{"id":640584,"date":"2025-12-18T16:56:15","date_gmt":"2025-12-18T16:56:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/640584\/"},"modified":"2025-12-18T16:56:15","modified_gmt":"2025-12-18T16:56:15","slug":"americans-beliefs-about-frances-1940-fall-are-all-wrong","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/640584\/","title":{"rendered":"Americans’ Beliefs About France’s 1940 Fall Are All Wrong"},"content":{"rendered":"

The United States, according to the New York Times, has a Maginot Line problem. In the first in a series of articles<\/a> castigating the 21st century U.S. military for allegedly failing to adapt to modern military technology, the editorial board raises the specter of Monsieur Maginot\u2019s infamous namesake fortification.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt is an ancient and familiar pattern,\u201d the editorial board laments. The French in 1940, ensconced safely\u2014so they thought\u2014behind their elaborate frontier wall, utterly failed, unlike the Germans, to pay attention to the new verities of armored warfare and airpower and paid the penalty in a catastrophic six-week defeat. The image of overconfident security is easy to grasp. The problem is that it has little to do with what really happened in 1940.<\/p>\n

This is hardly the first time that L\u2019\u00c9trange D\u00e9faite (\u201cthe strange defeat\u201d) of France in 1940, as historian Marc Bloch dubbed it, has been cited in U.S. punditry as emblematic of a profound societal failure to grasp the realities of the present when existential stakes are on the line. The so-called \u201cMaginot mentality\u201d epitomized, so it is routinely said, France\u2019s inability to learn the proper lessons of the 1914-18 conflict. In the words<\/a> of U.S. Navy Lt. Cmdr. Leah Amerling-Bray, that lesson was \u201cto perceive changes in the conduct of war and to adapt<\/p>\n

Daniel J. Mahoney writes<\/a> that the campaign \u201cwas a direct result of this failure to adjust to the requirements of warfare in the age of the internal combustion engine.\u201d Sheltering behind a fortress wall \u201cto stop a German attack that never came while failing to anticipate the one that did,\u201d in Thomas Wright\u2019s words<\/a>, the French ceased to innovate while their enemies developed weapons<\/a> and doctrine for a new epoch of war.<\/p>\n

In the severest interpretations of this argument, France\u2019s military myopia in the 1930s was merely symptomatic of a deeper civilizational trough, what Mahoney calls a \u201cspirit of palpable decadence and decline that permeated the atmosphere of public life.\u201d French troops, sapped of the will to resist by national demoralization, supposedly \u201ctook to their heels or meekly surrendered in the face of German assaults,\u201d Niall Ferguson writes<\/a>. Cue The Simpsons\u2019 Groundskeeper Willie\u2019s taunt<\/a> that the defeated of 1940 were \u201ccheese-eating surrender monkeys.\u201d<\/p>\n

Much of the inspiration for this originally came from the French themselves. In the immediate aftermath of the German victory, Marshal Philippe P\u00e9tain\u2014the new leader of the collaborationist Vichy regime\u2014blamed his country\u2019s recent defeat on the spiritual d\u00e9cadence of the prewar years, a moral rot that he claimed could only be arrested by a politically conservative, reactionary Catholic and unabashedly antisemitic national revolution.<\/p>\n

Across the English Channel, Charles de Gaulle\u2019s Free French movement endorsed a narrower criticism that the Third Republic\u2019s generals had been guilty of trying to refight the last war. This was an accusation that had particular appeal for Gaullists because it seemed to substantiate the warnings contained in their leader\u2019s 1934 book Vers l\u2019Arm\u00e9e de M\u00e9tier (The Army of the Future). After the war, the charge of obsolescence stuck.<\/p>\n

Yet the reality of French strategy in 1940 has little to do with these politically convenient caricatures. Take the much-disparaged Maginot Line first. Contrary to a lot of modern assumptions, it was never expected to defeat a German attack by itself. The point of the Maginot Line was not to stop the boche in their tracks, but to channel any future westward offensive away from the French industrial heartland\u2014which had been so devastated in the First World War\u2014and toward the Low Countries, particularly Belgium.<\/p>\n

There, the French ground forces could meet their enemy on a usefully constricted battlefield that would have the inestimable advantage of being in someone else\u2019s country. In this, the Maginot Line accomplished exactly what it was designed to do. The Germans never successfully took it by frontal assault, and some of the French garrison troops held out doggedly until early July 1940, weeks after the armistice. The Maginot Line cost a lot less than the modernization of the French battle fleet in the 1930s, which, as it turned out<\/a>, made not a single contribution to the country\u2019s defense. If the French lost the battle in Belgium, that was not the fault of the Maginot Line\u2019s architects.<\/p>\n

So why did they lose that battle? At this point, a sharp contrast is traditionally drawn<\/a> between the ossified French Army of 1940, clinging to the outdated verities of trench warfare, and the German Wehrmacht, with its embrace of state-of-the-art armored fighting methods. But the French were hardly unaware of the importance of tanks. Not only did they have more of them in 1940 than the Germans did, but they were also more heavily armed and armored\u2014and often better organized, too.<\/p>\n

The three French Divisions L\u00e9g\u00e8res M\u00e9caniques (\u201cfast mechanized divisions\u201d) were more effectively balanced in equipment mix and force structure than the German Panzer divisions that they faced. The French commander in chief, Maurice Gamelin, was a passionate believer in the centrality of the tank in future conflict and had been one of the principal voices within the French Army arguing for faster mechanization in the 1930s. He viewed the Polish campaign in September 1939 as illustrating<\/a> \u201cthe penetrative power of speedy and hard-hitting German armoured formations and the close co-operation of their Air Force.\u201d<\/p>\n

