During 1939, combined French and British military spending exceeded German military spending. Not only that, but Britain and France spent a considerably smaller percentage of their GDPs on the military than did Germany. Even in '38, combined Anglo-French military spending was nothing to sneeze at! By the time the German invasion appeared in France in late spring/early summer of 1940, the French had had plenty of time to correct flaws created by a lack of spending.
That being said, I’m in agreement with Clyde that French military thinking was fairly standard-issue for the time. Blitzkrieg was a case of the Germans being more creative and innovative than the norm, not of the French falling below the norm.
The purpose of the Maginot Line was to allow France to defend its border with Germany using a reduced number of forces. This would free up French forces for use further north, to defend against a repeat of the Schlieffen Plan. France’s strategy may not have been the most creative in the world, but I don’t see it as cowardly.
It is true that France sometimes betrays its allies almost as a matter of course. Daladier’s decision to make false promises to Poland about a general offensive against Germany is the most insipid example of this which comes to mind. Off the top of my head, I cannot think of a single other example in which a nation of any political persuasion deliberately set up an “ally” to get conquered by hostile foreign powers. No one’s mind should ever work the way Daladier’s did back in '39.
But as an American, I must admit that my own nation’s leaders have not always been 100% honorable. Take Woodrow Wilson for example. It’s possible that he really was as naive as he seemed to be, and that he entered WWI with the purest of intentions. It later became obvious that WWI was not really a war “to make the world safe for democracy” so much as it was a war to make the world safe for France to brutally exploit Germany. German children and adults often went to bed hungry during the ‘20s, largely as a result of the massive reparations payments required by Britain and France, and because of those nations’ decision to close their markets–and their empires’ markets–to German imports. (Germany needed money from manufactured goods exports to pay for food imports.)
As WWI drew to a close, it quickly became clear that Britain and France would treat Germany with a mean-spirited and unjustified vindictiveness. Woodrow Wilson had sacrificed American blood . . . for nothing. But when the Soviet Union and Poland went to war in 1919, Wilson had a chance to redeem himself. Here was a war against a truly evil regime. Given that Britain and France insisted on allowing Germany no more than a token military, it was the responsibility of the Western democracies to resist Soviet expansionism. That included the United States–especially because it was Woodrow Wilson’s decision to enter WWI which gave France and Britain the ability to strip Germany of its military. Instead of helping the Polish resist the Soviet invasion, Wilson did nothing. Poland retained its independence not because the Western democracies came to its aid–they didn’t–but because the Polish military, alone and unaided, resisted the Soviet threat. (Successful Polish resistance would not have been possible, had the Soviet Union not been in a state of civil war.)
To take another example: in the years after WWII, the Chinese nationalists were on the verge of finishing off the Chinese communists. At that point, the Truman administration exerted enormous diplomatic pressure on the nationalists to give the communists a respite. The nationalists gave into that pressure–a fact which allowed the communists to regroup. The communists would go on to push the nationalists out of mainland China. Chiang Kai-shek later said that giving into the Truman administration’s diplomatic pressure was the biggest mistake of his life.
Another example of a shameful action committed by the U.S. government was Operation Keelhaul.
On March 31, 1945, Soviet General Secretary Joseph Stalin, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt concluded the final form of their plans in a secret codicil to the agreement. Outlining the plan to forcibly return the refugees to the Soviet Union, this codicil was kept secret from the US and British people for over fifty years.[2]
The name of the operation comes from the naval practice of corporal punishment, keelhauling. In his book Operation Keelhaul, Epstein states: “That our Armed Forces should have adopted this term as its code name for deporting by brutal force to concentration camp, firing squad, or hangman’s noose millions who were already in the lands of freedom, shows how little the high brass thought of their longing to be free.”
The refugee columns fleeing the Soviet-occupied eastern Europe numbered millions of people. They included many anti-communists of several categories, assorted civilians, both from the Soviet Union and from Yugoslavia, and fascist collaborationists from eastern Slavic and other countries.
At the end of World War II there were more than five million refugees from the Soviet Union in Western Europe . . .
Often prisoners were summarily executed by receiving Communist authorities, sometimes within earshot of the British.
FDR had agreed to forcible repatriation of refugees, and Truman carried it out. (As did Winston Churchill.) Had some other power later attained military victory over the Allies, it would have been that power’s responsibility to hang Truman, Churchill, and (if he was still alive) FDR as war criminals.
Yes, French political leaders have done despicable and contemptible things over the years. They have typically been at their worst when they were feeling most pro-communist. Unfortunately, France wasn’t the only Western democracy capable of acting dishonorably in the face of overwhelming Soviet evil; or of delivering up its supposed “allies” to Soviet expansionism.
Maybe we (including me) are spending too much time dwelling on the negative–on all the times Western politicians felt entirely too comfortable with the Soviet Union and its ways. We should also remember there have been times when people–in France, the U.S., and elsewhere–have resisted the evil of communism. Perhaps we should talk a little about the positive (French, British, and American acts of anti-communism, honor, and fidelity).
