The ANZACs- myth and reality

[alex_revell]

Pete,
You say that more than half the German casualties in France were suffered AFTER Dunkirk. I find this rather surprising. Dunkirk was over on June 3 1940, the Germans entered Paris on 14 June and on 22 June the French concluded the armistice with Germany. Eleven days seems rather a short time in which to inflict such heavy casualties on the Germans, especially as a great number of French troops were also taken off the beaches at Dunkirk. Perhaps you'd let us know your scource for the statement. I'm not being awkward, or saying you are wrong, just curious where that figure comes from.
A very interesting book about this period is For Your Freedom and Ours. The Kosciuszko Squadron. The forgotten heroes of World War II. by Lynne Olson and Stanley Cloud. This is the story of the Polish airmen who escaped to England after the fall of France. Before the fall they were attached to L'Armee de l'Air. Their reception by the French pilots, and the French pilots' lack of enthusiasm in engaging any German aircraft over their homeland, makes chilling reading. There were also about 75,000 men in the Polish army and General Weygand ordered them to lay down their arms. Prime Minister Sikorski rejected the order. The Polish army distinguished itself in the heavy fighting after Dunkirk, while covering the French retreats. On June 13 a Polish armoured brigade repulsed a heavy German attack near Montbard, mounted a counter-attack and inflicted heavy casualties. At Belfort, the 2nd Polish Infantry Rifles Division held German forces at bay for six days, facing an artillery barrage three times stronger than its own. General Weygand remarked that if he had had only a few more Polish divisions, he might have been able to halt the Germans. Most of the Polish troops who fought in France were killed, only 20,000 made it to England. This number, with airforce etc, grew to well over 30,000. So, again, I think the French are being a little bit selective in their account of that time. But then, losers always are. Who's to blame them.

[crankcase]

Originally Posted by alex_revell

...
You say that more than half the German casualties in France were suffered AFTER Dunkirk....

I don't know how many casualties there were before Dunkirk, but if you count AFTER as being all the way up to the end of the war, then maybe the balance looks different?
marc

[alex_revell]

Crankcase
No, only till the armistice with France on 22 June.

[RussGannon]

Alex

Sounds to me the caption writer can't handle having his chain pulled!

Russ

[RussGannon]

Pete

I saw your comments on Waterloo. That is one of my old favourites. Forked out quite a few dollars on the 'Waterloo Companion' a couple of years back. Have you ever read the 'Waterloo Letters'? Please excuse me but I'm going off the cuff in my local library, but it was compiled by the officer commissioned to make the diorama of the battle in the mid 1880's and he secured letters from many many surviving officers. It presents a very non jingoistic picture.

Quiz question: who wrote "Never did an army with guns use their legs so much!" and what action did it refer to?

Cheers Russ

[Pete Hill]

Hi Alex,
Regarding your enquiry about the German losses in the invasion of France in 1940 I got the information from the book 'Time to Kill' edited by Paul Addison and Angus Calder (Pimilico Books, 1997). It is a collection of essays on the western theatre of WW2 by a number of notable writers and historians. The essay in question is "No taste for the fight?: French combat performance in 1940 and the politics of the Fall of France" by Martin S Alexander.
According to Alexander, a German communique issued on the 4th June 1940listed Whermacht casualties between 10th May and 3rd June as 10,000 killed and 42,000 wounded. A second communique issued on 2nd July stated that by 25th June, the figures had grown to 27,000 killed and 111,000 wounded. Unless the figures for the first period had been under-estimated, I took that to mean that the additional losses had been inflicted after the 3rd of June.
The book is an interesting one as many of the essays challenge commonly-held perceptions of the war. Brain R Sullivan's essay on the Italian soldier in combat 1940-43 makes a convincing argument, backed with considerable evidence, that the Italian infantryman does not deserve the popular image of him being cowardly and timid. Theodore Wilson's essay "Who Fought and Why?" is highly critical of the US army's habits of assigning the poorest and most under-educated recruits to frontline rifle companies whilst those men lucky enough to finish High School tended to get the jobs in the rear. J A Craig's essay "The British Soldier on the Home Front" is particularly scathing of the way English recruits were treated by their army- the wretched conditions, the poor pay, the low status and the resulting poor morale.
Warm Regards Pete

[NeilE]

Correction Russ, all those prisoners and material were captured by Commonwealth forces - not the British as you say.

