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entrepreneurs like you. Sign up for your $1 a month trial at Shopify.com slash setup. Hello and welcome to the latest episode of Battleground 44 with me Saul David and Patrick Bishop.

Today the subject is resistance and in particular the French resistance. All occupied countries had their resistance

or partisan groups, often sustained by allied support from the outside. And there's been an excellent

recent book on the subject with the same name, Resistance, the Underground War in Europe,

1939 to 1945, by Halic Kachanski, which won last year's Wilson Prize.

Now, if you want to learn more about resistance in general, have a look at that.

But today we're going to concentrate on the French resistance, as we say.

The importance of resistance to the struggle in the West at least,

it was a different story on the Eastern Front, was limited.

But with the clock ticking down to the

great invasion of Normandy in 1944, the significance of resistance grew, which begged two main

questions. What military roles should resistors play in the battle to come, and what might be their

political role once the battle was over? The potential role of French resistance was therefore one of keen interests for British and

American planners as they fine-tune their plans for Operation Overlord.

And of course, the free French leader General de Gaulle had to be consulted,

for as Winston Churchill noted when President Roosevelt, who loathed de Gaulle, suggested ignoring him,

the response from Churchill was, you can't really cut the French out of the liberation of their own country.

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