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[Previous entry: "What does morality have to do with it?"] [Main Index] [Next entry: "Liberation Day"] 05 May 2003: ""Cheese-eating," granted..."In a recent article in The Economist ("Blame, aim, fire"), one line in particular caught my attention, especially the bit in parentheses: Military ties and defence contracts [between the US and France] will also suffer (which in one way is unfair, as France's military men disagreed with Mr Chirac's Iraq policy, and would have been keen to join America in the fight).Now, I have my issues with the French government (oh, do I ever), and it'll take a lot to change that, but even in the run-up to this war I found the popular American characterisation of the French—and the French soldier in particular—as "cheese-eating surrender monkeys" to be not only unfair, but also indicative of an ignorance of history which is beyond risible. Let's take a look at French military history over the past two centuries. For the two decades following the French Revolution of 1789, the armies of France beat the living shit out of every opponent they faced; even when the tide turned against them, it was not due to lack of courage or fighting skill on the part of the French soldiers, right down to the last stages of Battle of Waterloo, when the commander of the French Imperial Guard, faced with imminent defeat, declared that "La Garde meurt et ne se rend pas!" ("The Guard dies and does not surrender!") The next European war France was involved in was the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1871. The French defeat was due primarily to gross incompetence at the general staff level (and above), but if this had been the only factor, the war would have been known as "the Franco-Prussian War of 1870." The Emperor Napoleon III surrendered on 02-Sep-1870, less than two months into the war, but in response a republic was proclaimed in Paris on 04-Sep-1870; the Prussians encircled Paris by 19-Sep-1870 but it was not until 23-Jan-1871 that the French (as distinct from their ex-ruler) sued for peace. The French performance in World War I resembled the Franco-Prussian War in a number of ways; the general staff were criminally incompetent (as were their allied, British, counterparts) and the equipment issued to the troops was markedly inferior to that of the enemy. French rifles were inferior in almost every way to the German Mausers, and the Cauchat light machinegun is generally acknowledged to be the worst firearm ever designed. French infantry were initally issued a metal skullcap (worn under a cloth American Civil War-style cap) rather than a decent helmet; the "Adrian" model which became standard from 1915 onwards was initially designed as headgear for VIPs visiting the front line, and it was not until later that someone hit upon the idea that maybe the troops' heads needed decent protection as well. To top it all off, the French army started the war wearing scarlet trousers. Several years earlier, the French had developed a synthetic red dye, which was the first since William Perkins had developed mauveine; thus, the French stood to break the British monopoly on synthetic red dye, and how better to demonstrate this than by clothing the entire army in red from the waist down? As a result, French troops made remarkably easy targets for the first year of the war. Despite these handicaps, the French bore the brunt of the fighting on the Western Front for over three years; if they'd had half decent leadership and equipment, there is every possibility the war might have been over before the US ever decided to get involved. And so to World War II. Equipment had improved; French tanks were, one for one, superior to German tanks, the Cauchat had been discarded in favour of the Chatellerault and the MAS36 rifle, while not particularly good, was pretty much a match for the German Mauser K98k. Unfortunately, the higher echelon was craptastic as ever, which led to the disaster that was the Maginot Line. Don't get me wrong, the Maginot Line was a fantastic defensive work, but it tied down the bulk of the French army in a static position which, as it turned out, was easily bypassed. Nevertheless, it should borne in mind that in 1940 it would take you two, maybe three, days to drive from Trier to Paris; it took the German Wehrmacht more than forty days, despite the fact that most of the French army was in no position to oppose them (being stuck on the Maginot Line). On the darker side of World War II, the SS managed to raise an understrength division of French fascist volunteers; these troops, the 33. Waffen-Grenadier-Division der SS Charlemagne, were the staunchest defenders of Berlin against the Red Army in April 1945. By this time, there were eight French divisions (in De Lattre de Tassigny's 1st French Army) fighting in the European Theatre of Operations, while Foreign Legion and colonial troops were engaged in Italy. To compare, Canada's entire contribution to the war effort consisted of three divisions. (Not that I want to disparage the Canadians; it's Liberation Day in the Netherlands today, and the Canadians played a major role in that; thanks, eh! But when columnist Mark Steyn claims, as he did in this column in the Spectator, that "Canada would have been more deserving [of a permanent seat on the UN Security Council than France], given our respective contributions to the war effort," he clearly needs a history lesson.) The long and short of it is that the French have never avoided a fight, and have generally fought well. Sure, their generals have often been incompetent, but that's hardly unique to the French; McClellan was known to be hopeless at the time, Grant won only because he could afford to waste more men than Lee (and waste them he did), MacArthur is increasingly acknowledged to have run a terrific PR machine but little else, and you notice nobody's named a tank after Westmoreland. In his book A History of Warfare, John Keegan has the following to say about Clausewitz and the French revolutionary armies: The social failure of the Prussian army was unlikely to have troubled the young Clausewitz had it not also condemned the Prussian state to military failure. Within a year of joining the army [which had been in 1792] Clausewitz was pitched into battle against French soldiers animated by motives entirely different from those of the ex-serfs he was commanding. The armies of the French Revolution were bombarded by propaganda about the equality of Frenchmen as citizens of the Republic and about the duty of all citizens to bear arms. Their wars with Europe's surviving monarchical armies were characterised as struggles to overthrow the aristocratic order wherever it was found, not only so that the Revolution might be defended at home but so that its liberating principles might be implanted wherever men were still unfree. For whatever reason—the subject is extremely complex—the Revolutionary armies proved almost impossible to beat [...]Curiously, this seems entirely appropriate to a (somewhat idealised) vision of the American fighting man (and woman) today. |
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