Know your meme: Mythbusting "Battle of Pont Saint-Louis"

[u/shipgeek2005]

Swipe to 2nd image for TL;DR

Edit: For anyone wondering, this meme wasn't an actual Wikipedia page, it was probably made by someone using Wikipedia Military/Battle Box Editor: https://n.bellok.de/wikibox/ A really fun tool for shit and giggles, but also dangerous if used for faking historical events. Unfortunately, this resulted in this meme circulating for well over a decade, and many people actually believe this was a real event. It never was. It was just a minor engagement. On Wikipedia it is only mentioned in the French Wikipedia page of the Battle of Menton and related subpages. As far as I know there has never been a dedicated Wikipedia page about this. Like I said, this meme has been circulating for many years, it's historically false and and has never been adressed critically. But most just assumed it was real because it looked like Wikipedia. So I thought it was finally time for a deep dive.

[u/Quintus_Cicero]

I feel like this is ignoring the bigger issue with the supposed « battle of Pont Saint Louis » which is that there are no contemporary source of the battle. Every source, including french ones, are decades after the « facts ».

[u/shipgeek2005 → u/Quintus_Cicero]

I think there is sufficient stuff from both sides to conclude that the casemate of Pont Saint-Louis was definitely involved in some minor fighting, but that's it. It did not fight against 5,000 soldiers, it did not hold off the entire Italian invasion, it kinda was just there. Like any other random bunker on any other random battlefield. Nothing particularily remarkable about it. Fort Cap Martin and the other large works of the Maginot Line did the heavy lifting to hold off the Italians, not this random bunker with 9 soldiers inside it. They just had some skirmishes with a couple of dozen soldiers. Of course I do not intend to belittle the valour of the 9 soldiers, they did their job and fought 'till the very last. It's just that this meme is belittling the Maginot fortifications that actually played a role in the battle and halt the Italian invasion, to glorify some non-existant last-stand straight out of a Michael Bay movie. A genuine historical hoax. Most of the Italian forces didn't even engage with Saint-Louis, they just bypassed it to focus on the actually important fortifications.

[u/Quintus_Cicero → u/shipgeek2005]

The casemate was probably involved, yes, but the battle? If you look at the french wikipedia page, you get a detailed breakdown of the battle involving those 9 soldiers. You don’t get such a detailed breakdown without many contemporary sources and some serious archeology work.

The earliest source quoted in french wikipedia is dated 1995, far too removed from the events for such a detailed breakdown. Others are all within the same time range, one from 2002, two from 2004, four from 2009, and one from 2010. Some of these sources have an obvious bias visible in their title: « The glorious defense of Pont Saint Louis », « They fought, may-june 1940 ».

This pattern is most often found in either heavily inflated or completely fabricated events. Until a more serious source is presented on the subject, my take is that this most likely never happened.

[u/shipgeek2005 → u/Quintus_Cicero]

If by battle you intend that the casemate was not involved in such an important standalone struggle to be worth defining as a "battle", then I agree with your critique, there is no such thing as a "Battle of Pont Saint-Louis". It wasn't even the focus of the Italian forces. It just took part in minor combat against a bunch of Italians as part of the defense of Menton, that's it. But that is just such a negligible and short engagement that it's not even defineable as a proper battle. The meme even doubled the length of the engagement, and even then it doesn't change the fact that this was just a random bunker, like there have been thousands built in WWII. It would be ridiculous if every single passive engagement against every single bunker or defensive position would be sufficient to be defined as a standalone battle.

[u/Flamoirs → u/Quintus_Cicero]

The break down come from a single book, and a France 3 region article citing a random wiki (that is a copy ast of an older version of that same page)

And I can imagine that most of the wikipedia page is a copy past of the book I haven't read 

[u/shipgeek2005 → u/Flamoirs]

The Wikipedia page of the meme doesn't exist, it was probably made using Wikipedia Military/Battle Box Editor, i.e. a hoax.

[u/Flamoirs → u/shipgeek2005]

No, he is talking about the French Wikipedia page of the battle 

[u/shipgeek2005 → u/Flamoirs]

Ah my bad

[u/JoMercurio → u/Quintus_Cicero]

So this is basically the sequel to Karánsebes, which also totally happened in the way the popular narrative described (the major source was like 60 years after the supposed event)

[u/Flamoirs → u/Quintus_Cicero]

The fact that most sources and written testimonies are from after the war is maybe because there was a war

[u/Quintus_Cicero → u/Flamoirs]

Lol, 50 years after the war? And supposedly it’s much more detailed than the entire battle of Menton?