Personally the doings of F-111's are a world away from the time I like to study and I think I'd like to keep them there.

There is no doubt that the American people and some of their Great War Historians - or writers - take at face value the writings of their press at the time regarding the achievements of the AEF . There is no doubt that US journalists and some US Generals (or Generals to be), such as Pershing and Patton, talked up the achievements of the AEF, in a similar way to Bean for the Australians and others for most of the other combatants.

The propaganda laden portrayals of the actions of the AEF at the time were perhaps coloured in part by the need to justify US involvement in The Great War to a divided home front. It may have have been further coloured by notions of the 'sturdy frontiersman ethic vs decadent old world Europeans' and similar notions also (This may have something to do also with the empathy felt between Australian and American troops mentioned by some authors). Post-war, this mythology entered popular culture and grew from there, ultimately leading to uncritical replication by populist authors such as Shaara.

From what I have read - and I admit it is not extensive - the experience of the AEF in France in 1918 was little different to any of the other Allied combatants at the time. There were some differences of course. Both the French and British staff liaison officers attached to the AEF commented on the poor state of American staff work. particularly in the areas of munitions and supply, which they thought to be particularly sub-standard. Looking at it more objectively, it is probably likely that it was quite similar to that of the British in 1915, which experienced similar problems with shell and rations shortages.

Whether Pershing was the right man for the job of leading the AEF is perhaps debatable. Both the French and British found him hard to deal with, and very unwilling to adopt the lessons of four years of trench warfare learnt by the French and Commonwealth forces. His insistence on advances in line and that the American offensive spirit (his version of the "British spirit of the bayonet") would carry well sited and defended German positions led to the usual high casualty rates.

The notion that the AEF stopped the German offensives is, of course, just not true. They stopped some smaller offensive thrusts at Belleau Wood and elsewhere but the main, most threatening German offensives of the Kaiserschlact had been stopped months before by Commonwealth (mainly Australian) Forces at Villers Bretoneux and Hazebrouck.

Looking at the fighting at Belleau Wood for a moment, whilst it was certainly hard and in close, it was certainly not as intense at the two months combat over High Wood on the Somme in 1916 or the South African Brigade's experience at Delville Wood the same year where of the 3,433 men who entered the wood on the 14th of July 1916, only 768 remained unhurt when they were withdrawn on the 20th of July (with a ratio of 4 dead to one wounded - unlike the usual 1:3 ratio common on the Western Front).

St Mihiel, often lauded as THE innovative offensive of The Great War by some American writers, was in fact a variant on the infantry tactics and weapons combinations used in the Commonwealth offensives at Hamel and Amiens. St Mihiel was not as successful in scope as Amiens was either, with the AEF and French failing to capture Metz, the target of the offensive.

All this is not to downgrade the significance of these actions of the AEF, or those later on the Meuse-Argonne front, which have significance in the American history of arms in that they were the first times US forces were involved in conflict in Europe, and against a European power on equal terms. Thus their national significance cannot be discounted - though none of them have taken on the almost religious significance of Gallipoli or Villers Bretoneux (in recent times).

[alex_revell]

