What might have caused the French to fight on from North Africa?  Let’s start at a point that doesn’t look like it has a lot of potential and see if we can make it develop into a situation where France fights on.  We’ll start with General Giraud.  French general Henri Giraud had a reputation as a hard-charging, energetic fighter.  He had been wounded and captured in World War I, but managed to escape from a German prison camp.

   In the real world, General Giraud, along with seven of the best-trained and most mobile French divisions including one of France’s three light armored divisions, was sent on a fool’s errand called the Breda variant in May of 1940.  They pushed all the way through Belgium, and into southern Holland in an attempt to connect up with the Dutch army and support it against the Germans.
 
   By the time the French arrived the Dutch had already retreated from the area.  The French troops, exhausted and with quite a bit of wear and tear on their vehicles, didn’t get back into a position to play a major role in the Battle for France until German forces had already broken through French lines and were well on their way to the coast, cutting off French and British forces in Belgium.  Even when they arrived they came in division-sized or less packets and were thrown into the battle piecemeal to shore up some threaten part of the line rather than used as a coherent maneuvering force.

   The French army brought General Giraud back along with a few aides to try to regain control of the French Ninth Army, which seemed on the verge of disintegration.

   Unfortunately, that army had essentially disintegrated by the time Giraud arrived to take command.  Giraud found himself on the run from the Germans along with a small group of French soldiers.  After a series of skirmishes and narrow escapes, Giraud was surrounded in a farmhouse along with a small group of his men by German troops accompanied by three tanks.  He surrendered to keep his men from getting slaughtered and became a German POW on May 19, 1940.  That made two wars in a row.

   In April 1942, almost two years after the French surrender Giraud escaped from German captivity again, and eluded an intense German manhunt to make it back to Vichy France.  Again, that made it two wars in a row.  In a rare act of defiance, Vichy French authorities refused to return him to the Germans.  Giraud ended up in North Africa, where he briefly competed with DeGaulle for the leadership of French forces in North Africa and lost.

   Giraud was a determined, energetic, and resourceful man, whatever his faults as a politician or a general,  Let’s say that in November 1939, as the French make their plans for countering a German invasion of Belgium and Holland, Giraud or one of his staff officers have an idea.  They decide to try to get airborne forces to use to secure key chokepoints on routes that the Germans might use to counter the French move into Belgium.

   The French do have airborne units.  A few companies of them were established in 1937 and have been languishing ever since because French doctrine doesn’t really have a role for them.  Now Giraud thinks he has found that role.  His forces are being asked to go further and further into Belgium, and by late November of 1939 it is already looking like they may be asked to move all the way through Belgium and into Holland.  Giraud’s forces will ultimately be asked to move 250 kilometers to objectives that are only 100 kilometers away from the Germans.

   To reach those goals, and have time to set up defenses, Giraud needs an edge.  He thinks that the airborne forces may give it to him.  He doesn’t have much trouble getting the troops assigned to him.  They’ve been pretty much forgotten by the rest of the French army.  Getting airplanes assigned to drop the airborne units is much more difficult, and Giraud develops plans to use them as elite long range reconnaissance units if he can’t use them as airborne.

   As the months of the “phony war” drag on, Giraud continues to refine his ideas on use of the airborne units.  He wants more of them, but expansion is a slow process.  He also wants them to be better armed, especially against armor.  The French don’t really have an anti-tank rifle, but over the months they are able to get a few from the British.

   The very effective German use of airborne troops in Norway pushes France to put much more energy into expanding airborne units, but there isn’t enough time between the Norway campaign and the invasion of France to do much.  The German paratroopers in Norway also make Allied governments very worried about similar German operations against them.  That makes dropping French paratroops more complicated.  How do you do that without getting them shot up by jumpy allies?

   The bottom line on the airborne troops is that they end up unused as airborne troops and a couple hundred of them accompany Giraud as he heads over to take command of the Ninth Army.  When Ninth Army collapses, that puts a couple of hundred elite light infantry troops behind the Panzers, in a partial vacuum filled with mainly with German logistics troops and security forces.

   Guarded by the French airborne troops, Giraud escapes the German troops that historically captured him.  He links up with small remnants of the French Ninth army and manages to add a few hundred to a thousand of them to his fighting, or at least evading force.

