French Mutuny Ends World War I
French Army Mutinies (1917)
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The mutinies
The French troops at Chemin des Dames had suffered a steadily growing number of desertions since the end of April.
[2] On 27 May, those desertions turned to mutiny. Up to 30,000 soldiers left the front line and reserve trenches and went to the rear.
[2] Even in regiments where there was direct confrontation, such as the 74th Infantry Regiment, the men wished their officers no harm; they just refused to return to the trenches.
[1] The mutinies were not a refusal of war, simply of a certain way of waging it.
[3] The soldiers had come to believe that the attacks they were ordered to make were futile.
In the behind-the-lines towns of
Soissons,
Villers-Cotterêts,
Fère-en-Tardenois and
Cœuvres-et-Valsery, troops refused to obey their officers' orders or go to the front.
[2] On 1 June, a French infantry regiment took over the town of
Missy-aux-Bois.
[2] According to historian Tony Ashworth, the mutinies were "widespread and persistent," and involved more than half the divisions in the French army.
[3] On 7 June, General Pétain and British commander
Sir Douglas Haig had a private talk: Pétain told Haig that two French divisions had refused to go and relieve two divisions in the front line.
[4] Historian John Keegan estimates the true figure was over fifty divisions.
[5]
Detailed research in 1983 by the late French military historian
Guy Pedroncini, based on the French military archives, concludes that, altogether, 49 infantry divisions were destabilized and experienced repeated episodes of mutiny. This was calculated as: nine infantry divisions very gravely impacted by mutinous behavior; fifteen infantry divisions seriously affected; and twenty five infantry divisions affected by isolated but repeated instances of mutinous behavior. As the French Army comprised a total of 113 infantry divisions by the end of 1917,
[6] this puts the proportion of destabilized French infantry divisions at 43%. Conversely, only 12 artillery regiments were affected by the crisis of indiscipline.
[7]
Instead of the Mutiny ending, if the French are forced out of the War at this point UK and the Central Powers would be settle for an end of the War.
Germany would lose some colonies to Britain and gain other colonies from France and maybe Belgium.