by John Kelly
* * *
One morning toward the end of October 1939, a middle-aged man, burly of build and with a sharp-featured, lively face, stood in a bunker ten feet below the Maginot Line, breathing in the close air and peering through a periscope. The man’s suit, discreetly well tailored, and his speech, flavored with the sparkling vowels of the English upper classes, suggested an official of some sort—a touring diplomat perhaps, or an undersecretary of some obscure but interesting government department secreted away in a Whitehall basement. However, anyone with an eye for such things could tell from the visitor’s bearing and the informed questions he asked that he had a military background. Edward Louis Spears, KBE, retired colonel, and currently Member of Parliament for Carlisle, knew this part of northern France well. During the Great War, Spears had visited the region several times. Except for the birds that had come back grudgingly in the late 1920s and the soldiers who arrived in the 1930s to man the Maginot Line, not much had changed since Spears’s last visit in 1918. The line of raised earth that ran across the abandoned field in front of the French positions marked the remains of a trench line; the rusty objects in the field, the unexploded shells that the wet season threw up in this part of France; and the broken tree line behind the field, the aiming point of some long-ago artillery barrage.
Spears was chairman of the Anglo-French Committee, a parliamentary group created to promote Allied solidarity. Unlike the United States, France was viewed as essential to British national security, and the front-line tours and talks with French colleagues allowed committee members to assess French morale and military readiness. Spears owed his chairmanship to his unique background. Born in France of English parents in 1886, he had spent part of his childhood in the country and had headed the British military mission in Paris in the final years of the Great War. As a professional soldier, he also had an understanding of the ways in which the British and French military did and did not complement each other.
Britain had a large navy and a growing air force, but its army, decimated by budgetary cuts during the interwar years, still existed largely on paper. Presently, there were only four regular army divisions in France, all short of artillery, tanks, radios, and ammunition. Six more regular divisions would join them, upon completion of their training in Britain. But beyond those ten divisions, there was nothing available except a wilderness of conscripts and part-time reservists who would take a year or more to train up to a professional standard, and several dozen battalions of the Indian Army, who were needed in India. On a recent visit to the French High Command outside Paris, Anthony Eden, the secretary of state for the dominions, had flushed with embarrassment upon examining the High Command’s map of the Western Front. Amid the forest of tricolor flags, Eden counted only two Union Jacks. The War Office planned to create a fifty-five-division army at some unspecified date in the future, but until money could be found to arm the divisions and soldiers found to man them, the main British weapon on the Western Front would be the French Army.
The best army in the world, people said of the French Army after the Great War, and twenty years later that trope had been repeated so often, French military superiority was taken for granted. “The most perfectly trained and faithful mobile force in Europe,” Churchill had said recently, and the Bastille Day parade the previous July seemed to give proof to the first lord’s words. Under a fleshy pink summer sky, down the Champs-Élysées marched Algerian, Moroccan, and Senegalese colonial regiments without end; “cannons of all calibers . . . tanks of all sizes. . . . [While] squadrons at high and low altitude [flew] over Paris from the Arc de Triomphe to the Obelisk.” The army gave “an impression of order, discipline, irresistible force,” said one spectator. A generation later, the producers of the classic BBC series The World at War would use footage from the 1939 parade to send up the myth of French invincibility. As grainy images of the marchers flickered across the screen, the narrator, the actor Laurence Olivier, noted that the French army of 1939 relied on trains and horses for transportation. A long, stagey pause followed; then Olivier added, “especially horses.”I He was right, but he had the benefit of hindsight. In 1939, the French public and the British politicians and generals believed what Churchill believed: the French Army was incomparable.
And nothing symbolized that incomparability more than the Maginot Line. Embodying all the defensive lessons of 1914–18, the line, a series of large forts or ouvrages, was hailed as a military masterstroke, the kind of achievement only the French Army was able to execute: an impenetrable defense system capable of chewing up an invading German army at minimum cost in French lives. The line also had its critics, among them Colonel Charles de Gaulle, a leading proponent of armored warfare, who warned that in the next war, France would not be fighting the German army of 1914. But de Gaulle’s warnings were ignored. A champion of the offense, the prickly colonel was viewed as out of step with the French public, who remembered the offensive battles of 1914, when as many as twenty-seven thousand men had been killed in a single day. Never Again.
