206: Defeat

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France was defeated. Why? Who? How?

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Hello everyone and welcome to History of the Second World War Episode 206 - The Fall of France - Defeat. This week a big thank you goes out to Kyle and Aurelia for choosing to support the podcast by becoming members. You can find out more about becoming a member over at historyofthesecondworldwar.com/members. On June 16th the French Prime Minister Reynaud had resigned, to be replaced by Marshal Petain, who immediately moved into armistice negotiations with the Germans. The armistice was then signed on June 22nd, and came into effect just 35 minutes after midnight on June 25. But by that point the signing of the armistice was mostly a formality, on June 17th Petain had announced to the French people that he was seeking an armistice and that ‘we must stop the fighting.’ On June 18th every French city and town of more than 20,000 people had been declared an open city, and would be handed over to the Germans without a fight. When the armistice came into effect the fighting in France was over, at least for another 4 years, and so the question for many Frenchmen became why? how? who? what sequence of decisions and mistakes had led them to defeat. Different groups and different individuals would have their own answers to these questions. Petain and his new government would place the blame squarely on the final pre-war governments, with particular blame placed upon the Socialists of the Popular Front. There would also be blame placed upon General Gamelin and the pre-war French military leadership. This blame would eventually result in the Riom trials of 1942, trials that will be covered in episode 32 of this series. But since we are at the end of the fighting, and this is a military history podcast, it feels like it is time to dig into the campaign as a whole to try and make our own determination of who is the blame for France’s defeat.

An appropriate place to start the investigation is probably at the lowest level, with the French soldiers. I think it is instructive to look at how the last few days of the campaign played out at the front, even if that front was rapidly changing due to the French retreat. On June 17th Petain had sent his radio broadcast that made it clear that France was going to surrender, and that fighting needed to stop, but at the front there was a shocking amount of fighting still happening. The declaration itself came as a shock to the vast majority of the French soldiers, even though relatively high up in the chain of command. Many knew that things were not going well, particularly those at the Corps command level who knew far more about the overall situation than those further down the list, but even those Corps commanders assumed that French resistance would continue for some time. The French were generally in retreat everywhere, and many of the military formations were sort of abandoned by French high command. This is best shown by the fact that on June 18th the French High Command would not issue any actual orders to the various armies, divisions, and units that were still retreating from the Germans. Without any new guidance on what to do, most simply continued on with their last orders, which meant a retreat to the Loire river or its surrounding areas. At levels below High Command most of the day and the days that followed would see officers trying to keep their units together as best as they could given the very difficult situation. In southern France efforts were being made to evacuate both France’s gold reserves and as many allied troops as possible, this included many of the Polish forces that remained in France. Hundreds of tons of both French and Belgian gold would be evacuated in this way from French ports to Africa, and 27,000 Polish soldiers would also be able to make their way to Britain to continue the fight against Germany. After June 18th several of the French armies suffered generally similar fates, they would be outpaced by the German mobile forces, surrounded, and forced to surrender. This would occur to the 2nd Army Group when Guderian reached the Swiss border, with the French armies that were trapped within slowly being squeezed by various German forces until they surrendered on the 22nd of June. Other divisions continued retreating south at varying levels of disorganization and confusion. Before the armistice went into effect there were some instances where particularly pilots would take matters into their own hands, with 19 Non commissioned officers and 115 pilot trainees finding their way across the channel to Britain in these final days. Elsewhere the fighting slowed down as the inevitability of the armistice became clear, with the Germans in particular slowing their pursuit of French forces outside of a few motorized elements that would continue to press on as quickly as possible. French resistance would continue, albeit at a small scale until the forces in the Maginot Line surrendered near the end of June, proving that French morale was far from shattered even under the pressures of the French defeats over the previous month and a half. What does all of this tell us? I would say that it speaks quite well of the majority of French soldiers. They had experienced very little but defeat and retreat for the better part of 5 weeks by the time that the armistice came into effect, and even in those last few days there would be real fighting between the Germans and the French. While many units would just sort of disintegrate during the retreat, a shockingly high number of soldiers stayed together during the long weeks of June. And before that retreat began the French Army had proven during the attacks of Case Red that they were still able to put up a fight and to cause real harm to the German forces that they faced.

