But why the delay in starting this urgent programme? Grandsard criticizes the idleness and softness of his men, and the lack of authority of the junior officers; but the most injurious factor seems to have lain in the protracted inability of Billotte and his army commanders to agree upon a standard type of fortification.
Meanwhile, in early March, Gamelin had received a prophetic letter from a Deputy, Pierre Taittinger, who had just completed a parliamentary inspection of the line. The defences at Sedan so shocked Taittinger and his colleagues that they foresaw it as a sector ‘of misfortune for our forces’. Gamelin responded by reinforcing Givet, fifty miles down the Meuse, with a solitary battalion,18 and ordained the construction of a line of maisons fortes, protecting Sedan midway between the Belgian frontier and the right bank of the Meuse. A maison forte was a small semi-disguised block of masonry with a thick layer of concrete in the ceiling; above was a superstructure providing living accommodation for its garrison of four to five men. They were supposed to resist any bombardment, but in fact one Stuka bomb or even a direct hit from a big German self-propelled gun would be sufficient to blow them apart. The garrisons of the maisons fortes tended to be selected from the ‘undesirables’ – grumblers and men under suspended sentence. It was a formula that hardly spoke for success; moreover, by 10 May, the right-bank line covering the Sedan ‘bridgehead’ was far from completed – as Rundstedt’s keen-eyed photographic expert, Major von Stiotta, had spotted.
On 11 April, Huntziger, more anxious than ever about the state of the Sedan defences, begged Gamelin to send him four reserve divisions to speed the work. His request was refused. Thus, by 10 May, only 54 out of 100 bunkers had been completed, representing an increase in density of from three to six per kilometre.19 But, worst of all, most of those completed had still not received their steel doors or the armoured shields protecting the weapons embrasures. The latter were left inadequately protected by sandbags, gaping Achilles’ heels for Guderian’s high-velocity tank cannon to seek out; and the same deficiency applied to bunkers built on Corap’s front.20 On the vital heights behind Sedan, only one casemate mounting two 75-mm. guns – that at Bellevue – was ready when battle began. The standard of construction of many of the Meuse works also seems to have been deplorable. Sarraz-Bournet, a major on Gamelin’s Deuxième Bureau, was appalled to discover that some new bunkers built by civilian contractors did not even have embrasures that overlooked the Meuse: ‘Was this sabotage, or was it simple forgetfulness?’ Near Givet, he found barbed-wire entanglements of which the stakes were so poorly planted in the ground that they hardly held: ‘Nobody had ever taught the officer concerned to lay out wire; no senior officer of his unit had come to supervise his work…’ On the Belgian frontier, Major Barlone recorded inspecting an anti-tank ditch so unimpressive that ‘a quarter of an hour’s bombardment and the earth would crumble away and would leave free passage, I fear, to any armoured vehicle’. To back up these inadequate anti-tank ditches, there were of course mines. General Ruby reckons, however, that Huntziger’s Second Army would have required 100,000; it was allocated only 16,000. To make matters worse, by March it was discovered that those already laid were suffering from humidity, so they were lifted and stored in a dry place, and Ruby cannot swear that they were replaced by 10 May.
Little enough effort seems to have been made to camouflage or conceal the new construction work. By the beginning of May, Grandsard admits that on his corps front ‘the building zones had not been cleared up and remained clearly visible to aviation, and sometimes the mass of material even hindered fields of fire’. Marcel Lerecouvreux, serving with Huntziger’s cavalry, recalls being shocked by the lack of security surrounding the defence works at Sedan; on Sundays the soldiers were frequently visited by young women whom they ‘did not appear to have known for long’. How easy it would have been, he reflected, for the Germans to infiltrate among these ladies agents crossing over the open Belgian frontier only a few miles distant!
