Today is the 70th anniversary of one of the great catastrophes of the 20th century - Hitler's stunningly successful invasion of France, and the near-total collapse of resistance to Nazi Germany.
Reading the papers today, I wonder how far we are from the same degree of corruption and paralysis, and suffering a fate that may not be the same as France of 1940, but one that may have disturbing similarities: a corrupt society controlled by an irrational, reactionary right, drifting towards a totalitarian increasingly unable to cope with the challenges of the present.
The fall of France in 1940 was a disaster that has been obscured in triumphal WWII mythology subsequently,along with all sorts of nonsense about the "French Resistance", and near-total amnesia about the widespread apathy and even support for Hitler in the US at the time. Hitler had in that moment his one chance to subjugate Europe, and force a detente with the United States - and absent the leadership of Winston Churchill, he might have succeeded.
Why did France collapse? It's army was powerful and well equipped, and had been the dominant military force in the world just 20 years before - just as the US is the dominant military power today.
I believe that there are many ugly parallels to our present time. No, I don't think that Obama is Hitler or Bin Laden is Hitler, or Joe Lieberman is Hitler...Rather, I believe that France collapsed because of terrible political paralysis, coupled with economic instability - conditions that we are approaching now.
The French of 1940 clung to illusions about obsolete, staggeringly expensive military technology; much as we do now. The French could have faced their real threats, but chose wishful thinking instead -- in large measure because of an entrenched intransigent right wing (though there were plenty of deluded Stalinists on the left too).
We can face our real problems now, but will we?
A little review, if you can tolerate an amateur historian's limited grasp on the events:
On May 10, 1940, the German Army brought a nine month "phony war" to an end with attack that overran and politically destroyed the Republic of France in just six weeks. This represented the complete destruction of what had just 20 years before been the most powerful army on the planet.
German victory was not fore-ordained. In fact the German high command fought against Hitlers plan (He had demanded an immediate invasion of France weeks after the invasion of Poland in 1939), and moved the date back nearly 100 times, prompting accusations of treason on Hitler's part, and assassination planning on the part of the generals.
Finally, with great fear on the part of the Nazi military leadership, they Germans struck - and France collapsed. (That stunning collapse, by the way, cemented Hitler's control of the German military establishment, until the disaster at Stalingrad 2 1/2 years later).
Why?
In history books, one generally finds little more than a passing reference to the wonders of the New German, "blitzkrieg" tactics – the use of dive bombers combined with deeply-penetrating thrusts of tank columns to disrupt and encircle large armies rather than destroying them in bloody frontal assaults (precisely the documents that the US army adopted and used with such effect in Iraq).
In my opinion, the "blitzkrieg" explanation, is invalid. The real reason was the staggering incompetence on the part of the French Army; and something that transcends even that, a kind of societal sickness composed of apathy, vicious political partisanship and entrenched grieve - which paralyzed the capacity of the French Republic to fight.
Before the invasion, the French actually had plenty of time to study the "new" German military techniques: They were repeatedly employed in the Spanish Civil War, four years previously, and were on full display in Poland in 1939 less than a year before. Simple corrective measures could have been taken to significantly protect France against such attacks.
For example, in every subsequent phase of the war, and ever since, it has become common place to see heavy machine guns mounted on the roofs of tanks and trucks, and more powerful rapid fire anti-aircraft guns traveling in trains and other convoys. These weapons render the dive-bombing attacks of the "blitzkrieg" suicidal for pilot. Another example: The French and British battle tanks were actually significantly better than the German ones, but they were never employed in an effective fashion, and were either side-stepped or destroyed piecemeal on the ground.
A great deal of more could be said about the collective French delusion regarding the fortifications on the French-Germany border, the so called "Maginot line – the essential fact being that this advanced rate of fortifications protected only one flank of the French Nation, leaving the North Western border – the route that Germany had used to invade France in 1870, 1914, and again in 1940 – utterly exposed.
Another explanation frequently ruled out, is the notion that the allies were simply not "tough" enough to take on the Nazis, and that Hitler rose to power as the result of this spinelessness.
This myth has little more substance: The first modern use of the word "holocaust" that I am aware of was developed to describe the slaughter of two generations of European young man (27% of French men of military age died in World War I, for example). But there was no shortage of "toughness" right after the war.
France invaded Germany in 1923 when Germany defaulted on its reparation payments. Both France and England undertook extensive military operations in the 1920s in their effort to consolidate their colonial control of what had been the Turkish Empire. Most notable among these efforts was a costly failure in Iraq conducted under the eager advocacy of the subsequently-disgraced Winston Churchill.
