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ISBN 0-7006-0764-1
260 pages

List of Abbreviations; Preface; Introduction; Notes; Selected Bibliography; Index

   Eugenia Kiesling poses a stinging question in her Preface:

   It is commonplace to deride France for two kinds of failure—the failure to prepare for war against Germany and the failure to perceive the weakness of French national defense policies. What will future historians say about current Western societies that, facing threats to their quality of life at least as grave as that posed by military conquest, understandably prefer, as interwar France understandably preferred, business as usual to unpleasant sacrifice—and therefore assure themselves as their world decays around them that things really are not all that bad?

   Indeed, although she does not always explicitly say so, many of the historical issues and options she disinters from the grave of the Third Republic also face political and military leaders today, and the examples here can be very instructive.
   As Kiesling enumerates in her Introduction, many books have been written about various aspects of French national defense in the inter-war years. (For English-language accounts, she recognizes in particular titles by Doughty, Young, Alexander, and Gunsberg.) Of the many themes which have been discussed in those books, she takes up three—national security policy, military organization, and military doctrine—and places them under her finely focused microscope for close and careful inspection. This inspection commences with an analysis of the manifold constraints under which French leaders operated, the options open to those leaders, and the reasoning behind the fateful choices they made. The emphasis is not on "what France did wrong" but on how France made and implemented decisions.

   ...At every level of action, from national security policy to squad-level tactics, French possibilities were severely limited, and the resulting policies, plans, and doctrines ranged from suspect to demonstrably inadequate. Still, neither Army nor nation resigned itself to defeat, collapse, disaster, or catastrophe. Instead, French leaders mobilized their defense resources within the limits of what the polity allowed. The results were less than perfect but were deemed to be good enough. Choosing optimism over cynicism or despair, military and political leaders alike dismissed French weakness, exaggerated French strengths, and persuaded themselves of the intrinsic merits of arrangements that they had neither the ability nor the inclination to alter.

   The first chapter, "Mobilizing the Nation in Arms", demonstrates the difficulties faced by France, as by any nation attempting to reconcile peacetime rights and traditions with wartime requirements and sacrifices.
   From 1922 efforts were made to draft, finalize, and ratify a Loi sur l'organisation de nation pour le temps de guerre (Law for the organization of the nation in time of war). This was exactly the sort of legislation—for girding the populace, economy, and military for total war—that would in hindsight prove to be the prudent foundation for formulating and planning the integration of manpower, industry, and strategy in an increasingly dangerous international environment. The bill, however, suffered a rough passage from committee to Chamber of Deputies and Senate where elected representatives of all persuasions debated, criticized, and amended the measure over mere wording as well as substantial issues such as conscripting women for national service, rules for government requisition of personal property (such as trucks), and even whether legislators should be required to—or prohibited from—serving in the armed forces. Kiesling stresses this debate issued not from inability of unwillingness to face the real possibility of renewed threat from Germany, but rather from genuine concern over the extent of personal, political, and economic liberties France could afford to sacrifice in the cause of protecting those very liberties.
   Although the bill—controversial and unpassed—was shelved for six years, the government in the meantime legislated and funded other critical defense measures such as military reorganization and the Maginot Line. Reintroduced in 1935, the measure was finally ratified and signed into law in 1938, but only after further lengthy debates caused it to be amended almost beyond recognition.

   The sixty-eight articles of the new Loi sur l'organisation de nation pour le temps de guerre called upon the government to make peacetime preparations for the mobilization of the population and resources of France to meet the exigencies of war. It delineated the responsibilities of the various civil and military authorities and imposed national service obligations upon all male residents of France over eighteen years old. The state was empowered to negotiate with private citizens for the wartime use of property, and resources not secured by peacetime negotiations were subject to requisition with the payment of an indemnity. Legislators enrolled in the first reserve would be required to fulfill their military obligations; whether they could also exercise their political mandate was left for the two houses to determine. The government was to be assisted in preparing for wartime mobilization by a chief of staff of national defense, the Conseil Superieur de la Defense Nationale, and the council's subordinate agencies. The specifically military aspects of national security planning—including the employment of armed forces, the creation and execution of armaments programs, and industrial mobilization—were the responsibility of the Comite Permanent de la Defense National. At the outbreak of hostilities, these military concerns shifted to a new Comite de Guerre chaired by the president of the republic. The war committee would issue directives to the service commanders-in-chief and could choose to delegate to a single individual the power to coordinate the actions of the army, navy, and air force. The nation's economic mobilization was to be organized by special bureaus within the ministries. Acquisition and distribution of each scarce resource would be the responsibility of a single ministry, and similar centralized control was to be imposed on the national transportation and communications networks. Finally, a substantial portion of the law, eight of the sixty-eight articles, dealt with measures to protect the population of France from aerial bombardment.