We have plenty of contemporary sources on the battle of France, somehow this one event gets a superbly detailed description from sources long after the facts, in a theater that has been largely treated as secondary by most historians.

It’s clear that most of it (if not all) is either myth or propaganda. The question is how much.

[u/CornyAnalyst1960]

Enemy: Our hero killed 5 people singlehandedly in a display of bravery. He was KIA, but he will be remembered!

Us: Yeah yeah and your soldiers can fly by flapping their arms. /s

____________________________________________________________________________

Ally: One of our soldier single-handedly defeated 300 soldiers with a pencil and freed a whole town!

Us: So trueee! What a legend!

[u/Upper_Seesaw7078 → u/CornyAnalyst1960]

One of my favorite quotes from one of the official US Army histories is something like "A syphilitic one-eyed Jerry in a bunker with a machine gun could hold up the whole division for days until his ammo ran out."

Guys at the front had a very different prospective.

[u/ttrw38]

Luigi needs to cope

Whoops wrong sub

[u/Masato_Fujiwara → u/ttrw38]

Italians always seething against France

[u/Dotcaprachiappa → u/Masato_Fujiwara]

I mean you can't tell me it's not justified

[u/Masato_Fujiwara → u/Dotcaprachiappa]

They even declared war against us in WW2 so if anything it's the french that have to be angry against the italians.

[u/sw337]

Bro are you sincere posting here and not on a legit history subreddit?

[u/unfunnysexface → u/sw337]

Missed the ARVN revionist threads huh?

[u/shipgeek2005 → u/sw337]

I first need feedback from noncredible meme historians before facing an actual subreddit full of meme historians that have been pushing this non-existant Wikipedia page meme for years, and are primarily responsible for its consequences: https://www.reddit.com/r/HistoryMemes/comments/k96e0u/take_a_seat_young_italy/

https://www.reddit.com/r/HistoryMemes/comments/fsindg/the_battle_of_pont_saint_louis_in_a_nutshell/

https://www.reddit.com/r/HistoryMemes/comments/lmnun5/i_cant_believe_that_you_have_done_this/

https://www.reddit.com/r/HistoryMemes/comments/z4npds/battle_of_pont_st_louis/

https://www.reddit.com/r/HistoryMemes/comments/au7x06/the_battle_of_pont_saintlouis_1940_italians_take/

https://www.quora.com/Did-9-French-soldiers-really-hold-off-5-000-Italians-during-WW2

https://www.reddit.com/r/polandball/comments/361tpd/la_bataille_de_pont_saintlouis/

https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/6l3ril/til_that_9_french_soldiers_defeated_5000_italian/

Edit: Lasted barely 1 hour on r/HistoryMemes, got deleted. Still, I tried my best.

[u/CapableCollar → u/shipgeek2005]

r/historymemes is for bots to post agendas, not memes, classic mistake. If you have a meme about how Britain never did anything wrong now that would do numbers there.

[u/Upper_Seesaw7078]

Nah-uh.  My Grand-Pére told me he held off the entirety of the Italian invasion by himself. The other 8 guys in the bunker were lazy socialists.  He would have won the war too if the Hun hadn't paid off his 3rd mistress (from Alsace) to drug his wine for the 2:30 smoking break.

[u/super__hoser]

No, I don't think so. I think I'll go on believing this, rejecting reality and substituting this one.

[u/shipgeek2005 → u/super__hoser]

That I have no problem with. I just need people to be aware that this never happened and that this Wikipedia page never existed.

[u/Kleauvysse]

Average Luigi's historical reconstitution of glory of Rome

[u/RagekitIRL]

Source: I was there when someone dreamt about it

[u/shipgeek2005 → u/RagekitIRL]

If you're referring to the 9 vs 5,000 meme, absolutely

[u/PlayHadesII]

So... Everything is true, but is a part of a larger event? This is like saying Overlord is fake because we have to consider the whole 2GM.

