France, 1940: National Failure and the Uses of Defeat

June 2003 · Historically Speaking4 1 Societyand the Institute ofMathematical Statistics adopted resolutions ofappreciation for her work. In 1953 Rees returned to New York as dean offacultyatHunter College. She went on to a brilliant career as an academic administrator , eventually serving as the first president of the City University of New York Graduate Center. An interviewer asked Rees ifshe left Washington because Eisenhower came in. While notreplyingdirectly, she did admit that "when Mr. Eisenhower was elected president, the budgetwas cut . . . the Republicans cut budgets."5 The demands ofwarimpose pressures on societythatbreakdown barriers to advancement and can be liberating to those able to take advantage ofthe change. This is understood to have been the case for manywomen duringWorldWar?. Yetscholars argue that after the war most women returned to their prewar status. While that is generally true, there were exceptional women like Grace Hopper and Mina Rees who built successfully on their wartime training and experiences to follow new postwar paths. Kathleen Broome Williamsisaprofessorof history atBronx Community College, CUNY and the CUNYGraduate School and University Center. She is the authoro/Improbable Warriors: Women Scientists and the U.S. Navyin World War ? (NavalInstitute Press, 2001), which received the North American Societyfir Oceanic Historys 2001 John Lyman BookAwardfor the best book in U.S. navalhistory. 1 Quote is from Grace Hopper interview by Christopher Evans, 1976. OH81, 2. Charles Babbage Institute, University ofMinnesota, Minneapolis , MN. 2 Hopperinterview, OH81,11. 3 Grace Hopper interview by Uta C. Merzbach, July 1968. Computer Oral History Collection, Oral History #196, series I, box 11, folder 7, 5. NationalMuseum ofAmerican HistoryArchives Center, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC. 4 Mina Rees interview by Nina Cobb, November 16, 1983 toJanuary 20, 1983. Women in Federal Government Oral History Project, OH40, 10. Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Cambridge , MA. 5 Rees interview, 236. France, 1940: National Failure and the Uses of Defeat David Gordon The collapse ofFrance in sixweeks was arguably the greatest surprise of World War ?. Few could believe that the rapid collapse of a large, well equipped armywas the resultofmüitaryincompetence. Some socialists and communists blamed capitalism , clericalism, and anti-republican generals . Those newly triumphant at Vichy faulted anti-clericalism, parliamentary corruption , and the Marxist parties that had divided the nation. However, all the explanations about fundamental weaknesses behind the collapsewere greadyexaggerated. France hadnotgone towar divided. Nor was France betrayed. As recent literature demonstrates, France was defeated because her generals made serious mistakes during the campaign. Robert Doughty put it best whenhe wrote thatthe Germans "outfought the French tactically and outsmarted them strategically."1 The French had moved deep into Belgium earlyin the 1940 campaign to establish defensive positions as farfrom their border as possible. General Maurice Gamelin's one audacious gambit, the socalled Breda variant, in which he decided to move still farther into the Netherlands, depletedhisstrategicreserve andfatallyweakened die French. When Guderian's panzers broke through the Ardennes, there were no strategicreservesleftto stophim. Bythe time the French were prepared to resist, the battle was already lost. Stanley Hoffman has famously called Vichy "the revenge ofthe minorities." The Riom trials, begun in February 1942, were part ofthat revenge. The aimwas to discredit the country's prewar socialist and radicalsocialist leadership, as well as Gamelin. But when the political defendants were able to prove that the mistakes ofFrench strategic planninghad been made longbefore the creation ofthe 1936 PopularFrontgovernment, the trialwas suspended. The German defeat at Stalingrad little less than ayearlatermade debate over 1940 less important. With allied victorya growing possibility, French interest turned to the nature and extent ofcollaborationist guilt However, the signal factremains thatfor two years after the armistice every political groupwaswed tosome kind ofmythologized explanation for the defeat. No onewas willingto see the militaryfailure forwhatitwas. Further* no one asked why Germany had beenallowedto become sostrongintheyears prior to 1940. 42Historically Speaking · June 2003 The greatest failure ofthe French republicanregime had notbeenitsinabilityto stand up to the German attack. It was its unwillingness to act against the growingNazi danger when there was still time to do so. There were several reasons for this. International hostility to the 1923 occupation of the Rhineland, the 1926 Locarno Treaties that guaranteed the permanence ofFrance's eastern borders, and German entry into the League ofNations the sameyearwere among them...