The ‘Impenetrable’ Ardennes
The success of any French defence along the Meuse would obviously depend to an important extent upon Belgian intentions for holding the Ardennes. The Belgians in fact had entrusted this large sector to no more than seven battalions of Chasseurs Ardennais, almost without reserves, which made the prospects of manning any ‘continuous front’, let alone any defence in depth, quite impossible. Their orders were, on being attacked in force, to destroy communications and then withdraw northwards (i.e. uncovering the French positions on the Meuse), so as to link up with the main body of the Belgian Army. Of the fortifications on the Liège-Arlon line, Paul Reynaud quotes a Belgian general as having remarked: ‘I piss on it, and I pass by!’ The Belgian strategy was perfectly clear and intelligible; they did not reckon to have sufficient forces to protect their whole country, so they would concentrate on defending the centres of population and industry in the north, rather than the underpopulated wilderness of the Ardennes southwards of Liège. They hoped that the French cavalry would arrive in time and strength enough to secure the Ardennes. Citing the Belgian refusal, after 1936, to discuss their defence plans with the French High Command, French writers have blamed the ‘surprise’ at Sedan partially upon the Belgians, for not revealing that it was their intention to ‘vanish’ in the Ardennes. But the French Deuxième Bureau must have had a good idea of what the Belgian plan was, and one Belgian general, Wanty, goes so far as to claim that the whole French High Command from Gamelin down was fully aware of it.
What of the actual terrain across which Rundstedt’s mighty mechanized phalanx was to advance, described by Petrarch six centuries previously as ‘the savage and inhospitable forests from which warriors and arms emerge at great risk’? In August 1914, General Lanrezac of the French Fifth Army had warned the army commander on his right, de Langle de Cary, of the dangers which would confront his impending attack in the Ardennes: ‘All this country is eminently suitable for the defensive and for ambushes… you will not enter into this region, and if you do you will not return from it.’ Langle plunged in, was ambushed, and reeled back with heavy losses. Although between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries no fewer than ten successful military operations had been carried out in the ‘inhospitable’ Ardennes, it was Langle’s unfortunate experience that made the most indelible impression upon the post-war French High Command, adorning the Ardennes with its reputation of being impenetrable.
There are indeed parts of the Ardennes which, extremely rugged, could constrict the passage of a large and cumbersome army. On stretches of the Meuse, as between Charleville and Givet, the approaches are protected from the east by sheer and rocky cliffs. At Dinant the river can be reached only through wooded, twisting gorges difficult for tanks to negotiate and easily blocked by resolute demolition teams. Sedan itself is protected by dense woods and a vulnerable road that winds for three to four miles up the gorge of the Semois from picturesque Bouillon, and all its eastern approaches are superbly overlooked from the Marfée heights west of the river, providing both a view and an observation point on which it would be hard to improve. But once up on the high plateau of the Ardennes, much of the landscape provides ideal tank country. The forests are interspersed with large clearings of rolling pasturage; the triangle Arlon–Bastogne–Neufchâteau, through which would run Guderian’s main approach route beyond the Luxembourg frontier, is generally flat, wide-open country. Even the minor roads are good and well surfaced; nor was it generally true to say, as Gamelin claims in his memoirs, that the terrain ‘did not permit infantry and tanks to deploy from the roads’. Even in the magnificent forests of oak and beech and fir where, in May, the wild raspberries are pushing up bright green shoots and the broom bursting into saffron explosions, there are numerous tracks cutting through them, readily viable to armoured vehicles. In fact, far from being a hindrance, here the thick boscage provides superb natural camouflage from the air, so that whole Panzer divisions could easily lose themselves to the enemy’s sight, effecting a modern variant of B
irnam Wood come to Dunsinane. To be sure, there are ravines and natural barriers such as the meandering River Semois, but none of any value unless backed by a powerful, organized defence. As Liddell Hart has remarked, all natural obstacles are more readily surmountable than those of human resistance.
