The Second World War

by John Keegan

  This now consisted of sixty divisions, some survivors of the battle on the Meuse, some withdrawn from the Maginot Line; only three were armoured, all much depleted, particularly de Gaulle’s 4th Armoured, which on 28-30 May had once again tried but failed to dent the flank of the Panzer corridor, this time near Abbeville. Two British divisions remained in France: the 1st (and only) Armoured Division and the 51st Highland Division, defending the coast west of Dunkirk (the British rifle regiments committed to the defence of Calais had already been overwhelmed). Against them the Germans deployed eighty-nine infantry divisions and fifteen Panzer and motorised divisions, the latter organised into five groups, each of two Panzer and one motorised divisions. These Panzer-motorised combinations formed powerful offensive instruments, which provided the model for the tank-infantry formations with which offensive operations would be conducted throughout the Second World War and, indeed, ever since. The Luftwaffe continued to deploy about 2500 strike aircraft, fighters and bombers, which they could now operate from captured airfields close to the battle line. The French air force, though reinforced by machines hastily purchased from the United States, and supported by 350 aircraft of the RAF, could only operate some 980.

  The Weygand Line

  Weygand, his ‘plan’ having collapsed, now pinned his hopes for resistance on the defence of a position which would be called the ‘Weygand Line’. The resilient old general had not yet abandoned hope; he had even outlined a defensive scheme which mirrored that of the German offensive plan in its modernity. The ‘Weygand Line’, running from the Channel coast along the line of the rivers Somme and Aisne to join the Maginot Line at Montmédy, was to be held as a ‘chequerboard’ of ‘hedgehogs’ (NATO would adopt a similar scheme for the defence of the Central Front in Germany in the 1970s). The ‘hedgehogs’ – villages and woods – were to be filled with troops and anti-tank weapons and to continue resistance even if bypassed by enemy spearheads.

  The theory was excellent, the practice lamentable. The Weygand Line broke almost as soon as it was attacked by the right wing of the Panzer array between Amiens and the coast on 5 June. The fault lay not with the fighting spirit of the French troops, which had greatly revived, but with their material weakness. They were outnumbered and lacked tanks, effective anti-tank weapons and air cover. Colonials and reservists fought with equal valour. ‘In those ruined villages’, wrote Karl von Stackelberg, ‘the French resisted to the last man. Some hedgehogs carried on when our infantry was twenty miles behind them.’ On 5 and 6 June the Germans were stopped dead at several points and even suffered crippling tank losses. If the Weygand Line had had ‘depth’, the German advance might have been held by its outposts, but, once its crust was broken, there were no troops behind it to seal off the breach or counter-attack. Rommel, leading the 7th Panzer Division across country when it was checked by hedgehogs commanding the roads, quickly found a way into the rear and was directed by the headquarters of Bock’s Army Group B, to which he was now subordinate, to turn towards the coast and encircle the defenders of the Weygand Line’s left wing from the rear; in the process he would force the surrender of the last British infantry division left in France, the 51st Highland.

  On 9 June Rundstedt’s Army Group A moved to the attack on the Aisne. Led by Guderian’s Panzer group of four armoured and two motorised divisions, it was briefly checked, notably by the resistance of the French 14th Division under General Jean de Lattre de Tassigny, a future Marshal of France, whose reputation for defiance in the teeth of defeat was established that day. Yet on the Aisne, as on the Somme, the Germans were now too strong for any display of French courage to hold them in check. The previous evening Pétain, the Deputy Prime Minister, told his former chief of staff, Bernard Serrigny, that Weygand foresaw the possibility of holding the line for three days at most and that he himself intended to ‘push the government to request an armistice. There is a meeting of the Central Committee tomorrow. I shall draft a proposal.’ Serrigny warned that the next day would be too late. ‘Action should be taken while France still has the façade of an army and Italy has not yet come in. Get a neutral to intervene in the approach. Roosevelt seems the obvious choice. He can bring his power to bear on Hitler.’

