Hand writing in Greeting CARD from PHILIPPE PÉTAIN

VINTAGE POSTCARD   *About 70 years OLD  FRANCE   Greeting card send by Post Office ( Postmark VICHY ALLIER ) ( Le Chef de l' Etat Francais ) * /The card sent from PHILIPPE PÉTAIN  ( Hand writing and signature ) to Monsieur Guy  Rouvier  .....   

Condition as you can see on the pictures.  ( Some aged stains )  FREE SHIPPING

PHILIPPE PÉTAIN  Pétain emerged from the war as a national hero and was made a Marshal of France. He was encouraged to go into politics although he protested that he had little interest in running for an elected position. He continued to play a military role, commanding French troops during their alliance with the Spanish in the Rif War after 1925. Pétain is also on record as a strong supporter of the Maginot Line which proved to be exceedingly costly while geographically limited and thus a strategically ineffective border defense. Pétain had based his strong support for the Maginot Line on his own experience of the role played by the forts during the Battle of Verdun in 1916. Although he supported the massive use of tanks he saw them mostly as infantry support, leading to the fragmentation of the French tank force into many types of unequal value spread out between mechanized cavalry (such as the SOMUA S-35) and infantry support (mostly the Renault R35 tanks and the Char B1 bis). Modern infantry rifles and machine guns were not manufactured on Pétain's watch, with the sole exception of a light machine-rifle, the Mle 1924. A modern infantry rifle prototype only came out in 1936 but very few MAS-36 rifles had been issued to the troops by 1940. An excellent French semiauto rifle prototype,the MAS 1938-40, never reached the production stage until after World War II as the MAS 49. Thus French infantry had to face the enemy in 1940 with the old weaponry of 1918. Petain was made Minister of War in 1938, thus overseeing French military aviation and the Navy as well. Yet French aviation entered the War in 1939 without even the prototype of a bomber airplane capable of reaching Berlin. French industrial efforts in fighter aircraft were dispersed among several firms (Dewoitine, Morane-Saulnier and Marcel Bloch), each with its own model. On the naval front France had purposely overlooked building modern aircraft carriers and focused instead on four new conventional battleships which later proved to be useless to the war effort. Captain Charles de Gaulle continued to be a protégé of Pétain throughout these years. He even named his eldest son after the Marshal before finally falling out over the authorship of a book he had ghost-written for Pétain. In later years, in a reference to the Rif War, de Gaulle had been known to observe: "Marshal Pétain was a great man; he died in 1925". Pétain finally retired as Inspector-General of the Army, aged seventy-five, in 1931