To Lose a Battle

by Alistair Horne

  The night of 18–19 May witnessed the consummation of the tragedy of the French Ninth Army. Out of contact both with General Frère and with most of his own troops during the 18th, General Giraud had been ordered by Billotte to pull back his H.Q. to Le Catelet, but, as ‘the only way of maintaining morale, he insisted on staying put himself in his command post at Wassigny, fifteen miles to the east, with a minimum of staff. At 1600 hours he decided to withdraw to Main Army H.Q. at Le Catelet, little knowing that it was about to be overrun by the 6th Panzer. Accompanied by two of his officers, he got to within six miles of Le Catelet when he heard reports that German armour was in the neighbourhood. For the next three hours the group worked their way across country by compass. Arriving at the burning town of Le Catelet, Giraud and his group exchanged shots with a Panzer detachment. They then took refuge in a wood, and Giraud ordered his companions to separate. Slowed down by a wound acquired in the First War, Giraud was picked up by a French column, with a gun-carrier in the lead, into which he climbed. More German tanks were encountered, the first being knocked out by Giraud’s gun-carrier. Later Giraud was forced to seek refuge in an isolated farmhouse. At 0600 hours on the 19th it was surrounded by German troops, and Giraud was forced to surrender : according to the French, to a group of tanks; according to the War Diary of the 6th Panzer, to the men of one of its field kitchen units. That same day the division also captured General Bruneau, the commander of the annihilated French 1st Armoured Division. Giraud’s command had lasted exactly three and a half days. He had done the best he could in an already hopeless situation.

  With the disappearance of Giraud, the Ninth Army, which the portly General Corap had taken into battle just nine days earlier, also disappeared. One of Gamelin’s liaison officers, returning from the front, reported :

  Complete disintegration. Out of 70,000 men and numerous officers, no single unit is commanded, however small… at most 10 per cent of the men have kept their rifles… Out of the thousands we sifted, it wasn’t possible for me to form one company for the defence of the bridge at Compiègne. However, the losses had not seemed to be high. There were no wounded among the thousands of fugitives… they don’t understand what has happened to them. The sight of an aeroplane induces terror in them. Service troops broke up before the infantry and it was they who spread disorder everywhere.

  Covering the B.E.F. sector for the New York Times, Drew Middleton encountered some of the tattered remains of the Ninth Army straggling through Amiens :

  They were the clerks, the cooks, the anti-aircraft, and the heavy artillery of the Army that had been decisively beaten and routed. As they sat on their horse-drawn carts in their dirty uniforms, they did not look like soldiers but like gypsies.

  It was not a heroic epitaph.

  Fugitives and Refugees

  The spectacle of broken French soldiers who had lost touch with their units, or were simply on the run, was becoming common throughout northern France as the Panzers speeded their advance. One typical Odyssey was that of Jean Muray, a gunner on leave at Signy-le-Petit in the Ardennes when the Germans attacked. He and several hundred others were told to await transportation back to their division, but it never arrived. On 15 May, fugitives from the battle on the Meuse began to pass through Signy, and the rumble of guns was audible in the distance. Finally a sergeant-major distributed one rifle to every five men and ordered them to try to make for safety in small groups. Still lugging their heavy leave kit with them, Muray’s group headed westwards. Soon they joined up with a retreating column commanded by a lieutenant; it was all that was left of an artillery regiment mauled on the Meuse, plus a sprinkling of a few infantrymen. They had already been on the road for three days, rifling what food they could from abandoned villages. During the night of the 16th, says Muray :

  We marched incessantly, with a surprising continuity for two long hours, and then the column suddenly stopped. A powerful light was fixed upon us at a turn in the road… profiting from this unhoped-for halt, men sat down on the side of the road. A quarter of an hour passed. Then an officer came to the back of the column, to announce that we were prisoners and that we must throw away our arms. In front of us was a machine-gun carrier. The commander had already been taken away by the Germans… I threw my rifle away in the ditch. How simple this had all been…!