Even allowing for the distortions of hindsight, after one has actually explored the terrain, it is hard to comprehend how anyone (except perhaps a Deuxième Bureau officer who had never set foot outside the Crillon Bar) could possibly have deemed the Ardennes ‘impenetrable’ for a modern army. It becomes still more extraordinary when one learns that, in 1938, manoeuvres were actually conducted under General Prételat (then commander designate of the Second Army) which exactly paralleled the German attack of May 1940. Hit by an imaginary seven German divisions, four of them motorized plus two tank brigades, debouching from the Ardennes, the French ‘defence’ in these manoeuvres was battered beyond possibility of re-establishing itself. The results were so decisive that at least one senior commander begged that they never be published, lest they ‘upset the troops’. Studying the manoeuvres from the Citadel of Verdun, amid the opiate memories of those past miracles wrought by the French Army on the defensive, Gamelin had simply observed that adequate reinforcements would have been available in time for the enemy blow to be parried. Even General Ironside, the British C.I.G.S. who was hardly an outstanding military thinker, had predicted as early as October 1939 that the Ardennes might be selected by the Germans as the sector for their main attack. It remains to be explained why, despite the lessons of the Polish campaign, despite admonitions by de Gaulle and by Taittinger, and despite the repeated warnings leaking out about Hitler’s intentions during the spring of 1940, Gamelin appeared to remain blind to the danger lurking in the dark woods of the Ardennes.
Was Gamelin Blind?
In 1940, one of the principal arms of military Intelligence was aerial reconnaissance, and we have already seen what use the Germans made of it to reveal the state of readiness of the Meuse defences. Why were the Allied air forces, then, apparently unable to observe the massive concentrations of German armour pointing towards the Ardennes? Every appeal made by Air Marshal Barratt for permission to carry out high-altitude reconnaissance flights across Belgium was turned down on political grounds; needless to say, the Germans were not similarly impeded and are reported (by the Belgians) to have carried out some five hundred flights in the eight months preceding May 1940. But the French Air Force, flying north from Alsace-Lorraine, could easily have reconnoitred the Eiffel and the vital communications across the Rhine. Their failure to do so has been variously attributed (by the French) to the inferiority of their aircraft and the bad weather conditions of the winter of 1939–40.21 After the loss of several planes, at the end of September 1939 the Bloch 131s were withdrawn from daylight operations and put on night work only, the Bréguet and Potez reconnaissance planes were instructed to operate only ‘behind battery positions’, and the Mureaux were permitted to ‘approach between one and two kilometres from the lines, on condition that they operated in patrols of two’. General Ruby writes that the French reconnaissance planes ‘could not pass over our lines except under fear of death’. Less charitably, Air Marshal Barratt, who from the very first had been appalled at the apathy and defeatism that he found in the French Air Force, declared that their reconnaissance teams simply ‘would not leave the floor, often they gave the excuse that the weather was too bad’. The fact is that, during the crucial month of April, only four French aircraft were lost through enemy action, hardly an excessively high price to have paid when one considers the mortal danger then confronting France.
Despite the shortcomings, however, of French aerial reconnaissance, G.Q.G.’s Deuxième Bureau had managed to acquire a remarkably accurate picture of the German order of battle – more complete perhaps even than the breakdown of the French forces prepared by the O.K.H.’s ‘Foreign Armies West’. Already in March it had become aware of the German concentrations building up near Trier and in the area between the Rhine and Moselle; towards the end of March it reported that German Intelligence had suddenly begun inquiring about road conditions along the Sedan–Abbeville axis; a month later it knew the location of all the German Panzers, as well as of the three motorized divisions. From this massive accumulation facing the Ardennes – which, to shift elsewhere, would have required a major military operation – the French High Command should certainly have been entitled to suppose (and know beyond a shadow of a doubt, if it had studied Guderian’s Achtung – Panzer!) in which direction the centre of gravity of an attack might be aimed. A Swiss military historian, Eddy Bauer, tells us that Swiss Intelligence had observed the construction of eight military bridges across the Rhine between Bonn and Bingen, and had deduced from this that the main thrust could not be coming in the north, or south through the Maginot Line; he claims that these facts were also known to the French. Probably on the basis of this Swiss Intelligence work, the French Military Attaché in Berne informed G.Q.G. on 30 April that the Germans were going to attack between 8 and 10 May, with Sedan as ‘principal axis of the movement’.
All this various information was duly passed to Gamelin, but he remained sceptical; among other things, to the bitter end he insisted that the Germans were holding twice as many troops in Army Group ‘C’, opposite the Maginot Line, as his Intelligence experts stated, and that the O.K.H. was keeping forty-five – instead of twenty – divisions in reserve.
