While this discussion was going on, through the chaos of communications Billotte had at last managed to trace Weygand’s whereabouts and had arrived at Ypres. But there was still no sign of Gort or any of his staff, and Blanchard, who shared an equally vital interest in the plans being discussed, had apparently not been invited. Billotte was to be granted no opportunity to set down his own recollection of what transpired at this second meeting at the Ypres town hall – so, once again, accounts of it vary. Apparently Weygand outlined his projected scheme in the broadest terms; this would be to strike simultaneously southwards from around Cambrai and northwards from the Somme, the two thrusts meeting somewhere in the neighbourhood of Bapaume. According to General van Overstraeten, Billotte then pointed out that the French First Army was in a very confused situation, tired and severely tested, incapable of launching an attack, and barely capable of defending itself. In his opinion, only the B.E.F. still constituted a powerful offensive force. Weygand comments: ‘I had long been aware of the intelligence, decision, and energy of General Billotte… The fatigues and anxieties of the past two weeks had left a deep mark on him,19 but he realized the capital importance of the manoeuvre to be carried out and shared my view of its urgency.’ But it is questionable whether Billotte gave Weygand the full facts concerning the ‘Frankforce’ attack then in progress – namely, that Blanchard had declared himself unable to launch a two-division attack until the 22nd–23rd, and that Gort had only been able to find one brigade group, with which he was attacking at that very moment. If Blanchard and Gort had been at the Ypres meeting, it seems improbable that Weygand could have returned to Paris harbouring any serious belief that the northern armies could ever attack concertedly on anything like the scale that he would be promising in front of Reynaud and Churchill twenty-four hours later. Once again a French C.-in-C. was to deceive his Government with false hopes.
Gort Misses Weygand: Billotte Mortally Injured
Annoyed that Gort had neither turned up nor sent any explanatory message, Weygand waited in Ypres for him until 1900 hours. ‘I could not go back without meeting him,’ thought Weygand, and despite his undertaking to Reynaud to return to Paris within twenty-four hours, he wondered, ‘Ought I to spend the night where I was and try to succeed better next day?’ At this moment, Admiral Abrial, the French Commander of the Naval Forces of the North, presented himself and, warning Weygand that enemy bombing of airfields had now made it impossible for him to fly out, he offered to place at his disposal a 600-ton torpedo-boat, the Flore. Weygand accepted and left forthwith for Dunkirk. There he embarked in the midst of a violent air-raid, with the Flore crossing the harbour at full speed, ‘amidst fountains of water thrown up by bombs falling in the sea, and alongside the quays set alight by incendiaries’. After a detour via Dover, the Flore deposited Weygand at Cherbourg shortly after dawn on the 22nd From there he continued his journey, and, still showing no trace of fatigue, reached Paris at about 1000 hours.
Approximately an hour after Weygand left Ypres, Gort arrived. Previously, both King Leopold and General van Overstraeten had urged that efforts be made to bring Gort to the meeting, since nothing could be decided without his views being known. In vain, Overstraeten had tried to reach him on the telephone and then had driven with Admiral Keys to Hazebrouck, where Gort was thought to be. Eventually he was tracked down to his new command post, at Prémesques, between Lille and Armentières, where he had just moved from Wahagnies. According to Gort, all he knew of Weygand’s visit was a signal from Churchill to Keyes, copy to Gort, received the previous night (the 20th), which stated simply ‘Weygand is coming up your way tomorrow to concert action of all forces.’ A message sent by the British mission at French G.Q.G., warning that Weygand would land at Norrent-Fontes at 0900 hours, apparently miscarried; there is no record of its receipt either at B.E.F.’s G.H.Q. or Gort’s command post. Meanwhile, he had spent the whole day waiting for notification of Weygand’s whereabouts. Until Overstraeten’s intervention, no one on the French side seems to have thought of sending messengers to scour the countryside for the British commander.
