Questions about France in 1940

Interesting, maybe I should put it on my birthday list (it's a long contantly renewed list but I'll find some space) . Maybe it will make me buy more of his books as well.

 

The French people themselves went through enough soul searching from mid-1940 onward. Why bash them even further than they have already done so themselves?

The facts are that French attitudes and Frenchmen will always be their own biggest critics.

Besides, had we thrown in our lot with the Bonapartes as a continent, Europe would have been united for a long time. The fact that the more established monarchies brought down a regime that had beaten them , time and again, and fair and square, said a lot for the ostentatious bigotry of England, and the monarchial families that supported the war against Bonaparte and all things French. The Congress of Vienna sowed the seeds of 1914, which brought the conflict in 1940 to a head. Take that, British Imperialism!

Foreign policy in England from 1815 and before was generally to break up European alliances by supporting one or the other of them to fight amongst themselves. British people often say that "Britain is not Europe". Europeans themselves have been suffering from this deplorable foriegn policy for a very long time now, all in the name of keeping Britain as top dog.

So, if we wish to talk history of conflict in Europe, lets just remember the origins of WW2 and WHY these countries were fighting at all. Just remember, the French Revolution and the rise of the Bonapartes was the worst nightmare come true for European monarchist families. When you can crown yourself an Emperor, you bring into being the possibility that ANYONE can be the a Royal Family, which threw into question the very foundations of the ancien regime and it's privelaged people.

Without the French Revolution to show us the way, we might all still be fighting under the banner of rich Imperialists, with all that goes with it. So, thank God for the French, thank God for the age of the common man, and down with those that would deny The People their rightful place to rule their own destiny.....

God Bless the French!!

 

Interesting point of view Volga, Although I wouldn't go as far as compare the Treaty of Vienna and Versailles and I don't think the Bonapartes would have kept Europe united too long. However I'd go back a little more in History to get the real seeds in my opinion : I'd go as far as the French and indian War. This is partly why the French gave their support to the American insurgeants in 1776 and Louis XVI instead of feeding his own people sent some of the last Guineas he could borrow from Dutch bankers to La Fayette and Beaumarchais, not realising one second that his own starving people would thrown him from his thrown in 1789, six years after the end of the U.S. Indepence war.
The Revolutionaries would be precisely those who got inspired by the 4th of July and took Lafayette as a model as well. Hence chaos , Robbespierre and Bonaparte who conquered most of Europe until he was stopped after several coalitions .Then the Congress of Vienna being with wars breaking out almost immediatly in the Netherlands, the Balkans and leading to WWI a century later.

 

Don't forget, too, that when the AEF landed in France in 1917, General "Blackjack" Pershing felt he was paying back an old debt to a country that had guaranteed the very existence of his own..."Laffayette, we are HERE!", he said on arrival.

The first group of Americans to fight for France in 14-18 was none other than the "Escadrille American". This name was later changed to "Escadrille Lafayette", to honour French-American relations.

Too many forget that France bankrupted itself supporting America, something isolationists of the Great War seemed to have forgotten. I notice that you have not.

French people are always the first to stand up in a room and protest if anything seems incorrect or unfair. Their attitude is an inspriration to everyone in the modern period. I simply won't stand for the same old propaganda going round and round that France 'laid down without a fight" in WW2. They joined the side that conscience dictated they ought to support in WW2, fought the good fight....and came out of it with their heads held HIGH and their honour INTACT!

 

A lot of factors for the French debacle of 1940, and with the benefit of hindsight we are now all experts.

1. The Germans came prepared to fight World war 2, the french and british came prepared to re-fight World war 1. The British attitude was "We have already beaten them once, why do we now have to do it again?"

Hitler said publicly that a second world war would be very different from the first, but neither the French nor the British really listened. French tank doctrine was completely flawed, they spread their tanks out evenly as a supporting arm for the infantry in defense, whereas thanks to General Guderian's carefully thought out tactics, the Germans only used the Panzers en masse in the offense, where they were most effective.

