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United States military government in France

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A dollar-like 100-franc note produced by the Americans and supplied in June 1944 following Operation "Overlord".

The United States military government in France was a planned government of liberated France that was to be run by the American Army. This was abandoned in favour of France being run by the Provisional Government of the French Republic led by Charles de Gaulle.

The U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt insisted that an AMGOT should be implemented in Vichy France, but this was opposed by both U.S. Secretary of War Henry Stimson and U.S. Under Secretary of War John J. McCloy, as well as Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF) commander, General Dwight Eisenhower, who had been strongly opposed to the imposition of AMGOT in Vichy French North Africa. Eisenhower, unlike Roosevelt, wanted to cooperate with Charles de Gaulle, the leader of Free France; he secured a last-minute promise from Roosevelt on the eve of the invasion of Normandy that the Allied officers would not act as military governors and would instead cooperate with the local authorities as the Allied forces liberated Vichy French territory. De Gaulle would, however, later claim in his memoirs that he blocked AMGOT.

The AMGOT would have been implemented in Vichy France after its liberation but the Free French established control of the country through the Provisional Government of the French Republic in the name of the Free French Forces and the united French Resistance (French Forces of the Interior) following the liberation of Paris by the French supported by US forces, in August 1944.

References

  1. Kim Munholland, Rock of Contention, Free French Americans at War in New Caledonia 1940–1945, Berghahn Books, New York, Oxford, 2005, p. 190.
  2. Charles L. Robertson, "When Roosevelt Planned to Govern France"
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