Arming the Free French Air Force.

[Kevin J]

As I see it, De Gaulle could have held Brittany and perhaps Darlan not Petain could have held what became Vichy. Darlan had the balls that Petain didn't. What are we going to equip their Free French Air Force with. So evacuation of factories around Bordeaux should be feasible. IIRC that Means D520. FF can still get Mohawk, Tomahawk, Maryland, Boston. Germans will still get all the way down to Biarritz eventually, although initially they stopped at Bordeaux.
Amiot 351/4. HQ Cherbourg, Cotentin peninsula. Should be able to hold long enough for evacuation of factory.
Bloch Mb 152. SW France. Evacuation, may be feasible, but its North of Bordeaux.
Dewoitine D520. Central France. Should be okay.
LeO 451. South and South East France. Time for evacuation and in Vichy.
MS 406. East and Central France. Again okay, but not essential.
So Free France both Bretagne and Vichy could have made a reasonable collection of modern combat aircraft. Any experts here on factory evacuation?

 

[Admiral Beez]

Can you at least try to be accurate? It's a Simpson's joke, nothing said by Bush.

Cheese-eating surrender monkeys - Wikipedia

 

[Kevin J]

Can you at least try to be acurate? It's a Simpson's joke, nothing said by Bush.

Cheese-eating surrender monkeys - Wikipedia

Well I never. I could have sworn he used that phrase. Nonetheless, I'm still looking for experts on factory evacuation. The Germans were at the end of their supply lines, and those aircraft I named, look pretty good to me for any Continuation of the Battle of France.

 

[buffnut453]

Maybe consider changing the thread title to something more appropriate? Just a suggestion...

 

[Crimea_River]

Pretty offensive, and I'm not even French.

 

[DerAdlerIstGelandet]

No need for this kind of ignorance. And by that I am calling a spade a spade.

 

[DerAdlerIstGelandet]

I have reopened the thread with a more appropriate thread title.

Don't get it closed again.

 

[michael rauls]

The subject got me curious so I Wikipediad the free French Air force. Something I had never read before is that they used p63s.
I have so often read that the King Cobra was only used by the Soviets during ww2 I found this quite surprising.

 

[Kevin J]

Evacuation in the Soviet Union - Wikipedia
The Soviets officially started their industrial evacuations in August 1941 according to Wikipedia. So after about 6 weeks. That is the length of time it took to inflict a severe tactical defeat on the French. The evacuations continued until the end of the year. Quite possibly its too late for the French. Also some relocations occurred from late 1940. So I assume that the French would have needed to start relocations after the defeat of Poland, but then that would have been seen as defeatist. It took the Germans 2 months to take mainland Norway. So maybe we can assume a similar sort of time to take Vichy and Brittany?

 

[Shortround6]

German logistics are a lot easier in France. No transporting anything by sea, (Luftwaffe air transport was in tatters at this point) and there was NO north to south railroad in Norway over much of the country in 1940. Lots of railroads (and regular roads) in France.

 

[Kevin J]

German logistics are a lot easier in France. No transporting anything by sea, (Luftwaffe air transport was in tatters at this point) and there was NO north to south railroad in Norway over much of the country in 1940. Lots of railroads (and regular roads) in France.

What I'm getting at is they're advancing over relatively flat terrain. Only Brittany and the Massif Central are going to present problems. Vichy is the Massif Central. Brittany and Bordeaux represent 4 to 5 hundred miles from start point. The same sort of distance into the USSR when they faltered. Also, by 1940, the French have some quite good aircraft.

 

[swampyankee]

France's political environment pre-invasion was beyond toxic. To add to the toxicity, the French right had a history of using foreign invaders against its internal opponents, as happened after the Franco-Prussian War.

Fixing the French Air Force wouldn't help if part of mainstream political thought is the nazis will help suppress those opponents, and this is more important than sovereignty

 

[Kevin J]

France's political environment pre-invasion was beyond toxic. To add to the toxicity, the French right had a history of using foreign invaders against its internal opponents, as happened after the Franco-Prussian War.

Fixing the French Air Force wouldn't help if part of mainstream political thought is the nazis will help suppress those opponents, and this is more important than sovereignty

Hitler can't invade the USSR without those 2 million French POWs doing the jobs those Germans boys did after they got called up to the Eastern Front. Its worth noting that British radar stations were installed where they were on the assumption that the next major war would be with France.

 

[tomo pauk]

France can fight on if they decide to evacuate what can be evacuated in the North Africa. Wehrmacht will crush anything left in France in 1940, especially once BEF is out of picture. What French units can do is delay, wreck bridges and hill roads, so the evacuation can happen with as much of stuff & men evacuated.