The French air force too was largely caught on the ground by the luftwaffe and rendered inneffective - and even before the end of the battle, the RAF was already bringing back all their fighters to England lest they be lost. Flawed tactics in the air and on the ground.

2. The French had spent millions building the Maginot line and it might have been effective - had the Germans only attacked there. As events unfolded the Germans did attack areas of the maginot line but only as a diversion. The Germans also sent large forces northwest through Belgium, where the Maginot line ended, and this was exactly what the British and French thought they would do. So they sent their main force there to counter it. Once the allies were committed, the main German force went through the forests of the Ardennes - an area the French thought of as "tank proof". A large allied attack from the air on the German tank columns at this point could have stopped the German attack cold - but it was not forthcoming. By the time the French recognized what the Germans were doing and attempted the proper response - a pincer movement in the German rear to seperate the tanks from their supporting units - it was too late and in a few days the Germans were at the Channel.

 

This really isn't true. Instead, the French air force was ineffective for much the same reason the French army was: A failed doctrine.

The French air force doctrine was flawed on several levels. First, it was developed almost in complete isolation from the Army's. That is, there was little cooperation between the two and what cooperation there was was placed into the wrong ideas.
Like the RAF the French intended to have a strategic air force that in war operated largely independent of the ground forces. What was happening on the ground or, the army's needs were seen as mostly irrelevant to the air force.
The one area the French air force did conceed to the army was in the field of cooperation and specialist ground attack aircraft. The air force put alot of effort into developing a specialized class of cooperation aircraft for tactical reconnissance and aerial observation of artillery fire. Many of the designs the French came up with were far better than the British Lysander that was built for the same role by the RAF.
But, these aircraft presupposed that the air force would obtain air superiority or, at least the enemy air forces couldn't or wouldn't interfer with their use. This of course, proved wrong. Aircraft for this role like the Potez 63.11 proved incapable of operating over the battlefield in the face of any aerial opposition.
In ground support aircraft like the Breguet 690 series looked good on paper. This plane, sort of a small 'Beaufighter' proved equally unsuited to operating in the face of aerial opposition in its intended role.

At the same time, the French army was writing off the air force and 'their' war as irrelevant outside limited tactical cooperation. Gamelin even said as much dismissing the air force and expecting its destruction within weeks of the opening of the campaign. He literally expected air power to play zero decisive role in the ground war for either side.

A good portion of why the French air force failed defensively can be accredited to the combination of lack of a good air warning system and a poorly evolved fighter defense system in general. On the offensive they were straddled with mostly obsolesent bombers (some of which are some of the most hideous designs to ever take flight like the Amiot 143). This left them largely ineffective as a bombardment force too.

It also didn't help that the French aircraft industry was heavily unionized and socialized economically. This meant that aircraft production took a leasurely pace, that production schedules were rarely met and, that quality often suffered. Thus, even though France had started rearming in ernest as early as 1937 by 1940 most of the new aircraft designs were still little more than a handful of prototypes or production aircraft in service. Thus, even though the French had developed aircraft every bit as good as most German designs these were not the bulk of their air force. Instead, they were still soldiering on with the previous generation of now obsolesent planes in service for the most part.

 

In a nutshell Dewoitines 520 were needed and outdated Moranes were used.... The 1936 Morane was still "not too outdated" in 1939 , but when the Luftwaffe attacked in 1940 they had improved their engines and caught the Moranes by surprise by flying faster. The Dewoitine construction was then accelarated (200 were ordered) , but only several were ready on time. Those who made it did a god job so, including famous German aces (but instead of sending them to Canada they had to free them in June 1940) some Dewoitines were assigned to Polish units who would later fly for the RAF.

Dewoitine 520















Morane Saulnier

 

A couple decades ago the essay linked below was written by a USAF LtCol Kirkland. After reviewing French records his views are represented in this essay.

THE FRENCH AIR FORCE

Doughty in his analysis 'The Seeds of Disaster' has a much less complete analysis of the FAF preperations and strategy.

 

The French have recently pubblished tonns of data, some of it very detailed, and the general impression one gets browsing through it is that while in combat they "gave as good as they got" the airforce was suffering from the same problems the army had, bad doctrine and C3 rather than raw numeric inferiority.

