"10 May 1940 the French army come in Belgium" Topic

I know a lot of guy think French army was ridiculus…
but in reality the French army was avaible to stopped nazi force in 1940. But the commandement do a lot of mistake…

I create my french army, it is the 3e DLM in 1/72. I create a lot of my soldiers in white metal, but I still used also some plastic conversion.

I hope you will like my soldiers.
Salut à tous quelques photos de quelques unes de mes figurines (j'ai atteins les 300).
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For vehicles I would consider experimenting along these lines:

Do the base in plain mud. Brown with dry brushing, maybe a rock or two. In snow sprinkle the bases with baking powder for snow. Then just blow them off with canned air or a hair dryer after the game.

For spring, sprinkle with flock.

For summer, leave them muddy.

Thank you, but I love create the figures but I am not excellent in painting.. also for tank or vehicules… I am affraid to make mistake and destroy my work…

That sure is a lot of motorcycle troops. You've done a magnificent job with all of them.

Jim

I don't think the French Army of 1940 was ridiculous. I am currently painting a 15mm French Infantry Division for Blitzkrieg Commander IV and 20mm French platoons for Bolt Action.

thank you. If you know history of France battle, you know that the german Victory is avaible because of the big mistake of the French command and also because command dont want change his strategy!

But, I love my french army. 15mm is very cool to have a big battle, but I love create my figures and I stay in 1/72… best regards all

Yep, the main problem with the French army in ‘40 was that its generals were trying to re-fight the first World War.
Another problem was that they thought one-men tank turrets were a great idea, that didn't help either.
Nice army btw, paint-job is good enough for table topping in my opinion ;)

How unusual!

Great to see an early war French army like this. If I thought there was a problem with the painting I would say something with tact and I hope also a suggestion or two. But we are seeing 20mm figures at X2 or even X3 magnification on a monitor. These are great.

As for ridiculous. Was not the problem one of morale and national confidence in 1940?. More that, than even clever German strategy, a lonely tank turret gunner, or complete failure to understand Blitzkrieg tactics? Incompetence was not confined to the French high command. Consider the largely British organisation (or lack of it) in the Allied intervention in Norway.

Above all, consider how remarkably the remaining French army did after Dunkirk, by now outnumbered and fighting a far more hopeless battle.

Very nice ! The France '40 Campaign is one of my favorite areas of study. And even gaming back in the day.

thank you… I am happy to see you appreciate my figures and the French army… For the painting, I am not expert… but I have 300 french soldiers, it is very mutch to do, best regards

Everyone always tries to find the Silver Bullet reason for why France lost in 1940. There were many. Truth be told the French were outclassed at just about every level from high command to tactics to morale. And equipment. It's useless to look at French armor in terms of paper performance data. In the field is what counts and they couldn't manage to fight the Germans in anything approaching balanced battles. They brought a pocket knife to a duel with Flamethrowers. Sad but true. Cheers!

I reall7y like your figures and how you painted them. Your French khaki appears a bit tanner than mine, but it may not be in actuality. What you see on the monitor is not always what was photographed given how different devices handle colors and color shades. What company made the motorcycle troops? I'd like to get some for my 20mm French force.

Very nice! I am about to add some more French 1940 troops to my 6mm WWII forces

Individual French troops were good, the French had decent artillery and some pretty good tanks – but they were handicapped by generals with a WWI mentality and their TO&E – French armoured divisions were essentially all-tank units and at the grand tactical level French forces didn't get the combined arms thing

the compagny is lesarmeesoubliees.blog4ever.com

No army in 1940 was capabale of holding its own against the blitzkrieg initiative. Hadn't England been an island it would have overrun too.Nice figures .I enjoy building early war afvs especially French tanks

I have a small collection of French tanks and infantry for 1940. Despite the debacle, there were a lot of very brave French soldiers who fought to the end

The big historical fault is the return of Pétain… French Empire and French marine can continue the fight in 1940…
if only…

The art of failure analysis is to not let yourself fall into the trap of "this one thing…". Because a major failure is almost never caused by one thing. Yes, you can identify an issue and say "look, if not for this, the bad stuff would not have happened the way it did." So what? If he had not gotten out of bed on Friday morning, he would not have been hit by a truck at 12:10 on his way to lunch. That does not mean getting out of bed was the cause of his broken leg!

