Sorry, but I score this as one for my point about not overestimating the contributions of the resistance. From Gerhard Weinberg’s World at Arms, p. 50:
“In July of 1939 [that is, before the war begins] the Polish code-breaking experts with the approval of their government turned over to the French and British duplicates of Polish reproductions of the German enigma machine used for encoding radio messages.”
This is a great thread. I’ve done a lot of archival research on this topic. Part of this was a series of interviews with captured German officers done by the US Army in Europe right after the war. In many of the interviews, the Germans were asked directly if the French Resistance hindered their operations. Almost all of them said it wasn’t a factor. Of the many groups that made up the French Resistance, the French Communists were probably the most effective, and that part of the movement hasn’t been studied enough.
A forgotten fact is that for the first year of the occupation, the French Communists viewed the Germans as liberators and tried to cooperate with them, because the PCF had been legally banned under the French Third Republic and the Germans lifted the ban because there was an alliance between Berlin and Moscow (until Germany launched Operation Barbarossa in 1941).
The Resistance did give the French something to hold onto after the war to avoid a total loss of face, so you could say it was a moral victory of sorts. But if you compare the French Resistance to that of say, the Yugoslavs, there’s no comparison. As Rod Hill states, there was no one group called “The Resistance.” That’s not to denigrate any Frenchman who risked his life to fight the Nazis or save Allied aircrew. But overall the movement never gained the unity or traction needed to be effective.
You can find my research here:
It is worth noting that the most effective of the French resistance groups were the communists under Lecompte - Boinet. While the Allies were happy to support them during the occupation, both Churchill and De Gaulle were pretty concerned about the rise of communism in France and determined that it should be stamped out. No doubt the Americans were even more worried.
This thread predates that paper by five years.
your point being … ???
Listen very carefully, I will say this only once.
Nice thread resurrection, very informative.
sometimes, the zombie threads are fun
Anyone got a clue what this means?
If I interpret them correctly both incidents are covered in Max Hastings’ excellent book:
Das Reich: The March of the 2nd SS Panzer Division Through France, June 1944:
The most valuable contribution of the resistance movements was in intelligence gathering; for example locating V1 and V2 launch sites so they could be attended to from the air.
Tigers probably means tanks.
Big cats were surprisingly ineffective against artillery.
Why exactly was the resistance effort in Yugoslavia and the USSR better than the French Resistance in military terms?
Yes. Two models of German tank were referred to as Tigers (Tiger and Tiger II). There were also the Panther and Lion.
Of course it means tanks, though the alternative might make a good movie.
What I would like explained is:
“…such as the syphoning, with only a straw and power of mouth, of a whole set of railroad engines,”
If this refers to the disastrous decision to drive Das Reich to Normandy rather than use tank transporters, I understood this was an apparently arbitrary decision by the German High command, not the result of locomotive shortages. For such an urgent mission I am sure locomotives could have been found if wanted.
Terrain and community structures - mountain redoubts in Yugoslavia, forests in Russia/Ukraine, and weaker governmental structures associated to the occupiers.
There was certainly plenty of resistance activity in France. I came across the memoirs of Dany Cordier, who served as assistant to Jean Moulin, de Gaulle’s nominated representative in France, in his efforts to co-ordinate and unify the activities of different groups, and it was certainly clear that plenty of them were getting on with all sorts of sabotage or propaganda and intelligence-gathering. But it meant communicating very laboriously through manual messaging and shifting money and materials, mostly in or through urban centres, under the eyes of regular civilian police as well as LVF/Milice and informers.
(Incidentally, Cordier’s own story is instructive - a teenage anti-republican, anti-semitic, proto-fascist extremist who expected Pétain’s arrival in office to mean reviving traditional France so as to “properly” carry on the war, was shattered to hear of the armistice, took off with some friends for England to join de Gaulle, and found himself over time shifting to the democratic left; his work allowed him to see at first hand the inter-group rivalries over access to money and materials from London and de Gaulle, and the battle for potential postwar status between the new young resisters and the old political party organisations).
The French rail system had essentially collapsed prior to the landings at Normandy in one of the few clear successes of strategic bombing. From here:
My own in-expert (but somewhat-informed) opinion is that the French were treated better by the Nazis and didn’t foment the hatred like they did in the USSR and Yugoslavia. If one lived in Vichy France then there wasn’t a lot of incentive to risk one’s life in the resistance (although plenty did). Much of this was based on racism; the Germans and the Slavs had little love for each other.
It was certainly in a bad way in the north of the country, but Das Reich was moving up from the south. To quote Max Hastings (p98)
“Major Stickler at once signalled a routine request to the Corps for rail space for his tanks… To his utter astonishment it was peremptorily refused, without explanation.”
Hastings implies that rail sabotage may have been partly behind the decision, but it is not very clear. Obviously Major Stickler wasn’t expecting this, and one imagines he ould have kept himself very well-informed about local railway sabotage.