Still I'm a bit suspicious of a paper that compares aircraft with pilot losses and quotes the results of specific engagements rather than totals that are avaible to anyone willing to do some research.

 

The big two that obliquely come out in the above paper, and have been shown elsewhere are doctrine and lethargy. Some additional notes:

Carl's link mentions the LeO 450 bomber. This aircraft is roughly the equivalent of the Douglas DB 7 attack bomber in capacity. It was armed with several fixed forward firing 7.5mm machineguns and a dorsal rear firing 20mm cannon. The paper makes this aircraft out to be particularly effective. In reality it proved marginal.
The first problem was the aforementioned doctrine / lethargy. The first offensive mission by an LeO 451 equipped unit was GB I/12 and II/12 sending just 12 unescorted bombers to attack the bridges at Mästricht on the Belgian-German border on May 11 a full day after the German invasion began. One aircraft was shot down by flak.
Because of the limited number of Bre 691 ground attack planes in service the LeO was frequently called on to act as tactical or operational ground support. In this role losses skyrocketted.
Most of the time the Groupes de Bombardement found themselves flying their missions unescorted. When escorts were provided these usually were so few in number that it made little difference.
The defensive armament of the LeO proved less than effective too. The 20mm while very effective when it found a target had a limited field of fire that the German fighter pilots quickly took advantage of. Additionally, the gun used drum ammunition with 60 rounds that required frequent changes. This limited the effectiveness of the weapon further.

In fighters, while on paper these might have been a match for the 109 the reality was far different. The biggest problem was simply performance. Like the US and British found out all-too-quickly altitude is everything. The French fighters, like their pre-war US and contemporary British counterparts lacked good altitude performance. Above about 15 to 20,000 feet their performance fell off dramatically. The Dewotine 520 suffered from several vicious tendencies including a propensity to spin in a tight turn. The Curtiss Hawk 75, a French mainstay was relegated to training and secondary theaters by the RAF just a few months later as obsolesent.
Other aircraft like the Moriane and Cauldron were just simply put bad. Both were just overmatched completely.

But, it was mainly a poor doctrine and lethargy that lead to the French defeat. As mentioned briefly, the French Air Force took nearly a day to get any offensive operations going. Even when they did they sent a penny packet of aircraft to targets that required a far greater effort.

There was no set doctrine for bomber operations or escorting. Instead, these were based on peacetime practices. Formations tended to be less than tight and the escort didn't have a good handle on how to deal with attacking enemy aircraft beyond basic methods.

Nighttime bombing of Germany didn't really start for the French until well after the German invasion had started. It wasn't until May 24 a full two weeks after the invasion that the first attacks on Germany were mounted. Even then these amounted to a few F 222 bombers ineffectively scattering a few bombs on Germany. On June 7 - 8 a single French NC 223 bomber the Jules Verne dropped bombs on Berlin for the first time. Hardly a harbringer of success.

Doctrine matters. The French had one that was pathetically bad. Lethargy in war is deadly and the French took their operations at a leasurely pace. The combination was devastating to them.

 

With the benefit of hindsight I guess it's always easy to look back and declare authoritatively what should have been done, but British historian Julian Jackson [among others] says, that the rapid fall of France can be greatly attributed to the poor strategic planning of the French High Command.

Jackson takes pains to point out that there was no one specific cause, however General Gamelin & the Dyle Plan was most probably the Lynch pin in the French defeat.

The [Dyle] Plan played into the hand of the Germans when they executed their main attack [Manstein's Plan] through the Ardennes on the assumption that the Allies would advance into central Belgium.

Gamelin initially proposed the less risky Escaut Plan, which called for a defence based upon a series of fortifications along much of the actual Belgian-French border rather than in Belgium proper. However, Gamelin eventually decided to adopt the Dyle Plan with the argument that the new anti tank defences built by Belgium along the Dyle allowed for a quick entrenchment of the Allied armies.

He compounded his faux pas by moving the 7th army [his sole strategic reserve,] to bolster the extreme left of the of the French move into Belgium.

