In British popular memory it is almost entirely forgotten that the British forces of the Second World War were, in fact, a multinational coalition composed of soldiers from Britain, its empire and its European allies. After Germany’s victories in the summer of 1940, Britain became the refuge for exiled military personnel from German-occupied Czechoslovakia, Poland, Norway, Holland, Belgium and France. In spite of objections from senior British officers, the British Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, insisted that strong national contingents of exiled personnel be organised immediately. This decision inaugurated an unprecedented degree of transnational military cooperation between Britain and its European allies: by 1944 Britain had organised over 230,000 military exiles into land, naval and air forces which supported the Allied campaign to liberate German-occupied Europe. Despite this remarkable fact, we know very little about how the British forces operated on a transnational level – the most fundamental question being how did the British integrate the various foreign units into British combat formations, in order to ensure a cohesive fighting force?
Much of what has been written on the military history of the Second World War in the last 70 years has been dominated by a nationally-compartmentalised understanding of the war. Thus, while there are some studies of foreign contingents in the British forces, they focus narrowly on particular units within the contingents and they generally analyse their service from the perspective of the foreign personnel. FFABFORCE is innovative because it rejects a one-sided, national focus. Rather, it analyses the process of integration from both the host’s perspective and that of the foreign personnel, thereby contributing to the research of a new generation of historians who are seeking to understand and highlight the transnational nature of the Allied and Axis war efforts.
The project’s two main objectives are: to assess the British approach to organising effective multinational forces during the war, using the Free French as a case study, and to analyse the responses of the Free French to their host’s efforts to integrate them.
There are two salient reasons for choosing the Free French contingent for this case study of transnational cooperation in the British forces. Firstly, from August 1940 onwards the Free French represented the second largest exile force after the Poles and secondly, unlike the land forces of most of the other foreign contingents who only saw active service in 1944, the Free French soldiers had been fighting alongside the British in Africa and other theatres since the autumn of 1940.
