Surrender Monkeys

(Many comments have been added to this entry on February 1.)

Fascinated by “the rapidity and apparent ease with which the German Blitzkreig subdued France,” VFR reader Larry T. sends this selection from Niall Ferguson’s War of the World, pp. 387-89, discussing the collapse of France in June 1940:

…The Poles had fought courageously, but they were outnumbered and outgunned. The most striking thing about the war in the West the following year was that the opposite was true. It was perhaps predictable that the Dutch and Belgians would succumb to superior German forces, but the fall of France within a matter of just six weeks was, as the historian Marc Bloch said, a ‘strange defeat’. Even without the support of the British Expeditionary Force, the French forces were superior on paper, an advantage that ought to have been magnified by their fighting a defensive campaign. They had twice the number of wheeled vehicles and 4,638 tanks to the German 4,060. Moreover, French tanks had thicker armour and bigger guns. Yet when the German offensive was launched on May 10, 1940, many units put up only token resistance. On May 15 General Erwin Rommel’s 7th Panzer Division was able to take 450 prisoners in the course of two small skirmishes; later they captured 10,000 in the space of two days. ‘Rommel himself was struck by the readiness of the French officers to give themselves up, and by their insouciant requests, including, among other things, permission to keep their batmen and to have their kit picked up from Philippeville, where it had been left’. Another German officer saw ‘several hundred French officers who had marched 35 kilometres without any guard from a prisoner of war dispatch point to a prisoner of war transit station… with apparently none having made their escape’. Karl von Stackelberg, a reporter in one of the new ‘propaganda companies’, was baffled: ‘20,000 men… were heading backwards as prisoners… It was inexplicable… How was it possible, these French soldiers with their officers, so completely downcast, so completely demoralized, would allow themselves to go more or less voluntarily into imprisonment?’ British soldiers captured in 1940 could not help noticing that ‘the French had been prepared for capture and so were laden down with kit, while we were all practically empty-handed.’ In all, around 1.8 million French troops were taken prisoner in 1940, of whom nearly a million were kept in Germany as forced labourers until 1945. It is true that perhaps as many as half of those who surrendered did so in the period between June 17, when the new Prime Minister, Marshal Petain, announced that he was seeking an armistice, and its implementation five days later. But it is still remarkable that more than a third of the French army had already been taken prisoner before Petain’s statement. Indicative of the poor state of morale is the fact that colonial troops from French Africa fought with more determination than their supposed masters; their units certainly took heavier casualties.

What lay behind the French collapse? To Liddell Hart—who was so appalled by the outbreak of war that he suffered a nervous breakdown— it was essentially a failure of military doctrine: “The panzer forces’ thrust could have been stopped long before reaching the Channel by a concentrated counterstroke with similar forces. But the French, though having more and better tanks than the enemy, had strung them out in small packets… The one British armoured division available was not dispatched to France until after the German offensive was launched, and this arrived too late for the first, and decisive, phase… This Blitzkrieg pace was only possible because the Allied leaders had not grasped the new technique, and so did not know how to counter it … Never was a great disaster more easily preventable.”

Marc Bloch agreed that the debacle was due at least in part to the abysmal quality of French generalship. A decisive factor was the German decision to switch the direction of their main attack from Luxembourg and the Low Countries, as Hitler had originally planned, to the line running between Liege and Namur, through the supposedly impenetrable forests of the Ardennes. The French would have fared better against the original strategy; they were wholly taken by surprise when five panzer divisions thrust their way through the Ardennes and captured the bridges over the River Meuse. Thereafter, their reactions were culpably slow or inept. Yet what happened in 1940 was more than just a military failure. At root, as Bloch argued, it was a collapse of morale. Even during the ‘Phoney War’ of late 1939 and early 1940, Lieutenant-General Alan Brooke, who commanded the British Expeditionary Force’s 2nd Corps, had been deeply troubled by the mood of the French army, which he was inclined to attribute to the defensive character of French strategy. The heavily fortified Maginot Line’s ‘most dangerous aspect’ as it ran down the border with Germany, Brooke noted in his diary, was ‘the psychological one; a sense of false security is engendered, a feeling of sitting behind an impregnable iron fence; and should the fence perchance be broken then French fighting spirit [might well] be brought crumbling with it!’ There was more to French defeatism than this, however. To many Frenchmen, the Third Republic simply did not seem worth dying for, when so many of their fathers, brothers and friends had died. for it already between 1914 and 1918. This was the mood—the refusal to pursue another Pyrrhic victory—that had been foreshadowed in Louis-Ferdinand Celine’s Voyage au bout de Ja nuit (1932), with its stomach-churning evocation of the slaughter of the last war’s opening phase. The same mood inspired the Nobel laureate Roger Marrin Du Gard’s letter to a friend in September r936: ‘Anything rather than war! Anything.. . even Fascism in Spain… Even Fascism in France: Nothing, no trial, no servitude can be compared to war: Anything, Hitler rather than war!’ In the words of one German officer: ‘French spirit and morale had been… broken… before the battle even began. It was not so much the lack of machinery… that had defeated the French, but that they did not know what they were fighting for… The Nazi revolution had already won the Battle of France before our first armoured divisions went to work.’ Some Frenchmen on the Right, no doubt, saw distinct advantages to a German victory. Most, however, simply underestimated the costs of defeat. It is unlikely that the French would have surrendered in such large numbers and in such an orderly fashion if they had not expected these costs to be comparatively light. The assumptions clearly were that, with the war seemingly over, they would soon be returned to their native land; and that any German occupation would be short lived. Some senior generals seem to have been more worried about a possible left-wing revolt at home than by the prospects of German occupation. These expectations were rooted in the more distant memories of 1871 rather than 1914. They were to be bitterly confounded. The French Left melted away. The Germans stayed.

