Another 10000 P-36/40 aircraft? (1 Viewer)

I can see Hawk 75 helping a lot against Ki-27 or A5M4, but probably a bit overmatched by A6M or Ki-43. Not so much that they wouldn't help mind you.

But the issue with the armor etc. is a telling one. In that Torch engagement, fighter losses on both sides (USN and RN vs. French) but the Anglo-Americans lost far fewer pilots, most of them being picked up and surviving, whereas the French lost a lot of their pilots KiA, which I'd put down to armor.

Schweik said:

In that Torch engagement, fighter losses on both sides (USN and RN vs. French) but the Anglo-Americans lost far fewer pilots, most of them being picked up and surviving, whereas the French lost a lot of their pilots KiA

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It must have made the French pilots wonder what and who they were fighting and dying for.

For the honor of France, naturally. Even if they knew they were on the wrong side at that time, they couldn't let France seem to be a complete pushover. Their concept of honor or 'face' (which is still very much a thing over there) meant they had to fight. The Anglo-Americans didn't ask permission to come in and wreck everything and take over. Not that they easily could have done without alerting the Germans. And some of them were fascist sympathizers, who existed in every country leading up to the war (and during). There was also a sense of grievance against the British in particular. Many French ships based in North Africa had been sunk by the British (as a precaution) after the French capitulation and many French sailors who didn't even perhaps know they were at war on the other side at the time, died with little warning.

Some of those same pilots ended up with the Free French Lafayette Escadrille, and some switched sides yet again and flew their US issued planes over to the German lines. Must have been quite a roller coaster. Some of the Foreign Legion in that area also tended to be somewhat politically ambivalent, though you also have LeClercs army coming up from Africa and they ended up as some of the best and most reliable troops of the Free French army, serving as the vanguard when they entered Paris.

Schweik said:

For the honor of France, naturally.

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I suppose, but had Britain been successfully invaded by the Germans I'd like to think that British, Imperial and Commonwealth pilots would have joined forces with the US (and USSR) rather than turning on their allies.

Admiral Beez said:

I suppose, but had Britain been successfully invaded by the Germans I'd like to think that British, Imperial and Commonwealth pilots would have joined forces with the US (and USSR) rather than turning on their allies.

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Had the UK lost in 1940, I think the possibility of getting to Canada or America would have been pretty difficult, resulting in may neutralized by simply grounding them or the airplanes themselves.

Right. Long flight. Also remember, we (US and Britain) attacked them. I'm not sure we had any choice, but that is how it was. War is quite tragic for all involved, generally speaking.

The French Navy by 1940, was a serious threat to any navy it opposed.
Britain's fear that it would fall under Kreigsmarine control was a very founded fear.
Their decision to neutralize it was perhaps a painful decision, but a very sound one.

Schweik said:

Right. Long flight. Also remember, we (US and Britain) attacked them.

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Because they refused to join in the fight but instead decided to surrender their ships intact to the Germans.

I don't disagree that Britain did what they had to do, as the French fleet could have been a real problem for them in the Med, but if your brother, uncle, or father had been killed when they bombed the French fleet, basically by surprise, and so soon after being allies, would you rationalize it so easily?

War is like that sometimes, people get screwed. It would have been better if there was some other way to handle it, warn the sailors or something, but it may not have been possible.

My point is, under the circumstances, it's not too hard to understand why they put up a fight, if only for two days.

There is a Drachinifel video on Mers El Kabir. It was very illuminating. The French Admiral commanding deserves most, if not all, the blame. He refused to meet with a mere captain and passed on only one of the English proposals.

Doesn't surprise me. An insane kind of rigidity in the French senior command structure was one of the main reasons for their disastrous defeat. But I think there is enough blame for Mers El Kabir to go around, I wouldn't put it all on the French.

However incompetent or arrogant the French admirals and generals were, they were threading a very tricky needle. The French surrender treaty made this deal where France still controlled a big part of the south of the country, while the Germans had direct control over the rest. Vichy still had some of their own armed forces, and yet were not obligated to throw them all into the breach in say, Russia or North Africa. Many people in France were spared much harsher treatment due to this arrangement. Many were able to hide from the Gestapo in the South. Most of the resistance groups moved down into the South where it was a bit safer.

