Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
France was one of the largest military powers 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.
By the autumn of 1944, Paris and the northern part of France were in Allied hands following Normandy campaign, and the southern part of France was free in the wake of the success of Operation Dragoon. Except for a few Atlantic pockets, the Allies were in full control of France, freeing their military forces to push eastward across the Rhine ...
France had lots of armed forces in World War II, in part due to the German occupation. In 1940, General Maurice Gamelin commanded the French Army, headquartered in Vincennes on the outskirts of Paris. It consisted of 117 divisions, with 94 committed to the northeastern front and a commander, General Alphonse Georges, at La Ferte-sous-Jouarre.
As one of Hitler's few concessions, the French Navy was to be disarmed but not surrendered, for Hitler realised that pushing France too far could result in France fighting on from the French colonial empire. An unoccupied region in the south, the Zone libre, was left relatively free to be governed by a rump French administration based in Vichy.
Albania, which was a client state, was considered a territory to be annexed.. During the late 1920s, the Italian Prime Minister Benito Mussolini spoke with increasing urgency about imperial expansion, arguing that Italy needed an outlet for its "surplus population" and that it would therefore be in the best interests of other countries to aid in this expansion. [1]
France had spent a higher percentage of its GNP from 1918 to 1935 on its military than other great powers [example needed] and the government had added a large rearmament effort in 1936. [citation needed] France mobilised about one-third of the male population between the ages of 20 and 45, bringing the strength of its armed forces to 5,000,000 ...
While horrific, the mortality rate was lower than in other occupied countries (e.g. 75 percent in the Netherlands) and, because the majority of the Jews were recent immigrants to France (mostly exiles from Germany), more Jews lived in France at the end of the occupation than did approximately 10 years earlier when Hitler formally came to power.
5 June: The second part of the Battle of France began with the Germans striking south from the River Somme. 9 June: German forces launched an offensive on Paris. 10 June: Norway surrendered to German forces and Italy joined the war by declaring war on France and Great Britain.