France at War, 1939–1942
Cambridge University Press, 2023, ISBN 9781107047464, 742 pp,
RRP AU$53.95 (hardcover)
Author: Douglas Porch
Reviewed by: John Nash
One of the most fascinating aspects of the Second World War is France’s rapid defeat at the hands of Germany in mid-1940. The success of the ‘Blitzkrieg’ was a shock to many and changed the dynamics of the war. It is easy to see the fall of Paris as the end of France’s war, but this is far from the case. In the five years that followed, French military forces and political machinations were significant in Allied strategic considerations.
Douglas Porch has written widely on French military history and is well placed to write on France in the Second World War. Defeat and Division is the first of two volumes to examine France’s war, covering the period 1939–1942.[1] It is a comprehensive analysis of France’s preparations for war and the foundations of its defeat following Germany’s invasion. It holds many lessons of value for students of military history, experts in military preparedness, army professionals, and those interested in coalition management.
France’s role in the war, especially after 1940, is often misunderstood, and Porch sets out to clarify and reorient these popular but inaccurate views of France’s war. An important starting point is the acknowledgement that, as Porch says, ‘France did not exit the war with the signing of the June 1940 armistice’.[2] With this in mind, Porch explores the full range of French experiences during the first phases of the war, starting with the build-up to 1939, then mobilisation and the so-called ‘Phoney War’, followed by military operations and defeat, to round out the coverage of the conventional aspect of the war. Two transition chapters are also included; these focus on the political situation of Vichy France, and the oft-overlooked topic of French prisoners of war (POWs), both their experience and the issue of their use by Germany as a bargaining tool for France’s good behaviour. Porch then moves on to the mobilisation of French resistance, especially externally, and the power plays leading to Charles de Gaulle rising to prominence. The volume culminates with the narrative moving to Africa and the Allied invasion in Operation Torch.
For those interested in military preparedness, Porch’s examination of how France was situated entering the Second World War is fascinating reading. After examining the political and diplomatic manoeuvrings and policy of appeasement, Porch surveys French rearmament in the late 1930s. This review is focused on the two least prepared services, the air force and the army. In essence, air force mobilisation was a disaster as it dealt with insufficient industrial capability, antiquated aircraft designs and a lack of doctrine, and the air force was engaged in intense inter-service rivalry with the army.[3] As with the air force, the army suffered from problems in both organisational capacity and the quality of materiel available. France had one of the largest armoured forces in the world at the time, but French tanks had small fuel tanks and were equipped poorly for the radio age, having either no radios, or radios that had limited range or were able to receive only.[4] More seriously, the French Army simply did not have adequate doctrine or understanding of the tank as a weapon of war. Tanks were largely employed to support infantry—who did not know how to use them effectively—and were committed piecemeal against much larger German armoured formations, often with inadequate air or infantry support.[5] Worse still, anti-aircraft guns were inadequate, both in quality and in numbers, and their control was a source of tension between the army and air force.[6] Finally, all of this was hampered by an unwillingness to embrace radio communications, with field phones and dispatch riders/runners seen as the primary means of communication, and even carrier pigeons rating highly.[7] Such materiel dysfunction and ill preparedness was a poor foundation for national defence.
These materiel and doctrinal problems were perhaps only symptoms of a much more serious problem: a lack of direction from the top, and a poor state of professionalism in the French military. The newly minted minister at the Air Ministry in 1938, Guy La Chambre, recognised the parlous state of national defence:
beginning with the fact that the government did not have an overall national defense plan coordinated with the three services, with budget allocations to match. Nor did the French military have a coherent command structure able to define a national defense architecture and a joint services combat doctrine.[8]
All organisations and hierarchies are subject to politics and tribalism, but the French Army of the 1930s was particularly divided and parochial, and generals became labelled by ‘networks, connections, and religious habits’.[9] Such a toxic culture within the officer corps is summed up by Porch: ‘But this was the French army, after all, where it was said that lieutenants are friends, captains are comrades, majors are colleagues, colonels are rivals, and generals are enemies.’[10] Moreover, the French Army’s adoption of the methods of the Prussian staff course, after their defeat in 1870–71, might have borne fruit in the 19th century, but by the 1920s and 1930s the French staff course had become stale and unimaginative, focused on rote learning and tactics, and reducing many problems to mere calculations to be solved by formulae.[11] This no doubt contributed to the paucity of effective doctrine leading into 1939–40. Finally, inter-service rivalry was rife. It was not only with the air force that the army was in dispute, and indeed the French Navy saw itself as the elite force, aristocratic and even religious in its disposition and self-importance.[12] This was the state of the French military as it faced down the threat of German invasion in 1939–40.
