The Combatants VI

The French Army of Liberation

Of the larger allied armies of the final year of the war, the French Army of Liberation is one of the least well documented in the English language. There are sources available, though, leading one to conclude that some of the prevailing ignorance regarding these French troops is more a matter of choice and bias than an absolute lack of information. It is bad enough to see the same old nonsense being repeated on the internet, but this willful ignorance is also present in recent historical works by well-known authors who should have either known better or done better research before they displayed their ignorance (or national biases) in published volumes.

The French army of 1944-45 bears scant resemblance to the large army that was handily defeated by the Germans in the Spring of 1940. The Army of Liberation, as the French refer to it, was a seasoned, well-led, and ultimately victorious force. The part of this organization called the French First Army was one of the most successful allied field armies on the western front during the campaign in NW Europe, and its operations are well worthy of study. During periods of time when the other allied armies were bogged down in front of German lines, the French First Army moved decisively, rupturing German defensive lines and capturing entire corps of German troops. Because historical documentation of the operations of the entire 6th Allied Army Group (French First Army and U. S. Seventh Army) has taken a distinct back seat to boatloads of volumes describing operations of the U. S. 12th Army Group, the contributions of the French First Army remain comparitively unknown.

In terms of weapons, the major units of the French army used weapons provided by the U.S.A. Their unit organization as well was largely patterned after 1943-style American organizational forms. By organizational tables, a regular battalion of French (or French colonial) infantry was equipped with these weapons:

Carbines M1C, 132 each, 30 rpm, 7 grams
Rifles M1903, 387 each, 20 rpm, 9.85 grams
60-mm mortar M2, 6 each, 8 rpm, 1360 grams
50-Cal Heavy MG M2HB, 3 each, 236 rpm, 46.01 grams
30-Cal Light MG M1919A6, 6 each, 203 rpm, 9.85 grams
30-Cal Auto Rifle M1918A1, 27 each, 150 rpm, 9.85 grams
30-Cal Heavy MG M1917A1, 8 each, 250 rpm, 9.85 grams
81-mm mortar M1, 6 each, 8 rpm, 3145 grams

Thus, the French battalion could produce a weight of fire totalling 457 Kilograms or 1,005 pounds in one minute. The only real difference in the French armament was the use of bolt-action M1903 rifles with a rate of fire that was about two-thirds of the semiautomatic M1 rifle used by U. S. infantry units. Like the U. S. units they were patterned after, the French battalions lacked a weight of fire that could contend with the prevalence of belt-fed machine-guns and heavy mortars found in German units of like size. Tellingly, soon after the war the French adopted organizational structures that equipped approximately one-third of every infantry squad with submachine-guns as a way of increasing the infantry's weight of fire.