Catching up on a backlog of posts, I'll seize an opportunity to split a
few hairs on some of the issues raised in the e-colloquium, and specifically
about France 1940. I hope that Stephen Badsey, whose post I use as a support
to my waffle, won't think that I'm picking on him after the Normandy thread.

On 6 Apr 2004, Stephen Badsey wrote: "In the case of technological
determinism he chooses the defeat of France in May-June 1940. It is indeed a
very good example of why weapons technology may not determine the outcome of
a war: the French (with their Allies) had quantitive and qualitative
superiority in tanks over the Germans, and also quantitative superiority in
infantry divisions. The Germans did have (as Lynn fails to mention) a
considerably superior airforce, and (as he mentions only in passing) also
considerable superiority in radio communications. It is a big but not
impossible leap from this to his conclusion that 'the key German advantage
was conceptual not mechanical', but that does not mean that it was not in
large part technological."

WARNING: BORING PART FOLLOWS WITH MARKER AT THE END.

   First, at the risk of revealing my own shortcomings about the Vichy
historiography (fortunately the man who was responsible for my historical
education when I was a student and who pretty much wrote the book, at least
in French, about that period is unlikely to read this), I am not sure that
French historians have deserted the issue of the 1940 campaign and focused
more on Vichy (as Stephen Badsey writes in another part of his post). There
is a plethora of anecdotical books on both topics, but I am aware of fewer
French-language good books about Vichy than I am about 1940. Looking at my
bookshelves, I will adopt the German mobilization system and mention
specific sources in three "waves".

   1. Books in French for which to my knowledge neither equivalent nor
substitute exists in English.

CREMIEUX-BRILHAC: "Les Francais de l'An 40", Gallimard 1990. The first
volume, "Ouvriers et Soldats", deals mostly with civilian morale and
political pacifism between Munich and 1940. The second volume, "La guerre,
oui ou non ?" is a very good treatment of the French industrial
mobilization, as well as efforts to address shortcomings during the Phoney
War. The end deals with some aspects of the 1940 campaign itself.

FACON: "L'Armee de l'Air dans la Tourmente - la bataille de France
1939-1940", Economica 1997, is
simply the best single-volume source about the French air force in that
period. It doesn't offer a detailed coverage of air operations, but a very
good analysis of the industrial and doctrine problems in the 1930's, the
production problems during the Phoney War, and a statistical analysis of
numbers of aircraft available, air losses and air victories for the 1940
campaign.


   2. Important books in French, but which are either about specialized
subjects or which have been quoted in some English-language works. The
classification being subjective, the Facon book above could go in the "for
specialists" category below, or alternately the first 3 entries in this
category could go in the "must have" category above depending on one's focus
and level of interest.

CHAIX: "En mai 1940, fallait-il entrer en Belgique ?", Economica 2000 - a
good discussion of the Dyle plan.

SAINT-MARTIN: "L'Arme Blindee Francaise, Tome 1: Mai-Juin 1940", Economica
1998 - is to French armor what Facon is to the French airforce.

DUTAILLY: "Les Problemes de l'Armee de Terre Francaise", SHAT 1980 -
substitutes in English being
Doughty's and Kiesling's books.

LEVISSE-TOUZE (ed.) "La Campagne de 1940", Tallandier 2001: substitutes (in
some cases better substitutes) exist in English for some but not all of the
articles.

MARY & HOHNADEL: "Hommes et Ouvrages de la Ligne Maginot" (Histoire &
Collection, 3 volumes published so far, between 2001 and 2004).


   3. Books in French for which no equivalents exist in English but which
the non-specialist can safely do without:

VANWELKENHUYZEN: "Miracle a Dunkerque", and "1940, Autopsie d'un Desastre".
This is a Belgian, not French, author, listed because these are high-level
treatments of the campaign (Army Group and government level coverage) which
are more precise than the English-language equivalents - whose focus is
broader - like Chapman's "Why France Fell" and Horne's "To Lose A Battle".
All the other entries are battle histories.

BRUGE: one series of books (I found 3 in my shelves but there might be more)
about the Maginot Line, another (5 found) about the June 1940 fighting. The
latter could go in the #2 category because I don't know of anything else in
English about that topic. These are very readable narratives, a bit like
Paul Carrell for the Germans but without the Nazi leanings or the
interjections of a sports commentator reporting on a match that the home
team is losing.

