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 Germany and France agreed on an armistice following the defeats of May and June, Marshal Wilhelm Keitel and General Charles Huntzinger, representatives of the Third Reich and of the French government of Marshal Philippe Pétain respectively, signed it on 22 June 1940 at the Rethondes clearing in Compiègne Forest. As it was done at the same place and in the same railroad carriage where the armistice ending the First World War when Germany surrendered, it is known as the Second Compiègne armistice. France was roughly divided into an occupied northern zone and an unoccupied southern zone, according to the armistice