Pete,
Yes, it's difficult to know if the German casualties were the total at the 3 June, or if they were added to/amended later. I'm no authority on WW2 but from what I've read I very much doubt many of the extra casualties were inflicted by the French. They seem to have lost the will to fight - witness the large numbers of their troops taken off at Dunkirk - and if the attitude of their airforce is anything to go by, then they were probably quite willing to call it a day. But it's surprising how little known facts can shed a different light on things. Until I read For Your Freedom and Ours, I had no idea that the Poles had any troops in France.
I quite agree with your comments about the fighting qualities of the Italian soldiers. I think this is due to the wartime propaganda, which I remember well, of portraying them as ice cream sellers and not much else. A friend who fought them in the desert and in Italy itself, put me straight on that a long time ago. According to him, they were pretty good fighters. The same chap was driving his Captain in a jeep towards Rome when they were stopped by an American General - by my memory it was Clarke - and asked where the hell they thought they were going. The Captain replied that they were going to Rome. The General told them in no uncertain terms that the hell they were, informing them that the American forces were to be the first into the city, backing it up by a hand on his automatic. I would have told him where to get off, but then I always was a bolshie individual!
Yes, the British soldier had to put up with some pretty bad conditions - poor pay, low status etc - but the French troops, especially in the WW1, were considerably worse off. You must remember that in those days, in England, the average working man in the forces was a victim of the class thing. He wasn't thought to be of much importance, anything was good enough for him, and if the incompetence of his leaders led to high casualty rates, then what did it matter. He was only one of the great unwashed, his loss was of no consequence. Cannon fodder.
Saw a documentary recently about the D Day landings. I was amazed at the planners giving the Americans the beaches they did. Omaha, for instance, was shown in the doc. to not only have high cliffs for the troops to climb - bad enough with machine guns at the top - but was crescent shaped, so that they were also enfiladed. On top of this the German defenses seemed to have had no attention from the off shore naval guns and there was no supporting air power. Amazing.
To go back to generalities. I remember my uncle, who landed on D Day2 and fought as an infantryman right through to the end of the war, being very scathing about the US troops. He often told me how, as he put it, 'we had to go and get them out of the shit time and time again'. From what little reading I've done on WW2, I know he must have been wrong, but why did he think that? He certainly wasn't anti-American - who was in those days - his big hero was James Cagney. Another thing he said was that the Yanks wouldn't move without air cover - rightly so, in my opinion - and that the real boys were the pilots flying Tiffies. They always called them up, when they were stuck in a small town or village, and last stand troops needed to be winkled out. He was also full of admiration for the German soldier. He told me many times they were the finest troops in the world. So much so that he often wondered how the allies ever won!
Neil,
I think you've hit the nail right on the head, and fairly. Peter Hart, in his latest book, 1918, has summed it up very well. How the lessons of the previous three years had at last been learnt, leading to what he calls 'an all arms battle' ie the technique of using all types of arms co-ordinated in an attack - artillery, tanks, aircraft etc. rather than sheer man power.
Regards to you both
Alex

[Jenny]

One of my all-time favorite books. And I love Graves poetry as well. He may have been right Re. trench-foot. We now know that a person's moral can play havoc with the immune system. Poor discipline can, lead to poor moral, and vice versa. There is plenty of anecdotal information out there on how one's personal outlook affects one's health. Whether this is due to seratonin levels, or something else ought to be studied. There is a definite mind/body connection, and when you throw in the generalized stress of trench warfare, poor living conditions, etc., one could certainly go into a downward slide culminating in trench-foot.
Now how would one set up such a study? Or would one rely on retrospective evidence? Wonder if the Journal of Military Medicine might be interested? Are there articles of the epidemiology of trench-foot? I wonder if my local SPH school would know? I need to find a psychiatrist specializing in brain biochemistry, as well as infantry related military medicine. Here's a question: What is the effect of serotonin levels on the development of trench-foot? If high serotonin levels prevent the development of trench-foot, could/should one give troops in the field doses of Prozac , or similar drugs to up the saratonin levels? Under battlefield conditions, how would you administer said drug? Pill, patch, long-lasting injections? Sorry about the tangent, but this might be worth a f/u. Jenny. I may get my call from Stockholm yet!

[Taz]

Neil, Alex, Pete- As an intellectual exercise, what would have happened in WWI if the US had remained neutral? There was adequate reason to remain so with a large German population and large numbers of Irish who hated the English with a passion. The War of 1812 was still remembered and was not much more distant than WWI is today. There was a large affinity for the French, but that could have been ignored. Manpower was being drained rapidly on the Continent and, as already mentioned, Australian, and likely other Commonwealth nations, recruitment had fallen off as the casualty rates and horrors of trench warfare became known. French and English draftee numbers were falling off as only those who came of age had not already been inducted.

Most of the gasoline and a large amount of raw materials was supplied by America. If not for the British naval blockade, America could have gotten rich supplying both sides by remaining neutral. As it was the war was the beginning of the end of Great Britain as a world power because nearly a whole generation of poets, engineers, philosophers, leaders, inventors and workers were lost in the trenches or elsewhere. WWII would finish the job.

Would the war have carried on until 1919 or 1920 without the influx of men and material beginning in 1917? No statistically significant number of Americans really fought until Spring/Summer 1918, but the flow of raw materials, gasoline and other products surged in 1917. So what do you think? How much longer would the war have lasted?

Taz
Terry Phillips