Alone, 1932-1940

by William Manchester

  Ten days after his directive, the generals submitted their plan for invasion in the west. In Hitler’s view, and in history’s, it was remarkable for its mediocrity and lack of imagination. They proposed a frontal assault driving head-on across the Low Countries to the Channel ports. Six days later the Führer suggested that the main thrust drive across southern Belgium and through the forested Ardennes toward Sedan. Their reply echoes Pétain’s view; the hills and thick woods of the Ardennes were “unmöglich” (“impossible”). The Führer made no further comment then. He hadn’t dismissed the idea, but had the fine weather held, the unimaginative attack would have proceeded. Although the Allied armies were not up to strength, that was the plan they expected, and they would have met it with everything they had. They did so seven months later, when they had much more. Unfortunately, the German plan of attack had changed; while they were rushing to bar the front door, the enemy slipped in the back.

  The weather, responsible for the long delay, persuaded Hitler to postpone his assault nine times. Each time, he reconsidered lunging through the Ardennes with a panzer corps. His aides were instructed to bring him aerial photographs and detailed topographic maps of the terrain. Studying them, he felt confirmed; much of it was good panzer country, fields and roads; the forested areas which discouraged generals could be used to advantage, camouflaging tanks from aerial surveillance. In fact, although this was unknown to him, in 1939 when the Conseil Supérieur had staged a seven-division German drive in the French Ardennes with armored support, the “enemy” had put the defenders to flight. Field Marshal Walther von Brauchitsch, army commander in chief, was unconvinced, and protocol required the Führer to deal directly with him. However, a handful of his most gifted generals, Manstein, Rundstedt, and Guderian among them, believed that a massive panzer Sichelschnitt (scythe-cut) in the south, with a far stronger force than Hitler had proposed, could slice through the Ardennes, drive to the sea, and trap the Allied armies in the north, where the Germans were expected. On February 17, in a traditional ceremony, five generals promoted to corps commanders were invited to dine with the Führer. Manstein was among them. He gave his host a detailed account of the plan he, Rundstedt, and Guderian had developed. Hitler was ecstatic. At noon the next day he issued a new Führerordnung, incorporating all Manstein’s points. By February 24, Hitler, Halder, and the OKW in Zossen, working round the clock, had completed the final orders for their Ardennes offensive. The blow would fall in May.

  The British military presence in France, so slight before winter closed down Hitler’s plan for a lightning stroke in the west, grew through the bitter winter, until Lord Gort, the BEF commander, had nearly 400,000 men dug in. Unlike their fathers in 1914, they were not eager to fight, but they were ready. Morale was high; the British spit-and-polish traditions were observed; so were training schedules; and officers organized games, the more vigorous the better, to keep the men fit. Gracie Fields’s ration song was unheard here. The music halls had given the BEF a rollicking anthem which enjoyed tremendous popularity until events soured its lyrics.

  We’re gonna hang out the washing on the Siegfried Line.

  Have you any dirty washing, Mother dear?

  Soldiers given leave headed for Paris, where the season’s hit shows were Paris, Reste Paris, at the Casino de Paris, starring Maurice Chevalier and Josephine Baker; Lucienne Boyer at her boîte de nuit in the rue Volney; and revivals of Cyrano de Bergerac and Madame sans Gêne at the Comédie Française. But on the whole Tommies found the City of Light disappointing. The attitude of the French puzzled them. They seemed surly, hostile, smoldering with grievances. And so they were. Some of their anger was intramural; they held their leaders in contempt. After the Russians had picked up their winnings in Poland and declared themselves at peace, France’s powerful Communist party took the position that the war was a “capitalist-imperialist project” in which workers had no stake. At the other end of the political spectrum, the extreme French right still yearned for an understanding with the Reich; with Poland gone, they argued, the need for an anti-Bolshevik bulwark was all the greater. To them, German National Socialism was preferable to French socialism; their rallying cry was “Better Hitler than Blum.” Lucien Rebattet, a gifted writer for the Fascist weekly Je Suis Partout, wrote that the war had been launched “by the most hideous buffoons of the most hideous Jewish and demagogic regime…. We are supposed once more to save the Republic, and a Republic worse than the one in 1914…. No, I do not feel the least anger against Hitler, but much against all the French politicians who have led to his triumph.”129