On the complete opposite side of the spectrum we have the commander of the French Army, General Weygand. Weygand was not appointed to the position until May 17th, after the initial disasters had already occurred along France’s eastern border. This makes it difficult to blame him for all of the French armies failures, but he made a few critical mistakes immediately after taking command that exacerbated the situation, particularly due to the critical two days he would spend trying to determine what to do after taking command. One of the largest criticisms that can be leveled against the French army in 1940 is that time and time again it would lack the urgency that the situation demanded. During earlier wars, even during the First World War, this urgency was rarely required due to the slower pace of operations, however in 1940 it faced an enemy that used the tremendous tempo of armored operations to great success. On the Belgium plain in the early days of the campaign, along the Meuse at the various areas where the Germans crossed the river, after the Meuse when the German armored divisions were outpacing their infantry on the way to the coast, there were so many opportunities where the French Army could have taken advantage of the situation if they had acted quickly and decisively, but then they just didn’t. Instead there were many half measures, dreams of larger plans that were outdated by the time they were actually put into practice. And Weygand falls onto this list as well, because after spending 2 days trying to determine the exact course of action the plan that he developed, of an attack from the north and the south of the German salient, was already out of date, with the German forces changing the situation in ways that made the attack impossible. Once the attack was cancelled there was little that could be done for the troops trapped in the north, but Weygand resisted the idea of moving fully towards an evacuation policy like the British did, which increased confusion within the trapped forces. After Dunkirk the French Army was left with a much reduced force that had to try and hold against the German that everybody knew would be coming, and for this purpose Weygand chose to stake everything on the defense of the Somme and Aisne rivers. A new tactic was used, based around fortified villages and strongpoints which, in theory, would deny the Germans the ability to easily move through the countryside. For this new tactic, as always, inspiration was round on the battlefields of the First World War, with it being similar to what had been done to meet some of the German spring offensives of 1918, particularly by the French army in Champagne. There was just one small downside, it was almost inevitable that the troops would be surrounded, but this was almost part of the plan, with Weygand writing that “Above all things, should a unit find itself cut off from its neighbors it was not to withdraw but to fight on, holding up the enemy and endangering his advance. The utmost effort was to be made to deepen the zone of defense.” In theory these cut off units would then be relieved by fast and active counterattack forces that would push back the German advances, but by June 1940 the French Army had already lost most of the units that would have been used for this purpose. Instead, when a unit was cut off they were often cut off for good, and all they could do is resist as long as possible to slow the Germans down. To quote one French Prisoner of War from his writings while in a German prisoner of war camp: “When one doesn’t have what you need to furnish the front, one says to the troops: ‘It doesn’t matter. Form a series of enclosed strongpoints, to fight in all directions and hold to the death.’ If the enemy passes between the strongpoints, it’s not important, so long as the strongpoints hold. Yes, but most of the time, a strongpoint that has been bypassed collapses!!" What made things worse was a lack of radios which often made it difficult to even coordinate counterattacks when they were possible, or fire support to allow those trapped units to hold out longer. The end result of all of this was that more and more French troops were either killed or force to surrender, at a time when the French were already scrambling to get enough men into the field. Giving out orders to hold at all costs, while it did have its merits, also put the French Army in a situation in which it was ill prepared for when a breakthrough occurred, and the entire goal of the German Army was to achieve such a breakthrough. This meant that French units even behind the front would find themselves surrounded by German forces that had managed to push through the French lines entirely. All of these criticisms have to be balanced against the fact that there probably was not a winning formula for the French Army by the time that Case Red began on June 5th. I could spend an entire episode criticizing Weygand’s strategy during the first week of June, but I do not think I could provide an alternative with a greater chance of success. An area where I think criticism is more easily, and more validly, directed at Weygand is around his attitude and belief in victory, or his completely lack of belief in victory I guess. Weygand entered the French High Command on May 17th full of vim and vigor, believing that he brought with him the key to glorious triumph. When that was robbed from him after the cancellation of his initial attack, he seems to have simply lost the ability to see a path towards not even victory but anything other than total defeat. This mindset then cascaded down and around him, impacting the actions of the French army and the French government. Armies were simply told to retreat, with no real plan for what to do, sometimes without even orders, and in the French Cabinet Weygand became one of the most vocal advocates for surrender. While writing the orders that demanded that his men fight on no matter what, giving their lives for the defense of France, Weygand had already given up.

