Congratulations to Mr. Prewitt. It should be noted, however, that France’s highest order of merit is called the Legion of Honour (Légion d’honneur), not the Legion of Armour, and also that France doesn’t actually have knighthoods in the same sense as Britain does. “Chevalier” (knight) is indeed one of the Legion of Honour’s five levels, and the name is a holdover from the days when France still had an aristocracy, but the French nobility system went out the window with the French Revolution. I once saw a series of amusing cartoons depicting what life in France would be like today if the Bourbon monarchy hadn’t fallen, and one of them showed an irate air traveler standing at the ticket counter of “Royal Air France” and telling the ticket agent “But I’m a baron and I have a confirmed reservation!” The agent replies, “I’m sorry, sir, but the Duke of So-and-so has precedence over you, so we gave him your seat.” In fairness, the same sort of thing actually happens in real-life republican France. A few years ago, there was scandal involving one of the major D-Day anniversaries (I think it was the 50th one), when the French government contacted various hotels in Normany and appropriated some of their existing reservations so that various French officials could have rooms for the event. Some of those rooms, however, had been reserved by foreign veterans of the D-Day invasion. When the story broke on the front page of French newspapers (under such headlines as “Our Liberators Insulted!”), public opinion was outraged and the French government beat a hasty retreat. The prevailing editorial opinion over this affair was: Do this to our own citizens if you want, but don’t do this to the heroes who ended the occupation of France.
Last Canadian Spanish-Civil-War-Vet dies
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@rjpeters70:
Yeah, I never got the “oh, so and so fought against the Fascists in the Spanish Civil War”, as though that were a good thing.� I always say “oh, so he fought with the Stalinists?� Got it.”
In that case, how do you feel about the American’s fighting with Stalin and Mao in the Second World War?
The average Republican was no “Stalinist”.
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I don’t think wheatbeer meant The country of America but rather American citizens vis-a-vis the Spanish civil war, but I could have the wrong take. Fighting fascists in Spain mean support the communists basically and they were supported by Stalin so……
America did investigate support of Mao with the Dixie mission.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dixie_Mission
Interestingly, although it came to nothing and the authors of the report were treated poorly via McCarthyism, it did serve as a bridge between the two powers under Nixon.
I guess that just shows you should always support both sides in a civil war just to make sure you have connections with the winner…
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@rjpeters70:
We gave the Soviets some stuff, to be sure, but there wasn’t that much help or coordination. We really did hold our noses to work with them.
Many of the Basques and Catalans who fought on the Republican side seeking autonomy likely felt the same way.
We weren’t Allies with Mao, but we fought on the same side. There’s no escaping that Stalin was our ally, no matter how distasteful that was. My point was simply that fighting on the same side as Communists isn’t automatically negative.
Unless you think Franco was a good ruler or you know what happened in an alternative universe where Republican forces prevailed, I don’t understand your perspective.
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@rjpeters70:
How did we fight on the same side as Mao? Mao fought the Chiang Kai Chek. He did not fight the Japanese.Â
Actually he did:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hundred_Regiments_Offensive
In fairness, both the Chinese Republicans and the Chinese Communists spent part of their time in WWII fighting the Japanese and part of their time positioning themselves for the resumption of hostilities against each other as soon as WWII had ended. And if I’m not mistaken, this greatly annoyed people like Joseph Stilwell, who would have preferred them to keep their attention focussed on the Japanese rather than each other.
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Circa 1940 was a BAD time to be a poor Chinese male…
If you’re not being sent to fight other Chinese men, you’re being sent to fight off an invading empire.
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@rjpeters70:
No, fighting on the same side as the Communists isn’t negative, but the Communists dominated the Republican side of the fight. It’s not like they were one group out of many fighting a common enemy: They were the dominant part of the fight.
The Republican belligerents were predominantly left-wing (at the war’s onset, far more reformist than revolutionary) … but most weren’t actual Communists.
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@rjpeters70:
Stalin was the primary financier and weapons supplier of the Republican effort
Now that’s 100% accurate.
But with Moscow 2,500 miles away (in that era), I wonder how much influence they could have exerted post-war?
After all, Germany didn’t exactly get a good return on their investment in the winning side.
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40,000 volunteers who NEVER surrendered an inch of territory.
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40, 000 guys….so a few days of combat on the eastern front…
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@rjpeters70:
Yeah, I never got the “oh, so and so fought against the Fascists in the Spanish Civil War”, as though that were a good thing. I always say “oh, so he fought with the Stalinists? Got it.”
Sigh….take the pain away sweet brown liquor. Take away the pain of gross over-generalizations of an ideologically diverse united front. “Oh so you happened to be fighting against the same enemy as the Stalinist faction of the communists were? Clearly they were all Stalinists.”
The Stalinists would eventually gain the dominate position in the Republican government after Stalin was able to provide the most tanks, guns, etc., but even then that wasn’t until they spent a year crushing the numerous non-stalinist communists, the socialists and the anarchists, and the moderate republicans simply went along with it because the Communists were the best bang for the buck, and if the French or British had forked over the money and supplies, the stalinists would have been readily cast aside by the majority of moderates and left-wing groups, especially latter in the war.
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@rjpeters70:
Germany got a bastion of anti-communism in Spain who gave 40,000 “volunteers” in Barbarossa. What more you want?
Taking Gibraltar from the British.
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