Larry T. adds:

The behavior of the French today is similar to their behavior in 1940. I don’t know what it is going to take for these people to save themselves. Like you, I am not a determinist. At the same time, there is little reason for optimism. There doesn’t seem to be a French Churchill on the horizon.

LA replies:

This reminds me of the devastating scene in Churchill’s The Gathering Storm, when the French premier Paul Reynaud calls him on May 17, 1940, just one week after the German invasion of the West has begun, and announces with finality that the French lines have collapsed and the Germans are pouring into France and the war is over. Churchill, stunned, flies to France that same day to meet with the French leaders. Churchill asks Gen. Gamelin, the commander in chief of the French army: “Ou est la masse de maneouvre? Where is your strategic reserve?” (meaning additional forces behind the front lines that can rush forward to fill a gap). And Gamelin answers with a Gallic shrug, as though it were a matter of complete indifference to him, “There is none.”

- end of initial entry -

Vishal M. writes:

I have always thought that the quick surrender worked very well for French— they didnt lose many men and escaped a lot of destruction. Of course, the quick surrender doomed others—Jews, Russians, Poles—but the French suffered less than any warring country in WWII.

Adam C. writes:

Great topic today, the passivity and collapse of France in World War II. I have seen it claimed a number of places that one can view World War I and World War II as one interconnected whole, just as ripples made in a swimming pool bounce against a wall and return, amplified, a minute later. I have seen some historians talk of the two wars as a single event, Western Civilization in total war against itself, 1914-1945.

The foundational event here was the barbaric, mechanized, inhuman trench warfare of WWI. And one can say that the horrors of battles such as the Somme, Passchendaele, and the Battle of the Frontiers was what initiated the breaking the back of Western Civilization. VFR readers who have read any histories of the outbreak of WWI, for example Barbara Tuchman’s “The Guns of August” or Robert Massie’s “Dreadnought,” have probably felt a feeling of shock and sadness in the descriptions of the almost unrecognizable confidence, pride, health, fertility, and virility that marked pre-war Europe.

WWI seemed to lead to a collapse of the traditional sources of European authority, most concretely the hereditary monarchies. But the common people who were among the few to survive going over the top to attack and get mowed down against defensive lines of barbed wire, machine gun nests, and artillery barrages, also lost faith in their generals, their government ministers, and their God. The two sides facing each other over the Western Front intended to destroy the heart of the other’s civillization, to “bleed the other white,” and, with the aid of modern science, largely succeeded.

It seems to me that many of the pathologies of the modern world grew directly out of, or in concert with, the trauma of World War I: state communism, fascism, Nazism, massive state bureaucracies, European anti-nationalism, post-modernism, militant Third Worldism, the growing de-militarized passivity of Europe, and, in general, the deligitizmation of social hierarchy, religion, the white people, and of Western Civilization. Continental art was beautiful and European philosophy life-affirming before the war; their art has been ugly and their philosophy alienated and hateful ever since.

As Churchill wrote in his autobiography, “War, which used to be cruel and magnificent, has now become cruel and squalid. In fact it has been completely spoilt. It is all the fault of Democracy and Science … Instead of a small number of well-trained professionals championing their country’s cause with ancient weapons and a beautiful intricacy of archaic manoeuvre, sustained at every moment by the applause of their nations, we now have entire populations, including even women and children, pitted against one another in brutish mutual extermination, and only a set of blear-eyed clerks left to add up the butcher’s bill.”

LA replies:

Adam has summed up the conventional view of World War I and I agree with it. However, I don’t think the complete demoralization he describes set in immediately. Europe in the ‘20s and ‘30s recovered a lot of vitality. It was the combined effect of both wars that really seems to have done them in, plus, one must add, the post World War II liberalism that was spread and imposed by the United States, which further broke down the legitimacy of the European nations and their empires. If racial guilt over colonialism has played the same role in the self-delegitimization of the Europeans as guilt over racial discrimination has played in America, isn’t it the case that it was the Americans who were in the forefront of delegitimizing the European empires, which led not only to a loss of self-confidence in the European countries, but to the various catastrophes in the Third World attendant on the precipitate termination of the European empires after World War II? As VFR reader “Conservative Swede” has written, the hyper liberalism for which American conservatives now criticize Europe originally emanated from America and was then adopted and taken in a more radical direction by Europe. The Europeans, in short, have been our too devoted pupils. What force in the world is a greater enemy of the old order than America itself, with our irritating insistence that everyone become liberal and democratic like us?

But certainly it was the first war that initially broke the faith in the old order and it never recovered. I see the First World War as a unique catastrophe in the history of the West, and over the years I’ve often fantasized various scenarios by which it might have been avoided or shortened. As in a science fiction story, I’ve imagined alternative histories, taking place in a different dimension of time, in which it never occurred or ended much more quickly. What if the British had not turned back in the Dardanelles in April 1915, leading to the catastrophe of Gallipoli, but had taken Istanbul and opened up a second front? Or what if Germany had not been stopped at the Marne and had won a quick victory in 1914?

