From the outset of the battle, a combination of French caution and disorganization and German fighters and anti-aircraft guns weakened the air effort. At 11:00 A.M. on May 10 General Joseph Vuillemin, head of the French air force, agreed to strike at enemy columns but not “agglomerations,” which were not to be bombed “at any price.”24 Attacks on the advancing German forces soon crumbled. On May 14 the French air force lost over 40 planes in an attempt to destroy a bridge over the Meuse River, twenty-eight of them falling to Panzer antiaircraft fire. The British did little better. On May 11 eight Fairey Battle airplanes sortied against the Ardennes and only one returned. After a week, the French had only 149 fighters available in the entire northern zone of operations, and the RAF had lost 248 aircraft. French losses between May 10 and 30 totaled 660 planes.25
France’s material deficiencies were magnified by a clumsy command structure that soon ceased to correspond to the realities of the front line, and by the absence of any practiced methods of dealing with fast-moving armored columns. Much of the French air force was parceled out to act in cooperation with the army—which was interpreted chiefly as spotting for artillery. The air commander in each aerial operations zone received his orders from his respective army group commander and from the overall commander of aerial cooperation forces, General Marcel Têtu. Soon after the battle began, zone commanders began to find themselves on the receiving end of unreconcilable orders from both these sources, while Vuillemin conducted his own air war with the general reserves under his personal control. To make matters worse, the air zones quickly ceased to correspond to army command areas as the Allied front buckled before the German attack.26
In tackling the Germans, the French air force lacked not only coordination but also guidance in combat techniques. By 1939—as a result of failings in the interwar years—air doctrine had got as far as defining “assault bombing” and “dive-bombing” missions, but there were no aircraft capable of carrying them out. In a desperate attempt to fill the doctrinal gap, the commander of aerial forces in the northeastern zone rushed out “provisional instructions for rapid air support of ground operations” on May 30, 1940. But by then it was too late to remedy the failures of the prewar airmen.
To compensate for their inferiority in the air, the French tried to draw on the reservoir of RAF Home Defence Squadrons stationed in England. On May 16, Churchill provided ten extra fighter squadrons—but kept six of them operating from airfields in Kent. As British losses mounted—-106 Hurricanes and Spitfires fell during the week-long evacuation of Dunkirk—the British high command became increasingly determined not to squander in France fighters that would be needed for the forthcoming battle for Britain. Desperate for British fighters to shore up their vanishing air defenses, the French suggested on June 5 that the air strength of both countries be placed under a single command. The request was rejected. At the end of the first week in June, nine British fighter squadrons were still operating in France; but after June 15, when the bombers of the Advanced Air Striking Force left the continent, only five remained behind to cover the final withdrawal of British and Allied forces from Europe. By this time, the French air force had been shattered.27
THE MATRIX
In the case of the fall of France, our failure matrix (Fig. 8–1) has been constructed so that each of the three functions of command we identify as of major importance correlates with one of the three types of failure with which we are now familiar. The four levels of command along the vertical axis are occupied by the high command, theater command, operational commands, and tactical commands.
In order to avoid overpopulating many of the boxes it is necessary to include in each one only the most fundamental and important actions of command. Also, to avoid a plethora of secondary pathways—since almost every box in this matrix could be connected to one or more others by such pathways—it has been necessary to indicate only the most obvious connecting links.
Once again we can see how pathways of misfortune cross boundaries to affect separate command functions. Given the disastrous performance of the armies in the field, it is hardly surprising that “all roads lead to Rome” by drawing us down to the critical failure in box 4.3—the inability of tactical commanders to react quickly and effectively to the German attacks. We shall examine each of the three types of individual failure shortly; however, our matrix does suggest several general conclusions. First, more critical failures appear under the heading “Ability to React” than in either of the other two columns, suggesting that the fall of France was predominantly the result of adaptive failure. Second, more critical mistakes were made by the high command than at any other command level. Here failure is spread equally across all three categories, providing clear evidence of the multiple shortcomings of the French high command both before and during the campaign.
Arrows indicate causal links. Solid lines indicate primary pathways; dashed lines, secondary pathways.
