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The French soldier is apt to look sloppy in the ranks but the army is well grounded in the essentials and its men are tough individual fighters, particularly on the defensive. In training the rank and file, the French forget fancier phases of close-order drill, concentrate on teaching men how to shoot. Majority of French ordnance is old; but, like a skilled automobile mechanic with a battered jalopy, French marksmen get the most out of 1914 Hotchkisses, 1897-model Seventy-fives. The French are short on good anti-tank guns, way behind in the air (nationalization of the aircraft industry was a flop under the Popular Front), well-fixed for heavily-armored tanks.
The French army is kept democratic by the invariable practice of allowing only one-half its active officers to be taken from Saint-Cyr and the Polytechnique, Gallic West Points. The result has been a businesslike class of fine professional officers. With a hierarchy of officers whose continuity of tradition has not been broken since the 1870s, the French are probably weak on new tactics. They are scholars in warfare. It is typical that able Chief of Staff Gamelin, even-tempered Parisian who studied under Foch at the Staff College, is so close a student of Napoleon's campaigns that he is supposed to remember "every order as they were given, day by day, during the Empire" (the words are attributed to Foch). But Gamelin is considerable of a realist and it is quite possible that in the next war, he would profit by the mistakes of the last war.
Germany. The old German Imperial Army was cock-of-the-walk, and all Germans, even Socialists, gawped at it in awe. Although the Nazi army (1,000,000 men) is not the old Army's equal either in training or in tailored splendor, it tries to carry on the tradition. But the "Versailles gap" (1919-34), a period in which conscription was prohibited, has left the Germans weak in well-trained reserves, short on crack lieutenants and captains. The gap was not complete, however, because some German officer material was lent to train the Russian, Chinese, Bolivian armies. Young officers are being rushed through training schools, but no short course can make a well-grounded officer. Old Reichswehr sergeants, now lieutenants and captains, are good drill masters, but have more limitations than talents. By recently making officers of men from the lower middle class and even peasants, the Germans have lowered the morale of their old aristocratic officer class. But despite these things, Germany has once more one of the most formidable armies in Europe.
The Germans have more anti-tank guns than the French, and learned the value of heavy armored tanks after the debacle of the light tanks in Spain. But Germans are way ahead in production of planes, build them with speed and without gadgets, "to fight in . . . [not] to live in." Since kudos goes to Nazi airmen, morale of air force is excellent. Göring's policy is to produce pilots in short order, then turn them loose and depend on the survival of the fittest.