Churchill’s attitude to de Gaulle was always shot through with this mixture of exasperation and grudging admiration. Only his intervention prevented the conference being even more unfavourable to de Gaulle. Without informing Churchill, Roosevelt had signed a memorandum committing the Allied governments to the position that ‘all the French fighting against Germany [should] be reunited under one authority’ and recognizing Giraud as that authority – a total contradiction of his own policy that no one authority had the legitimacy to speak for France. When Churchill discovered this after the
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