Accusations of being wrong and 2 random youtube links. I’m sold.
Q: Why are the streets of Paris lined with trees?
A: The Germans like to march in the shade.
And thirteen years later, joined today to post that, to boot.
We dream for the financing to one day appear for a board software with a probation feature and with a “warning: the last post you’re responding to is over 10 years old” flag.
I’m a little more skeptical. I want one link that shows The Truth[sup]TM[/sup].
Then I’ll change everything I’ve ever believed before.
I learned from a student doing a grad paper about the French resistance - the dirty secret was that the occupied French overall did not care about the war. They’d fought, they lost, except for the beaches up north they were away from all the fighting, they were generally running their own (Vichy) government for a large part of the country. The war touched them less than most people in Europe. Maybe 5% of the population was active or supporting the resistance. The rest were mostly apathetic. Once de Gaulle and the Allies recaptured France, suddenly everyone was a covert resistance supporter from way back.
As others have discussed, internal politics had much to do with it too. Some people supported the right wing and Hitler because he was against the communists. Remember, those communists were the people who only 20 years earlier overthrew the Russian government, murdered the rightful ruler and his family, and for the last two decades had run a reign of terror and starvation while stealing all the property in Russia; and their fanatical minions had created a protracted nasty war in neighbouring Spain, burned down the Reichstag trying to sow chaos, and more fanatic minions inside France were clamouring to do the same (and had created chaos in Paris in 1871). Plus, the right-wing had cool uniforms and made the trains run on time.
It’s only the emergence of the true horror of the Nazi regime that has since given fascism a bad name. At the time, it was just one more political faction, promising to make <insert European country here> great again.
It’s not just the relatively straightforward military question - there’s a political side to this.
Politics in France had been viciously divided for generations, to the point that there was a substantial minority opposed to the whole concept of the Third Republic (in a way that doesn’t occur in the US, for example) and what are understood as secular and democratic values, as well as to the way this worked itself out in instability of successive governments. There had already been one extreme right movement to unseat the whole system in the aftermath of the depression and financial scandals, then the advent of the Popular Front government and its subsequent implosion over the Spanish Civil War made things more unstable still. A side-effect of this general attitude on the right was that there was a concentration of ultra-Catholic and anti-democratic views in the Army (since that was held to be an “untainted” way of demonstrating patriotism and public service without getting entangled with the secular state). The instability of governments continued even after war had been declared, with, in the end, the Reynaud government simply unable to sustain itself in power, and parliament effectively handed over its powers to Petain, who had been brought into government precisely as a bridge between the politicians and the anti-republican right in the Army. It’s not clear to me precisely what they expected him to do at that point in any great detail.
I found something interesting in a memoir by Daniel Cordier, who as a teenager had been on the extreme monarchist, anti-Semitic, right before the war. He and his friends thought that the defeat was all the fault of the prewar leftwing governments and the system, and that when Petain was brought in, he would continue the fight somehow.
Don’t forget, it was an Armistice, not a total and unconditional surrender. Some people continued to persuade themselves there was some room and potential for the Vichy government to retain enough power to launch some resistance at some point, since it still had a fair number of organised troops retained in barracks (I suspect this may have been a factor in Roosevelt’s persistent attempts to maintain contact with Vichy and to sideline de Gaulle for so long).
The Vichy government was itself divided, with some truly appalling anti-Semites in key positions, while other pro-Nazi movements and political parties were firmly sidelined and kept out of power. The official line in favour of collaboration over deportations and the supply of labour to the Germans was that this was a way of getting French POWs home again (if you believed German promises). Likewise, it wasn’t exactly difficult to persuade a lot of ordinary civilians that acts of individual violence, assassinations of random German soldiers and officers, were rampant terrorism. If you were trying to keep your head down and struggling to cope, that was the last thing you needed.