The blindness of Gamelin – and, for that matter, of Georges, Billotte and the weight of French generaldom – lay partly in the genuine belief that the defences at Sedan were adequate, based upon that ineradicable, mystical self-assurance of the invincibility, in extremis, of the French Army. But one must also take cognizance of the effectiveness of German deception measures, which were all part of the final Sichelschnitt plan. From February onwards, Admiral Canaris’s Abwehr was deliberately spreading reports in neutral countries telling of war-weariness in Germany, and of how the Army would be incapable of sustaining a major offensive against the Allies;22 less than a month before Sichelschnitt began, the German Military Attaché in Brussels was heard to discount any attack ‘in depth’, on grounds that ‘we would have an initial success, but that would lead to nothing’. German ‘travellers’, beautiful women in night-clubs, indiscreetly talked about a German offensive coming along the old Schlieffen route. But the most highly organized deception plan was that carried out by Leeb’s Army Group ‘C’. Few officers in that group were even aware that it was a ‘deception’; up to the last it was widely believed that they would be involved in an offensive at the southern end of the line, combined with much talk about Italy coming into the war and lending twenty divisions for such an attack. Around 20 April, the Deuxième Bureau picked up a speech by Goering in which he declared that the Maginot Line was going to be attacked at two points between 5 and 15 May and that the Germans were prepared to lose 500,000 men and 80 per cent of the Luftwaffe in pursuit of success. This mass of conflicting evidence relayed by the Deuxième Bureau was undoubtedly confusing to Gamelin, who could never shake from his mind the possibility of a serious enemy effort being made against the Maginot Line, or even one outflanking it via Switzerland. But the fact is that it was the latest reports, particularly that emanating from the French Military Attaché in Berne, which should have been believed.
As May brought the unleashing of Sichelschnitt ever closer, some remarkable warnings came out of Germany itself, the most accurate of which were received by the Dutch. Colonel Hans Oster, a senior officer in the Abwehr itself and one of the most active and courageous members of the German ‘resistance’,23 was an intimate friend of Colonel Sas, the Dutch Military Attaché in Berlin. Four times between November and 10 May he provided Sas with precise warnings of Hitler’s offensive plans; but the Dutch were mistrustful – partly because of the past false alarms, partly because they ardently wanted to believe that they would not be attacked. On 3 April, Oster had warned Sas (correctly) of the No
rwegian operation; now, on 3 May, he told Oster that Holland was imminently to be attacked. The Dutch informed the Belgians, and took some measures to alert their Army. Sas would meet Oster once again, on the evening of 9 May.
On the Brink
Seldom had there been a more marvellous spring (though few cared to remember that it was just the same wonderful weather, ‘Goering’s weather’, as had accompanied the rape of Poland the previous September). Parisians lingered in the pavement cafés, listening to the strains of J’Attendrai and dreaming nostalgically of last year’s holidays. Clare Boothe went into raptures at how
chestnuts burst into leaf on the lovely avenues of Paris, sunlight danced off the opalescent grey buildings, and the gold and grey sunsets, glimpsed through the soaring Arc de Triomphe at the end of the long splendid vista of the Champs-Élysées, brought a catch of pain and pleasure in your throat.
There were art shows in the Grand Palais, racing at Auteuil, and soccer matches between Tommies and poilus in the suburbs. ‘The shop windows of van Cleef and Arpels and Mauboussin and Cartier sparkled with great jewels in the sunlight,’ she recalled. ‘And lots of people bought them…’ The Ritz, as usual, was ‘crowded with lovely ladies wearing simple dresses or the smart uniforms of the Union des Femmes de France service’. There was also a wealthy Mrs Corrigan who wore a uniform of her own design, embroidered with her motto ‘Bien Venu!’ There were meatless days, sugarless days, liquorless days, no more luxury chocolates and the pâtisseries closed three days a week, but none of this made too much difference to Parisian gastronomy. On 2 May, says Fabre-Luce, ‘Parisian society gave its last party. It was a charity gala at the Marigny Theatre…’ The front seats were occupied by such dethroned monarchs as the Duke of Windsor and King Zog of Albania. About the same time, André Maurois found the Academy peaceably working away on its eternal dictionary:
To Lose a Battle Page 24