  This was a counsel of desperation. Roosevelt had already declared to Reynaud his inability to influence the course of events in Europe, by the dispatch either of more new material or of the United States fleet, while Mussolini, who had told the British ambassador on 28 May that not even the bribe of French North Africa would keep him neutral, was now bent on declaring war before its termination deprived him of a share of the glory and its rewards. On 10 June, the day Pétain had indicated he intended to press the government to treat for terms, Reynaud evacuated it from Paris. As it headed for Tours on the Loire, whither Churchill would fly for his fourth meeting with his ally on 11 June, the German Panzer groups were outflanking the city to the west and east. The day after the government left, it was declared an ‘open city’, to spare it destruction. However, Hitler did not choose to attack it – perhaps, quite unnecessarily, fearing another Commune. Churchill, on his flying visit to Reynaud in Tours, reminded him of ‘the absorbing power of the hour-to-hour defence of a great city’. However, those Parisians with cars were already streaming southwards in tens of thousands, while those who remained behind opened for business as usual when the first German soldiers arrived on 14 June; three days later they were thronging the terrace of the Café de la Paix, happy to be sightseers in the tourist capital of the world.

  Frenchmen in uniform were still fighting, often to the death. Like the Belgians, they found at the approach of defeat an outraged capacity for self-sacrifice. At Toul, behind the Maginot Line, the 227th Regiment of Infantry fought on long after it had been surrounded. At Saumur the students of the Cavalry School held the bridges over the Loire from 19 to 20 June until their ammunition ran out. The garrison of the Maginot Line itself, 400,000 strong, refused all calls to surrender; only one section of blockhouses was ever to be captured by German attack. South of the Loire an officer of the Fifth Army watched a ‘small group of Chasseurs Alpins from the 28th Division’ cross on 17 June. They were ‘led by a sergeant covered with dust, their uniforms in rags, marching in order and in step, the men bent forward, pulling with both hands at the straps of their equipment. Some were wounded, the dressings stained with dirt and blood. Some slept as they marched, ghosts bowed under the weight of their packs and rifles. They passed in silence, with an air of fierce determination.’

  Comrades-in-arms of these mountain troops were meanwhile confronting Mussolini’s attack on the Riviera across the Alpes Maritimes, Italy having declared war on 10 June. Four French divisions stood in the path of twenty-eight Italian divisions. They held their ground without difficulty, yielding nowhere more than two kilometres of front, losing only eight men killed against Italian casualties of nearly 5000. Eventually, in desperation, the Italian high command asked for German transport aircraft to land a battalion behind the French lines, as a token of success. ‘The whole thing is the usual kind of fraud,’ wrote Halder. ‘I have made it clear I won’t have my name mixed up in this business.’

  The humiliation of France

  Resistance in the Alps and the Maginot Line could avail not at all against German triumph in the heartland. The British landed the 52nd Lowland and the Canadian Division at Cherbourg on 12 June, to assist returning French troops to open a new front in the west; both had to be evacuated almost immediately to avoid capture. The day before, Churchill had seen for himself the hopeless pass to which France had been brought. At Tours, Weygand, all fight gone, told him and the French ministers: ‘I am helpless, I cannot intervene, for I have no reserves. . . C’est la dislocation.’ De Gaulle, determined on some ‘dramatic move’ to keep the war going, proposed to Churchill in London on 14 June that ‘a proclamation of the indissoluble union of the French and British peoples would serve the purpose’, and Churchill offered such a Declaration of Union to Reynaud on 16 June. His
ministers rejected it categorically. Jean Ybarnegaray no doubt spoke for many in saying that he ‘did not want France to become a dominion’ (of the British Empire). Pétain was now chiefly concerned that France should not fall into disorder; even more than defeat and continuing casualties he feared a takeover by the left. His determination to seek an armistice which would allow the conservatives to continue in office was at least a policy; Reynaud had none. On the evening that Churchill’s offer of union was rejected, President Lebrun decided that the old marshal should be asked to form a government. General Edward Spears, Churchill’s personal emissary to France, left for England at once, taking with him Charles de Gaulle, who, promoted general on 25 May and appointed Under-Secretary for Defence on 10 June, was almost the only member of the government determined to carry on resistance. Next day, 18 June, de Gaulle broadcast from London to the French people: ‘This war has not been settled by the Battle of France. This war is a world war . . . whatever happens the flame of resistance must not and will not be extinguished.’ He called on all Frenchmen who could join him on British soil to continue the fight. For this defiance de Gaulle would shortly be court-martialled and condemned as a traitor by the Pétain regime.

