The Last Lion

by William Manchester

  Some officers, among them Colonel Charles de Gaulle, were relieved when the generals were forced to back down. France’s army had a great reputation, even in Berlin, but idle troops are worrisome. The British Expeditionary Force, or BEF, had dealt with the problem of inactivity during the winter. Although there were still fewer than four hundred thousand British soldiers on the Continent—only 18 percent of the Allied ground forces—their quality was high, in part because officers kept spirits up with programs of vigorous exercise. The French did not. As the war entered its third season, the armies of France were stagnating, even rotting.

  Every allowance must be made for the French, and the French soldier of 1940 must be regarded with great compassion. With the exception of Serbia, no nation had suffered so terribly in the Great War. Because their fathers had been bled white, the World War II generation, unlike that of 1914, simply wanted to be left alone.

  At the time, this atrophy of spirit was imperfectly understood. In 1938, Churchill had called the French army “the most perfectly trained and faithful mobile force in Europe.” In January 1940, to his dismay, he found that the French did not view the war “with uprising spirit or even with much confidence.” He blamed the long months of waiting that had followed the collapse of Poland. This hiatus, he believed, had given “time and opportunity” for the “poisons” of communism and fascism to be established. It was certain, he wrote, that the quality of the French army was being “allowed to deteriorate during the winter.”75

  The eight-month lull at the front was seen variously. Vincent Sheean wrote that there was “no possible doubt that a dawn must come, one day or the next, when the gray rivers of the German flood would begin to roll westward over Holland, Belgium and France… and yet, in the way people have, I think we only half believed the inevitable until it had taken place.”76

  Since the expected curtain-raiser would have brought vast bloodshed, others were optimistic, including some who should have known better. General André Beaufre saw it as “a giant charade acted out by mutual consent” that would lead to nothing serious “if we play our part right.” Alfred Duff Cooper, who had resigned from Chamberlain’s cabinet to protest the Munich sellout, fatuously told an American audience in Paris that the Allies had “found a new way to make war, without sacrificing human lives.”77

  Many argued that it must stop, that it couldn’t go on this way, that there was no point to it. Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain privately said he had “a hunch” that the war would be over by summer. Others felt otherwise; eminent men in Paris and London were persuaded that the war would continue as it was, with the naval blockade slowly strangling the Führer’s Reich. That would take a year or two, of course, but by then the British would have fifty divisions in the field, and doubtless the Americans would sail over with a hundred more to deliver the coup de grâce. (It was the sort of showy thing they liked to do.)

  The arguments of the distinguished scholar Alfred Sauvy to the contrary, the French masses had accepted the war, however reluctantly. They believed France would win it. They felt “sure,” William L. Shirer, the CBS radio correspondent in Berlin, observed, “that all a democracy had to do to win a war was to declare it, that if a ‘free nation’ was united in its desire to win, no ‘slave-driven force’ like Hitler’s could defeat it… they talked to you about the gigantic War Effort, and explained to you how, because this was a democracy, the War Effort was certainly greater than in Germany, because it was voluntary.” Shirer noted a growing conviction that “in this peculiar war there was no need to suffer, to deprive oneself of the good, easy life. Sacrifice was not this time needed.”

  The French government encouraged such lullabies. Its deputies had invested Premier Édouard Daladier with dictatorial powers over French industry, including the right to conscript labor, but he had not used them. Factories that could have been converted to munitions manufacture were still turning out civilian goods. The Parisian firms of Lelong, Balenciaga, and Molyneux were exporting silks that Frenchmen would next see in German parachutes. Food was unrationed; so was gasoline, despite the fact that every gallon had to be imported. A subcommittee of députés had recommended that ski slopes and the Côte d’Azur resorts be reopened.