At the same time, it is not fair to speak of the old order, since the forces that led to the catastrophe were not old but new—a very modern belief in the Will, in the unlimited self-assertion of the national state and of entire peoples, enhanced by unprecedented fire power. As Churchill put it, “It is all the fault of Democracy and Science.” If that view is correct, then the old order, meaning aristocracy, authority, religion, and traditional and bourgeois morality, were unfairly blamed for forces and events that were not of the old order but were themselves the opposite of the old order.

Maureen writes:

One aspect of the urge to surrender is related to the effects of unconscious wholescale genetic engineering. What happens to the genetic capabilities of a country whose best warriors have been destroyed systematically every twenty years over a period of 100 years? Answer: The male dregs get to breed the succeeding generation of males. Abject military failure or a too costly (draining) military victory contributes to the birth of an anaemic, effete population and culture.

The consequences for a country of a dwindling pool of virile, self-sacrificing, brave men with which to breed the next generation is often openly discussed in Russia, where Death in the form of huge losses from WWI, the Civil War, Stalin’s elimination of political rivals, WWII and mass starvation wiped the best Russian men, not to mention their families, from the gene pool.

The men who were left were the lame, the mentally defective, jailed criminals, the pusillanimous, the psychologically devious—basically, contrary to Darwin, the survival of the Un-Fittest.

As Bernard Schwartz said in “The Diversity Myth”: “… the energies exhausted in the killing of 70 million people from 1914 to 1945 … contributed to Europe’s postwar stability.”

It was a stability bought at the price of war—of removing a significant portion of feisty males from the breeding pool.

LA replies:

Interesting theory. But does it hold up in the case of France? It was only in WWI that France endured great losses. The Franco Prussian War was brief, and the French surrendered so quickly in World War II that their losses were limited. So we do not see the best French men systematically destroyed every 20 years over the last 100 years. However, the First World War was so devastating to France that by itself it may be enough to make Maureen’s theory work.

And what she’s saying is amazing, isn’t it? The countries that ardently sent millions of men to their deaths in World War I are now afraid to eat a peach.

Maureen writes:

Don’t forget the French Revolution’s culling of France’s ruling class of the best (and worst) and brightest, including, eventually, those who merely wore clean clothes, in 1793, followed by Napoleon’s wars in Egypt and Russia where his poor military planning sent thousands of Frenchmen to their deaths either by disease or frostbite. Then in the death throes of his regime, Napoleon sent more Frenchmen to die against the English. Napoleon’s wars alone decimated two generations of Frenchmen.

Jeremy G. writes:

I disagree that a possible long term reduction in “strong” men from the gene pool is the problem. I don’t see any reason to believe the casualties were not distributed relatively uniformly throughout the male population. Almost every male went to war. Furthermore, the United States did not take nearly the high level of casualties as Russia and Germany and we are in the same exact mess. Switzerland stayed out of both wars and is also in a serious mess. In the American Civil War between the North and South, the southerners lost a huge percentage of their men, but afterwards contributed far out of proportion to America’s military services and continued to resist liberalism. After WWII, despite losing 20 million people to the war and tens of millions more to the purges, Russia was very agressive and proceeded immediately to gobble up Eastern Europe. Following the decline of Communism, and in the face of declining birth rates, Russia is becoming a more nationalistic country. The enemy we face is liberal ideology. An ideology that became more attractive to an exhausted European population. Our gene pool is not the problem. How much courage does it take to defend a border with Mexico? However, the question of what happened to all the women without potential mates is an interesting one.

Daniel writes:

The point that racial guilt over historic colonialism has played a big part in leaving present European society prostrate in front of the incessant demands of mulsim immigrants and others is correct, but I think that it is only a partial explanation. Consider that Sweden, Norway and Denmark had no colonial empire. Italy never really got going in that business, Belgium lost the major part of her empire early in the 20th century, and the Dutch empire was so detached and remote that it did not press much upon the minds of the Dutch people. Besides, none of these nations, with the exception of Italy, had any connection with muslim north Africa.

The immigration importation schemes of these countries, starting as a trickle in the late 1960’s and becoming a torrent by the 80’s and continuing up to today, has another justification, albeit a silly one, a very silly one, but a very real one, in my opinion. Ghetto Envy. Today’s Euro elite, who came of age in the 1960s and 1970s were brought up with newsreel and Hollywood images of America as a wild, violent, seething cauldron of racial and social strife. (a story I read yesterday brought to mind this era. Do you remember that in 1971 15 New York City policemen were killed in the line of duty!!!!). They contrasted this America (a grossly distorted view) with their own staid, prosperous, un-hip, boring, white-bread cultures (cultures that they knew were protected mostly by American military and political power, which infuriated them) and determined to change that. They wanted excitement and relevance too. They wanted dysfunctional, exotic ghettos. Oh, because they are Europeans and smart and socialist, their ghettos would never become incubators of the outrageous pathologies that America’s are. The worst excesses would be palliated. There would be just enough of an edge to their ghettos to “make it real”. But they couldn’t transplant millions of poor, unstable American blacks to their own cities so they cast about for the most accessible exotica available: Muslim North Africa. Well, now the Euro elites have got what they wished for; authentic, violent, colored ghettos, except the pathologies of these ghettos don’t just reach a fever pitch on Saturday night and cool off for Sunday. Their ghettos are militant and triumphalist. They are on the march and determined. And the worst thing of all, in the minds of the elites, you can’t get any good Jazz or Blues in these Euro Muslim Ghettos.

