Foreign News: Two Friends

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A curious footnote to history bobbed up in the wake of General de Gaulle's Moscow visit. Before Joseph Stalin, Charles de Gaulle had met one other Soviet marshal—Mikhail Tukhachevsky, the Red Army's brilliant Chief of Staff and No. 1 mechanizer, who was liquidated in the 1937 purge of the Russian high command.

De Gaulle and Tukhachevsky first met during World War I. Both were young officers. Both were war prisoners in Germany. Both were interned at Ingolstadt, the Alcatraz of German prison camps. Both the short, ebullient Russian and the tall, solemn Frenchman were advocates of the new ideas of military mechanization. In their conversations each influenced the other.

The two met again in Paris in 1936. De Gaulle was then a lieutenant colonel, Tukhachevsky the youngest (43) marshal in the Red Army and Vice Commissar for Defense. He had come to Paris to complete the Franco-Soviet mutual assistance treaty. At a gay reunion dinner he talked over old times at Ingolstadt with De Gaulle and other French Army men.

A year later Tukhachevsky was arrested on a questionable charge of treason and shot. But not long before his death, Tukhachevsky had written a treatise on mechanization for the Red Army. In it he praised "the brilliant French military writer, De Gaulle." Now his friend De Gaulle, head of the French Government, was the honored guest of the biggest Soviet marshal of all.