  Pétain had himself broadcast to the French people the day before de Gaulle: ‘Frenchmen, at the appeal of the President of the Republic, I have today assumed the direction of the government of France. . . . I give myself to France to assuage her misfortune. . . . It is with a heavy heart that I say we must end the fight. Last night I applied to our adversary to ask if he is prepared to seek with me, soldier to soldier, after the battle, honourably the means whereby hostilities may cease.’ Hitler, the insistent ‘front fighter’, would treat ‘soldier to soldier’ but without the ‘honour’ his defeated enemy craved; Versailles had eaten too deep into his psyche for that. When the emissaries sent by Pétain met their German counterparts near Tours on 20 June they found themselves transported first to Paris and then eastward. On 21 June, at Réthondes, near Compi’gne, General Charles Huntziger, whose Second Army had been one of the first victims of the Panzer onslaught, alighted from a German military convoy outside the railway coach in which the German delegates had signed the armistice of November 1918. An exultant Hitler observed his arrival; General Wilhelm Keitel, head of OKW, presented the armistice terms. They did not allow for negotiation: Pétain’s government was to remain sovereign, but Paris, northern France and its borders with Belgium, Switzerland and the Atlantic were to become a zone of German occupation; Italy, on terms to be discussed with Mussolini, was to occupy south-eastern France. The French army was to be reduced to 100,000 men and ‘occupation costs’, set at an exorbitant franc:mark exchange rate, were to be met from the French budget. The French empire – in North and West Africa and Indo-China – was to remain under the control of the French government (which was shortly to establish its capital at Vichy), as was the French navy, which was to be demilitarised. All prisoners taken in the campaign, including the garrison of the Maginot Line, though it had not surrendered, were to remain in German hands. France, in short, was to be emasculated and humiliated, as Hitler believed Germany had been in 1918. The terms, in truth, were far more severe than those imposed at Réthondes twenty-two years previously. Then Germany had been left the bulk of its national territory and its soldiers their freedom to return to civilian life. Now the most productive part of French territory was to be occupied and two million Frenchmen, 5 per cent of the population but perhaps a quarter of France’s active manhood, were to go into German captivity with no term fixed for an alteration of these penalties. The delegation argued, but, as Léon Noœl, the former ambassador to Poland, observed, while it did so ‘fighting was still going on, the invasion was spreading and fugitives were being machine-gunned on the roads’. Huntziger applied for instructions to Pétain at Bordeaux, where the French government had withdrawn. He was instructed to sign forthwith and did so on the evening of 22 June. Meanwhile a delegation led by Noœl signed terms at Rome with the Italian government, which provided for the occupation of the Franco-Italian border up to fifty kilometres’ depth on the French side. The armistice with both Germany and Italy was then timed to come into force at 25 minutes past midnight on the morning of 25 June.

  By then some German spearheads had penetrated deep into the ‘free zone’ which the armistice left to the new Vichy government. There were German tanks south of Lyon, German tanks outside Bordeaux; for a time there were even German tanks in Vichy. As the armistice terms took effect, they withdrew, without heel-dragging; the campaign of 10 May to 25 June 1940 had not cost the German army dear. The French counted some 90,000 dead in what many of their village war memorials, incongruously to British and American eyes, call ‘the war of 1939-40’; the Germans had lost only 27,000. Theirs had been, in its last weeks, almost a war of flowers. ‘Reached here without difficulty,’ Rommel wrote to his wife from Rennes in Brittany on 21 June. ‘The war has become practically a lightning Tour de France. Within a few days it will be over for good. The local people are relieved to see everything happening so peacefully.’ The German army, imbued with the magnanimity of victory, behaved with all the ‘correctness’ to their beaten enemy that army orders prescribed. The French, as if shell-shocked by the catastrophe they had undergone, responded with an almost grateful meekness. Virtually no part of France had been spared the sight of beaten French soldiers – young conscripts, older recruits, black Senegalese, Arab light infantrymen, Polish and Czech volunteers, infantry, cavalry, artillery, tanks – falling back, dirty, hungry, tired, directionless, sometimes leaderless, on through fields and orchards ripening for harvest under a sun and skies whose daily brilliance remain, for victors and vanquished alike, inseparable from their memories of the ‘summer of ’40’. Amid the persisting normalities of life – Sunday lunch, first communions, jours de fête – the sensation of a predestined national doom, averted in 1918 by the tenacity of their British allies and the miraculous intervention of the Americans, overwhelmed the nation. This was how it had been in 1815, when the enemies of France had beaten the first Napoleon in Belgium; this was how it had been in 1870 when the Germans had beaten the second Napoleon in Lorraine. The victory of 1918 now seemed merely an intermission. The decline of la grande nation, set about by philistines and barbarians, might seem irreversibly charted. Pétain, hero of Verdun, embodied the spirit of his countrymen in June 1940 above all because they saw in him a being inured to loss and suffering.

