French regression and weakness

In the years after the conclusion of the First World War, one of France's most serious weaknesses was the loss of its wartime allies, notably Russia with its powerful army and deep pool of natural resources and manpower. 

 

French hostility towards the new Soviet Union had replaced the happy alliance that France previously enjoyed with the Tsarist government. The French hierarchy was displeased by what they felt was the failure of the Bolshevik government to maintain their commitments to France during the war, and claims by Paris that the Bolsheviks refused to honour the war debt payments the Tsarist government had undertaken with France. 

 

The French establishment held ideological prejudices against the Soviet Union. This attitude on the part of France continued up until the outbreak of World War II, when the French again found themselves at war with their traditional foe, Germany. Russia would not be there to rescue France in 1940 as the Russians had in 1914. 

 

France's internal problems were also severe. Nearly 50 percent of the young men of military age in France in 1914 were killed or injured over the next 4 years. France's population was smaller immediately following World War I than before it, even after the French had reclaimed the region of Alsace-Lorraine from Germany in 1919. The overall trend of France's birth rate was one of decline, and the country's birth rate had been falling sharply in the years leading up to the two world wars. 

 

Though France was not defeated in World War I, the disparity between France and Germany continued and there was no remedy for it. In 1920 the German population was 62 million whereas there were 38.5 million French in 1920. The potential to relaunch German industry and arms output in the years ahead remained as well. 

 

By 1939 the production of an important industrial and war commodity like pig iron in Germany, with the nation under the grip of the Nazis, had increased that year to 17.5 million tonnes. France produced just over 7 million tonnes of pig iron in 1939. 

 

Right after World War I, Germany had neither been dismembered nor treated leniently at the hands of its adversaries. By the terms of the Treaty of Versailles signed in June 1919, such as stripping Germany of modest bits of territory and ordering its government to pay huge reparations, the country was instead wounded. Germany retained enough strength to recuperate and seek vengeance against its enemies. 

 

Italian philosopher Niccolò Machiavelli argued centuries before that, depending on the situation, a defeated enemy should either be completely finished off or given generous terms. The worst thing to do is to inflict non-life threatening injuries and leave him with the capability one day to recover and look for revenge. Machiavelli had more sense than the negotiators of the Western powers in 1919. 

 

Britain, France's ally, did not want the trouble of keeping its soldiers in mainland Europe after 1918. Nor did the British want Germany to be so badly weakened as to not recover. In such a scenario the British believed that France would become the dominant nation in western Europe, a prospect which London's politicians were not keen about. In addition Britain's financial analysts were stating that the German economy should be allowed to recover, which they felt was needed to bolster global trade. 

 

It was a major mistake for the British to have become entangled in 1914 in a continental war on the European mainland. Britain was a colonial power holding possessions abroad. London's vital interests and source of wealth were on the high seas, while it was not to Britain's advantage should one nation be too powerful across the English Channel. The territory of Britain had experienced no fighting during World War I but the British Army suffered nearly a million casualties in 4 years. 

 

Following 1918 relations between Britain and France cooled. There was a feeling among some Britons, which was rarely expressed openly, that their country had been lured into fighting an unnecessary war for French interests in helping her to defeat Germany and retake the coveted Alsace-Lorraine. 

 

The British also found distasteful the ongoing antagonism France had for Germany, and there were disagreements between British and French politicians about the demands made on the Germans relating to war debts, disarmament, and reparations, with France of course pushing a hard line against Germany. It should not be forgotten that Britain and France were once common enemies during the time of Napoleon and before him. When France had been a great power the actions of the British Navy curtailed French enlargement. 

 

By the end of World War I, France was exhausted and fed up with war. Most of the fighting on the Western front occurred on French soil, not German soil, and Germany had occupied parts of eastern and northern France such as in its attempts to capture Paris in 1914 and 1918, both of which failed. 

 

What was ominous for France was the sickness afflicting its army, which came to the fore with the mass mutinies that lasted for 2 months (April to June 1917) and had affected more than 50 of its divisions, a vast bulk of the French Army. Tens of thousands of French troops also deserted from the frontlines with close to 30,000 heading for Paris alone. 

 

In early June 1917, there were only 2 fully reliable French divisions between the German Army and Paris, and both of those divisions were old-fashioned cavalry formations. Had the Germans attacked France that June they would certainly have won the war. They missed a golden opportunity because the German high command, dubious of the accuracy of the reports it received concerning the French mutinies, had already decided in late 1916 the following year was to be primarily one of defensive warfare. 

 

The French Army would participate in the successful offensives of the summer and autumn of 1918, but the old attacking spirit was long gone; and they would have been unable to secure victory without the support of their allies, which included in 1918 increasing numbers of American troops. 

