Henry D. Fetter: The French Open During World War II: A Hidden History

Henry D. Fetter is the author of Taking on the Yankees: Winning and Losing in the Business of Baseball and has written widely about the business and politics of sports.

For the sixth time—matching the record set by Bjorn Borg—Rafael Nadal walked off center court at Roland Garros yesterday as French Open champion. He took his place once again in the tournament's roll of honor along with such other multiple conquerors of the terre battue as Rod Laver, Ken Rosewall, Gustavo Kuerton, and Jim Courier, not to mention France's own Henri Cochet and Rene Lacoste—but also Bernard Destremau and Yvon Petra, too. Not that you will find Destremau and Petra listed in the roster of former singles champions on the tournament's official web site, for they won the tournament in 1941 and 1942 (Destremau) and 1943 to 1945 (Petra) when, according to that site, the tournament was "cancelled from 1940 to 1945 due to the Second World War." But that is more of a convenient, than an historical, truth.

For decades after World War II, the day-to-day experience of "ordinary" French life during the war was obscured by two prevailing narratives—that of the all powerful Nazi occupier and that of the heroic Resistance. It was only a quarter century later that Marcel Ophuls's controversial documentary, The Sorrow and the Pity and American historian Robert Paxton's seminal study of Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order first challenged these polarities. These works launched a more searching and disquieting inquiry about the complicated and often ambiguous reality of life in wartime France that has continued ever since.

And this is where those officially ignored Roland Garros champions Destremau and Petra come in, because French tennis provides its own evidence about the nature of everyday life in that troubled time that was long obscured by these conflicting, but also complementary, story lines....