The allies were slow to re-arm in the 1930s not because they were insufficiently "tough," but because they were broke and facing the horrors of the great depression with the additional burden of World War I death. The US eventually forgave debt obligations, but too little and too late.
US investment poured into Germany in the 1920s, by contrast, prompting a wave of industrial modernization that was later credited to Adolf Hitler, but in fact predated his rise to power. In other words, the industrial base of Hitler's war machine was in great financed by eager US speculators, while France and Britain languished.
Most crippling to France, was the polarization of the country between a large and active communist party on one hand, and a reactionary, anti-Semitic, hard-line rightly catholic constituency on the other, with which most of the senior officers in French party were identified, and depended on for their own advancement. A more moderate, democratic socialist party in the middle assumed power under the leadership of Leon Blum (corrected), whose Jewish origins enraged the right, much as our own president’s does today, and the phrase "better Hitler than Blum" became a rallying cry on the right.
After the French army collapsed, many Frenchman believed that the defeat could not have occurred without active treachery at high levels in the army. This seems not to have been the case. Rather, the army was in the hands of an aged, insular clique of generals in their 70s and 80s who had little interest in modern warfare. The great popular historian, Alistair Horne notes that a single reconnaissance plane over the Ardennes forest on 05/08/40 could have changed the course of the Second World War. Instead, the absence of such a plane nearly lost it.
Silly comparisons to episodes and history, taken out of context are merely as common as comparisons to Hitler in our debased popular consciousness; but I am nonetheless struck by dire similarities to our present situation:
- The American public is bitterly divided, with firebrands on the right denouncing every other constituency as unpatriotic traders;
- We are in a state of economic uncertainty, possibly facing worse in the future;
- Our military planning is politicized and hide-bound, producing stunningly expensive weapons for wars we will never fight, while our vulnerability to the "next war" increases (lubricated by generals who move to lucrative jobs in the "private sector" in the very programs they supervise).
The US today has spent about $300 on anti-missle technology to defend us against threats we are unlikely to ever face - with similar amounts squandered on the F-22 fighter and other boondoggles.
At the same time, the threats we face are dire - surmountable if addressed, but dire.
See for example, Richard Clarke's warnings about the penetration of America’s computer networks by Chinese and other computer warfare operations.
More broadly, like France after World War I, we are in a state of crisis and confusion about our destiny. Are we to be an imperial nation, caring the torch of what Glenn Beck refers to as "white values" to the world? Many might wish it so, but this vision is in fact as unrealistic and doomed as that of the French and British emperors was 70 years ago. How we will deal with our own swelling masses of poor and the multiplying ranks of desperate and disempowered people around the globe?
Most critically, what of our own ruling classes? We have been lead to great extent by pigmies, political hacks, pollsters, paid off in back rooms by powerful corporate interest – a trend that is likely only to increase.
The Iraq Invasion, Katrina, the Madoff Ponzi scheme the 2008 financial meltdown, the current gulf oil-spill -- all of these represent disasters that could have been averted, if rational, responsible leadership had been in place. But, generally speaking, that's not what we have.
Look at the tremendous resistance the Obama administration faces as it tries to implement the most mundane goals. Just as the French right cried "better Hitler than Blum", our rightist cadres scream the things we're all familiar with.
But the problem is right-wing crazies: it's the system of government for sale, relentless corporate greed, greed and complacency on a personal level that infiltrates nearly every doctors office, university boardroom, science lab, on down the line.
The US isn't going to face waves of dive-bombers and tanks. We're facing environmental catastrophes, financial turmoil, terrorism, and cyberwar.
And we're just not ready.
After France collapsed, the rightists stepped in, and imposed the Vichy dictatorship which cheerfully shipped French Jews to the gas chambers, and eventually sent hundreds of thousands of its non-Jewish citizens to slave labor camps serving the German war machine. Plenty of upper-echelon Frenchmen got rich - that's why they supported the Vichy regime.
US business elites are already selling our heritage off to the Chinese, the Saudis, anyone who wants a slice of the pie. Well-endowed business school professors proclaim the glory of "free trade" and deregulation to anyone who will listen. You read the other diaries here - you don't need me to spell it out for you.
It's coming. The only question is, can we do better than the French did?
References:
Strange Defeat - Rene Bloch
To Lose A Battle - Alstair Horne
Five Days in London - John Lukacs
Cyber War: The Next Threat to National Security and What to Do About It Richard A. Clarke