French Forces of The Interior - Amalgamation

Amalgamation

Subsequent to the liberation of areas where FFI units operated, they often formed battalions and brigades named for their commanders or region of origin (Battalion Oziol, etc.) These FFI units were predominantly of the light infantry class, although some formed light reconnaissance units like the 12th Regiment of Dragoons. Some of these units were used to besiege German troops in still-occupied French ports or to secure France's alpine frontier with Italy, others were used to secure Allied lines of communications in France, and still others were assigned as army reserve units for the use of General de Lattre de Tassigny's French First Army. From October 1944 until March 1945, the FFI units were amalgamated into the French Army in order to regularize the units. Units such as the 49th Infantry Regiment (formerly the FFI Corps Franc Pommiés) and the 3rd Demi-Brigade of Chasseurs (formerly the FFI Alsace-Lorraine Brigade) were constituted in this manner using FFI manpower. Amalgamation was successful in varying degree; the training, tactics and attitudes of the former French Resistance fighters often differed from those of the regular soldiers with whom they served. General De Lattre's comments on this situation are enlightening:

were not and could not be the characteristics of the F.F.I. units. Condemned to be born and live in secret, placed outside the law by the enemy and by the enemy's accomplices, they had above all developed the revolutionary military virtues, those of partisans. By force of circumstances the personalities of the leaders had played a determining role and had stamped each maquis with a different brand. . . . To the regiments we had landed the extreme variety of the F.F.I. organizations, their at least peculiar discipline, the differing quality of their groups, the poverty of their equipment, the crying inadequacy of their armament and supplies, the heterogeneity of their officering, the facility with which their superior ranks had been assigned, and in certain cases the ostensibly political nature of their aims, ran counter to the classical military outlook of many officers, some of whom, in reaction, exaggerated their regulation strictness. . . . The part had taken in the fight for liberation not only encouraged them rightly in the wish to retain their individuality; their successes, valued often from a local angle, established in their view the excellence of the military system which circumstances had led them to create and which they intended to substitute for the traditional system, which they considered out-of-date.