   Despite the years of wrangling delay, this was not the law of a nation studiously avoiding the possibility of hostilities. On the other hand, Kiesling also points out "Those parts of the Loi sur l'organisation de nation pour le temps de guerre that government agencies did not like were simply ignored."
   When war came, the gaps and inadequacies in the law, as well as the failures to heed some of its provisions, led to chaotic problems in areas such as organizing the railways for military purposes, balancing competing manpower requirements, and mobilization of the armed forces. "[The French] made do with a law that was politically acceptable and then told themselves it would be adequate...."
   In the following chapter, Kiesling outlines the rather grand conception, contentious birth, and entirely stilted, unproductive existence of the "National War College". Originally intended to be "a tool to prepare for and to prosecute 'total war'", combining selected officers from all three services as well as civil servants from important ministries in an environment designed to imbue them with the axiom of "unity of war" and prepare them to understand and conduct strategie generale ("the art of directing, in war and peace, all of a nation's forces and resources for struggle"), inter-service bickering and an orthodox, uninspired curriculum of stale historical cases robbed the College of vitality and relevance.
   Most interesting is the description of the 1938-1939 "case study" wargame involving a hypothetical war in October 1939 brought about by German aggression in central Europe. In the scenario, the College students offered as their only offensive maneuver an attack against Germany's ostensible Italian ally.

   ...Even this plan struck Admiral Castex [head of the College] as too ambitious, and so great was his alarm that he delivered an unscheduled lecture reminding the class of France's long-war strategy and, therefore, of her commitment to maintaining a defensive posture in all theaters of operations.

   Kiesling's judgment is swift. "At the [College], as in the nation as a whole, the government pretended to have a viable strategy and the armed forces pretended to be able to carry it out."
   Kiesling next points out the difficulties of keeping the Army trained and ready for action. Beginning with the class of 1930, conscripts were required to serve for only one year. In order to ensure that sufficient numbers of "trained" men were always on hand, the annual class of conscripts was inducted in two groups six month apart. This allowed only six months for a training cycle, although in World War I this kind of training had required a cycle of nine or ten months. Furthermore, the conscripts were inducted into the active Army where they served with a small cadre of professional soldiers. This meant the largest proportion of the active Army comprised raw recruits who had not completed more than a fraction of their training. A number of schemes were tested for maximizing training, but there was no good solution to semi-annual conscription for a single year of service. The problems were exacerbated by the need for the active Army—still laden with raw recruits of short term service—to provide cadres for the annual training of the reserve Army. Funding reductions also progressively limited the supply of ammunition for training in the three years before the war. Training with transport was equally spotty: the French Army possessed only 30,000 trucks and would need to requisition over 300,000 from civilian sources during mobilization (which was one of the sticking points of the long-delayed Loi sur l'organisation de nation pour le temps de guerre).

   The most mundane material wants interfered with peacetime training. Some units could not provide soldiers with a second pair of shoes or trousers and cancelled exercises in inclement weather because their men would not have dry clothes to wear afterward. Conscripts were offered reimbursement for supplying their own boots, belts, wool socks, spoons and forks, and blankets. Reservists were encouraged to wear their own shoes for training periods, but most chose to suffer with ill-fitting army issue as the reimbursement would not replace a decent pair of civilian shoes. An armor battalion inspected in December 1939 proved not only to be without it allotment of tanks and vehicles but also poorly housed and inadequately fed. Items in short supply included beds, uniforms, boots, leather jackets, helmets, water bottles, and the goggles essential for motorcyclists. Rations were inadequate even in the officers' mess, and the men ate cold meals because of the distance between the kitchens and the barracks. For an economical evaluation of the material defects of the French army, one need only note that even after the 14-million-franc procurement program of 1937-1940 had been supplemented in 1938 with an additional 12 million francs, the allocation deemed necessary after Germany's annexation of Czechoslovakia was more than 64 million francs. This "eloquent sum," remarks Pierre Hoff, reveals "how much the French army fell short of being a truly modern army."