DE WAILLY: "De Gaulle Sous Le Casque" and "La Victoire Evaporee" about the
Allied counterattacks at Abbeville. It seems that there are four books in
total, but I only have these two.

GILLET: "La Luftwaffe A L'Ouest - Les Victoires de la Chasse Francaise",
extremely detailed coverage of the air battles May 10-15. First volume of a
series.

   All the books listed above are fairly recent (Bruge's work is from the
1970's, but most of the entries are from after the 1990's), and either in
print or easy to procure. There is of course an abundant historical
literature in French about 1940, which would be far too long to list here.
My shelves hold other books in French, but these are memoirs, unit
histories, or battle histories which are either harder to find or by authors
whom I can't remember if they are French or Belgian so I will stop boring
everybody with that sort of listing. Suffice it to say that historiography
in French about the 1940 campaign is anything but an endangered or extinct
species as far as I can tell. Granted, it doesn't begin to approach the
volume of books published about D-Day or the 1918 BEF, but you have to allow
for a smaller French-speaking word and the fact that military history is
more of a marginal phenomenon in French than in English.

END OF THE (MOST ?) BORING PART.

   Now, to address whether the Germans displayed a technological or a
cultural superiority in 1940 - or both. Let me start by saying that I am in
the "cultural superiority" camp.

   In 1940, everyone believed that the Germans had a quantitative
superiority, and that belief went a long way to shape Allied plans,
including the decision to fight a defensive (verging on "passive") war and
that of moving north to try and add Dutch troops to the Allied order of
battle, in a desperate attempt to even the odds. While the Allies at the
time overestimated the German numbers, the revision has perhaps gone a
little too far. Practically no mention is made of the 1940 campaign without
adding that the French had more tanks. As Stephen Badsey pointed out, the
picture looks different if you count "modern weapons", i.e. tanks + AT guns
and planes + AA guns. Also, while the Allied division count was higher - 135
Germans vs 152 Allied including the Dutch - the Belgians and the French had
less staying power than the Germans, having mobilized approximately twice as
much of their population, and Dutch divisions were generally ill-equipped.

   I would say that the quantitative Allied advantage was not such that it
would make up for the inferior coordination of coalition forces ("I have far
less admiration for Napoleon, now that I have commanded a coalition" - Foch
in 1919) and inferior equipment in a lot of the Allied units. I am
well-aware of the problems the Germans had, and of the fact that all sides
had what they perceived to be inadequate armed forces. Even then, I don't
think that the Allies enjoyed a significant advantage there, though they
would probably have a year later.

   Regarding technological and cultural superiority, the issue is far from
clear-cut either. It is often stated that French tanks were better than
German tanks. Better at what ? They were better at surviving enemy hits, and
they were marginally better at putting an enemy tank out of action when they
hit it. On the other hand, German tanks were better at not being hit in the
first place, they were better at getting off the first short, they were
better at firing faster and more accurately, they were much better at
employing group tactics.

   Essentially, the French technological choices were made in view of a
WWI-like battlefield, where a tank would come under fire from many weapons,
so it was worthwhile sacrificing extra crewmen and a radio for better turret
protection and more tanks. So the French tanks were built on the assumption
that they would get shot at and should survive. German tanks focused on not
getting shot at, by eliminating the opposition first, finding and exploiting
weaknesses in the defence, and using combined arms tactics. I am obviously
simplifying both sides' conscious choices and actual shortcomings (e.g. the
Germans would gladly have fielded a heavier force) here, but the fact
remains that I don't think technology constrained the cultural choices,
rather the other way around.

   Two examples to illustrate my point: French tanks enjoyed better
protection. However, German steel and armor technology was better (partly
because the French used lower-quality steel). German tanks enjoyed better
communications, but the French technological backwardness in the field of
radio was not innate (the French had been in the "not state of the art but
good enough" category during WWI and built good enough radios for their
ships when they wanted to) but caused
by French army indifference curtailing development of useful military
radios. By contrast, the British had a technological advantage in radio
during most of WWII (mostly in the end). Why is that ? In 1939 they spent
5.5 million pounds on radio and radar, in 1940 they spent 28.8 and in 1944
the spent 123.6 million pounds. With due allowance being made for
self-agrandizement concerns,  the second volume of Churchill's memoirs
(dealing with the second half of 1940) makes it very clear that the decision
to make radio the top investment priority was a political one.

