Armistice of Saint Jean d'Acre

The Armistice of Saint Jean d'Acre concluded the Syria-Lebanon campaign of World War II. It was an armistice signed between Allied forces in the Middle East under the command of British General Henry Maitland Wilson, and Vichy France forces in Syria and Lebanon, under the command of General Henri Dentz, on 14 July 1941. [citebook|title=French Foreign Legion 1914-1945 |author=Martin Windrow|year= 1999|publisher=Osprey Publishing|id=ISBN 1855327619|url= http://books.google.com/books?vid=ISBN1855327619&id=zv6egv9EsjwC&pg=PA34&lpg=PA34&ots=3ak5bKwHhi&dq=%22Armistice+of+Saint+Jean+d%27Acre%22&ie=ISO-8859-1&output=html&sig=3wgVjqFoQH_cmVdrUX80n-k2dnE]

On 12 July, escorted by a convoy of Australian high commanding officers, Vichy Brigadier General De Verdillac went all the way from Syria to Acre in Mandatory Palestain, for the Armistice talks instead of his superior commander General Henri Dentz. it has been written in the Time magazine from the 21 July, 1941 that General Dentz sent De Verdillac to the talks, for he was more pro-British, less anti De Gaulle than Dentz was.

The Armistice talks (The first between Great Britain and France since Napoleon's days) were held in the officers mess of "Sidney Smith Barracks", on the outskirts of the city of Acre. Despite the generosity of the British terms, representatives of Vichy made a brief show of refusing them, then dumped the whole mess into General Dentz's lap. On July 14 General Henri Fernand Dentz, Vichy's High Commissioner to the Levant States, signed Syria and Lebanon away to the conquering British and to the Free Franch forces. The date seemed to mock General Denz for it was Bastille Day, despite that fact, he signed and signed his full name. when General De Verdillac uncapped his pen to add his signature, all the lights in the room suddenly fused out, and so in order to complete the ceremony a dispatch rider's motorbike had been brought from outside in to the room to light the place with its head lamp.

References

External links

[http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,765788,00.html "Acre Pact"] - Time Magazine Article, 1941