To Lose a Battle
Page 1
PENGUIN BOOKS
TO LOSE A BATTLE
Sir Alistair Horne was born in London in 1925, and has spent much of his life abroad, including periods at schools in the United States and Switzerland. He served with the R.A.F. in Canada in 1943 and ended his war service with the rank of Captain in the Coldstream Guards attached to M15 in the Middle East. He then went up to Jesus College, Cambridge, where he read English Literature and played international ice-hockey. After leaving Cambridge, Sir Alistair concentrated on writing: he spent three years in Germany as correspondent for the Daily Telegraph and speaks fluent French and German. His books include Back into Power (1955); The Price of Glory: Verdun 1916 (Hawthornden Prize, 1963); The Fall of Paris: The Siege and the Commune 1870–71 (1965); To Lose A Battle: France 1940 (1969); Small Earthquake in Chile (1972, paperback reissued 1999); A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954–62 won both the Yorkshire Post Book of the Year Prize and the Wolfson History Award in 1978 (revised paperback edition 2006). His other publications include The French Army and Politics 1870–1970 (1984), which was awarded the Enid Macleod Prize in 1985, Harold Macmillan, Volumes I and II (1988–91), A Bundle from Britain (1993), a memoir about the USA and World War II; The Lonely Leader: Monty 1944–1945 (1996); Seven Ages of Paris: Portrait of a City (2003); Friend or Foe: A History of France (2004) and The Age of Napoleon (2004). In 1969 he founded a Research Fellowship for young historians at St Antony’s College, Oxford. In 1992 he was awarded the CBE; in 1993 he received the French Légion d’Honneur for his work on French history and his Litt. D. from Cambridge University. He was knighted in 2003. He is currently working on an authorised biography of Henry Kissinger, as well as a second volume of his own memoirs.
Grateful acknowledgement is made for permission to reprint the following copyrighted material:
Excerpts from Panzer Leader by General Heinz Guderian, translated by Constantine FitzGibbon. Published in the United States of America in 1952 by E. P. Dutton & Co., Inc., and reprinted with their permission.
Excerpts from The Rommel Papers. Copyright 1953 by B. H. Liddell Hart. Reprinted by permission of Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc.
The poems ‘Spring Song’ (or, ‘Crocus Time’) and ‘Baku, or the Map Game’ from Siren Song by A. P. Herbert, published by Methuen & Co. Ltd. and Doubleday & Company, Inc. Copyright 1940 by Alan Patrick Herbert. Reprinted by permission of Sir Alan Herbert, his agents, A. P. Watt & Son, and Doubleday & Company, Inc.
Excerpts from The Second World War by Winston Churchill, published in the United States of America by Houghton Mifflin Company.
Excerpts from Berlin Diary by William Shirer. Copyright 1940, 1941 by Wiliam Shirer. Reprinted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf. Inc.
La France a perdu une bataille!
Mais la France n’a pas perdu la guerre!
(France has lost a battle!
But France has not lost the war!)
GENERAL DE GAULLE’S PROCLAMATION IN LONDON
AFTER THE FALL OF FRANCE
When at last… the will-to-live of the German nation, instead of continuing to be wasted away in purely passive defence, can be summoned together for a final, active showdown with France, and thrown into this in one last decisive battle with the very highest objectives for Germany; then, and only then, will it be possible to bring to a close the perpetual and so fruitless struggle between ourselves and France.
ADOLF HITLER, Mein Kampf (1925)
Alistair Horne
To Lose a battle
France 1940
PENGUIN BOOKS
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First published in Great Britain by Macmillan London Ltd 1969
First published in the United States of America by Little Brown and Company 1969
This revised edition published by Macmillan London Ltd 1990
Published with a foreword by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr in Penguin Books 1990
Reissued in Penguin Books 2007
Copyright © Alistair Horne, 1969, 1990
Foreword copyright © Arthur Schlesinger, Jr, 1990
All rights reserved
The moral right of the author has been asserted
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject
to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent,
re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s
prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in
which it is published and without a similar condition including this
condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser
978-0-14-193772-4
Contents
Tables and Maps
Foreword to 1990 edition
Preface to 1990 edition
Preface to 1979 edition
Acknowledgements
Part One (1919–40)
1 Grandeur and Misery of Victory: 1919–30
2 ‘Thank God for the French Army’
3 Fortune Changes Sides
4 Palinurus Nods
5 ‘Queer Kind of War’
6 Gamelin
7 The Sickle and the Reaper
8 Towards the Brink
Part Two
9 The Crocus Blossoms: 10 May
10 Through the Ardennes: 11 May
11 On the Meuse: 12 May
12 The Crossing: 13 May
13 Consolidating the Bridgeheads: 14 May
14 The Break-Out: 15 May
15 ‘We Have Lost the Battle!’: 16 May
16 The Panzers Halt: 17 May
17 The Dash to the Sea: 18–20 May
18 Encirclement: 21–23 May
19 The End in the North: 24 May–4 June
20 One Last Battle: 5–22 June
21 Aftermath
Bibliography
Reference Notes
Notes to Foreword
Index
Index of Military Units
FOR
ALEXANDRA
Tables and Maps
Tables
A. Allied order of battle 10 May 1940
B. German order of battle 10 May 1940
Maps
1 Western Front showing directions of Schlieffen Plan (1914) and Sichelschnitt (1940)
2 The opposing forces (10 May 1940)
3 The Meuse crossings (12–13 May)
4A The Dinant crossing (13–14 May)
4B The Sedan crossing (13–14 May)
5 The Panzer breakthrough (15–17 May)
6 The Panzer ‘corridor’ (18–21 May)
7 Counter-attack at Arras (21–23 May)
8 Encirclement of the nothern armies 23–31 May)
9 The last phase (5–22 June)
A. ALLIED ORDER OF BATTLE 10 May 1940
With names of commanders principally concerned Units reading from north (left) to south (right)
B. GERMAN ORDER OF BATTLE 10 May 1940
Units reading from north (left) to south (right)
1. Western Front showing directions of Schlieffen Plan (1914) and Sichelschnitt (1940)
2. The opposing forces (10 May 1940)
3. The Meuse crossings (12–13 May)
4A. The Dinant crossing (13–14 May)
4B. The Sedan crossing (13–14 May)
5. The Panzer breakthrough (15–17 May)
6. The Panzer ‘corridor’ (18–21 May)
7. Counter-attack at Arras (21–23 May)
8. Encirclement of the northern armies (21–31 May)
9. The last phase (5–22 June)
Foreword to 1990 edition
General Maurice Gamelin, Time told its readers in a cover story on 14 August 1939, “is head of what, by almost unanimous acclaim, is today the world’s finest military machine.”1 “An incomparable machine,” Winston Churchill had called the French army two years earlier.2 Yet the world’s finest military machine, the great incomparable, disintegrated in six short weeks before Hitler’s onslaught in the lovely spring of 1940. To Lose a Battle, Alistair Horne’s fine book on the fall of France, so effectively joins a masterful account of the fighting with incisive political analysis and brilliant portraiture that in twenty years it has achieved the status of a classic.
For Americans old enough to recall the fall of France, To Lose a Battle will bring back many memories. The war of 1914–1918 — the Great War, as we called it then — had left the United States in a mood of disillusion, and the Great Depression, by turning America inward, reinforced ancient instincts of isolationism. When a new European war broke out in September 1939, most Americans hoped that the Western Allies would win, but still regarded the conflict in Europe as from a great, almost impassable, distance. For centuries, as ex-President Herbert Hoover put it, there had surged through the twenty-six nations of Europe “the forces of nationalism, of imperialism, of religious conflict, memories of deep wrongs, of age-old hates, and bitter fears.… With a vicious rhythm these malign forces seem to drive nations like the Gadarene swine over the precipice of war.”3
Some Americans, however, saw a definite American stake in the European conflict. Foremost among them was the President of the United States. Franklin Roosevelt combined the balance-of-power realism of his kinsman Theodore Roosevelt with the collective-security idealism of Woodrow Wilson, the President he had served as Assistant Secretary of the Navy during the Great War. The Great Depression made the domestic economy Roosevelt’s first priority, but nonetheless he followed the rise of Hitler with acute foreboding.
So Roosevelt refused at the London Economic Conference of 1933 to sacrifice his national recovery program to European demands for an international gold standard; but, as he subsequently wrote the aggrieved British Prime Minister, “I am concerned by events in Germany, for I feel that an insane rush to further armaments in Continental Europe is infinitely more dangerous than any number of squabbles over gold or stabilization or tariffs.”4 When Stafford Cripps came to luncheon in 1935 and assured Roosevelt that in the end Germany would wriggle out of any actual fighting, the president wrote ironically to William C. Bullitt, his ambassador in Moscow, “He told me, with a straight face, that Hitler does not feel he can count on the German people to back him up in a war.”5
German aggression, Roosevelt believed, was bound to threaten the national security of the United States. His annual message to Congress in January 1936, with its condemnation of “autocratic institutions that beget slavery at home and aggression abroad,”6 began Roosevelt’s long labor of popular education to prepare the American people to meet the danger. Then and later, his hands were tied by the rigid congressional neutrality policy that, over his objections, prohibited arms shipments to all belligerents, victims of agression as well as agressors. Roosevelt persevered. His “quarantine” speech of 1937 was another step in his campaign. Neville Chamberlain, the British Prime Minister, thereafter rebuffed gestures of co-operation, believing that Roosevelt’s policy ran athwart his own program of appeasement.
