@Narvik:
The OOB rules are wrong.
The OOB rules admit this: the rulebook says that “This game doesn’t deal with the German installment of the Vichy government in France.”
Global 1940’s concept of pro-Allied neutrals, pro-Axis neutrals and strict neutrals is potentially tricky to use when describing France (and many other countries) in WWII because it’s an abstract mechanism that crams into the same category countries which were actually in very different situations during the war. Just as an example, the game designates three countries as “pro-Axis neutrals”: Finland, Bulgaria and Iraq. Finland participated actively in the invasion of the USSR in 1941, as an Axis co-belligerent fighting a nominally separate war, and held the Kerelian Isthmus for two years. Bulgaria symbolically declared war against the US and the UK, but not against its neighbor the USSR, so it essentially did nothing militarily. Iraq briefly sided with the Axis following a pro-Axis coup, was promptly invaded by Indian troops, and within a few weeks had been put under new management by the Allies.
Politically, France and its territories (and its leaders) were a disjointed and contradictory mess after the June 1940 surrender. The Vichy regime maintained an affectation of neutrality, to try to convince itself that it was a free and autonomous nation, but it was in reality a puppet state of Germany, with whom it collaborated in many ways. Some of its leaders, like Pierre Laval, were outright collaborators; others, like Darlan, were unprincipled opportunists who changed their allegiances to fit the circumstances of the moment. I always think of Darlan when I hear Capitaine Renault in Casablanca say, “If you ask for what my convictions are, I have none. I blow ith the wind. And right now the prevailing wind blows from Vichy.” He switched to the Allied side when the Allies invaded North Africa, and soon thereafter was assassinated (possibly by a Frenchman who wasn’t impressed by Darlan’s sudden conversion to the Allied cause). The Allied invasion of North Africa did indeed involve some fighting, but beforehand it also involved some back-room negotiations with nominally-Vichy officers so that the fighting would be kept to a minimum. Even the Free French side was a mess: General Giraud and General de Gaulle were blatant rivals (notwithstanding their famous Casablanca handshake), and the history of the submarine Surcouf is another example of how murky the Vichy / Free French situation could get.
So in essence, any depiction of France in WWII in practical gaming rules is bound to involve a lot of simplification (even to the point of being completely unhistorical) because otherwise you’d need some very complicated political rules.
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