I did so to suggest that you were ascribing a great deal of importance to numbers without any knowledge of the facts on the ground.
Actually, the colonies that De Gualle controlled are a matter of historical record.
But the characterization of their support is either subjective or should be based on numbers like troop strength. What is it?
...which makes them three years late compared to the non-muslim De Gaulle colonies.
Two years and some (summer 1940-November 1942), and that was largely a choice of the fascist Christians in charge of the colonies.
Except that you've provided no evidence of that ever occuring.
Again, it's not a claim I'm making. I'm simply pointing out your willingness to play with numbers. You claim that even if the French concentrated their recruitment efforts among Muslims in colonies where Muslims were a distinct minority, "those colonies would still produce a small minority of the troops raised there." (#350) Of course, that makes no sense, because if the majority of French recruits were Muslims, the majority of the troops would be Muslims, regardless of the makeup of the overall population.
Given the sparsity of numbers until now and the evasiveness of your tongue, that is far from clear.Early on you were suggesting that muslims and the FFL were virtually synonymous.
I suggested no such thing.
It is also a dubious assertion at best, considering that the mahometan colonies were all latecomers to De Gaulle's forces. Of course you could easily put the matter to rest by being forthright on your statistics. Put another way: (Muslim FFL/Total FFL)*100=% Muslim
De Gaulle had approx. 100,000 troops in the Italian campaign and his policy of "whitening" the army replaced 20,000 West African soldiers with European French troops. So, given the 66.4% Muslim participation in the West African forces, we can reasonably expect 12,000-13,000 Muslims in the force of 100,000, or 12% of the invasion force.
In war control of a region is determined by allegiance and lines of battle. The named colonies either gave their allegiance to De Gaulle, or were taken by him early on as he shifted the line of battle. Nothing subjective about that
I'm simply pointing out your willingness to play with numbers.
...says the guy who resisted giving specific muslim troop strength numbers for two weeks and hundreds of posts.
You claim that even if the French concentrated their recruitment efforts among Muslims in colonies where Muslims were a distinct minority, "those colonies would still produce a small minority of the troops raised there." (#350) Of course, that makes no sense, because if the majority of French recruits were Muslims, the majority of the troops would be Muslims, regardless of the makeup of the overall population.
Your limited grasp of statistics is showing. Suppose I'm a French colonel recruiting in Gabon, which is 1% muslim. Also suppose I have 100 recruiters, and they are all equally productive. Each recruiter I send out brings back 2 soldiers in a week.
If I simply spread them out equally and said "recruit" I would get a recruitment sample that's pretty close to the population of Gabon. About 1% of my recruits from Gabon would be muslim and 99% would be something else. TOTAL: 2 muslims, 198 non-muslims.
Now suppose I got a crazy hunch and decided I was going to concentrate my recruitment efforts on muslims. So instead of having everyone recruit at random from the population at large, I take 10 of my men and assign them to only recruit at mosques. That would make for a very concentrated effort BTW - the equivalent of spending 5% of my budget on only 1% of the population, or five times what I would get if I recruited at random. The other 90 are still told to recruit anywhere. So another week passes by and 200 more recruits show up. The 10 guys sent to mosques bring back 20 muslims. The 90 guys sent everywhere else bring back 180 troops, 1% of them (or 1.8, rounded up to 2 soldiers) muslim. TOTALS: 22 muslims, 178 non-muslims.
Conclusion: Even by wratcheting up my muslim recruitment concentration to 5 times its portion of the population's religious distribution, I still end up with an army that's only 11% muslim.
For some reason I suspect that De Gaulle was willing to take anybody he could get circa 1940, and thus did not waste his time concentrating on muslim recruits - particularly since only one of his colonies even had a sizable muslim population in the first place.
So you're entering in a number of 12-13,000 Muslims then?
Do you intend to add any others to this total to represent all muslims on the allied side? If so, now's the time to put it out on the table.