The Fall of France

On June 21st, 1940 France surrendered to Germany. The Germans insisted that the surrender documents be signed in the same railroad car where the German surrender took place in 1918. Hitler was personally present for the ceremony and there was a bit of allied propaganda, absurd by today’s standards, which purported to show Hitler “dancing a jig” in celebration at the ceremony. It was actually news reel footage of Hitler walking while the film ran at a fast speed forwards, then backwards then forwards again. I can personally testify that this film was still being shown as if it was a true depiction of events in the late 1950′s.

The fall of a major victorious power from world war I was a shock and a surprise. I used to ask my father, a world war II Marine, all sorts of questions about his war experiences. One day it occurred to me to ask my stepmother what she remembered about the war. She paused and thought for a moment and said, “We were all surprised when France fell.” (Later she told me a story about the days immediately after Pearl Harbor but I’ll save that for next year.)

This spectacular German success temporarily put an end to the plots of the German generals against Hitler. It could no longer credibly be said that Hitler was putting the country on the road to ruin. The victory also caused Hitler’s popularity with the German people to soar. Thus he was free to concentrate on plotting the invasion of Russia thereby putting Germany back on the road to ruin.

The terms of the treaty were generous by Hitler’s standards. Northern and western France became German occupied zones. The interior and the south coast were placed under the control of a collaborationist government with its capital at Vichy which came to be known as Vichy France. However, the idea of being a collaborationist was not a widely understood one at the time and many French people simply accepted Vichy as the lawful French government. There was probably some rationalization going on here. If Vichy was the lawful government then as a French person you could accept the idea that the war was over for you.

Of course many French people did not buy this reasoning at all. Most notable among them was a French army colonel Charles deGaulle who founded the Free French movement intended to rally all French people who wished to continue the fight. More on him later.

Vichy France also included the French colonies. This greatly disappointed Mussolini who was told by Hitler that there would be no French North African colonies in Italy’s future. The immediate issue for Britain was the future of the French navy. It belonged to Vichy but this did not adequately assure the British that it would not fall into German hands.

At the time the only way the allies and their sympathizers could explain this disaster was to say that the Germans used “blitzkrieg” tactics to gain their victory. They might as well have said the Germans used magic beans as this would have been an almost equally enlightening explanation. Only after some emotional distance has been achieved through the passage of time are we beginning to understand what happened. Expect a mini-essay on this issue soon.