To Lose a Battle

by Alistair Horne

  In the crucial matter of armour, figures have varied wildly; on 10 May, the French Deuxième Bureau estimated that the Germans had 7,000 to 7,500 tanks, a vastly inflated figure which came to be extensively used in France by way of excuse for what was to follow. According to Guderian, Germany’s ten Panzer divisions should have had 2,800 tanks, but in reality had only 2,200; as a reliable figure based on German archives, one could, however, accept a total of just over 2,400 and well under 3,000.8 For the number of Franco-British tanks available to the North-East Front, Gamelin himself gives a total of 3,432 modern vehicles, while Colonel Goutard, a generally trustworthy source, puts the Allied total ‘in the region of 3,000’, and the most recent estimate (by General de Cossé Brissac, former head of the French Army’s Service Historique) calculates the French total alone at ‘3,100 of which 2,285 were modern’. Thus, in overall tank numbers, the French and British jointly were actually superior.

  Nor in quality of tanks was the gulf between the Wehrmacht and the Allies quite so wide as it had been two years previously. The mainstay of the German Panzer divisions was the light Mark II tank, which carried only a 20-mm. cannon; more than 1,400, or over half the total Panzers, were Marks I or II, while there were only 349 of the medium Mark III tanks, which carried a 37-mm. gun, and only 278 of the new 24-ton Mark IV, carrying a low-velocity 75-mm. gun. Against this, the French possessed their new, heavy (33-ton) ‘B’ tank – possibly the best of any nation in 1940 – and the fast, medium (20-ton) ‘Somua’. The ‘B’ tank mounted a 47-mm. gun in a revolving turret and a 75-mm. mounted in the hull,9 and had armour thicker than any German tank; the ‘Somua’ also mounted the high-velocity 47-mm. gun, with better penetrative power than any other gun of the period, and the numbers of these two tanks, despite all the delays in French production, totalled 800, or more than the Marks III and IV possessed by the Germans. (In addition, the 100 British infantry tanks in France were also more heavily armoured than their German counterparts, and their 2-pounder gun more potent than the Germans’ 37-mm.) The defects of the ‘Somua’ and ‘B’ tanks were that their turrets were operated by one overworked commander-loader-gunner, compared with the two- or three-man turrets of the British and Germans; the 75-mm. of the ‘B’ tank (fired and aimed by the driver) could only be pointed laterally by moving the tank itself; and French gun-sights were inferior. The other modern models of tank principally employed by the French were the R.35 (Renault, model 1935) and the H.35 (Hotchkiss, model 1935), still mounting an old-fashioned, stubby 37-mm. gun that was useless against armour.

  But the gravest defects of the French tanks still lay, as has been mentioned earlier, in their poor operating range and the fact that four-fifths of them carried no radio. Thus was their mobility badly impaired. Still weightier than any technical advantage, however, was the superiority of the German Panzer crews in training and doctrine. During the Anschluss of 1938, many German tanks10 had broken down on the way to Austria and there was chaos on the roads. In the meantime, however, Hitler had had two years and two campaigns – Czechoslovakia and Poland – in which to put this right. He had not wasted his opportunities. Finally, worst of all, of course, was the way in which the French tanks were scattered: 700 to 800 in the cavalry divisions or D.L.M.s, 1,500 to 1,700 dispersed in independent battalions under the infantry. The remainder belonged to the three new armoured divisions, only formed in 1940,11 and each contained just half as many tanks as the ten powerful Panzer divisions into which was concentrated all the German armour.

  In anti-tank weapons, the German 37-mm. gunners would be hard pressed to make an impression on the heavier French tanks. But the much superior French 47-mm. was in such short supply that only sixteen divisions possessed any at all; the few that existed were drawn by fifteen-year-old converted tractors, but the ammunition was carried in trucks, so that the guns could move across country but not their ammunition. The older 25-mm. lacked punch, weighed half a ton and depended largely on horse transport. It too was short in numbers, with Corap’s Ninth Army (which would need them most desperately) possessing only half of the established number of 25-mms. The situation in anti-tank mines was even worse; by some extraordinary omission, not one had been ordered in France before the war, and by May 1940 they were just beginning to reach the front-line forces. In artillery, France was numerically superior, with 11,200 guns to 7,710. But still as reliant upon the horse, so pathetically vulnerable from the air, as it had been in 1918, the French artillery was equipped with none of the self-propelled guns to be found in every German Panzer division.