French Generals were not trying to refight WW1. They were trying to figure out what the next war would look like, and fight it. They got several things right, several things wrong, and in the end they got some things wrong that cost them too much vs. the Germans, who got fewer things wrong.

The DLMs were well balanced combined arms mechanized divisions. In some ways better balanced than the Panzer Divisions (which were short on infantry and medium tanks in 1940). The DCRs were not well balanced, but were never conceived to act like the Panzer Divisions, being far closer in concept to the later German Schwere Abtielungs (although larger and better balanced). The French operational plan of moving their best mobile divisions into Belgium, while relying on less solid divisions to hold prepared defensive lines elsewhere, was not a bad scheme of maneuver. Some of the French equipment was very good. And the DLMs fought Panzer Divisions they faced one-on-one pretty much to a stand-still.

But there were more Panzer Divisions than there were DLMs, and quantity has a quality all it's own. And the Belgians didn't allow the French to enter Belgium and occupy defenses until after the Germans crossed the border, so the French lost the advantage of prepared defenses and had to fight in meeting engagements, against superior numbers, instead. And the Dutch and Belgian forces collapsed, and the Belgian government sought to reach terms without consultations with the other allies, allowing the Germans to turn the flanks of the British and French in Belgium, making the defensive line they had worked so hard to create untenable. And the Germans had so many more Panzer divisions, and used them so audaciously in the Ardennes, that the best units of the German forces crushed some of the under-equipped reserve elements and managed a deep turn of the French and British on the other flank, precipitating a crisis. And overriding it all, the French high command made the huge mistake of trying to centralize their decision-making in a time when they were far behind on communications.

As the US Army figured out by in-depth study in the late 1970s and early 1980s, not only of the French 1940 campaign, but also the Russian 1941 campaign, and the Arab-Israeli wars, if you can get inside your opponent's OODA loop, if you can consistently make the second thing happen before your opponent has implemented their response to the first thing you made happen, then the orders your opponent will be issuing won't make any sense to the troops on the ground, and they (the troops) will loose all confidence in their command, and morale will fail, and units will wander about or advance piecemeal into killzones or revert to "everyone for themselves" or just sit and wait to be rounded up. To say the French had a failure of morale is not wrong, but if you leave your examination at that, you gain no understanding of WHY French morale failed. It wasn't because they had low morale. It was because they were out-maneuvered, , out-led, and more than anything out-tempo'd.

Many French troops fought fanatically and took massive casualties right up to the end. But often others didn't, sometimes because they had lost all confidence in their commanders, or because their orders sent them to places where they were useless, or the orders didn't arrive and they had to figure things out for themselves without any big picture guidance. So the "fanatical" defenses were frequently fought by troops that had been encircled as their flanking units failed and fell back, or got orders and fell back, or got no orders and decided on their own to fall back, or were overrun because they had no supporting fires against superior numbers of Germans with superior fire support.

At the table top level this is hard to duplicate. Give a French player orders that don't make sense and he gets angry at the game master. Put 2 French players in a game but don't let them talk to each other and they'll get upset with the game master. Have him face a German force 3x larger than his, and tell him he'll get support but never provide it during the game, and he won't be back to play in your games again. But that's what French small unit commanders faced. And it's what small unit British commanders faced, and Russian commanders faced, right up until about 1942/43.

The kit is great to look at, but it's hard to game. Doesn't mean it can't be done well, just that it's hard to do well.

That's part of what makes it sooooo interesting. At least to me.

-Mark
(aka: Mk 1)

I hope you will like my soldiers.
Salut à tous quelques photos de quelques unes de mes figurines (j'ai atteins les 300).

Bien fait! Ils sont super, les gars.