The French government, less persuaded of the virtues of appeasement and alarmed by the growth of Hitler’s Luftwaffe, sent Baron Amaury de La Grange to the United States in January 1938 to buy American military aircraft. As La Grange reported to Paris, he found Roosevelt “well informed about what is going on in Germany and… completely in favor of all measures that the French Government might believe necessary to reinforce its air formation.” He added that “as long as the White House is occupied by Mr. Roosevelt, who is Francophile and fears German expansion,” there was hope of repeal or sympathetic interpretation of the neutrality restrictions.7
Although La Grange was disappointed to find that the American aircraft industry was not yet up to producing modern combat planes, he recommended that orders be placed for improved models. Little was done, however, until Munich, when Édouard Daladier, now the French Prime Minister, sent Jean Monnet on a second air mission to the United States. With the ardent co-operation of Henry Morgenthau, Jr., the American Secretary of the Treasury, Monnet laid the basis for large-scale French (and soon English) purchase of American planes — a development seized by Roosevelt as a means of promoting the expansion of American military aircraft production. Ironically, Paul Reynaud, as French Finance Minister, opposed plane purchases in America lest they deplete France’s gold reserves. (He changed his mind when he became Prime Minister in 1940.) In the end, the Anglo-French orders of nearly $70 million (nearly one billion in current dollars) quadrupled American aircraft capacity8 — more than an isolationist Congress was willing to do.
The expansion, it turned out, helped the United States more than it helped France. Hitler invaded the Low Countries on 10 May 1940. The delivery of American planes had begun the previous December, but assemblage (in Casablanca!) was slow. When the Germans launched their attack, the French Air Force had received fewer than 170 American planes. Despite the limited training time for French crews, the Glenn Martin and Douglas attack bombers acquitted themselves effectively in combat; so did the Curtiss Hawk fighters.9
It was, as so often in those days, too little and too late. Had French purchases of American planes begun earlier, had French assemblage been more efficient, had assemblage taken place in Bordeaux rather than in Casablanca, Germany might not have gained control of the air so quickly. But Guderian’s Blitzkrieg smashed through Allied resistance and tipped the balance of the war in the first week. Did it have to happen that way? Alistair Horne’s graphic account shows how much in the fog of war turned on decisions that might have been made differently.
Had King Leopold of Belgium foreseen the inevitable and permitted the entry of Allied troops before the German attack, or, given Leopold’s obstinacy, had the Allies not sent major forces into Belgium at all… had Georges not vetoed air attacks on the Panzer divisions in the early days of the campaign, and had the Allies possessed more effective bombers, and more of them, to destroy the German pontoons across the Meuse at Sedan… had the French counter-attacked with concerted vigor against Rommel’s and Guderian’s bridgeheads across the Meuse… had Guderian obeyed Hitler’s order of 17 May and halted his hellbent advance into France… had Weygand waited for Gort in Ypres on 21 May or, alternatively, had he not wasted two days in a tour of command posts… had the Allies struck across the thinly lined and overextended Panzer Corridor by 21 May… might not, on such ifs, the German attack have been turned back? Roosevelt told his Cabinet as late as 7 June that, if the French could hold out for three weeks, they would be able to win against the Germans.10
The ifs might have helped the Germans even more. Had Gort not acted on his own, attacked at Arras on the 21st, and then begun the withdrawal of British forces toward Dunkirk on the 23rd, and had Hitler
not stopped his own Panzers with his halt order of 24 May, would not the Germans have beaten the British to Dunkirk, cut off the British Expeditionary Force, and ended the war in 1940?
Why did France fall? Alistair Horne’s judicious assessment gives full weight to the political decadence of the Third Republic; the obsession of the French rich with the Communist danger and their complacency about fascism; Madame de Portes and the breaking of Paul Reynaud, the anti-Nazi Prime Minister; the fear of another national bleeding like that of 1914-18; the lack of military coordination with the Belgians, the Dutch, and the British; the release of Germany from a two-front war by the Hitler-Stalin Pact. But in the end he generally endorses Weygand’s terse summary, “We have gone to war with a 1918 army against a German Army of 1939” — and with a 1918 army grown old in rigidity, inefficiency, and confusion. Though the French had more tanks and guns than the Germans, the French General Staff had drawn the wrong military lessons from victory while the German General Staff was drawing the right military lessons from defeat and concluding that the war of position was giving way to the war of movement. The superb set piece with which To Lose a Battle begins, the Victory Parade of 14 July 1919, implies and explains the illusions of 1940.
Alistair Horne’s verdict resembles that of Captain Marc Bloch, the great French historian who fought bravely during the fall of France, as he had done in the Great War, joined the Resistance after the French surrender, and was tortured and killed by the Germans in 1944. “Whatever the deep-seated causes of the disaster may have been,” Marc Bloch wrote in 1940, “the immediate occasion… was the utter incompetence of the High Command.”11
The Battle of France had immediate and drastic impact on the United States. It provided Franklin Roosevelt with the evidence, or a good deal of it, that he needed to press the American military buildup. His Cabinet meeting a week after the Nazi attack, wrote Harold Ickes, the interventionist Secretary of the Interior, “was the longest Cabinet meeting that I can remember.… Our feelings were not very cheerful because all during the week the news from Holland and Belgium and France had been getting worse and worse. The problem with us now is to throw everything into high gear and prepare as fast as we can.”12