  De Gaulle, the lonely Cassandra, wrote to Paul Reynaud, then still French Minister of Finance: “Now, as I see it, the enemy will not attack us for some time…. Then, when he thinks we are weary, confused, and dissatisfied with our own inertia, he will finally take the offensive against us, possessing completely different cards in the psychological and material line from those he holds at present.” He was right, but when the upstart colonel told Pierre Brisson, editor of Le Figaro, that he felt uneasy over the French enemy’s passivity, Brisson ridiculed him: “Don’t you see that we have already won a bloodless Marne?”78

  The British, possessing on the whole a better record on European battlefields, ought to have been more realistic. They weren’t. Instead, they were complacent. The Isle looked fine; ergo, the Isle was fine. In the autumn, the Times had proclaimed Britain’s “grim determination” to see it all through, but nine months after the outbreak, English life had returned to normal. Idle men dozed on Hyde Park “deck chairs”; the sheep lazed away the days in London’s park enclosures, and admiring crowds gathered by the nearby duck ponds. In 1940, the city’s skyline was still dominated by St. Paul’s, by the steeples of Wren’s fifty other baroque churches, by the neo-Gothic Houses of Parliament and Big Ben. Blacked out now, it loomed serenely on moonlit nights, invoking in some memories of the imperial capital before the arrival of electricity. Nightlife was as innocent and diverting as ever; John Gielgud was King Lear; Emlyn Williams’s Light of Heart played to busy houses; elsewhere in the West End the most popular dance tunes were the American “Deep Purple” and “Somewhere over the Rainbow.” Clearly Londoners were less interested in the war than in the rituals of peace. The Times, ever the vigilant recorder of multifarious ornithological sightings, reported the return of swallows, cuckoos, and even nightingales.

  Churchill tried to wake the nation. Speaking that March on the BBC, HMG’s first lord of the Admiralty warned his countrymen that “more than a million German soldiers, including all their active and armored divisions, are drawn up ready to attack, on a few hours’ notice, all along the frontiers of Luxembourg, of Belgium and of Holland. At any moment these neutral countries may be subjected to an avalanche of steel and fire, and the decision rests in the hands of a haunted, morbid being who, to their eternal shame, the German people have worshipped as a god.” He observed that in Britain “there are thoughtless dilettanti or purblind worldlings who sometimes ask us: ‘What is it that Britain and France are fighting for?’ To this I answer: ‘If we left off fighting you would soon find out.’ ”79

  Nevertheless Lord Haw-Haw, a pseudonym for William Joyce, the English traitor who broadcast Nazi propaganda to Britain from Berlin—for which he would later hang—was not yet resented; most Britons considered him merely amusing. At No. 10 Downing Street, the young diarist Jock Colville noted: “The war looks like being an immobile affair on the Western Front.” After an evening in town, Colville wrote of seeing “a group of bespectacled intellectuals remain firmly seated while God Save the King was played.” He commented: “Everybody looked but nobody did anything, which shows that the war has not yet made us lose our sense of proportion or become noisily jingoistic.” He had yet to learn that tolerance is a weakness in a nation at war, and that in wartime, jingoism becomes patriotism. The Germans already knew it. Had Berliners snubbed “Deutschland Über Alles” or sat through the “Horst Wessel Lied,” they would have been fortunate to lose only their freedom.80

  The burgeoning spring revealed a minor scandal. The sandbags piled high around entrances to Whitehall government buildings split open and sprouted green weeds, clear evidence that they had been filled, not with sand, as stipulated in contracts, but with cheaper earth. Inevitably a question was raised in the House of Commons, though it was never really an
swered, largely because no one much cared. Sandbags and the other impedimenta of war—the barrage balloons, the air-raid trenches in the city’s parks, the air-raid wardens, and the gas masks, which, as Punch pointed out, were carried only by officers and high civil servants—like stories of the evacuated children and jokes about women in uniform—had become banal. Indeed, the war itself had turned into a tiresome commitment to be grudgingly met.

  That mood began to shift in the first week of May. The public, misled by the press, which had been misled by the government, had been under the impression that their troops were driving the Germans out of Norway. In fact it was the other way around. The fiasco ended on Thursday, May 2, when Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain rose in the House of Commons to announce that the British troops, having suffered a stunning defeat, were being evacuated. That weekend a Gallup poll revealed the public’s disillusionment: fewer than a third now supported Chamberlain.