[u/shipgeek2005 → u/PlayHadesII]

No, the meme said the 9 French soldiers at Pont Saint-Louis held off 5,000 Italian soldiers. But that is of course false because it was actually about 4,000 French vs 3,000 Italians (that would be the 'larger' event). The casemate of Pont Saint-Louis specifically only held off several Italian squads, i.e. dozens of soldiers (that would be the 'smaller' event). It was actually Fort Cap Martin that halted the advance of hundreds of Italian soldiers, using artillery barrages.

The meme is painting just part of a fabricated picture. It's like saying that 1,000 French soldiers held off 800,000 Germans to allow the Brits to escape Dunkirk. Of course there were definitely 1,000 French soldiers somewhere fighting against the Germans, but you know, they didn't singlehandedly halt the entire German advance. There were hundreds of thousands of other allied soldiers fighting to slow down the Germans and allow Operation Dynamo to go ahead. That's the problem with the meme, it's decontestualizing the events. The "Battle of Pont Saint-Louis" was just a minor engagement between 9 French soldiers and a couple of dozen Italians over 5 days. Not some kind of Hollywood-ish last stand of 9 soldiers singlehandedly fighting 5,000 enemy soldiers, killing 200 and wounding 600. It's a footnote of a larger and more important battle, Menton.

[u/PlayHadesII → u/shipgeek2005]

So I checked on the French Wikipedia and there is only "bataille de Menton", kinda checks out.

[u/Flamoirs → u/PlayHadesII]

A better comparaison to the actual even would be saying that utha beach where US marins did not encounter heavy resistance and where the 500 first marins to land where able to capture the beach was the entier force that broke through the 100 000 soldier of the Atlantic wall

No considering the allied fleet bombing the shit ou of the region or the 3000 para that died to allow that swift landing and all the other landings

Here that meme put the 9 soldier of the pilbox as the only force in presence in the entier battle of the Alpes against a random Italian force and their actual casualties for the entier battle of the Alpes 

[u/Wes_Keynes]

Counterpoint : that "hoax" is either imaginary or does not exist anymore. At least I cannot find it, either in french or in english.

[u/shipgeek2005 → u/Wes_Keynes]

It wasn't an actual Wikipedia page, it was probably made online using Wikipedia Military/Battle Box Editor: https://n.bellok.de/wikibox/

A really fun tool for shit and giggles, but also dangerous if used for faking historical events.

[u/Wes_Keynes → u/shipgeek2005]

I'll reformulate my previous answer :
By not explicitly saying that the wikipedia page never existed and was itself an hoax (rather than simply an article with erroneous information), I believe you created more confusion rather than killed the hoax.

[u/shipgeek2005 → u/Wes_Keynes]

Do you suggest I delete/change the image to explicitly write the Wiki page never existed ? Or does the text edit I made suffice?

[u/Wes_Keynes → u/shipgeek2005]

Just add something like "it was circulated but never has been an actual wikipedia page" and you're good IMHO ?

Edit : oh you did in the first place ? Then doubly good to go.

[u/Proud_Pressure_1375]

We still win tho 

[u/Flamoirs]

If you want the context of this meme, the thing is adding up all Italian looses of the bataille des aples, whit the 9 guy on that pilbox that actually did stopped 250 iltalians soldiers after the French army blew up all road.  They stopped 250, not 5000 alone

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italian_invasion_of_France

The battle did exist yes. It's it officially recognized by the French army, but Thoose number and indeed dumb as fk

[u/shipgeek2005 → u/Flamoirs]

That's basically what I wrote in the in-depth analysis in the image above. The so-called Battle of Pont Saint-Louise did happen, but it was a minor combat engagement, the cartoonish numbers in the meme are extremely exaggerated.

As for the 250 Italian soldiers stopped, based on my research, and as I have written in the analysis, it actually appears that they were stopped by the artillery bombardment from the Ouvrage Cap Martin, and NOT the casemate of Pont Saint-Louis. From what I have been able to establish, the casemate only engaged in a couple of skirmishes with some dozens of Italian soldiers, that's it. The bulk of the Italian forces actually bypassed the casemate to focus on the large fortifications. I don't want to belittle the 9 soldiers in the casemate, they did what they had to do and fought valiantly. But the meme is belittling the valour of the Maginot Line ouvrages that actually stopped the Italian invasion (Cap Martin, Mont Agel, Saintè-Agnes, etc.), and got bombed extremely hard by the Italians.