To Lose a Battle

by Alistair Horne

  It was, he declared, ‘transcending the frontiers of reason’. Rundstedt too, deprived of the reassuring presence of Manstein, continued to worry about that ‘open southern flank’, deducing that it must be along the axis Paris–Châlons-sur-Marne-Verdun that Gamelin would logically mass his strongest reserves. His new Chief of Staff, Sodenstern, had his doubts about the hideous traffic tangle that might ensue from the vehicles of seven Panzer divisions all converging on the Ardennes. Even Guderian was seen to be having some second thoughts about whether his corps alone could force the Meuse at Sedan. Halder, right to the end, harboured doubts as to whether the troops would be capable of executing this plan, which called for the utmost skill and endurance. The deficiencies shown in the Polish campaign still worried him, and even by the spring of 1940 only a portion of the Army seemed to him to be up to standard, either in spirit, training or equipment, and all these élite units would be committed into the first wave of the attack.

  But gradually new sand-table exercises and war games ironed out the remaining defects in the plan. Day after day the Panzer men brought themselves and their weapons to a higher pitch of efficiency; up in the Eifel Mountains, schools, dance-halls, and timber sheds were turned into workshops, keeping the vehicles in top running order, ready for action at twenty-four hours’ notice as decreed by Hitler. Meanwhile, Intelligence reports brought encouraging news. By mid-March, ‘Foreign Armies West’ had a complete enough picture of the French order of battle to assure the O.K.H. that the most reserves Gamelin could bring to bear upon that vulnerable southern flank of the breakthrough would be 41 to 48 divisions, of which 12 to 17 could be rated as ‘third wave’ units only. And to muster this force, the French High Command would have to act with great speed and decision; this, ‘Foreign Armies West’ assessed, was not of the highest probability. A second cause for satisfaction stemmed from the results of aerial reconnaissance over the Meuse crossing zones. Throughout the winter, Luftwaffe planes flying at extremely high altitude had been busily photographing the area. From a microscopic examination of the prints, Major von Stiotta, an Austrian engineer of great ability, reported to Rundstedt shortly before the attack was due to be unleashed that the French fortifications belonging to the Maginot Line ‘extension’ were very far from completed.

  In Rome in mid-March, President Roosevelt’s peace envoy, Sumner Welles, was told by Ciano that recently ‘Ribbentrop seemed to be convinced that the German Army could achieve a military victory within five months’, and Welles recalled the cockiness Goering had displayed when interviewed in Berlin, declaring that Germany now held ‘all the trumps in her hands’. At the beginning of April, Halder’s diary reveals a new note of confident enthusiasm, while later in the month General Fromm, commanding the Reserve Army, was heard to prophesy ‘We shall push through Holland and Belgium at one stroke, and finish off France in fourteen days.’ It was not least a growing awareness of the real beauty of Sichelschnitt as a strategy of war that lay at the root of this self-assurance. As subsequent events were to prove, Sichelschnitt was one of the most inspired blueprints for victory that the military mind has ever conceived.25 In its final state, it could no longer be rated as the brainchild of any one person: without the extraordinary drive and instinctive ideas of Hitler, and without Manstein’s brilliant strategic conception, the O.K.H. would never have contemplated a knock-out blow against France. Yet without Halder and the O.K.H., Hitler would probably have launched a half-cock offensive in 1939, and it was finally Halder’s organizational excellence, his ability to digest and apply technical advice, and his meticulous care that brought Sichelschnitt to its ultimate perfection.

  But in fact, Sichelschnitt was not quite perfect. Otherwise it would have won not just the Battle of France, but the whole war. Tactically perfect, strategically almost perfect, yet as an instrument of higher policy it possessed one fatal flaw. In mid-March Hitler was questioning Guderian on his plans for establishing a bridgehead across the Meuse at Sedan on the fifth day of the attack: ‘ “And then what are you going to do?” He was the first person who had thought to ask me this vital question,’ Guderian recalls.

  I replied: ‘Unless I receive orders to the contrary, I intend on the next day to continue my advance westwards. The supreme leadership must decide whether my objective is to be Amiens or Paris. In my opinion the correct course is to drive past Amiens to the English Channel.’ Hitler nodded and said nothing more. Only General Busch, who commanded the Sixteenth Army on my left, cried out: ‘Well, I don’t think you’ll cross the river in the first place!’

  Guderian adds revealingly: ‘I never received any further orders as to what to do once the bridgehead over the Meuse was captured…’ This reluctance of the German High Command to name the Channel as its ultimate objective was typical of the nagging fears at the audacity of Sichelschnitt, which, with memories of the brilliance of the French Army of the Marne still persisting, could never quite be suppressed. Most of the energy that the O.K.H. had lavished upon Sichelschnitt had been absorbed in planning the actual breakthrough, but little on its immediate aftermath. Furthermore, the contingency of Sichelschnitt leading to a total victory over France seemed so remote that, beyond the operation itself, no thought whatsoever had been given to how a knockout blow might then be administered to Britain. The vanquishing of France in one swift offensive remained altogether too startling a prospect for the First War minds of Halder and company, and even Hitler’s inspirational vision for once failed him. Just three days before the great attack began, Hitler had an interview with Admiral Raeder, his naval chief; but neither Sichelschnitt, nor any possible follow-up invasion of Britain, was ever mentioned. All Hitler could think of was the mighty engagement by land that lay ahead.

  Herein lay the Achilles’ heel of Sichelschnitt, and the seeds of Hitler’s defeat.

  By mid-March 1940, Sichelschnitt and its dependent forces had already reached the necessary state of readiness. Everyone expected Hitler to press the button in a matter of days. But his attention was temporarily distracted elsewhere. Despite the capitulation of Finland and the collapse of their crazy schemes of intervention, the Allies still appeared to be showing a disquieting interest in Narvik and the Swedish iron-ore fields. To forestall them, Hitler decided that, while the Allies dithered, he would strike in Norway first.

  Chapter 8

  Towards the Brink

  Easy training, hard combat; hard training, easy combat.

  SUVAROV

  All conditions are more calculable, all obstacles more surmountable, than those of human resistance.

  B. H. LIDDELL HART, The Strategy of Indirect Approach

  Disaster in Norway

  On 14 December concern about the course of the Russo-Finnish War had caused Hitler to instruct the O.K.W. to prepare preliminary studies for an invasion of Norway. His preoccupation with Gelb kept thoughts of any such project well in the background, until, on 16 February, the Royal Navy boarded within Norwegian territorial waters a German ship called the Altmark, liberating a large number of British seamen taken off ships which the Graf Spee had sunk. Three days later, Hitler, enraged by this coup de main and alarmed by Allied interest in Norway, ordered the speeding-up of plans for Weserübung (‘Exercise Weser’), the code name for the occupation of Denmark and Norway. On 1 March he signed the directive for Weserübung, but for two days could not make up his mind whether it should come before or after Sichelschnitt. Then, upon the advice of Jodl1 that the two operations should be kept entirely independent of each other, Hitler decided that the Norwegian operation should be implemented first, and he began to cast around for a suitable pretext for violating the neutrality of two more countries. All this resulted in further delay to Sichelschnitt.

  Meanwhile, after months of argument, Churchill, at a meeting of the Allied Supreme War Council on 28 March, finally persuaded Chamberlain to permit the Royal Navy to mine the Leads, the Norwegian coastal waters, along which flowed the Swedish iron ore destined for Hitler’s war plants. Warning of thi
s breach of neutrality was to be transmitted to Norway and Sweden on 5 April. By now the advent of spring had brought a new (and quite misplaced) cockiness to the men and mouth-pieces of British public life. On 4 April, Chamberlain made his famous speech informing the Conservative Party that Hitler had ‘missed the bus’, while on the same day it reported his speech, the Daily Express published an interview with the C.I.G.S., under the headline ‘Come on Hitler! Dares Ironside!’, in which Ironside was quoted as having said: ‘We would welcome a go at him. Frankly we would welcome an attack. We are sure of ourselves…’ But while Chamberlain and Ironside were speaking, the first of some 10,000 German troops were already ‘embussed’ for Norway, concealed aboard merchant ships and colliers, in what was to be one of the most daring strokes of the war.

  On 9 April, Denmark was seized almost without a shot being fired. In five separate groups, the Germans landed in Norway at Oslo, Kristiansand, Bergen, Trondheim, and Narvik. Airborne forces seized the key airfields at Oslo and Stavanger. The Norwegians fought back courageously, though ill prepared and surprised. But the Allies, in spite of having had months in which to think about the problem, were equally taken by surprise. In Paris, the Secretary of the newly created War Committee, Paul Baudouin, recalled that ‘for five minutes the Prime Minister and I vainly sought on the coasts of Norway for another Narvik, for we were sure that the Narvik where the German troops had been reported could not be the iron-ore port in the north’ – a thousand miles from any German base. British submarines watched the German troopships creeping across the Skagerrak, but it was not until the afternoon of the 9th that they received orders to torpedo them, by which time it was too late. The fact was that the Allies, in arrogant confidence of the supremacy of the Royal Navy, had never believed that Hitler with his tiny naval forces could conceivably launch an amphibious operation of this scope. Leisurely, and confusedly, they reacted. Between 10 and 13 April the British scored a heartening naval victory by sinking all ten German destroyers covering the Narvik landings; but they carried with them no ground troops with which to follow up. It was the story of Gallipoli and Suvla Bay all over again. Further south, off Bergen, a three-hour air attack by Luftwaffe bombers on the 10th sank a destroyer and hit the battleship Rodney with a dud bomb. Modest as these results were, they had the critical effect of persuading the C.-in-C. Home Fleet, Admiral Sir Charles Forbes, to turn back out to sea. It was the first time in war that ground-based aircraft had proved their ascendancy over capital surface ships.

  At Rosyth, four British battalions already earmarked for a Norwegian adventure were embarked, disembarked and then re-embarked, losing in the process much of their stores and departing almost without artillery or tanks. The first British contingent arrived at Narvik on 15 April; then between the 16th and 18th other feeble forces landed at Namsos and Andalsnes, on either side of Trondheim in central Norway, in hopes of cutting off the German bridgehead there. On the 19th, ten days after the Germans had landed, the first French troops arrived; but, according to Paul Reynaud,

  they were completely incapable of moving off or offering any action whatsoever. Their artillery, tanks, anti-aircraft guns, their mules and even their skis and snowshoes had remained in the auxiliary cruiser Ville d’Alger, which had not been able to enter the harbour because of her length – a detail which had been forgotten.

  By now, using 350 Ju-52 transport planes, the Luftwaffe had thoroughly established itself in central and southern Norway, and here the Stukas rendered the Allied expeditionary forces quite helpless. This extreme mobility of German air power was a depressing foretaste of what was to come, in France, a month later.

  By 3 May the British had been forced to evacuate all their troops from central Norway. Narvik remained the Allies’ only toehold, and indeed here things went badly against the Germans; only the exigencies of the war in France were to save General Dietl and his 2,000 mountain troops from being wiped out.

  In his Norwegian gamble, Hitler lost ten out of his twenty destroyers, three out of eight cruisers. Thus on a sideshow with no decisive bearing upon the war, he had squandered his Navy, without which (even had he prepared any such strategy) an invasion of the British Isles in 1940 would be utterly out of the question. This, for the Allies, was the one net gain from an operation that was otherwise an unrelieved saga of British professional incompetence and half-heartedness – ‘frivolous dilettantism’ was Hitler’s scornful verdict. Here, as at Gallipoli in 1915 (not to mention Suez in 1956), Britain failed at just the kind of operation for which both her history and geography should have best prepared her.2 Worst of all, Norway was a flagrant defeat of British sea power. Its repercussions upon the forthcoming campaign in France also deserve serious consideration: first, there was the impact that defeat in Norway had upon the already impaired morale of France; and secondly, there were its stimulating effects upon the German leadership.

  From Berlin on 9 April, William Shirer recorded the news of Hitler’s Scandinavian move as ‘stupefying’. Reactions in France were just that much more powerful. They were admirably summed up by a lieutenant accompanying André Maurois on a visit to General Corap’s ill-fated Ninth Army:

  It’s a bad business that our first enterprise in this war met with failure. A young horse must never be defeated in his trial runs. If he is, he gets the habit, loses his self-respect and comes to consider it perfectly natural that he should stay behind.

  Frivolously, Paris society affected satisfaction at Britain’s discomfiture; Vincent Sheean noted that ‘even the most sensible Frenchman seemed to take pleasure in saying that France could have managed things better’. Everything the caustic Ferdonnet broadcast from Stuttgart about ‘les sales anglais’ seemed to be true. But in the Army, there was the deepest apprehension; if Hitler could worst Britain in her own element, where the Royal Navy was supposedly supreme, how could the French Army stop him on land, where the odds were by no means so favourable? Was there, in fact, no stopping this apparently invincible demon? Morale descended yet another few pegs.

  Unknown to the Allies, however, for all the feebleness of their counter-efforts, Norway was in fact a much closer-run thing than it had seemed. Hitler had been significantly shaken by the few reverses suffered there. There were two periods of what Jodl in his diary describes as ‘leadership chaos’: from 14 to 18 April, concerning Narvik, and until the 23rd over Trondheim. Narvik threw Hitler into a complete panic, and he actually ordered Dietl to surrender; the signal was, however, suppressed by a courageous staff officer on the O.K.W. Trouble with the airborne landing in Norway had made Goering and his staff extremely nervous about the operations projected for Holland, while so large a portion of Luftwaffe strength (especially in the indispensable Ju-52 transports) had been committed to Norway that even a moderate increase in the British air effort there might well have made a considerable inroad in the air support of Sichelschnitt. But the most important factor was psychological. Whatever the results in Norway, they would have been unlikely to halt Sichelschnitt; on the other hand, the panic Hitler showed over Narvik entitles one to conclude that one or two harder knocks would most probably have persuaded both him and his generals to greater caution when it came to France. And nothing would have been more likely to spell ruin to Sichelschnitt than excessive caution, or bad nerves.

  As it was, by 24 April the situation had improved so much that Hitler could now once again turn his eyes back to the West. On 1 May, more good news prompted him to order that steps be taken so that Sichelschnitt could be launched at twenty-four hours’ notice at any time from 4 May.

  Crises in France and Britain

  If Norway led, among the German generals, to renewed confidence in their Führer, in both France and Britain it resulted in a major crisis of leadership. For Gamelin, the days of 12 and 13 April were ‘among the most painful of my existence’; on being summoned to a Cabinet meeting, he found ‘an atmosphere of ice. It was as though they had just pronounced “Bring in the accused!” ’ Following on the Finnish débâcle, pu
blic dissatisfaction had already brought about the fall of Gamelin’s protector, Daladier, replaced (on 21 March) by a new Cabinet under Paul Reynaud, who was no friend of the French Generalissimo.

  When France went to war in 1914, her political parties had declared a truce, forming under the Union Sacrée a coalition almost unique in the history of France. Poincaré had possessed no love for Clemenceau, but out of patriotism was prepared to collaborate loyally with him; in 1939, although Léon Blum had declared that he would ally himself with anyone dedicated solely to winning the war, it was typical that at a dinner party where Clare Boothe was present, half the guests refused to shake hands with poor Blum. In war, the musical chairs of the Third Republic went on as dizzily as before. Shortly after its outbreak, Daladier had managed to purge the appeaser, Bonnet,3 from the Quai d’Orsay, though he could not get rid of him altogether, and Bonnet had lingered on as Minister of Justice. Daladier then made an attempt at re-creating the Union Sacrée by bringing his old foe, Édouard Herriot, into the Government in Bonnet’s place. ‘Come, it is your duty,’ he is reputed to have said to Herriot. ‘At the Quai d’Orsay we need a faith, a doctrine, a capable head, endurance; in short, a man.’ Herriot retorted, ungraciously, ‘What for?’ but accepted with the proviso that he should be ‘covered’ by Pétain also entering the Cabinet. The old Marshal’s response to Daladier, however, was: ‘I am at your orders. But veto Herriot.’ Thereafter Daladier was left with no alternative but to turn himself into a one-man band: Foreign Secretary, as well as Premier, Minister of National Defence and Minister of War.

  The Cabinet swiftly divided itself into the ‘hards’, as represented by Paul Reynaud and Clemenceau’s former hatchetman, Georges Mandel, and the ‘softs’: Bonnet, de Monzie, Pomaret and Chautemps.4 These ‘softs’ within the Cabinet represented but a small fraction of the various dissident groups, opposed to the war to some extent or other, with whom Daladier had to deal: Communists, anti-militarists of the non-Communist Left, conservatives fearful of revolution, the rich trembling for their riches, defeatists and pro-Fascists such as Pierre Laval, who, though still in outer darkness, wielded a potent influence upon the ‘softs’ within Daladier’s Cabinet. Meanwhile, above it all, the Head of State, who could perhaps have lent more teeth to France’s war-time Government, was manifestly senile; on visiting President Lebrun in the spring of 1940, Sumner Welles found his memory ‘failing rapidly. It was difficult for him to remember with any accuracy names, or dates, or even facts…’ He attempted ‘with a good deal of assistance’ to tell Welles about the various paintings in the Élysée, but ‘was quite unable to remember the names of any of them’.