- Joined
- Sep 26, 2014
Way to put Great Britain in arm's-length too, by trusting fucking Belgium.
Is France's poor WW2 reputation justified?
- Thread starter Slap47
- Start date
Way to put Great Britain in arm's-length too, by trusting fucking Belgium.
- Joined
- Mar 11, 2015
French tanks were meme tanks.
Orkeosaurus
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Jul 18, 2016
Reminder that the completely intact French fleet was destroyed with 1200 lives lost by the Royal Navy because they wouldn't scuttle their ships. Some allies huh? Like why couldn't they just dock in GB? For context, the admiral promised not to hand the fleet over to Germany despite the armistice, which stipulated that the Germans would not be given control of the fleet. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attack_on_Mers-el-Kébir
Really though, the French have won more wars than any other existing country. All of the issues with France in WW2 rests on the shoulders of leadership (French & otherwise).
Really though, the French have won more wars than any other existing country. All of the issues with France in WW2 rests on the shoulders of leadership (French & otherwise).
- Joined
- Mar 11, 2015
Only if your definition of "country" is overly generous and you think that France has been one continuously existing nation since early medieval times or whatever. Modern France was only founded in 1958 with the adoption of the constitution of the Fifth French Republic, and since then all they've managed to do is have a middling record in wars in current and former colonies.
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- Feb 4, 2018
They didn't realize that they were a puppet state yet.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scuttling_of_the_French_fleet_in_Toulon
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- Feb 1, 2015
IIRC there's a whole subgenre of French uchronie literature and bande-desinee centered on the premise of "et si la France avait continue la guerre", basically nitpicking to death the thousands of things that could have gone slightly different in 1940 to prevent the fall of France. I read some of that stuff a long time ago, but all I can remember of any of it is that they really like the idea of blowing up the Meuse River bridges.
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- Apr 30, 2018
What was shameful was the almost immediate compliance of the Vichy regime and the people who lived in it.
- Joined
- Sep 26, 2014
Nah, the Poles were just used as cannon fodder and an Allied buffer state which clearly worked sooo well.
Everybody in France who mattered were accused of being Vichy collaborators.
- Joined
- Oct 20, 2016
On paper the French should have defeated or at least stalemated the Germans.
From everything I've read they had ineffectual leadership. That is also why the US and NATO would probably have ass raped the USSR because of their ineffectual war doctrine.
If you send an A or B unit in a BMP to attack a NATO held position with a M1A1 or AH-64, while you hold back your best units. Then that is a recipe for disaster.
I use to argue with french faggots all the time. Ever other one said their fucking relatives were in the resistance.
Unlikely.
From everything I've read they had ineffectual leadership. That is also why the US and NATO would probably have ass raped the USSR because of their ineffectual war doctrine.
If you send an A or B unit in a BMP to attack a NATO held position with a M1A1 or AH-64, while you hold back your best units. Then that is a recipe for disaster.
I use to argue with french faggots all the time. Ever other one said their fucking relatives were in the resistance.
Unlikely.
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- Joined
- Jun 23, 2015
The key to understand why France had such a defensive mindset is WWI. In that war, France lost around 1,3 million soldiers on the battlefield and over 4 million got wounded. That is gigantic numbers and remember, the western front was all in France (and part of Belgium but nobody cares about them, creating huge damage to the countryside, infrastructure and more. The politicians and generals had WW1 still fresh in their mindset and didn't want that all over again. This was social trauma on national scale and France has not yet recover from it. I don't believe for a second that if Americans lost nearly five procent of their population in a massive war fought on the soil of the US, would be so smug about Frances performance in the second world war.
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- Mar 5, 2018
Considering they kicked Lenin in the teeth pretty hard, and had to deal with both the USSR and the Nazis at the same time, I'd say they're underrated in terms of military accomplishments.
Corbin Dallas Multipass
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Jun 20, 2018
From what I've read, the Maginot line was a pretty good idea, and the nazis going around was almost the best case scenario. It was only almost, because the french found it too good to be true, and didn't properly defend against it. But were it not for that incredible mistake, they would have been able to destroy the germans trying to get through the black forest.
It's hard to say, historians seem to get caught up in popular theories just as much as anyone else, so it used to be the maginot line was a terrible, idiotic idea, now it maybe wasn't such a bad idea. It's like how the US dropping the atom bombs forced the end of the war, saving lives, but also the japenese had already surrendered and the bomb was just to scare the russians.
Historians are just another group of morons who are mostly wrong about everything. Just like everyone else.
It's hard to say, historians seem to get caught up in popular theories just as much as anyone else, so it used to be the maginot line was a terrible, idiotic idea, now it maybe wasn't such a bad idea. It's like how the US dropping the atom bombs forced the end of the war, saving lives, but also the japenese had already surrendered and the bomb was just to scare the russians.
Historians are just another group of morons who are mostly wrong about everything. Just like everyone else.
- Joined
- Apr 30, 2018
The nazi central army did have to go through the Maginot Line and while they were held back for a considerable amount of time the idea of it being some impassible fortress was proven nonsense. It most likely would not have held the german army back for a while but fortress warfare had been shown to be an impractical form of defence since the opening days of the first world war. Mobility was king. Also if I recall my school history book correctly the reason why the germans could go around it is because the French didn't want the Belgians to get pissy for building a fortress on their border because it implied that the french were expecting war with germany (you know, like how they were actually expecting war with germany)
This+
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Jan 18, 2018
From what I remember, the French military in the early 20th century had a problem of geriatric commanding officers. In WWI, many of the officers thought cavalry charges were effective and thought machineguns were for "barbaric warfare" against African tribes, a number of officers from other countries thought the same which quickly changed once the Germans started to fire their Maxim guns.
By WWII, 19th-century officers died out and were replaced with geriatric WWI-era officers who thought fortresses and trench warfare was the most effective strategy.
French tech was good. French tanks were better than German tanks during the battle of France, the MAS-36 rifle was arguably more cheaper, practical, and efficient than the G98/Kar98k rifles the Germans used. France understood the importance of semi-automatic rifles even during WWI, and was only limited by manufacturing capabilities. But the Germans had the much better planes and air force and proved that air superiority would be key in modern battles.
France also had high casualty rates in WWI (I mean, most of the Western Front was in France) and suffered a declining birth rate, so they were short on manpower and outnumbered by the Germans by the invasion.
There are tons of other factors and reasons as to why France lost against Germany, but with the hands they were dealt, I'd say the footsoldiers and junior officers did the best they could.
By WWII, 19th-century officers died out and were replaced with geriatric WWI-era officers who thought fortresses and trench warfare was the most effective strategy.
French tech was good. French tanks were better than German tanks during the battle of France, the MAS-36 rifle was arguably more cheaper, practical, and efficient than the G98/Kar98k rifles the Germans used. France understood the importance of semi-automatic rifles even during WWI, and was only limited by manufacturing capabilities. But the Germans had the much better planes and air force and proved that air superiority would be key in modern battles.
France also had high casualty rates in WWI (I mean, most of the Western Front was in France) and suffered a declining birth rate, so they were short on manpower and outnumbered by the Germans by the invasion.
There are tons of other factors and reasons as to why France lost against Germany, but with the hands they were dealt, I'd say the footsoldiers and junior officers did the best they could.
- Joined
- Mar 13, 2016
I dunno. I recall reading somewhere that the French resistance during occupation was filled mostly with young people and all they really did was bitch about Germans, drink, and fuck. The occupation forces let them get away with it because they knew where they were and it was a source of information when there were actual guerrellas popping up.
So I wouldn't really be surprised if there were a ton of "partisan" outfits spread all over the place with lots of members since it sounds like a party to me.
- Joined
- Feb 1, 2015
In actuality the "French resistance" was not a single monolithic bloc, but it suited the post-war Gaullist mythology to portray it as such in order for the Gaullists to lay claim to all the successes of the resistance groups that were unaligned or opposed to de Gaulle's Free French government. More importantly, the myth of the monolithic French resistance allowed all the cowardly resisters, black market opportunists, neutrals, and even some of the collaborators to claim that they too were an integral part of the heroic Resistance because of that time they refused to give up their seat on the metro to a rear-echelon German military clerk on leave in Paris. These kinds of fair-weather "resisters" are the ones who gave the post-war myth of the resistance a bad name.
The activity and effectiveness of the various resistance factions and cells on the ground differed considerably from place to place. It was a lot easier for the resistance groups in unoccupied Vichy French territory to operate boldly compared to those groups in German occupied France where martial law was in effect, since the resistance in Vichy areas often had sympathizers and infiltrators among the Vichy authorities, and the Vichy security forces were not as good as the German Gestapo and anti-partisan units.
Different resistance factions had different priorities and directives, which resulted in vastly different wartime behavior. The Communist cells under Comintern/Soviet influence tended to be very violent and active at sabotage and assassination, since their handlers in Moscow wanted to tie up as much German manpower in the West to reduce the pressure on Soviet armies in the East. Jean Moulin's Free French resistance was competent at espionage and information gathering to the great satisfaction of their handlers in London, but they were under strict orders from General de Gaulle and the OSS to save their strength and avoid risking their people in violent actions until a general uprising could be launched simultaneously with the Allied landings at Normandy in 1944. And of course, the roaming Maquis bands that terrorized the rural areas were largely comprised of young men in the "draft dodger" mold who fled into the countryside to avoid being shipped to Germany as forced laborers or conscripted into the Vichy security forces or imprisoned for petty crimes, so the Maquis often resembled little more than bandits and outlaws in their behavior and ran at the first sign of a real German anti-partisan patrol or Vichy Milice security sweep since their chief priority was not getting caught and they weren't really interested in dealing a blow against the occupation if it meant that their own safety would be comprised by reprisal crackdowns.
- Joined
- Feb 12, 2013
Oh yeah and since we are on a "lets soberly look at WW2 in hindsight" thing, let me just say this right now.
HITLER DID NOTHING WRONG
....at least in terms of strategy.
TLDR: Hitler actually kinda knew what he was doing and his generals were pretty dumb
HITLER DID NOTHING WRONG
....at least in terms of strategy.
For decades the prevailing view on the war was that germany was led by brilliant generals who could have won the war at multiple opportunities but were always sabotaged by the cackling madman that was Hitler.....mostly because these same generals and their friends wound up writing the history books and becoming important enough to the west in the early cold war that nobody really bothered to correct them for a long while (incidentally these same men wound up heavily downplaying or flat out denying their own happy participation in the war crimes the Third Reich comitted, leading to the masturbatory "Wehrmacht dindu nuffin" shit beloved by wannabe historian types on the internet)
However when actually looking at the facts, a lot of hitlers more "LAWL SO STOOPID!" decisions actually make a fucktunne of sense, while his generals wind up looking like utter dumbasses. To cut a long story short, Hitler was entirely aware that Germany's position in terms of resources was fucking terrible. They had the men, they had the food, they had the iron ore from sweden, but they sorely lacked one absolute fundamental.
Oil.
Without it they could not hope to persue and offensive war since everything that was not a man or a horse or a train relied on oil to move. All the tanks on the fucking planet wouldnt do shit if they didnt have fuel, nor would planes or boats or submarines. The only major sources of this resource on the planet at the time were
a) The US
b) The USSR
c) Venezuela
d) British holdings in the Middle East
e) Dutch Holdings in Indonesia
f) Romania
After a vast chunk of its own oil reserves were expended in the blitzkrieg attack on poland and france and western europe, Germany was facing an absolutely existential crisis. Because the British were still opposing them, this meant that options a/c/d/e were completely off the table since the Royal Navy's blockade was in place. This left begging their soviet frenemies for a few spare dribbles, and desperately buying all the romanian oil they could get their hands on.
Problem is, romanian oil was in a heavy production decline at the time, and because Germany was now running continental europe, in order to exploit its resources even a little they needed this oil to go all over the fucking continent rather than be earmarked for the wehrmacht. This is the main reason why germany's logistics in the war were infamously based around horses despite everyone else switching to trucks and vehicles, and it left Germany with a ticking timebomb. If they didnt find a new major source of oil quick (and im talking middle 1942 at the absolute latest) they would just flat out be unable to operate as a state, the economy would just fucking vanish, and Germany would be a sitting duck for an eventual British/commonwealth counterstrike or (more seriously) a soviet betrayal.
Hitler was entirely aware of this, and this is why he did such seemingly counterproductive things like allow the BEF to evacuate Dunkirk and (more importantly) why he greenlit operation Barbarossa. In the Former example, Hitler's desperation to get the UK on his team or at the very least have an agreed peace that would leave it and its empire entirely untouched was not down to mere "OH DADDY I LOVE YOUR BIG HARD EMPIRE DICK!" fappery, but because the UK leaving the war would give germany access to all the foreign oil it desired (alongside a fucktunne more vital resources) wheras the UK continuing the war and keeping germany blockaded with the Royal Navy would either eventually cause a full on collapse of the Nazi war machine/state or would force it to do the most desperate and dangerous gamble imaginable in order to get the oil it needed to both expand and maintain its empire....that gamble being the latter example.
Operation Barbarossa was less Hitler's ego and ideological obsession with conquering Russia, and more "ok mein negars, we are absolutely fucked if we dont get oil and this grocery list of resources fast. The soviets have almost all of these things we need in the Caucasus so if we use our last reserves of oil in another blitzkrieg to push on through and take the oil fields and ukraine food resources and shit, we might actually have a chance of winning" and the reason it was launched before germany was properly ready was because the deadline on the whole "total collapse of military and industry" thing was coming up fast.
Unfortunately for hitler, this is when his generals started really fucking things up. Because they were solely focused on the military aspect, they were obsessed with taking Moscow and thus magically making the soviets decide "ah crap, guess we automatically lose now despite all our industry being elsewhere, may as well line up to be exterminated" rather than go with Hitler's desire to focus on the Volga and both take the oil and resources for germany AND to starve the soviets of these same resources (which may well have critically endangered the USSR given how it was already dependant on Lend-Lease for food and shit at the time) which is why Barbarossa bogged down and started to recede despite killing and capturing millions of soviet soldiers.
Even at this critical juncture they did not realise just how fucked the resources and fuel situations were, and just assumed that winning enough important looking field battles would just cause the soviets to spontaneously decide to stop fighting. They pushed for pointless shit like the Battle of the Kursk against hitlers wishes (and then bitched when he canceled it after a week of failure), and neglected shit like Stalingrad that could have allowed Germany the opportunity to seal its grip on the Caucasus (which is also why Hitler issued the infamous no surrender orders, since losing there would be absolute disaster). After this failed, Germany was now doomed. Hitler probably realised this to a degree which is why he started chugging back pills like no tomorrow while screaming abuse at the fucktard generals who screwed him over.
Dont get me wrong, hitler wasnt a strategic genius or anything, and his idea of tactics were at best overly dependant on his experiences in WW1 (which is why he compulsively greenlit impractical super heavy tank shit and big showpiece guns instead of mass producible shit) and at worst based entirely on his idealogical obsessions (which is why he emphasised pissing off and wasting bullets exterminating and brutalising populations in the east instead of treating them half nicely and recruiting them against the USSR that they despised) and wound up hamstringing germany in a thousand different ways, but he had a decent head for overall strategy and gamblers luck when it came to blitzkrieg, and had the early war geopolitics gone the way he assumed (thanks to the advice of lolcow tier fucktards like Ribbentrop) with Britain and France staying out, he may well have won the war.
His Generals on the other hand may have been great with the tactics on the battlefield, but had no fucking idea about how to wage war on a larger scale strategy and thus they steered hitler towards shit that while impressive looking just wasted time and resources the Nazis could not afford to waste, and the fact they were allowed to pin the blame for all their fuckups on hitler along with the blame for all the war crimes and acts of pointless depravity they ordered is actually kinda unfair to the old Fuhrer.
However when actually looking at the facts, a lot of hitlers more "LAWL SO STOOPID!" decisions actually make a fucktunne of sense, while his generals wind up looking like utter dumbasses. To cut a long story short, Hitler was entirely aware that Germany's position in terms of resources was fucking terrible. They had the men, they had the food, they had the iron ore from sweden, but they sorely lacked one absolute fundamental.
Oil.
Without it they could not hope to persue and offensive war since everything that was not a man or a horse or a train relied on oil to move. All the tanks on the fucking planet wouldnt do shit if they didnt have fuel, nor would planes or boats or submarines. The only major sources of this resource on the planet at the time were
a) The US
b) The USSR
c) Venezuela
d) British holdings in the Middle East
e) Dutch Holdings in Indonesia
f) Romania
After a vast chunk of its own oil reserves were expended in the blitzkrieg attack on poland and france and western europe, Germany was facing an absolutely existential crisis. Because the British were still opposing them, this meant that options a/c/d/e were completely off the table since the Royal Navy's blockade was in place. This left begging their soviet frenemies for a few spare dribbles, and desperately buying all the romanian oil they could get their hands on.
Problem is, romanian oil was in a heavy production decline at the time, and because Germany was now running continental europe, in order to exploit its resources even a little they needed this oil to go all over the fucking continent rather than be earmarked for the wehrmacht. This is the main reason why germany's logistics in the war were infamously based around horses despite everyone else switching to trucks and vehicles, and it left Germany with a ticking timebomb. If they didnt find a new major source of oil quick (and im talking middle 1942 at the absolute latest) they would just flat out be unable to operate as a state, the economy would just fucking vanish, and Germany would be a sitting duck for an eventual British/commonwealth counterstrike or (more seriously) a soviet betrayal.
Hitler was entirely aware of this, and this is why he did such seemingly counterproductive things like allow the BEF to evacuate Dunkirk and (more importantly) why he greenlit operation Barbarossa. In the Former example, Hitler's desperation to get the UK on his team or at the very least have an agreed peace that would leave it and its empire entirely untouched was not down to mere "OH DADDY I LOVE YOUR BIG HARD EMPIRE DICK!" fappery, but because the UK leaving the war would give germany access to all the foreign oil it desired (alongside a fucktunne more vital resources) wheras the UK continuing the war and keeping germany blockaded with the Royal Navy would either eventually cause a full on collapse of the Nazi war machine/state or would force it to do the most desperate and dangerous gamble imaginable in order to get the oil it needed to both expand and maintain its empire....that gamble being the latter example.
Operation Barbarossa was less Hitler's ego and ideological obsession with conquering Russia, and more "ok mein negars, we are absolutely fucked if we dont get oil and this grocery list of resources fast. The soviets have almost all of these things we need in the Caucasus so if we use our last reserves of oil in another blitzkrieg to push on through and take the oil fields and ukraine food resources and shit, we might actually have a chance of winning" and the reason it was launched before germany was properly ready was because the deadline on the whole "total collapse of military and industry" thing was coming up fast.
Unfortunately for hitler, this is when his generals started really fucking things up. Because they were solely focused on the military aspect, they were obsessed with taking Moscow and thus magically making the soviets decide "ah crap, guess we automatically lose now despite all our industry being elsewhere, may as well line up to be exterminated" rather than go with Hitler's desire to focus on the Volga and both take the oil and resources for germany AND to starve the soviets of these same resources (which may well have critically endangered the USSR given how it was already dependant on Lend-Lease for food and shit at the time) which is why Barbarossa bogged down and started to recede despite killing and capturing millions of soviet soldiers.
Even at this critical juncture they did not realise just how fucked the resources and fuel situations were, and just assumed that winning enough important looking field battles would just cause the soviets to spontaneously decide to stop fighting. They pushed for pointless shit like the Battle of the Kursk against hitlers wishes (and then bitched when he canceled it after a week of failure), and neglected shit like Stalingrad that could have allowed Germany the opportunity to seal its grip on the Caucasus (which is also why Hitler issued the infamous no surrender orders, since losing there would be absolute disaster). After this failed, Germany was now doomed. Hitler probably realised this to a degree which is why he started chugging back pills like no tomorrow while screaming abuse at the fucktard generals who screwed him over.
Dont get me wrong, hitler wasnt a strategic genius or anything, and his idea of tactics were at best overly dependant on his experiences in WW1 (which is why he compulsively greenlit impractical super heavy tank shit and big showpiece guns instead of mass producible shit) and at worst based entirely on his idealogical obsessions (which is why he emphasised pissing off and wasting bullets exterminating and brutalising populations in the east instead of treating them half nicely and recruiting them against the USSR that they despised) and wound up hamstringing germany in a thousand different ways, but he had a decent head for overall strategy and gamblers luck when it came to blitzkrieg, and had the early war geopolitics gone the way he assumed (thanks to the advice of lolcow tier fucktards like Ribbentrop) with Britain and France staying out, he may well have won the war.
His Generals on the other hand may have been great with the tactics on the battlefield, but had no fucking idea about how to wage war on a larger scale strategy and thus they steered hitler towards shit that while impressive looking just wasted time and resources the Nazis could not afford to waste, and the fact they were allowed to pin the blame for all their fuckups on hitler along with the blame for all the war crimes and acts of pointless depravity they ordered is actually kinda unfair to the old Fuhrer.
TLDR: Hitler actually kinda knew what he was doing and his generals were pretty dumb
- Joined
- Dec 22, 2017
To get back to France. They had an uphill battle from the end of ww1 till the start of ww2.
- Labor unions
- They chucked the hell outta the French military production infrastructure with some really fun labor strikes
- Said strikes fucked the production of planes.
- They chucked the hell outta the French military production infrastructure with some really fun labor strikes
- Literally no political will to fight
- Everyone wanted to avoid a war beyond the nationalists who were getting rather pissed that the Germans went into the Rhineland.
- Air support.
- There was none.
- Tanks
- Well protected but, someone thought that a cast turret would totally not make a lot of noise when struck.
- Fucking retard thought that a two man tank design would work.
- Makes some sense when you are thinking of changing from the ww1 tanks which had like what 7?
- Joined
- Feb 1, 2015
Their tanks weren't that bad for the period. Two man tanks worked ok for the French because they didn't need a radioman due to their lack of radios. The Soviets also had lots of those two man light tanks that were perfectly adequate for blunting the German armored spearheads in 1941, so it was not a deal breaker. Same thing with the poor turret configuration (ie, commander/gunner/loader all in one crewman) and lack of rotating turret basket. Soviet armor had the exact same problems and it was not a world-ending impediment. The main problem was poor employment of French armored forces by the Old Guard of WWI veteran commanders, who could only envision tanks as infantry support elements that should be doled out piecemeal to infantry units and not concentrated into a mobile striking force. French armor was good enough to beat German armor when placed under the command of younger officers with a firm grasp of modern mobile warfare, as illustrated by the tactical successes that de Gaulle and his peers were able to achieve when they had a chance to command French armor.
The French aerial forces were more than adequate for the conflict on paper in terms of design capabilities and numbers, but in the field they suffered from inferior fighter tactics (interwar 3-plane vic system vs German finger-four) and especially poor logistical support/organization.
- Joined
- Dec 13, 2016
I don't think the French were massively incompetent at the infantry level, but their officer corps was embedded in WWI thinking even though WWII was already showing to be very different from the previous war.
What I think France had the worst time with was Britain's lack of spine in the early days of the war. I think it would have gone differently if France had effectual allies.
What I think France had the worst time with was Britain's lack of spine in the early days of the war. I think it would have gone differently if France had effectual allies.