   The relationship between the active forces and the reserve forces was critical. All conscripts spent part of their time in each.

   Under the provisions of the army organization laws of 1927 and 1928, healthy French males were liable to military service for twenty-eight years, of which only the first year was intended to be spent on active reserve, or, more precisely, in training to become a combat-ready reservist. By the time a soldier was fully trained, his active duty obligation was finished and he graduated to a ready reserve called the disponibilite. For the next three years, he remained attached to his active-duty regiment, was liable for a three-week training period, and could be recalled to the colors by the minister of war. In the event of war, each active infantry regiment absorbed about 2,000 men from the disponibilite and left behind for further training its 700-1,000 first-semester recruits. After the disponibilite came sixteen years in the first-line reserve, during which the reservist could be called up twice for three-week training periods. Military obligations concluded with eight years in the second-line reserve, theoretically including a seven-day exercise.
   The reserve-training obligation totaled nine or ten weeks, but its actual incidence depended on funding by parsimonious and antimilitaristic parliamentarians. At seven francs a day per man, reserve exercises were an expense that the French government chose to avoid from 1919 to 1927. In spite of the provisions of the 1927 law, no class of disponibilite was called up for reserve training until 1933, and the next two years saw convocations from the disponibilite but not from the first-line reserve.

   In theory such difficulties were to be assuaged in part by the system of military regions and creation of units which were conscripted from a single locality, trained there together, and lived in proximity during peacetime—thus providing the units with a certain amount of esprit and cohesion. In practice, most units drew their manpower from a variety of scattered regions and were further subjected to a bewildering array of special rules, assignments, exemptions, and exceptions so that such local recruiting and cohesion meant little. Furthermore, as a soldier moved from one level of service to another, this accumulation of complexities usually meant that he moved from one unit of strangers to another. This also meant that reservists had suddenly to acquire new military specialties.

   In fact, in September 1939, a regimental commander discovered that a sentry who did not know how to present arms had done his conscript year as an officer's batman and that fully 150 of the men in his regiment were products of the navy, the air force, the cavalry, or the tank arm. These men, who had never undergone the basic "school of the soldier," had to be removed from their companies to be trained as infantrymen.

   Thus, for her active force France relied on a small number of regular soldiers engaged in training the mass of raw, short-term recruits who would need to be detached and left behind in the event of war, and on reserves who had likely moved to unfamiliar jobs in unfamiliar units with little additional training.
   Kiesling's next topic involves a rarified discussion of French military philosophy between the wars. This is the most theoretical and hypothetical chapter of the book, and seems to underline French military conservatism as the author compares and contrasts, with much quoting of Doughty, the "historical" and "material" methods of argumentation in formulating doctrine. Whatever the philosophical underpinnings, she concludes "Surely, it was a concern for safety, a fear that innovation might lead to bloody errors, rather than conservatism for its own sake that guided doctrinal development by the French high command." She also notes that, despite popular perceptions, the French high command did not believe in the "inviolability of prepared positions" (notably the Maginot Line) and did not reject the concept of maneuver. She goes on, however, to scrutinize the French Army's definition of maneuver and determine that it did not equate to the Anglo-American concept of fluid movement and mobility. The bottom line? The development of French doctrine was sorely constrained by the nature of its predominantly under-trained conscript and reservist divisions, and at every turn the generals were forced to match their textbooks and regulations to the capabilities of their troops. All in all, despite that important point, this is the least elucidating and least successful chapter.
   The book concludes with its strongest chapter. When Kiesling begins to examine the specifics of doctrine itself, rather than its formulation, she quickly foreshadows her theme: "Investigation of the elements of the doctrine so often blamed for the French debate in 1940 suggests, however bad the result in 1940, the French Army would have found it very difficult to fight differently." She covers the following elements:

• "Firepower and the Defensive" — "The indisputable key to interwar French military doctrine was respect for the murderous efficacy of artillery and automatic weapons."

• "The Methodical Battle" — "The companion of French defensive confidence was the belief that attacking was inherently dangerous, and thus for French soldiers to think offensively required either cognitive dissonance—believing simultaneously that French defenses would stop German attacks and that French attacks would penetrate German defenses—or a plan [the methodical battle] to overcome the defender's acknowledged advantage."

• "Motorization" — "...like other aspects of doctrinal development in interwar France, the story of armor doctrine is not one of blind conservatism, or sloth, or stupidity, or national poverty either physical or intellectual. It is a story of intractable problems, irreconcilable requirements, and a particular, reasoned set of strategic and doctrinal judgments."

• "Mechanization" — "The pace of armor development was glacial during the 1920s, however, for the perfectly sensible reason that the 3,500 existing Renault FTs were, though obsolete by the 1930s, perfectly adequate against an enemy who, thanks to the Treaty of Versailles, lacked anything better.... Historians have tended to emphasize French hesitation to create armored divisions, but for some contemporary military analysts, the DLM represented excessive haste to adopt an untried form of warfare." This section also includes a brilliant interpretation of how the integration of tanks forced the doctrine of "methodical battle" to become only more methodical.

• "Heavy Armored Divisions" — "The sledgehammer of massed medium tanks was to be wielded only in conjunction with the other components of the methodical battle. Its missions were aggressive ones—counterattack, flank attack, exploitation, and rupture of organized fronts—but it would not attempt to advance until other French forces had silenced the enemy antitank defenses."

• "Sources of Satisfaction" — "On the whole, studying German doctrine reinforced French confidence in their own methods. Similarities were stressed, perhaps even wishfully invented. When possible, discrepancies like those arising from conflicting judgments of the relative effectiveness of tank and of the antitank gun were ascribed to German miscalculations."

   In closing, Kiesling ties together all the threads of her chapters with a carefully considered summation.

   ...If French doctrine was not what [the American observer, General Ralph K.] Smith would have chosen for the United States Army or Guderian for the Wehrmacht, it suited the Third Republic. It was not a doctrine created for an ideal army but for the army France had.... More ambitious doctrine would have required a different army, but the mission of the French high command was to heed the nation's political, economic, and psychological limitations and to develop simple, stable, and credible methods appropriate for a nation in arms.
   ...
   We will never know whether the doctrine of firepower and the methodical battle would have met the case if supported by the kind of training and leadership to which the high command paid rhetorical homage, for the same constraints that reduced doctrinal options undermined the army's combat effectiveness as a whole.
   ...
   As for Paul Reynaud's warnings that France need to have either "the army of her policy of the policy of her army," one could have replied that France had, if not an army geared to support her diplomatic engagements, one that reflected her politics in the largest possible sense. It was an army unready for war against the Wehrmacht in 1940, but it could not have been different and remained the army of the Third Republic.

   French leaders believed, if forced to fight another war with their neighbor across the Rhine, they could only win as part of an alliance, and even then they would need to fight a lengthy war in order to fully mobilize industry and manpower for final victory. Consequently, they adopted the concept of the "methodical battle" to guide a defensive strategy during which no risks would be taken and, eventually, the carefully orchestrated, phase-by-phase offensive that would be required to overwhelm the enemy's defensive positions. From this strategy flowed slow, conservative battlefield tactics which stifled initiative by providing that units should not advance without orders, lose touch with the units on their flanks, or engage the enemy outside the range of friendly artillery fire. On the eve of the Second World War, most military observers considered the French Army, the product of these carefully considered policies, to be the most powerful and efficient in the world. Not until May 1940 would it be clear how the inexorable momentum of pre-war decision-making had taken France to a catastrophic dead end.
   Kiesling's is not an inclusive survey of the broad spectrum of military, economic, political, and diplomatic issues in the years leading up to war for the entire French armed forces. Instead, the author has intentionally focused narrowly on a few representative areas. The result is an insightful, analytical volume with much, much to recommend it; it is also a very scholarly work in which the endnotes can be as important as the text. It is no criticism to say that the brevity and narrowness of Kiesling's excellent work generate the desire for a fuller and more rounded history of the limitations confronting France, the options available, the choices made, and the consequences of those choices.
   Available from online booksellers, local bookshops, or directly from University Press of Kansas.
   Thanks to UPK for providing this review copy.

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Reviewed 17 January 1999
Copyright © 1999 by Bill Stone
May not be reproduced in any form without written permission of Stone & Stone