  Parliament debated the Scandinavian losses on the following Tuesday. On Wednesday the Labour Party forced a division—a vote of confidence—and more than one hundred members of Chamberlain’s own party deserted him. So stinging a rebuke should have led to the immediate fall of the prime minister’s government. Clinging to office, the P.M. spent that evening trying every conceivable political maneuver to stay in office. All failed.

  In Berlin that same day—Wednesday, May 8, 1940—William L. Shirer noted “a feeling of tension in the Wilhelmstrasse today.” He added, “I hear the Dutch and Belgians are nervous. They ought to be.” The Associated Press reported that two German armies, one from Bremen and the other from Düsseldorf, were moving toward the Dutch frontier. That angered the Germans; nevertheless, Shirer wrote that his censors “let me hint very broadly that the next German blow would fall in the west—Holland, Belgium, the Maginot Line, Switzerland.”81

  In Brussels the papal nuncio requested an audience with King Leopold to relay a warning from the Vatican. The pope had learned that a German invasion of Belgium was “imminent.” Two coded dispatches to Brussels from the Belgian embassy in Berlin confirmed it. The Hague was alerted by the Dutch military attaché in Berlin.

  Hitler was in a state of high excitement. In Mein Kampf he had sworn to destroy France in “a final, decisive battle (Entscheibungskampf).” Now the hour was at hand. General Jodl noted in his diary: “The Führer does not want to wait any longer…. He is very agitated. Then he consents to postponement until May 10, which he says is against his intuition. But [he will wait] not one day longer.”82

  In the Château de Vincennes, Généralissime Gustav-Maurice Gamelin announced the restoration of normal peacetime leave in the French army. Four days earlier General André-Georges Corap, commander of the French Ninth Army, had told his men: “Nothing will happen until 1941.” A Paris headline, welcoming the coming weekend, read: DÉTENTE AU HOLLANDE (Relaxation in Holland).

  Because Britannia ruled the waves, the Admiralty in Whitehall determined overall naval policy for the war, but with the 400,000 troops of the British Expeditionary Force outnumbered by over 2,100,000 French, the disposition of troops was fixed by the short, courtly Gamelin. The généralissime was confident he could stop the enemy because he believed he knew exactly where they were going to attack. It would be through Belgium, precisely where they had come in August of 1914, when, achieving complete strategic surprise, the gray tide of the Reich’s huge right wing, a million strong, had swept down and cut a swath seventy-five miles wide, enveloping France’s left flank. That had been among the last imaginative maneuvers on the Western Front in 1914–1918. The French had avoided immediate disaster by falling back and rallying on the Marne. Then the sidestepping had begun as each army tried to outflank the other. Neither could. The result was a stalemate. The Allies found themselves defending for more than four years a snakelike chain of trenches that began on the Swiss border and ended 566 miles away on the English Channel. Breakthroughs were impossible, because whenever a position was in peril it could be swiftly reinforced; troop trains packed with defending troops could rocket to the tottering sector before the attacking infantrymen, plodding ahead at the three-miles-an-hour pace of Napoleonic foot soldiers, could reach their objective.

  Gamelin foresaw a precise encore. But this time, he assured his countrymen, the war would not be fought on “the sacred soil” of France. Under his Plan D, he would send his armies into the great northern plain of eastern Belgium and meet the enemy there on the line of the Dyle River. Where else, he asked, could the Nazis come? It was everyone’s opinion that a German invasion through Switzerland was inconceivable, and France’s perimeter comprised the Belgian plain (Flanders) on the left, the great Ardennes forest in the center, sprawling across Luxembourg, Belgium, and northern France, and the eighty-seven-mile Franco-German border, where the two hostile powers confronted one another directly.

  This last location held no threat. Every inch of it was now defended by the most expensive system of fixed fortifications in history, the mighty steel-and-concrete Maginot Line, manned by forty-one divisions. When Lord Gort, commander of the British Expeditionary Forces, and a group of British generals toured the fortifications, they asked their French guide, René de Chambrun,* how much it had all cost. Fifty-five billion francs, Chambrun replied, over ten years. Then, realizing his English guests were of a seafaring nation and calculated in pounds sterling, Chambrun put the numbers into a nautical perspective: Had France spent the same amount of money building the biggest and fastest of battleships, of which there were about twenty-five in all the navies of the world, the French fleet would now consist of fifty such behemoths. Thus, Chambrun explained, the interconnected forts and artillery batteries of Maginot could be thought of as a great line of “land battleships,” an analogy the British appeared to grasp. Gort, Chambrun wrote, “could not conceal his astonishment.” Chambrun did not disclose to his guests that the cost of the line had precluded investments in tanks and mechanized units. Nor did he and his guests take the naval analogy far enough, for battleships are mobile and can react to changing tactical conditions. Forts—“land battleships”—are not and cannot.

  Le Maginot, as the line was known to all Frenchmen, was named for André Maginot, a politician who, like Premier Édouard Daladier, had spent four years suffering in the trenches of the first war and vowed: never again. To be sure, the line ended at the Belgian border. Consideration was given to building it up to the northern French coast but the French believed that would send the wrong signal to Belgium, that their troops wouldn’t even bother to fight until the Germans got to the French border. Some members of the Conseil Supérieur de la Guerre had urged that the line be extended to the Meuse River, within Belgium, but that was vetoed by Maréchal Henri-Philippe Pétain, the French commander of the army in 1918. To reach the Meuse, the Germans would have to pass through the Ardennes—a thickly wooded Hans Christian Andersen forest, slashed with deep ravines, and fogged with mist rising from peat bogs—“impénétrable,” Pétain declared, thus ruling it out as a channel of invasion. By the process of elimination, Gamelin reasoned, that left the Belgian plain as the only possible battlefield.83

  Although he did not see them, he faced grave problems. Napoleon had warned his commanders against forming a picture—deciding in advance what the enemy was going to do. That is precisely what Gamelin had done. It never occurred to him that the Germans, having watched one great plan fail in 1914, might have formed another. Gamelin had also overlooked an ominous change in Belgium’s rulers. In the last war King Albert had been a mighty ally, but in 1936, his son, Leopold III, had astonished Europe by renouncing his country’s military alliance with France and Britain. In any new war between Germany and France, he declared, Belgium would be neutral—as though such an absurdity were possible. He had actually gone so far as to fortify his border with France, and had told the French that an extension of Le Maginot to the North Sea would be looked upon in Belgium as an unfriendly gesture.84

  But Gamelin’s greatest error was his assump
tion that warfare had not changed since the Armistice in 1918. His Conseil Supérieur took the same view, although there were a few vigorous dissenters, among them Colonel de Gaulle. De Gaulle was making a pest of himself, insisting that the French must study the swift Nazi conquest of Poland with tanks. Tanks, he said, had revolutionized battle; new strategies were needed to turn them back. As early as November 11, 1939, he had sent General Headquarters an aide-mémoire on the lessons of the Polish campaign, chiefly the need for fluidity on the battlefield, specifically the formation of a mechanized shock corps (armée de métier), soldiers specially selected and trained to lead an attack. Unless France followed the German example, he predicted, the gasoline engine would demolish French military doctrines even as it demolished fortifications.

  But his superiors thought him absurd. One of them asked the others, Suppose the Boche panzers did burst through the lines. Where would they refuel? None of them reflected on the fact that since 1918, thousands of filling stations had appeared in northern France. To them they were irrelevant. After all, these petrol stations—which, like 91 percent of the automobiles in the country, had not existed in 1918—were there to serve civilian automobiles, not German panzers. The fact that both cars and tanks used the same fuel was disregarded.

  Some war correspondents, haunted by the spectacle of the Führer’s armored columns crushing the gallant Poles, remained troubled, but at Gamelin’s grand quartier général they were told sharply that a replay of the blitzkrieg here was impossible. General Dufieux, the army’s retired commander of tanks, declared that Nazi armored units could not “hurl themselves unsupported against our lines and penetrate deeply without facing complete destruction.” Another senior officer chided the foreign press for its doubts: “Ah, my fellows, how naive you are!” A war of movement across the dry Polish plains, yes. But through the Ardennes, through the Dutch floods, through the Belgian defenses, through the Maginot—through the tank-traps and barbed wire and casemates, in the face of our powerful air force—that was absurd.”85