by Douglas Boyd
Facing them were 104 French divisions and just fifteen divisions of the BEF, which should have been more than enough to fight a defensive battle in prepared positions, without counting the Dutch and Belgian armies and fortifications that would absorb the first German thrusts. The British government had promised its French allies to build the BEF up to thirty-two divisions and eventually forty-five, but not before 1941 at the earliest.8 Although French tanks outnumbered the German armour 4:3, less than a third of these were in mobile armoured units due to the failure of the General Staff to rethink this tool of modern warfare along the lines argued for more than a decade by a cavalry colonel named Charles de Gaulle.
Ninety per cent of French artillery pieces dated back to the First World War. 55th Infantry Division, defending the key city of Sedan, did not have a single anti-tank gun capable of stopping a Panzer.9 Thanks to the Depression and the pacifist stance of inter-war governments, particularly Leon Blum’s left-wing Popular Front, the French air force was also poorly equipped. Flying off grass fields with their outdated motors fuelled by 70 or 87 octane fuel, its pilots went up against Messerschmidts and Stukas of the Blitzkrieg-tested Luftwaffe, with little on their side but courage and willingness to die for their country.
It is not true that the French General Staff placed all its faith in the supposed impregnability of the Maginot Line fortifications running along the Franco-German frontier from Switzerland in the east as far as Belgium in the west, but that is perversely where its best troops were stationed – and not in the unfortified stretch at the western end of the line.
When Hitler had invaded Poland the previous September, British journalist Nicholas Bodington had been with the French armies on the Alsace-Lorraine frontier with Germany. Taking advantage of the inevitable thinning of the forces ranged against them, the French General Staff had ‘straightened the line’ by ironing out a few kinks, in the process annexing thirty-six German villages which became briefly French after only a few salvoes of artillery from the retreating defenders. It seems that this early success engendered a false sense of superiority in Paris.
In the summer of 1940, with the left flank of the Allied line anchored on the Channel coast and entrusted to Lord Gort’s BEF, the space between it and the Maginot Line was filled by some very second-rate French units, rotated so often that their officers did not know which units were on their flanks, while the men they commanded were less acquainted with their weapons than the picks and shovels they were using to construct makeshift blockhouses and trenches in a too-little, too-late attempt to extend the Maginot Line westwards on the cheap.
It was to this stretch of the front between Longwy at the north-west end of the line and Sedan that General Franz Halder had pointed on a map at OKW – the German Army High Command – six months earlier. ‘Here is the weak point,’ he said. ‘Here we have to go through!’10 Launched on 10 May, the northern thrust of the German attack sliced through the Dutch army, while the central drive took the panzers deep into Belgium and the southern prong of Hitler’s trident drove through the Ardennes Forest of southern Belgium and Luxembourg like an arrow pointing straight at Sedan.
General Erich von Manstein’s Fall Sichel, or Operation Sickle, was a classic, fast-moving, massive Panzer offensive with close air cover – that essential feature of successful Blitzkrieg, which the chiefs of both the RAF and the French air force thought a misapplication of air-power. By coming through the theoretically impassable Ardennes forests, Manstein wrong-footed the Allied defence so brilliantly that, three days after the start of the offensive, his advance units were in France.11 Holland surrendered to the inevitable on 15 May. Hearing the news, Premier Paul Reynaud took one look at the war map and telephoned the new British Prime Minister Winston Churchill to say, ‘The battle is lost.’
Far from the sound of the guns, on 18 May Mayor Delthil warned the stunned inhabitants of Moissac to expect a new wave of refugees from the north and east. It was almost a relief for him to have something so mundane to worry about after the weeks of rumours about parachutes dropping on remote areas, of women seen struggling along country roads carrying cases so heavy they must have contained weapons, and were obviously storm troopers disguised as nuns – and of mysterious aircraft engines heard at night. At least the refugees were real.
