Six on History: World War II
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"Eighty years ago this May and June, northern France was overrun by a combined air and land assault the Germans called blitzkrieg. Two things are known with certainty by those who can remember, and those who have learned – even if imperfectly. As one earnest undergraduate put it: ‘The Germans took the bypass around France’s Marginal Line’ as part of their strategy of ‘Blintz Krieg.’ Well, the idea is there.
The first certainty is that the armed forces of the Third French Republic were defeated in six weeks. The second is that the defeat led to the immediate collapse of the Republic and the advent of Marshal Philippe Pétain’s Vichy government, a short lived (1940-44) but murderous regime that collaborated with the Nazis and deported thousands of Jews for slaughter. Neither the suddenness of defeat nor its consequences are in doubt.
But because the collapse was so sudden and unexpected, and the consequences so vile, a body of dubious ‘knowledge’ has arisen and endured. It is that which has so colored popular impressions of pre-war, wartime, even contemporary France. Simply recall the famous and worn jests: "How many Frenchmen does it take to guard Paris? Nobody knows, it’s never been tried." Or "Raise your right hand if you like the French. Raise both hands if you are French." Or "What do you call 100,000 Frenchmen with their hands up? The Army."
Many readers will be familiar with the post-1940 exploits of courageous partisan units defying the German Occupation and operating under the generic expression "French Resistance." But most will not recall reports such as those in Winnipeg Free Press articles of 10 May and 15 June 1940, articles which attributed to the fighting "a ferocity which defies imagination," and which described allied resistance as worthy of "inexpressible admiration." Few now know that there were some 100,000 French soldiers who did not surrender. Somewhere between 55,000 and 85,000 actually died in that six-week campaign, with another 120,000 wounded. Fewer still will know that anywhere between 27,000 and 45,000 German soldiers died during those six weeks, and that over 100,000 of them were wounded. To which one might wish to add their 6,600 dead airmen. Even minimally, therefore, over 300,000 French and German combatants were killed or wounded in May-June 1940. So much for the popular notion that the French army folded like a warm croissant.
Why, then, has ignorance bred faith? Partly because neither of the post‑1945 Republics, the Fourth and Fifth, could see any advantage in rehabilitating a predecessor linked directly to military defeat and indirectly to collaboration with the Nazis. Best leave their predecessor in ignominy. Partly because in their scramble to blame someone else for the disaster, former decision‑makers of the Third, both civilian and military, ensured that the stain would be widespread. Partly because it seemed obvious that a great defeat had to have great causes, ones that surpassed the battlefield and implicated the entire nation. It is this third that explains why so many observers were quick, if only after the fact, to pick up the scent of moral rot: a society which, allegedly since the 1920s, had surrendered to the pursuit of pleasure and self‑indulgence long before it would surrender to the Germans."
- * Lee Hak-rae, who was born in South Korea under Japanese colonisation, was convicted of war crimes for his abuse of Allied POWs in Thailand
- * He was the last member of a group of war criminals calling for an apology for being forced to serve in the Japanese military, as well as compensation and pensions
