A row over the guest list for this week's D-Day commemorations has reopened a divide over who should share credit for the World War II defeat of Nazi Germany. -- PHOTO: AP
LONDON - A DIPLOMATIC tiff over Queen Elizabeth II's omission from the guest list for this week's D-Day commemorations has reopened a divide over who should share credit for the World War II defeat of Nazi Germany.
Britons are grumbling that the nation does not get its due - either from its wartime ally, the United States, or from the French whom it helped to liberate.
American war effort 'dramatised'
Britain, France and the United States have always seen the war rather differently. In The Guardian newspaper, humorist Simon Hoggart summed up the British view -- 'the Americans took their own good time to join us (fighting Hitler), but when they did, between us we rescued the useless French. And are they grateful? Don't be silly.'
Some blame Hollywood for distorting popular perceptions of the war in films like 'The Longest Day', 'Saving Private Ryan' or the TV series 'Band of Brothers,' which dramatised the Normandy campaign from an American point of view.
On Saturday, President Barack Obama and French President Nicolas Sarkozy are due to stand side by side in Normandy to remember the Allied landings 65 years ago, when more than 150,000 troops swam, waded and parachuted onto Nazi-occupied French soil, turning the tide of the war.
The queen - Britain's head of state, the supreme commander of its armed forces and a veteran of the wartime women's Auxiliary Territorial Service - won't be there. Prime Minister Gordon Brown was invited to represent the country instead.
Buckingham Palace said on Tuesday that Mr Sarkozy had sent an invitation to the queen's son and heir, Prince Charles - a royal compromise that helped soothe ruffled British feathers.
Military historian Peter Caddick-Adams of Britain's Cranfield University said the spat 'says a lot about Britain and France.' 'There is a concern in Britain that France is keen to diminish the role of the British,' he said. '(And) there is this concern in French minds about their liberation at the hands of their Anglo-Saxon rivals.'
The French insisted no slight was meant, and said Saturday's ceremony is intended primarily as a US-French event, rather than a full-blown commemoration of the Allied effort.
That has left Britons feeling slighted. More than 60,0000 British troops landed on June 6, 1944, alongside 73,000 Americans, more than 20,000 Canadians and a small number of Free French commandos. Many of the ships and planes that supported the landing force were British, too.
Political commentator Agnes Poirier, said the attempt to recast D-Day commemorations as a Franco-American affair 'is not only the rewriting of history, it's lunacy.' 'Many French people are really embarrassed about this,' she said. -- AP