 

[Kevin J]

France can fight on if they decide to evacuate what can be evacuated in the North Africa. Wehrmacht will crush anything left in France in 1940, especially once BEF is out of picture. What French units can do is delay, wreck bridges and hill roads, so the evacuation can happen with as much of stuff & men evacuated.

An intriguing idea. The troops evacuated from Dunkirk were disembarked in Cherbourg on the Cotentin peninsula, hold that we keep the Channel Isles. Hold Brittany and that scuppers the U-boat war. Blow up every bridge in the Massif central, how are the Germans to advance to the Mediterranean Sea?

 

[swampyankee]

Hitler can't invade the USSR without those 2 million French POWs doing the jobs those Germans boys did after they got called up to the Eastern Front. Its worth noting that British radar stations were installed where they were on the assumption that the next major war would be with France.

If I remember my reading correctly, post-conquest, well over 25% of conquered France's output was going to supply Germany with commodities like food and horses. Here, Germany was trying to maximally shear the sheep instead of slaughtering it, as was policy in the East.

While the French military neither planned nor managed their defense well, the problem wasn't at the level of individual soldiers or even small units. (note that neither the French military failures in planning or executing the defense says anything negative against the bravery of individual soldiers). When the leadership is bumbling, it doesn't matter how well the guys on the ground do. Probably over eighty percent of the failures in the defense of France happened in le Grand Quartier Général, l'Hôtel de la Marine, and whatever was the location of the Ministry of Air headquarters. The remainder was scattered between Palais du Luxembourg, Palais Bourbon, Quai d'Orsay, and l'Élysée Palace.

Bluntly, the UK also has to bear some blame for the Fall of France, not because of the actions of the BEF, but because of actions in Whitehall and No. 10 Downing St in the mid-1930s and before, as they frequently undercut any French initiative to either enforce the provisions of the Versailles Treaty or German rearmament.

 

[Kevin J]

Can you at least try to be accurate? It's a Simpson's joke, nothing said by Bush.

Cheese-eating surrender monkeys - Wikipedia

Where would we all be without Wikipedia, the holy Bible of good honest information.

 

[Shortround6]

Vichy is the Massif Central. Brittany and Bordeaux represent 4 to 5 hundred miles from start point. The same sort of distance into the USSR when they faltered.

French and German rail systems were the same gauge, French had a better road net than the Russians. How much the Germans could use the french rivers and canals is certainly subject to question. Germans only have to move supplies from Germany to the front in France. They don't have to travel through Poland (250-300 miles?) before getting into Russia.

Overall Logistics are going to be easier in France. Enough easier to shorten such a campaign by weeks? I don't know.

 

[MikeMeech]

Hitler can't invade the USSR without those 2 million French POWs doing the jobs those Germans boys did after they got called up to the Eastern Front. Its worth noting that British radar stations were installed where they were on the assumption that the next major war would be with France.

Hi

The initial Radar stations were not installed facing France, the first stations (1936-38) constructed were to protect the Thames Estuary and hence London. The northern station was Bawdsey the southern one Dover, with three in-between, facing eastwards towards Belgium and Holland from where the German bombers would have to come over from Germany (see page 122 of 'Building Radar' by Dobinson for map). In October 1938 (Munich crisis) Radar Stations were added up the East Coast to Scotland, although some of these were 'temporary', one was also added at Ventnor on the Isle of Wight (map p.187), that did face France. By December 1939 there were Chain Home Stations from Ventnor (none further west) to North Scotland (map p.252), basically the east of Britain. By July 1940 they had spread further west along the south coast and to south Wales (map p.302). Chain Home Low had also been added to the system by late July 1940 (map p.304), these spread further up the west coast (as well as south and east coasts), mainly to look out for Luftwaffe mine laying aircraft.
In summary the east coast was more a priority for the early radar installations facing the German threat not facing France.

Mike

 

[MIflyer]

Socialism/Communism was a factor in pre-WWII France. The Germans had signed a non-aggression pact with the USSR and were, after all, Socialists, too. The French Left did not want to fight the Germans. And in May 1944 the future editor of the leftist newspaper Le Monde said that the Americans were the greatest danger to France, basically because they were not Socialists.

So how do you keep the country going when you have that kind of attitude among a significant number of the people? An evacuation to North Africa of some of the military forces would have been possible, but recall that the US had to fight those forces during Operation Torch. When the Vichy Air Force in North Africa was reequipped with P-40F's by the US, one pilot promptly flew his Warhawk to Occupied France

My high school physics teacher was a USN aviator in WWII and was transferred to Pensacola. Getting his car to his new duty station was a problem and so the captain of a USN tanker headed that way offered to let the car be carried as deck cargo. The tanker was reassigned to Operation Torch and the French shot up his car; when he got it back, it was full of bullet holes and the top had been blown off.