FIGURE 8-1. Matrix Of Failure
Failure to Learn
When German forces attacked Poland on September 1, 1939, Blitzkrieg was an unknown quantity for all practical purposes. Although French military intelligence had paid some attention to the ideas being developed across the Rhine and had observed German maneuvers closely, neither France nor any other country appreciated the consequences of combining the power of the tank and the dive-bomber with a skillful and audacious concept of maneuver warfare. Within three short weeks the Allies were presented with apparently incontrovertible evidence of what the German war machine could do. Over the next seven months the French army had the opportunity to profit from their vicarious experience of the Wehrmacht in action in order to ready themselves to meet the challenge of the new-style war, but that opportunity was apparently squandered. “Of all the attitudes struck by the French High Command during the Phoney War,” writes Alistair Home, “none today seems more incomprehensible that its apparent refusal to take cognizance of the lessons of the Polish campaign.”28
Strategically, the campaign in Poland differed considerably from the assault on western Europe which followed it eight months later. The Germans’ aim was to encircle the Polish armies west of the Vistula and then annihilate them; and in order to achieve this, the armored and mechanized German units were held in check to keep them in touch with the advancing infantry rather than give them their head—as would happen after Guderian crossed the Meuse on May 13, 1940. But operationally the effects of German military powers were fully visible. “On the ground for the first time in modern war, the combination of armored mobile formations supported by aircraft proved devastatingly effective.”29 While the Panzers tore gaping holes in the Polish front, the Luftwaffe first paralyzed the Polish air force and then broke up Polish army columns and gave the German ground forces close air support. Within a little more than a fortnight, the war was over.
If the French failed to learn the lessons of the Polish campaign, it was not through ignorance of what those lessons were. A month after the campaign had begun the French high command circulated a detailed report by the head of the French military mission in Poland, General Paul Armengaud, which analyzed in considerable detail the new German methods. Armengaud described the German system of combining dive-bombers and tanks to break open the enemy line and penetrate deeply into the rear areas, opening the path for the infantry whose task was to clean up local pockets of resistance and occupy captured territory. He drew particular attention to the way in which the German dive-bombers had pinned the Poles to the ground, making it impossible either to get reinforcements forward or to launch counterattacks.30 Armengaud’s report was supplemented by an analysis by Colonel Maurice Gauché, head of French military intelligence, which pointed out that the Germans had aimed at destroying the Polish field army and not at capturing Warsaw.
As these reports, which were used as a basis on which to reconsider French doctrine and methods, were filtered down the chain of command, their impact was watered down. The reports that reached the lower echelons struc
k a more ambivalent note than Armengaud’s original had done, suggesting that although the Germans would try the same methods against France, the operations would have a different appearance. War games were designed and conducted to show the superiority of the French army over the Wehrmacht and the likelihood that the French would suffer anything resembling the Polish defeat was explained away on the grounds that the defeated always exaggerated anyway, that the Poles were brave but badly led, and that they had the misfortune to live in a country that lacked natural frontiers.31 Such actions, which may have seemed necessary in order to reinforce the morale of the mass of the French army, probably contributed to the paralysis which quickly set in after May 10 as the war took on unexpected dimensions.
At the summit of the French army, Gamelin was by no means ignorant of the true significance of the Polish campaign. At an allied conference at Vincennes on October 6, 1939, he remarked that “the chief lesson to be learned from the Polish campaign was the penetrative power of the speedy and hard-hitting German armored formations and the close cooperation of their Air Force.”32 However, he proposed to meet the new threat not by accepting the challenge of encounter battles, which would involve a major rethinking of accepted doctrine and extensive retraining, but by fighting the Germans only in previously prepared positions. Gamelin’s formula for fending off a Blitzkrieg attack, which he defined on September 21 and reiterated on several occasions during October, involved thinning the French front to a strength able to halt a surprise attack and massing his reserves for a counterattack.33 Unfortunately, his choice of the Breda variant would deprive him of exactly those reserves he most needed when the battle began.
The way Gamelin absorbed the lessons of the Polish campaign and incorporated them into his operational concept reflected an understandable—if unwise—reluctance to depart from the established methods of war developed by the French high command over the previous two decades. In this way predictive failure-which we shall examine shortly-helped to contribute to learning failure. However, the ink was scarcely dry on Gamelin’s directives when major changes in Allied strategy forced him to reconsider both operational methods and the means to carry them out. The advance to the Scheldt and then to the Dyle, and the dash to Breda, changed the circumstances in which the French army would go into action in several important respects. While Gamelin hoped to find lines prepared by the Belgians into which his forces could settle, he had little idea of how strong and solid they would be. The one certain fact was that they would not be defensive positions carefully prepared by the French themselves long in advance, as was the case along part of the French frontier. The need for speed to get to the Dutch frontier before the enemy, and the prospect of something more like encounter battles than the French had hitherto been accustomed to, may have contributed to a change of heart by Gamelin that resulted in a partial incorporation of the major lesson of the Polish campaign into French thought and practice.
On November 11 Colonel Charles de Gaulle sent a memorandum to general headquarters urging that French tanks be gathered together in armored divisions instead of being widely dispersed as supports to the infantry. “The petrol engine knocks out our military doctrines just as it will knock out our fortifications,” he wrote. “We have excellent material. We must learn how to use it as the Germans have.”34 His ideas were indignantly rejected by senior French tank specialists on the grounds that the Germans would find French lines much stronger than those in Poland, and that the traditional French doctrine of using tanks to support infantry was correct. But the notion that France must reorganize her armor on the basis of the Polish experience was taking root at a more senior level. In November Gamelin agreed to the formation of a light mechanized division and an armored division. In early December General Billotte wrote to Georges, commander in chief of land forces, pointing out that the Polish campaign had demonstrated the effects of the daring use of Panzer divisions and arguing that since the Germans might try the same thing in the West, the French must have the means to parry them. As a result of this initiative two armored divisions were created in January 1940, a third in March, and a fourth on May 15.35 Unfortunately, these new formations had to go into action before they were either fully-equipped or completely trained.
