Warlord Games: New French & Italian Bolt Action PDF Painting Guides

I've always wanted to try out the French. Everyone tends to look down at them, but at the beginning of WWII they actually had a fairly powerful army. From what I've read it was the French high command that failed them, not the troops on the front lines.

The collapse of the Army of the Third Republic was a strategic and operational failure, not a failure of courage on the part of the individual French soldiers as the German propaganda newsreels would have posterity believe. Tactically the French could fight and well and often did. They had better tanks in terms of armor protection and firepower, but suffered in turn from poor gas mileage, poor ergonomics, lack of radios, and poor tactical doctrines. The Char B1bis and SOMUA S35s still proved so devilishly hard to kill in a tank-on-tank stand up fight that the Germans very quickly learned to pull back the panzers when French tanks were detected concentrating and call in the Stukas, as a head-on encounter with even French light tanks (which though poorly armed with the weak 37mm 18SA cannon were all well armored) could prove difficult to say the least.

It was during the French campaign that the Pak 36 3.7 cm anti-tank gun earned it's monicker "door knocker" as the then-standard German anti-tank gun proved seriously lacking in penetrative power against even the French Renault R35 and Hotchkiss H-series light tanks, and all but hopeless against the Char B1bis. The Char B1bis in particular was a real monster in 1940. The first tank ace of WW2 was a Frenchman, Capitaine Pierre Billotte who with his crew of the Char B1bis "Eure" racked up as many as 2 Panzer IVs, eleven Panzer IIIs, and several Panzer IIs in a single engagement in the streets of Stonne along with claiming two Pak 36 that were foolish enough to engage the rampaging French char.

Billotte's tank was hit 140 times at point-blank range by German return fire without a single penetration. Most of his tank kills that day occurred in a matter of minutes in a point-blank exchange of fire between the "Eure" and a column of eleven of the heaviest panzer types then in service, with Billotte and his driver-bow gunner Sgt. Durupt systematically butchering the hapless panzers they'd caught halted in column as they entered the town rolling straight down main street(!).

A few days later at Landrecies two Chars B1bis performing a reconnaissance due to a lack of any other more suitable units wound up finding the Germans infesting the town in strength, and proceeded to run amok through the streets against what may have been an entire German reconnaissance battalion. The two Char B1bis destroyed as few as fifty to as many as circa *100* light tanks, armored cars, halftracks, and other vehicles at point blank range, scattering Germans like rabbits in every direction before the two French heavies trundled back out of the town, leaving mayhem behind them. both chars were hit repeatedly without effect by the no-doubt terrified (and appalled) Germans.

Yes, during the catastrophe of May-June 1940, sometimes the Frenchmen won, and rather well in fact.

Leland R. Erickson
Metal Express
metal-express.net