Excerpts from History of the Entente-cordiale, Fourth Edition (Paris: Fraternité, 2005)
A Sixth-Form/Lycée level history textbook, one of the standards in education since the late 1980s. Many modern French or British students were exposed to it in school. It represents the absolute middle of the road of historical opinion.
Chapter VI: The Darkest Hour
The Popular Front had been in power scarcely a month before the domestic situation began deteriorating. The invasion of Norway had provoked a deep rift among many figures in the previous centre-right régime. Under the leadership of Leon Blum of the SFIO, a broadly anti-fascist coalition had claimed a mandate to prepare for an “inevitable outbreak of hostilities with Germany,” as Blum had put it.
The army, always a deeply conservative institution, was still modernizing. Its leaders were as divided as the general populace. Many saw no sense in interfering with Germany’s anti-communist war aims. Marshal Petain, a patriot and hero of the Great War, made a grievous miscalculation in judging German aims. Communicating through back channels with Adolf Hitler, Marshal Petain became increasingly convinced that the civilian leadership was dangerously out of touch with the world, an increasingly common delusion among the military leadership.
The final straw came on 12 December 1941, when Prime Minister Blum issued orders for mobilization in response to increased German military presence in the Rhineland. Convinced that war was imminent, Marshal Petain began to rally a group of co-conspirators to deliver what he called “the military’s vote of no confidence in the Blum government.” This act would only serve to play into Hitler’s plans.
On 2 February 1942, preparations were complete. Marshal Petain delivered his pronunciamiento, announcing that the military had no faith in the civilian government. The address called upon “patriots of France” to oust the “communist dupes” from the Palais Bourbon. The commanders of the forces stationed along the Maginot Line made their support of the Marshal public. A week long standoff began between the government and the military.
Across the Channel, the government of the United Kingdom could only watch helplessly. Prime Minister Edward Wood sought to mediate between the two camps. The issue was forced when the Corps de Cavalerie, at the orders of General René Prioux, advanced on Paris. With his three light mechanized divisions, General Prioux hoped to seize the capital quickly, and overthrow the government before a civil war would develop between the Petainists and the Loyalists. The question of whether he acted independently, on the orders of his army group commander, or on the orders of Marshal Petain himself, is an open historical question. Many of the men who might have known took the secret to their graves, and the Nazi collaborationist regime worked tirelessly to destroy incriminating documents in its twilight days.
Regardless of whose orders General Prioux acted on, the civil war began with the Parisian citizens taking to the barricades to block the advance of the Corps de Cavalerie. The Gendarmerie fought tenaciously enough to give the mobilized reserve divisions loyal to the Republic time to reinforce the capital.
Whatever excuses we make for the old heroes of France must end on the night of 10 February. Marshal Petain met that evening with Rudolf Hess, Hitler’s favored lieutenant. They brokered an agreement in which Germany would support and recognize a new régime under Petain’s leadership and assist with the pacification of the country. In exchange, the French State would join as a full member of the Anti-Comintern Axis.
On the next day, the German government announced its police action in support of the French people’s “valiant efforts to throw off the Judeo-Bolshevik yoke.” The 1st and 2nd Army Groups, constituting the bulk of the French Army’s modern mechanized forces and combat power turned towards the heartland, supported by the German Army Group West.
It was a crushing morale blow that pushed much of the remainder of the French Army in the metropole into Petain’s camp. Nevertheless, the Loyalists mounted a valiant resistance. Battle was joined in the north-east, as Frenchman fought Frenchman amidst the cemeteries of the Great War.
In the UK, a faction of the Conservative Party rebelled, forcing a no-confidence vote against the Prime Minister. The splinter Torys, under the leadership of Winston Churchill established an alliance with Labour, elevating Clement Attlee to the premiership. The new government vowed to support the Republic unconditionally. A declaration of war was issued against Germany on 14 February 1942. The union treaty would be ratified two weeks later, mere days before the fall of Paris.
While much of the government was able to evacuate, the fall of the capital ended most major fighting in the metropole. Remaining loyalist units were ordered to evacuate to the south of France to continue resistance. In the resulting March of Sorrow, armed resistance began to collapse quickly. Military units were internally divided, and with Petain’s quick succession of crushing victories, demoralization hit swiftly. Only a handful of crack divisions endured the March of Sorrow, evacuating into Red Spain on 1 April 1942.
The Entente government was soon faced with a difficult choice. Italy had been mobilizing for war since the start of the crisis. With French Algeria and the bulk of the Marine Nationale swearing allegiance to Marshal Petain, the size of the threat to the Royal Navy in the Mediterranean had quickly doubled. With recent intelligence indicating mere weeks until Falangist Spain mobilized for war, the Blum-Attlee diumvirate agreed to begin evacuating refugee troops from Red Spain.
Right on their heels, the Italians began their move against Malta. In a costly victory, the long bastion of British power in the Mediterranean fell after a week of brutal fighting, while the Italian Navy delivered a powerful bloody nose to the Mediterranean fleet at the Battle of the Ionian Sea, sinking the aircraft carrier HMS Formidable, the battleship HMS Warspite, two light cruisers and destroyer, at the cost of one of their own battleships and a heavy cruiser.
Having lost the initiative in the Mediterranean, the military would be forced to make strategic withdrawals as the Italian Army advanced into Egypt. The vast fighting power of the British Empire was out of position, deployed in opposition to Socialist America with the expectation that the next war would be against them. The prospect of a general war in Europe was prepared for too little, too late, as Field Marshal Montgomery concluded in his memoirs.
1942 would be a year of retreat for the fledgling Entente. In June, a joint Falangist/German force would take Gibraltar, shuttering the Pillars of Hercules. In that same month, the British Somaliland force would fight a desperate and losing battle against the Italian Abyssinian Corps, while Italian spearheads moved on Alexandria and Cairo in Egypt. By September, the Entente would be forced out of the Mediterranean entirely. The damaged battleships HMS Valiant and Queen Elizabeth were scuttled just off the coast as rest of the Mediterranean Fleet evacuated via the Suez Canal.
The war reached its darkest hour, as the King of Iraq turned against his Entente allies, conspiring with Turkey to divide the Loyalist French Mandate for Syria. Within a day, Imperial Japanese forces announced the capture of Manila. A campaign against French Indochina and British Burma and New Guinea would soon follow.
On the Eastern Front, after a titanic summer battle that claimed nearly a million lives on both sides, the city of Stalingrad nearly fell to the Germans. While the Comintern saw more success in pushing German troops further from Moscow, it came at the staggering cost of almost four hundred thousand lives, more troops than had been lost in the entirety of fighting on the Western Front at that point in the war.
Next: the AH.com brigade picks apart their history books. Truly the universities are nests of Reds!