  A short time later, Muray and his companions realized that the Germans had all departed, taking with them only the commander of the column, so they resumed their flight. Passing through a wood they heard a fusillade of shots, then came on some civilian refugees whom stray soldiers were contemplating shooting as spies. There was also a twenty-year-old infantryman who had been beaten up and was in such a state he could not explain which unit he came from. He was taken along with the fugitives, under escort. The next day, on reaching Brunehamel, strewn with dead horses with horribly distended stomachs – the remnants of a column shot-up during Reinhardt’s break-out from Monthermé – Muray and his group were surrounded by Germans. Trying to flee across some fields, he was shot in the thigh and taken prisoner.

  The luckier Army fugitives made their way not only as far as Amiens, where Drew Middleton saw them, but to the very gates of Georges’s G.H.Q. at La Ferté. A ‘centre of regroupment’ was set up, but there were simply not enough military policemen to cope with the numbers. Stories circulated of fugitives, including several officers, being shot at Mont-Valérien – pour encourager les autres. Certainly the demoralization they caused as they straggled through the villages and towns, throwing away their arms and leaping on to any available horses or cars, was extreme.

  But whatever emotions the disbanded military might exact, the condition of the civilian refugees driven from their homes by nameless fears was incomparably more pitiful. At one point it was estimated that as many as 2 million Dutch and Belgians and nearly 8 million French refugees were on the roads; some nine-tenths of the population of a city like Lille departed. During the first five days of the battle, the French kept the Belgian frontier closed. Then the human flood burst into northern France, resembling more one of the great migrations fleeing before the Barbarian in times of yore than any event hitherto seen in modern Europe. The number plates on the cars of the refugees, telling the truth the censors were trying to hide, in turn set more and more in motion as they realized the speed at which the Barbarian was approaching.

  Pierre Mendés-France, back on leave from Syria, watched the fleeing hordes pour through his home town of Louviers (south of Rouen), of which he was mayor:

  During the first few days, we had seen high-powered American cars driven by uniformed chauffeurs. Their occupants, elegant women with hands resting on their jewel-cases… then came the older, shabbier cars… a day or two later came the most extraordinary procession of veteran cars… then came the cyclists, mostly carefree young people… there were also the pedestrians, sometimes whole families… last of all came the heavy waggons of the peasants from Flanders; they advanced slowly, laden with the sick and the aged… strings of these waggons stretching for a mile or more would represent the combined evacuation of an entire village, with its mayor, its priest, the old schoolmaster, the policeman. It was a colossal uprooting.

  At first there were no soldiers among the refugees; later whole detachments ‘were swept into the great river of humanity which flowed towards the west and the south’. Apart from the most common sights of the countless wheezing old crocks, their roofs heaped high with mattresses, and the huge lumbering hay waggons with the family grouped under the shade of an umbrella (they reminded Simone de Beauvoir of ‘a tableau staged for a ceremonial procession’), almost everything that could move took part in the exodus. There were racy Paris tourist buses, with ‘Paris la Nuit’ still written up on the side, furniture vans and fire-engines, ice-cream carts and hearses, and pathetic pedestrian groups pushing battered prams laden with the precious acquisitions of a lifetime. Those without any transport besieged the railway stations. Around the station at Amiens, Maurois found

&
nbsp; a torrent of refugees… seated on their bags, on sidewalks, on pavements, they made an immense human carpet worked in dull and lifeless colours. They had emptied the larders of the restaurants, the ovens of bakeries, the shelves of the groceries, as completely as necrophagous insects clean out a corpse.

  There were refugees who had made a similar pilgrimage at least once before; to a French officer caught up in the retreat, one old man remarked plaintively : I’m eighty-two. Eighty-two, do you hear? I went out in ’70. I went out again in ’14. I thought all the same they’d let me die at home, in my own house.’ On the road, the wretched columns of refugees were alternately bombed and machine-gunned by German planes, and pushed off the road by Allied units trying to get up to the front. As the exodus gathered momentum, the condition of the refugees deteriorated, and their plight did not always bring out the best in human nature. Lieutenant Georges Kosak of the cavalry was involved in a sadly typical scene during the retreat from Charleroi. A huge man

  tries to pass four abreast with an enormous chariot which is too heavily laden, drawn by six magnificent animals. He strikes with his whip at everything which is in range. The enormous vehicle, bulging with packs, pitches and jolts, and ends by getting hooked up with and upsetting a wretched cart drawn by a little donkey; then he sends two wheelbarrows and a child’s pram into the ditch amidst cries of protest and despair. People leap on to him, but the man is a real colossus, at least six feet tall, with a red face, and wide shoulders. Some women and old men try to master the brute, but he grabs his whip by the small end and strikes with the heavy end against the spines of these wretched people. Why was such a Hercules not at war?

  In the end, Kosak drew his pistol on the brute. He blenched, dropped his whip, and abandoning his ponderous vehicle disappeared at top speed.

  Initially, the civil population treated the refugees with kindness. In Paris, Clare Boothe noted, ‘The stations were full of volunteers. Tireless, white-faced little French Boy Scouts helped them off the trains and stacked their bicycles and bundles in careful confusion.’ Then, as the numbers multiplied and locust-like they denuded the countryside of foodstuffs, kindness turned to hostility. By the end of May, says Fabre-Luce, the French ‘had expended their pity. They now greeted the new arrivals with closed faces.’ Requests for bread, petrol, or even somewhere to sleep, were increasingly met with refusal. In their turn, the refugees often showed undisguised hatred towards the French troops they encountered on the road, which at times seemed to exceed what they felt for the enemy. A German officer overtaking the wretched refugees in their thousands during the rapid advance claimed : ‘They don’t hate us, and they don’t love us. For them everything has come upon them as an act of God; they don’t concern themselves with the causes of catastrophe.’

  The ‘Fifth Column’: Myth or Reality?

  To the Allied forces the encumberment of the refugees on the roads presented an impossible problem. Reinforcements desperately needed at the front were held up for hours at a time; wounded soldiers died in ambulances trapped in endless traffic blocks. The military police tried to force the refugees to camp in the fields during the day, but gradually they would drift back on to the roads. Short of actually gunning them down, the troops were helpless. Meanwhile the plight of their kinsmen had a markedly depressing effect on the French troops, and even on the British, fighting though they were on foreign soil. ‘This continual sight of agonizing humanity drifting aimlessly like frightened cattle becomes one of the worst of daylight nightmares,’ General Alan Brooke confided to his diary :

  One’s mind, short of sleep, is continually racked by the devastating problems of an almost hopeless situation, and on top of it one’s eyes rest incessantly on terrified and miserable humanity cluttering the lines of communication on which all hope of possible security rest.

  Earlier the B.E.F. had worked out an elaborate scheme for evacuating some 800,000 inhabitants from the industrial areas of northern France, but as Panzers curled around their escape routes westward, Brooke encountered these unhappy evacuees crowding back towards the east :

  many women were in the last stages of exhaustion, many of them with their feet tied up with string and brown paper where their shoes had given out… I was informed by the Prefect that these were the 800,000 people whom we had evacuated westward. They had run into the German armoured forces, and into rumours of these forces where they did not exist. Like one big wave, the whole of this humanity, short of food and sleep and terrified to the core, was now surging back again and congesting all roads at a moment when mobility was a vital element.

  The mass exodus of the refugees proved to be one of Hitler’s most successful ‘secret weapons’ of the French campaign. To what extent was it a diabolically contrived policy of the Germans? What were the motivating causes behind this mass migration? In Allied countries during and after the campaign, it was widely believed that German radio broadcasts and ‘Fifth Column’ activity had been responsible for getting the refugees in motion, and that the Luftwaffe had then kept them moving by deliberately strafing them. Dr Goebbels’s ‘terror’ propaganda was undoubtedly angled at sowing panic among the civil population, but no one in Germany calculated on the migration attaining such a scale. German troops frequently affected surprise that the neutral Belgians and Dutch whom they were coming to ‘protect’, as well as the French civil population, should regard them with such fear, but they forgot how deeply engrained were memories of German ‘beastliness’ in occupied territories during 1914–18. Superimposed on these memories was the impact made by news films of German terror-bombing during the Spanish Civil War and in Poland, not to mention the more recent example of Rotterdam. Many reliable witnesses4 testify to the fact that refugee columns were machine-gunned and bombed in open country. Possibly the strafing could on occasions be attributed to inexperienced pilots genuinely mistaking the refugee columns for troops, and on others to the viciousness of individual Germans. But there is little to suggest that it was Luftwaffe policy. The refugees, however, expected to be attacked from the air, and this added to the uncontrollability of their panic. Maurois tells a pathetic story of a Belgian woman who, ‘having noticed that our lorries and tanks were camouflaged with branches, had picked up four leaves and spread them neatly in line along the top of her baby-carriage’.

  The stories, widespread at the time, of a vast malevolent network of ‘Fifth Columnists’ mingling with the refugees and transmitting bogus instructions to propagate terror also rarely stand up to examination. Louis de Jong, a Dutchman who made a sober and careful assessment of the whole ‘Fifth Column’ background, goes so far as to declare of France : ‘In not a single concrete case have we any evidence that the flight of the population was furthered by false orders circulated by enemy agents.’ It is impossible to avoid the conclusion that many of the allegations in this context stemmed from an instinct on the part of the authorities to explain away their own failings. Often it was the very people who should have attempted to curb the mass panic who led the exodus. Accounts of the scene behind the Ninth Army front frequently refer to gendarmes passing through the villages and telling inhabitants ‘You must leave.’ At the huge Pechiney works near Compiègne, the managing director (according to Senator Bardoux) took the entire factory into flight with him. In the north, Saint-Exupèry, watching the refugees teem past as if ‘a boot had scattered an ant-hill’, asked them:

  ‘Who ordered you to evacuate?’

  It was always the mayor, or the schoolteacher, or the mayor’s clerk. One morning at three the order had run through the village : ‘Everybody out!’

  They had been expecting this. For two weeks they had seen the passage through their village of refugees who no longer believed in the eternity of their homes… The villagers were on the move. And no one so much as knew why.

  And so the chain reaction passed from hamlet to village, from town to city. In view of the appalling dislocation the refugee hordes caused the Allied war effort, it was a grave failure on the part o
f the French and Belgian Governments not to have taken drastic measures. They could, for instance, have stopped the sale of petrol, closed the Belgian frontier completely to civilian traffic, and used the radio to order the population to remain at home, instead of as a means to fill the ether with tranquillizing dance music and untruthful communiqués.

  No less powerful a ‘secret weapon’ in Hitler’s armoury was the much-vaunted ‘Fifth Column’ – or the belief in its sinister ubiquity. ‘Spy-mania’ had gripped France during the darkest moments of defeat in both 1870 and 1914, but never more devastatingly than in 1940. Shortly after the collapse of the Ninth Army, a group of journalists were trying to make their way out of Cambrai. Percy Philip of the New York Times was dragged out of a train by some soldiers after it had been bombed, his war correspondent’s uniform, blue eyes and fair hair having given rise to suspicions that he was a German parachutist. He was about to be shot out of hand when some gendarmes arrived and confirmed that his papers were in order. But they would take no responsibility for his safety, because of the ‘dangerous mood’ of the crowd. Philip finally escaped with the aid of three French Army doctors. About the same time, Maurice Noël of Le Figaro was seized while bicycling through a French village. Like the tricoteuses of the Revolution and the harpies thrown up by the Commune, women seem to have led the mob, shrieking, ‘The newspapers have told us to kill all parachutists.’ An Arab soldier announced to Noël: ‘I can tell by your accent that you are not a Frenchman.’ Then the police intervened. On searching him they found a box of white powder which Noël carried as a remedy for indigestion. At once the crowd shouted : ‘There it is! There is the explosive!’ To demonstrate that it was not, Noël lit a match, but before he could put it to the bicarbonate of soda three police officers and a dozen bystanders flung themselves on him, ‘in a desperate attempt to save the police station from total destruction’. Noël was only saved by the intervention of a courageous mayor.