In 1962, while traveling by car from Paris to Brussels, we stopped for dinner in Dunkerque. Shortly after we sat down, a French family sitting next to us got up and moved to the other side of the room.
My mother explained that the family moved because they resented us as Americans and that they were angry that we had bombed the Dunkerque area so heavily during WWII. Even though I was still in grade school, I wondered if that French family would have preferred living under the Nazis because that was the only alternative to bombing them in order to drive them out.
They may have preferred the NAZIs, one of France’s unspoken truths, quite a few French thought the NAZIs were just fine. Obviously more supported the allies, but quite a few enthusiastically supported Hitler.
In the 1980’s I was working in the machine industry for a Swiss company and was in Hanau for a sales meeting with our German rep. Over lunch he began talking about how the Americans destroyed the city towards the end of WWII, which was unnecessary since the war for the Nazis was all but lost. I mentioned to him that my mother was born in London in 1939 and as a young girl had to often scamper into the back yard into their private bomb shelter when the Nazis bombed civilian targets in the nation’s capitol. He shut up after that.
The French in 1940 seemed to indicate a preference for Hitler to Stalin, who had armed the communists in neighboring Spain’s civil war (where they killed 8,000 priests, hundreds of nuns, and a dozen bishops). Catholic Europeans watched the Western Allies ignore the communist atrocities in Spain, and then watched Hitler and Mussolini step in to stop the communists...