When anyone asked how France, with barely half Germany’s population (39 million versus 80 million) and only a third of its steel production (6.6 million tons versus 19 million tons) could hope to prevail in a new conflict, the answer was always the same: the Maginot Line. In the interwar years, belief in the Maginot Line became the principal article of faith in the French catechism of war. Whenever its effectiveness was questioned, defenders would set upon the heretics with a fury. They would point to the twelve to sixteen miles of artillery, antiair, and machine-gun emplacements that made up each strongpoint in the system, and ask how the Boche could hope to penetrate such a killing field. And the defenders were right: the Germans could not, not if they made a 1914-style infantry attack. But a mobile army led by tank columns could maneuver through gaps in the line left by poor planning and budgetary constraints. From Switzerland in the south to Luxembourg in the north, the French border bristled with defenses, except along the Belgian border, the German invasion route in 1914.
There were also skeptics who questioned the commitment of the French political class to the war. The parties of the right viewed communism, not Nazism, as the main threat; the French Communists viewed capitalism as the greater evil; and, between the two extremes—in the broad middle of French politics—there was equivocation and division about the war. Some prominent members of the center-right and center-left parties, such as Georges Mandel, the minister of the colonies, and Paul Reynaud, the minister of finance, supported the war without reservation. Others, such as Georges Bonnet—who, though no longer foreign minister, remained an influential figure—and Pierre Laval, a prominent French senator, regarded the new contest with Germany as tantamount to national suicide; and Laval and his followers in particular were working energetically behind the scenes to reach an accommodation with Hitler.
Finally, there were the French people.
On the early November day Spears arrived in the capital for talks with senior French politicians, the boulevards and cafés were crowded, and every radio in every sidewalk café seemed to be blaring out Maurice Chevalier’s new hit, “Paris Reste Paris.” But this Paris of barrage balloons, sandbag emplacements, and flics (French slang for policeman) with tommy guns did not feel like the Paris that Spears knew. There was no energy or gaiety in the crowds, no silhouette of the Eiffel Tower illuminating the night sky, no noisy American tourists, and almost no young or middle-aged men, except at the railway stations, where conscripts as old as forty-five and fifty were boarding trains for the front. The Champs-Élysées was bedecked in tricolor flags, and periodically a voice on the radio would announce, “We shall prevail because we are stronger,” but not many people found the voice convincing. There was more than a grain of truth in the observation that on September 3 France had gone “to war looking over her shoulder, her eyes seeking peace.” Hitler’s October 6 speech had produced such a clamor to end the war that for a time William Bullitt, the American ambassador, feared the Daladier gov
ernment would be unable to resist it. “In this city of bronze memorials and dreadful rolls to the dead,” wrote Janet Flanner, the New Yorker’s Paris correspondent, there are “millions . . . [who] continue to think [war] could be avoided even after it has been officially declared.”
The day after his arrival, Spears told Jean Giraudoux, the minister of information, that he was surprised at how much anti-British sentiment he had encountered in Paris. It is the fault “of German propaganda,” Giraudoux said, which was not exactly a falsehood, but not exactly the truth either. Comparing the French and British war efforts in October 1939, the average French man or woman could be forgiven for thinking there was still truth in that old Great War jibe “The British intend to fight the war with French soldiers.” France was fully mobilized; its people were working extended wartime hours, paying wartime taxes that undercut their standard of living—and every able-bodied male fifty or younger was being mobilized. By contrast, Britain had yet to institute rationing, had raised taxes only two shillings in the twenty-shilling pound, had confined conscription to men in their twenties, and had not yet put its industry on a full wartime footing. In the second month of the war, the British unemployment rate still stood at near depression levels: 1.4 million men. Toward the end of the conversation, Giraudoux did permit himself one mild criticism: he told Spears that anti-British feeling in the capital might subside if fewer British soldiers were seen on leave in Paris and more at the front.