The decision to mobilise after the German invasion of Poland came on 3 September 1939. The levée en masse joined the Maginot Line as France’s bulwark against invasion. Herein lies an illuminating case study of how not to do mobilisation. The French failure was both military and societal. From the outset, the terrible toll of the First World War hung over France, and many questioned whether Hitler and a resurgent Germany could be stopped.[13] Porch argues that the failure of the levée itself was not preordained, but badly mismanaged.[14] Those mobilised were required to take three to four days’ worth of food with them. Reception centres were understaffed, there was insufficient room to house reservists, and many barracks lacked sufficient beds. Meanwhile, soldiers were issued outdated equipment, if there was enough to go around at all.[15] Much of this mismanagement returns to the aforementioned issue of the French staff course, which had provided insufficient training and, most of all, insufficient numbers of staff officers to manage mobilisation. Just over half of the men eligible for call-up were in uniform by Spring 1940.[16] Thus the levée en masse was not only of dubious quality; it was also lacking in masse.
On the home front, mobilisation proved deeply unpopular, especially as the Phoney War dragged on. From the start there was no clear narrative of why the French were mobilising. To many, the threat was far away in Poland and not, as in 1914, on French soil.[17] As 1939 turned to 1940 and the months passed, military and civilian morale plummeted as people tried to make sense of a war without fighting, because ‘mobilization without combat made the war seem like an abstract concept, relegated since October 1939 to the back pages of the papers’.[18] During this long wait, the levée engaged in desultory training, lacking in expertise, equipment, or even sufficient ammunition, and doing little to dispel the boredom of the soldiers.[19] When given leave, they were shocked to find a society that was not on a war footing in many respects, with those in uniform often treated with suspicion or contempt by civilians. This perfectly illustrates the dangers of mobilising too early, with little planning, with insufficient equipment, and without a narrative to drive popular support.
Thus when the Phoney War became real, the French were not prepared. Porch pulls no punches:
What the historian is left with is a French military that was so operationally and tactically inept and out of date, and so poorly equipped and indifferently led, that even different force disposition most probably would not have saved the Allies from defeat.[20]
Porch does an excellent job of narrating France’s defeat. In the context of a journal focused on the army profession and idea of mission command, it is worth singling out Porch’s contrast of the German and French approaches. While the German ‘Blitzkrieg’ was fuelled by Auftragstaktik, the French way was a rigidly top-down system of orders and control. Porch summarises this in his acerbic style:
[French] Officers with no orders who acted on their own initiative courted charges of insubordination, especially if their decision resulted in a reverse, which alas was the fate of most French decisions.[21]
French commanders established headquarters well behind the lines, and their aforementioned reliance on static phone lines and runners made it easy for them to lose contact with subordinate commands, rendering command and control difficult. It is an excellent example of how poor leadership culture, command, control and communication can destroy military effectiveness.
With chapters three and four covering the combat operation in France, Porch then turns to the oft-overlooked issue of French POWs in the aftermath of their capitulation. Some 1.8 million French soldiers surrendered, many having not even fired a shot, ‘a national humiliation that translated into a psychological crisis’.[22] Porch’s examination covers both the experiences of the POWs as a group and how they were used by the Germans as leverage over the French. Essentially they were hostages to be traded for good French behaviour and used as a labour force to make up for the shortfall of working-age men in Germany.