It was all down hill for the French once Guderian & Rommel's Panzers crossed the Meuse at Sedan & Dinant.

There was a lot of opposition to the Dyle Plan within the French army, but Gamelin was strongly supported by the British government, because Holland was an ideal base for a German air campaign against England.

Jackson also debunks the "vast superiority" of the German army, revealing that the more experienced French troops did well in battle against the Germans & says that the margin of German victory over France was much closer than it later seemed in retrospect, after the collapse of French morale and the ascendancy of Vichy.

 

AFAIK there was no "collapse of French morale", after the replacement of Gamelin by Weigand the French resistance actually stiffened and there is strong indication the French were learning how to deal with the German tactics. Fortified positions with all round defence and a good number of 75mm guns that were still fairly abbundant were a tough nut to crack for the panzers contrary to the previous linear defence that had proved vulnerable to massed armour attacking the weak spots.

But by then the French had lost 3 armies (1st, 7th and 9th), the BEF had escaped across the channel and the Dutch and Belgians had surrendered so the German had a significant numeric advantage. The mobile forces that could have made the "hammer" to the fortified position "anvil" were gone so the German could afford to isolate and deal with the strongpoints one by one and the French could only delay the end.

 

and fate: when Weygand was called he was all the way in Syria and did not arrive until May 21th. He then decided a counter offensive , but Lord Got did not make it to the Ypres meeting on time and moved the BEF to Dunkirk and the French General Billotte in charge of the counter offensive died in a car accident while on his way to this decisive meeting, resulting in a massive desorganisation of a beheaded army. His follower Gen Blanchard did not attend the ypres conference either and had to improvise.
Weygand followed Petain until 1941 but was arrested by the Germans for negociating with General Murphy and was deported to Dachau and survived there until 1945.

Maxime Weygand - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

It didn't help matters that leading elements of the French leadership [both political & military] had openly lost heart as early as May 15 .........

...The French high command, was reeling from the shock of the sudden offensive and was stung by a sense of defeatism. On the morning of 15 May French Prime Minister Paul Reynaud telephoned newly minted Prime Minister of the United Kingdom Winston Churchill and said "We have been defeated. We are beaten; we have lost the battle." Churchill, attempting to console Reynaud reminded the Prime Minister of the times the Germans had broken through allied lines in World War I only to be stopped. However, Reynaud was inconsolable...

...Churchill flew to Paris on 16 May. He immediately recognized the gravity of the situation when he observed that the French government was already burning its archives and preparing for an evacuation of the capital. In a sombre meeting with the French commanders, Churchill asked General Gamelin, "Where is the strategic reserve?" which had saved Paris in the First World War. "There is none," Gamelin replied. Later, Churchill described hearing this as the single most shocking moment in his life. Churchill asked Gamelin when and where the general proposed to launch a counterattack against the flanks of the German bulge. Gamelin simply replied "inferiority of numbers, inferiority of equipment, inferiority of methods"....Their Finest Hour p. 42-49


Here's a German summing up of their opponents....

..Very marked differences appear when it comes to assessing the military capabilities of the French. Very poor units rub shoulders with exceptional units. In the overview, the difference in quality between the active & reserve units is extraordinary. Many active divisions fought desperately, many of the reserve divisions, however, are far less able to endure the shock, which battle inflicts on the morale of troops....

Problem was that there were some 36 A & B grade reserve divisions in the French Army, & while some fought hard, some were not up to scratch & two of them happened to be Guderian's path when he crossed the Meuse at Sedan, & after extremely concentrated air attacks [especially by the Stukas] the will to fight quickly disintegrated.....

Weygand lifted spirits & tried his best, but by then as you say, some 45 divisions, including the cream of the French army, the BEF & the Belgians were lost, it was too little, too late, Jackson says the French soldier fought with elan when he didn't feel abandoned by his superiors.