  The Germans, by contrast, were in lightened spirits. ‘The great battle of France is over,’ wrote Karl Heinz Mende, a young engineer officer who had fought the campaign from start to finish. ‘It lasted twenty-six years.’ The British, too, were in lightened spirits, perhaps perversely so. ‘Personally,’ wrote King George VI to his mother, ‘I feel happier now that we have no allies to be polite to and to pamper.’ Winston Churchill, face to face with realities, confronted the future in starker terms. ‘The Battle of France is over,’ he told the House of Commons on 18 June. ‘I expect that the Battle of Britain is about to begin.’

  FOUR

  Air Battle: The Battle of Britain

  The Battle of France, though sensational by reason of its brevity and decisiveness, had been an otherwise conventional military operation. In their support of the German armoured spearheads, aircraft had played a major part in bringing victory; but neither they nor indeed the tanks they had overflown had wrought the Allied defeat. That defeat was the outcome of defects in strategy, military structure and readiness for war, psychological as well as material, which were buried deep in the Western democracies’ reaction to the agony they had undergone in the First World War.

  The Battle of Britain, by contrast, was to be a truly revolutionary conflict. For the first time since man had taken to the skies, aircraft were to be used as the instrument of a campaign designed to break the enemy’s will and capacity to resist without the intervention or support of armies and navies. This development had long been foreseen. Aircraft had been used as w
eapon platforms – by the Italians in Libya in 1911 – almost as soon as they had become viable as vehicles. For much of the First World War they had served as auxiliaries to the ground and sea forces, but from 1915 onwards airships had been used intermittently as bomb-carriers against Britain by the Germans and, later, bombing aircraft were used by both Germany and Britain against each other’s cities. By the 1930s bombers, drawing on the technology of the increasingly dependable and long-range civil airliner, had become instruments of strategic outreach; it was that development that in 1932 drew from Stanley Baldwin, then a member of the coalition government, the incautious (and inaccurate) forecast that `the bomber will always get through’. The terror inflicted by German and Italian bombers on the Republican population of Spain in 1936-8 seemed to endorse his warning. As the air historian Dr Richard Overy writes:

  By 1939 it was widely believed that the air weapon was coming of age. The experience of the First World War . . . persuaded many, politicians and generals among them, that the next war would be an air war. This was founded partly on the uncritical expectation that Science was now harnessed sufficiently closely to military life to produce a stream of new weapons; of secret devices from the air whose nature could only be guessed at. It was founded too on the more critical scrutiny of what aircraft had actually done in the First World War. In reconnaissance work, in the support of troops on the ground, in co-operation with the navy on the first clumsy aircraft carriers and primarily in the carrying out of bombing campaigns independent of surface forces, the aircraft threatened to dwarf the contribution of the other services or even to supplant it altogether.

  The belief that air forces might supplant armies and navies as war-winning instruments of power took root earliest and deepest in three countries with widely disparate strategic needs: the United States, Britain and Italy. In the United States, isolationist after 1918 and vulnerable only to transoceanic attack, it was the ability of the aircraft to destroy battle fleets which commanded attention. Successful experiments in the aerial bombing of captured German battleships prompted the foremost American exponent of independent airpower, General William Mitchell, to agitate for the creation of an independent air force, with such insubordinate vigour that he was obliged in 1925 to defend his stand at court martial. Britain, committed to the defence of both the Empire and the home base, and experienced in ‘strategic’ bombing against Germany at the end of the First World War, had created an autonomous air force in 1918 which thereafter formulated its own empirical concept of broad deterrence of attack by independent air operations. Curiously it was in Italy that a comprehensive theory of air strategy emerged in its most developed form. Giulio Douhet, universally recognised as the Mahan (if not the Clausewitz) of airpower, seems to have arrived at his vision of ‘victory through airpower’ by a recognition of the futility of First World War artillery tactics. In his book Command of the Air (1921) he argued that, rather than bombarding the periphery of enemy territory with high explosive, where it could destroy only such war material as an adversary deployed there, the logic of the air age required that it be flown to the centres of enemy war production and targeted against the factories, and workmen, that made the guns. Douhet’s perception was conditioned by Italy’s experience of the First World War, which it had fought on narrow fronts dominated by artillery that was supplied from factories located chiefly in modern Czechoslovakia, at no great distance from its own airfields.