A few days later, while visiting Georges Mandel, an old acquaintance from the Great War, Spears asked how committed Édouard Daladier, the French premier, was to the war. Spears had heard rumors that the Bull of Vaucluse possessed “the horns of a snail.” Mandel chuckled at the question, then made one of his rare forays into humor: “No truer quip had been evolved in the Chamber [of Deputies].”
* * *
Not long after Spears returned to London, the Chamberlain government canceled the annual Armistice Day celebration at the cenotaph in Whitehall. The announcement set off a debate in the offices of a London pacifist group. “If we win this war,” said a member of the group, “shall we have another Armistice Day and a new monument to the Glorious Dead? Or shall we again contrive to end the war at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, so as to save inventing another ceremony?”
Neither, replied a colleague. “Ever seen the French monument to the dead of 1870 [the Franco-Prussian War] in the churchyard at Camiers? After the last war, they economized by adding a brief inscription commemorating the heroes of 1914–18. We shan’t have any money when we’ve won this war—so we shall probably just have to do the same.”
* * *
I. In fairness, the German army also relied heavily on horse power.
CHAPTER THREE
EUROPE IN WINTER
In January 1940, the war was entering its fifth month and the only fighting to be found in Europe was closer to the Arctic Circle than to France. The previous September, when the war began, Josef Stalin looked west and saw peril everywhere. Germany—despite the Soviet-Nazi Nonaggression Pact—represented the gravest danger, but a conflict with anti-Communist France and Britain was not beyond the realm of possibility. Consequently, Stalin concluded that the western flank of the Soviet Union needed bracing. Under pressure from Moscow, the Baltic states—Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania—agreed to grant the USSR military bases. Next, Stalin turned his attention north. In early October, the Finns were presented with a list of territorial demands, including the annexation of a large portion of the Karelian Isthmus, the thinly populated strip of high-forest, steep-hill, and marshy swamp that forms a land bridge between Finland and Leningrad (St. Petersburg). The Soviet demands were rejected; Stalin abrogated Moscow’s mutual assistance pact with Helsinki and assembled a twenty-one-division army along the Finnish border. Early on the morning of November 30, the preternatural quiet of the Karelian Isthmus was shattered by artillery fire. In between shell bursts, the clank of tanks could be heard approaching through the high forest from the east. Farther to the north, a second Soviet force stormed the arctic port of Petsamo. So confident were the Soviets of a walkover that the invasion forces brought along brass brands to celebrate their victory.
A month later the Red Army was bogged down in a bloody war of attrition on the Karelian Isthmus; the military reputation of the Soviet Union was in tatters; and Britain, France, and the United States were in the grip of Finnish “mania.” Like Spain before it, gallant little Finland had become an international symbol of democratic resolve. Here, at last, thought wakeful-minded Europeans and Americans weary of the ludicrous “phony war,” was “a real war, a man’s war.” Across Western Europe and America, balls and galas were held for Finnish relief and sweaters knitted for Finnish soldiers. At art galleries in New York, London, and Paris, the fashionable gathered under stark black-and-white photos of the Winter War to sip wine and lament the unhappy state of the Western democracy. “The fortified front of Karelia evokes, simultaneously, the Maginot Line and a season of winter sports,” wrote a Frenchman who likened the Finnish war to “a highly seductive glossy magazine for skiing amateurs.” In Allied chancelleries, maps of Finland were taken out and examined; eager fingers measured the distance between Finland and the iron ore fields of neutral Sweden, which fed the Nazi war machine; and eager minds imagined shifting the war’s center of gravity from France, with its lovely countryside and crowded cities, to the north, where the vast, empty wastes were perfect for a war of maneuver and the only civilians put in harm’s way would be the reindeer and the Finns.
* * *
Meanwhile, along the Western Front, barely a shot had been fired in anger. Well into the autumn of 1939, power plants in the German Saar were still providing French border towns with electricity, and when the French city of Strasbourg was evacuated, it was German Army searchlights that illuminated the way for the evacuees. “They are not wicked,” an indignant French soldier replied when a visiting British journalist asked him why he did not shoot the German soldier bathing in a river fifty meters away. In the winter of 1939–40, visitors could be forgiven for thinking that the primary function of the Western Front was to provide photo ops for the celebrated and glamorous. The Duke of Windsor was photographed visiting Fort Hochwald; the journalist Dorothy Thomas, shooting a French .75; and there was almost no place on the Western Front where Clare Boothe, playwright, journalist, scriptwriter paramour of Bernard Baruch and Joe Kennedy and soon to become Mrs. Clare Boothe Luce, had not been photographed. The air of unreality that hung over the war that winter undermined military discipline and raised questions about the combat readiness of the Allied armies. French soldiers strolled around in bedroom slippers—cigarettes dangling from their lips, jackets unbuttoned, hands thrust in pockets. The British Expeditionary Force had a crisper, more disciplined air, but its troops were not trained up to the standard of the best German units; and the BEF’s commander, Lord John Gort, an amiable Anglo-Irishman, was more interested in the aspects of war that fascinated readers of Boy’s Own, such as how to mount a trench raid, than in the broader strategic questions that are the proper province of an army commander. Asked about the Maginot Line’s weaknesses, Gort exclaimed, “Oh, I haven’t had time to think about that!” “Queer kind of war,” William Shirer of CBS news wrote after a tour of the Western Front.
It seemed like a queer kind of war to civilians, too. The British public had expected the war to begin as the Great War had, with a series of epic encounter battles on the plains of Belgium and northern France. Instead, there was a brief French foray into the Saar, then nothing. The autumn of 1939 brought all the annoyances of war—price rises, blackouts, unheated flats, evacuations, censorship, conscription, long queues—without any of the dramatic events that make civilians feel their sacrifices have purpose and meaning. “It’s a war of nerves,” said a man in a Blackpool pub. “War of nerves, my arse,” said his companion. “It’s boring me bloody stiff.” “The British people [are] prepared to accept great
sacrifices,” observed Sam Hoare, the home secretary. “But not minor irritations.”
In folk memory, Britain went to war to the voice of Vera Lynn, singing
They’ll be bluebirds over
The white cliffs of Dover . . .
In reality, Britain went to war to the voice of the nanny state admonishing the citizenry, in pamphlets and posters: “Don’t spit, it’s a bad habit”; “Make your family gargle before they go to the shelter”; “Keep your feet dry”; “Keep Calm and Carry On”; “Try not to lie on your back—you are less likely to snore”; “Make your home safe now!”; “Don’t dig a deep trench unless you know how to make one properly.” Even British officialdom’s attempts at inspiration, such as the poster “Your Courage, Your Cheerfulness, Your Resolution, Will Bring Us Victory” just sounded like Nanny in a patriotic mood. That poster also set people to wondering who this “us” was and for whom this “us” was going to win the war. Many working-class Britons suspected they were “us” and that they were being called on to win the war for their social betters.
In time, a sense of duty and confiscatory tax rates would make the wealthy more like the rest of us; but in the winter of 1939–40, that time was still some way off. At the Dorchester, top-hatted doormen still greeted guests; at the Savoy, strawberries and cream were still available, at the Connaught, grouse, oysters, and partridge. And at the dinner parties of Lord Kemsley, the owner of the Times of London, guests were still attended by a “galaxy of footmen,” the food was still “vast and excellent, and the wine flowed like water.” In the East End, one of the poorest neighborhoods in London, a wealthy couple and their chauffeur descended upon a grocery store, snatched four twenty-eight-pound bags of sugar from the shelves, and carried them to the cash register. The store owner refused to sell the sugar. “I don’t think that sort of thing is right,” he said. “They don’t give the poor a chance.”