   They head south toward French lines, avoiding German forces where possible and fighting when they have to.  The German panzers have headed on toward the Channel, and follow-on infantry haven’t established a firm grip on the area yet.  Giraud and his men hit a few German convoys and communications units on their way south, and create a certain amount of confusion among the Germans, who are very concerned about French activities in the weakly held areas behind the Panzers.  Historically, the French paratroops did rather well against German troops in small scale raids they engaged in during the ‘Phony War’.  They repeat that success in the chaotic environment behind the panzers.

   The attacks come at a time when parts of the German leadership, including Hitler, is very worried about the long, exposed flanks along the ‘Panzer Corridor’.  The attacks, small as they are, emphasize the danger of those flanks.  The German high command has already ordered the panzers to halt and allow the infantry to consolidate once.  They order another halt order, then rescind it or allow it to be ignored after about four hours.

   Giraud and some of his forces finally fight their way through German lines on May 22.  They haven’t had much of an impact on the war.  The panzers reach the Channel a little over four hours later than they did historically and have to fight a little harder to get there because the Allies have had a little longer to organize defenses.

   Events diverge a bit more on the political front.  France needs heroes and victories, and the escape of General Giraud and his men can be amplified into one.

   Giraud fits perfectly into French propaganda needs.  He ties the current struggle back to the desperate but victorious days of World War I.  He did exactly what France needs its soldiers to do—fight on and try to do as much damage to the enemy as possible even when cut off and in a seemingly hopeless position.  French propaganda turns Giraud into a national hero.  French Premier Reynaud brings him into the French government.

   The question then becomes what to do with Giraud.  General Weygand is now in command of French forces and is jealous of any encroachment on that position.  After a bit of debate, Giraud is given the job of rebuilding French armored and mobile divisions out of whatever remnants can be salvaged from the looming fiasco around Dunkirk.  That satisfies Weygand by giving a possible rival a thankless and probably impossible job.  It also satisfies Reynaud because he has long been an advocate of armored divisions, and the German victories show the power of such divisions.

   Giraud takes on his new job with his usual energy.  He doesn’t have a lot to work with—DeGaulle’s improvised 4th DCR, small remnants of the three French mechanized divisions (DLMs) that are for the most part trapped in the pocket around Dunkirk, and a few scratch units with a couple dozen tanks apiece at the most.

   Giraud manages to get British and French authorities to give priority to members of the DLMs in the Dunkirk evacuation, at least on paper.  That doesn’t help as much as it should have because many of the men from those divisions have already been captured or killed, and the chaotic situation in the Dunkirk pocket makes those orders hard to carry out.

   Giraud also manages to intercept some of the divisions from Africa on their way to the front.  Those units generally are more oriented to mobility than units from Europe.  He tries to stop the movement of French forces from North Africa to France.  He also tries to stop forces evacuated from Dunkirk and from Norway from being brought back to France, at least until they are re-equipped and reorganized into an effective fighting force.  He isn’t successful in holding onto all of the North Africa forces, but he does manage to get the ones that are brought to France replaced by divisions that are still in training and don’t have enough equipment to have significant combat capability.

   That may disguise French weakness in North Africa from Mussolini to some extent as long as he doesn’t look at the quality of the French divisions opposing him in North Africa too closely.  It also keeps open the possibility that the new divisions can eventually be brought up to strength and be used as the basis for French resistance from North Africa if that becomes necessary, or brought eventually brought back to fight in the battle for France is it lasts long enough.

   As Giraud tries to come up with contingency plans in late May 1940 he doesn’t know how much of the French army is going to be salvaged from the pocket of French and British forces around Dunkirk.  He is pretty sure that any troops that get away from the closing German trap will be disorganized, demoralized, and without heavy equipment.  They are however, some of the best troops in the French army.  Given time they can become the core around which France can rebuild its mobile divisions.  It is vital that as many as possible be successfully evacuated and that they not be sent back to the front in penny-packets.

   Giraud helps shore up Reynaud’s flagging morale, sketching out grand but overly ambitious plans to mobilize the manpower and resources of the French empire and the industry of the United States to build an army to come to the rescue of metropolitan France.  There isn’t really time to do that, and Giraud probably knows it, but it is the only chance, however unrealistic, for France to win the war.  

More next time.

Comments are very welcome.