In 2004, a multimedia exhibition opened in Toulon celebrating the sixtieth anniversary of the liberation of the soudi of France by the "Free French." In fact, the vast majority of these troops were the men of the Tirailleurs Sénégalais from French West and Equatorial Africa, together with contingents from French North Africa, French Indo-China (and General Patch's American Seventh Army).

Yet despite the major role they played in the liberation of France, African soldiers had not been permitted to march in either the Bastille Day parades or the celebrations marking the liberation of Paris-thus perpetuating the de Gaulle myth that France was liberated by the "French" French (with a little help from the Americans and the British).

That the forgotten colonial soldiers were to be unexpectedly commemorated in Toulon sixty years later was a result of the challenge of the National Front in Le Pen's stronghold in France's own Deep South. Uncompromisingly entitled "Nos Liberateurs," the exhibition was a poignant opportunity to remind the liberated of what they owed to those who had arrived from the colonies to free them. Having apparently slipped off the pages of French history once France shed its empire, the Tirailleurs Sénégalais finally achieved the recognition they deserved for the vital part they played in overthrowing the racist German state.

Back in the dark ages of the 1980s, when I began my doctoral research, very little had been published on the Tirailleurs-and virtually nothing by African authors. Historians of modern Africa tended to emphasize resistance to colonialism; by implication, this registered disapproval of those who collaborated with colonial power-and, of course, the men that actually carried out the colonial conquest of Africa. If, as it is often claimed, history is tainted by being written by the victors, then what happened to the African soldier? Twenty years on, all this has changed.

New books on the soldiers of Algeria, Burkina Faso, and Tunisia have appeared in the last two years alone; there is also a burgeoning comparable literature, refreshingly no longer restricted to the memoirs of retired British officers and colonial civil servants, on the soldiers of Anglophone Africa.

Does all this mean the field is getting too crowded? Clearly not, for the two additions to the corpus here under review both (in different ways) make important contributions to our knowledge of the Tirailleurs Sénégalais. Gregory Mann's Native Sons clearly commenced with a strong focus on Mali, but inexorably became concerned with a full sweep of the tirailleur [African colonial soldier] experience-although he does not explore in any detail the tirailleur in combat. Raffael Scheck's Hitlers African Victims, by contrast, focuses mercilessly on the matter of German inhumanity, notably toward captured African soldiers in that brief period during the collapse of the French army in June 1940; but what Scheck forfeits in scope, he makes up in intensity.

Native Sons takes the reader seamlessly from recruitment to retirement and thence from the politics of pensions to the politics of the French connection. The reader will readily recognize Mann's determination to describe the situation in starkly realistic terms, without making concessions to any preference for palatability rather than accuracy.

Mann reminds us early in the work that "like many of its neighbors, contemporary Mali is as much a post-slavery society as a post-colonial one"; the relationship between the Malian soldier and slavery is a prominent theme throughout the book, for many of Mali's former soldiers were drawn from the lower strata of society. In addition, the skill with which Mann traces the processes that led to the recruits' adoption of a new identity-a new caste, as it were-is manifest throughout.

He is primarily concerned with the contextual relationships between the soldier and his society, the soldier and his army, and with the reality of blood ties-or, as he puts it, "who owed what to whom?" The sad tale of the struggle for any pension-let alone for pensions equal to that of French ex-soldiers-is brilliantly unfolded. His research into the complexity of French legislation on this issue is a model of clarity, and adds much to our understanding of contemporary attitudes in both France and West Africa.

The successors to the tirailleurs, who had so valiandy fought for the liberation of France, were those who served in the French Indo-China wars, and subsequently the Algerian conflict. These are controversial subjects that have rarely received attention; indeed, to the extent that the service of the Tirailleurs Sénégalais can be linked with the current immigration "crisis" in France, these are subjects that continue to plague historians. For West African migrants, their right to live and work in France was bought in the blood of the Tirailleurs Sénégalais.

Scheck's interest arose from a mere mention in a French textbook of the massacres of tirailleurs. Having worked extensively on German right-wing politics, he became interested in researching these barely documented episodes. No longer are they barely documented; Scheck has produced a meticulously researched oeuvre, breaking new ground by trolling through French local archives in the actual locations of the massacres. (However, in so doing, he sometimes overlooks the archival work of others who have toiled in the field, this author included.)

Chapter 1 tells us what actually happened, as far as this can be reconstructed. Scheck then organizes his inquiry over whether the killings were motivated by racist ideologies, or were regarded as "justified" because of the acknowledged ferocity and bravery of the African combatants. While there are certainly grounds for the latter explanation, it will come as no surprise to the reader to discover that in virtually all cases, the Germans killed black soldiers because they were black; white prisoners, in contrast, were separated from their black comrades and marched off to imprisonment (sometimes for as much as four years).

That this discrimination was possible Scheck attributes largely to the effects of Goebbels's propaganda offensive in the spring of 1940. Between fifteen hundred and three thousand African soldiers were murdered in June 1940, not as specific policy, Scheck tells us, but on specific orders given by individual Germans. At least another ten thousand ended up in h prison camps in northern France and Germany. Ultimately, surely, one must blame the massacres on those German soldiers and their commanders who carried out murders in the face of all civilized military practice.

The well-tended graveyards of the tirailleurs who died in the liberation of southern France in August 1944 are lonely and sad places, rarely visited by family members. Many of their headstones are marked only with the poignant inscription, "mort pour la France." Perhaps, however, the appreciation of the ultimate sacrifice of the Tirailleurs Sénégalais is being renewed in the many books and papers that are now dedicated to their history; though very different in genre, the volumes by Gregory Mann and Raffael Scheck provide splendid-and fitting-testimony to such sacrifice.


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