Military "Culture" and the Pall of France in 194O

International Security

Volumn 24, Issue 4, 2000, Pages 157-180

  Porch, Douglas ^a  

^a NAVAL POSTGRADUATE SCHOOL   (United States)

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EID: 0034392652     PISSN: 01622889     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1162/016228800560336     Document Type: Article

References (61)

1. Marc Bloch, Strange Defeat: A Statement of Evidence Written in 1940 (New York: Norton, 1968), pp. 131-132.
2. Elizabeth Kier, Imagining War: French and Britisli Military Doctrine behccen the Wars (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1997). Subsequent references to this book appear parenthetically in the text.
3. Bloch, Strange Defeat, p. 126 (emphasis in original).
4. Philip Bankwitz, Maxime Weygand and Civil-Military Relations in Modern France (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1967), pp. 165-166. See also Robert A. Doughty, Tlie Breaking Point: Sedan and the Fall of France, 1940 (Hamden, Conn.: Archon Press, 1990), pp. 325-332; and Martin
5. Alexander, The Republic in Danger: General Maurice Gamelin and the Politics of French Defence, 1933-1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 399.
6. Eugenia G. Kiesling, Arming against Hitler: France and the Limits of Military Planning (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1996), p. 4.
7. Martin Alexander, "The Fall of France, 1940," Journal of Strategic Studies, Vol. 13, No. 1 (March 1990), p. 14.
8. Stephen Schuker, "France and the Remilitarization of the Rhineland," French Historical Studies, Vol. 14, No. 3 (1986), pp. 299-338;
9. Jean-Baptiste Duroselle, Politique étrangère de la France, 1871-1969: La décadence, 1932-1939 [The foreign policy of France, 1871-1969: the decadence of 1932-1939] (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1939);
10. and Duroselle, L'Abîme, 1939-1945 [The abyss, 1939-1945] (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1983).
11. Douglas Porch, "Arms and Alliances: French Grand Strategy and Policy in 1914 and 1940," in Paul Kennedy, ed., Grand Strategies in War and Peace (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1991), pp. 125-126.
12. Indeed, even Bloch argues that the French peasant of 1914 was no more eager to die for Belgrade than was the French peasant of 1939 for Danzig. Bloch, Strange Defeat, pp. 136-137.
13. Jean-Jacques Becker, 1914: Comment les français sont entrés dans la guerre [1914: how the French entered the war] (Paris: Presses de la Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques, 1977), argues that French soldiers went to battle in 1914 in a spirit of resignation rather than in a state of patriotic euphoria.
14. Kiesling, Arming against Hitler, p. 5.
15. Robert J. Young, In Command of France: French Foreign Policy and Military Planning, 1933-1940 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1978); and Alexander, Tlie Republic in Danger.
16. Robert Frankenstein, Le prix du rearmament français [The price of French rearmament] (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1992).
17. Jeffrey Gunsberg, Divided and Conquered: The French High Command and the Defeat of the West, 1940 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1985);
18. and Henri Dutailly, Les problèmes de l'année de terre française (1935-1939) [The problems of the French army (1935-1939)] (Vmccnnes: Services historiques de l'armée de terre, 1980).
19. Alexander, "The Fall of France, 1940," p. 16.
20. Judith Hughes, To the Maginot Line (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971).
21. Allan R. Millett and Williamson Murray, Military Effectiveness, 3 vols. (Boston: Allan and Unwin, 1988).
22. Stephen Peter Rosen, Winning the Next War: Innovation and the Modern Military (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1991).
23. Robert Allan Doughty, Seeds of Disaster: The Development of French Army Doctrine, 1919-1939 (Hamden, Conn.: Archon Press, 1985); and Doughty, Tlie Breaking Point.
24. Riesling, Arming against Hitler.
25. Jack Snyder, The Ideology of the Offensive: Military Decision Making and the Disasters of 1914 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1984).
26. Barry R. Posen, The Sources of Military Doctrine: France, Britain, and Germany between the World Wars (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1984).
27. "The greatest significance of (Kier's) book is that its central ideas should replace simplistic notions about doctrine that currently exert great influence," writes Robert A. Doughty in the American Political Science Revieiv, Vol. 92, No. 3 (September 1998), p. 750.
28. Michael C. Desch, "Culture Clash: Assessing the Importance of Ideas in Security Studies," International Security, Vol. 23, No. 1 (Summer 1998), p. 144.
29. Methodical or controlled battle doctrines were developed by the British and French armies during World War I and called for the close coordination of infantry, artillery, and tanks, and eventually close air support in an advancing wave of firepower.
30. Nigel Hamilton, Monty: The Making of a General, 1887-1942 (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1981), pp. 214, 281, 353-354, 436-437, 493, 532.
31. Ibid., pp. 637-711, at p. 695.
32. At Alam Haifa, Rommel's plan for victory consisted of drawing the British tanks from their defensive positions and then destroying them with his antitank guns as he had in the past. Montgomery's plan kept his tanks in their defensive positions to support his infantry, hence condemning Rommel's attack to defeat.
33. Ibid., pp. 775-848.
34. Even Gen. George Patton's two celebrated armor-led dashes to Palermo or in Normandy succeeded because, in each instance, the hard work of infantry and artillery tied down the main German forces and removed the threat from his flanks. One criticism of Patton was that his armored thrusts were spectacular precisely because he went where the German forces were weak or virtually nonexistent, for example, northwestern Sicily in 1943.
35. Williamson Murray, "British Military Effectiveness in World War II," in Millett and Murray, Military Effectiveness, Vol. 3, T\ie Second World War, p. 119.
36. The Germans began to experiment with armored vehicles near Kazan in the Soviet Union in the mid-1920s. In 1929 Heinz Guderian fathered the idea of armored divisions, and field exercises began from 1932. What was the attraction of enhanced mobility for the Germans? Gen. Werner von Fritsch, commander of the army between 1934 and 1938, called it a doctrine of "offensive defense." Wilhelm Deist, Manfred Messerschmidt, Hans-Erich Volkmann, and Wolfram Wette, Germany and the Second World War, Vol. 1, The Build-up of German Aggression (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), pp. 432, 434, 440.
37. The conviction of Capt. Alfred Dreyfus on charges of espionage in 1894, on the basis of fraudulent evidence, touched off a bitter fight for a revision of the verdict that eventually expanded to encompass anti-Semitism and the place of the army in the state.
38. Kiesling, Arming against Hitler p. 25.
39. Kiesling goes into some detail about the army's problems in training both conscripts and reservists in the 1930s. Ibid., chaps. 3, 4.
40. Like their French counterparts, German officers insisted that one-year conscription was insufficient to both train and maintain battle-ready divisions. Their solution was to raise conscription to two years in 1936, and draw officers from where ever they could find them, including the police and, in 1938, the Austrian army. German generals were never satisfied that their conscripts were sufficiently trained, and continued to insist that they would not be ready for war before 1943.
41. Deist, Germany and the Second World War, Vol. 1, pp. 449, 453.
42. Although the influx of conscripts from 1935 caused the Germans immense problems, it also gave them enormous advantages. First, the German army was virtually permanently mobilized from that moment. Conscripts called up in 1935 were only released in the autumn of 1937, to be recalled in the spring of the following year. The rapid pace of German rearmament, the incorporation of the Austrian army into the Wehrmacht, and the takeover of the Skoda arms works in the autumn of 1938 meant that training in mobile warfare could be carried out in the German army. In September 1939 the German army was offered a dry run in Poland to test its theories; it sustained substantial casualties. Ibid., pp. 448-453. Diest notes that the rapid expansion of the German army did impede the training of motorized troops in the winter of 1938-39 because of a lack of vehicles. Ibid., p. 453.
43. The Germans organized their army in four waves. The first wave comprised 78 percent active-duty personnel. Most of the conscripts and reservists were consigned to second-echelon units. Ibid., p. 455. The French, too, divided their army into more highly trained A and reserveheavy B divisions. Unfortunately for the Allies, however, because the Germans held the strategic offensive, they were able to identify the Allied deployment through radio intercepts and concentrate their forty-four best-trained and highly mechanized units against the worst-trained French units, placed in the Ardennes precisely because that was where Gamelin thought an attack least likely.
44. Bankwitz, Maxiine Weygand and Civil-Military Relations in Modern France, pp. 86-87, 154, 160.
45. Alexander, The Republic in Danger, pp. 37-39.
46. Hamilton, Monty, pp. 213-214, for disagreements with Liddell Hart; p. 320 for Dempsey, Leese, and Horrocks; p. 329 on Brooke; p. 436 on armor as a revival of the "romance of cavalry"; and pp. 353 and 493 on Martel.
47. Far from being prejudiced against the "nation-in-arms," one can argue that the adoption of a long-war strategy demonstrates that the soldiers of the Western alliance actually placed greater faith in the willingness of their populations to sustain a long war than did German soldiers and Hitler, who sought to win the war quickly lest they again be "stabbed in the back" by a fickle population as in 1918. In fact, it was the German doctrine that was rooted in a deep cultural pessimism, while that of the Allies was calculated to entice the most efficient performance from citizen-soldiers.
