Stephen M Cullen

I've been looking forward to reading this booklet for awhile, in as much as I had an uncle whose plane went down in France in late 1943, and for whom these troops would have been a big part of the threat in the process of evading. Still, what you really get out of Cullen's study is the nuts and bolts of what has been called the "Franco-French" war, as the social stresses of post-1918 France turned into a real civil war, with the participants in these units having chosen the wrong side. Seeing as I've read my share of Vichy France's history, the narrative going along with the details of the uniforms seems sound. That the survivors of the much loathed "Milice Francaise" wound up being amongst the last defenders of Berlin in 1945 (having been drafted into the 33rd Waffen-SS Division) is truly ironic.… (meer)