  Aircraft

  In anti-aircraft weapons, France’s position was particularly deplorable. According to General Roton, ‘on 10 May we possessed 17 guns of 90-mm. calibre’. Of light anti-aircraft, so vital in defence against dive-bombers, only 22 French divisions were equipped with the 20-mm. Oerlikon, and their allocation was a mere twelve pieces each; 13 other divisions had the new French 25-mm. anti-aircraft gun (six each), but these had only begun to arrive at the end of April, hardly time enough to give the crews adequate training. There were 39 batteries kept in reserve at Army level; otherwise the remainder of France’s anti-aircraft defence was made up of 75-mms. left over from 1918. In contrast, against a total of just over 1,500 weapons, the Germans could mount 2,600 of the powerful 88-mm., and 6,700 light flak with which each Panzer and motorized division was plentifully endowed.

  It was of course in the air that the most blatant inferiority of the Allies lay. By the spring of 1940, the Luftwaffe stood nearly at its peak. Despite the efforts of Raoul Dautry, in April the French aircraft industry was still only producing sixty planes a month,12 the same quantity it had produced during September 1939. The relative merits of the opposing aircraft have already been discussed; in numbers the balance was now as follows:

  Germany13 France13 Britain (in France)14

  Bombers 1,400 150–175 220

  Dive-bombers 342 54 0

  Fighters 1,000 700 130

  Reconnaissance and scout planes 500 350–400 50

  The French total was thus approximately 1,200, and the British deployed something over 600 in France, if one also took into account the aircraft of Bomber Command which could intervene in the battle. But according to General d’Astier de la Vigerie, who commanded the Zone d’Opérations Aériennes Nord (Z.O.A.N.), because of the French system of dispersal, his vital Zone, supporting Billotte’s No. 1 Army Group, could only count on a total of 746 aircraft. Against this, Goering would be able to deploy 3,000–3,500 planes out of a grand total of 5,000, the remainder (including the Ju-52 transports) being kept in Norway or in reserve in Germany. What the Wehrmacht lacked in guns on the ground was more than made up for by its ‘flying artillery’. In mobility and training, the Luftwaffe, with its experience in Spain and Poland, also had an incalculable advantage.

  The French on the Meuse

  The French forces which specifically would bear the weight of the German offensive, of Rundstedt’s forty-five divisions spearheaded by those seven Panzers, were the Ninth Army of General Corap and the Second Army of General Huntziger.

  As already noted, the function of the Ninth Army under Gamelin’s ‘Dyle-Breda Plan’ was to wheel forward upon its pivot north of Sedan to hold the Belgian section of the Meuse running from Namur southwards, which would involve an advance of up to forty-five miles. The front Corap was expected to hold spanned approximately fifty air miles; but in fact, taking into account the sinuous twists and turns of the Meuse, it amounted to considerably more than this. For this task, he had only nine and a half divisions. There were two Light Cavalry Divisions (the 1st and 4th), plus the 3rd Spahi Brigade, a mixture of horses and light armour that could in no way stand up to a German Panzer division; these, acting as a reconnaissance screen, were to push into the Ardennes across the Meuse and absorb the first shock of a German attack while the infantry were taking up position along the Meuse.

  Of Corap’s seven infantry divisions holding this key sector of the front, only two, the 5th
Motorized and 4th North African, were regulars; two (the 18th and 22nd) were ‘A’ series, which meant that only 23 per cent of their officers, 17 per cent of the N.C.O.s and 2 per cent of the men were regulars, the remainder reservists; two others (the 61st and 53rd) were ‘B’ series, which were composed almost exclusively of reservists (and the oldest reservists at that – men of forty unkindly nicknamed ‘crocodiles’ by the rest of the Army) commanded by generals called back from retirement; finally, one (the 102nd) was a fortress division of the kind to be found embedded in the Maginot Line, severely limited in its mobility.

