Sorting fact from fiction: The Maginot Line and the French army in the Second World War

The events of six short weeks in the spring of 1940 have indelibly impressed themselves upon the history of western civilization. France, a nation that had exerted practically legendary effort during the First World War, was swiftly defeated and occupied by the Germans. This much practically everyone knows. What is less well known, however, is how tenuous some of the common-knowledge historical conclusions about these events are. To illustrate this assertion, let us consider a few true/false questions: T/F T/F T/F T/F T/F France surrendered unconditionally to Germany in 1940. The French army did not return to combat against Germany after 1940. The Maginot Line was a failure. The French suffered hardly any casualties in 1940. The performance of the Red Army in its first six weeks of combat against the Wehrmacht was materially better than that of the French army in 1940. The performance of the U. S. Army in its first six weeks of combat against the Wehrmacht was materially better than that of the French army in 1940. The French army was the only Allied army of the Second World War to experience the surrender of entire divisions.

T/F

T/F

Would it surprise you to know that the answer to all of these questions is False? While it is indisputable that France was badly defeated by Germany in 1940, it is an event that is most accurately viewed in the context of other events of the period. Strangely, many who refer to the French defeat of 1940 fail to recognize that another wartime ally, Great Britain, was just as badly surprised and effectively routed by the German offensive into France. Had Hitler not prevented the advance of German armored troops, the British Expeditionary Force would have been captured on the coast of France. More tellingly, in the first six weeks of the German invasion of Russia, the Red Army suffered amazingly devastating defeats and lost huge amounts of men and material to the advance of Hitlers armies i.e., a performance comparable to that of Frances in 1940. One key difference in the Russian experience was that Russia had two qualities that France lacked: space, and therefore, time. Time was the true key, for as effective as Blitzkrieg operations were, the Germans lacked the logistical wherewithal to keep Blitzkrieg sustained for more than a few weeks at a time. Truth be told, nobody was ready to effectively counter Blitzkrieg in 1940 or 1941. Prior to the outbreak of the Second World War, France invested tremendous resources into securing their border with Germany. The First World Wars casualties, while serious for Germany, had been devastating for France. Quite literally, an entire generation of men (and consequently, the descendants they could have fathered) had fallen. The

manpower shortage was still impacting France in 1940, and forced a national military strategy that was very costly in terms of money, and yet exercised economy of force in terms of manpower. The French solution to the manpower shortage had been to build the Maginot Line, a chain of large and sophisticated fortresses and smaller works that extended from the Swiss frontier to the frontier with Belgium. The objective of the Maginot Line was to discourage attacks from Germany directly into France across their common border. By forcing the Germans to go around the Maginot Line, the French intended to meet any German invasion on grounds of French choosing (i.e., outside of France) and with the mobile elements of the French army. To this end, the Maginot Line was an outstanding success. To avoid a frontal assault of the Maginot Line, the Wehrmacht pivoted through Belgium, Luxembourg, and Holland. The French had expected as much but the Germans still achieved surprise by pushing several armored divisions through the heavily forested and rugged terrain of the Ardennes. The Germans exited the Ardennes near the town of Sedan while the best units of the French army had swung farther north into Belgium, expecting to meet and defeat the main German thrust between Liege and Brussels. Thus, at Sedan, an unfortunate division of overage French reservists was shattered by the German armored thrust that emerged from the Ardennes. Moving beyond Sedan, the Germans headed for the Channel coast and succeeded in splitting the Allied armies into two parts. The Allies best units were cut off in Belgium, and the second string of the French army was desperately attempting to rally after the defeat at Sedan and to re-establish a cohesive front. Cut off from their source of supply, the French units in Belgium were left with the option of eventual surrender or evacuation to Great Britain. While fighting continued into the third week of June, the campaign had been won by Germany when their tanks reached the English Channel. It is tempting to speculate what might have happened had the main French force met their German counterpart in or near the Ardennes. A large tank battle fought near the town of Merdorp provides some insight to this question. Two German armored divisions that were supporting one of the flanking German field armies fought a two-day meeting engagement with French armored cavalry forces under the command of General Prioux. It was a clash of mechanized elites, and the outcome was a tactical victory for the French (the advance of the German divisions was halted). While the fighting around Merdorp is today largely unknown, it was at that time the largest tank battle in history. Had Prioux and his colleagues been farther south, near Sedan, they may have been able to inflict severe enough losses on the Panzers to stop the thrust to the Channel . . . During these events, the fortress infantry regiments of the Maginot Line had held firm. Even after the Germans got behind the Maginot Line, they found the forts still practically impervious to assault. However, France as a nation was defeated and signed an armistice with the Germans. Faced with a combination of the inevitable and orders from higher, the troops of the Maginot Line surrendered as well. Some troops, like those at Schoenenbourg, made a point of holding out a few extra days to underline to the Germans that the Maginot Line had not been defeated in combat. In six brutal weeks, the French army suffered over 90,000 men killed.

