Eighty years ago this week Vichy forces murder a politician who had opposed Petain's dictatorship from the start

 

French politician Georges Mandel was murdered by the Milice, Vichy's internal security operation, which was conducting a war of terror against dissidents.  His death had been demanded by Otto Abetz, the German ambassador to Vichy and an SD detachment oversaw the killing. Mandel was a Jew but his real offence was that he had been one of the eighty French parlaimentarians to oppose the abrogation of the Constitution to give full powers to Marshal Petain in 1940. He had been intermittently imp-risoned but could easily have fled France; Churchill would have been happy with him as a leader of the Free French instead of de Gaulle. 

De Gaulle had moved to France and gave no indication of being anything other than the national leader. President Roosevelt accepted the fait accompli and recognised de Gaulle's national liberation committee as the provisional government of France.  The British had been willing to do so for some time but the President had kept his options open until the end.

British led untis finally entered the city of Caen but this had little military signifigance. It was entirely in ruins and substantial German forces bloked any further advance. At the western end of the Normandy battlefield the Americans launched an attack on St Lo after heavy bombing practically demolished the city. In 1946 Samuel Beckett wrote a piece about the after effects entitled, "The Capital of Ruins."