If the French broke this treaty and just handed their fleet over to the British, all of that would of course end. French forces would have been interned and / or conscripted en-masse and forced into the German army and as slave labor. A lot of that did eventually happen anyway but Vichy kind of delayed it.

To me it would have been a lot better if France and England had been able to work a deal sooner. With Leclerc coming up from Chad perhaps something could have been worked out, He seemed to have a good working relationship with the British. But by then of course the French fleet had already been attacked. It was a big and very tricky problem, and England had a very tough fight of their own on their hands at the time - they felt like they were under an existential threat. Their decisions were not always gentle, but they were contending with their own survival. And in the Med, their Imperial supply lines were threatened, among other things.

Schweik said:

If the French broke this treaty and just handed their fleet over to the British, all of that would of course end. French forces would have been interned and / or conscripted en-masse

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The French navy should have sailed to British ports before any treaty was signed before Vichy and Germany made any formal treaties.

Admiral Beez said:

The French navy should have sailed to British ports before any treaty was signed before Vichy and Germany made any formal treaties.

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A Navy taking to sea en masse, especially during those days would have been seen as an aggressive move.
The French should have sailed their ships to neutral ports ASAP in the final days of the Battle of France, before capitulation.
Waiting until the surrender to sail could have been seen by Germany andnother Axis navies as an aggressive move, delaying the cease-fire and possibly triggering surface engagements.

GrauGeist said:

A Navy taking to sea en masse, especially during those days would have been seen as an aggressive move.

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Damn straight, and it should have been seen as such. There should have been little of the French navy left to take to sea after the Armistice, as its battleships should have been bombarding the Italian coast, its submarines, cruisers and destroyers attacking any Italian ship or port within range.

Can you imagine Britain's navy standing by as the home islands were under attack? The Royal Navy had but one priority in its four centuries of existence; beyond escort duties, flag waving or colonial protection, that task is defence of the homeland from invasion. Thus there's no chance any RN ship with a man and a gun operational will let the Germans pass.

When the Germans are almost mid-channel, they would be met by the RN's battlecruiser squadron (Hood, Repulse, Renown), 30 cruisers, 85 destroyers, 20 submarines (and their Perisher qualified COs), along with dozens of FAA, Bomber Command and Coastal Command strike aircraft, under the cover of over 500 radar-vectored Spitfires, Hurricanes and Whirlwinds (4x20mm in the nose). Behind them, coming down the coast at 25 knots, are all five QE class battleships and further destroyers. In short, it's a bloodbath.

That's why you have a navy, not to hang off its anchors in North Africa while the homeland is invaded.

GrauGeist said:

Waiting until the surrender to sail could have been seen by Germany and other Axis navies as an aggressive move, delaying the cease-fire and possibly triggering surface engagements.

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Why not sail before any surrender, and start lobbing shells? You can sail for a neutral port once you've exported some explosive.

In a war where one's country is going under, is triggering engagements much of a worry? I'm not sold on that line of thinking.

In my mind (scary place, to be honest), the French Navy had several battleships and heavy Cruisers - they could have done several actions during the Battlenof France:
One, they could have attacked German assets to the east, drawing Luftwaffe and Kreigsmarine elements away from French coastal areas as well as bombarding inland in the days leading up to Dunkirk.
The only time during those days, that the French Navy came through, was assisting in the evacuation of Dunkirk...

The French government and powerful industry leadership was riddled with anti-communism/pro-fascism people (along with the normal complement of non-aligned powermad people), and in effect became a Fifth Column. The Germans had been in communication with the French pro-fascist community before the war, just as they had with the similar minded people in the US and UK. These people hampered the French operations, not by direct interference during the war, but by sowing discord pre-war. Then, once the shooting began in earnest and it became clear that France was going to be drawn into a long war and/or fight for survival, the Fifth Column pressured the government to sue for peace or surrender - as long as it would allow the French hierarchy to survive more or less intact. This is the reason as to why the Vichy government came to power so quickly and smoothly.