The armistice allowed most of the southern half of France to remain unoccupied by the Germans. This unoccupied region had the town of Vichy as its capital, and was thus known as Vichy France. The armistice further stipulated that Vichy France was expected to be neutral unless attacked by an outside power. The authorities in Vichy France were allowed to keep a small, lightly equipped army. The armistice presented an exquisite dilemma for France: while allowing a large region of the country to escape occupation by the Germans, it also effectively held that same region of France hostage to the demands of the Germans. The French realized that if they displeased Hitler, all of France would be occupied. French authorities outraged by events of 1940 therefore had to balance their desire for revenge against the desire to provide for the welfare of the French people. The French relationship with the allies became even more complex after the British attacked their Mediterranean Fleet at Mers-el-Kebir, Algeria. After France signed the armistice with the Germans, the British determined the French Mediterranean Fleet posed a potential threat of great danger to British naval operations in the Mediterranean. Therefore, in July 1940, the British sailed their fleet to Mers-el-Kebir, where the French fleet lay in anchorage. The British demanded the French fleet join them or face destruction. The French, who had just signed an armistice and an effective declaration of neutrality, refused to agree to the British demand. The British were good to their word, and in the ensuing attack, thousands of French sailors were killed. Following their humiliating defeat at the hands of the Germans, the effect of the British attack on the French attitude toward the Allies can be well imagined. Many French saw the British attack as unwarranted and opportunistic. As a result, the French military stationed in the French colonies of the Levant and northwest Africa became anti-British and anti-German at the same time. Relations were further strained in 1941 by a German-inspired adventure in Iraq that culminated in Allied invasions of both Iraq and the French colonies of Lebanon and Syria. By this time, General De Gaulle had succeeded in organizing pro-Allied Free French forces of approximately divisional strength. To prove the determination of the Free French to the Allied cause, De Gaulle ensured that part of the Allied invasion force into Syria and Lebanon included the Free French troops. This resulted in French-on-French battles, and further bitterness within French ranks in both groups because of the sheer murderous irony of the situation. The unstable political situation of Vichy France, and the Vichy France versus Free France conflicted lasted until the invasion of French Northwest Africa by the U.S. and Great Britain in November 1942. While there were secret attempts by the U.S. to engineer a peaceful collapse of the Vichy regime in Algeria and Morocco, they only partially succeeded. As a result, relatively few French generals (and obviously, none of troops) were aware of the impending Allied landing. Again, unfortunate results ensued in the form of Vichy French troops fighting for a couple of days against the allied troops. However, the Allies had been politically sophisticated enough to give the U.S. the apparent primary role in the operation. After the shock of the invasion subsided, the French army in northwest Africa wanted to be on the side of the U.S. (their distrust of Great Britain notwithstanding) much more than it wanted to be associated with

Germany. In this fashion, the French forces in Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia joined the Allied forces. The French army in northwest Africa had done this without authorization of the Vichy authorities in France. Regardless, Hitler considered the French to be in default of their armistice terms, and German forces promptly occupied both southern France and the ports of Tunisia. At this point, the terms of the 1940 armistice were moot, and the Vichy regime was defunct. De Gaulle had political conflicts with former Vichy authorities in northwest Africa to settle, but essentially all Frenchmen not under occupation rallied to Free France at this point. As far as the U.S. experience went, the first weeks of combat against the Germans proved painful, and eventually resulted in the relief of a corps commander. To be blunt, the Americans in Tunisia proved every bit as amateurish as the French had in 1940, and the accompanying British forces under General Anderson werent much better. Had the Allies in Tunisia faced a more powerful German force, the Allies might well have found themselves thrown back into Algeria. As it was, they hung on by their nails and eventually brought the situation under control. Apparently, putting theory into practice was a difficult transition for any army, even one like the U.S. Army, who had enjoyed the luxury of reviewing operations in Europe from across the ocean and while at a state of peace. Ironically, the one Allied force in Tunisia that did not underestimate German capabilities was the French army. Following the Allied victory in Tunisia, the U.S. agreed to re-equip the French army to a standard similar to that used by the U.S. Army. This was a farsighted decision whose only fault was that it wasnt pursued on a broader scale. As it was, the program reequipped eight French divisions and organized them on lines similar to those of the U.S. Army. The officers and soldiers of this force were a far cry from the French army of 1940. The Frenchmen in this force were hard-bitten career soldiers who had long service in the sparse conditions of the colonies. As well, there were common soldiers who were Algerians, Moroccans, Senegalese, or Tunisians and well accustomed to hardship and harsh discipline from childhood on. This hard core of human material was complemented by a burning desire for revenge against Germany for the humiliation of 1940. Subsequent to the Tunisian campaign, this new French force lost no battles to the Germans. They were competently led as well by such men as General Leclerc, who had practically single-handedly organized an incredible march with colonial troops out of central Africa, across Chad and Libya, and into Tunisia to participate in the final battles there. Starting with a corps, the French Army of Liberation (as the Free French were now called) ejected the Germans from Sardegna, Corsica, and Elba. The advance that proved the key to dislodging the Germans from the strongpoint on Monte Cassino was accomplished by French troops, after many other Allied forces had struggled fruitlessly in the famous battle. In southern France, French troops effected rapid capture of the cities of Toulon and Marseille, and then fought northward on the left flank of the U.S. Seventh Army. The liberation of large areas of France resulted in new sources of French manpower. The U.S. and Great Britain declined to arm and organize new French units, so the French used captured equipment and stretched their logistical train to extremes

in order to organize several new divisions and independent brigades and regiments. By September 1944, the French had two corps in action against the Germans, and so they formed a field army command (French First Army). As the Allied advance to the German frontier slowed down in the autumn of 1944, the French army took the right flank position. By November, the Germans had dug in behind the Westwall (the German border fortifications), and fighting along the front had assumed a positional character. The French, however, proved capable enough to keep moving forward at a time when the other Allied armies had ground to a halt. After forcing the Belfort Gap and near the Vosges Mountains town of Burnhaupt, the French First Army bounced a German corps out of its position and promptly destroyed it, resulting in scathing accusations from Hitler of treachery in the German chain of command. This victory allowed the French to reach the Rhine River in the area where France and Switzerland meet. Further north, the U.S. Seventh Army attacked and pinned German troops in their positions near the town of Saint-Di. While this was happening, General Leclercs 2nd French Armored Division poured through a hole in the German lines, unhinged the entire German defense in the region, forced the Saverne Gap, and liberated Strasbourg on the Rhine in a lightning offensive that, in concert with the Burnhaupt fighting in the south, reduced the German presence in Alsace to an oval-shaped bridgehead called the Colmar Pocket. Four and one-half years had passed since May 1940, and much to the chagrin of the Germans, the French army that emerged from the cauldron of defeat proved an apt student. Strangely, senior U.S. generals held the same assumption about the Ardennes in December 1944 that the French had held in May 1940 that the region was essentially unsuited for offensive operations. The Germans held no such assumption and mounted a 26-division counterstroke into the Ardennes, hoping to once again split the Allied armies into two parts. The massive clash in the Ardennes drew U.S. forces northward, and stretched the defensive lines of the U.S. Seventh Army and the French First Army very taught. The Germans exploited this condition on New Years Day 1945 with an attack of several divisions into Alsace. After two months of bitter combat on the Alsatian plains, the German forces were finally thrown back across the Rhine or behind the Westwall. By mid-March 1945, the Americans and French were ready to assault the Westwall in the region of the Wissembourg Gap (an open area east of the steep, forested hills of the Pfalz) and the Bienwald (a large forest on the Franco-German border). For this assault, two groups were organized. On the left, the U.S. 14th Armored Division would attack through the Wissembourg Gap. On the right, the French Corps Task Force Monsabert was to assault the Bienwald. In ten days of hard fighting, the Westwall in front of the Seventh Army and the French First Army was penetrated, and the Germans were cleared out of the Bienwald. The fighting cost the Germans 1,300 prisoners and destroyed the German 905th Division. Following this attack, U.S. and French forces moved up to the Rhine River in the area between Mannheim and Karlsruhe. Not much later, both U.S. and French forces crossed the Rhine in this area and drove into Germany against an increasingly disorganized opponent. But while the Seventh

Army got temporarily hung up around Heilbronn and the Jagst River Valley in early April, the French pushed rapidly through the northern reaches of the Black Forest, capturing Pforzheim and encircling the German XVIII SS Corps. The German SS Corps was rapidly destroyed before the baffled SS commanders could organize a coherent defense. Subsequently, the French captured Stuttgart, Ulm, and the southern part of the Black Forest. The end of the war found their forward forces in the Austrian Alps. After the defeat of 1940, the French army suffered another 58,000 KIA while supporting Allied operations. As well, an estimated 24,000 members of the French resistance were killed during the German occupation of France. In a final twist of bitter irony for the French, France also lost 38,000 KIA from the provinces of Alsace and Lorraine fighting for the German army. This odd condition resulted because Germany reclaimed Alsace and Lorraine after defeating France in 1940. Because Germany considered Alsace and Lorraine to be German provinces, the French there were drafted by Germany, and subsequently, these unfortunate men died after having been forced to serve in the enemys army! In summary, there is very little cut and dried about Frances political situation or military contributions during World War II. The war put France through a political wringer, and the France that emerged at the conclusion of the war was far different from the one that declared war on Germany in 1939. American collective memory of France in the war focuses almost exclusively on the events of 1940. For those looking more deeply, however, the truer nature of modern, postwar France and its army are to be found in the events that took place after 1940 for the relatively unmotivated and uncertain France of 1940 was completely swept away by the scathing experience of defeat and occupation.

W. B. Wilson January 2012