When evaluating the effectiveness of the French Army and Weygand, and all of the Army’s leadership like General Gamelin that Weygand replaced, some caution needs to be taken to separate what actually happened from what they were blamed for after the defeat. After the signing of the armistice Weygand, Petain, and the Vichy government in general would spend the next several years trying place the blame for France’s defeat in a very precise narrative. Their challenge was to blame the French Army leadership of the interwar period, and the French governments of the 1930s while also not encountering the fact that all of the Vichy leaders had participated in those governments, and had been active leaders of the Army during the interwar years. To thread this needle required many discussions of active sabotage and gross incompetence, which do not really have much evidence behind them, as would become apparent at Riom. But there are three areas that go a long way to explaining why France was defeated in the spring of 1940. The first we have already discussed earlier in this episode, a lack of urgency among the military leadership, which resulted in sluggish and sometimes non-existent reactions to German actions. The second challenge was a lack of proper equipment, which was most telling in the areas of anti-tank guns and in tanks themselves. For anti-tank guns, as would happen for many nations during the early years of the war the French Army simply did not have enough anti-tank guns, which was only partially rectified by the adaptability of the French Artillerymen who quickly started using their 75mm artillery guns in a direct fire anti-tank mode. They did not have enough of the right kinds of tanks either, with critical design flaws in otherwise very capable tanks like the Char B1 bis making it difficult to use on the battlefield. The third challenge was that there was not enough equipment in reserve when things went wrong, like when most of the best divisions of the French Army might get trapped by the Germans and forced to abandon most of their equipment. This challenge is more indicative of the challenges that France faced during rearmament, with it being difficult to produce the volume of equipment required by the French Army to be successful in a modern war. When the fighting started they had not even fully equipped all of the units that were at the front, let alone created any kind of stockpile should they be required. The lack of additional equipment made the manpower shortages even more problematic because not only were the French heavily outnumbered by June, they were also missing important equipment and weapons. Also, a special mention goes out to the British when trying to determine the causes of France’s defeat but at least some portion of the blame belongs in London. In some respects the British were even less prepared than the French to fight against the Germans in 1940, and they were also in a position to constantly hedge their bets against a French defeat, which made them far from an ideal ally. Even when Churchill replaced Chamberlain at Prime Minister and brought with him a different view of Britain’s role in defending against Germany, the British were far from being all-in with the French. From our perspective today we can see that this was an important part of the final defeat of Germany, due to the importance of Britain and the British Isles later in the war, but that does not mean that the decisions of the British leaders that allowed for that possibility did not directly contribute to France’s surrender in June 1940.