  Corap’s mixed bag of an army comprised largely Normans and Bretons (good fighters, but very conscious of the past tendency of French commanders to commit them where other softer, more meridional troops might fail), men from the Loire and colonials from North Africa, Indo-China and Madagascar. Altogether, they had certainly not made a good impression on Lieutenant-General Alan Brooke, when he had attended an Armistice Day parade with Corap in November 1939. Beneath a monument on which was inscribed ‘Ici triompha par sa ténacité le Poilu!’, Brooke watched Corap’s guard of honour march past:

  I can still see those troops now. Seldom have I seen anything more slovenly and badly turned out. Men unshaven, horses ungroomed, clothes and saddlery that did not fit, vehicles dirty, and complete lack of pride in themselves or their units. What shook me most, however, was the look in the men’s faces, disgruntled and insubordinate looks, and, although ordered to give ‘Eyes Left,’ hardly a man bothered to do so. After the ceremony was over Corap invited me to visit some of his defences in the Forêt de St Michel. There we found a half-constructed and very poor anti-tank ditch with no defences to cover it. By way of conversation I said that I supposed he would cover this ditch with the fire from anti-tank pill-boxes. This question received the reply: ‘Ah bah! on va les faire plus tard – allons, on va déjeuner!’

  The bitter, idle winter had certainly brought little improvement, while of the whole French front there was probably no other sector less densely held than Corap’s. On a visit to the Ninth Army, André Maurois was ‘struck by their lack of numbers. Returning to Vervins, I had the feeling of traversing an abandoned country.’

  At Dom-le-Mesnil, on the confluence of the Meuse and the Ardennes Canal about five miles downstream from Sedan, lay the boundary of the Ninth and Second Armies. General Huntziger’s Second Army, whose role under the ‘Dyle Plan’ did not entail any advance into Belgium, consisted of only two army corps (plus a cavalry screen similar to Corap’s).

  It is, however, X Corps (General Grandsard) which principally concerns this story, as his was the one to be attacked by Guderian’s Panzer spearhead at Sedan. To guard against an outflanking attack on the Maginot Line, Huntziger (disastrously) had deployed his best divisions on the right and his poorest on the left immediately behind Sedan, where they linked hands with Corap’s indifferent forces. Grandsard’s right wing was held by the regular 3rd North African Division, which would be almost left out of the crucial phase of the battle, while his left was held by the 55th Infantry Division, another ‘B’ series unit, and a poor one at that. Behind, in reserve, stood the 71st – also a ‘B’ division belonging to X Corps.

  Quite early in the war, Huntziger, talking in confidence to an American volunteer ambulance driver, Florence Conrad, admitted that the poor morale of his troops was worrying him. Of the 55th and 71st Divisions, General Grandsard himself says:

  … cases of ill-will were rare, but the ardour for work, for training and the desire to fight, were even rarer. Nonchalance was general; it was accompanied by the feeling that France could not be beaten, that Germany would be beaten without battle… the men are flabby and heavy… In the artillery the men are older, the training is mediocre…

  The 55th (General Lafontaine), recruited in the region of Bourges, has been described as a ‘poor relation’ in terms of equipment;15 it was particularly short in modern anti-aircraft weapons. Of its 450 officers, only 20 were regulars, and this included only the colonel of each infantry regiment, and 3 out of 50 gunner officers. The 71st, recruited in Paris (including some of the more red-tainted suburbs), was probably even more mediocre than the 55th. On 10 May, owing to leave, sickness and other causes, it could muster no more than 10,000 men out of its normal establishment of 17,000, while (according to General Ruby) its commander, General Baudet, ‘brilliant once, but now physically enfeebled, did not inspire confidence either among his troops or their leaders. His replacement was a matter of days.’

  Thus three third-rate ‘B’ divisions, the 55th, the 71st and Corap’s 53rd, were left guarding the fateful sector of Sedan. It was, as Gamelin mildly admits in his memoirs, a ‘dangerous’ thing to do – and a heaven-sent gift for Guderian.

