Why was France so Useless in World War Two???

I met an elderly French man from Nantes who was 20 years old in the French infantry in Belgium in May 1940. He chucked his uniform and stole a bike and clothes. He cycled all the way through Paris with his army cru cut looking like a soldier past German forces who did not stop him once.. He got to Nantes on West Coast where he was stopped by two French police on foot. They asked for his papers, he told them the truth, he was a French soldier and he just wanted to spend the war with his wife and child and that they could hear from his accent he was a local, like them. They arrrested him anyway and he was put on a train all the way back to Germany where he was held for a week. After that time he was brought before a German officer who, after looking down at papers summarising the story and for some long minutes, in impeccable French looked up at him and said " ah so, nice friends you have in France " He told me "even the German officer couldn't believe the French police had arrested me"! He thought he would be shot but spent the duration of the war in a prison camp. 5 long years. This is what you have to understand when dealing with 1940s France. This was not unusual.. many helped and collaborated and the resistance such as it was, often fought amongst themselves and had conflicting communist influences. Story related in French to me. The man was called Renaudin and I was dating his grandaughter Maud Renaudin. He is sadly long gone. She is happily married with a grown up family still in Nantes.. just thought I'd share a 100% real story from one who was there but no longer here to do so himself.. I hope he'd approve

Sitting around waiting for your enemy to attack whenever and wherever they choose is never an effective strategy.

The French did have the unfortunate circumstance of not having the English Channel between them and Germany.

Those of us that lived during the prosperity and decadence of the second half of the 20th century have no idea how intensely traumatic the first half was. The industrial revolution gave humanity the promise of the most comfortable life possible in history, but also industrial scale human misery. So the world saw the largest and most devastating war in history, followed by a worldwide economic depression and then the largest and most devastating war in history.

I don’t really think it can be underestimated just how much damage the first would war really did. The war had destroyed virtually any real confidence in leadership. Simply too many men had been pointless marched into machine guns and artillery barrages.

In every documentary I have seen on this topic, and this video adds to this theory, it was not the French Army that was bad but the French Army leadership and decision makers that were bad.

To be fair, the British and other allies didn't fare to well against the Germans in 1939 either. England was only spared because of geography.

What is always missing from these documentaries is a perspective on losses. During the Battle of France, Germany suffered 156K casualties and lost 1/3 of the the Luftwaffe in only 6 weeks. It wasn't a walk in the park and the French did fight.

Being French and having examined a wide range of sources about this era, I've concluded that the root cause of France's issues during this period was political. While most nations in continental Europe had evolved into various forms of dictatorships, France remained a democracy, despite numerous coup attempts. However, the severe tensions between the far left and far right plunged the nation into political turmoil: over the 20 years of the interwar period, France experienced 43 government changes and had 37 different prime ministers (serving in a role equivalent to presidents in the Third Republic). This backdrop of internal strife led to decisions more concerned with preserving the political system than with operational efficiency. For instance, when De Gaulle introduced his book "Vers l'Armée de Métier" in 1935, proposing a few fully mechanized and armored divisions as the vanguard, similar to the German Panzer divisions, the left viewed his proposal suspiciously as a tactic to create a Praetorian Guard capable of overthrowing democracy. Many on the right also objected, fearing that such a force would necessitate a large number of mechanics, who were often socialist and could act as a fifth column within the military. Similarly, the lack of political consensus resulted in a fragmented aviation industry for almost the entire interwar period, leading to inadequate aircraft production. This deficiency became a critical factor when German air supremacy allowed their forces to advance rapidly, leaving French forces incapacitated. As for military leadership, these challenging conditions resulted in command being entrusted to the same individuals who led during WWI. This approach persisted even as France capitulated, with leadership then being assumed by the octogenarian WWI hero, Pétain. While it's important not to default to ageism, history shows that nations with dynamic military leadership often benefit from the energy and innovation of younger commanders, rather than relying on veterans of past conflicts. Nonetheless, chance played a significant role in the outcome of these events. The French strategy (the Dyle Plan Breda variant), which was ill-suited against the German tactics, could have been effective just a few months earlier. The Germans had postponed their attack multiple times for various reasons, and most of their earlier plans would have played directly into French hands. The decision to adopt a new, daring strategy came after the Germans had to cancel another attack due to weather, during which a plane carrying their battle plans crashed in Belgium, compelling them to abandon those plans. Even though the German strategy ultimately proved to be the perfect counter to the French plan (to everyone's surprise, including the Germans), the situation wasn't immediately hopeless. However, the French response was consistently just a bit too slow, often by mere hours. Had certain events unfolded slightly differently, the Germans might have been forced to halt their advance, potentially leading to a scenario similar to WWI but with the Germans in a far less advantageous position for a war of attrition. PS: I would add more nuance to the Vichy regime portrayal. The holocaust was not something people were aware of back then, so you cannot say that "many people in Vichy France were totally onboard with the extermination of jews". As for antisemitism, it wasn't stronger in France than in the US nor the UK. France actually had many jew political and industrial figures before the war, and Pétain for example was the godfather for a jew family. The inclination to simplify history for moral reasons is understandable, including within France, but accuracy is paramount when examining historical events. France had the highest survival rate for Jews in Europe at 75%, despite being fully occupied from 1942 onward. While Vichy did surrender foreign Jews within its territory to Germany, it negotiated to leave French Jews undisturbed. Although there were indeed pro-Nazi elements within Vichy, the situation is complex, with several different Vichy governments succeeding one another, the most collaborationist of which came after France was fully occupied and under complete German control. Pétain, at 85, was largely a figurehead.

