The best “what if” way to achieve the OP’s premise would be for the Germans to have stuck to the original Manstein plan for the invasion:
(Bolding mine) If they’d done this, the allies’ mobile forces, rather than being wrong-footed by their rush into Belgium, would have met the Germans’ mobile forces in a large tank/motorised infantry battle, and who knows what would have happened then.
The Germans fielded 10 panzer divisions in the campaign.
The French fielded 3 DLMs and 4 DCRs (Division Légère Mécanique and Divisions Cuirassées - both types more or less armoured divisions), and were starting to convert their 5 cavalry divisions to DLMs when the battle began.
These forces played little part in the actual battle, but if the original Manstein plan had been used, perhaps they’d have gone some way to grinding down the panzer divisions, and thus giving the French breathing space to call up more of their reserves. Plus the allies - French and British - had far more motorised infantry divisions than the Germans.
One of the stranger things was that based upon deployments, there was too little faith placed in the Maginot Line. After spending all the money building the Maginot Line, the French deployed their forces as if it wasn’t there. Two French Army Groups with 38 divisions manned the French-German border. Facing them the Germans only deployed Army Group C, by far the weakest of their Army Groups with only 18 divisions - Army Group A had 45 1/2 divisions and Army Group B 29 1/2. So 38 French divisions enjoyed slightly more than a 2-1 advantage over the 18 German divisions they faced; the Maginot Line could have easily been held by half that number freeing up a significant reserve.
France didn’t seek an armistice when Paris fell, but later
The french did try to form a defense line along the Loire. But when it was in place in point A, the Germans had already crossed the river at point B (and on the other side, they were following the Rhone valley down south). You’re really underestimating the extent of the rout.
If you look at a map of the campaign, you’ll see that the Germans were already occupying the largest part of France at the moment of the armistice. And, as I wrote above, at this point, they were advancing unopposed, precisely after the failure of the defensive line along the Loire river.
Not in mainland France. France herself was hopelessly lost at this point. It was just a matter of days.
Again , the choice was between surrendering and fighting from North Africa or on the seas. Fighting in France wasn’t an option.
I sort of doubt that. I know the majority of German tank divisions still rocked shitty little panzer Is, IIs and 38(t) at the time, but they still had a sizable corps of actual bloody tanks that were both manoeuvrable, fast and deadly in the IIIs and IVs.
By contrast, the British and French were still hobbled by their infantry/cruiser tank dichotomy and the concept that tanks were to be used primarily to clean out trenches and similar fortified strongpoints, not wreck other tanks (in their minds, tanks were to be dealt with using AT guns and airplanes when they tried to… clean out trenches and similar fortified strongpoints).
As a consequence their manoeuvrable tanks were lightly armoured and packed weak guns (or worse, in the case of the grand majority of French tankettes, heavy machine guns) while the ones they had that packed decent firepower were slow and ponderous, if better armoured. In a tank battle, the Germans could have run rings around the heavies while blowing the lights up day in, day out.
When all is said and done, the Allies were all deployed and geared up for a new protracted trench war. But the Germans just didn’t want to play that game again. I don’t really mind, either - when all is said and done, France could hardly have taken another one of those. I most probably wouldn’t be here today if my grandparents had been trench fodder, either.
But the IV stil had the short barreled 75mm. Which was an infantry gun not a PAK.
The III did not yet have a 50mm gun, but a 37mm, at this time and could not tackle a B1. Yet this was the best anti-tank tank available.
I believe the total number of Panzer III’s was some 300 or 350.
Yeah, the IV was mostly an anti-infantry tank - their guns would still have made short work of Allied tankettes even though they did have noticed troubles with French heavy armour. At least they do in Combat Mission
OTOH the total number of French D2s, the only real mobile anti-armour tank the French had was… wait for it… 82. Of which half were crippled by heavy training exercises, and half were missing trained crews. So, um, yes. Too little, too late.
As for the B1s, they might have been prime trench clearing material what with their huge tracks (kind of like Warhammer 40k Leman Russ tanks). Prime targets for mobility kills though, if their ridiculous speed and range problems weren’t enough. As I said, the Germans could and did run rings around those “infantry” tanks, which were in essence mobile fixed gun emplacements. Strand them here, move troops over there.
The S35 was certainly on par with the Panzer III. It had a better gun and better armour.
It’s 47mm could penetrate the III’s armour where the III would have to get lucky.
At that the 350 III’s were spread thin over the 10 Pzr divisions.
That and the 37mm gun on the masses of Renault R35s and Hotchkiss H35s had no problem going through the armor of the IIIs and IVs, to say nothing of the thinner Is and IIs.
The devil is in the details, a huge advantage the German armor had was radios: pretty much all German tanks had radios while only the platoon leader in French tank formations had a radio for communicating with superiors, orders to the rest of the platoon had to rely on signal flags.
