Nearly surrounded and under pressure from all sides, two German armies organised their retreat during the Battle of the Falaise Pocket.

As was the case for all of France and the French Empire, New Caledonia, one of France's principal possessions in the Pacific, played a role that remains mostly unknown in France today but was nonetheless important, or even crucial, at certain points during the World Wars, especially in the Pacific operations during World War II.

At the beginning of the Second World War (1939-45), Jean de Lattre de Tassigny was France's youngest general.

After the signing of the armistice, on 22 June 1940, he set about planning to overcome the Nazi occupier, under the motto Ne pas subir ('Never give in'). His rallying to General de Gaulle's Free France took him to Algiers, which he left with his army in 1944 to liberate France, from Provence to the Rhine.

On 9 May 1945, de Lattre was present in Berlin, alongside the Allies, to sign, on behalf of France, the official act of surrender of Nazi Germany.

The battles in Saint-Marcel marked an important turn of events in Brittany's Resistance movement.

In 1940, Le Vercors, a genuine natural fortress, sixty kilometres long and 30 wide, at an altitude of over 2,340 m between L'Isère and La Drôme, was a place of refuge especially for victims of the Vichy Government's political and racial discrimination measures.

Seventy years ago, on 11 November 1943, Captain Romans-Petit, leader of the Maquis of Ain and Haut-Jura, organised a military parade in Oyonnax to mark the 11th November and to show the Germans the strength and discipline of the Resistance.

History

Right from the start of the Second World War, Norway attracted the attention of the belligerents. It lay at a strategic maritime crossroads, its fjords could accommodate a large fleet, and iron ore from Swedish Lapland, potentially invaluable to the German war effort, passed through the port of Narvik.

The Memorial heritage of Paris and its greater region is not particularly rich in monuments relating to the memory of the first world war since Paris was not directly concerned by the fighting. Paris did not experience the war so few monuments concern military operations.

With the German attack on the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941, the Japanese aggression on the American base at Pearl Harbor the following 7 December and the United States' subsequent entry into the war, the conflict became a World War.