August 1944 Landing In Provence: The Real Thing. D Day Was A Lure.

During the Landing In Provence, more than four times as many soldiers fought as during D Day. They were all French, and US Americans. More than twice the number of Allied soldiers died during this Operation Dragoon as in Normandy on D Day. And Dragoon was much more important than D Day strategically… because it provided the Allies with ports.

So why is the Landing in Provence, Operation Dragoon, so studiously ignored? Was it because more than half of the army was from French Africa? Or is it because the logical universe in which Dragoon occurred tells us a lot about how today’s world, complete with why finance supreme, fracking, Uberization, and spying all over blossomed so magnificently?

I read thousands of books and articles on World War Two, and interviewed exhaustively people who took part in it including my grandparents and mom (resistance, saving of more than 100 Jews, among others, personalized hunting by Gestapo in 1944), or my dad (African army), or uncle (officer in the French army, fighting for six years).

Toulon and Marseilles fell within ten days, thanks to remarkable assaults by the French army. Smaller ports in France or the Netherlands, would stay under Nazi control for 8 months, until the reddition of the 1,000 years Reich… 7,301 US soldiers died, during the Provence Landing, including lots of elite paratroops…

The same things are always said, presumably to please the same authorities, and because authors, anxious to publish what works, read each others. So here a few points, never emphasized.

The Vercors mesa fighting was a major diversion: the French Resistance was made to prepare an airfield, to get heavy weapons and Allied troops. But that was a lie. The Resistance believed in it, so did the Nazis. Thus elite SS and paratroops landed on said airfield… instead of intervening in Normandy, where they would have made a difference. 

The real disembarkment was supposed to be in Provence, not Normandy. The reason is obvious: Normandy had no significant port, and especially no port expected to survive Nazi sabotage. Normandy, like Versors, was a lure. Provence has two huge, indestructible ports, so huge they were: the vast bay of Marseilles and the nearly enclosed, gigantic rade de Toulon.

Sure enough, the Provence disembarkment had three times more soldiers (450,000!) than the famous “D Day”. All the units were elite and very experienced from fighting the Nazis in North Africa (where 160,000 elite Afrika Korps personnel were captured in Tunisia, and sent to the USA to be watched by black US soldiers…)  The armies landing in Provence had also fought the Nazis in Sicily and in a grueling war up the mountainous dorsal of Italy.

Initial US plans had Normandy and Provence simultaneously, but, supposedly fighting among US commanders about the availability of ships, delayed Provence.

French African troops en route for the Reich, Operation Dragoon.

In any case, two thirds of the army was French, the other, US. All combat proven elite troops. The US army chased the Nazis up north, while the French army wheeled around, and besieged the extremely well defended Toulon and Marseilles… Many Nazi held French ports surrendered only May 8, 1945, when Nazi Germany capitulated without conditions. But seizing Toulon and Marseilles was crucial to the assault on Nazi Germany, and the French captured them quickly. 

The French? Some have scoffed: those were African troops. That sort of remark is racist. These were French troops of African origin: my uncle and my dad (born in Algeria) are examples. Those troops may have been born in Africa, but they were Franco-French in mentality. They hated Nazism, because they hated racism (they may have suffered from it a little bit, some of them, motivating them even more). Those French troops born in Africa wanted to kill racism. They made war by choice. (Although there was a draft, in Algeria, that was just in Algeria, and those who wanted to get into combat volunteered for combat; my dad wanted to become a fighter pilot, but his eyesight was not good enough, he ended up in anti-aircraft unit, and saw combat there as Nazi jets tried to destroy those units first…)

A small part of Operation Dragon invasion fleet. The invasion was spread over 100 miles of coastline…

The preceding is official history. Let me now put my grain of sand in this well oiled US propaganda: why didn’t the southern attack against Nazi Germany not occured before? After all, this is what Churchill had been begging for… for years. After the French army of general Juin (same army as later in Provence) broke through the Hitler Line, east of Monte Cassino, Juin asked for more divisions and means: he declared he could be in Austria in three weeks. Juin, nicknamed “Hannibal” by his US colleagues, could have done it (long story). He had no Nazi forces in front of him. Instead Allied command removed divisions from Juin. 

What was the US Deep State game? According to my general theory, Nazism was all about the US leveraging Nazism for US benefit. As Hitler was clearly on his way out, he had to be replaced, as a dictator occupying Europe, and Stalin was the obvious choice. If General Juin’s proposal of operating a Blitzkrieg straight into the core of the Third Reich had been accepted, having a French army cavalcading into central Europe was not part of the plan: Comrade Stalin was supposed to do that, and did… a year later. More generally this is why Churchill’s insistence at displeasing Stalin by attacking from the south was always rejected. 

Clausewitz said war is politics by other means. To understand a war, one has to understand the politics underlying it. World War Two was the extension of the darkest politics, the same festering today. Progressives would gain by understanding what really went on then, because it’s the same which is going on right now.