Weygand was to go into German captivity still believing that Gort ‘had purposely abstained from coming to the Ypres conference’. To this day, Gort’s absence remains a matter of acute controversy in France. Did he stay away in a state of pique because Altmayer had not materialized at the ‘Frankforce’ conference the previous night, and because the French had failed to participate in the Arras attack? J. Benoist-Méchin20 suggests that Gort deliberately absented himself, because he had already become ‘a partisan of evacuation’, and any involvement in Weygand’s offensive schemes would have placed him ‘in an inextricable position’. On Gort’s side, there is the fact of the appalling communications and the signal which never arrived; he had just shifted his command post, on the 21st, and his preoccupation both with the Arras counter-attack and the awkward predicament of two of his corps on the Escaut front would seem to offer sufficient excuse for not attempting to track down Weygand.21 But principally, any such complex devious thinking as Benoist-Méchin attributes to Gort is simply out of character.
The failure of Gort and Weygand to meet on the 21st was in any event disastrous. At Ypres the third meeting of the day took place between Billotte and Gort, at which Billotte relayed Weygand’s intentions. Gort in turn reported on the not very encouraging progress of the Arras operation, pointing out that all his available reserves were now committed. The Belgians were finally persuaded to fall back from the Escaut to the Lys, so as to relieve British divisions for Weygand’s offensive. But this was a poor compromise; as the map reveals, the Lys line hardly offered any shortening of the front, and Gort reckoned that the switch-over could not be completed in time for the relieved divisions to attack before 26 May at the earliest. As the last meeting ended, King Leopold informed his waiting Ministers that Gort had agreed to co-operate in Weygand’s offensive, but
The British General considers that the chances of the manoeuvre in which he is going to take part are practically nil. The situation is desperate.
Thus in effect nothing specific had been decided about the proposed offensive. The Belgians had not committed themselves to withdrawing to the Yser. Gort had not heard anything that might restore his faith in the capacity of the French First Army to join effectively in an attack, and the Belgians had certainly given him no confidence in the security of his left flank. Weygand had returned to Paris thoroughly mistrustful of Gort, and imbued with notions which Gort could swiftly have persuaded him were impracticable, had the two men but met in Ypres. The meetings broke up, according to Overstraeten, in a very depressed atmosphere.
There then followed yet another of the tragic twists of fate that had seemed to dog the Allies from the very beginning of hostilities. Shortly after the Ypres conference, some young British officers were about to appease their hunger by sharing out a bottle of milk found in a nearby farmhouse. Abruptly the door opened and in came a senior French general. Spotting the milk he exclaimed ‘Ah! Du lait! Excellent!’ and without any further formality grabbed the bottle, drained it, and then departed before the Britons could register their indignation. This was Billotte, and it was probably the last time he was seen alive by any member of the B.E.F. Carrying him on through the darkness to brief Blanchard about Weygand’s intentions, a few hours later Billotte’s car apparently skidded and ran into the back of a refugee lorry. The driver, who was wearing a steel helmet, survived; Billotte, not so protected, was gravely injured, and after lying in a coma for two days, died. His removal from the scene could hardly have been more catastrophic for the Allies. He was the only French or British commander with the northern armies who knew of Weygand’s plan at first hand,22 and he was the one person in whom both Gort and King Leopold still had some confidence. With Billotte fighting for his life, another three days were allowed to elapse before the badly shaken Blanchard was confirmed as his successor, and General Prioux was then moved up to command the First Army. Thus in these crucial days t
here was to be no co-ordinating hand to harness the three Allied armies in the north to the ‘Weygand Plan’. Meanwhile, demoralizing rumours swiftly ran round the French camp that the unfortunate Billotte had committed suicide.23
Churchill’s Second Meeting with Reynaud
In Paris that afternoon, Reynaud had made a courageous – indeed, a great – speech before the Senate. For the first time he revealed to France just how grave was the situation. ‘The country is in danger!’ he proclaimed. ‘It is my first duty to tell the Senate and the nation the truth.’ Murmurs swelled into a roar; there were demands for the names of the guilty. The Premier continued, enumerating some of the terrible facts. He spoke of the ‘serious failures’ of the Ninth Army, condemned General Corap and disclosed that ‘through unbelievable faults, which will be punished, bridges over the Meuse were not destroyed’. When he revealed the news that Amiens and Arras had been lost, Alexander Werth in the gallery recorded, ‘A gasp of bewilderment rises from the senators’ benches…’ The air cleared only a little when Reynaud went on to offer a source of hope:
In the midst of our country’s misfortunes we can take pride in the thought that two of her sons, who would have been justified in resting on their laurels, have placed themselves at the nation’s service in this tragic hour: Pétain and Weygand. (Prolonged cheers.) Pétain, the victor of Verdun, the great soldier with the human touch, the man who knows how a French victory can come out of a cataclysm. Weygand, Foch’s man, who halted the German onslaught when the front was broken in 1918 and who was afterwards able to turn the tables and lead us to victory… France cannot die. For my part, if some day I were to be told that only a miracle could save France, that day I should say: ‘I believe in the miracle,24 because I believe in France.’
