Weiss, Stéphane Les poches de l'Atlantique et de Dunkerque 1944-1945

The liberation of France cannot be reduced to the Normandy landings and the liberation of Paris. Far from the main front, the war continued until May 1945 in German positions along the French coast, from the Gironde estuary to Dunkirk. These positions, referred to as pockets by the Allies and fortresses by the Germans, were not created by chance. They were part of a strategy to blockade the deep-sea ports on the French, Belgian and Dutch coasts, which was decided upon by the enemy in January 1944 in order to deprive the Allies of their logistical base in the event of a landing on the continent. When the German High Command ordered the retreat to the Reich borders on 17 August 1944, the garrisons entrenched themselves in thirteen fortresses from Toulon to Dunkirk. However, this strategy failed at the end of the summer of 1944 when the Allies captured the port facilities of Antwerp and Marseille. Some fortresses were attacked in the summer of 1944: while Toulon and Marseille put up only a few days of resistance, Cherbourg, Saint-Malo, Brest, Le Havre, Boulogne and Calais were reduced to little more than useless ruins. The remaining pockets (Royan and Médoc, La Rochelle, Saint-Nazaire, Lorient, Dunkirk and the Channel Islands) did not pose a major threat to the Allies' supply lines. The liberators therefore classified them as a low priority and contented themselves with simple guarding. In contrast, General de Gaulle included these defensive pockets in his plan and planned large-scale operations there, which, however, were not carried out until April 1945 (Royan and Médoc). In this context, the siege of the pockets, which was largely entrusted to French troops of the Forces françaises de l'Intérieur, turned into a long wait punctuated by sporadic local fighting. Far from the main front, these pockets were referred to as forgotten fronts from autumn 1944 onwards, a term that has survived to this day, albeit not without paradox: their memory is based on this feeling of being forgotten. An exemplary historical study of the last fires of the war in the West.