After Dakar

Last week as the Commandant Duboc was warped in at Duala, 2,000 miles southwest of Dakar in the Cameroons, three rows of native troops and French soldiers stood at attention. General Charles de Gaulle, leader of Free Frenchmen, stepped ashore. He kissed Governor General Colonel Leclerc on both cheeks. An officer of the Duala garrison shouted, not exactly in the military tradition: "Here you are at home and there's plenty of pinard" (French soldier's slang for wine). Then a pandemonium of cheering broke out.

General de Gaulle had gone to the Cameroons, which had declared for him along with most of French Equatorial Africa, straight from his failure at Dakar. Despite that fiasco, he still had hope. Said he: "I cite Hitler's words from Mein Kampf that a people may be beaten, but when a people and their leaders accept defeat, then they are forever lost. On the other hand, if a handful of men do not accept defeat, everything is to be hoped for. The Cameroons will have a place in the history of this war and the history of the nation."

General de Gaulle did not specify the "everything" for which he hoped as he arrived at the Cameroons. It appeared that he would have a worse time at Dakar if he tried again to take it. A German mission was almost certainly in control of the harbor, and last week General Maxime Weygand, who has a genius for dissolving opposition to the Nazis, was reported on his way there.

Winston Churchill defended General de Gaulle before the House of Commons last week. His version of the affair was that letting the six French warships out at Gibraltar was all a clumsy mistake, that the responsible officers were being disciplined. But knowing Britons told another story, according to which Winston Churchill needed some disciplining:

Gibraltar had notified London of the approach of six French warships. The War Cabinet, according to this version, met, and Winston Churchill decided to take care of the French vessels outside the Mediterranean. The order was sent to let the Frenchmen out, but if they turned south, an M Squadron (light craft) was to keep them above Casablanca. Instead, during dark and perhaps stormy hours, the M Squadron lost the ally-enemy, and the Frenchmen reached Dakar.

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