To relax our US friends (most of them Trumpists at heart, even if they don’t suspect it), a contemporary case is Hong Kong: the People Republic of China wants to recover it… And that means recovering it to the same Chinese imperial mentality which cost the degeneracy of China to start with. Clearly, Hong Kong is too democratic, and Beijing, not enough.

After the landing in Provence, the US army rolled north in record time through disorganized, Resistance harassed, Allied planes hounded Nazi defenses. They arrived just in time to save my family fleeing the Gestapo through the woods, south of Grenoble. 

Under US (racist) insistence, the French army was then dis-Africanized, and painted white: all too many French African troops were disbanded, in spite of their great combat experience. Some of them, in Algeria, would launch the Algerian independence movement, as they were mistreated as they celebrated May 8, 1945, when the Nazis surrendered.

Was it because the French and the Americans got only a bit more than 25,000 casualties? Is it because the US forces got only 7,301 killed (plus hundreds of MIAs)?

By comparison, *only* 4,402 died on D Day!

D Day had an invasion force of 156,000 (with a bit less than half from the USA). Operation Dragoon, the Landing in Provence had an invasion force of 573,833 men, including 260,000 French infantry, plus 75,000 French FFI (French Forces Interior), fighting the Nazi from inside.  

800 French Special Forces launched the assault shortly after midnight on August 15 by climbing up the vertiginous rock cliffs of Cap Negre (named for the volcanic rock’s dark colour). On top of the cape laid giant guns, which they destroyed (those guns would have been a problem for the 2,200 ships of the invasion force approaching the coast).

So why was the landing in Provence forgotten?

Because a massive attack from the south could have been done earlier (Churchill begged for it). Because one has to hide the truth: the US Deep State’s mood was to keep Europe under dictatorship, as much as possible. That meant an orderly transition from Hitler to Stalin (both US clients), giving enough time to Stalin to conquer half of Europe, that meant not having a Franco-African army in Austria, after conquering industrial Northern Italy. That was not just racially insufferable, that defeated the US Deep State vision, the entire purpose of World War Two, keeping Europe weak, divided, confused, self-defeating.

This is why D Day was organized the way it was, before the landing in Provence, which was the real Reich killing move.  

Some will search the Internet for a link certifying this revelation. They will not find it: I came to this synthesizing conclusion by studying a lot of documents. 

In recent years, the US has been in full subjugation mode versus European industry, and France has been the number one target. The US Deep State has weaponized the US “Justice” system to do so. Macron was even a (maybe unwitting) accomplice of this. Now he shows some sign of understanding. Thus he celebrated with gusto the Provence landing.

Said Macron to veterans in Saint-Raphael: “The glory of all these soldiers of the Liberation is immense, and our gratitude must never fade. We will never forget anything, nor anyone”.

He was joined by the presidents of Guinea and Ivory Coast, Alpha Condé and Alassane Ouattara, for a ceremony marking the 1944 operation which saw French forces take a lead role in freeing their mother country from Nazi Germany’s grip. The all too US friendly Senegalese president was absent.

The Provence offensive included remnants of France’s free forces from 1940 and thousands of soldiers from its African colonies. Macron rightly insisted: “For decades these African fighters did not have the glory and the esteem they deserved for their bravery… France has a part of Africa in it…These men make all of Africa proud, and express the essence of France: a commitment, a love of liberty and greatness, a spirit of resistance united by courage,” Macron said.

Condé also lauded the “shared memory of the French and African people,” even more important, though, are the shared values. France will be hosting the G7 in Biarritz in a few days. More significantly, Macron will host personally Russian semi-eternal president, Vladimir Putin, on the Fort Bregancon micro peninsula, before that.  

Time to revisit history, and, especially, what it all means, seriously misunderstood, so far…

Could a landing in Provence have worked in 1943, using Corsica as a giant aircraft carrier? Probably.

Starting September 9, 1943, a complex war against the Nazis started in Corsica, first with the Corsican Resistance and the Italian army (soon under French command). 10,000 French troops (and 400 US Special Forces) soon defeated 42,000 Nazis. By October 5, 1943, Corsica had been liberated. It became an important air base for the Allies. It’s only 100 miles from the beaches of Operation Dragoon, and an invasion could thus have been mounted there quickly.

To have started with the landing in Provence, or to have provided Juin with the support he needed in Italy, while the Nazis were bottled at Anzio, would have considerably shortened the war: the Nazis were not ready for either, they would have been taken from behind (the best way to take Nazis). Neither happened, because shortening the war from the West was not the mood in the highest spheres of the USA. In the absence of reasons to the contrary, malevolence has to be suspected.

Patrice Ayme

Tags: Landing in Provence, Operation Dragoon, US Deep State, US Double Game WW2