48. In taking Wellington as an example of how British military culture precluded decentralization (p. 149), Kier offers further evidence of her failure to accord sufficient weight to factors other than cultural bias. Wellington faced problems that only strict centralization could cure: his army was undisciplined, plundered the population at will, and was literally caught napping during French attacks. A minor Irish baronet and "sepoy general" like Sir Arthur Wellcsley might have found it difficult to have his orders followed by commanders who, though inferior in rank, considered themselves socially superior and better connected at court. These intriguers, whom Wellesley called "croakers," were led by his second-in-command, Sir Brent Spencer, a favorite of George III, who spread discontent with Wellington's leadership in the army and at home. Wellesley could not afford to have his subordinates make common cause with his numerous enemies in the British press and in the government. Although Wellesley certainly fit the definition of a snob, class preference had nothing to do with his reluctance to decentralize command. Given the inferior size of Wellington's army and the fact that survival in the musket era depended on the maintenance of an unbroken front, allowing subordinate commanders to "plan their own operations" would be courting extinction. But Kier's accusation that Wellington was a martinet driven by a gentry desire to control everything is belied by the fact that, as the leader of a coalition force, he often had to plead with and cajole his Spanish and Portuguese allies to carry out their preassigned role in his operations. Christopher Hibbert, Wellington: A Personal History (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1997), pp. 8586, 88, 93, 98-99.
49. Desch, "Culture Clash," pp. 144, 149, 150.
50. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (New York: Verso Books, 1991).
51. Eric Hobsbawm and Terrance Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983).
52. French socialist leader Jean Jaurès' L'organisation socialiste de la France, originally published in 1910, argued that if France and other European countries adopted a Swiss militia system, war would cease because these conscript armies would be capable of carrying out offensive operations. Jaurès, L'organisation socialiste de la France: L'armée nouvelle [The socialist organization of France: the new army] (Paris: Editions Sociales, 1977). See chapter 7 on the benefits of the Swiss militia system and chapter 5 on the virtues of a defensive strategic posture.
53. Angus Calder, The People's War: Britain, 1935-1945 (London: Granada, 1971), p. 285.
54. According to Sir David Hunt, who left Magdalen College, Oxford, to serve both Auchinlcck and Montgomery as an intelligence officer in the Western Desert, the accusations of Blimpish attitudes had senior British officers bending over backward to show that they were "imaginative," which led to "a good deal of proliferation of special forces, private armies, separate intelligencegathering organizations. . . . Senior regular officers of the Indian Army were among the keenest in this way. General Auchinleck, for instance, was determined to show himself as unconventional as possible." The Welsh Labour leader Aneurin Bevan attributed Rommel's success in 1942 to his (incorrectly) alleged working-class origins, and insisted that he would never rise above the rank of sergeant had he been born in Hull instead of Heidenheim.
55. Hunt, A Don at War (London: William Kimber, 1966), pp. 15, 74. This eagerness of the British army to shed its Blimpish image by promoting working-class officers is brilliantly satirized by Evelyn Waugh in Officers and Gentlemen (London: Penguin, 1970), pp. 216-217.
56. Joseph Monteilhet, Les institutions militaires de la France [The military institutions of France] (Paris: Felix Alcan, 1932).
57. Richard D. Challener, The French Theory of the Nation in Arms, 1888-1939 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1955).
58. If these men were so ensnared by their dysfunctional organizational cultures, how did they manage to have any success at all? Colonial expeditions, at which the British excelled, were extremely complex to organize both logistically and politically. The British army in 1914 was considered one of the most professional that Britain ever fielded. The professional British army was sacrificed in the first two years of the war and had to reorganize virtually from scratch, utilizing methodical battle as the best operational device to employ a mass of untrained volunteers in an offensive capacity.
59. "The doctrine the French created during the 1930s made sense for the army that France had and the war that France was planning to fight," Kiesling argues. "The result, both in the form of the long-war strategy and of the doctrine of the methodical battle, was designed to deter war if possible and, if deterrence failed, to maximize the likelihood of victory while minimizing its cost." Kiesling, Arming against Hitler, p. 5.
60. Karl-Heinz Frieser, Blitzkrieg-Legende: Der Westfeldziig, 1940 [The legendary blitzkrieg: the western campaign, 1940] (Munich: Oldenbourg, Militargeschichtliches Forschungsamt, 1996).
61. Desch, "Culture Clash," pp. 162-163.