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The new Premier was born plain Delmas in Paris. He became a journalist after graduation from the Lycée Lakanal, was eventually called to military service as a private. Before long he was in officer's training at Saint-Cyr, where he led his class. In World War II, he fought on the Maginot Line. Demobilized after the fall of France in 1940, he began leading a dangerous double life. Using the code name "Lakanal," he spied on French factories taken over by the Germans. At the same time, as a seemingly obedient follower of the Vichy regime, he studied for and passed the arduous examination for Inspecteur des Finances, the prestigious civil service post from which many of France's top leaders have launched their careers.
Delmas was given more and more underground assignments, eventually was made brigadier general at the age of 29. Once, hovering over a radio for messages from London, Delmas was informed that his Lakanal code name had been broken. Told to propose a new one, he looked out a window, noticed a plaque inscribed "Chateau de Chaban." His exploits made the name so famous that he formally prefixed it to his own at war's end.
By 1944, Chaban-Delmas coordinated all Free French military operations in France. He was sent into Paris to prevent the Communists from inviting destruction of the city through a precipitous uprising. At one point the youthful general was flown to London to plead with Allied leaders for prompt entry. He got back into occupied France, after a flight to Normandy, by bicycling through German lines wearing tennis clothes (he is a tournament player). His clothes, his tennis racket and a chicken he carried were meant to mark him as a gentleman who had been playing in the countryside and was returning home to food-short Paris with dinner.
De Gaulle observed after his first meeting with the young officer that "the famous General Chaban has the face of an adolescent." Over the next quarter of a century, De Gaulle apparently became convinced that the adolescent had matured. His list of possible successors reportedly contained only three names: Pompidou, Michel Debre and Jacques Pierre Michel Chaban-Delmas.