France did not surrender in WW1, Germany did.
France surrended in WW2, but later won, and Germany surrendered.
so the surrender score is France-1 Germany-2
So who is the “surrender-monkey”?
I commented more than once to someone on another board that the English only had time to run their empire because the other Europeans were kept away from London by the English Channel.
Didn’t the British Army have a reputation for being quite disorganised and poor at logistics for quite some while because they were kept away from Continental wars so often, only popping over to fight alongside someone else once in a while?
World war II is what won them the reputation pretty much all by itself. The French high command really performed really poorly during '39-'40 with deployments, etc. Not that there weren’t problems tactically, etc, but the big problems were at the highest level.
I think it is fair to say that France was unwilling to repeat 1914-18. Thus in the dire situation in 1940 capitulation was preferred (especially as a British armistice was expected shortly, after which peace could be negotiated).
I think it should be emphasized that Germany was equally unwilling to repeat the WWI experience. It was only that the cheap, quick, and easy victories that seduced the army and population to continue with the invasion of the month club. I tend to feel that if in 1940 there were the first hints of attrition warfare or total warfare the Nazi’s would have been out on their asses right quick. It’s just that it was '43 before reality set in - and it was too late.
Reading Treis’ post, it occurred to me that another factor could be France’s need to split her efforts between the navy and the army. On the one hand, Britan was able to have a world-class navy to protect her colonial empire and the islands, and on the other Germany came to the table to late to have an empire, so could focus on an army. France needed a world-class navy to compete with the British overseas, and a world-class army to fend off the Continental threats. So, the strain of competing with two very different threats left France less able to handle either. Since France and Britan never duked it out on the high seas, the massive naval investment seems wasted, but in a different history it could have been decisive.
I don’t think that this was the major factor in the nightmare of WWI or the collapses of 1870 and WWII, but I think it might be a contributing one.
Yeah, compared to those cowardly Polish, the French were courageous military knights! Not only did they hold their positions in the face of a technologically superior power, they also came to their allies the Polish and created a two front war in Europe! :rolleyes:
With respect to WWII, I challenge anyone to examine the shameful and cowardly early surrender of General Percival’s army in Singapore and say the British couldn’t be chicken, too.
British troops surrenders so quickly and with so little fight on so many occasions early in the war that an exasperated Churchill exclaimed, “why won’t they just FIGHT?”
I will not accept anyone’s characterization of the French armed forces as substandard, as lacking in fighting spirit, courage and stamina until that person tells me that he has walked the ground at the vast and mournful cemetery of the Verdun battlefield. No one who has been there will repeat the “Surrender Monkeys” slander.
Someone once said that patriotism is the feeling that your particular country is paramount because it is the place of your birth. Too often that sense is a substitute for thinking, too.
Was France’s performance in WWII pathetic? We need to consider that they were fighting the Germans, and the German army in WWII was very good at what it did. They beat hte Polish, Danish, Norweigans, Dutch, Belgians, Yugoslavians, and Greeks. Realisticially most of those countries folded a lot faster than the French did. In tyhe Yugoslavia campaign, for instance, there were fewer than 5000 German casualties. One might even bother to point out that the first time American soldiers faced serious action against veteran German units in Tunisia it was almost a disaster and the British had to be called in to save the day. The Germans were deploying never-before-seen tactics, and it’s unreasonable to expect that any other country would be ready for such a thing.
Which makes you wonder if the latter would have garnered them the kind of respect and lauds was given to the Poles, Dutch, Czechs, etc later on. But the power establishment in France just could not see itself in the G-I-E role… AND they WERE defeated at defending the homeland itself – not just pushed back, defeated, no way to avoid the total conquest of the homeland. For hundreds of years what you did when that happened, was recognize reality, capitulate, and at least save your state as a continuing legal entity. As MMI points out, the “reasonable” expectation at that time was not that this was the start of a 5-year Total Global War to the Death against Evil Itself.
The Blitzkrieg tactics was so new and fast, that even German commanders in France thought they were moving too fast and wanted to slow down. It might have been even faster! That combined with total surprise and a static French defense make the French look outmaneuvered, not cowardly.
De Gaulle did just that with his Free French forces
July 14, 1941 - US still undecided.
I remember reading in Vol. I of Churchill’s history of WWII that on more than one occasion in his speeches in the 30s about the dangers of German rearmament, he would praise the French Army as being one of the few protections for western Europe. In fact, I think he used the phrase, “Thank God for the French Army.”
A bit ironic coming from Marlborough’s descendant, but certainly an indication of the esteem he had for the French as a fighting force.
I see I forgot last night to finish my thought about the significance of the unification of Germany and Italy:
I meant to add:
By contrast, in 1914, France faced a unified German Empire on its main eastern frontier. Fortunately for France, Italy havered about before finally joining the Allies, instead of fulfilling its obligations under the Triple Alliance.
The situation was even worse for France in 1940: Italy joined Germany in attacking France, meaning that France faced a two-front war. It was forced to take defensive measures on the Italian frontier, siphoning troops away from the main front with Germany.
Here’s a nice visual to show the difference in France’s opponents in 1800 compared to 1900. The two maps dramatically show the consolidation that occured on France’s borders to the east and south-east.
Oh, they did from time to time. In fact in the period from 1778 to 1782 they were able ( by dint of massive spending and in concert with Spain and later the Netherlands ) to gain a de facto naval superiority over an overstretched Britain, one result of which was Yorktown. Of course the effort nearly bankrupted France and the dominance was short-lived. But France and Britain did have a few naval dustups over the years.
In general though I’d agree that France was forced by its geographic position to concentrate predominantly on its army. More normally in the 17th and 18th centuries, French naval expenditures were only 10-20% of their military budget ( during the Seven Years War they were outspent by the Royal Navy at a rate of ~5:1 ).
- Tamerlane
Actually, France is usually regarded as the first nation to practice “total war”. In the 1790’s, the revolutionary government declared that the entire French nation was going to go to war. This was a new idea; prior to this, most countries assumed that most of their population would continue in their normal routine while a minority of its subjects would be fighting. And it worked; other European powers were surprised by how many troops France was able to put in the field and had to imitate their methods to keep up.
I wasn’t clear; I was thinking of about the 1860’s on. Prior to the Franco-Prussian war, I don’t think anyone thought of the French as pushovers.
I want to say the last serious shooting between the French and British was the Napoleonic Wars, but that seems too old. Are you aware of something later?
Apart from the fighting with Vichy France during WW2 the last war between Britain and France was in 1815. There was often friction afterwards over their respective colonial ambitions, and they came close to war over Fashoda in 1898, but they also shared common foreign policy goals of opposing Russia (Crimean war as an example where they fought as allies). From 1904 they were effectively allies against Germany.
Completely correct. However, my post was about the decline of the French military after Napoleon, during the Industrial Revolution.
In comparison, a big part of the British economy was coal mining, and a big part of her defence was her coal-buring navy, so it was inevitable that these two interests would link up and the Admiralty would have a deep understanding of the economy as a whole and how to turn it toward national defense. The British Army, though much smaller that the Royal Navy and traditionally run on a shoestring, still contained officers who knowlege and understanding of overall national economics & infastructure. As an example, when General Napier led a putnitive invasion of Ethiopia from India, it was no leap of imagination for him to bring along a railroad with him, lay it from the coast at Mombassa up to the fighting at Addis Abada, then tear it up and take it back with him when the war was over.
Whereas the French, even a the beginning of the 20th Century, didn’t have representatives at the major manufacturing centers, and didn’t teach industrial economics at war college. This fact is something I remember reading in one of John Keegan’s books.
But allow me to agree that the “surrender monkey” slur is unfair. Between the end of February and the first week of September 1916, the French lost 377,000 men at Verdun. That’s more than one death every three minutes, for over six months. Under a Stalin a nation can be forced to accept such losses, but France is not a nation of slaves. And did we really fare any better in Vietnam than they did, or are we doing any better against the same tactics in Iraq that they faced in Algeria?
But at the time he was not representative of the French “power establishment”, but a dissident.
Indeed. Which should give Americans pause at the whole “surrender-monkey” idiocy (though to be fair in turn, in 1939-41 the US forces were quite unready to take the fight to the enemy).
True.
I was trying to register a point that not all French capitulated. Reynard resigned, Petain gov’t sued for peace, while De Gaulle always insisted on fighting to the end. De Gaulle was decorated officer but politically small figure. He went into exile and started organising Free French forces, which by the end of the WWII numbered 1,250,000. They were the people that rebuit France after the war.
Perhaps Roosvelt had good reasons not to mess with Hitler in 1940. Likewise, perhaps French had good reasons to sue for peace after putting up a fight and being utterly defeated.