The French were not taken by surprise by blitzkrieg; they had been thinking about how to defend against such an attack for years. And in principle, at least, they had figured out how to stop it. Field exercises showed that even a powerful tank advance could be halted by a well-prepared defense-in-depth using minefields, anti-tank guns, and mobile reserves for counterattacks.<\/p>\n

These were exactly the same tactics that would be used successfully against the Germans later in the war in North Africa and Russia and are the basis for anti-tank warfare today. The French had a healthy respect for the Wehrmacht, but they rightly understood that there was nothing invincible about it and that there was no reason to think that it could not be stopped by a sound, well-organized defense.<\/p>\n

Where the problems started to creep in were assumptions about exactly the Germans would strike. Gamelin assumed, reasonably enough, that Adolf Hitler would send his tanks to good tank country\u2014that is, to the Gembloux Gap, a 25-mile plateau in central Belgium between Wavre and Namur. This offered a perfect unimpeded route for the Panzers to advance toward Paris. Unbeknownst to him, the chief of staff of the main German army group, Erich von Manstein, had successfully persuaded Hitler that the main thrust should come further south, through the thickly wooded Ardennes region.<\/p>\n

The decision would have struck Gamelin as crazy\u2014just as it did lots of German generals\u2014because it would create a massive vulnerable traffic jam in the forest roads as thousands of vehicles tried to make their way westward. Alas, for all his excellent martial qualities, the French commander possessed a certain stubbornness of mind that meant that even when evidence began to mount that the Germans were indeed taking the Ardennes route, he refused to accept that they would ever do something so militarily stupid.<\/p>\n

Even this would not necessarily have been fatal on that day had Gamelin not also decided at the last minute to change the disposition of the French Seventh Army, one of his best-equipped and trained formations. Instead of keeping it in place just behind the front line as a strategic reserve to respond to an unexpected Wehrmacht move, he ordered that as soon as any German attack in the west started, it should dash toward the border with Holland to link up with the Dutch Army.<\/p>\n

Gamelin\u2019s second-in-command, Gen. Alphonse Georges, warned his chief that this \u201cBreda variant\u201d to the original plan exposed the French to unnecessary dangers. Should the Germans decide to come by a surprise route, like\u2014just for example\u2014the Ardennes, he told Gamelin<\/a>, \u201cwe could find ourselves lacking the necessary means for a counterattack.\u201d<\/p>\n

Gamelin was again unmoved. In the event, Georges\u2019s fear proved catastrophically prescient. In May 1940, just four days into the campaign, the Germans emerged on the far side of the Ardennes, crossed the River Meuse at Sedan, and struck deep behind the Allied lines with no strong French reserve available to stop them. Had the Seventh Army remained in place and not rushed pointlessly to Breda, it might quite easily have pinched shut the narrow German bridgehead across the Meuse and brought the whole blitzkrieg offensive to a halt.<\/p>\n

As contingent on these mistakes as the German victory was, none of this is to deny that the French Army had its problems in 1940, some of them serious. Heavy reliance on short-term conscripts and reservists meant many troops lacked the training for flexible, mobile operations. French doctrine emphasized carefully planned, firepower-intensive methodical battles that required extensive preparation between each phase of advance; a slow French decision-making loop<\/a> resulted in critical delays in responding to enemy movements. Air power was poorly organized, and air-ground cooperation was poor.<\/p>\n

But then, the German Army had lots of problems, too. Contrary to the blitzkrieg legend, roughly 9 in 10 Wehrmacht soldiers<\/a> marched into battle on foot. The army\u2019s logistical apparatus still relied on horse-drawn wagons. Half the troops were middle-aged; most had had a few weeks\u2019 training. Even the vaunted Panzers were mostly small, thinly armored Mark Is and IIs with cannons or machine guns as armament. There was absolutely no reason to think that Hitler\u2019s hastily scraped-together army had some strong inherent advantage over the French.<\/p>\n

Because the \u201cstrange defeat\u201d of France in 1940 was so unexpected and had such profound consequences, there has always been a temptation to think that it must, therefore, offer some profound lesson about the nature of war. Actually, all it offers is the less-than-spectacular advice to keep an open mind, not have a bad plan, and not be unlucky.<\/p>\n

Banalities about supposed<\/a> Revolutions in Military Affairs excite tech disruptors<\/a>, but historians and strategists should be wary of them. Actually, any real lesson to be drawn from 1940 is about German failure. Having\u2014to their own amazement\u2014defeated the French, the Germans had no idea what to do next. Stumbling along for a theory of victory, they first fought and lost the Battle of Britain, then embarked on a grandiose and doomed invasion of the Soviet Union. Operational success, it turns out, avails you little in the absence of strategic vision.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The United States, according to the New York Times, has a Maginot Line problem. In the first in…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":640585,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5309],"tags":[2000,299,36,2348,6219,49,771,12873],"class_list":{"0":"post-640584","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-france","8":"tag-eu","9":"tag-europe","10":"tag-france","11":"tag-history","12":"tag-homepage_regional_europe","13":"tag-united-states","14":"tag-war","15":"tag-world-war-ii"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115741628577259130","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/640584","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=640584"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/640584\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/640585"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=640584"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=640584"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=640584"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}