian President Paul Biya, Togolese President Faure Gnassingbé and Moroccan Prime Minister Aziz Akhannouch — are expected to attend, alongside other leaders from the continent.

The operation was symbolically important for France, allowing the nation to feel it was effectively liberating itself after a lighting-fast collapse to the Germans in 1940. The troops achieved their objectives in a few weeks.

“The colonial soldiers of the French Empire performed the bulk of the fighting for France through September- October 1944,” Cameron Zinsou, a historian specializing in World War II, told Courthouse News. “But what's weird is that there's this still this prejudice or paternalism that exists among the French officer corps, so most of these units didn't have Indigenous officers."

"They weren't allowed to rise above the rank of captain, so the majority of these formations are still led by white Frenchmen who have quite racist views against these colonial soldiers,” he said.

Relations between France and troops from the colonies could be fraught. On Dec. 1, 1944, at least 35 African troops demanding back pay for their service were shot and killed by French soldiers in Senegal.

In addition to African troops, there were soldiers from New Caledonia, which has seen recent protests against continued French rule, and the Antilles in the Caribbean.

“Without colonial soldiers, there’s no way that France would have been able to contribute to the liberation of southern France in a meaningful way, aside from a division or two,” Zinsou said.

The Allies didn’t agree on the approach to Operation Dragoon, which was initially code-named Operation Anvil to complement Normandy's moniker, Operation Sledgehammer. That was later changed to Operation Overlord.

British Prime Minister Winston Churchill didn't want to invade via the Mediterranean, advocating instead to attack through the Balkans or charge through the Alps to Germany. In retrospect, experts are skeptical that plan would have worked.

Gerhard Weinberg, a diplomatic and military historian, told Courthouse News: “I do not think that crossing the Alps was a better idea in World War II than it had proved to be in World War I. The mountains had not gotten any lower in the interim between the two wars.”

“If the Americans had yielded to Churchill's opposition, it is conceivable that the Allied forces in Italy would have gotten a couple of miles further into the Alps than they did,” Weinberg said. “But it is inconceivable to me that they would really have gotten into Germany the way they got into it from the west.”

U.S. military strategy was to capture the ports of Marseille and Toulon to bring supplies through France. After Stalin got on board, the mission was scheduled in conjunction with D-Day but eventually pushed back for logistical reasons. There weren’t enough soldiers and resources to support both invasions at the same time.

“Stalin kind of serves as the tiebreaker on that and favors an approach to southern France,” Zinsou said. “So the original intention of Anvil/Dragoon was for it to happen at the same time as Overlord, and to occur in such a way that Anvil would be the supporting effort of Overlord, designed to draw German forces away from Normandy to allow easier facilitation for the Allied advance.”

“When the operation eventually happens on Aug. 15, the inverse is true,” he added.

Operation Dragoon saw significantly less resistance and fewer casualties than the Normandy invasion, as German forces were concentrated in Normandy and elsewhere in France at the time. The Allies suffered 395 casualties compared to D-Day’s 10,300 out of an army of nearly 160,000.

“The operation tends to get overlooked because it's happening at the same time as the Allied breakout for northern France, but 25% of all Allied supplies that come into France and Europe from September of 1944 through the end of the war come through Marseille and Toulon,” Zinsou said. "It's also a hugely symbolic victory."

Despite the military success of the operation, it caused a lasting rift among the Allies.

“It also represents the nadir of Anglo-American relations; I argue that this is the point at which the British accept that they’re the minor power in the kind of grand alliance of the United States, Great Britain and the Soviet Union,” Zinsou said.

“And that it's going to be mostly the Soviets and the Americans who are dictating the course of the remainder of the war and take all the kind of post-war negotiations,” he added.

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