Lessons observed at second-hand are unlikely to have quite the same impact as those experienced at firsthand: Ethnocentric ideas can lead, as we have seen, to a disparaging of the defeated party and the barrier to change which is presented by received ideas and established practice can be well-nigh impermeable. Only in the weeks before May 10, 1940, when French forces were briefly involved in the campaign in Norway, did they have any direct experience of fighting Germans. The defects revealed were immense: “no modern equipment, no ack-ack, no decisive bombing policy, no drive in the troops—except the very best—and no incisive command.”36 By then it was too late to do very much about them.
Although the French air force had no more direct experience of the Germans in April 1940 than the French army, the Spanish Civil War had provided it with an ideal opportunity to learn about modern air war in general and about the performance of German aircraft in particular. The success of Russian fighters and bombers in halting an offensive by two Italian light divisions in its tracks at the Battle of Guadalajara in March 1937, and the breakthrough at Brunete four months later by a combined Republican force of tanks and planes provided much food for thought. The French military attaché provided full reports on the demoralizing effects of dive-bombing on troops; and in February 1938 a French air mission was able to examine the main German fighter (Messerschmidt ME-109) and bomber (Heinkel HE-111) at close quarters. All this information struck a bottleneck in the Intelligence Division at Vincennes, where a lone officer had part-time responsibility for studying the war.37 Perhaps more important—and like the army—the French air force set little store by the experience of others, preoccupied as it was in the struggle with the army over its main role in a future war.
When the Germans struck on May 10, the French armed forces were aware of some of the problems they were about to face—such as that French bombers attacking enemy ground formations would need fighter escorts, something prewar doctrine had not envisaged—but had devised no solutions to them. Learning failure was a major reason why the French found themselves forced to extemporize when battle began, and why a military organization accustomed to operate a rigid system then fell rapidly to pieces. However, the difficult task of recognizing and incorporating the lessons of Spanish and Polish experience into French military practice was itself greatly exacerbated by the long-established conviction that the next war would be similar in certain vital respects to the last.38 Only at the eleventh hour would the French begin to modify both their ideas and their doctrine, thereby moving against the tide of interwar prediction.
Failure to Anticipate
In order to prepare themselves as effectively as possible for a German onslaught, the French had to make two sets of predictions and get them both right. Over the longer term the high command had to predict what the general nature of a future war would be and prepare the French army to fight by devising and elaborating doctrines to guide peacetime training and preparation as well as determine what types of weapons were procured. In the short term the intelligence services had to anticipate both the location and the timing of the German attack. In other words, the French had some time in which to think about how to fight, but very much less time to think about where and when they would be called on to do so. It was not sufficient, however, simply to carry out these two tasks efficiently and effectively—although in practice this was difficult enough. The two types of prediction had to marry with one another. If they did not, the French armed forces might be called on in the heat of the moment to carry out maneuvers and undertake actions in response to enemy initiatives which had not been foreseen in their peacetime preparations. This was partly what went wrong in 1940.
French experiences in the First World War had burned deep into the national psyche. B
y 1917 the prewar French belief in the power of the offensive had been exposed as a horrible delusion as a generation of Frenchmen were sacrificed to German machine guns. In its place Pétain, the hero of Verdun, sanctified the primacy of the defensive followed by the counterattack. At war’s end he came to symbolize the new military spirit of the republic, no longer relying on republican ardor and national élan but putting its faith in barbed wire, artillery, and concrete fortifications.39 The politicians of the interwar years would have found it hard to overthrow this conception of national strategy even if they had wanted to, but most of them did not.
World War I was the formative experience for the French generals who rose through the army in peacetime and reached its summit in 1940, and they based all their predictions of future land warfare on it. It was widely believed that a new era had opened in 1914 and that by dint of historical analysis all useful lessons for the future could be extracted from it. Thus, introducing a report on the army’s proposals for peacetime preparation to the French chamber of deputies in 1921, Colonel Jean Fabry pointed out that what was necessary was “less a matter of innovating than of perfecting” existing practices.40 Eighteen years later, in 1939, the French infantry journal prided itself on the fact that French tank doctrine had stayed true to the lessons of 1914–18, unlike almost all other armies. Accordingly, influenced by their experiences in 1917 and 1918 and entirely disregarding the successful German tactics that broke the Allied lines in March 1918, the French built up a picture of future warfare based on three fundamental assumptions: the destructiveness of firepower, the strength of the defense, and the superiority of the methodically conducted battle.
Military Misfortunes Page 27