The French Resistance - was it of any use to anyone?

today I thought I would talk about the role of a French Resistance during world war two in this video which has been sponsored by our friends at the great courses plus more of them later now I in my youthful naivety did buy into the idea that the French Resistance was one big organized unit of brave Gallic souls who who as one united body resisted the front the German occupation of France all the way through the war and I was wrong but I I'd been sold the mythology sold mythology largely by the French I do remember in my youth I went to France on the whole thing with my family loads of times when I was a little boy and I remember that we went to a Tank Museum because what you would with news it's girly the tanks in it and how much my father laughed at the video that was playing on a loop I didn't completely understand it but his French was better than mine it showed loads of pictures of a parade of Tanks in front of a big clapping audience and there was a history of World War two playing and to paraphrase it when something like this in order to liberate France from the dastardly Germans the French invaded Germany but having then found that she had been betrayed by her ghastly allies she was then forced to withdraw from Germany but she came up with a master plan which was to go back across the channel to Britain or someone like that and then we masse and then come back and liberate Europe and that's what they did apparently and well it seems to work so well done France and like remember looking at this parade of Tanks and thinking well that French tank looks remarkably Alex Ben can be like a Sherman it really I knew my tanks even as little boy that looks remarkably like oh no it's not a Sherman though because it's got French markings on it what that looks like an m3 half - oh no no French again I can see the Maquis well that looks like a pretty Oh French markings again all these French tanks were being paraded these French World War two tanks I'm rid of my family used to marvel at the number of bronze statues there are in France of French World War two generals as though they did anything of any significance it's it's it's bizarre but de Gaulle quite knowingly and deliberately just Eagle but de Gaulle particularly quite knowingly and deliberate fostered this myth of France liberating herself against their better judgment possibly the Allied High Command were persuaded by de Gaulle to let him walk into the just liberated Paris as though he had liberated it ahead of the Allied forces and there he made a speech one which as he would on so many other occasions stunned the Allies with its ingratitude he said and I quote although of course I quote in translation Paris liberated liberated by her own efforts liberated by her people with the help of the armies of France with the help of all France that is France in combat the one France the true France eternal France yeah right thanks to Gaul we believe you um but in fact de Gaulle didn't organize the French Resistance in fact the French Resistance was being organized by the British and they didn't even tell him they didn't let him in on any of their secrets because French security was notoriously lacks if he told the French then the secret to be out pretty quickly the British actually had managed to insert ninety what they called circuits of F section think the F stands for France of SOE special operation executive agents in France SOE was later to become mi6 you know James Bond and all that well and they managed to get there these the circuits set up within France and they would teach the locals to listen out for certain code words code phrases that were quite surreal real you know listen on some bizarre power stuff and these would be broadcast after the news on BBC now you may be thinking oh yeah yeah right yeah you Lloyd with your notorious pro-british bias of course you're saying that the French Resistance was organized by the British you would say that wouldn't be what happened actually let's be fair to the French here the French couldn't organize the French Resistance they didn't have well let me describe some of the problems they had France is really quite big the entire population can't just take to the hills and hide behind bushes there not enough Bush is not enough hills and too many people in France the Germans later on recruited men of fighting age to work in labor camps so when in 1944 the JED brew teams dropped in to organize these these recruited gangs of men that were going to do the job they were quite disappointed to find out that they had loads of fifteen year old boys and out of condition broken-down middle-aged guys so where are all the guys in between they were mostly working in labor camps doing whatever the Germans told them to do and so the French didn't have the manpower the French didn't have the mass communication ability because all these these little groups of resistance all around France how are they to communicate with each other they couldn't use the mass media the BBC he could broadcast to the whole of France but that they couldn't take over a broadcasting station if they if they use the mass media they would very quickly be caught and killed so they couldn't actually coordinate in that way and what were they going to coordinate with you see if you just do some active of vandalism in the name of the resistance it doesn't really do a lot so you you blow up a load of machines in the local factory okay well what have you achieved you've taken a great risk you've put load of factory workers out of