  However, the chief target of French discontent was Britain. Although the British were allies, they were treated with scorn. Until Tommies began manning sectors of the Maginot Line, a brigade at a time, most poilus were unaware that the British Expeditionary Force even existed. Certainly their newspapers didn’t tell them. The Parisian press, reinforcing the public mood, was resentful not of Nazi aggression, the root cause of the war, but of l’Albion perfide. England, in the popular French view, had forced France into unnecessary hostilities, and there was widespread suspicion that the British had no intention of fighting—that when battle appeared imminent they would withdraw to their island, shielded by the Royal Navy, while poilus were slaughtered. Daladier told William Bullitt, the American ambassador, that he was convinced Britain intended to let the French do all the fighting. At the Quai d’Orsay, Alexis Léger spoke as though Britain were uncommitted, telling Bullitt: “La partie est perdue. La France est seule.” Holding his first staff meeting as supreme commander of Allied troops, Gamelin revealed his opinion of his ally by neglecting to bring an interpreter and speaking so rapidly that less than half of what he said was understood by the British officers.130

  We’re gonna hang out the washing on the Siegfried Line

  ’Cause the washing day is here.

  Churchill had been visiting France since childhood, and despite his atrocious accent, he spoke the language fluently. Hitler spoke only German. He had never been abroad. Yet Churchill’s Francophilia was a romantic illusion, while the German führer’s evaluation of the people who had been Germany’s foe for over two thousand years was penetrating. “Hitler,” Churchill later wrote, “was sure that the French political system was rotten to the core, and that it had infected the French Army.” Whatever the reason, the rot was there. And Joseph Goebbels knew how to make it fester. The Luftwaffe, like the RAF, staged truth raids. They were, however, far more clever than England’s. Their contribution to what one French officer called “une guerre de confettis” was not leaflets but single slips of paper that fluttered down round the French lines. Resembling colored leaves, they bore on one side the message: “In the autumn the leaves fall. So fall the poilus, fighting for the English.” The obverse read: “In the spring the leaves come again. Not so the poilus.”131

  The leaflets were followed by beguiling enticements from French-speaking Germans using bullhorns and large signs taunting poilus at the front, asking why they should die for Danzig, the Poles, or the British (“Ne mourez pas pour Danzig, pour les Polonais, pour les Britanniques!”). Nazi propagandistic statements quoted by Molotov, effective among French Communists, assigned to “la France et la Grande-Bretagne la responsabilité de la poursuite des hostilités.” On September 26, with Poland vanquished, the Germans opened a new propaganda campaign: “Why do France and Britain want to fight now? Nothing to fight about. Germany wants nothing in the West [L’Allemagne ne demande rien à l’ouest].” The most effective line was the assurance that if the French didn’t open fire, German guns would remain silent. Time reported a version of this: “We have orders not to fire on you if you don’t fire on us.” Soon poilus and Soldaten were bathing in the Rhine together. Time readers unfamiliar with the fighting spirit essential in infantry combat—not only for victory but also for the survival of the individual infantryman—might have thought this harmless. But it served the Führer in two ways. In the first week of the war civility between men
on both sides would permit his thin screen of troops on the Reich’s western front to hold while the Wehrmacht finished off the Poles. And idle soldiers, especially those doubtful of their cause, deteriorate under such circumstances; their combat efficiency loses whatever edge it had, and when the balloon goes up, they find it almost impossible to kill the likable, fair-haired youths on the far shore, which means the youths on the far shore, no longer under orders to appear likable, are far likelier to kill them.132

  British soldiers appeared to be immune to the contagion. Their commanders were not defeatist, neither their great-grandfathers nor their fathers had been routed by German troops in 1870 and 1914—and besides, whoever heard of Blighty losing a war?