One of the contributory factors in France's failure was the supreme commander Gamelin, he headquartered himself in a remote chateau with no radio or telephone communications and relied on dispatch riders to deliver information and dispatch orders.

The outnumbered French First Army fought with such tenacity defending the Dunkirk Evacuation pocket at Lille, only surrendering when they ran out of ammo, that a German general accorded the French troops military honors. They were permitted to parade with their arms. He said of them, "I see in these French soldiers the same determination and defiance as those at Verdun." This angered Hitler, who had the general dismissed.

The key element people forget about Blitzkrieg called Bewegungskrieg at the time. Is the most important element the encirclement, the french coast meant that the germans had a huge natural feature to complete the encirclement. They just had to go straight and the encirclement had occured and they initiated it from one of the shortest distances.

Ultimately, France brought the defeat to itself. The men on the ground fought hard, the numbers are actually impressive- B1 tanks rampaged into German occupied villages wiping out dozens of tanks, the outnumbered air force caused so much damage to the Luftwaffe that it might have played a role in the German's defeat at the battle of Britain. But no matter how hard the individual soldiers fight, if your chain of command is so impossibly stupid as to NOT bomb the ENTIRE German invasion force out of existence while it remains as sitting ducks in the Ardennes and end the war right there then you stand little chances in a war of millions of men. These generals were, for the most part, generals from WW1, so-called war-heroes... From a war that involved a lot of merely charging at the German trenches. Not only were they "old-school", prone to use outdated tactics, they were OLD, and I mean REALLY REALLY old, they might not even have been all there in some cases, I believe.

Germans attacked Sedan in the 1870 Franco prussian war. They repeated this in WW1. The french built a fort at Sedan but staffed it with reserve conscripts. Defence in depth at Sedan would have stopped the Nazis dead. The spanish civil was only 3-4 years before and the French generals must have watched the newsreels with stuka's taking out key infrastructure. Gamelin's bunker in Paris had no phone lines or radios. He intended to write letter delivered by messengers with millions of refugees on the roads. He was dumb as a box of rocks.

