de France, to Désiré-Émile Inghelbrecht. In 1936, Georges Mandel invited him to conduct the Orchestre de Radio PTT. As his fame as a conductor grew, he was attacked in Action Française in 1937 by Lucien Rebatet, who demanded his expulsion from his radio conductorship. In the same year Serge Koussevitzky, in Paris during the Exposition, invited Rosenthal to become assistant conductor of the Boston Symphony under him – an offer reiterated after a Salle Pleyel concert on the eve of war in 1939. After Ravel's death in 1937, and following the success of Gaîté Parisienne, he became a close colleague of great Russian émigré composer Igor Stravinsky. Rosenthal's musical career was interrupted by World War II when, as a corporal in the 300th infantry regiment stationed in 1939 in Alsace near the Rhine, he was taken prisoner by the Germans in May 1940. Still musically active even as a POW, he not only organized concerts in the camp he was interned in but even composed an operetta based on a play by Georges Courteline. Included in a POW exchange, he was sent back to the occupied zone, arrived back in Paris in March 1941 and escaped to Marseille in the Zone libre (free zone) with the help of Roland-Manuel. But he was arrested in Besançon in September 1941 while trying to see his son and sentenced to six months forced labor. With the assistance of a German officer, however, he got the necessary papers to escape back to Marseille. Later in 1942, he returned to Paris and courageously joined the Resistance, working with eminent musical colleagues Désormière, Durey, Delvincourt, Charles Munch and others. Upon the liberation in 1944, he returned to the Orchestre National de France to become their principal conductor, a post he held until 1947. The first concert consisted of works from each of the Allied countries, including the Hymne à la Justice by Magnard. He made sure a wide range of contemporary music was played, and the first season included a complete Stravinsky cycle. In his final year with the orchestra, he brought it to England to join Sir Thomas Beecham and the Royal Philharmonic in a concert organized by Jack Hylton that filled the Harringay Arena with 13,500 listeners. In early 1946, Rosenthal's first conductorship in the USA was with the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra. Having accepted the post of composer-in-residence at the College of Puget