An Englishman's Castle

PRESIDENT FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT'S STATEMENT UPON TERMINATION OF DIPLOMATIC RELATIONS WITH THE VICHY GOVERNMENT

Washington, D. C., November 9, 1942
White House news release.
The representative of this Government at Vichy has reported that last evening M. Laval, Chief of the Government at Vichy, notified him that diplomatic relations between Vichy and this Government had been severed. ..
The Government of the United States can do nothing about this severance of relations on the part of the Vichy Government.
Nevertheless, no act of Hitler, or of any of his puppets, can sever relations between the American people and the people of France. We have not broken relations with the French. We never will.
This Government will continue as heretofore to devote its thought, its sympathy and its aid to the rescue of the forty-five million people of France from enslavement and from a permanent loss of their liberties and free institutions.

Apart from the surprise that the USA and Vichy had maintained Diplomatic relations until so late in the war - the next day the Germans drove into Vichy - the thought that the French people needed rescuing from "enslavement and from a permanent loss of their liberties and free institutions" by their political masters seemed still to be apposite.