On 28 May, Belgium also surrendered to avoid further useless loss of life. What else could King Leopold’s government have done? One unique political gesture of the little-respected Belgian politicians was to rush through a law authorising the destructions of état civil records of Jewish children to give them the names of non-Jewish adoptive parents. No count exists of how many young lives this saved.
After the panzers of the two northern thrusts regrouped and swung southwards, they poured through the weakest point in the centre of the Allied line. Judging the Battle of France lost, Lord Gort began withdrawing the BEF to the coast in preparation for evacuation by sea before the line of retreat was cut. They nearly missed the boat, literally, after General Heinz Guderian’s tank columns reached the Channel coast near Abbeville on 20 May and swung north to cut off the British from the ports of Calais and Dunkirk. However, Hitler ordered Guderian on 24 May to halt on the canal line just outside Dunkirk while the Luftwaffe wiped out the men on the beaches – which it failed to do. By the end of the seaborne evacuation 198,000 British and 140,000 French and Belgian soldiers, sailors and airmen had crossed the Channel to safety. Such was the elation in Britain that Churchill had to warn his people ‘not to ascribe to this deliverance the character of a victory’.
NOTES
1. D. Barlone, A French Officer’s Diary (Cambridge: CUP, 1942), pp. 8–11.
2. T. Kernan, France on Berlin Time (New York and Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1941), pp. 223–9.
3. Ibid., pp. 229–31.
4. C.D. Freeman and D. Cooper, The Road to Bordeaux (London: Readers’ Union & Cresset Press, 1942), pp. 12, 13.
5. Ibid.
6. A. Hillgruber, Hitlers Strategie: Politik und Kriegführung 1940–41 (Bonn: Bernard & Graefe, 1965), p. 38.
7. Figures quoted in E.R. May, Strange Victory (New York: Hill & Wang, 2002), p. 477.
8. Ibid., p. 309.
9. Ibid., p. 388.
10. Ibid., p. 229.
11. Ibid., p. 309.
2
PÉTAIN QUELLS
THE PANIC
The Germans did not have it all their own way. Among French commanders who bloodied their nose more than once was Colonel Charles de Gaulle, France’s premier advocate of tank warfare. The success with which he practised what he had preached in books between the wars earned a citation from Weygand:
An admirable leader, daring and energetic, on 30 and 31 May he attacked an enemy bridgehead, penetrating more than five kilometres into the enemy lines and capturing several hundred prisoners and valuable materiel.1
However, in the chaos of the German breakthrough not even officers like de Gaulle could do much at the front, so he was recalled to Paris by Reynaud and appointed Under-Secretary for War in a government that was numbed at being abandoned by its only ally.
Reynaud still had 2 million men under arms in the area of conflict but, having taken losses of 92,000 dead and over 200,000 wounded in the brief campaign – against German losses roughly half as severe – his cabinet was irrevocably divided over the course of action to pursue. A minority of six ministers supported his plan to fight on and eventually withdraw to French North Africa and continue the war from there, but Reynaud’s political credit was all but spent. Exactly two months earlier, on 28 March 1940 he had signed an agreement in London under which both British and French governments undertook not to negotiate peace terms unilaterally. Renault had signed without first seeking the approval of his cabinet, which made his signature unconstitutional and not binding on the French government. In any case, as President Lebrun argued after the war at Pétain’s trial, Britain had unilaterally vitiated the agreement on two counts: she had never committed her air force t
o the common cause and she had withdrawn her ground troops from the conflict without consultation.
In Paris hardly anyone of consequence, inside the cabinet or elsewhere, believed it was still possible to stop the German advance. The great hero of 1914–18, Marshal Henri-Philippe Pétain, told the American Ambassador on 4 June that he firmly believed the British would shortly sign a pact with Germany.2 Although Charles de Gaulle was despatched to London on 5 June with the acting rank of brigadier, there was little he could do there at this stage.