"I'd rather have a German division in front of me than a French division behind me." - General George S. Patton

France was no more useless than the rest of Europe when faced with the Nazis and the power of the German army. Poland fell right away, and the others followed. Great Britain was saved only by the fact that they were an island, but they were pummeled by whatever bombs could reach them. WWII could have been won a lot quicker if the Americans had gotten involved sooner, but for the longest time Roosevelt and his administration resisted it because of economic reasons. Meanwhile in France the country was divided, many were too terrified to rebel against the German invasion, and you cannot blame them. My grandmother described to me the horrendous paralyzing fear watching the German army entering Paris, and the deafening sound that their boots made on the pavement. Her and my grandfather decided early on to enter the resistance, and unfortunately my granddad was arrested in 1942 with five of his friends who were in the same reseau, and all of them were sent to concentration camps in Germany. None of them came back, my granddad died at the liberation of the Sachsenhausen camp by the Russians, of starvation and pneumonia. He was too sick and weak to hang on for a few more months. My mom was six years old and she never saw her father again. Don’t think that Europeans were just sitting on their behind in their comfortable homes during the German occupation. There was no food, gasoline, nor anything for the civilian population, everything went to the German occupants. My grandma and her sister had to stand in lines for hours with tickets to get a piece of bread, butter, some meat and whatever was available on that day, and some days there was nothing at all. Some people, mostly antisemite monstrous assholes, were more than happy to help the Germans. They were called the Milice, they dressed in those ridiculous black uniforms and worked for the Gestapo. They arrested resistants and Jewish people alike, and unfortunately a lot of those repugnant miliciens did not pay for their crimes at the end of the war, too many. I could go on and on about all I know about those dark times, I am an older French woman who has lived in the USA with my American husband for the last 45 years, and when I was growing up in France, the war still permeated a lot of our lives. It was talked about, thought about, it was in the realistic French films we watched, books we read. WWII was a war not just endured by armies, it was a war that abused, tortured and decimated a huge part of civilians population all over Europe. That kind of war never affect only one generation, it always affect two, and often enough three depending on the circumstances lived through by your family. Try to understand and respect it. Thank you.

Had the French military been organized along the lines of a war of maneuver, had the leadership not been stuck in the 1870's and the first year of WWI, had French politicians had the courage to back their military leaders and had the military even considered the ubiquitous use of radio communication, used their tanks (then the best in Europe) as tanks instead of mobile artillery.... the list goes on, and on, and on, and on. The principal reason the French lost the Battle of France is that the leadership throughout the military (with a few exceptions) were more concerned with their careers and the politicians were more concerned about being seen as the "savior" of France. In other words, the French lost the Battle of France because they were French. The individual soldiers were damned fine fighters, their leadership from the bottom to the top seemed to be staffed by men freshly off the short bus.

Pétain's quote is always truncated. He said that the Germans would be pincered as they left the Ardennes forest "provided that the necessary and adequate defenses were built", which wasn't the case. Apart from Petain's assessment, the French High Command had confirmation on many occasions throughout the 1930s that the Ardennes could be crossed and the Meuse be reached by armoured vehicles in 3 to 5 days, which is roughly what happened. So the French HC had an accurate assessment of the potential "Ardennes" scenario. It wasn't "the French", but Gamelin, who decided that the German Ardennes thrust could only be a diversion, and devised his Dyle-Breda plan with no strategic reserves and ignoring reality.

I was lucky enough to live in France (a long time ago – 2005/6) and it’s amazing how different countries teach kids about the same conflict. My French friends told me how they are taught that the British army fled, deserting them in their fight against the Germans. Us Brits are taught that we had no choice but to withdraw as the Allies were getting pummelled, France was lost and the heroic evacuation at Dunkirk allowed the war to continue. There is still a lot of resentment in France over the idea that Britain abandoned the French and the Germans could have been defeated had we stayed. I can't say I agree with that assessment. The French guys I knew also said they were taught that the British ‘betrayed’ them at Oran, which remains a highly controversial topic.

An excellent video - thank you. My neighbour was a tank driver with a British tank in France at that time. He was very bitter about those early battles , and said ‘the French were appalling to us - they hated us - they would poison their wells rather than let us have the water we needed from them - and we were there to help them!’. In the end he had to withdraw to Dunkirk, abandoning the tanks at the outskirts. He was evacuated by the Royal Navy from the beaches of Dunkirk. In the 1980s my mother - a driver with the ATS in WW2, partly based in London - visited Paris with a friend. She came home very upset at how untouched by war the buildings of Paris where whereas parts of London were even then still being rebuilt. ‘How could they just hand it over’ she questioned - ‘we were ready to fight street by street in London’.