Why was France so useless in World War Two?

This was the title of a video I stumbled on while surfing the Internet. The film was short, only about 30 minutes, but it was good enough.

The author covered the Ardennes breakthrough, one of the most daring and successful operations of the Second World War. Getting an airing was the irresponsible negligence and incompetence of the French high command, with every general certain that no modern army could advance through those hills densely covered with impassable forests.

The French expected an attack through Belgium, the traditional route of northern armies into France. It was there that they (and the British expeditionary corps) concentrated most of their resources. The German advance through the Ardennes and towards the Channel cut those troops off, and their desperate attempts to break through the encirclement ultimately proved unsuccessful.

Quite a few names, both French and German were mentioned, but two were inexplicably left out: Gen. Manstein who planned that operation and Field-Marshal Rundstedt who commanded the Nazi troops. That was an innocent omission though: 30 minutes isn’t very long and there was a lot of ground to cover.

One error was less innocent but more understandable. The author described the German Pz-IV tank as ‘heavy’. Such classification came directly from Stalin’s historians, who had a vested interest in grossly exaggerating the strength of the Wehrmacht, explaining thereby the catastrophic routing of the regular Red Army during the first few months of its war.

In fact, the Germans had no heavy tanks at all until the Panthers and the Tigers made their appearance at Stalingrad in late 1942. The Pz-IV weighed 25 tonnes, which was lighter than the Soviet T-34 (26.5 tonnes) that’s universally described as a medium tank. At the same time, the Soviets started the war with a real heavy tank, the KV (50 tonnes), for which the Germans had no analogues until almost two years later.

Sorry, did I say catastrophic routing? That’s how the defeat of the French army during the six weeks starting on 9 May, 1940, is normally described, including in France herself. That defeat still rankles as a national shame, when, according to de Gaulle, “the shaken nation was totally paralysed”.

Yet that’s not how the official Soviet, and now Russian, history treats the period following the German attack on the Soviet Union (22 June, 1941). Yes, there were original setbacks, admit those historians. But the Red Army was fighting heroically, making the Nazis pay dearly for every inch of Soviet territory.

That version of events effortlessly migrated into the works of most Western historians as well, the German scholar Joachim Hoffmann being a notable exception (his seminal book Stalin’s War of Annihilation is a masterpiece). While praising the heroism of the Red Army, those same historians are openly derisory about the performance of the French during those fateful six weeks.

That version has become part of folklore. The video I’m talking about helpfully provided a sequence from an animated film, in which the French are described as “cheese-eating surrender monkeys”. While most French people I know would resent such vulgarity, they wouldn’t take exception to the general view of their six-week debacle.

So there we have it: Germans enjoying a cakewalk through northern France, with the French army routed without putting up any meaningful resistance – on one side. On the other side we have the valiant Red Army heroes irrigating every patch of Soviet territory with German blood, the early setbacks notwithstanding.

However, Descartes taught that all knowledge is comparative. So do let’s compare those French six weeks with the same period in the war between Stalin and Hitler, roughly until the end of July, 1941.

The Franco-German war unfolded in Flanders and Normandy, on a territory about 300 km long and 150 km deep. That area was about the size of Lithuania, which the Wehrmacht Army Group North, the weakest of the three attacking the USSR, occupied in a week.

It took the Germans 14 days to reach the Channel, with their panzer divisions covering 350 km. During the same 14 first days of the other war, the German Army Group North covered 470 km, and the Army Group Centre 425 km.

During the French campaign the Wehrmacht suffered 156,000 casualties (killed, wounded, MIA). In the Soviet Union, the Germans suffered similar casualties by late July, 1941, but they were advancing along a frontline 1,450 km long, having covered an area 100 times as large as the part of France they occupied.

By 9 July, 1941, the Germans had exceeded in Russia every marker of victory achieved in the entire French campaign (the numerical strength of routed enemy troops, depth of offensive penetration, weaponry captured). By that time the Wehrmacht suffered about half the number of its losses in the entire French campaign.

Looking at the same first six weeks, the Germans lost 640 tanks in France and 503 in Russia – this though, unlike the Red Army, the French were desperately short of anti-tank weapons, and even those they had were poor. In air combat the contrast is even starker.

During the French campaign from 9 May to 24 June the Luftwaffe lost 1,401 planes, with another 672 badly damaged. In Russia, the similar six-week numbers were 968 and 606 respectively.

This is especially remarkable since the combined air forces of France and Britain only had 700-750 fighter pilots, whereas the Russians had about 3,500 just in their western military districts (and about four planes per pilot). Moreover, the Luftwaffe had twice the number of warplanes in France that they had at the beginning of Operation Barbarossa.

You may say that after the first few weeks and months, when the Nazis took over four million Soviet POWs (more soldiers than the Wehrmacht had altogether), the Soviets regrouped, remobilised, rearmed and eventually ended up on the winning side.

True. But so did the French, although their contribution to the Allied victory wasn’t as significant as the Soviet one. Still, the French reclaimed Paris on 25 August, 1944 – which by no means excuses their performance in 1940. By the same token, the Soviets’ entry into Berlin in May, 1945, shouldn’t make us forget about the defeat they suffered in 1941, perhaps the greatest military catastrophe in history.

If such is the story, what’s the moral? Simple. Whenever you read history books, make sure you have a bag of salt and ideally a bottle of tequila within easy reach.

And if such history emanates from official Russian sources, start downing shots before opening the book. That may prepare you for the retrospective political propaganda that passes for historical scholarship in Putin’s Russia.