In this first section let’s ask ourselves: In the real world, why didn’t the French empire keep fighting after the fall of France in 1940? There were at least six pretty good reasons why the French historically didn’t try to fight on from North Africa.

1. Most of the French leadership figured that the war was essentially over. Britain didn’t have the manpower or monetary resources to take on Germany by itself, and the United States had shown neither the willingness nor the capacity to help very much. Most French leaders figured that Britain would eventually have to make some kind of deal with Germany.
2. In order to get significant resources to North Africa before the fall of France, the French would have had to start planning and gathering resources to do so before the Battle of France was clearly lost. Even after Dunkirk the French felt that they had a significant chance of holding the Germans off long enough for the troops evacuated from Dunkirk to be re-equipped and reorganized to rejoin the battle. Holding the Germans in northern France required all of the resources France had (and a lot more as it turned out). France actually moved several of the more combat-ready French divisions from North Africa to France in late May and early June of 1940. Those divisions were absolutely vital if the French were to have any chance of holding the line in northern France, but moving them to France made resistance in North Africa much less feasible.
3. Once the Germans broke through French lines in Northern France, there was not much that the French could do in terms of evacuating large numbers of French troops. Bringing French troops back from the front lines for evacuation would have caused those front lines to crumble even faster than they did. The Germans would probably have been able to move faster than the French, and historically would have probably reached the ports of southern France before the bulk of the French army did if the French hadn’t accepted the Armistice when they did. Trying to evacuate at this stage would have almost certainly resulted in hundreds of thousands if not over a million additional French troops being killed or taken as German prisoners of war.
4. The French empire and fleet were vital bargaining chips to keep Germany from occupying all of France and exploiting it as brutally as the Germans were exploiting Poland. The French leadership knew enough about what was going on in Poland to have some inkling of how bad things could get under German occupation. Significant parts of that leadership felt that shielding France from the worst of that occupation was absolutely vital. The threat of fighting on from North Africa kept German demands from being as brutal as they could have been. Actually fighting from there would have removed that restraint on German behavior.
5. French leaders felt that North Africa was simply not defendable with the troops the French could get there. The Germans could simply move troops into Italian-held Libya and/or the Spanish-held portion of Morocco and take French North Africa if the French tried to fight on from there. Also, the French worried about German and Italian incitement of Arabs in those colonies if the French tried to fight on. Historically resistance to French rule in North Africa was not particularly significant during this period, but that was in a situation where French North Africa remained neutral until the point where the Allies clearly had the upper hand in North Africa. Arab nationalists could have become a problem if the French tried to resist at a time when the Germans seemed like the wave of the future. Certainly the French were afraid of Arab nationalist revolts under those circumstances.
6. Most of the French leadership was in no mood to continue fighting as British allies by the time the decision would have had to be made. While most English-language sources have emphasized French failings in their analysis of the fall of France, the French became increasingly bitter about the British role in the battle for a variety of reasons
   • After seven months of war the British still had barely more than a dozen divisions on the continent, well under one-fifth the number that the French mobilized from a comparable population and with a smaller industrial base.
   • While French and British airpower combined was not dramatically inferior to that of the Germans, the Luftwaffe dominated the skies partly because 600-odd British fighter planes sat on British runways to defend Britain while the Luftwaffe was devastating French communications and making a coherent defense virtually impossible. In addition, the relatively modern bombers of British bomber command continued to try to win the war themselves through strategic bombing while the French and a few obsolete British bombers tried desperately to knock out key German-held bridges that kept the Panzers supplied. The British focused on the large number of British fighter planes that participated in the Battle for France. The French were very aware of the large number of British planes that sat that battle out. For logistical reasons there is considerable doubt that those British planes could have been effectively used in the Battle of France, but that didn't decrease the French sense of betrayal.
   • The British set in motion the evacuation at Dunkirk without telling the French, and at a time that the French thought they still had a chance to slice through the Panzer corridor cutting off Allied forces in Belgium, or at least hold a pocket in Belgium that would tie down German divisions and keep the full force of the German army from concentrating on taking the rest of France. There was also a nasty incident where a British force was evacuated from a Channel port jointly defended by the two allies. The French commander was not informed of the evacuation and he was left high and dry when it occurred. All of this reinforced French stereotypes of the British left over from World War I, which said that there always needed to be French troops between British troops and the sea to keep the British from evacuating in a crisis.
   The French bitterness at the British may or may not have been justified, but the point is that it existed. Rightly or wrongly many French leaders felt betrayed by the British and had a very low opinion of the British contribution to the common war effort. That sense of betrayal became much worse shortly after the French surrender, when the British attacked French warships in an effort to make sure they didn’t end up in German hands.

Next issue we'll look at what might have caused the French to fight on from North Africa and what the results might have been.