No German tank was a match for the B1, but it was extremely slow and consumed a lot of fuel. Which means that in a movement war, it hardly could be where it would have been needed (assuming it had access to any fuel at all).
As for the lack of radios, this was deliberate, so that communication could not be intercepted by the ennemy :dubious: and general (I mean, the infantry didn’t have radios, either, and was expected to communicate with field telephones. Again, the French army assumed a trench war, where buried phone lines would have been relatively safe. In a movement war, again, the officers couldn’t communicate with the headquarters, and vice-versa, with the obvious result of nobody knowing the situation on the ground)
As a note, De Gaulle used runners to dispatch orders to his subordinates during a tank battle (maybe not well know outside France, but he was an early and staunch supporter of tanks units using their mobility, like the German did, instead of the “infantry support weapon” envisioned by the French high command. This and some mitigated success in battle got him a job of under-secretary at war and eventually made him end up in London)
No doubt, I was responding more to the idea that the B1 was a prime target for a mobility kill. When the Germans did have to face them they gave the Germans enormous headaches, much like the King Tiger did to the Allies later in the war and it suffered the same problems of extremely slow speed, high fuel consumption and mechanical unreliability.
Aye, as I said the devil is in the details. The French (and British) had superior tanks and more of them than the Germans, but a radio in every tank made them much more responsive in a fluid battle.
You seem to be forgetting that while the Dunkirk evacuation was required because of a collapse of the French and British defenses, it was only possible because of incredible resistance by the French Army suffering heavy casualties (as well as the British rearguard units). It doesn’t affect the overall argument you are making, but without this French bravery, the BEF would have been eliminated (and I wouldn’t exist, given that Granddad would have been in a grave or German POW camp rather than conceiving my mother).
Yes. The Anglo-French forces went into the Low Countries expecting to meet a German thrust head-on as it came around the flank of the Maginot Line. The problem was that the Germans attacked right at the “hinge” between the end of the Maginot Line and the right flank of the Anglo-French advance. This created a classic “revolving door” engagement where the A-F forces were heading north and then east into the German rear areas and the German forces were heading west into their rear areas. A revolving-door engagement isn’t always fatal; both sides can switch places entirely sometimes. The problem here was that there was a coastline on the left flank of the Anglo-French advance, which the Germans could quickly reach to cut them off, and the Anglo-French would have had to go in a much larger, almost-complete-circle to their right to cut off the Germans.
I don’t see it mentioned prominently so far, although clairobscur alludes to it with the “infantry support” issue, but probably the predominant reason the French armor did not stop the German is the way it was organized. The German armor was massed and delivered against a single point; the French armor was (except for a small independent force) dispersed, mingled with infantry, to cover the “continuous front.” The theory was that tanks would “stiffen” infantry against small local attacks (like the German “storm” tactics used at the end of the previous war) while still being generally useful against a broad frontal infantry offensive (such as had characterized most of the previous war).
The problem then becomes one of mathematics. If you disperse your French tanks along miles of front, a given width of front has only a small number of tanks, and they’re separated. The Germans don’t spread out to match you, though – they send all their tanks at a single point, with the result that most of your French tanks do and see nothing, but a few encounter masses of enemy tanks, which overwhelm them and break through.
And since the point of dispersing the tanks in the first place was to maintain the thought-to-be-important continuous, unbroken front, that breakthrough throws the entire French strategy into crisis.
Once it became known (as it was known, before the war) that the Germans had organized their tanks into dense, mobile formations, the dispersal (famously called “penny packets” by one writer) makes no strategic sense, and should have been abandoned. But institutions can be slow to adapt.
Had the French government of the day escaped to North Africa, they could have kept the French Navy in the fight. Consider this a big boast to the Royal Navy and a big problem for the Italians (no Germans yet) in North Africa.
We could imagine a larger number of French pilots getting out and even a number of large-scale ground formation. Certainly a three-division corps, if not more. This would seem to lead us to North Africa falling the French from one side and the British on the other by early 1942, or even much sooner.
(Oddly this gives us no place for the US Army to learn its trade against the Axis second-string.)
The French would want to get back to the Metropolitan region as soon as possible, perhaps a southern invasion in 1943? It would be a roll of the dice how that would go.
You’re massing against the wrong wing of my post, so to speak. Whether the French forward thrust failed or succeeded has little directly to do with why the French front was pierced by the German thrust, which is what I was talking about.
The French had only two tank-heavy mobile divisions available south of the main thrust. Eventually DeGaulle used some of this force to try and “pinch off” Guderian’s thrust (which historian John Keegan points out is militarily the “correct” solution), but his force was too small.
Meanwhile, doctrine or not, the bulk of French armor was indeed dispersed among the infantry, as a deliberate, if outdated, strategic decision, where it indeed was unable to stem the massed German penetration.