  What though the weather be wet or fine,

  We’ll just travel on without a care.

  British officers, however, were worried. One of their strengths, and a source of impotent rage among those who lived under other flags and had to deal with them, was that Englishmen with their background could not be offended by pomposity because their own capacity for arrogance was infinite. In 1914 British officers had told their men, “The wogs”—a pejorative for subjects of the Empire—“begin at Calais.” They were still saying it in 1939, distinctly pronouncing the final s in Calais while natives gnashed their teeth. Gamelin, reading French aloud at top speed, could never win playing this game with them. They had invented insolence and would leave his hauteur a thing of shreds and patches.

  They were, however, concerned about the poilus’ morale. If the Germans came—and despite enemy propaganda no one in authority doubted that they would—these French soldiers would be on the British right. Should they break, the BEF’s flank would be left hanging on air, the ultimate horror of a generation of soldiers wedded to the doctrine of le front continu. Again and again they had been told that the French army was “matchless,” a word, it now occurred to them, subject to two interpretations. Certainly few of them could recall seeing its equal in carelessness, untidiness, and lack of military courtesy. General Sir Alan Brooke, a future CIGS now commanding a BEF corps, attended a ceremony as the guest of General André-Georges Corap, commander of the French Ninth Army. In his memoirs he would recall taking the salute: “Seldom have I seen anything more slovenly and badly turned out. Men unshaven, horses ungroomed, clothes and saddlery that did not fit, vehicles dirty, and a complete lack of pride in themselves and their units. What shook me most… was the look in the men’s faces, disgruntled and insubordinate looks, and although ordered to give ‘Eyes left,’ hardly a man bothered to do so.” It would be a distortion, however, to indict the conscripted French soldier for his reluctance to defend the soil of France. The blight went all the way to the top. It was their généralissime who expressly forbade poilus from firing on German working parties across the river. “Les Allemands,” he said, “répondront en tirant sur les nôtres” (“The Germans would only respond by firing on us”).133

  Sumner Welles, the American under secretary of state, accepted an invitation to inspect the Allied front. Welles was touring Europe as a special emissary of FDR, and in Washington he reported that French officers had privately complained to him that their men were undisciplined; unless the Germans attacked soon, they predicted, the poilus would spontaneously disband and go home. If an army’s leaders take a foreigner aside to criticize their own men, something is very wrong. Vigilant French leaders knew it. Not only was there no training; neither Gamelin nor General Georges, Churchill’s friend, ordered exercises at divisional strength to make commanders familiar with the problems of handling large units in the field. General André-Charles-Victor Laffargue later wrote: “Our units vegetated in an existence without purpose, settling down to guard duty and killing time until the next leave or relief.” Longer leaves were granted more frequently, recreation centers established, theatrical troupes summoned from Paris to entertain the troops.134

  Nothing worked. Morale continued to decline. General Edmond Ruby, commander of the First Army, was alarmed to find “a general apathy and ignorance among the ranks. No one dared give an order for fear of being criticized. Military exercises were considered a joke, and work unnecessary drudgery.” The next step down was alcoholism. It appears to have descended upon the whole army overnight. “L’ivrognerie”—drunkenness—“had made an immediate appearance,” General Ruby noted, “and in the larger railroad stations special rooms had to be set up to cope with it—euphemistically known as ‘halls of de-alcoholizing.’ ” So many men were so drunk in public that commanders began to worry about civilian morale.135