 

Weygand should have been called in from syria on May 10th , a precious week was lost and whne Reynaud realized this weigh ton his shoulders was too heavy.
If those reserve units had been given modern weapons and proper training they would have been as effecient as the elite units , but neither money , nor inovation was fashionable those days and the men were sent to combat with old Lebel weapons and not enough cartridges ( men had to share them ) , horse carts, Moranes and FT-17 tanks whereas more Mass 36, Somuas and Dewoitines 520 were needed.

Infantry has often blamed the Armée de l'air for not giving them enough support, but they had to face issues that could not be solved

I have a thought for those brave recco units , flying the Potez 63. These were outstanding pilots and liberty lovers. They all volunteered to go to Finland in 1939, but this was denied because of logistics reasons (Sweden refused to open air space) and they were converted as low bombing units instead: guinea pigs trying to play the Me-110..... They were slaughtered and shot down one after another while trying to stop the Germans in the Ardennes.










Another example is the bombing of Stuttgart . About a dozen obsolete farman 220 bombers took off, flying bearily at 250km/h and being pigeons for the Flak batteries. If my memory is correct, only two returned, having bearily reached the subburbs and causing no major damage.










A third example is the three fighters (Moranes?) described in le "Bar de L'escadrille" ,taking off on June 3rd with light weapons only , and flying over Dunkirk to show support to the troops (but not being able to attack or even defend anyone) . They were attacked by German fighters and shot don one them , but they lost one too and two aircrafts returned with no amno left..... The next day they could not take off.

 

We must also remeber that despite their having the Army to conquer the world, the French were very slow to react to the movement of the German blitz. DeGaulle screamed for the tanks and the ability to use effective tactics, but it never came in time to mount an effctive defence let alone counter attack. Many units of the French army fought tooth and nail until they were either decimated or out of ammunition. Many of the officers were loyal to Petain because of his record in WWI. Many and most wanted to continue the fight and were discusted with Reynaud's colapse and defeatist attitude.
The French people were very opposed to the capitualtion as is seen by the almost immediate blossoming of resistance groups throughout the country. In what little defense can be had for those who capitulated, many were thinking of France as a whole, remembering the devastation of WWI and thinking they may spare the country. Others were very socialist minded and welcomed the Nazi regime and worked fervently with the docterines of Hitler. France was a mixed up place politically, and that even influenced the arming of the resistance by the allies. There was a fear that the communists if armed would take over France after the war. The communist arm of the resistance was already very organized as an underground organization because of the persecution before the war. But even the communist underground were loyal Frenchmen who wanted to defeat the Germans.
I say NO, the French were not cowardly, they were not pushovers from an individual standpoint, and were greatly let down and discusted with the speed at which their Gov'nt caved in.
Vive La France - Vive DeGaulle!!!

 

Questions:
1) Did the British and French militaries ever train together betweem 1918 and 1939, or plan/strategise for the possibility of a joint response to a German attack?
2) Am I correct in understanding that France (and the UK) had no fall back plan in case a German attack on Paris were to succeed?
3) I understand that France had much of its best military equipment from tanks to aircraft held back in reserve in western France and never used, that France was urging the RAF to use its reserves whilst it was not using its own. Is this correct?

 

Can't remember episodes of joint tactical training but the staffs did talk to each other and overall strategies were agreed.

Basically yes, they did not plan for the unthinkable, for Paris to fall the army would need to have suffered a major defeat and militaries do not plan for major defeats, they plan to avoid them. Your question is a bit like asking if the British had planned before the war for a continuation of the war from Canada after the fall of the British Isles.

Wrong, the best tanks were in the DLM and DCR, the former were committed in Belgium in the initial phase of the battle and the latter spent themselves in unsuccessful counterattacks just after the Meuse crossings of 13 May. Same goes for the planes.
After Dunkirk, when the end looked inevitable, the French tried to send as much equipment as they could to North africa to avoid it falling in German hands but up to then the used all they had.

 

There were actually 2 fall back plans but made AFTER the fall of Paris. the firs tone was calle dthe "Reduit Breton" which was a smaller front in the Britanny and the second one was the Loire River. The Breton front line could not be set up on tie and the Loire River front was devastated on June 15th and most River cities like Orleans and Gien destroyed after massive bombings. Curiously history does not remember those martyr cities