Military Misfortunes

by Eliot A Cohen

  For all its protestations of innocence, the French high command could not easily wriggle out of the accusation of military incompetence. The charge laid against it by Marc Bloch was fundamentally simple and utterly damning: that the German triumph was essentially an intellectual rather than a physical victory.9 The Wehrmacht’s leaders—youthful, energetic, and dedicated professionals—had studied modern war more closely and had found out how to use tanks and airplanes to transform combat from a slogging match anchored in trenches and fortifications into a fast-moving contest whose outcome was determined by agility and daring. Meanwhile the French high command had aged gracefully, drawing comfort and security from its successes in 1918. Its bitterest critic, Charles de Gaulle, lamented that the French army

  Lineup of the Allied and German Armies on the Eve of the German Invasion, May 10, 1940

  SOURCE: Extract taken from The End of the Affair: The Collapse of the Anglo-French Alliance by Eleanor M. Gates reproduced by kind permission of Unwin Hyman Ltd. Copyright © 1982 by Unwin Hyman Ltd.

  became stuck in a set of ideas which had had their heyday before the end of the previous war. It was all the more inclined that way because its leaders were growing old at their posts, wedded to errors that had once constituted their glory.10

  The collapse of France in 1940 has been explained as being chiefly the result of faulty decisions made long before the Germans began their war—which largely exonerates the French army and air force from the charge of not having fought very well once the battle started. These decisions were themselves based on misapprehensions about the First World War. As one American scholar has concluded, “more than being a victim of German military excellence, France was a victim of her own historical experience, geography and political and military institutions.”11 It is certainly true that the French high command had built up a picture of what a future war would and should be like as a result of a selective view of the past, and that this did restrict their capacity to understand and react to German moves right from the start. We shall explore the nature of these assumptions shortly. But the French were by no means condemned to defeat solely by virtue of being shackled to the past. They also failed to anticipate the future on the basis of available evidence that pointed with considerable accuracy to the likely nature of a German assault. And, along with both these handicaps, there were also moments during the battle of France when commanders and troops failed the test of battle. Each of the individual categories of misfortune was present; none was solely responsible for defeat. When the same author can claim that the French were blind to the past and to the future, complex forces were clearly at work.12

  The assumption that on May 10, 1940, the die was already cast—that, as de Gaulle later put it, France was “spinning at giddy speed” down “the fatal slope to which a fatal error had long committed us”—gives those short summer weeks an aura of tragic grandeur.13 Men seem to be little more than pawns in the hands of fate, able perhaps through great exertions to lessen the scope of misfortune but powerless to avert it entirely. But if we accept this seductive imagery in its entirety, we are in danger of losing sight of an important dimension in France’s military misfortune. Once the guns began to fire, mistakes were made that meant new burdens for the troubled French army, and failures in the field and at headquarters loaded the dice yet further in the German’s favor.

  Part of the explanation for France’s sudden collapse is to be found on the field of battle itself, where “a disastrous misjudgment in the dispositions of Allied forces combined with a small but fatal error in gauging the speed of the enemy advance gave Hitler’s Wehrmacht a golden opportunity”.14 Nor was it the case that the whole French army fought poorly, when it fought at all; there is plenty of evidence that some units put up a stubborn and determined resistance even when the odds were hopelessly against them. For example, it was the heroic stand by the French First Army around Lille that made possible the British escape from Dunkirk. In explaining why France collapsed in 1940 we have to look as closely at the events of May 10 through June 22 as at the twenty years that preceded them. Otherwise we shall distort our understanding of the true explanation of France’s defeat.

  The Six Weeks War

  At 4:30 A.M. on May 10, 1940, German parachute and airborne forces dropped from the skies to seize key bridges at Rotterdam, Dordrecht, and Moerdijk in Holland and Maastricht in Belgium, while a handful of glider-borne troops seized the Belgian fortress of Eben Emael, which guarded the Meuse just north of Liège. An hour later a general assault by 135 Wehrmacht divisions began.

  The overall balance of forces by no means favored the Germans. A total of some 3,740,000 Allied soldiers (including 2,240,000 French troops) in 130 divisions faced 2,760,000 Germans. As well as a manpower advantage, the Allies enjoyed a three-to-two superiority in artillery pieces and a no-less-striking preponderance in tanks. Although the French had only three armored divisions to throw into the scales against ten Panzer divisions (plus a fourth, created during the battle), they committed 3,254 tanks to the fighting compared to the Germans’ 2,574. Only in respect to aircraft and antiaircraft defenses did the Germans enjoy a marked superiority.15 However, the overall picture of the theater balance of forces concealed a crucial local advantage in the central section of the Allied line opposite the Ardennes, where the Germans massed forty-five divisions to launch their main thrust against only nine French divisions.

  The initial German army plans had envisaged a pincer attack to encircle the Allied forces in the middle of Belgium between Brussels and Liége, but during the winter of 1939–40 these plans had undergone major changes. First, on October 28, Hitler had intervened to change a limited operation into a drive across central and northern Belgium to cut the country in half. Then, that winter, a series of war games played by General von Manstein showed that great opportunities for decisive action could be created if the weight of the German attack was directed not into central Belgium but into northern France via the Ardennes. On February 18, 1940, the plans were radically revised to shift the weight of the German attack south. The campaign’s opening thrusts into Holland and northern Belgium became feints designed to draw Allied forces north while the main German attack drove through southern Belgium and Luxembourg and into northern France behind the British, French, and Belgian armies.

  The French army’s plans had also changed during the nine months between the outbreak of war and the German attack, but unhappily the outcome was to make the Allied armies ever more vulnerable to the blow launched against them. On October 24, 1939, the Allies agreed to advance a short distance into Belgium in the event of a German attack to occupy the line of the Scheldt River. On November 15, Gamelin suggested extending the advance to the Dyle River. The advantages of such a move were that the three Allies would then be able to cooperate more closely and would have to hold a shorter defensive line than they would otherwise have to defend; the disadvantages were that executing the plan entailed an advance of some sixty miles into Belgium to occupy unreconnoitered defensive positions which the Belgians would not allow the allies to prepare. Shortly afterward Gamelin proposed that when the fighting began, the left wing of the allied advance should travel the length of Belgium to Breda in southern Holland to link up with the Dutch army. General Alphonse Georges, commander in chief of land forces and commander of the northeastern theater, protested vigorously against committing “the major part of our reserves in this part of the theatre, in face of a German action which could be nothing more than a diversion.”16 Despite his objections, Gamelin ordered the adoption of the so-called Breda variant on March 20, 1940, and seven of Georges’ best divisions, including a mechanized division he had been holding back as part of his mobile reserve, were allocated to the Seventh Army, which would make the dash through Belgium to the Dutch border.

  When the Germans launched their attack on May 10 the Allied line was strong on its left and right but weak in the center, opposite the Ardennes. The leaders of the French army had repeatedly reassur
ed parliament during the preceding decade that this region was impenetrable and that felling trees and blowing craters in roads would be enough to secure it against any serious attack. Unfortunately the Belgian Chasseurs Ardennais either failed to carry out enough of these or neglected to stay behind and defend the area. While the Seventh Army moved to Breda, taking two days to get there and suffering heavily as a result of German air superiority, and while the French high command was preoccupied with the German thrust through central Belgium from Maastricht, German Panzers carved their way through the “impenetrable” Ardennes. Then, on May 13, while General Erwin Rommel’s Seventh Panzer Division crossed the Meuse at Dinant—taking quick advantage of an unguarded weir—General Heinz Guderian’s XIX Armored Corps crossed the same river farther south at Sedan.

  The units facing Guderian at Sedan were second-line infantry divisions composed of elderly reservists who lacked modern training and equipment. The Fifty-fifth Division, which took the brunt of the attack, had been stiffened with extra artillery to compensate for its weakness, but it was paralyzed by the unrelenting fierceness of the attacks by Stuka dive-bombers on May 13.

  The gunners stopped firing and took cover. The infantry, cowering and immobile in their trenches, dazed by the crash of bombs and the shriek of the dive-bombers, were too stunned to use their anti-aircraft guns and fire. Their only concern was to keep their heads down and not move. Five hours of this punishment shattered their nerves. They became incapable of reacting to the approaching enemy infantry.17

  This scene was to be repeated many times during the coming weeks, as French troops faced an onslaught for which they were unprepared and that their own air force was unable to counter.

  The troops facing Guderian at Sedan retreated as soon as they could, with the heavy artillery in the lead. Their action was copied at higher levels over the next three days as divisional, corps, and army commanders pulled back their headquarters and dispersed valuable armor in fruitless attempts at forming defensive positions to stem the advancing German tide. These moves totally lacked overall coordination as Gamelin left his commanders to their own devices, despite reservations about the way General Georges was conducting the battle, until it was too late. His only significant action at this time was to order a retreat from Belgium during the night of May 15/16. At last, on May 19, while panic was setting in in Paris and after Guderian’s drive west across France had brought him within one day’s march of Abbeville and the Channel, Gamelin bestirred himself sufficiently to issue a “secret and personal instruction” to launch an attack into the southern flank of Guderian’s Panzer corps. The order was so vague that Georges, who was supposed to carry it out, said that it was not an order at all but “an umbrella.”18 The next day Gamelin was fired, to be replaced by his seventy-three year-old predecessor, General Maxime Weygand.

  Weygand took over in less-than-propitious circumstances. Recalled from Syria on May 17, he arrived in France two days later, after a grueling journey and was at once catapulted into command. It therefore took him some time to get a grip on the battle. If he was to turn a tide of events that was running strongly against him, he had to coordinate a British attack from the north and a French attack from the south in the hope of “pinching off” the German corridor that now extended to the Channel but was not yet solid enough to be entirely secure. Uncoordinated attacks south of Arras by the British on May 21 and the French on May 22 were too weak to make any impression on the Germans. Meanwhile, Weygand’s efforts to launch a major attack on the Germans in the Amiens-Arras-Abbeville area foundered when General Gaston-Henri-Gustave Billotte, selected to command the action (and the only man who really understood the commander in chief’s intentions), was fatally injured in a car crash on May 21. His replacement was not appointed for two days, during which the opportunity to cause the German’s serious difficulties disappeared.

  The end was now near in the north. The British began to fall back towards the Channel ports, determined to rescue what they could from a hopeless situation. As they began to evacuate their troops, Weygand issued a general order to the French army to stand and fight, throwing back every enemy advance by “crushing him under artillery fire and aerial bombardment and by counterattacking.”19 This was a counsel of perfection: The troops were untrained for tactics of this sort, and in any case the Germans enjoyed complete aerial superiority everywhere except over the beaches of Dunkirk. On May 28, the Belgians surrendered. Seven days later, most of the British troops left the continent at Dunkirk.

  On June 5, the day after General Beaufrère had surrendered the remaining French troops defending Dunkirk, the Germans began the battle for France. The odds were overwhelmingly in their favor. To resist the onslaught of six Panzer divisions and approximately one hundred infantry divisions, Weygand could muster forty-nine field divisions, one motorized division, and the debris of two armored divisions. French counterattacks went in without any aerial protection, and there were no reserves with which to conduct a battle in depth. In the circumstances it is hardly surprising that a feeling of pessimism began to set in at the summit of the politicomilitary hierarchy.

  The Germans now sought to encircle Paris from the west and east, just as they had done seventy years earlier in September 1870, to trap the remaining French forces where they stood. West of Paris, General Ewald von Kleist’s army group, with Rommel in the van, drove for the lower reaches of the Seine. The French fought well, but on June 7 Rommel forced their line and advanced to within 24 miles of Rouen. The next day the city fell into German hands. Switching four Panzer divisions from west of Paris to General Gerd von Rundstedt in the east, the Germans launched the other prong of their offensive on June 9. Reims fell two days later and the Germans reached Château-Thierry on the Marne, some 30 miles east of the capital. Having ordered the army to stand and fight on the Somme, Weygand now decided not to defend Paris—largely because of his fears of German air power—but to withdraw his battered and fragmented forces to a line stretching across the center of France from Caen in Normandy via Tours and Dijon to Dole. His stated objective was to cover the heart of his country for as long as possible and to conserve the largest number of major formations.

  By now resistance was possible only in isolated pockets where some determined individual was able to rally his exhausted troops—easily bypassed by the probing fingers of German armor. Everything was being extemporized, for the pace of war no longer allowed for the preparation, writing, and transmission of orders. This disoriented French commanders (at all levels), who had expected to receive—and to offer—continual written guidance during the conduct of battle. The troops suffered the effects of repeated movements and lacked regular rations, while their leaders were unable to contact superior headquarters for orders and lacked all but the vaguest knowledge of the situation.

  Early on the morning of June 14 German troops entered Paris and marched in triumph down the Champs-Élysées. While they savored this symbolic act of victory, the war hastened to its end. A proposal to create a “Breton redoubt” and fight on there was contemptuously brushed aside by Weygand, who had a rather more realistic view of the capabilities of German air power than did some of his civilian colleagues. The high command now concentrated its energies not on the Germans but on defeating those civilian ministers, led by Premier Paul Reynaud, who wanted a cease-fire that would spare the government the odium of surrender. Pétain and Weygand were determined that the war must be ended by the politicians and insisted on an armistice as the only honorable course in the circumstances.

  In this poisonous atmosphere Pétain took over the reins of government on June 16 and completed the work the Germans had begun five weeks earlier. Broadcasting the following day, he announced to the French people: “I tell you today that we must end the fighting.”20 Taking this as a direct instruction, many of them did so; and Weygand had to issue instructions on June 18 that the troops were not to cease fighting until an armistice had been concluded. During the evening of the nineteenth, at the urgin
g of Weygand and over the protests of Georges, the government declared that all towns of 20,000 or more inhabitants were to be treated as open cities and not to be defended against the Germans. Since such towns guarded the principal river crossings, the keys of what was left of France were thus unceremoniously handed over to the enemy.

  On June 20 Pétain again went on the air to announce that the Germans had responded to the French request for an armistice. Reviewing France’s weakness in 1940 as compared with 1918, he left no doubts in the minds of his listeners as to the causes of France’s humiliation:

  Less strong than we were 22 years ago, we also had fewer friends. Too few children, too few weapons, too few allies, there are the causes of our defeat.21

  At 6:50 P.M. on June 22 General Charles Huntziger, representing the French army and thereby saving Weygand considerable embarrassment, and field marshal Keitel signed the armistice terms. Two days later a second armistice was signed with Italy, which had entered the war against France on June 10, and the war came to an ignominious end. The inquest opened almost immediately, and has continued ever since.

  Defeat in the Air

  Although the balance of land forces on May 10, 1940, favored the Allies, the balance in the air was heavily against them—both materially and morally. In material terms the French could put some 1,090 modern machines into the air (comprising 610 fighters, 130 bombers and 350 reconnaissance planes) to meet approximately 3,500 German aircraft.22 Morally, the inactivity of the “phony war” had taken its toll on the French; and shortages of uniforms and weapons, the inadequate functioning of most services, poor lodgings that were often some distance from the airfields, and physical weariness among the flight crews as a result of a shortage of personnel all combined to depress morale. However, once the battle began the French fought gallantly.23 They had alongside them two echelons of the Royal Air Force—the Advanced Air Striking Force and the Air Component of the British Expeditionary Force, which together comprised some 160 fighters and 272 bombers. During the course of the campaign the British were able to make good their fighter losses, but the French were not.