   My point here is that between industrial nations of comparable
technological base, technological
superiority on the battlefield was the product of political (cultural ?)
choices. You made your
technological superiority, just as sometimes you make your own luck.

   The 1940 campaign was decided on a lot of factors. One of them was that
France was essentially alone against a Germany which had twice its
population and three times its industrial base, so the Germans had more
modern, often more and often better equipment. But that had not been a
sufficient factor in 1914 (although the Marne was a near-run thing), and
need not have been in 1940 either. Another factor was that the Allies had a
very bad plan, while the Germans had a plan which capitalized on the
opponent's mistakes (as in 1914) but was also practical (unlike 1940). Here,
the blame lies squarely with Gamelin for coming up, and pushing, his stupid
Breda variant, as well as with the political leadership (in both countries
but particularly France) for not checking him. A last factor was that the
Germans simply fought better, and here one can but invoke cultural rather
than technological reasons. German infantry wasn't appreciably
better-equipped than British or French
infantry, but was better in the attack. German units were better at changing
direction, reacting quickly, launching quick but coordinated attacks.

   I can't think of material or technological reasons why the Allies
couldn't have fielded a force which could have coped with the German
tactics. Both Britain and France had budgetary, technological and industrial
limitations, but the 1940 situation also largely came out of choices which
were not caused by those factors. The French, for example, invested heavily
in the light tank technology. They didn't have to. They could perfectly have
built a smaller tank force, but composed exclusively of radio-equipped SOMUA
equivalent with a larger turret. They just chose not to. They could
perfectly have fielded a decent AA service: they had the guns, they had the
technology to produce guns (and did in fact produce quite a few of them),
they just didn't consider that to be important
enough to warrant a special priority.

   The French air force, and to an even greater extent its British
counterpart, had the technological
capacity to contest air superiority and try to cordon off the battlefield
like the Luftwaffe did. At least
as important as technological factors (Hurricanes and French fighters being
inferior to the Bf-109) were "cultural" things like bad liaisons between the
airforce and the ground troops, poor organisation on the ground, etc. The
RAF probably had the world's best (actually the only) integrated air defence
system in 1940 over Britain, yet it took two more years for but a fraction
of it (the Desert Air Force) to become an efficient tactical air force. The
1940 Germans already knew how to effectively support their ground forces in
1940, but took longer to set up an effective air
defence. As far as I can tell, no technological factor as opposed to
(cultural ?) choices came into that.

   I realize that I'm more than stretching the definition of "cultural"
here, by including pretty much anything that isn't dictated by geographical,
demographic, industrial or technological constraints. So to wrap up this
already much too long post, I'll try to be a little less imprecise.

   For unknown (at least to me) reasons, the British and French army
cultures in the 20th century have been remarkably similar. Both armies were
very much control, as opposed to command, organisations. Both had a
different social outlook than the German army. During WWI, both armies were
forced to adapt to a changed environment, in which their traditional
recipees didn't work (this might qualify as cultures under stress). Both had
by 1918 adopted a more or less watered-down version of the German mission
tactics. Interestingly, both then proceeded to unlearn a lot of these
lessons in the afterwar years, as they seemed to run so much against the
grain of their respective
institutions. As a result, both the British and the French armies were, in
1940, in a doctrinal state
inferior to that of 1918. The story of the British army in WWII has been
told in many books, but let me suggest that, had France not collapsed and a
western front remained active, it might have evolved much more quickly (as
the French army showed signs of doing in June) as it could no longer have
afforded the luxury of following its cultural guidelines.

   Similarly, the 1940 German army was, like its Allied counterparts, a sort
of stripped down version of the 1918 one from a doctrinal point of view. It
had substituted increased technical expertise for a
narrower doctrinal approach - just like its British and French counterparts
- which led to a broader
version of its WWI problems (particularly the lack of an effective strategy)
as the war went on.


Regards

Louis Capdeboscq

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