Very nice! I am about to add some more French 1940 troops to my 6mm WWII forces…

I have been adding to my French 6mm forces recently.

From my 6mm thread:

I too have developed an interest in French motorcycle troops.

I can now use them with my DLM forces for France/Belgium 1940, or my RCA forces for Morocco/Algeria/Tunisia 1942/43.

So I now have a single French company that can fight against Germans, Italians or Americans.

Alons-y!

-Mark
(aka: Mk 1)

At the scale of a skirmish or even a battle it doesn't matter that the campaign or war was a blowout. Think of the battle for the village of Stonne. This hilltop village changed hands many times in just a couple of days of intense fighting.

I love you 6mm french side car and soldiers… where you find them?

Mark I – a very good comment on the 1940 campaign. One of my favourite campaigns as well.

Regards

Great pics !

I'm not so sure if all the equipment were equal, the French would win , due to the Germans all being high on meth.

At the scale of a skirmish or even a battle it doesn't matter that the campaign or war was a blowout.

Yes.

And … well … no.

My 1940 French force is, so far at least, undefeated on the gaming table. At least in terms of 1940 France battles (they did take a bit of a beating in a hypothetical 1940 Tunisian scenario).

Even my H-39s and Panhard AMD-178s, nevermind my S-35s, have come through victorious against panzers by the dozen (and the odd L3 from time-to-time).

Ils sont des braves, ces mecs.

Do I get a real sense for the campaigns from this? Not really. It's been fun, particularly for me. But it hasn't really tracked much of the real world events. It's hard to game it well on the table top.

I love you 6mm french side car and soldiers… where you find them?

I don't want to divert this thread too much with my modelling. So I will say only that I have described the figures and the approach I took, with several more pictures, starting in the 9th posting in my "Recent 6mm Work" thread: TMP link

With that said, allow me to return to admiring the 1/72 work that we get to see at the start of this thread.

I am particularly engaged by the painting of the dragoons (les Dragons). There's a lot of detail on these guys, and it makes a very nice impression, distinguishing them clearly from the standard infantrymen in the last few pics. I was not able to do that with my 6mm figures (no great surprise there…).

I also quite like the paint jobs on the S-35s. One of the best parts of doing a force for the French 1940 campaign is the camo of the vehicles -- you can justify such a variety of schemes that you wind up with a force with so much character and distinction.

If I would offer one idea for you to consider, it would be to add some weathering on top of all those lovely paint jobs. For me, I like my vehicles to look used, not new, when I put them on the game table. Of course, there is some historical evidence that a lot of the French vehicles actually rolled into combat looking quite new, as there was a lot of painting of camo done in the early spring just before the campaign went hot. Still, for me at least, I want some dust and mud and rust on my tanks, and even my trucks.

It's always a little tough to do, emotionally. I spend so much time painting things up to be just perfect, and then I go and ruin it by slopping washes all over and dry-brushing everything. But in the end, I feel like my tanks are telling me stories with their rust and mud every time I look at them, and it just pushes my imagination one step further.

Your tankage may vary.

-Mark
(aka: Mk 1)

Hello Mr G.

It is lovely to see your project starting to come together with all those conversions and vehicles on the move at last.

The French campaign was more than just the Blitzkrieg element which most people remembrance well.

The French army at times did quite well against an agile and innovative opponent. The problem was generally command coupled with a political malaise right up to the top as I understand it.

Looking forward to seeing them in action.

Best wishes,

Chris

I've always thought the best way to play the Battle of France was to give the French player a force about 1.5 times the size of the German. Draw up 3 table top maps that line up short side to short side. The French player then deploys across the 3 maps. The German player (not knowing the french deployment) selects one of the maps to attack through. Victory conditions would be for the Germans to reach the opposite side of the map in X number of turns. The players would be permitted to move between maps. Terrain and unit activation rules would play and important part.

guilhemdelyon
Loved the pics of your French army. Is there a blog where we can see more of them?
Mark1
Very much enjoyed your post on 1940. Good fortune to your French in the future. You know you really need to go back and give correct the scores against those Italians.