Not ot mention the fact that the bombs would have killed a lot of the prisoners.
A couple point, quickly :
How do you know Petain was leery of a static front warfare? I’m not sure he was a member of any “lost generation”. It’s not like he had been a 20 yo soldier living in the trenches during WWI.
And anyway it’s irrelevant since at this point, there was no possibility to organize a front, static or not. As I wrote above, the choice was between surrendering and forming a government in exile.
I wasn’t offended. But I thought(and actually still think) there was a lot of misunderstanding about the situation at the time that needed to be corrected.
The allies of course expected the Germans to attack through the low countries/Belgium. That’s why most of the french army and all the BEF was massed at the Belgian border, waiting for the attack to happen to rush into Belgium (to eventually be trapped there…see Dunkirk)
The Maginot line use was to prevent Germany from attacking in eastern France with a limited number of troops needed to defend the area. So, it reduced the frontsize and limited the german’s options. And it wasn’t extented along the Belgian border because 1) It was very costly 2) because the Belgian government was strongly opposed to it, affraid that the french army would safely stay behind the line instead of fighting in Belgium.
What was not expected was :
-The blitzkrieg : all the french organization was based on the expectation of a static frontline. For example, radios had been discarded in favor of buried telephone lines because radio communications could be intercepted. Of course, a buried phone line is of zero use in a mobile war (in practice, the heaquarters had no clue about what was happening on the frontline during the german offensive). Other example, tanks were dispatched in small numbers in the infantry units as support weapons, and there were lose to no mobile armored units, except a handful of armored regiments, more or less experimental and untrained to fight this way (De Gaulle was commanding one of those, by the way, since before the war he was only known as a theorician promoting mobile warfare).
-An attack through the Ardennes. It was deemed to be impassable quickly by a significant number of ennemy troops by the french high command, due to the rough terrain and poor roads. For this reason, this area was only defended by a small number of reservists, without reserves.
Wait a minute…He wasn’t obligated to stay in power. If he have had serious issues the resignation option was always open.
His defense has always been that he acted as a necessary “shield” to protect the french people during the war. And actually, the french people might have been better off with the Vivhy regime that it would have been under direct German rule. There’s no way to know.
Actually, the Vichy government did both. It occasionnally did more and earlier than requested by the Germans. Especially between 1942 and 1944 when, Petain being way too old to, the actual power was in the hands of his much more pro-German prime minister/home office minister/foreign affairs minister/information minister Laval, while Petain role was mainly as a reassuring figurehead.
Petain is widely more well-known, but the main actor of the Vichy government and the collaboration policy has been Laval. For instance, the mandatory yellow star for Jews, and their rounding-ups were implemented just following him taking charge.
Of course he was picked by Petain, though. And AFAIK never disavowed by him.
Actually, this part wasn’t written in response to your post, but to smeone else’s, who menitonned hints availlable about the genocide (articles in the New-York Times, testimonies of witnesses…).
And my point was precisely that the Rwandan genocide was out in the open.
That’s precisely why I chose this example. Since people didn’t react nowadays to an ungoing genocide, “right in the open”, and in time of peace, how would you expect other people living in a time of war, and reading every day about bombings and battles going on everywhere, to have reacted to some vague hints that could have been available to them providing they looked hard enough (and believed the rumors/articles to be true)?
That’s what always surprised me in these requests to bomb the camps. Given the “accuracy” of the bombings at this time, what could have resulted from this apart from the death of many inmates???
I strongly suspect that this is the reason why the Allies “did nothing” about the death camps. The air force commanders would have been well aware of the limitations of contemporary bombing accuracy. Any attempt to destroy the rail lines into the camps or the gas chambers would have required one or more major bombing raids, with most of the bombs hitting the area around the actual target. While this wouldn’t have been a problem by this point in the war against a regular German target, it would have killed most of the prisoners they were supposed to save.
The only real hope the Allies had of helping death camp inmates was to defeat Germany as quickly as possible. As well, there may have been a belief that the transport of prisoners to the camps would cease as the bombing campaign increasingly targeted the German railway and transport systems and priority was given to war-essential freight. I don’t think the Allies anticipated the illogical fanaticism of the Nazis in their assignment of priorities for prisoner transport over the badly damaged rail system.
a straightforward railway line is easy to repair, work gangs could have it functioning again in a few days. Bombing railways usually concentrated on complex junctions and marshalling yards which would take more effort to repair. Even then the damage was often less than overwhelming. Viaducts and tunnels would appear to offer more possibilities but it proved very difficult to inflict decisive damage on these. The RAF visited the Bielefeld Viaduct numerous times before finally closing it to traffic in March 1945
Oh, please. Petain commanded at Verdun (against his wishes, BTW). He knew what trench warfare was like.
As for bombing the death camps, no one’s mentioned the fact that allied bombers didn’t have the range to reach them and get back to safety.
Not to mention being responsible for getting the French army back into fighting trim after atrocious losses, ghastly living conditions, and callous and incompetent leadership had resulted in most of the army mutinying. Petain knew all about trench warfare.
And srategic bombing wasn’t nearly as accurate as everyone claimed it was. Generally, you were lucky if you hit the right city.
Not entirely true. It was true in the case of the Operation Reinhard death camps; while reports received by the British and US governments identified most of these relatively early on in their operation, at that stage of the war they were definitely beyond what could be bombed. They also ceased operation in 1943, some time before the main Allied advances.
Auschwitz is a different case. Although it had been known for a long time that a major concentration camp had been opened in the town and isolated fragments of information had reached the west, it wasn’t until June 1944 that either the governments or the Jewish organisations realised that the area was also a site for systematic mass gassings on a scale alongside the Operation Reinhard ones, i.e. another extermination camp. Until then the question of bombing it simply hadn’t been on the radar, but once the significance of the camp was realised the requests from the Jewish Agency and the World Jewish Congress quickly followed.
At roughly the same time, the advance up Italy began to give the Allied airforces bases from which Poland could be bombed. It’s again true that, initially at any rate, such missions were regarded as too much of a stretch and too dangerous. In cases like the relief missions that summer to drop supplies to the Warsaw Uprising, crews were restricted to those prepared to volunteer. But the situation through the summer and autumn of 1944 wasn’t static and bombing missions against southern Poland became regarded as normal operations. There were then quite a few large bombing raids by the US air force against targets in the area.
In fact, part of Auschwitz was bombed. The Buna plant in the Auschwitz III camp at Monowitz (a few miles from Auschwitz I and Birkenau) was targeted by the US air force on 20th August and 13th September 1944 (and also in January 1945). It’s from the reconnaissance and damage assessment flights relating to these raids that the well known aerial photos of the camp derive.