We are, but we should not be surprised that elites can be captivated by such trivialities. The consequences can be ruinous.

LA replies:

I don’t know if Daniel’s theory is correct or not, but even if it’s not, it’s brilliant.

Maureen writes:

Re Jeremy G’s concluding sentence: “However, the question of what happened to all the women without potential mates is an interesting one,” as I said above, Russian women mated with the lame, the criminal, the devious, the mentally defective and the pusillanimous—or the rare male war survivors who dotted the landscape as the directors of schools, factories, etc, and who, as a result, had very active love-lives (comparable to the harems of the inbred Muslims). There were specially designed Soviet cities (devoted, for example, to weaving cloth) consisting mostly of women. The male directors of those factories had a field day.

Also, the last twenty years of doddering Soviet Brezhnev-type leadership can hardly be called evidence of continuing aggression. The Soviet cabal of Stalin-WWII-survivors merely sputtered out. The USSR died when they died. The new generation of KGB (aka Putin) is attempting a belated resuscitation of the traditional, autocratic central control. This revival, like Islamic aggression, is kept alive only by Western oil money—the vast sound of a productive part of the world giving its wealth to a non-productive part.

Howard Sutherland writes:

Ferguson gets at the heart of the reasons for French failure in 1940 here: “To many Frenchmen, the Third Republic simply did not seem worth dying for, when so many of their fathers, brothers and friends had died for it already between 1914 and 1918. This was the mood—the refusal to pursue another Pyrrhic victory—that had been foreshadowed in Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s Voyage au bout de la nuit (1932), with its stomach-churning evocation of the slaughter of the last war’s opening phase.” Nevertheless, some French units fought very well. Up against their own high command, which completely failed to understand what was happening and respond innovatively, and German operational brilliance, though, they could not affect the outcome. Perhaps the best-known example is the successful counterattack of the French 4th Armored Division at Montcornet, planned and commanded by Colonel Charles de Gaulle. In 1940, admittedly, De Gaulle was unusual. While the malaise Ferguson describes was widespread—and crippling among the high command—when well-led French units fight well.

The French Army was victorious in November 1918, although at horrifying cost. Given the relative size of their populations, France lost more in winning than Germany did in losing, or than Great Britain and the Dominions did in winning. (I’m leaving out Russia, Austria-Hungary, Italy and the Turks; their Great War was horrifying enough but let’s stick to the Western Front.) American casualties, while very high as a percentage of forces engaged compared to what we have since become used to, were relatively small—the American Expeditionary Force was significant on the battlefield only in the last six months of the War.

So the French emerged victorious at terrible cost—the worst combination imaginable in terms of being ready for the next war. Victors rarely learn a war’s military lessons. The sense is that one knows what to do; one won, after all. Combined with that complacency were demographic weakness and a terrible fatigue, one that affected the French senior commanders who had served the length of the Great War on the Western Front. Even before he shrugged his shoulders and answered Churchill’s question with a tired “Il n’y en a aucune“—indeed, even before the blitzkrieg began on May 10th—observers had noted how detached General Gamelin seemed to be. Gamelin had served with distinction on the Western Front and against the Bolsheviks in Poland—by May 1940, though, he was played out.

Liddell Hart pointed out the operationally disastrous dispositions of the French Army in 1940, and how its defective doctrine contributed so signally to the success of von Manstein’s invasion plan. But that isn’t all he had to say about the French soldier. After VE Day, Liddell Hart had unparalleled access to interned German generals. He published what he learned in The Other Side of the Hill. At one point he asked German commanders to rate the soldiers of the assorted WWII armies they had encountered. I’m relying on memory of something read over 25 years ago, but I think I am close here. Not surprisingly, the German soldier was rated very high, although some German generals said that Finnish soldiers were even better. The surprise, to me, was that—man-for-man—the German generals rated the French soldier above the Soviet, British or American. They believed good soldiers had been squandered by unimaginative, timid commanders. Under good commanders, Free French units were able to defeat German and Italian opponents in North Africa, Italy and Northwest Europe.

All that said, I think France is much weaker as a nation now than in 1939. The French Army may not have been able to stop the Wehrmacht, but at least it was fighting for a French France. One wonders how French the French Army of today really is, with all its Moslem troops (who are no longer colonial troops) under a national leadership engaged in preemptive dhimmitude and hell-bent on submerging France completely in the diabolical EU. In an opinion piece in Le Figaro, Jean Raspail, author of The Camp of the Saints, said he believed the French nation is finished because France’s ruling elites have betrayed the (real, physical, ethnically French) Patrie in favor of the (artificial, universalist, propositionalist) Republique—a comment foreshadowed by the attitude Ferguson describes above. I hope Raspail is wrong about the fate of France; there is no question that he is right about the treason of the French elite.

Gintas J. writes:

I don’t single out the French for failing in the face of the German Blitzkrieg. Yes, there was rot. But the Germans revolutionized warfare with their concentrated armored and mobile infantry units with strong tactical air support (we still use that method), and no one was ready. There were a few advocates of such warfare, notably Charles de Gaulle, who started to gain influence after the Blitzkrieg in Poland. But it was too late to do a thorough re-organizing, it would have required a bold decisiveness, something in short supply.

There is no doubt that Britain would have been run over in short order as well if not for the Channel. The Channel covered for an army which was pretty dismal itself up until Montgomery entered the scene in the middle of 1942 (North Africa). France, North Africa vs. Rommel, Singapore, Burma, nothing but disasters.

I can’t find it on Google (I believe it was in Paul Carell’s Foxes of the Desert; Carell tends is pro-German), but I remember a reprint of an order of the day from Auchinleck (or equivalent, not Montgomery), upon his appointment to command British forces in North Africa, that added a PS, “I do not envy Rommel.”

Maureen writes:

Re: Jeremy G’s concluding sentence: “However, the question of what happened to all the women without potential mates is an interesting one.”

As I said above, Russian women mated with the lame, the criminal, the devious, the mentally defective and the pusillanimous—or the rare male war survivors who dotted the landscape as the directors of schools, factories, etc, and who, as a result, had very active love-lives (comparable to the harems of the inbred Muslims). There were specially designed Soviet cities (devoted, for example, to weaving cloth) consisting mostly of women. The male directors of those factories had a field day.

Also, the last twenty years of doddering Soviet Brezhnev-type leadership can hardly be called evidence of continuing aggression. The Soviet cabal of Stalin-WWII-survivors merely sputtered out. The USSR died when they died. The new generation of KGB (aka Putin) is attempting a belated resuscitation of the traditional, autocratic central control. This revival, like Islamic aggression, is kept alive only by Western oil money—the vast sound of a productive part of the world giving its wealth to a non-productive part.

Larry T. writes:

I thought you might be interested in this. This quote is from Tony Judt’s book, Postwar- a History of Europe Since 1945. Judt’s recent remarks on Israel are appalling, but this book is a worthwhile read. Below, he is speaking of local administrations in some occupied western European countries: The local administrations in France, Norway and the Benelux countries had not covered themselves in glory. On the contrary, they had on the whole performed with alacrity the occupiers’ bidding. In 1941 the Germans were able to run occupied Norway with just 806 administrative personnel. The Nazis administered France with just 1,500 of their own people. So confident were they of the reliability of the French police and militias that they assigned (in addition to their administrative staff) a mere 6,000 German civil and military police to ensure the compliance of a nation of 35 million. The same was true in the Netherlands. In postwar testimony the head of German security in Amsterdam averred that ‘the main support of the German forces in the police sector and beyond was the Dutch police. Without it, not 10 percent of the German occupation tasks would have been fulfilled.’ Contrast Yugoslavia. which required the unflagging attention of entire German military divisions just to contain the armed partisans.

p.39 It is pretty clear that many western Europeans just wanted to ride out the war and wait for better days. They were content to let others do the heavy lifting.

LA writes:

I’ve always wondered why Europeans say that WWII and the Holocaust discredits all nations, not just Germany, and requires the elimination of all nations, not just Germany, in a transnational structure like the EU. Maybe what Judt says is the explanation for this: The Western Europeans went along too easily with Nazi rule and so share the Nazi guilt.

Alan Levine writes:

I found much to agree in with Daniel and Jeremy’s comments. I think Daniel has hit upon part of the way European elites think, but his interpretation is too positive; I suspect they wanted to import ghettos precisely BECAUSE they thought they would be hostile and destructive. He greatly understates the element of masochism and self-destruction here.

James Burnham was right!

One point of criticism: the Dutch identified very strongly with their empire, especially in Indonesia, probably more so than the British people identifed with the British Empire (other than its white dominions.) Further, the Dutch fought hard against the Indonesian nationalists after 1945. It is a mistake to confuse the Dutch of the 1940s and earlier with the Dutch of today; the Netherlanders may have changed more than any other European people in the last 50 years or so.

Alan Levine continues:

As for the French defeat in 1940, I would have serious reservations about the “they just collapsed” idea.

While French morale was not high, neither was that of the Germans; and there are too many circumstantial military reasons for the defeat. I”ll just make the following points:

1) Yes, the French had plenty of tanks, most of them good with better armor and guns than the Germans’. However, they had poor radios, their crews were poorly trained and their tactics were bad, and the French had only just begun organizing armored divisions.

2) The dispositions of the French forces—as you yourself noted, they had left themselves with no strategic reserve—were such that the strongest elements of the German army were able to fall on the weakest elements of the French and cut off the best French units and the BEF at one blow.

3) There are plenty of instances of the French fighting hard—notably around Lille, in the Dunkirk perimeter, and later on the Somme. The problem is that their commanders were idiots. Like French politicians. Observing modern French history, there are plenty of instances of the French fighting with great courage—Dien Bien Phu—but their leaders have usually been fools or worse.

Jeremy writes:

I am not an expert on Russian demographics.

I have looked at a population pyramid for Russia that I found at this site. It appears that Russia experienced a baby boom immediately after the second world war. This population boom began to decline in the late 1950s.

And if you look here, it seems also that Russia’s birth rate was between 2.5 and 3 per woman throughout the 1950s and didn’t take a serious nose-dive below 2.0 until the mid 1980s.

I wonder if the modern below replacement Russian fertility is more closely related with the decline of religiosity among the population than with the catastrophes of WWII. These are similar to the conditions we find in Western Europe and the U.S., including countries that were not devastated by WWII.

Adam C. writes:

It is an interesting point that Maureen brings up, that perhaps 1914-1945 culled the strongest and bravest men that Europe had to offer, leaving only the cowardly, the sick, and the devious to progenate the post-war continent.