A majority of thirteen ministers in Reynaud’s cabinet wanted to sue for terms immediately, never mind what pieces of paper had been signed with the British, who in their consideration had deserted France in her hour of need. Their position was strengthened by Marshal Pétain as vice-president of the Council of Ministers and General Maxime Weygand, who had replaced Gamelin as Commander-in-Chief of the army after the disastrous first week of the invasion. France’s two senior soldiers, they saw no alternative to an armistice, providing it ‘did not stain French honour’3 or involve handing over the intact French navy, built up and modernised by Admiral of the Fleet Xavier-François Darlan, despite the pacifist policies of inter-war governments.
With the army in full flight and no prepared positions to fall back on, there was nowhere the French army could stand and fight with any reasonable chance of holding a line against so fast-moving an enemy. There was also the question of morale. In the First World War, France and the British Empire each mobilised between 8 and 9 million men against the Central Powers, but the total French casualties had been twice as high as those for the whole Empire. From a population of 40 million, France lost 1,357,800 men killed, with 4,266,000 wounded and another 537,000 taken prisoner or missing in action. At the other end of the scale, the decisive but late entry of the USA into the war cost only a total of 323,018 American casualties, including 116,516 dead.4
So, by November 1918 one out of ten French citizens of all age-groups and both sexes was a casualty in one way or another, without counting the hundreds of thousands made homeless by the fighting and the concomitant disruption to family life. Coming as it did after the revolutionary wars, the wars of the two empires and the Franco-Prussian war of 1870–71, the First World War traumatised the whole nation. Long lists of names on war memorials in small villages all over France testify to the slaughter of all the adult males in many families. In the southern départements, telephone directories show as many Italian and Spanish surnames as French ones, thanks to the flood of landless younger sons who came from Italy and Spain between the two world wars to replace the dead youth of France by marrying local girls otherwise condemned to lifelong spinsterhood.
In addition to the demoralising scale of French casualties, there was another factor in the war-weariness of French soldiers by 1917 and 1918 that caused widespread and brutally repressed mutinies. For the British, Empire and American forces fighting on their flanks, the war was destroying a foreign land they would forget soon after returning home, whereas the poilus were fighting in a wasteland where formerly their farms, villages and cities had stood – but which was so torn and cratered by the bombardments that it seemed impossible for street lines to be traced with certainty, let alone homes rebuilt or fields poisoned with chemicals ever made fertile again.
It would have been surprising if, after only thirty-two years, the survivors of that carnage and their sons had wished to repeat the experience, once abandoned by their allies and having a totally justified lack of faith in their divided leaders, a disrupted command structure, virtually no working communications, outdated weapons and grossly inadequate air cover.
Paradoxically, to defend the country they loved, many foreign residents volunteered to fight for France. Accepted as combatants only in the Foreign Legion, they were formed into Régiments de Marche de Volontaires Etrangers (RMVE with numbering upwards of twenty), to distinguish them from the ‘old’ Legion, shipped over from North Africa in this hour of need. 22 RMVE listed men of forty-seven nationalities, but 25 per cent of them were Republican refugees from the Spanish Civil War. Both they and the east Europeans in these temporary regiments included a high percentage of communists, which made their officers consider them politically unreliable. Issued inadequate kit and weapons or none at all, they were held in reserve until after the invasion and then thrown into the line to sink or swim, poorly trained and ill-equipped. Yet their combat record was no worse than that of many regular regiments.5
In Alsace behind the Maginot Line, eminent Parisian surgeon and army reservist Joseph Gouzi worked day and night in a well-organised mobile surgical unit, moving from one pre-planned position to the next, but things were not like that in the centre of the line. Dennis Freeman and his friend Douglas Cooper enlisted in the French army as ambulance drivers and found themselves in the headlong rout, driving badly wounded men to improvised hospitals where doctors and patients were always on the point of being re-evacuated as the enemy pressed closer. On 7 June at Oigny, Freeman noted:
