Short History of World War II - James L. Stokesbury [5]
This was about the only item on which French governments were resolute. As a nation they were impoverished, enfeebled, and enervated by war. The stereotype personification of the Frenchman before the war was of a vigorous officer winning bits of empire for la civilisation française. After the war it was of an old man, slump-shouldered, bowed down by his cares and his past, making his annual pilgrimage along the voie sacrée to the Armistice Day ceremonies at Verdun. If little things give away a country’s sense of itself, it is significant that French subway cars still reserve rush-hour seats for “les grands mutilés de la guerre”—the multiple amputees of World War I.
Politically, the French argued their causes passionately and developed deep divisions between the right and the left. The divisions went so deep that the French Republic got lost somewhere in the middle.
Governments of the twenties and thirties rose and fell with alarming regularity. Even more alarming was the fact that they were the same old governments. Coalition after coalition of tired politicians played musical chairs and swapped ministries and made their back-room deals. The real problems of the republic—finance, industry, social reform, education—all were held in abeyance while the politicians talked. Words were the only surplus item in interwar France.
Of all the problems they failed to solve, the military one would become the most crucial, at least from the viewpoint of World War II. It was, indeed, a complex problem.
The first difficulty was the matter of manpower. The French had had military conscription, in one form or another, for some centuries. It had become regularized and modernized in the latter part of the nineteenth century, after the Franco-Prussian War had demonstrated, apparently conclusively, that a big short-service army was better than a small long-service one. This conclusion was probably wrong, but it was nevertheless the one all the experts drew from the war. France had rebuilt her army after 1871 with large numbers of conscripts on the German model. Her problem was that in the twentieth century she lacked the basic bodies to conscript. Before World War I her birthrate declined to the point where she had to keep her conscripts with the colors a year longer than the Germans did just to keep her numbers up. Every man-year in the army was an unproductive one from the point of view of the national economy, and equally from the point of view of marriage, parenthood, and the production of future potential conscripts. Add to this already existing difficulty the enormous wastage of World War I—1,654,000 deaths, most of them presumably of potential parents—and the demographic problems of filling up the ranks become readily apparent. During the thirties the French government would respond to its financial problems by reducing the length of military service, but that only further aggravated the difficulties of an army committed to large masses of citizen-soldiers.
For the army itself it was not just a problem of numbers, but of what to do with them. The whole question of the French interwar military doctrine is crucial to what happened in 1939 and 1940. Had they made different decisions, there might well have been no World War II.
The major question was, what sort of military posture should France adopt? The man most responsible for the answer was Henri Philippe Pétain, hero of Verdun, Marshal of France. He was to France in the period what Wellington had been to Britain after Waterloo, or what Eisenhower would be to the United States after World War II. He had saved Verdun, he had restored the French Army after the 1917 mutinies, he had won through to victory in 1918. His