French Navy

From the start of World War II, the Navy was involved in a number of operations, participating in the Battle of the Atlantic, the Norwegian Campaign, the Dunkirk evacuation and, briefly, the Battle of the Mediterranean. 

However, after the fall of France in June 1940, the Navy was obligated to remain neutral under the terms of the armistice that created the truncated state of Vichy France. 

Worldwide, some 100 naval vessels and their crews heeded General Charles de Gaulle‘s call to join forces with the British, but the bulk of the fleet, including all its capital ships, transferred loyalty to Vichy. 

Concerned that the German Navy might somehow gain control of the ships, the British mounted an attack on Mers-el-Kébir, the Algerian city where many of them were harbored. 

The incident poisoned Anglo-French relations, leading to Vichy reprisals and a full-scale naval battle at Casablanca in 1942 when the Allies invaded French North Africa. 

But the confrontations were set aside once the Germans occupied Vichy France. 

The capital ships were a primary goal of the occupation, but before they could be seized they were scuttled by their own crews. 

A few small ships and submarines managed to escape in time, and these joined de Gaulle’s Free French Naval Forces, an arm of Free France that fought as an adjunct of the Royal Navy until the end of the war. 

In the Pacific theatre as well, Free French vessels operated until the Japanese capitulation; Richelieu was present at the Japanese Instrument of Surrender.

The Navy later provided fire support and troop transport in the Indochina War, the Algerian War, the Gulf War, and the Kosovo War.

French Army

From 1939 until 1940, the French Third Republic was at war with Germany. 

The period from 1940 until 1945 saw competition between Vichy France and the Free French Forces under General Charles de Gaulle for control of the overseas empire. 

In 1944, after the landings of the Allies in France (Normandy, Provence), they expelled the German Army, putting an end to the Vichy Regime.

France and Britain declared war on Germany when Germany invaded Poland in September 1939. After the Phoney War from 1939 to 1940, within seven weeks, the Germans invaded and defeated France and forced the British off the continent. France formally surrendered to Germany.

In August 1943, the de Gaulle and Giraud forces merged in a single chain of command subordinated to Anglo-American leadership, meanwhile opposing French forces on the Eastern Front were subordinated to Soviet or German leaderships. This in-exile French force together with the French Forces of the Interior (FFI) played a variable-scale role in the eventual liberation of France by the Western Allies and the defeat of Vichy France, Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany, and the Japanese empire. 

Vichy France fought for control over the French overseas empire with the Free French forces, which were helped by Britain and the U.S. By 1943, all of the colonies, except for Indochina, had joined the Free French cause.

The number of Free French troops grew with Allied success in North Africa and subsequent rallying of the Army of Africa which pursued the fight against the Axis fighting in many campaigns and eventually invading Italy, occupied France and Germany from 1944 to 1945 by demanding unconditional surrender to the Axis Powers in the Casablanca Conference. 

On October 23, 1944, Britain, the United States, and the Soviet Union officially recognized de Gaulle’s regime as the Provisional Government of the French Republic (GPRF) which replaced the in-exile Vichy French State (its government having fled to Sigmaringen in western Germany) and preceded the Fourth Republic (1946).

Recruitment in liberated France led to enlargements of the French armies. By the end of the war in Europe in May 1945, France had 1,250,000 troops, 10 divisions of which were fighting in Germany. 

An expeditionary corps was created to liberate French Indochina then occupied by the Japanese. During the course of the war, French military losses totaled 212,000 dead, of which 92,000 were killed through the end of the campaign of 1940, 58,000 from 1940 to 1945 in other campaigns, 24,000 lost while serving in the French resistance, and a further 38,000 lost while serving with the German Army (including 32,000 “malgré-nous“).


France

France was the largest military power to come under occupation as part of the Western Front in World War II. 

The Western Front was a military theatre of World War II encompassing Denmark, Norway, Luxembourg, Belgium, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, France, Italy, and Germany. 

The Western Front was marked by two phases of large-scale combat operations.

The first phase saw the capitulation of the Netherlands, Belgium, and France during May and June 1940 after their defeat in the Low Countries and the northern half of France, and continued into an air war between Germany and Britain that climaxed with the Battle of Britain.

After capitulation, France was governed as Vichy France headed by Marshal Philippe Pétain. From 1940 to 1942, while the Vichy regime was the nominal government of all of France except for Alsace-Lorraine, the Germans and Italians militarily occupied northern and south-eastern France.