 

The underlying reasons for the French Army rebellions, such as reckless attacks that had been launched across no-man's-land by its commanders and the belief of ordinary frontline troops that the price of victory was no longer worth paying, were not discussed and brought out into the open. While the war was still going on there was good reason for this secrecy but not many years after the fighting had ended. 

 

The widespread feeling of French infantrymen, that the cost of victory was too high, was passed on to the next generation of soldiers which would play a central role in France's defeat to Nazi Germany. General André Beaufre, a French strategist, said that in the time following 1918 there was in France "a period of very deep decay, probably caused by the excess of effort during the First World War. We suffered from an illness which is not peculiar to the French, the illness of having been victorious and believing that we were right and very clever". 

 

Beaufre, however, made no mention of the unrest in 1917 which almost led to the collapse of the French Army. After the fighting ended, French military doctrines remained rooted in the experiences of the "Great War". The French high command continued promoting a reliance on horses to transport men and equipment, while overlooking or failing to appreciate the advantages of tanks and armoured vehicles, which in the event of war can allow soldiers to move quickly and inflict heavier losses on the enemy. 

 

Beaufre's colleague, Charles de Gaulle, was one of the few French officers who endorsed the creation of a mechanised army; but de Gaulle was not among the most senior officers in the French Army during the interwar years. He was a lieutenant-colonel at the end of 1932 and by the beginning of World War II was a colonel. In May 1940 de Gaulle led a French formation, the 4th Armoured Division, into battle against the Germans 150 kilometres north-east of Paris but, even though he showed promise as a commander, he hadn't anywhere near enough mechanised units under his command to influence the course of the war with Nazi Germany. 

 

Maurice Gamelin, among the best-known generals in the French Army, and who was the overall commander of Western Allied forces in 1939 and 1940, believed the Second World War would be similar to its predecessor: static, dependence on horses, cavalry regiments, and fortified positions, and that tanks would not be decisive or to the forefront. 

 

Much has been made of Gamelin's age. He was approaching 70 in the early 1940s but age in many ways is just a number and too much attention is given to it. As long as a person maintains his or her mental faculties and health an experienced age is not a drawback. Gamelin's successor, General Maxime Weygand, was 73-years-old in 1940 and continued to possess a sharp mind and good energy for years afterward. 

 

Unlike the French high command, its German counterpart would recognise the potential of armoured vehicles after World War I. Beaufre, who was part of the French General Staff from 1935 recalled how, "We had tanks in the First World War. We knew all the difficulties of the game while the Germans, who didn't have them, had the feeling of those who were attacked by tanks, and while we considered that the tanks were a little awkward and difficult to use, the Germans jumped to the new weapons with the appetite of a new rich". 

 

The French, British, and Polish armies of 1939 were effectively armies designed on the 1918 model. The German Army of 1939 was better organised and better trained than its rivals in France, Britain, and Poland. Generally speaking, the Wehrmacht's upper-level ranks were also filled with superior quality officers compared to the three other countries mentioned. 

 

The Soviet military by 1939 was heavily mechanised, containing more tanks, armour, and aircraft than any other military including the Wehrmacht; but the large-scale purges, which mainly took place in the late 1930s, caused major harm to the Soviet Union and its preparations for combat. In time the damage would be repaired. 

 

The Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko remembered long after the Great Patriotic War speaking to Georgy Zhukov, the Red Army commander who was the Chief of the General Staff when the conflict with Nazi Germany began and probably the greatest general of the war. Gromyko wrote that Zhukov spoke to him ruefully about "the enormous damage Stalin had inflicted on the country by his massacre of the top echelons of the army command. 'Of course, I regard them as innocent victims,' he said. 'Tukhachevsky was an especially damaging loss for the army and the state'." 

 

As matters unfolded the Soviet Union need not have been concerned about a German attack in 1939 or 1940, as opposed to the Franco-British powers. What was frightening from France's viewpoint was that the Wehrmacht by 1939 was imbued with high morale and confidence, clearly superior to the French Army. Germany's young frontline troops, brainwashed by years of poisonous Nazi propaganda, believed strongly in the cause of the Third Reich.

 

 

General André Beaufre's comments feature in episode 3 [France falls] of the World at War television series (first broadcast in 1973) 

 

Andrei Gromyko, Memories: From Stalin to Gorbachev (Arrow Books Limited, 1 January 1989) 

 

Zhukov, Georgii Konstantinovich, The Generals of WWII, Generals.dk

 

Jonathan Fenby, Charles de Gaulle: The General (Simon & Schuster, 5 May 2010) 

 

Donald J. Goodspeed, The German Wars: 1914-1945 (Bonanza Books, 1 January 1985) 

 

Gamelin, Maurice-Gustave, The Generals of WWII, Generals.dk