In Cordier’s case, news of the Armistice alone was so shattering that he and his friends took off for England to sign up with de Gaulle, and eventually he returned to France to work underground and ended up moving well over to the left after his contacts with the different resistance groups and movements. Even then, there were many divides and disagreements among resistance groups - the Communists had their eye on the possibility of their own revolution, there were different Army officers who resented de Gaulle as an upstart, the former political parties wanted to be in on the act, and young resisters like Cordier (who was working to support de Gaulle’s representative in trying to get them to work together) were pretty sceptical about a lot of the older generation representing prewar interests. And there were yet further tensions as between those who saw the need to fall in with Allied strategy for the invasion and liberation, and those who wanted to secure independent recognition for French ideas and plans (and among them there were those who remained suspicious of de Gaulle’s attitudes and intentions - he caused quite a bit of offence at the liberation by his seeming favouritism to the established Army as opposed to what he evidently saw as self-appointed upstarts in the independent and largely youthful resistance groups).
So, as with any set of human experiences in extreme situations - it was complicated…
Really? Where have you been these last few weeks?
I had the impression that whatever else you argue about and however you argue it, all sides agree the Constitution and the Republic are a thoroughly good thing, even if they each think the other has a completely cockeyed idea of what they are and should be.
Besides the Maginot Line’s better known limitation of weakness or non-existence much to the west of the Luxembourg border, it was also weak in Fortified Sector Saar, where Operation Tiger was launched. There were no large works (‘gros ouvrage’) in that sector, mainly just infantry blockhouses, a handful of small ‘downscale’ 75mm casemates added not long before the war (M1897’s in concrete ‘garages’ basically), and the artillery-less petit ouvrage at Haute Poirer. And the attack coincided with the retreat of all interval troops and field army units in the area, leaving the troops manning the actual fortifications outnumbered almost 10:1 by the Germans. And still the Germans had some serious problems initially. They persevered because they captured the retreat orders for the interval and field troops.
It wasn’t much of a test of the ease of taking ‘Maginot proper’ ouvrages. And when those were attacked from the rear afterward they did not fall, though in some cases significantly damaged: the clock ran out basically when the armistice came.
Likewise from German perspective they penetrated the ‘Maginot Line’ in the initial May offensive, since they didn’t make a categorical distinction between ‘real’ line and the also weak blockhouse-only extended line in the western part of Fortified Sector Montmedy. See Rommel’s memoirs about 7th Pz. Div ‘penetrating the Maginot Line’ in this sector, ie blowing past a pretty thin line of blockhouses not well prepared and in low visibility conditions.
But again, the well know fundamental problem of the Maginot Line was inability to build strong ouvrages well backed by interval troops and mobile heavy artillery over the whole length of threatened border where terrain wasn’t truly impassable. None of the new (post WWI) French defenses including those in the Alps, which virtually completely shut down the Italian offensive in June 1940, had long range heavy arty under armor or concrete. Counterbattery fire against heavy enemy siege guns, or heavy enemy artillery in enemy fortifications (like the Italian fort Chaberton neutralized by French mobile siege arty), relied on French mobile heavy artillery behind the line, or else the enemy siege arty would eventually pound the forts into submission. Similarly mobile artillery could contest direct firing Flak 88’s, though ouvrages with their own turret/casemate 75mm guns and 135mm howitzers also could and did neutralize direct firing 88’s in the sectors around Metz when attacked from the west. But again in areas of quick German success, along the Rhine as well, there weren’t such fortifications, nor interval troops or mobile arty backing the line by the time the Germans attacked.
This is the right kind of Zombie to bring back.
I never restart old threads, but if somebody else does I typically just don’t notice that the posts further up are from years ago, so I responded also to a 13 yr old one. It was about the Maginot Line, which I was also somewhat interested in in 2003, but that was before Jean-Yves Mary et al wrote Hommes Et Ouvrages de La Ligne Maginot in 5 volumes. That’s a must read for anyone really interested in the topic and at all able to fumble along in French, and I hadn’t read it in 2003.
As Tom Lehrer and others have pointed out, one thing that unites people along all these divides is anti-Semitism. And no where deeper was it culturally normal in the Soviet sphere countries, and the populations of Ukraine, Latvia, Lithuania (not to speak of the Nazi-allied Hungary) relished the removal of previous norms of acceptable Jew hatred, as the German insistence on Jews==Bolshevik menace allowed them to feel more justified in aiding the Final Solution.
