What was France contribution to WWII?
The only thing I can think of is the Maquies, cheeses, wines (including champagne) and French food.
Ooops, almost forgot, a place to land in order to reach Germany/Berlin.
Way to start in a WW2 forum.Well done you!
Why don’t you do some reading on it, and get back to us. I guess their contribution would be the blood of their 190,000 soldiers killed in combat, and absorbing the first blows of the German “schwerpunkt” effectively waking the world the hell up! Including the US, which would likely have been destroyed wholesale in 1940 had we not had an ocean to buffer us from the panzers and Luftwaffe…
They also made a good rearguard to help the British in Dunkirk.
Don’t forget letting Hitler take them over, so he could take all of the unreliable French Army trucks to the USSR, where they broke down wholesale, causing a severe disruption in Wehrmacht logistics by the beginning of 1942. And force the Boshe back to the horse and wagon…
Sort of an automotive “Montezuma’s Revenge!” 
France took the full brunt first, meaning that the German War Machine was fully loaded and not weaken at any point.what the french conribution too ww2 ,i think the underground and resistance fighters,and i think that help the allies. :shock:
Bir Hakeim anyone ?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Bir_Hakeim
and of course it would be impolite of me to go in to detail about how the Liner the St Louis with Jewish refugees from the Third Reich was refused permission to land at an American port, so I won’t other than to say it might be an idea Hi8ha to draw a distinction between the patriotic Free French then and now and the likes of Vichistes and their modern equivalent in Les Collaboratuers d’Intifada Francaise in the same way I would draw a distinction between those in the USA who thought Herr Hitler was regularly sort of guy with good ideas on race and a healthy lifesytle and those who thought he was a fascist scumbag.
Best and Warm Regards
Adrian Wainer
Ironically not to forget the french to fight with the “Charlemagne” division in besieged Berlin till the very end. Henri-Joseph Fenet and Eugene Vaulot (Voulot?) earned their Knight’s Crosses there on April 29, 1945.
Im correcting myself here:shock:
It was poland that took the full brunt first.
Fighting for a Third Reich that did what it did at Oradour Sur Glane is in my view at the least a mistake. That any honour should be at attached to it, is questionable.
Best and Warm Regards
Adrian Wainer
Adrian, what’s up? You’re on the warpath tonight?
BTW, “Oradour” was an excess crime committed by one company (military term for a group of about 60 to 250 soldiers). A little side-fact: most members of that company were from Alsace-Lorraine.
Anyway, an inexcusable excess crime but one must consider all circumstances to lead to the incident.
Interesting …I didn’t know much about this and reading about it, its something I’m not proud of but hind sight is 20/20. Remember the year was 1939, as far as I know, we knew nothing about the death camps. The ship was bound for Cuba and because the passengers couldn’t pay $500 each, they were turned away and only then tried for the united states. We had strict immigration laws and quotas back then.
http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/article.php?ModuleId=10005267
"Quotas set out in the 1924 Immigration Act strictly limited the number of immigrants who could be admitted to the United States each year. In 1939, the annual combined German-Austrian immigration quota was 27,370 and was quickly filled. In fact, there was a waiting list of at least several years. Visas could have been granted to the passengers only by denying them to the thousands of German Jews who had already applied for them. President Roosevelt could have issued an executive order to admit additional refugees, but chose not to do so for a variety of political reasons.
American public opinion, although ostensibly sympathetic to the plight of refugees and critical of Hitler’s policies, still favored immigration restrictions. The Great Depression had left millions of Americans unemployed and fearful of economic competition for the scarce few jobs available. It also fueled antisemitism, xenophobia, nativism, and isolationism. A Fortune Magazine poll at the time indicated that 83 percent of Americans opposed relaxing restrictions on immigration."
The “death camps” didn’t really ramp up until much later, early 1942. It was America’s entry in the War that was the final signing of the implicit, if unmentionable, death warrant of the Third Reich from a Nazi-German point of view…Hence, they were to insure that their perceived enemies, the Jews, would never survive…
See the film “Conspiracy.” Extremely well done and an encapsulation of the meeting “minutes” of the “Wannsee Conference.”
To all:
Please accept my apologies for the politically incorrect comments I posted.
It was not my intention to neither offend nor disrespect the French, the members of this forum or start a fight. I could, should, must have avoided the sarcasm, word it differently and avoid putting my foot in my mouth.
Once again please accept my apologies.
P.S. Thanks pdf27
Nothing personal against yourself, like really I have never particularly interested myself in the Waffen SS but at the same time I certainly can concede the possability that individuals and individual units could have fought in a honourable manner themselves, even if the regime they were fighting far was thoroughly repelent and I certainly do not accept the concept of Waffen SS bad, German Army good. That said, whilst not knowing much about the French element of the SS, it would seem to me that there would be a lot less justification for a French person to join the SS than say an Estonian, a Latvian or Lithuanian as those countries had been part of the Russian Empire, had only a few short years of independence and in came the Russians again and occupied them and as far as many people in those countries were concerned the Third Reich was not seen as a Nazi state but as the continuation of Imperial Germany, which was seen as progressive and liberal compared to Russia. On the other hand, France had never been occupied by Russia but had been at War with Germany three times in a relatively short period and in the last conflict the Germans had resorted to poison gas and the Nazis were hardly invading France to bring democracy, so I find it difficult to come up with a rationale as to why a French person would think they would be doing the right thing in joining the SS.
