43. Marie Claude
“surrender worked fine for the Vichy Government”.
Only for as long as it suited France’s new masters, Marie.
And it freed up German troops for the Eastern Front, not only the ones that would have been needed to roll up the useless French Army but the troops that would have been necessary to keep order in the rump of France.
Useless? Sure.
Proved useless decisively when Hitler and a mere 5,000 troops, unaccompanied by tanks and with no air cover, illegally re-occupied the Rhineland on France’s border, thumbing their nose at the biggest and best equipped army in Europe.
Hitler had acted in defiance of the advice of his own military who well knew that France could easily throw them out. In fact the German generals had given their troops orders to retreat should the French attack.
And they anticipatd that a defeat of Hitler’s bluff would have resulted in a coup to throw the Nazis out of government within weeks.
Hitler himself later said, “If the French had then marched into the Rhineland, we would have had to withdraw with shame and disgrace, for the military resources at our disposal would have been wholly inadequate for even a moderate resistance”.
The “constable” of France, General Gamelin refused to throw the krauts out telling Premier Albert Sarraut that the French Army was “une force purement défensive” and suggested the French Government protest to the League of Nations.