Baah, baah bad French

Geoffrey Sinclair wrote:
> Again Nothing much new here.
>
> Arkadiusz Bugaj wrote in message ...
(snip)
> >> Try and cope with the fact there was skirmishing along all fronts
between
> >> battles.
> >
> >Au reverse. And your proof for this in case of Franco German border
> >is?
>
> The casualty figures I have seen in the histories of the period. The
usual
> low numbers for troops in the front line but not in major combat.

Then there is plenty of anecdotal evidence from German & French unit
histories, including recently-published books.

(snip)
> Ah so the idea is the French cannot be counted in 1944 because they
> were not in charge.

Alternately, you could argue that even in 1940 France wasn't the senior
partner in the Allied coalition so it never was in charge and if only
the country in charge is to be blamed than Britain lost in 1940, not France.

(snip)
> >There was much argument of how to deploy troops before September
> >campaign. many Polish commanders opted for defending the line of
> >Narew, Wis³a, San rivers, but the decision was taken at the political
> >level and
it
> >was determined by the fear of French ally reaction.
>
> "Of course the idea is to blame France for Poland's Army deployment."

All the more funny since the French had been among those advising the
Poles to deploy behind the Vistula, to which their Polish counterparts
told them than current defenses were perfectly adequate to stop Germany,
thank you.

> >In short Polish
> >policymakers and commanders were afraid that giving up a great chunk
> >of Poland without fitghting, including Pomeranian (the seeming cause
> >of the
> >war) corridor would make The French think that Poles were not going to
> >fight and thus induce them to abandon the case. It was the Munich
conference
> >lesson.
>
> "Of course the idea is to blame France for Poland's Army deployment."

Britain hadn't guaranteed Czechoslovakia. The Czechs bowed to Allied
pressure at Munich and accepted the German terms. Had they decided to
ignore the German ultimatum, there would have been war and France would
have fought on behalf of the Czechs. So all that was needed to avoid a
repeat of Munich was Poland refusing to hand over the corridor.

(snip)
> >And what about the Soviets? Would they have stayed idle watching
> >Hitler
take
> >half of Poland without defence?
>
> Up to Stalin, he did not move until the Germans were clearly winning,
> having surrounded Warsaw so the Soviets could declare the Polish
> government as being no longer in control.

More to the point, Stalin rushed an intervention force when it appeared
that the Germans were collapsing Polish resistance far more quickly than
expected. Stalin was a poor military commander but he wasn't a complete
idiot and the notion of defense in depth was one that the Russians were
familiar with. Therefore if the Poles had decided to deploy behind the
Vistula while screening their western border, Stalin would most likely
have waited for battle between the German and the main Polish armies to
be joined and won before committing himself.

(snip)
> >Was Petain encircled in bombed, shelled
> >and assaulted Paris? And surrendered after running out of ammo?
>
> Alternatively did the Polish government spare the citizens of Warsaw
> the effects of a major battle given that the battle was going to be
> lost?

Alternately, Petain was head of government and not mayor of Paris. The
Polish government wasn't encircled, bombed, shell, assaulted, or
whatever. It didn't run out of ammunition as it fled to Romania.

(snip)
> >> Check out the forces in the colonies that became pro allied.
> >
> >I know that nad gen Leclerc's oyssey, but how many stayed pro-Vichy?
> >Even during the Torch operation?
>
> Somaliland, New Caledonia, there were others, and try and find a pro
> Vichy colony around a week after Torch.

Somaliland remained pro-Vichy, New Caledonia and other Pacific
territories (e.g. Tahiti) went Free French, so did French Equatorial
Africa (Cameroon etc), as well as St-Pierre and Miquelon.

Jibuti (French Somaliland) only switched allegiance on 28 Dec 1942,
that's six weeks after Torch. The French West Indies only rallied in
1943. Obviously Indochina remained "loyal" to Vichy, not that it had
much choice.

(snip)
> Secondly at Normandy were two French light cruisers, the Polish one
> was an ex RN ship. The French battleship Richelieu had joined the RN
> in the Indian Ocean in April 1944.

Also, other French warships including a battleship participated in the
Dragoon operation.

(snip)

> >Of course you can always bow to force and became a helot.
>
> Try and understand the situation in all occupied countries was
> complex, and in 1940 in particular few in the west were ready to start
> actively resisting a Nazi rule that took a while to become heavy
> handed. The Germans started mass killings of Poles before the end of
> fighting in Poland, makes a difference to the attitude of the
> population.

There's a good recent book that detailed the German and Soviet
occupations of Poland. It showed how, far from the usual black and white
characterization of the Poles, the locals kept having to make
arrangements with the occupiers. Even the resisters had to strike deals
in order to survive and resist another day. This isn't particularly news
for anyone having studied occupation elsewhere and assuming that the
Poles don't constitute a separate species from the rest of humanity, but
as a local study it stands up well, I heard.

The interesting thing is how the same mechanisms which had been used to
resist the Germans (i.e. lying about the state of manpower, foodstuff
etc) were used practically unchanged to survive under the following
communist occupation.

(snip)
> "It is clear you do not understand a great deal, firstly France lost
> something like 3 to 4% of the population as war dead, and this appears
> to be around the highest percentage loss,

As a percentage loss, France is definitely highest of the major
belligerents in WWI. I think that the top scorer was Serbia. Note how
Yugoslavia lost heavily again in WWII, whereas France and Britain got
off relatively lightly.


LC
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