The villagers could not have left so very long before, for the little gardens looked well tended and there was an air of orderliness and well-being about the place. It was difficult to reconcile the ceaseless thunder of the distant guns and the busy movement of the doctors, infirmiers and stretcher-bearers with the rural scene. Cottages had been transformed into dressing-stations. The simpler operations were performed in the forge.6
From time to time, the two English volunteers crossed paths with compatriots. On 8 June near Troyes, Cooper noted: ‘Outside in the street I found several English soldiers [from] the Pioneer Corps, whose duty it was to follow the RAF around, making landing-grounds for them, and digging reservoirs for petrol. Now that most of the English airmen had left, they themselves were expecting to be moved any day:
The Germans had reached Forges-les-Eaux and were pressing on towards Rouen and the Seine. They seemed to be advancing everywhere. Weygand had issued a proclamation: Nous sommes en dernier quart d’heure [meaning, a quarter of an hour to go, with victory in sight] but the roads were horribly congested. The stream of refugees had swollen to considerable proportions in the space of an afternoon and there were not only lines of people on foot and in cars, but in addition a large assortment of barking dogs of all sizes, goats, cattle and poultry they were taking with them. Heavy military vehicles too were on the move and when I looked closer I saw petrol tankers, radio cars and the ground staff of airfields going south. It was an alarming sight.7
On 9 June Charles de Gaulle returned to his office in Paris after a meeting with Churchill in London in time to hear General Héring as military governor of the capital declare that the city would be defended street by street. The following day, Italy declared war on France and moved troops across the border, Mussolini intent on occupying as much of the country as possible before the inevitable armistice. Hearing the news in London, Churchill is said to have remarked maliciously, ‘It’s only fair. We had them on our side in the last war.’8
From Paris, the government fled south-west – away from the Germans – over roads choked with refugees. General Héring, ordered not to defend the capital after all, requested to be relieved of his redundant post and given a combat command. The art treasures of the Louvre Museum and the bullion reserves of the Banque de France had gone during the phoney war – the former to various chateaux in the Loire Valley and the latter spread far and wide in North America, Martinique and French West Africa. As it had during the German invasions of 1870 and 1914, the government continued its flight from Tours towards Bordeaux, with politicians and civil servants sleeping in their official cars by the side of roads lined with abandoned horse-drawn and motor vehicles. During the brief halt in Tours, Reynaud made a desperate appeal to the United States for air support, which fell on deaf ears.
On the night of 13 June the Parisian suburban hospital at Orsay was staffed by seven desperate nurses caring for eighty sick and elderly patients, plus refugee casualties. With no proper meal for days and only a
few hours’ sleep, they asked a passing army major what to do about the patients who could not be moved when the time came to evacuate the others. ‘Give them a last injection,’ he replied. ‘Morphine or strychnine is best.’ Too exhausted to think any further, four of the nurses prepared the fatal doses and administered them, rather than leave seven aged patients behind. The intended act of mercy cost them between one and five years’ imprisonment when they were sentenced in May 1942.
North of Paris, Freeman and Cooper in their ambulances were stopped in Sens by a general trying to rally some troops, who asked whether they had any maps he could borrow. A general without a map! It was unreal – as was their experience of driving into Sens with a naked, screaming, delirious wounded man being tended by a wounded African soldier, to find:
the café at the big crossroads full of people leisurely sipping their aperitif. Busy housewives laden with their baskets were completing their weekend shopping and in the courtyard of the Hôtel de Paris opposite the cathedral the tables with their chequered cloths and gay umbrellas were already laid for the evening meal.
The vast courtyard [of the hospital] presented an extraordinary spectacle. Hundreds of ambulances, parked without any attempt at order, were being loaded and unloaded at the greatest possible speed. Nurses, doctors, medics and stretcher-bearers … looked tired and bewildered by the unmanageable influx of new cases that had suddenly been flung upon them. Some drivers who had been waiting to unload for some time [and] had just been told that they were to go on to Auxerre, sixty kilometres distant.9
The German advance was so rapid that, no sooner had a hospital been set up than it had to be evacuated. Ordered back to Sens, Freeman and Cooper drove through the night without lights against the press of military and civilian traffic fighting its way southwards. The two Britons found what had been a calm provincial town the previous evening transformed: