Military history of France during World War II 2nd Armoured Division, famous for its role in the 1944 liberation of Paris and Strasbourg, with the caption "Yesterday Strasbourg, tomorrow Saigon: Join the Far East French Expeditionary Forces". In 1945 after Japan surrendered and China was in charge in Indochina, the Provisional French Republic sent the French Far East Expeditionary Corps to Indochina to pacify the Vietnamese liberation movement and to restore French colonial rule. Free French commando groups called "Corps Léger d'Intervention" (C.L.I.) were created by de Gaulle in November 1943 as part of the FEFEO and trained in French Algeria then in ,British India, after the British
German military administration in occupied France during World War II underground to avoid imprisonment and subsequent deportation to Germany. For the most part, those "work dodgers" ("réfractaires") became "maquisards". There were German reprisals against civilians in occupied countries; in France, the Nazis built an execution chamber in the cellars of the former Ministry of Aviation building in Paris. Many Jews were victims of the Holocaust in France. Approximately 49 concentration camps were in use in France during the occupation, the largest of them at Drancy. In the occupied zone, as of 1942, Jews were required to wear the yellow badge and were only allowed to ride in the last carriage