The French Navy was between a rock and a hard place. Once the war turned hot the Navy had little opportunity to do much harm to the Germans. The French Navy in the MTO had no real targets (as far as I know the Italian Navy did not sortie against them, at least not in force). They had a pro-German (kind of) Vichy government in power, who were nominally their superiors in the command chain, and this Vichy government used the threat of the French Navy to aid in negotiations for the Armistice. The Navy commanders understood this.

The Navy commanders could either go rogue and disobey the Vichy government's orders (ie fight to the last ship, desert France, join the Allies, etc), with the attendant consequences to themselves and their families - or they could follow orders to the minimum possible and not cause France to remain a direct threat to Germany, with the attendant consequences to France as a whole (ie what Schweik said upthread, quite eloquently I must say).

The French Navy (for the most part) chose to remain loyal to France while under Vichy control. Once the war was lost and the Vichy took over control, their duty to protect their country as a whole and the lives of the French people remained, became the most they could do. And they did so by going along with the Vichy orders.

Philippe Petain (the nominal head of the Vichy government) was tried and found guilty of treason after the war. If the repercussions had been spread out fairly among the conspirators and sympathizers, there would have been thousands of the French wealthy elite and government officials suffering a similar fate.

Look at the Dutch experience in contrast to the French. The Netherlands' government and navy fled, and their forces continued to fight against the Axis right up to VJ Day. Or the Poles, fleeing to Britain to continue the fight, including nearly their entire blue water navy, Polish Navy - Wikipedia

I think the key difference is for the fleet to have moved before the war ended. Norway and Netherlands did that, France didn't (although many French troops did make it to England).

I agree La Royale could have been very helpful at Dunkirk. They had been involved in anti-Uboat activities with the RN prior to and in the beginnings of the war (including working closely with some of the same British vessels which a few weeks later attacked them at Mers El Kabir). I don't know why the French fleet didn't move except that when you have battleships, Admirals seem very very hesitant to use them or even move them, both because they are so expensive and because they use such incredible amounts of fuel. And as ThomasP said, there were fascist sympathizers and so on, particularly I think some of the 'pieds noir' in North Africa, who had been rattled by the Spanish Civil War (the left wing Spanish Republicans had sought to liberate their colonies in Morocco which put the French colonies in Morocco and Algeria at risk, from the point of view of the Colonials). Ironically many of these same Spanish Republicans - including a lot of anarchists, joined the Free French units later on. Some of them fought for almost 10 years strait.

ThomasP said:

Philippe Petain (the nominal head of the Vichy government) was tried and found guilty of treason after the war. If the repercussions had been spread out fairly among the conspirators and sympathizers, there would have been thousands of the French wealthy elite and government officials suffering a similar fate.

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The French government actually did do that, briefly, after the war. They had a lot of reprisals against Nazi and Fascist sympathizers, informants and supporters. One of the things they did was take land from some of the wealthy French elite who supported or collaborated with the Nazis, and give it to resistance and Free French people. My grandfather was one of those, having been prominent in a resistance group. He was given a house in a fancy suburb of Paris, which had belonged to a wealthy collaborator (grandfathers own house having been destroyed in a reprisal during the war). He knew it wasn't going to last though so he very cunningly got them to make a special deal for him and sign a 99 year lease.

One year later when almost all of these moves were reversed, our family got to keep the house. The lease is still valid.



By the time of the French war in Indochina, a lot of the Foreign Legion were former SS, and the French army was using Panther tanks lol.

France was and still is deeply split. I think it goes back to the French Revolution. Not unlike the way the US is now. People tend to discount the Free French and resistance, but they were there and fighting hard. There were 7 divisions and 1.3 million Free French, and some of their generals like Leclerc were quite effective, arguably leading some of the best units on the Allied side. (Leclerc's 2e Division Blindée was in Patton's 3rd Army and is credited with destroying the 9th Panzer division and 112th Panzer brigade during the war)

Interesting article on the French impressions of the Panther: