The problem is dominated by the question of available forces… There is no doubt that our offensive manoeuvre in Belgium and Holland should be conducted with the caution of not allowing ourselves to commit the major part of our reserves in this part of the theatre, in face of a German action which could be nothing more than a diversion. For example, in the event of an attack in force breaking out in the centre, on our front between the Meuse and Moselle, we could be deprived of the necessary means for a counter-attack…9
Momentarily, Gamelin seems to have been swayed by Georges’s arguments. But as well as the essential military considerations, there was an element of personal honour and pride pushing Gamelin along: humiliatingly, as France’s top soldier, he had been forced to stand by while Germany crushed first Czechoslovakia and then Poland. His enemies had never ceased taunting him since the French Army’s lethargy during Hitler’s conquest of Poland, and he was determined not to give them cause to say he had cast Belgium and Holland to their fates too. Then, on 10 January, there occurred one of those freak accidents of war which change the destinies of mankind.
The Mechelen Incident
On 9 January a German major of the paratroops employed on an airborne planning staff, by name Hellmuth Reinberger, received a summons to attend a highly secret conference at Second Air Fleet H.Q. in Cologne the following morning. Reinberger was in Münster at the time, some eighty miles distant as the crow flies. That night he was invited to the local air base. After a number of drinks, and some conviviality, the station commander, a reservist major called Hoenmanns, genially proposed to Reinberger that he save him a dreary train journey by flying him down to Cologne. A First War flyer, Hoenmanns had a civil pilot’s licence and wanted to get in a few more flying hours; also he would welcome an excuse to visit his wife and take home some laundry. Reinberger accepted, on condition that weather conditions were perfect.
The next day dawned cloudless, with visibility over the Ruhr up to two and a half miles. The two majors set forth in a tiny Me-108, Reinberger hugging on his knees an imposing yellow pigskin briefcase, which bulged with top-secret documents relating to the air plan of a German operation to invade Holland and Belgium. Suddenly the weather closed in. Hoenmanns realized that he had probably strayed too far west from his course, and accordingly changed direction towards the east. At that moment, the engine inexplicably cut out. Narrowly missing a high-tension line and with both wing-tips ripped off by a row of poplars, Hoenmanns made a skilful forced landing in a snow-covered thicket. A quick investigation of the map revealed that they had landed just inside Belgian territory, near Mechelen, a few miles north of Maastricht. In horror, Reinberger leapt behind a bush hedge and tried to destroy the vital documents. But his lighter failed. Then an obliging Belgian peasant provided a match, and Reinberger built a small fire into which he fed the papers (always notoriously hard to burn) leaf by leaf. Soon some Belgian troops, under a captain, arrived and arrested Hoenmanns, who pretended that he had flown alone. The column of smoke from behind the thicket betrayed Reinberger, however, and the two majors were marched to a Belgian gendarmerie post. There, through what seems like extraordinary negligence, Reinberger was enabled to have another shot at destroying the documents by thrusting them into a stove. But he was interrupted by the Belgian captain, who rescued what remained. By nightfall, the papers were in the hands of the Belgian G.H.Q.; though badly charred, they contained enough to indicate that the Germans intended thrusting into northern France, via Belgium (and Holland), in what appeared to be a replay of the Schlieffen Plan of 1914.
The ‘Dyle–Breda Plan’
Belgium promptly passed this information on to the Dutch and the French. The French Army was placed in a state of alert. In terrible weather conditions, Billotte’s forces closed up to the Belgian frontier. Momentarily, the Belgian High Command raised the frontier barriers, and it seemed as if the Allies would be ‘invited’ to enter. But swiftly King Leopold reversed the order, sacking his Chief of Staff. Exasperated and despondent, the French Army drew back again. After 15 January, this apparently most menacing of the various false alarms receded into the ranks of the others. But the glimpse it gave of German operational plans proved enough to fix Gamelin in his resolve.10 On 20 March he issued a new directive, supplementing the former ‘Dyle Plan’ with the ‘Breda Variant’. Approved by both French and British Governments, this would in fact be the master-plan with which the Allies met the German onslaught when it came on 10 May. Instead of the ten French divisions (plus the B.E.F.) previously earmarked for Belgian operations, now thirty would be involved, among them the very cream of the French and British Armies: two out of France’s three new armoured divisions, five out of seven motorized divisions and all three of the Light Mechanized Divisions (D.L.M.s). On the extreme left flank the manoeuvre, edging the sea, was placed General Giraud’s Seventh Army of seven first-rate divisions (including one D.L.M.), with the task of being ready to move at top speed through Belgium to link up with the Dutch Army. Hitherto the Seventh Army had constituted a significant part of General Georges’s mobile strategic reserves; Gamelin’s decision to allocate it to the ‘Breda Variant’ was to have the most far-reaching consequences of any part of the Allied Plan. Next in line came Lord Gort’s B.E.F.,11 which would advance up to the River Dyle roughly between Louvain and Wavre; south of it came General Blanchard’s crack First Army, with the role of holding the Gembloux ‘Gap’ down to the fortress of Namur on the Meuse; while General Corap’s Ninth Army was to wheel forwards to occupy the line of the Meuse where it runs through the Belgian Ardennes, south of Namur. The pivot of the whole manoeuvre would be just north of Sedan, where the Meuse leaves France, and where lay the boundary between the Ninth and Second Armies; to the right of Corap, General Huntziger’s Second Army, stretching from Sedan to the Maginot Line anchor at Longwy, would remain static – as indeed would the rest of the French Army encamped behind ‘le trou’. In essence, the finalized plan meant that the main striking power of the Franco-British Army was to be committed to whatever might transpire in Belgium and Holland, north of the line Liège–Namur.
Up to the moment of the German onslaught, misgivings lingered in high French circles about the Dyle–Breda Plan. Following the 10 January alarm, the Belgian General Staff had been persuaded to prepare positions along the Dyle, in case the Allies should be called upon to occupy them; but General Prioux, commanding the Cavalry Corps, which with some of France’s best armoured and mechanized units formed the steel tip of Blanchard’s First Army, had strong doubts on the efficacy of the unreconnoitred defences the Belgians were supposedly erecting in the Gembloux Gap. General Giraud, whose Seventh Army would now have the most ambitious role to perform, complained of the difficulties in a letter to Billotte on 28 March. Billotte, whose No. 1 Army Group held direct responsibility for the whole manoeuvre, had been its most enthusiastic supporter among Gamelin’s subordinates, but he too now backed up Giraud’s reservations. General Vuillemin, always gloomy about German air superiority, had shared General Georges’s pessimism throughout, and Georges himself remained unconvinced. But perhaps because of the lack of communication between him and Gamelin, perhaps because his will-power had been diminished by his ailing health, Georges was impotent to influence the Generalissimo.12 In Britain, too, there were dissenting voices; but with only a handful of divisions in the field (by May 1940, Lord Gort still had no more than nine under his command), it was felt that she should keep quiet and leave the planning to the leaders of France’s invincible Army.13
Gamelin, buried away in his Thébaïde, alone remained sublimely confident. On 15 April he dispatched a last letter to dispel Georges’s doubts, once again reiterating that ‘it seemed impossible systematically to abandon Holland to Germany’. In defiance of the lessons of Poland, he somehow maintained a simple faith in the Dutch and Belgian ability to defend their countries. Far from fearing a German onslaught through the Low Countries, there were occasions when he gave the impression of actually longing for it, for, a
s he once informed the Government, ‘the enemy would be offering himself to us in open territory’.
It is difficult to conceive, however, with what forces Gamelin saw himself counter-attacking the German thrust which would thus be ‘offering’ itself. In expanding the Dyle Plan to embrace the ‘Breda Variant’ and by committing General Giraud’s Seventh Army to it, Gamelin was being totally loyal to the principles of the ‘continuous front’. But behind this front he retained only the scantiest of reserves. It was all right provided the front remained continuous, as it had done from 1914 to 1918. In Gamelin’s final alignment which was to bear the brunt of the German attack of May 1940, roughly thirty divisions were committed to the Dyle-Breda manoeuvre, ten garrison divisions were permanently installed in the Maginot Line, while yet another thirty backed them up as ‘interval troops’, leaving only twenty-two divisions in reserve. Of these twenty-two, seven (including two out of France’s three new armoured divisions) were earmarked for Belgium, and another five allocated to meet a possible German thrust through Switzerland, so that the overall strategic reserve left to General Georges amounted to between ten and thirteen divisions, or practically nothing. That an additional thirty good divisions should have to be employed ‘guarding’ the Maginot Line in itself seemed to point up a grave fallacy in France’s whole strategic plan; as things were to turn out, the crucial phase of the battle would already be lost beyond repair before any of these thirty wasted divisions could be thrown into it.14 Thus the overall picture of General Georges’s North-East Front showed a powerful right flank on the Maginot Line (absorbing nearly half of all his effectives), and a powerful left flank facing northern Belgium. But the centre, along a front of little less than one hundred miles behind the so-called ‘impenetrable’ Belgian Ardennes, was held by only some four light cavalry divisions (still partly equipped with horses) and ten mediocre infantry divisions of the Ninth and Second Armies – about which more will be said later. And behind them, emptiness.
What a standing temptation the spectacle of this French line, then, so weak in the centre, might present to an opposing captain of audacity and genius!
Polish Lesson Unlearnt
Of all the attitudes struck by the French High Command during the Phoney War, none today seems more incomprehensible than its apparent refusal to take cognizance of the lessons of the Polish campaign. Nothing that had happened to the unhappy Poles made France in any way alter her basic doctrine of war, review the training techniques of combat echelons, or consider possible German offensive plans against her in the light of the strategy that had succeeded so admirably against Poland. It was not as if the French High Command was uninformed. On returning to France in the autumn of 1939, General Armengaud, an Air Force general sent to lead a mission to Poland, and who had closely observed events there, delivered a detailed oral report to Gamelin, which he then followed up with a written memorandum. In this memorandum, he warned how the Wehrmacht in Poland had proved its ability ‘to break through a defensive front inadequately manned’.
It would be mad [continued Armengaud] not to draw an exact lesson from this pattern and not pay heed to this warning. The German system consists essentially of making a breach in the front with armour and aircraft, then to throw mechanized and motorized columns into the breach, to beat them down to right and left in order to keep on enlarging it, at the same time as armoured detachments, guided, protected and reinforced by aircraft, advance in front of the supporting divisions… in such a way that the defence’s manoeuvrability… is reduced to impotence.
Armengaud considered that of the German armour and aircraft, it was the latter that had been the ‘most decisive’, by impeding the defenders’ manoeuvrability, and by breaching the chain of command ‘in such a way that the command is made blind and cannot get its orders through’. To Gamelin, Armengaud expressed the view that the Germans would attempt a breakthrough in the West, probably near the centre of the French front, and that they would then try to fan out to the rear, using a mass of material and aircraft. He thought they would be able to make such a breach very quickly, possibly within forty-eight hours.
For his pains, Armengaud was relegated to an administrative post, as commander of the Paris Air Region, where, he says, he found himself powerless to stem the feckless optimism in high places, which increased as the Polish defeat receded from memory. But Armengaud was evidently also backed up by reports submitted to Gamelin by his Deuxième Bureau chief, Colonel Gauché, one of which described how the effects of the German aerial bombardment had ‘resulted in almost complete paralysis of the Polish High Command, which was rendered incapable either of completing mobilization or concentration, or of carrying out reinforcements or supplies, or of executing any kind of co-ordinated manoeuvre’. The Deuxième Bureau also pointed out the highly relevant strategic fact that the Germans had aimed not at capturing Warsaw, but had sought first and foremost to achieve the total destruction of the Polish Army. Here was certainly one lesson that would prove worth considering in May 1940. On more specific, but equally important, matters, the Deuxième Bureau warned the High Command of the effect of German tank guns on the Polish bunkers; these had ‘withstood the fire of 150-mm. guns perfectly, but their machine-guns were often destroyed by shots in the embrasure fired by the tanks. It thus appears that every fortified work must be provided with anti-tank weapons…’ It will be seen how much notice was taken of this warning.
The French High Command attitude to all this was roughly: ‘We are not Poles, it could not happen here.’ General Keller, Inspector-General of Tanks, wrote in answer to a memorandum written by Colonel de Gaulle:
… Even supposing that the present fortified line were breached or outflanked, it does not appear that our opponents will find a combination of circumstances as favourable for a Blitzkreig as in Poland. One can see, then, that in future operations the primary role of the tank will be the same as in the past: to assist the infantry in reaching successive objectives.
Thus inflexible remained the military doctrinaires of France. General Huntziger, commanding the ill-fated Second Army, did go to some length to circulate among his command details of the Wehrmacht technique in Poland, but few practical consequences by way of combat training ever seem to have followed.
Finland and other Distractions
No less extraordinary than the French High Command’s studied and arrogant disregard of the lessons of Poland was the astonishing unreality of all the Allied schemes and projects during the Phoney War, of which Gamelin’s delusive optimism is but one facet or syndrome. In both French and British Councils of War, new mad ideas of launching diversionary operations were constantly being thought up. Certainly, in France, the genesis of these schemes lay understandably in the external anxiety of keeping war away from French soil, but all were predicated upon strength which, in early 1940, the Allies simply did not possess, and, worse still, several of them would have brought Russia actively into the war on Hitler’s side, a possibility the folly of which hardly bears thinking about.
On 30 November, her demands for concessions to help secure the approaches to Leningrad having been refused, Russia attacked Finland. Hitting back, the gallant Finns captured Western imagination by inflicting defeat after defeat upon the ponderous Red Army. In England, Transport House condemned with angriest indignation ‘the criminal conspiracy of Stalin and Hitler’, while (according to the Daily Sketch) at Buckingham Palace a large-scale map of Finland soon displaced one of the Western Front in the King’s office. But in France emotions reached fever pitch: prayers were offered in the Madeleine for Marshal Mannerheim; ladies knitted vests for Finnish soldiers; gala charity performances in aid of the Finns were held at the Opéra and in the Carlton at Cannes. Here was a real war, a man’s war that one could get excited about! ‘The fortified front of Karelia,’ wrote Fabre-Luce, ‘evoked simultaneously the Maginot Line and a season of winter sports. It was like a highly seductive glossy magazine for skiing amateurs, obliged this year to remain at their hearth-side
s.’ From the squalor of the concentration camp at Vernet, French attitudes struck Arthur Koestler rather less favourably; the treatment of each Finnish success as ‘victories of France’ reminded him of ‘a voyeur who gets his thrills and satisfaction out of watching other people’s virile exploits, which he is unable to imitate’.
Ideologically, French emotions were compounded of several ingredients. At their highest, Russia’s attack was regarded as just one more repellent act of aggression by the totalitarian powers; and had not France, that same September, entered the lists as champion of the spirit of the League of Nations? But, more powerfully, among the bourgeoisie and the Right wing there were those animosities left lingering by the Popular Front, and exacerbated by the Ribbentrop-Molotov deal. Here the ‘Winter War’ presented prospects of a holy crusade against Bolshevism infinitely more appealing than the drôle de guerre against the dormant and untroublesome Hitler. The Assembly, from which the Communist Deputies had just been purged, became strongly interventionist. Senator Bardoux, an independent Radical charged with ‘sounding out the British’, represented a fair section of French bourgeois opinion when he wrote in his diary for 23 December:
The Russian disaster in Finland is a capital event. Henceforth, far from trying to split Germany and Russia, we must, on the contrary, weld them together more tightly, for a weak ally is a ball-and-chain and opens a breach in the common front. We must enter into it resolutely. By intervening to aid Finland we shall create, together with the neutrals and Italy [he added hopefully], the definitive bloc. It is possible to offer the Crimea to Hitler, to utilize the Ukrainians, the Transcaucasians and the Persians. We can roll up everything, all the way to the Caucasus…
To Lose a Battle Page 17