ARMY'S FM3

Incorporating the 9 principles of warfare in the Army's FM3, explain the Failure of the French Army in May-June 1940 as the Nazi's launched their broad attacks in Western Europe



Incorporating the 9 principles of warfare in the Army's FM3, explain the Failure of the French Army in May-June 1940 as the Nazi's launched their broad attacks in Western Europe

Introduction

From the moment France and Germany signed the June 1940 armistice, the unanimous verdict was that the defeat represented a judgment on the moral state of the French nation. Marshal Philippe Petain, Gen. Charles de Gaulle, and the Resistance movement offered competing versions of the view that the French defeat was rooted in the decadence of French culture. After spending 125 pages of his book castigating the French military, Marc Bloch suggested: In no nation is any professional group ever entirely responsible for its own actions.

Discussion

The solidarity of society as a whole is too strong to permit the existence of the sort of moral autonomy, existing in isolation, which any such total responsibility would seem to imply. The staffs worked with tools that were put into their hands by the nation at large. The psychological conditions in which they lived were not altogether of their own making, and they themselves, through their members, were as their origins had molded them. They could be only what the totality of the social fact, as it existed in France, permitted them to be."

Historians subsequently offered assessments broadly similar to Bloch's. Philip Bankwitz sees the fall of France as collaboration between the government and the military. Aware of the "exhaustion of the national spirit," political leaders were willing to tolerate, even encourage, a primal antimilitarism in French political culture. For its part, the high command was paralyzed by a sense of inferiority ...