At La Ferté, General Georges’s attention during 15 May appears to have been principally concentrated on the fighting around Stonne and Flavigny’s belated counter-attack. That evening, at 1700 hours, he personally telephoned the commander of XVIII Corps holding Huntziger’s right wing, with the emphatic order: ‘You must hold at all costs the anchor position Inor–Malandry. Upon this can depend the whole outcome of the war.’ Inor–Malandry was the line upon which Huntziger had disastrously fallen back during the night of the 14th; its significance was that it protected the northern flank of the Maginot Line, for which purpose Georges had sent those eight divisions. Herein lay the key to Georges’s thoughts that day. First it had been the threat to the Gembloux Gap; now it was the outflanking threat to the Maginot Line which stood paramount in Georges’s mind. Meanwhile, as Guderian, preparatory to his swing westward, was on the defensive at Stonne, the reports reaching Georges from Huntziger sounded as if the French were more than holding their own in this sector. Gradually, towards the evening of the 15th, a new note of quite ill-founded hope seems to have begun to replace the terrible debility that Georges had displayed the previous day. On the basis of Georges’s renewed optimism, Gamelin was inspired to conclude that day’s signal to the C.-in-C.s of the North African and Levant theatres with the following absurdly unrealistic summary:
To sum up, the 15th seems to show a lessening in intensity of enemy action, which was particularly violent on the 14th. Our front, which was ‘shaken’ between Namur and the area west of Montmédy, is gradually pulling itself together.
Gamelin: ‘Suddenly His Eyes Were Opened’
That evening, Gamelin delivered a similarly encouraging report to the War Cabinet. But at about 2030, shortly after Daladier, the Minister of National Defence, had returned from the meeting to his office in the Rue Saint-Dominique, Gamelin was on the telephone with an entirely different note in his voice. For the first time the Joffrian sang-froid, the sugary tone of reassurance which he customarily reserved for his political masters, had vanished. What combination of events and intelligence led to this sudden change of heart is not quite clear; in all probability it was caused by a report from a G.Q.G. staff officer, Lieutenant-Colonel Guillaut. Gamelin had dispatched Guillaut that day as his personal liaison officer to the Ninth Army, the only occasion so far when he had adopted such a measure, and reporting back Guillaut stated that
The disorder of this Army is beyond description. Its troops are falling back on all sides. The Army General Staff has lost its head. It no longer knows even where its divisions are. The situation is worse than anything we could have imagined… The roads are choked with routed troops.
According to Pertinax, up to this moment Gamelin ‘seems to have cherished the illusion that everything could be “patched up”. Suddenly his eyes were opened.’ Now he knew the Germans had consummated their breakthrough, while the major part of the French reserves were irrevocably committed, or had already been partly destroyed. William Bullitt, the American Ambassador, was with Daladier when Gamelin telephoned from Vincennes. Obviously caught off balance by the change in the Generalissimo’s demeanour and the tale of disaster that he had to tell, Daladier was heard by Bullitt to exclaim: ‘No, what you tell me is not possible! You are mistaken; it’s not possible!’ When the extent of the catastrophe revealed by Gamelin had sunk in, Daladier shouted again down the telephone: ‘We must attack soon!’ ‘Attack! With what? I have no more reserves.’ The conversation ended with the following exchange:
‘Then it means the destruction of the French Army?’
‘Yes, it means the destruction of the French Army!’
Daladier then demanded an explanation, after which Gamelin stated: ‘Between Laon and Paris I do not have a single corps of soldiers at my disposal.’
Within an hour of this dramatic conversation, General Georges at La Ferté was receiving the first ‘stupefying’ news that Reinhardt’s Panzers had reached Montcornet. For the French High Command, the whole picture was suddenly transformed. No longer was the main threat pointing at the Maginot Line, but – of course – at Paris herself! Late that night a meeting was convened by Paul Reynaud in the Ministry of the Interior, at which Daladier, General Hering, the elderly Military Governor of Paris, and Lieutenant-Colonel Guillaut, representing Gamelin, were present. In a thoroughly panicky atmosphere the first measures for defending the capital, and for the possible evacuation of the Government, were discussed. To begin with, the decision was taken to withdraw forty squads of Gardes Mobiles from the armies and place them at the disposal of General Hering – to maintain order in Paris.4
Reynaud Takes a Hand
Meanwhile, the head of the civil Government, Paul Reynaud, had already arrived independently at his own sombre conclusions on the Battle of the Meuse – and much earlier than his discredited Generalissimo. At 1745 on 14 May, Reynaud had wired an urgent message to Churchill in London. The chronological context of this message needs to be noted carefully; it was sent before anyone in Paris could possibly have known that Rommel had smashed the counter-attack by the 1st Armoured; before Reinhardt had broken out from Monthermé; before Flavigny had launched his action towards Sedan; only a matter of hours after Guderian himself had made up his mind to swing westwards; and while General Georges was still very much preoccupied with the notional threat developing against the Maginot Line. Said Reynaud to Churchill:
Having just left the War Cabinet, I am sending you, in the name of the French Government, the following statement:
The situation is indeed very serious. Germany is trying to deal us a fatal blow in the direction of Paris [author’s italics]. The German Army has broken through our fortified lines south of Sedan…
Between Sedan and Paris, there are no defences comparable with those in the line which we must restore at almost any cost…
The Germans could only be stopped, Reynaud concluded, by isolating the Panzers ‘from their supporting Stukas’. And for this, more fighters were desperately needed. ‘It is essential,’ Reynaud urged Churchill, ‘that you send immediately ten additional squadrons. Without such a contribution, we cannot be certain that we shall be able to stem the German advance.’
On having Reynaud’s wire relayed to him, General Ironside, the British C.I.G.S., ordered that a liaison officer be sent direct to Georges’s H.Q. ‘to find out what the real situation is’; but later that day he noted that ‘we could get nothing out of’ either Gamelin’s or Georges’s H.Q. Reynaud, he thought, was being ‘a little hysterical’. There is no doubt that the French leader was not in a good state, physically or mentally. He had not shaken off the depressing aftermath of his influenza; the strain of the previous weeks of political juggling had told on him; and his condition was not improved by Madame de Portes constantly importuning him with suggestions for running the war, and France, or with requests for advancement for friends or sons of friends. Élie Bois describes him in these days as being
worse than haggard. The nervous mannerism peculiar to him – a jerky movement of the head from right to left – was more in evidence than usual. His voice was weary and the brilliance of his glance unhealthy.
Because of the estrangement existing between Reynaud and the Generalissimo, whom he had been on the brink of sacking, his communications with Vincennes were just as unsatisfactory as Gamelin’s with Georges. Paul Baudouin tells of an absurd situation when, having heard from his Military Secretary, Colonel Villelume, of Corap’s collapse on the morning of the 15th, Reynaud had been
unwilling to telephone direct to General Gamelin in order to avoid a breach with M. Daladier, who is hypersensitive in matters of this sort… He therefore rang up Daladier to ask him what were Gamelin’s counter-measures, to which Daladier replied, ‘He has none.’
After Colonel Villelume had in fact rung up Vincennes for information, Gamelin’s chef de cabinet, Colonel Petitbon, snapped back: ‘If this goes on, I shall not give any information at all.’5 From the start, however, Reynaud, in his profound distrust o
f Gamelin, had relied upon his own ‘spies’. The information they brought him, compounded with his small man’s hyperdeveloped intuition, led him to conclusions closer to reality, even though they may have been tinged with ‘hysteria’, than either Gamelin or Georges. When he told Churchill on the 14th that the defences between Sedan and Paris had been ‘broken’, he also spoke with the technical knowledge of a Cassandra who had long preached, and studied, the possibilities of armoured warfare. He knew that
If our front were broken… everything was lost [Reynaud’s italics]. There was no question of a repetition of the Battle of the Marne. We had cast our lot in favour of a continuous front. We had to abide by such a decision.
At 0730 on the 15th, the morning after he had received the French Prime Minister’s first wire, Churchill records:
I was woken up with the news that M. Reynaud was on the telephone at my bedside. He spoke in English, and evidently under stress. ‘We have been defeated.’ As I did not immediately respond he said again: ‘We are beaten; we have lost the battle.’ I said: ‘Surely it can’t have happened so soon?’ But he replied: ‘The front is broken near Sedan; they are pouring through in great numbers with tanks and armoured cars’ – or words to that effect.
Still evidently half-asleep, Churchill replied reassuringly:
‘All experience shows that the offensive will come to an end after a while. I remember the 21st of March, 1918. After five or six days they have to halt for supplies, and the opportunity for counter-attack is presented. I learned all this at the time from the lips of Marshal Foch himself.’ Certainly this was what he had always seen in the past and what we ought to have seen now. However, the French Premier came back to the sentence with which he had begun, which proved indeed only too true: ‘We are defeated; we have lost the battle.’ I said I was willing to come over and have a talk.
After this more alarming communication, Churchill promptly rang up Ironside (who was then in the process of talking to Gort) to relay Reynaud’s message, commenting that the French premier had seemed ‘thoroughly demoralized’ and that he (Churchill) had told him ‘to keep calm’. Ironside informed Churchill that ‘we have no extra demands from Gamelin or Georges, both of whom were calm, though they both considered the situation serious’. Churchill tells us that he now personally ‘rang up General Georges, who seemed quite cool, and reported that the breach at Sedan was being plugged. A telegram from General Gamelin also stated that although the position between Namur and Sedan was serious, he viewed the situation with calm.’ With a candour that would have looked well if encountered in the memoirs of General Gamelin, Churchill admits ingenuously:
Not having had access to official information for so many years, I did not comprehend the violence of the revolution effected since the last war by the incursion of a mass of fast-moving heavy armour.
Thus on 15 May the judgement of Gamelin and Georges prevailed over that of Reynaud in Churchill’s appreciations. At the Cabinet meeting convened to consider the French plea for more fighters, Churchill did not overrule Dowding’s arguments that the home defences should on no account be further weakened. Britain’s decision to hold back her fighter squadrons will ever remain a source of extreme bitterness in France, but the influence exerted upon this decision by the misleading ‘calmness’ of the French C.-in-C.s in these early days cannot be overlooked.
By the morning of the 16th, however – the day of general awakening – Churchill too had begun to appreciate the full grimness of the situation in France. A new S.O.S. sent late on the 15th by Reynaud announced tersely: ‘Last evening we lost the battle. The way to Paris lies open. Send all the troops and planes you can.’ Churchill remarks that, although ‘no clear view could be formed of what was happening, the gravity of the crisis was obvious. I felt it imperative to get to Paris that afternoon.’ Accordingly, at about 1500 hours he flew off in an unarmed Flamingo at a steady 160 m.p.h., accompanied by General Ismay and the Vice-C.I.G.S., General Dill.
Vincennes, 16 May: The News is All Bad
At Vincennes, 16 May began with a seemingly endless succession of dismal tidings. ‘Just as the day of the 15th had been a day of waiting on the fringe of events, so that of the 16th with one blow plunged the command post of the commander-in-chief into the atmosphere of the battle itself,’ says Colonel Minart. After news had come through in the small hours that the Panzers were now nearing Laon, just eighty-two miles from Paris, ‘it was as if the old fort, witness of so many historic scenes, were pounded by the first breakers heralding the tidal wave which was about to engulf France. Never had the situation seemed so grave.’ At 0630 hours, Gamelin issued a desperate order instructing all troops ‘to hold out even when encircled, to constitute centres of resistance’. Still the information being passed on via Georges remained at a minimum, and at 1015 Vincennes learned that telephonic communication with Blanchard’s First Army had been cut off. But there now followed a series of direct communications from the front abruptly bringing Gamelin in immediate contact with the battle. First, Lieutenant-Colonel Ruby of Huntziger’s staff telephoned on his own initiative to report on developments around Stonne, the failure of the 3rd Armoured counter-attack and the sacking of General Brocard. It was the first time since 10 May that any such detailed report had reached Gamelin without being filtered through La Ferté. Almost immediately afterwards a call came in from Amiens, from the Chief of Staff of the Second Region, explaining that he had, ‘in view of the extreme gravity of the situation, decided to get directly in touch with Vincennes’. Giving an itemized account of the German forces which had passed through Montcornet, he then described the ‘withdrawal in disorder of units of all arms’ from Corap’s army into the eastern areas lying under the Second Region’s jurisdiction. Already some 20,000 men, among them fugitives from the 61st Division, had reached Compiègne; another call from the Second Region two hours later elevated the figure to 30,000. Again, this was the first precise news about the Ninth Army to reach Gamelin; coming from a non-combatant command such as the Second Region, it was as grotesque as if a British C.I.G.S. had to rely upon Aldershot Command for information about an enemy invasion of Kent. Finally, towards the end of the morning, General Touchon’s Chief of Staff telephoned to reveal the full extent of the breach the Panzers had made.
Evacuate Paris?
Everything seemed to confirm that the Germans were now moving on Paris at a horrifying speed. Early that morning Reynaud was with Daladier when Gamelin telephoned to warn him that ‘the Germans may be in Paris tonight’. According to Baudouin, Gamelin then disclaimed any responsibility for the safety of the capital, as from midnight – ‘which’, Reynaud observed to Baudouin, ‘is a polite way of washing his hands!’ Gamelin telephoned the same warning to Georges Mandel, at the Ministry for the Colonies, supposedly adding by way of explanation that the Army, ‘permeated with Communism’, had not held. At 1000 the senile Military Governor of Paris, General Hering, evidently in a state of collapse, sent a letter to Reynaud:
Dear Prime Minister,
In the present circumstances, I deem it wise, for the purpose of preventing any disorder, to suggest that you order the evacuation of the Government… I should be obliged if you would inform me of your decision as soon as possible.6
Once again, it is curious to note that, by singling out the danger of civil ‘disorder’, the Governor of Paris obviously sensed at his back the spectre of the Popular Front and of a resurrected Commune as a threat no less great than that of the approaching enemy.
At midday, Reynaud summoned a meeting attended by General Hering, M. Langeron (the Prefect of Police), the leaders of the Senate and Chamber of Deputies – Jeanneney and Herriot respectively – and those Ministers who happened to be available, including Daladier, de Monzie (one of the most committed ‘softs’ in the Cabinet), Dautry, the Minister of Arms Production, and Clemenceau’s old lieutenant, the cold and utterly unshakable Georges Mandel. The French leaders met amid an atmosphere of undisguised panic. Thick columns of smoke aris
ing from Ministries that were already beginning to burn their secret files brought home all too brutally the fact that, for the third time in living memory, Paris was directly menaced by the vile Boche and his diabolical war machine. Could anything now stop it? Everyone spoke at once. Some wild suggestions were put forward, including one that shallow-draught warships should sail up the Seine to defend Paris. Governor Hering explained the measures he had taken to defend the city, but he had no explosives. There was discussion about destroying industrial plants, but this was rejected on the grounds of the working-class riots which such measures might provoke. Reynaud, showing signs of being thoroughly alarmed, had come to the meeting prepared to order that the Government leave Paris for Tours at 4 o’clock that afternoon, and was drafting a proclamation calling upon the populace also to evacuate the city. But Daladier reckoned that the cure would be worse than the disease, and was resolutely opposed, on psychological grounds, to any Government departure; Dautry declared dramatically ‘we shall fight in the streets and everywhere’; Mandel, who appears throughout to have shown the most self-control,7 was also silently obdurate; finally, de Monzie clinched matters by announcing that there was simply not enough transport to carry out a large-scale evacuation. Another call from Reynaud to Gamelin (who was meanwhile allocating four divisions, plus another three light infantry divisions earmarked for Norway, for the defence of Paris) ascertained that the Government could still have until midnight before deciding about its departure. Reynaud’s resolve now hardened. He declared that the Government ‘ought to remain in Paris, no matter how intense the bombing might be’, though he then added, somewhat delphically, that ‘it should, however, take care not to fall into the enemy’s hands’.
To Lose a Battle Page 45