Best and Warm Regards
Adrian Wainer
Hi everybody makes mistakes e.g. Winston Churchill made lots of mistakes so you are in some pretty prestige company and really I would not worry about the “politically correct” thing too much like there are folks here that stick up for the Waffen SS, which is about as politically incorrect as you can get. Personally speaking I have a big problem with certain French elites but that of course is not the whole Country and there are all sorts of French people with all sort of opinions, more than few of them think the political establishment and establishment media have let the country go to the dogs.
and on the off chance you have not come accross it before, the following site is great resource for the ridicule of French establishment faux pas such as mindless anti-Americanism
http://no-pasaran.blogspot.com/2008_09_21_archive.html
Best and Warm Regards
Adrian Wainer
So what’s your opinion why they joined?
Actually the Soviet Union was seen as a threat for Central respectively Northern Europe’s freedom by many (ten thousands of Dutch, Flemings, Walloones, Scandinavians). That’s not only my opinion to this but surely this of most volunteers according to the many printed personal stories.
Ahhh the Charlemagne division and its controversies.In Mabire’s books they are often portrayed as more against Bolchevism than anything else.The reality is more complicated as always.The Charlemagne was made up of three different kind of soldiers,first was the Legion des Volontaires Francais (LVF) in the Heer which consisted of mainly military soldiers trying to redeem themselves of the defeat of 1940.Then the Brigade Frankreich in the Waffen-SS filled by young Vichyiste(sp?) full of hate for the Communists.Both were added together to form the core of the division.They were later joined by some reinforcements from fleeing French collaborationists who’d rather fight in the Eastern Front than get shot in their country.They were always some rivalry between the LVF and Frankreich but at the end they all died together in Berlin.
A little side story as well,all soldiers that fought in Berlin were volunteers.They did have the choice to leave the last regiment (the other one was decimated in Pomerania)and return to France.Some of them did and 12 soldiers were captured by Leclerc 2nd Division Blindee while in their journey back.
When Leclerc asked them why they were wearing some German uniform,one of them replied:Why do you wear American ones?(the 2eme DB was equipped by the US army) They were all shot except one whose father was a high ranked officer and a personal friend of Leclerc.
What the Division Charlemagne proves is that a French soldier is as good as any other soldiers as long the officer is on par with their duty.
Gentlemen…
Comments of the ups and downs of French participation in WW2 have come from other quarters, in addition to the poster above, and I might add, it was a mighty amusing post!
But he is not the only one to feel a little let down…
This is what German historian GERHARD L. WEINBERG, has to say…from a piece he wrote for an American wargamer’s magazine I used to subscribe to, COMMAND (Issue 22, page 53)…
[b][i]FRANCE
Next, it’s France’s turn. And here I would like to take up an entirely different kind of topic. It is a puzzle to which someone ought to provide a satisfactory answer. As yet, no-one as far as I know has even formulated the question. The puzzle is the following:
[COLOR=“Red”]Why was the army of Vichy France willing and able to fight everyone on the face of the earth [COLOR=“Black”]EXCEPT for the Germans, the Italians, and the Japanese?[/COLOR]
In 1940, at the same time as the army at Dakar was fighting off the British and Free French, the army in northern Indo-China was not called on to defend that French Colony against Japan. In the summer of 1941, the French army in Syria fought desperately against the British, the Australians, and the Free French; at the same time, there was no resistance to the Japanese occupation of southern Indo-China. In early 1942, the Vichy government urged the Germans to agree to joint efforts to try to get the Japanese to land on Madagascar. When, with strong U.S. endorsement, British forces landed at the northern end of Madagascar, the French army fought. When American soldiers landed in North West Africa, hundreds of them were killed by French bullets, but not one German or Italian soldier was as much as scratched when they landed in Tunisia or took over the unoccupied portion of France.
The literature on Vichy deals with each of those incidents in isolation without ever putting them together, without looking at the pattern.
The French forces in all these events were commanded by leaders who made their way up the promotions ladder in the pre-war years. They had carefully weeded out all the Jewish officers in a delayed reaction to the Dreyfus Affair. This was then what it’s leaders saw as the true army of France, and it would fight only the friends, but never the enemies, of the country.
It is my hope that someone will address this problem. Now that the French archives for those years are beginning to open, we may learn more about these issues.[/COLOR][/i][/b]
Comments?
If you think this is controversial, I will gladly type out the rest of this thought provoking piece.
I, myself, have often wondered why France was so full of “Maquisades” at the fall of Paris when the occupation by the Germans had been rather cordial and willing co-operation from the general French populace quite widespread…
As for Oradour-Sur-Glane, the man responsible for ordering Das Reich Division to carry out this atrocity (Heinz Lammerding) is still wanted and has been sentenced to death in absentia for his orders.
The massacre was a reprisal for the murder of one of Das Reich’s officers by local maquis…
Case of “tit-for-tat”, wouldn’t you say?