French tennis players Marcel Bernard (second from left) and Yvon Petra (right) arrive for a match of the French International Championships of Tennis, in July 1946 at the Roland Garros stadium in Paris. (AFP vis Getty Images)
Of course, in those days, tennis players in France had a lot more to think about than their major-title counts. Everyone’s life had been upended, and everyone had life-or-death decisions to make.
Bernard Destremau, winner of the Tournoi de France in 1941 and 1942, escaped from France to North Africa during the war, commanded a tank for the Free French forces, was shot in the back, and received the Legion of Honor. Destremau lived to become a diplomat, politician, and an ambassador for France.
Yvon Petra, winner of the Tournoi in 1943, 1944, and 1945, was wounded and taken prisoner. In 1946, he would become the last Frenchman to win Wimbledon. (For more on Petra, please read our 2016 story on his father, as told to us by the French Hall of Famer.)
Raymonde Veber Jones, winner of the women’s Tournoi de France in 1944, saw her brother captured and held by the Germans for seven years. During the war, she fled Paris with her mother and sister after their apartment complex was bombed. Later the family hid a Jewish player in their house for six months. (For more on Veber Jones, see Robert Weintraub’s 2015 profile of her here.)
If the war-time drama of French tennis had a leading man, it was Jean Borotra. As part of the country's fitness push, the legendary Bounding Basque was named First Commissioner of Sports by the Vichy government. After seeing the new regime up close, Borotra quit his position and vowed to join the fight against the Nazis. He was arrested by the Gestapo in 1942 and imprisoned in Germany. At the end of the war in 1945, he vaulted a wall to escape and, after a dash across an open field, helped alert U.S. forces of a prisoner camp that was subsequently liberated.
While Borotra switched sides mid-war, there wasn’t any question about his fellow player Simonne Mathieu’s allegiances. After winning at Roland Garros in 1938 and 1939, she headed up the women’s volunteer branch of the Free French forces, and marched with Charles De Gaulle through Paris when the city was liberated in August 1944. A month later, Mathieu helped mark the end of the war era in French tennis by presiding, in her army uniform, over the “Liberation Match,” an exhibition at Roland Garros between Petra and Henri Cochet. The tournament honored Mathieu first by naming the women’s doubles trophy after her, though her first name is misspelled, with one “n.” In 2019, officials tried again—and spelled her name correctly—when they named their new Greenhouse Court for her.
Roland Garros has given Mathieu and her war efforts their due, but the tournament doesn’t acknowledge the event that was played on its grounds in those years. Officially, the French Open was canceled after 1939, and its history doesn’t start again until 1946, when the Germans had been expelled and the tennis world was invited back to Paris.