The problem that I see with that theory however is that the previous millennias of European history were filled with massive armed conflicts which neither quelled the continent’s virile spirit nor produced an anemic, life-denying self-hatred.

The Thirty Years War left the center of the content decimated and depopulated, but the Treaty of Westphalia didn’t seem to end the bold nationalistic self-assertions of any of the various combatant peoples. For that matter, one imagines that the history of Europe post-Pax Romana and pre-Nation State, say 250 BC to 1500 BC, was one of near constant bloodshed, regularly wiping out the bravest and most-warlike, but that never seemed to leave behind a continent full of sleeping sheep who hated their collective identity. And, for that matter, as nearly as I can tell, the entire history of Africa, ancient to the modern day, seems to be saturated with tribal warfare which shows little sign of slowing down, even as the most hot-blooded are the first to fight and to die.

No, I think that there was something uniquely traumatic and soul-crushing about the mechanized horror WW1. Jena/Austerlitz never caused Hagel to argue for deconstructing cilivilization, and the constant French-English wars of the thirteenth century never had Aquinas lose his faith. There was, however, something about the butchery at Tannenberg/Masurian Lakes that produced Stalin. There was something about the final German defeats in 1918 that produced Hitler, Honecker, and Habermas. There was something about Sir Douglas Haig’s legacy that got Ken Livingstone elected. And, perhaps most importantly for the modern age, there was something about Verdun and first Marne that has left us with Sartre, Derrida, Foucault, Lacan, Althusser, and their ilk, and, ultimately, with the banality and cultural surrender mandated by today’s EU.

Robert B. writes:

On Western malaise or a sort of societal Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome, if you will.

Firstly, it was Napoleon himself who took warfare from a point, as Churchill points out, of small armies made up of highly trained soldiers who could execute complex battlefield maneuvers to the vast armies of the modern, bourgeois society. Mass culture and the worship of the masses required a mass army to fight for its beliefs. This was the implicit belief of the leaders of the First French Republic.

It was how, under Napoleon, they staved off defeat at the hands of the remaining European nobility, who took the murder of their (literally) kin as a direct affront to the stability of their own nation states and the “natural order” of civilization. The USA, was never a threat to that order as it had, from the very beginning, its own aristocracy. The American Civil War’s tactics and its massing of firepower is what actually set the stage for WWI- the only modern weapon missing from the Civil War by the end of it, was the tank, all else existed by 1865. America truly had the world’s most powerful navy and its largest standing army in 1865. Even trench warfare came into being in 1864. The size and scope of the battles, including the casualties, dwarfed anything the world had yet seen. It was Grant himself who devised the strategy of bleeding the enemy white by sacrificing one’s own troops to do so. Thus, the higher a nation’s male population, the greater its ability to out bleed the enemy. No matter how graceful Lee’s battle field maneuvers, Lee could not out bleed the North. Lincoln recognized this early on, and found a General willing to implement it in the form of Grant and Sherman. The European observers of the Civil War learned well from its lesson. [LA notes: that’s not true of Sherman; he habitually avoided the high-casualty type of combat for which Grant is famous.] Churchill himself later commented on the savagery involved in it.

Likewise, it was the French Republic which first raised up as an ideal, the illiterate masses. This view of the “plebe” or proletarian having a superior status to those of the traditional ruling classes permeates Western Society to this day. Hence the obvious conclusion that the members of the 3rd world, the quintessential proletarian, are to be lifted above their superiors- the white Western male. After studying Marxism and the French Republic, I have to say Marxists borrowed heavily from the French- right down to the penchant for the murdering of the elite and forcing them into a Western style dhimitude. The Founding Fathers of America chose, because of this flawed philosophy, to ignore France’s pleas for help in their war with England. In fact, for a brief period of time, the U.S. itself was in a naval war with France. The Founding Father’s did not believe in mass democracy, rather they believed in in enlightened self rule of a moral elite who held a vested interest in the perpetuation of that society and its civilization.

Lastly, let us not forget that it was the French who provoked the Franco-Prussian War, in order to maintain their hegemony of the European mainland and, after suffering a humiliating defeat at the hands of the Prussians (without whom, Wellington would have lost Waterloo), they spent the next 47 years plotting the defeat of the newly unified Germany. England had been allies with the German states for centuries, they had been France’s enemy for centuries. The French spent that 47 years bringing England around to their way of thinking that the German Empire posed a threat to the British Empire. The Versailles Treaty and France’s stated goal of stated goal of starving the Germans down to level whereby they could never make war again, is what gave rise to Hitler and his militarism. Both England and the U.S. begged France to back off, but they refused, seizing anything that Germany had in order to force the payment of the war debt and thereby force them into servitude.

Further, we have none of then Stalin himself who egged Hitler on with his goal of a Western European empire. Stalin believed that if the Western Powers were once again embroiled in a war, the would bleed each other white, and thereby make it possible for the Soviets to waltz their way to the Atlantic Ocean, taking everything in between under their wing, leaving only America as the world’s sole industrialized holdout.

Thus, I believe, it is France itself who is the bringer of death to Western civilization. It is their First Republic’s belief in the evil of the “Ancien Régime” and its civilization that uplifted the plebe, it is their belief in the need to tear down that civilization which permeates both Western Liberalism and Communism. It goes without saying, therefore, that there is no need to fight for that civilization, no matter how great one’s own nation’s contribution to it may have been. The interesting thing is, is that even Jefferson understood the possible long term damage that the philosophy could do- certainly the European nobility understood it.

Bill A. writes:

Back in my college days, when I was immersed in an extremely leftist milieu, we were taught that the French collapse in 1940 was the result of the decision taken by the French “ruling class” that a German victory would enable France to get rid of the socialist Popular Front government, and forestall the socialist revolution.

There were a number of French films, both fiction and documentary, that were based on this notion. I am thinking of “Le chagrin et la pitie” (The Remorse and the Pity) which portrayed very deep divisions within French society.

Apparently a common graffito at the time was “Plutot Hitler que le Front Populaire.”

The most important political leader of the Popular Front government was Leon Blum, a Jewish socialist, and the disdain for Jews and workingmen within the aristocratic and would-be-aristocratic circles was certainly real enough.

On the other hand, I have no doubt that Hitler presented himself, both within Germany but especially in appeals to the populations of countries that he invaded, as a revolutionary anti-capitalist, and the “socialist” part of National Socialist was certainly prominent in German propaganda.

Thus, at the moment, I am agnostic about this interpretation.

That being said, there is no doubt that the French were not willing to fight, and simply collapsed.

Larry T. sends some passages from Dwight D. Eisenhower’s Crusade in Europe about his relations with the French:

The French position in the war was, of course, not an easy one. Once known as the foremost military power of Europe, their Army as well as their pride had been shattered in the great debacle of 1940. Consequently when the Torch invasion of 1942 again gave patriotic Frenchmen an opportunity to join in the fight against the Nazis they were sensitive to all questions of national pride and honor. Added to this was their bitter hatred of the Nazi, a hatred which seemed to be intensified against some of their own former political and military leaders. On top of all this was the uncertain basis on which rested De Gaulle’s authority and that of the governmental organization he had installed in France. [LA wonders: what governmental authority did de Gaulle establish in France?] A further factor was the complete dependence of the French Army, and indeed of considerable portions of the population, upon American supplies. This was an additional irritant to their pride and, although they constantly insisted upon the need for greater amounts of every kind of equipment and materiel, they were naturally galled by the realization that without those supplies they were completely helpless. All this tended to make them peculiarly sensitive and therefore difficult to deal with when they could find in any question, no matter how trivial, anything that they thought involved their national honor. [p. 413]

But it was not only with respect to personalities and their influence in North Africa that our governments had miscalculated. They had believed that the French population in the region was bitterly resentful of Vichy-Nazi domination and would eagerly embrace as deliverers any Allied force that succeeded in establishing itself in the country. The first German bombing of Algiers—and there were many—proved the fallacy of this assumption. Of course there were many patriots, and after the Tunisian victory was assured their number increased, but in the early days of touch and go and nightly bombing the undercurrent of sentiment constantly transmitted to me was, “Why did you bring this war to us? We were satisfied before you came to get us all killed.” In his final dispatch, written after the completion of the campaign, General Anderson had this to say about the early attitude of the inhabitants: “Many mayors, station- and postmasters and other key officials with whom we had dealings as we advanced (for instance, the civil telephone was, at first, my chief means of communicating with my forward units and with Allied Force Headquarters) were lukewarm in their sympathies and hesitant to commit themselves openly, while a few were hostile. I can safely generalize by saying that at first, in the Army, the senior officers were hesitant and afraid to commit themselves, the junior officers were mainly in favor of aiding the Allies, the men would obey orders; amongst the people, the Arabs were indifferent or inclined to be hostile, the French were in our favor but apathetic, the civil authorities were antagonistic as a whole. The resulting impression on my mind was not one of much confidence as to the safety of my small isolated force should I suffer a severe setback.” This was a far cry from the governmental hope that the people of North Africa would, upon our entry, blaze into spontaneous revolt against control by Nazi-dominated Vichy! (p.112)

[If General Giraud cannot be the Supreme Commander, he will not help the Allied invasion of North Africa.]

That same afternoon, November 7, brought to me one of my most distressing interviews of the war. Because of the earnest conviction held in both London and Washington that General Giraud could lead the French of North Africa into the Allied camp, we had started negotiations in October, through Mr. Murphy, to rescue the general from virtual imprisonment in southern France. An elaborate plan was devised by some of our French friends and Mr. Murphy, who had returned to Africa after his visit to London. General Giraud was kept informed of developments through trusted intermediaries and at the appointed time reached the coast line in spite of the watchfulness of the Germans and the Vichyites. There he embarked in a small boat, in the dark of night, to keep a rendezvous with one of our submarines, lying just offshore. A British submarine, commanded for this one trip by Captain Jerauld Wright of the United States Navy, made a most difficult contact with General Giraud and put out to sea. At another appointed place the submarine met one of our flying boats, and the general, with but three personal aides and staff officers, flew to my headquarters during the afternoon of November 7. The incident, related thus briefly, was an exciting story of extraordinary daring and resolution.’ General Giraud, though dressed in civilian clothes, looked very much a soldier. He was well over six feet, erect, almost stiff in carriage, and abrupt in speech and mannerisms. He was a gallant if bedraggled figure, and his experiences of the war, including a long term of imprisonment and a dramatic escape, had not daunted his fighting spirit. It was quickly apparent that he had come out of France laboring under the grave misapprehension that he was immediately to assume command of the whole Allied expedition. Upon entering my dungeon he offered himself to me in that capacity. I could not accept his services in such a role. I wanted him to proceed to Africa, as soon as we could guarantee his safety, and there take over command of such French forces as would voluntarily rally to him. Above all things, we were anxious to have him on our side because of the constant fear at the back of our minds of becoming engaged in a prolonged and serious battle against Frenchmen, not only to our own sorrow and loss, but to the detriment of our campaign against the German. General Giraud was adamant; he believed that the honor of himself and his country was involved and that he could not possibly accept any position in the venture lower than that of complete command. This, on the face of it, was impossible. The naming of an Allied commander in chief is an involved process, requiring the co-ordinated agreement of military and political leaders of the responsible governments. No subordinate commander in the expedition could legally have accepted an order from General Giraud. Moreover, at that moment there was not a single Frenchman in the Allied command; on the contrary, the enemy, if any, was French. All this was laboriously explained to the general. He was shaken, disappointed, and after many hours of conference felt it necessary to decline to have any part in the scheme. He said, “General Giraud cannot accept a subordinate position in this command; his countrymen would not understand and his honor as a soldier would be tarnished.” It was pitiful, because he had left his whole family in France as potential hostages to German fury and had himself undergone great personal risks in order to join up with us. My political advisers at that time were Mr. H. Freeman Matthews of the American State Department and Mr. William H. B. Mack of the British Foreign Office. So concerned were they over this development that they suggested placing General Giraud in nominal command, while reserving to myself the actual power of directing operations. They felt that the difference between public association and non-association of the Giraud name with the operation might well mean the difference between success and disaster. To such a subterfuge I would not agree, and adhered to my decision that, unless General Giraud could content himself with taking charge of such French forces in North Africa as might come over to our side in the tight against Germany, we would proceed with the campaign exactly as if we had never met or conferred with him… His good-night statement was “General Giraud will be a spectator in this affair.” (pp.99-100)

We particularly desired De Gaulle to participate with me in broadcasting on D-day to the French people so that the population, avoiding uprisings and useless sacrifice at non-critical points, would stil be instantly ready to help us where help was needed. We worked hard within the limits of our instructions, to win De Gaulle to our point of view, but although after the campaign was started he co-operated with us effectively, he did not meet our requests at the moment.

Robert B. writes:

I have to agree with Allen C. concerning Maureen’s theory that the wars of the 20th century wiped out Europe’s best, bravest and brightest.

While Allen notes the devastation of the Thirty Years War, he leaves out Castilian Spain’s 700 year long war with the Western Caliphate, and the Hundred Years War and its devastation of not only the average French, but of the French nobility. A great book to read on this is “In A Dark Wood Wandering.” England too had its time of trial during the Wars of the Roses, and the Dutch with their war of independence from Spain, and America with its own Civil War. And of course Russia itself was forever locked in combat with powers to its south and east. In all of these cases, the European nations as well as America rose anew from their fires and became greater nation states. The old ruling elite of Europe knew very well the great sacrifices their ancestors had made in the making of the European states. They knew they had a right to rule based upon the blood they had sacrificed and the loss of their treasure. Perhaps modern warfare aided in the demise of their primacy on the battlefield by removing all officers of high rank from the battlefield, but what really removed them was the ideas of egalitarianism that began with the First French Republic, Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité.

Rather, the malaise besetting the West was begun not in the 20th century, but the 18th. It is there that the roots of defeatism, the loss of belief in the “rightness” of one’s culture and its people, began in Europe. It is a maxim that a people must believe in its right to exist, just as an individual must. The European peoples no longer believe in this right. One can see this in modern day persons with suicidal depression growing every year in America. One can see it in the haste with which the average person agrees or at least acquiesces, in the vilification and destruction of those institutions which represent the past 3,000 years of European development.

There were many factors behind French defeat. You acknowledged many of the spiritual ones. Others existed as well.

If some on the French right were willing collaborators after the fact, many on the left were collaborators before the fact. People forget that Nazi Germany and the USSR both invaded Poland. A French invasion of Germany in late September was against Soviet interests, and not coincidentally opposed by French Communists and some socialists. The anti-fascist movement, which should have aided French mobilization, had been controlled or at least hijacked by Communists and fell apart when needed. Not without reason, the French Communist Party was outlawed as was its successor in 1939. I don’t think that France’s poor production of material in 1939-40 despite an increased budget was accidental.

And this had serious consequences on the field of battle. France may have had more planes on paper, but only a few dozen were modern all-metal monoplanes and only the latest model had an engine capable of high altitude (25,000ft +) combat. An extra modern 120 fighters may or may not have mattered in the end. The French were still crippled by their failure to put radios in all their planes and tanks. Likewise, it is incorrect to compare French and German tanks. Most French tanks were used in infantry support. Even the famous Char 1B, which mention, was an infantry tank with a maximum speed of 30km. Sure it had a 47mm anti-tank cannon and a 75mm howitzer, but they were deployed incorrectly and were shot to pieces from the rear.

http://www.onwar.com/tanks/france/data/b1bis.htm

The French did have a few mechanized cavalry brigades which accorded themselves well despite a lack of radios. De Gaulle led some of these.

I suppose that to some degree the technical failures of the allies were caused by their lack of will prior to the war. The failure to fund militaries properly meant that military exercises and subsequent innovation in tactics and design were stifled.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at January 31, 2007 01:00 AM | Send