Wounded three times, de Gaulle was taken prisoner and spent the remainder of the war in German POW camps. It was in the “meat-grinder” of Verdun, where the French suffered more than 500,000 casualties, that Pétain distinguished himself. In 1916 he saw action at Verdun, a battle that came to epitomize the slaughter and carnage of the First World War. Their careers and lives would be entangled for decades in ways neither of them could have ever imagined.Įarly in World War I, de Gaulle was promoted to captain and received the Croix de Guerre. In 1913, de Gaulle, a second lieutenant, joined a regiment commanded by Colonel Philippe Pétain. His officer training (at the time Saint-Cyr emphasized preparation for positions in the infantry and cavalry) occurred as tensions between France, a republic since 1870, and Imperial Germany steadily increased. He attended Saint-Cyr, the French national military academy established by Napoleon Bonaparte in the early nineteenth century. As a young man, he became attracted to military life. Five months from his 50 th birthday, he had lived through and seen, however, some of the most significant events of twentieth-century French and European history.īorn in Lille in November 1890, the son of a teacher, Charles de Gaulle grew up in a very conservative and very Catholic family. Neither was he that well-known inside France.
France, he insisted in his radio address, would fight on.īy the standards of the time, de Gaulle was not a young man. Now in exile in Britain he summoned the courage, the confidence, and the defiance that earned him adulation and ire worldwide throughout his long life.
De Gaulle, a fervent French nationalist and defender of France’s status as a major imperial power, faced a situation of total humiliation in the wake of the Third Reich’s triumph over his homeland. The armed forces of Adolf Hitler’s Germany had overrun the country in a mere six weeks. In reality, it was midnight for the French nation. When General Charles de Gaulle first stepped up to a microphone provided by the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) in London and began to speak, the time was 10:00 pm on June 18, 1940. Regan Forrester, from the Collection of The National World War II Museum, 2002.337.968. Top image: General Charles de Gaulle, as Chairman of the French National Committee of Liberation, delivers an address on Armistice Day, November 11, 1943, in Algiers, Algeria, part of French North Africa.
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