Of course, Jews simultaneously are also the arch capitalists bankrupting the financial world for their ends. Go figure.
Wow. That’s a pretty extraordinary military action between one ally and another, I must say. What were the political ramifications anticipated and those actually occurring after the raid?
None of this explains why the French naval forces in North Africa actively fought *against *the Allies.
I assume De Gaulle was on board (sorry) with that action? As for Vichy France, why would Britain care what they thought?
For all effects and purposes, Vichy France was part of the Axis.
North Africa wasn’t the only place the British attacked them, by the way. One of the most interesting - and most forgotten - campaigns of the war was the Syria-Lebanon Campaign of 1941, in which British Empire forces invaded and captured Syria and Lebanon from the Vichy French. What was interesting about the campaign was the insane mix of British units taking part in the invasion: the force consisted of Brits, Australians, Indians, Free Czech, Free French, the Arab Legion (which would later become the Jordanian Army) and the Haganah (which would later form the core of the Israeli army), all fighting side by side.
Legalistically you could say, and I’m sure it was said at the time, that France had already broken the alliance by asking for terms independently. It was still too early for it to be clear exactly what the Pétain government’s attitudes to the Germans would be in a broader sense, but clearly no very high expectations were held as to their ability or willingness to re-join the war at any point, and times were pressing - a massive fleet like that potentially in the hands of the Germans or the Italians was obviously a major potential threat to supply lines through the Suez Canal and to the British effort against the Italians in North Africa. Also, it was politically imperative to demonstrate British determination to fight on.
At that point, de Gaulle was not in any significant position to influence events (the Pétain government still had representatives in London, and de Gaulle had so far attracted relatively few recruits), but in effect broadcast his agreement. But it did give the pro-Germans in French politics a huge propaganda weapon, which was used again and again through the Occupation.
Churchill later commented that if France had fought as well in 1940 as they did in Lebanon, England would still be on the Continent
“ouvrage”–bunker? fortification? [lot of word-formations with Fr. “work”]
Yes according to dictionaries ‘ouvrage’ translates to English as ‘work’, in the military sense of that term, ‘a defensive structure’. Specifically in the Maginot Line there were ‘gros ouvrage’ large works, which are the elaborate forts for which the line is best known, with turreted and/or casemated (protected all around by concrete, with a fairly narrow field of fire unlike the 360 deg turrets) artillery sticking up through the ground in apparently separate places, but tied together with a big underground system of ammunition magazines, barracks, power plants and underground passages, including sometimes little underground railways famous in pictures and films. The famous Belgian fort at Eben Emael, quickly seized in a coup de main by German glider troops in May 1940, is comparable to the bigger Maginot gros ouvrages, built at around the same time on a similar concept.
Then there were ‘petit ouvrage’ which were less powerful and more concentrated, typically with turrets but usually mounting only machine guns and anti-tank guns. Then there were independent so called infantry casemates with a few machine guns or antitank guns each, firing on narrow fields of fire, almost always to the flank. IOW they could fire at attackers who were passing by or had nearly reached the line being defended, but not typically those directly to the front. By the same token the front of the casemate could be protected by a thick barrier of earth and an enemy had to get at it from the side or top. Meanwhile, the next casemate down the line could in theory fire at enemy infantry or explosives carrying engineers trying to close in from the front against its neighbor.
In the areas the Maginot Line was actually penetrated by the Germans, there were no gros ouvrage, none of which fell to enemy action, only a few were seriously attacked. Although as mentioned the clock ran out on those German attacks in June 1940: no such fort was invulnerable, especially if friendly support couldn’t interfere with enemy siege artillery or heavy bombing. The Germans overcame a small number of petit ouvrage but mainly their ‘penetrations of the Maginot Line’ were against sectors containing only thin lines of infantry casemates, which might also be referred to as a blockhouses, bunkers or pillboxes (the smallest ones).
The problem Churchill faced was that if the Germans captured the French fleet, then England would surely be overtaken, and then the USA was also vulnerable.
For further information on this, search for “Churchill’s Deadly Decision”.