military forces brought to bear in the liberation of France were the forces of Free France, made up of colonial regiments from French Africa. The Free French forces included 300,000 North African Arabs. Two of the Big Three Allies, the United States and the United Kingdom, were next with Operation Overlord, with Australian air support and Canadian infantry in the Normandy beach landings. Individual civilian efforts such as the Maquis de Saint-Marcel helped to harass the Germans. An OSE operation hid Allied servicemen. The many scattered cells of the French Resistance gradually consolidated into a fighting force after the Normandy landings and became known as the French Forces of the Interior (FFI). The FFI made major contributions, assisting Allied armies pushing the Germans east out of France and past the Rhine. The military forces involved in the liberation of France were under the command of General Dwight D. Eisenhower, commander of the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF). General Bernard Montgomery was named commander of the 21st Army Group, which comprised all of the land forces involved in the initial invasion. On 31 December 1943, Eisenhower and Montgomery first saw the outline plan the Chief of Staff to the Supreme Allied Commander (COSSAC) had prepared for an invasion, which proposed amphibious landings by three divisions, with two more divisions in support. The two generals immediately insisted on expanding the scale of the initial invasion to five divisions, with airborne descents by three additional divisions, to allow operations on a wider front and to speed up the capture of the port at Cherbourg. The need to acquire or produce extra landing craft for the expanded operation meant delaying the invasion until June 1944. Eventually the Allies committed 39 divisions to the Battle of Normandy: 22 American, 12 British, three Canadian, one Polish, and one French, totalling over a million troops, all under overall British command. Free French Forces Despite 's call to continue the struggle, few French forces initially pledged their support. By the end of July 1940, only about 7,000 soldiers had joined the Free French Forces in England. Three-quarters of French servicemen in Britain requested repatriation. France was bitterly divided by the conflict. Frenchmen everywhere were forced to choose sides, and often deeply resented those who had made a different choice. One French admiral, René-Émile Godfroy, voiced the opinion of many of those who decided not to join the