Australia’s war with France

It was the era of ‘Vichy France’, a murky and mostly forgotten period following the French surrender. When the Germans occupied Paris, a conservative – borderline fascist – French puppet government sympathetic to the Nazis was installed at the spa town of Vichy. The new administration controlled the various armies spread across the French empire: North Africa, Indochina and the Levant.

Winston Churchill, the British Prime Minister, was worried that Syria and Lebanon would be handed on a platter to the Germans. He ordered an Allied force, headed by the Australian 7th Division, to wrest the territory away from Vichy France. These young Australian troops assembled in British Palestine, nervous and untested in warfare,