While the Germans would decisively defeat France, this victory was not without a cost. The official numbers for casualties over the course of the entire campaign were 156,000, of which about 45,000 were killed or missing. Now this is a drop in the bucket for the overall numbers of German casualties during the war, but was over three times the number of casualties that the German military suffered during the invasion of Poland 9 months before. The interesting thing about these numbers is just that top line number, but the fact that the majority of the casualties, around 57 percent of them, came not during the opening assaults during May but instead during Case Red in June. While by that point the French army was much diminished in terms of both numbers and material, the Germans also no longer benefited from surprise which was such a major factor during the early parts of the campaign. Along with the manpower that was lost, in the air the Luftwaffe lost about a 1/4 of all of the aircraft that it committed to the campaign, which meant around 1,200 total German aircraft would be destroyed. The losses would be the heaviest among the bombers, with a 30% attrition rate among medium and light bombers and a similar number among the Stuka squadrons. These losses would become critical when the Luftwaffe was called upon to undertake its greatest task of the war in the months that followed, the air assault on Britain, at which point it really could have used the bombers that were lost over France, and the over 1,100 airmen that were lost in those aircraft. In the air allied losses were larger than the German figure, but the exact number is a bit harder to determine, the British lost somewhere around 1,000 aircraft, with the French losing around 650 maybe, there are some pretty wild swings in the Allied numbers based on exactly how you count the numbers, the timeframe you include, and if you take the war as a whole or just operations over France and the low countries. What we do know is that both in terms of aircrew and aircraft the Germans lost less than the French and British combined. On the ground the Allies suffered somewhere around 325,000 total casualties, not including prisoners of war, but the numbers again are very flimsy here you can find numbers ranging 50,000 either side of of that 325,000 number, I have even seen French numbers that were over 325,000 by themselves. Among the French forces in particular there were wild swings from one division to another around total casualties due to where they might be positioned and often where specifically they were positioned in June. For example one French division, the 29th Alpine, would lose about 93% of its officers during the June fighting, with many of those confirmed killed or wounded. Along with the manpower losses, on the Allied side the losses in equipment were staggering. During the evacuations from Dunkirk, the French retreats and surrenders in the north, and then the long retreats of June huge numbers of everywhere from infantry weapons, artillery, trucks, and everything in between were captured by the Germans. This included 2.8 million tons of fuel that were captured among all of the territory taken by the Germans during their invasions, and enough trucks to motorize multiple infantry divisions, trucks that would still be in use during Operation Barbarossa over a year later. Even if all of the vehicles were partially worn, and would be difficult to find spare parts and replacements for, the mass of equipment captured by the Germans was a tremendous boon for an army that was already having issues fully equipping its divisions. Some of the equipment, particularly French artillery captured during the campaign, would still be in use 4 years later when it was used by the Germans against Allied forces in the second invasion of France.

With the end of the fighting between Germany and France also came the beginning of the occupation. The exact structure of that occupation, and the events that would occur in France during the occupation are beyond the scope of this episodes series, although do not worry, a dedicated series to the life of those in occupied Europe is already in the works. But at a high level there were four major considerations when it came to life in occupied France: the separation between the occupied and Vichy zones, occupation payments, prisoners of war, and the economy. The new French government would have to deal with the separation between the occupied areas of northern France and then the more independent areas of southern France that was under the direct control of the Vichy leaders. This also of course involved the relationship between the Vichy government and Germany, which was a relationship that would shift and change drastically over the years of the occupation both in terms of expectations and reality. At least initially the Vichy leaders hoped that there would be a good relations with Germany, especially if they proved that they could work with the German government through collaborating with their requests and demands. The long term goal was to take control of the occupied territories back from the Germans through some kind of treaty or agreement, and also to end the payment of occupation payments. These payments would begin almost immediately after the armistice was signed, and would amount to around 400 million Francs per day which covered all of the money required by the occupied forces in northern France plus a considerable amount of other items. The exact number of occupation payments would also change over the years, decreasing in 1941 before ramping up in the years that followed. These changes had little to do with the Germans feeling bad that they were essentially impoverishing all of France, but instead based on concerns that they were extracting too much money and that was hampering the French economy. Germany’s goal in France, unlike in Eastern Europe, was that France’s economy could be incorporated into the German war machine, with raw materials and finished goods all exported to Germany to fuel the Wehrmacht. But they hoped that the French companies and the existing French economic organization could be retained, lessening the load on the German political apparatus. This would cause a decrease in occupation payments due to the growing belief that they were so high that the French economy could not function well enough to be exploited by the Germans. The French prisoners of war also played into this area as well, because around 1.8 million Frenchmen had been taken prisoner during the campaign, mostly towards the end. Some of these prisoners were released back to France, especially those that played important and hard to replace roles within French industry, but the vast majority of the prisoners would remain in Germany for the rest of the war. The Vichy leaders hoped to eventually change all of this, and to bring France into a position of independence within a German controlled Europe, a position that they would never achieve and never really have a chance to achieve due to the continued resistance of Britain. Germany placed alot of emphasis on the signing of an official peace treaty to end the war, instead of just the armistice of June 1940, and it was only during those final peace negotiations that many of the sanctions and controls over France would finally end. The fact that Great Britain continued to fight meant that Germany refused to begin those negotiations for an end to the war, and so France would continue to be occupied. Speaking of Britain, next episode will jump over the English channel to discuss the views from London on the fall of France and what the future might hold.