April competition result

Charles De Gaulle

Congratulations to Mr George Cox of Devon, who has won April’s WW2History.com competition, as he was the first subscriber selected from those who correctly answered last month’s question.

The question was: De Gaulle was famous for his cryptic remarks. One of his strangest was when he was asked his reaction to the behaviour of one of France’s most famous heroes of WWI, who turned into one of the most infamous collaborators with the Nazis during the German occupation. This infamous collaborator did not die until 1951, yet De Gaulle said of him that he died ‘in 1926’. What was the name of this collaborator?

And the correct answer was: Marshal Pétain. In the years immediately after the First World War de Gaulle had hugely admired Pétain, the hero of the battle of Verdun, but then quarreled with him and subsequently preferred to think he had died rather than collaborated with the Nazis as head of the Vichy government.

A signed copy of Jonathan Fenby’s fine book on de Gaulle will shortly be on its way to Mr Cox.