work they're gonna really like you when your family if your family finds out that you took that risk than ever thinking you idiot we could have lost you and what's more if you were caught the Germans in reprisals would have killed all of us so your family now hates you and if anyone outside your family finds what- they're gonna be annoyed too because you the reprisals were quite often not just the immediate family but you know everyone in the area and maybe they burned down the village so you put all of us in danger and for what those machines will be replaced or repaired and after a while the factory will be working again what did you achieve you've got everyone hating you and you took a tremendous risk what have you actually achieve not a lot but if you had an outside coordination from Britain coordinating your actions we some really major thing like the Normandy landings then that's different because if you can get all those cells all around France all blowing up trains and doing stuff all at the same time right on the day of the Normandy landings then that's going to be militarily very very useful indeed when your enemy is busy that's when it's easiest to get away with guerrilla activity and it's also when like real activity is most effective so um did they achieve anything of many military use yes they also definitely did they did so much damage to the railway network that it was okay that it was operating at 30 percent capacity when the Normandy landing breakout phase was was going on so that's a great achievement that made it very difficult for the Germans to move troops around so difficult in fact that the Das Reich for instance division one of the elite Panzer units of the of the the German army it was only three days away from the front but it took them seventeen days to get into action they were so delayed by bridges being broken signposts pointing the wrong way telephone cables being cut and derailed trains and so forth the British dropped 70,000 tire bursters to to puncture the tires of passing convoys and entire divisions of Germans ran out of puncture repair kits so yes that was militarily very useful indeed and at that moment they showed what they could do but the thing is that up until that moment and even beyond it they spent most of their time fighting each other you see there wasn't one resistance instead there were loads and loads of local commanders who all wanted to be there you know their own boss and didn't want to coordinate with others because you know they enjoyed being a boss having their own little private army plus ideologically all these different splinter cells they all hated each other because you know some of them are communists but don't forget that there are several different kinds of communists who all hate of each other you trotskyists you Marxist Leninist you use Stalinist and so forth um and they all hate of each other and then there were the Socialists who again split into loads of different kinds of socialists and they all hated each other and they all hated the Communists and all hated the dude Gaullists because you know that's the alot entirely alleged so if you are in the in the Mackey if you are a volunteer in 1943 there's naturally no lot you can do you can't record innate your efforts with the big push with Normandy landings so that's not happening yet um and if you want to get some arms get some weapons you could you could steal them off the Germans that's really amazingly dangerous however and there will be horrendous reprisals if a load of arms get stolen off the Germans they're going to line up a load of presumably innocent people doesn't matter and shoot them against the wall so yeah maybe I know we'll steal weapons off a rival group of resistance because that's much safer there won't be any reprisal so we won't be universally hated and then when the war ends we'll be able to use those arms against the swine's ha yeah and this continued even when the Allies were dropping in supplies after Normandy even it would still be the case that you had to watch out because as you were sitting into an aircraft and watching me the supply drops parachutes come down onto your landing zone you wish you'd carefully prepared and lit with three beacons you might be ambushed by another lot of resistance who would then lick all your arms and then perhaps not even use them to fight the Germans but instead hoard them for the day when the Germans have gone and then you can fight against the de Gaulle lists or whoever it is and he's got so bad in fact that Allied High Command coming right from from Eisenhower decided that they would stop dropping so many arms to the French Resistance in three months July to September 1944 they dropped six thousand tons of small arms and explosives and then after a while they started dropping less because they thought great we're going to liberate a country which will then immediately just dissolve into a civil war because we'll have so many armed bands who all hate each other that there'll all be at each other's throats and we don't want that and it seems that they were quite wise because well though wasn't a big civil war immediately after World War two in France but perhaps there could have been now I was going to talk about the great courses Plus and so I will just briefly the great courses plus is a huge online website with loads and loads of lectures generally about half an hour long in all sorts of subjects and a lot of them are to do with military history and if you're watching this video you're probably into military history and I've been looking at