  Although Churchill believed that the French army would never break, however strong the German assault, in January 1940 he crossed the Channel for a visit to the front. He did not return reassured. The French artillery, he was pleased to find, had been improved “so as to get extra range and even to out-range, the new German artillery.” But he was deeply troubled by “the mood of the people,” which “in a great national conscript force is closely reflected in its army, the more so when that army is quartered in the homeland and contacts are close.” During the 1930s, he later wrote, “important elements, in reaction to growing Communism, had swung towards Fascism,” and the long months of waiting which had followed the collapse of Poland had given “time and opportunity” for “the poisons” of communism and fascism “to be established.” There could be “no doubt,” he observed, that “the quality of the French army” was being “allowed to deteriorate during the winter.” Sound morale in any army is achieved in many ways, “but one of the greatest is that men be fully employed at useful and interesting work. Idleness is a dangerous breeding-ground.” He had observed “many tasks that needed doing: training demanded continuous attention; defences were far from satisfactory or complete, even the Maginot Line lacked many supplementary field works; physical fitness demands exercise.” He had been struck by the “poor quality of the work in hand, by the lack of visible activity of any kind,” and thought the “emptiness of the roads behind the line was in great contrast to the continual coming and going which extended for miles behind the British sector.”136

  Colonel de Gaulle also believed the troops needed training and exercise, and urged it in a vigorous report to his superiors. He thought programs should be both intensive and exhausting, partly because the men weren’t fit but also to raise their spirits. Somewhere on its way up to high command his recommendation was lost, which was no surprise to those familiar with the system. In combat a leader’s greatest need is information, and if he is competent he does everything possible to establish a communications system that will survive in the chaos of battle, and, if possible, at least one backup net, for what works well in peacetime maneuvers may disintegrate and vanish when great armies clash in the fog of war.

  Gamelin seems not to have anticipated this obstacle. Indeed, it was almost as though he set out to frustrate his own chain of command and assure his isolation when he was most needed. Poring over documents in Vincennes, on the outskirts of Paris, he never established means of keeping in touch with field commanders. There was no radio at Vincennes. He could telephone Georges, the commander of all forces at the front, whose headquarters were at La Ferté-sous-Jouarre, thirty-five miles away, but he preferred to drive, an hour each way on roads swarming with suburban Paris traffic. In the age of radio and the teletype, it took six hours for an order from Gamelin to reach an air force command—by which time the target would be gone—and forty-eight hours to issue a general order to all commands. One French officer described his remote headquarters as a “submarine without a periscope,” and later de Gaulle wrote bitterly: “There he was, in a setting as quiet as a convent [silencieux comme un couvent], attended by a few officers, working and meditating without mixing in day-to-day duties. In his retreat at Vincennes, General Gamelin gave the impression of a savant testing the chemical reactions of his strategy in a laboratory.”137

  Sir John Slessor of the Air Ministry, one of a series of visitors from London, described the supreme
commander as a “nice old man not remotely equal to his enormous job.” Why, then, didn’t the British move to thwart the debacle that lay dead ahead? One reason was that the British troop commitment was much smaller than the French. Another was that in the last war it had taken four years to establish a unified command under Foch. Furthermore, Gamelin had served ably on Foch’s staff. Most members of His Majesty’s Government were Francophiles; they refused to credit the tales of Anglophobia across the water. All, Churchill included, retained their blind faith in the French army, which had taken the worst the Germans could throw at them between 1914 and 1918 and always came back. The poilus of this war were the sons of those in the last. Surely they had inherited the same fighting qualities. But they hadn’t. Unlike their fathers, they preferred to live.

  There was also the Maginot Line. Those whose memories do not reach back to the 1930s cannot grasp its enormous reputation before its hour struck. La Ligne was considered one of the world’s wonders, and the French never lost an opportunity to polish its image. The French high command celebrated the first Christmas of the war by announcing that they had completed a staggering “work of fortification.” Their goal had been “to double the Maginot Line” and it was “virtually complete…. From the first of this month our new line of fortifications seems to have removed any hope the enemy may have entertained either of crossing or flanking the Maginot Line.”138