  Football and Roses

  Of the general state of French training and defence preparations during the bitter winter of the ‘Phoney War’, Churchill comments how

  visitors to the French front were often struck by the prevailing atmosphere of calm aloofness, by the seemingly poor quality of the work in hand, by the lack of visible activity of any kind. The emptiness of the roads behind the line was in great contrast to the continual coming and going which extended for miles behind the British sector…16

  This was an impression also shared by many Frenchmen, soldiers and civilians. Instead of ardently studying and exercising upon the sober lessons of Poland, too many French troops were employed in blancoing the kerbs and steps of their barracks, playing organized football, growing roses to embellish the glacis of the Maginot forts, and, as spring came, tilling the fields, by way of dispelling boredom. Writing to Simone de Beauvoir from the front, Jean-Paul Sartre described his daily contribution to the war effort in terms that represented the futility shared by countless other French soldiers:

  My work here consists of sending up balloons and then watching them through a pair of field glasses; this is called ‘making a meteorological observation’. Afterwards I phone the battery artillery officers and tell them the wind direction; what they do with this information is their affair. The young ones make some use of the intelligence reports; the old school just shove them straight in the wastepaper basket… Since there isn’t any shooting, either course is equally effective…

  At Arras, André Maurois, on observing Territorials engaged in planting kitchen gardens and raising rabbits and pigs, inquired why they could not have been set to work fortifying the River Scarpe.17 He was told ‘The enemy will never advance that far. You are a defeatist!’ Hans Habe, an Austrian refugee who had joined up in a regiment that would later be thrown into the Battle of Sedan, recalled the futility of training with hopelessly rusted rifles on a beach near Perpignan: ‘… hardly an ideal drill ground. At every step you sank up to your ankles in sand; it was impossible to set up a single machine-gun or dig a single trench.’ The rare tank exercises had a habit of grinding to a halt, because the Intendance had not provided sufficient petrol in advance. Gamelin’s G.Q.G. would issue instructions nineteen pages long on the conduct of patrol actions, while officers at the front wondered why on earth it was not holding exercises to simulate dive-bomber attacks, so that the troops could be made to realize that safety lay, not in running about in a panic, but in staying put in fox-holes and weapon-slits. And during all these months of Phoney War wasted by the French, on the German side second-, third- and fourth-line divisions were being transformed from what was described as ‘an armed rabble’ into fully operational units.

  With Corap’s and Huntziger’s mediocre divisions protecting the Meuse – those who could most have benefited from intensive training – the picture was particularly depressing. The trouble was that the urgent need both for training of the reservists and for work on the deficient fortifications stood in direct conflict with each other. Four out of every five divisions were required in defending and working on the line all the time, so that on average only half a day per week could be devoted to firing practice and training, while after each of the numerous fals
e alarms, training and works had been interrupted for five to six days. The Arctic weather conditions had also had their effect; Grandsard noted that it was not possible until the beginning of March to send two of his infantry regiments to the rear for three weeks’ training. Instructors tended to be in-experienced, and, commenting on the ‘general apathy’ of the Second Army’s ‘B’ divisions, General Ruby remarks that ‘every exercise was considered as a vexation, all work as a fatigue. After several months of stagnation, nobody believed any more in the war…’

  In France it has always been held against Pétain that, in March 1934, he was the one to declare the Ardennes ‘impenetrable’ (though why the French General Staff should have persisted in unquestioningly accepting this thesis is another matter!); but Pétain’s rider, ‘provided special dispositions are effected there’, tends to be forgotten. By 10 May, just what ‘special dispositions’ had the men of the Second and Ninth Armies, ‘soldiers become navvies’, achieved? Some French staff officer had indeed suggested that the forest roads leading through the Ardennes towards the French frontier be blocked by the simple expedient of felling thousands of trees. But this had been rejected. Why? Because these roads had to be kept clear for the advance of the French cavalry screen. At Sedan itself, General Grandsard tells us, the Meuse at the beginning of the war had been guarded by only some forty bunkers of ‘type Barbeyrac’. Carrying either two machine-guns, or a small anti-tank weapon and one machine-gun, these could stand up to nothing heavier than a 105-mm. shell. There were no concrete installations for command posts or for artillery positions. Not until 25 November was a first programme launched to double the number of bunkers. Work began only on 5 December, and by 10 January no more than a fifth of the 45,000 tons of material required had actually arrived. Then, too, the terrible cold rendered the pouring of concrete almost impossible, so that virtually two months of the winter programme had to be written off; and to add to its residual disgruntlement, the 71st Division was forced to remake over ten miles of slit trenches which winter had wrecked.