the series of lectures there are 24 half hour lectures on great military blunders so if you want to know about um you know cardigan and the charge of the Light Brigade oops then maybe that's one for you but now if you type in WWI great courses plus dot-com dot-com don't forget the dot-com honestly Lloyd you had one job stroke Linda beige or it's quicker click on this shortened link in the description to this video you'll be taken to a landing page and there you will find waiting for you an offer of one free month membership and well why not take advantage of it because it's one free month and in that time you can look at the load of lectures and then at the end of the month if you you think you know what I don't think this for me or I've seen enough you can just cancel your subscription and pay nothing but don't think that in one month you're going to watch all the lectures because there are far too many of them you don't stand a hope of seeing everything in one month anyway so but great corsets plus what you've given a look if you're into what doesn't have to be history science cookery photography doesn't matter whatever it is give him a look so now the British sent in the jet bridge the Jerez were Special Operations Executive agents that were there to lead the French Resistance actually as combat units not as not as information relays but actually combat units so these guys were they were sent down in uniform and they were armed and they were say right we're gonna form units and typically a jet team found itself in command of about 1,500 resistance fighters and I have a read of actions that got up to battalion levels so you know some of the actions were really quite big that they were fighting the Germans besieged in in various garrison towns and so forth they did have a problem later on when the Allies were going forward so successfully that the there was a genuine risk of the irregular troops of the resistance meeting the regular advancing troops of the Allies and there being some horrendous confusion and friendly fire incidents and some and so forth and usually what they would do is just make themselves scarce because you don't want to mix regular and irregular forces and it did happen that sometimes forces of the Maquis would find themselves trapped between the Germans at the advancing allies which wasn't a nice position to be in now there were loads of people who were of course sort of in favor of the Nazi occupation they were the Malisse for instance which is only one letter away from the word malice and these were the secret police who were proficient Nazi occupation who would denounce their fellows sometimes in the spirit of just petty vengeance oh you know that guy over there who was so ungracious when MyCal won Best in Show at the agricultural competitions well hey I'll denounce him to the Gestapo and he won't be laughing now it seems that there are people out there who really are that petty and of course if you think that he's a do Gollust and you're a communist that's another reason for denouncing him even though you may think that they're both pro-french yeah these rivalries were so intense that there were people who would take advantage of the situation to harm their fellows now the Maquis of course when the Germans had been ejected from an area were often quite keen to round up all the people they think had been collaborators and without trial quite often execute them they killed a lot they killed about 30,000 Frenchmen this way which shockingly is about the same number that the Nazis killed during the whole of the French occupation so it seems you know based on that that maybe there was a genuine risk of civil war in France and so perhaps Eisenhower and the British allied High Command did a wise thing in stopping the armed arming of the the Maquis the resistance there was never one unified resistance and there are so many organizations that they were known to the SOE HQ as the the alphabetical resistance and here here are just a few of the the organizations that call themselves the French Resistance during well but this is just a few this is just a few samples they all have their own little initialisms there are so many of them and they were not coordinated but it does turn out that if you've got a large number of uncoordinated rival groups who are doing incredibly petty things like what one of the things the British had to stop them doing was could you please stop holding up tobacconist cigarette yes yes but it's not really very good for the for the war effort is it just holding up at the back and it's could you please just you know grieve could we fight the Germans can we do that yes but you can make them a very effective fighting unit if you get them all to do something of military use all at the same time just when you make the big push with your conventional forces and for that to happen you need an external organizing force the French couldn't have organized that the only people in a position to do it were the British [Music] Sydnee man [Music]

Channel: Lindybeige

Views: 684,402

Rating: 4.8184266 out of 5

Keywords: Maquis, resistance, resistence, french, france, ww2, wwii, world war two, world war 2, jedburghs, soe, milice, d-day, normandy, landings, british, organisation, war, warfare, guerillas, fighters, german, occupation, occupiers, reprisals, germans, third, reich, vichy, de gaulle, agents, spies

Id: YO-Ocueehfc

Length: 17min 7sec (1027 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 19 2016

Reddit Comments

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No, not particularly.