The Gallantry and Honour of the French WWII Military

 

 

June 27, 1940: ...But from what I've seen in Belgium and France and from talks I've had with Germans and French in both countries, and with French, Belgian, and British prisoners along the roads, it seems fairly clear to me that:  

                                       France did not fight.

 

If she did, there is little evidence of it. Not only I, but several of my friends have driven from the German border to Paris and back, along all the main roads. None of us saw any evidence of serious fighting.

The fields of France are undisturbed. There was no fighting on any sustained line. The German army hurled itself forward along the roads. Even on the roads there is little sign that the French did any more than harry their enemy. And even this was done only in the towns and villages. But it was only harrying, delaying. There was no attempt to come to a halt on a line and strike back in a well-organized counter- attack.

 

But since the German chose to fight the war on the roads, why didn't the French stop them? Roads make ideal targets for artillery. And yet I have not seen one yard of road in northern France which shows the effects of artillery fire. Driving to Paris over the area where the second German offensive began, an officer from the High Command who had missed the campaign kept mumbling that he could not understand it, that up there on that height, dominating the road and providing wonderful artillery cover with its dense woods, the French must have had the sense to plant a few guns. Just a few would have made the road impassable, he kept repeating, and he would order us to stop while he studied the situation. But there had been no guns on those wooded heights and there were no shell-holes on or near the road. The Germans had passed along here with their mighty army, hardly firing a shot. 

 

At no point in France and at only two or three in Belgium did I see a road properly mined, or, for that matter, mined at all. In the villages and towns the French had hastily thrown up tank-barriers, usually of blocks of stone and rubbish. But the Germans brushed them aside in minutes. A huge crater left by an exploded mine could not have been brushed aside in a few minutes.

 

D.B. in Paris, having seen the war from the other side, concludes that there was treachery in the French army from top to bottom -- the fascists at the top, the Communists at the bottom. And from German and French sources alike I heard many stories of how the communists had received their orders from their party not to fight, and didn't... 

 

Many French prisoners say they never saw a battle. When one seemed imminent, orders came to retreat. It was this constant order to retreat before a battle had been joined, or at least before it had been fought out, that broke the Belgian resistance.

Bordeaux, 1942: the entrance to the anti-Semitic exhibition “The Jews and France”.

 

The Germans themselves say that in one tank battle they were attacked by a large fleet of French tanks after they had themselves run out of ammunition. The German commander ordered a retreat. After the German tanks had retired some distance to the rear, with the French following them only very cautiously, the Germans received orders to turn about and simulate an attack, firing automatic pistols or anything they had out of their tanks, and executing complicated manoeuvres. This they did, and the French, seeing an armada of tanks descend upon them, though these were without ammunition, turned and fled.

 

Another mystery: After the Germans broke through the Franco-Belgian border from Maubeuge to Sedan,  

they tell that they continued right on across northern France to the sea hardly firing a shot. When they got to the sea, Boulogne and Calais were defended mostly by the British. The whole French army seemed paralysed, unable to provide the least action, the slightest counter-thrust.

 

On the whole, then, while the French here and here fought valiantly and even stubbornly, their army seems to have been paralysed as soon as the Germans made their first break-through. Then it collapsed, almost without a fight. In the first place the French, as though drugged, had no will to fight, even when their soil was invaded by their most hated enemy. There was a complete collapse of French society and of the French soul. Secondly, there was either treachery or criminal negligence in the High Command and among the  high officers in the field. Among large masses of troops Communist propaganda had won the day. And its message was: 'Don't fight'. Never were the masses so betrayed. 

A German military unit, marching down the Champs-Élysées; Paris, 4 July 1940  Yad Vashem

 

July 8, 1940: Tomorrow France, which until a few weeks ago was regarded as the last stronghold of democracy on the Continent, will shed its democracy and join the ranks of the totalitarian states. Laval, whom Hitler has picked to do his dirty work in France -- the notorious Otto Abetz is the main go-between -- will have the French Chamber and Senate meet and vote themselves out of existence, handing over all power to Marshal Petain, behind whom Laval will pull the strings as Hitler's puppet dictator. The Nazis are laughing.

 

July 9: The Nazis are still laughing. Said the organ of the Foreign Office Dienst aus Deutschland, in commenting on Vichy's scrapping the French Parliament today: 'The change of the former regime in France to an authoritarian form of government will not influence in any way the political liquidation of the war. The fact is that Germany does not consider the Franco-German accounts as settled yet. Later they will be settled with historical realism ... not only on the basis of the two decades since Versailles, but they will also take into account much earlier times'.

July 10: Hans came in to see me. He had just driven from Irun, on the Franco-Spanish border, to Berlin. He said he could not get over the looks of Verdun, which he visited yesterday. Not a house there has been scratched, he said. Yet in the World War, when it was never taken, not a house remained standing. There you have the difference between 1914-18 and 1940.

 

William L. Shirer ... The Journal of A foreign Correspondent, 1934-1941 BERLIN DIARY  

 

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