Knife Edge
In responding to the German offensive towards Vichy the imperial French had limited options. Reinforcing the town could only be done by taking troops from other parts of the Occitan line and invite more German offensives in the weakened areas in the process. And with the tenacity of the German attack facing the ferocity of the Foreign Legion’s defence, victory or defeat was balanced on a knife edge.
Instead, the decision was made to use the forces freed up in northern France by the closing of the Brittany pocket to launch against the Poitiers region from the north with the hope of catching the Germans in a pincer movement and defeating them, and thereby freeing up men to reinforce the Vichy area.
Meanwhile, elsewhere in northern France, imperial French troops found themselves coming under regular probing offensives by the Germans in the Paris area. While it was obvious that none of these offensives had any chance of success, each of them cost men and resources that the French Empire with its limited manpower could ill afford to lose, as well as forcing French forces to spend time building trenches and other defences rather than mount offensives of their own.
However, there were snippets of good news for the imperial French.
In Britain a combined French and English operation had succeeded in occupying the industrialised and heavily populated central belt of Scotland, encountering only sporadic resistance from German forces in the process, and was now heading north into the highlands and towards the great naval base at Scapa Flow. Once this operation was complete, it would free up five French divisions for the struggle in continental Europe, with the manpower of the Royal English Army being freed up to act as an emergency reserve should the front in northern France come under danger of being overwhelmed.
More promising reports came from north Africa, native cavalry and Pied-Noirs regulars, along with allied Portugese and Arab troops, were advancing towards Casablanca - even though the outnumbered German garrison was forcing them to play a game of cat and mouse deep in the Sahara.
And one final item of good news came from Bavaria where Austrian troops had made further advances through the mountain passes and were at last in a position to threaten Munich.
Then, on the 11th of April a key point in the war came when imperial French troops in Brittany, after days of hard fighting around Angers, were finally in a position to join the battle for Poitiers. Attacking from the north, they began the pincer movement intended to squeeze the Wehrmacht until the pips squeaked.
The effect of thousands of enemy soldiers attacking their unfortified rear was too much of a blow for the German defenders to bear. Chaos erupted as German officers hurriedly tried to reposition their forces to delay the French advance but within hours it became clear that the German position was untenable.
By eight o’clock in the evening, the Germans had been forced into a massed retreat over the Vienne river and the French commanders were celebrating the liberation of Poitiers with the very same dinner which had been prepared earlier in the day for their defeated opposite numbers.
Now at last the French Empire was in a position to attempt the relief of Vichy, and to see if there was still anything which could be salvaged from De Gaulle’s notion of a “war of mobility”.