The establishment of the Vichy government in France signalled a new phase of France’s involvement in the war. Porch does an admirable job of capturing the nuances and shifts of politics and society in France and in the French colonies. The best-known phenomenon in this period is of course the idea of ‘the French Resistance’. Porch does well to cut through the noise and lay out a more accurate way of considering this, not as ‘the French Resistance’ but as ‘resistance in France’.[23] There was no unified bloc of resistance, but instead numerous groups with different ideologies, methods and loyalties that could never be united. This is why Charles de Gaulle and his externally based organisation were able to triumph politically in the postwar period.[24] Indeed, de Gaulle was very cool on the resistance movements, and did not like the presence of Allied personnel in such movements because it undermined the mythmaking of France having liberated itself.[25] This was a sore spot for de Gaulle. As Porch illustrates, the French forces under de Gaulle were far less effective than he claimed, and less effective than other exiled forces such as the Polish. De Gaulle’s obstinacy and arrogance in this regard did much to damage France’s standing with the other Allies.[26]
Defeat and Division is not a small book, but it is absolutely essential reading for those interested in the Second World War. Porch’s narrative and analysis are both cutting and insightful. He pulls no punches but is not unfair in his analyses. This book should be read by anyone who is looking at military preparedness, mobilisation or the army profession, as the lessons from the French Army’s defeat in 1940 are illuminating. Many myths and misunderstandings are demolished by Porch, and it is an invaluable contribution to the scholarship of the Second World War.
About the Reviewer
Dr John Nash is an Academic Research Officer at the Australian Army Research Centre. Previously he was a researcher at the Australian War Memorial for the Official History of Australian Operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, and Australian Peacekeeping Operations in East Timor. He was awarded a PhD from the Australian National University in July 2019. He is also a Lieutenant in the Royal Australian Naval Reserve, with nine years’ full-time and 11 years’ reserve service as a Maritime Warfare Officer. He was the inaugural winner of the McKenzie Prize for the Australian Naval Institute and Chief of Navy Essay Competition—Open Division, 2019. His most recent publication is Rulers of the Sea: Maritime Strategy and Sea Power in Ancient Greece, 550–321 BCE, Volume 8 in the series ‘De Gruyter Studies in Military History’. His other publications include articles in the Australian Army Journal, the Journal of Advanced Military Studies (Spring 2024), the Journal of Indo-Pacific Affairs (March–April 2022) and the US Naval War College Review (Winter 2018, vol. 71). His areas of research focus include sea power and maritime strategy, littoral warfare, land power, and strategic studies.
Endnotes
[1] The second volume will be the subject of an additional review by this reviewer in a future edition of the Army Journal. The second volume is Douglas Porch, Resistance and Liberation: France at War, 1942–1945 (Cambridge University Press, 2024).
[2] Douglas Porch, Defeat and Division: France at War, 1939–1942 (Cambridge University Press, 2022), p. 4.
[3] Ibid., pp. 29–36.
[4] Ibid., p. 40.
[5] Ibid., pp. 36–40.
[6] Ibid., pp. 42–43.
[7] Ibid., p. 44.
[8] Ibid., pp. 45–46.
[9] Ibid., p. 47.
[10] Ibid., p. 54.
[11] Ibid., p. 75.
[12] Ibid., pp. 55–57.
[13] Ibid., pp. 71–72.
[14] Ibid., p. 72.
[15] Ibid., pp. 72–74. Interestingly, this echoes many of the issues that plagued France’s mobilisation in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71. See Rachel Chrastil, ‘Mobilization’, in Bismarck’s War: The Franco-Prussian War and the Making of Modern Europe (Penguin, 2023), pp. 27–43.
[16] Porch, Defeat and Division, p. 76.
[17] Ibid., p. 81.
[18] Ibid., p. 110.
[19] Ibid., pp. 102–108.
[20] Ibid., p. 134.
[21] Ibid., pp. 143–144.
[22] Ibid., p. 230.
[23] Ibid., p. 376.
[24] Ibid., pp. 372–382.
[25] Ibid., p. 376.
[26] Ibid., p. 432. One should not forget the fact that the US and British had to arm, equip and sustain the French forces. See David D Dworak, War of Supply: World War II Allied Logistics in the Mediterranean (University Press of Kentucky, 2022), pp. 51–54, 182. Book reviewed by the author in Australian Army Journal 22, no. 2 (2025).
