Would you also put quote marks around the Soviet Union “winning” WWII? Because that exact same list applies in that case as well.
Heck, if you agree that every long-term WWI Western Front participant had several large mutinies, and so ignore it, the remainder applies to Great Britain in WWII as well. Was their victory “Phyrric”?
And, the ‘almost lost their capital city’, ‘massive casualties due to stupidly repeated infantry charges’, and arguably ‘mutinies’ apply to the North in the U.S. Civil War (No major armed forces mutinies, but civilan anti-draft riots required significant forces to put down).
I guess the take on how badly France was harmed in WWI was also mistaken.
On another century entirely, I just saw Shakespeare’s HENRY V (the one with Tom Hiddleston, Loki as Prince Hal was excellent) and there’s lots of French-bashing jokesabout their [lack of] military prowess from Shakespeare. So it’s not a new phenomenonenon.
You seem to be mixing up the First and Second World Wars - it was in 1914 that the German forces marching through Belgium on their way to invade France tipped the balance and precipitated Britain’s entry into the war (though in my view Grey and Asquith would have brought Britain in anyway). As to Italy trying to break through the Maginot Line and failing I have no idea where this came from.
One point on this, there is an argument that France could have invaded Germany while the German forces were all committed in Poland but it makes a lot of assumptions about the pace of French mobilisation. British forces could not have participated. the BEF was not in place in northern France until mid-October by which time the fall of Poland was complete. The rate at which British forces were built up in France was terrible - much slower than in 1914 despite a lot more warning.
Saying that a country’s generals were stupid does not imply that the country itself or its soldiers are unmilitary. In the US, we are familiar with the Army of the Potomac in our own Civil War. A succession of inarguably bad leaders mishandled this particular army though a series of spectacular defeats and painful retreats, but the troops themselves acquired an aura of dogged fatalism and determination to see the war through to the end which was ultimately ennobling. At the war’s end, the Union Army was mighty and highly-regarded (even by Europeans) despite the poor reputation of many of its generals.
France is the equal of any country in Europe in military history. Some people may choose to remember the defeats of 1940 and 1870 while forgetting 1918 and the careers of Charlemagne, Charles Martel, Napoleon, and so on. Those of us in the US at least ought to remember our own debt to the prowess of Rochambeau, DeGrasse, and Lafayette.
Interesting. I will steal it and think about that as a driving force in continuing the war–or any war. An army-wide “band of brothers” effect where the army is actually a collection of many squads.
ETA: I assume others have thought of this already.
Well, it came from the Maginot line, from my visit there a year ago and the museum’s own explanation of the history of the maginot line. I can’t cite online sources since I actually was physically there getting briefed on it by both French and German sources discussing it in a mix of French and English. They even had pictures of Italian vehicles destroyed along the line in the forest. I’m far from an expert on that end of it, so I don’t know to what extent the Italians were making a serious effort, but it did happen.
As another poster pointed out, England was ‘officially’ at war with Germany by that time, but wasn’t doing much; Hitler’s mowing through the Ardennes and the attack on the BEF in Belgium changed things considerably, and forced England to stop messing around. England still at that point was not providing much assistance to the French defense. I’m sure there’s a certain amount of fighting the last war that came into play, but from everything I read, saw, and discussed, the common narrative is that the whole point of the line was to force Hitler around that direction and make it into more of a world war and less of a France V. Germany war in the West; the trick was that no one thought the tanks could make it through the dense Ardenne Forest, so the French and British forces got outflanked in Belgium and Hitler drove right through the forest (in Luxembourg I think, is that right?) and straight on past the French forces and on into Paris, so the Maginot line was successful in its main objective but due to the trick with the German tanks mowing down the forest, it didn’t end up giving the allies the time to respond they expected.
Anyway, that’s the best I can explain it from the perspective of, if not the French in general, the historians and museum people at the Maginot line.
Ah! I see where the confusion came in. In mid-June 1940 the Italians attacked south-east France (Mussolini was determined to grab what they could from the Anglo-French defeat before it was too late!) and came up against the French fortifications of the Alpine Line. These were built at the same time as the fortifications along the Franco-German border and sometimes get referred to as the “Little Maginot” but if you talk about “the Maginot Line” I think most people will assume you mean the main line from the Swiss border north to Luxembourg. Reading your original post I thought you were under the impression that the Italians had been part of the German invasion in the north.
On the wider point - Britain was not doing much fighting from September 1939 to April/May 1940 but neither was France - that’s why it was called the Phoney War or the Sitzkreig. Britain was fully committed to defending France from the start of the war in 1939 and had 10 divisions (300,000 plus men) in France by the time of the German invasion but the French plan (and it was France in command as they clearly had the bigger army) was to wait on the defensive. The French would have liked to move their’s and the British forces forward to the Belgium-German frontier before the attack but Belgium insisted on maintaining its neutrality. Instead the plan called for the Franco-British armies to move forward to support the Belgiums assumed to be holding out in their own fortifications.
The assumption was that the German invasion would be a re-run of the Schlieffen plan of 1914 with the main German attack coming through Belgium and aimed at Paris. In fact the main attack was with armour through the Ardennes heading for the Channel coast - not Paris - and the Franco-British advance into Belgium just made the situation worse. The German attack outflanked these troops to the north and split the Allied forces in two. Net result the evacuation of the British and French troops from Dunkirk and the collapse of French resolve. (Incidentally, the Dunkirk evacuation was complete before the Italians even declared war and France had effectively collapsed by the time they invaded.)
The Maginot Line certainly worked in the sense that the Germans avoided it where they could but I do not think the motivation for building it was the “internationalise” any future conflict. The motivation in all the literature from the 1930s was to economise on French manpower, to hold the vulnerable Franco-German border with as few men as possible and release more troops for the defence of the traditional route of attack through Belgium.
Note that while the French high command and government demonstrated a major lack of ability in 1940, down at the troop level the French fought with a great deal of courage and tactical effectiveness. It was by no means a walkover for the Germans, and there were numerous examples of French troops successfully repelling German attacks and even counterattacking and driving the Germans back. However, scattered local successes were not enough to offset the general strategic success of the German advances.
Historian John Keegan has noted that French Colonial units from Indochina fought with particular tenacity and skill, and were not demoralized by the German successes.
This should have been a warning to those French and Americans who would later assume Indochina (which we Americans know as Vietnam) would be overawed by First World military might.