After Reynaud’s speech, as Senator Bardoux recorded, the atmosphere in the corridors was ‘terrifying… Faces are distorted. Groups form and re-form…’ Now at last the veils were down.
That evening Reynaud suffered fresh gloomy forebodings as to what would happen if Weygand on his journey should fall into German hands, and to Baudouin he even began to speak of General Huntziger as a possible successor. The following morning (the 22nd) he anxiously waited for Weygand to report in at the Rue Dominique. Despite his arduous experiences of the past twenty-four hours, the seventy-three-year-old Generalissimo arrived full of bounce and launched into his analysis of the situation on an evident note of optimism. ‘So many mistakes have been made,’ he began, ‘that they give me confidence. I believe that in future we shall make less.’ The B.E.F., he declared, apparently without mentioning its engagement at Arras, ‘is in a very good state, for up to the present it has hardly been in action. Some elements in Blanchard’s army have been shaken, but… this army still constitutes a powerful force.’ He then offered to Reynaud the plan he had outlined to King Leopold and Billotte the previous day, namely, the joint thrusts from north and south meeting at Bapaume. In conception, it was roughly the same as Gamelin’s short-lived plan, contained in his ‘Instruction No. 12’ of 19 May; the main differences were that the pincers were to close further to the west, three days later, and it would be a heavier blow. Weygand said that he had ‘thoroughly explained’ his plan ‘to everybody I have seen,25 I think they understood me, and that I have convinced them. I cannot waste my strength running after armour. It is better to try this manoeuvre of a junction.’ He then concluded26 with a curiously revealing remark: ‘It will either give us victory or it will save our honour.’ In the coming days, the expression ‘save our honour’ was to appear with increasing regularity on Weygand’s lips, and it indicated which way his thoughts were already beginning to turn. As Colonel Goutard acidly points out: ‘As soon as it became a question of “honour”, we were in a bad way!’
Reynaud declared himself entirely in agreement with Weygand’s project, and informed him that Churchill was due in Paris at 1115. After collecting the British Prime Minister, Reynaud recalls: ‘At midday we went together to the stronghold of Vincennes under a sky whose very beauty seemed implacable in those tragic days.’ On this second visit of immense importance to Paris, Churchill was once again accompanied by the inseparable General Ismay and General Sir John Dill, who was about to succeed Ironside as C.I.G.S. Ismay noted that, despite the change in command since their last visit, ‘the Beau Geste flavour of the old fort was just the same – spahis with white cloaks and long curved swords, on guard duty, and the floors and chairs covered with oriental rugs’. (In the light of all these disastrous revelations of the past weeks, how anachronistic the power of the French Army must suddenly have seemed!) But Ismay was at once agreeably surprised by Weygand’s appearance:
He gave the appearance of being a fighter – resolute, decisive and amazingly active, in spite of his wizened face and advanced years. He might have been made of indiarubber. One dared to hope that the Allied armies would now have the leadership that had hitherto seemed lacking.
Churchill admits to having been equally taken by the Generalissimo:
In spite of his physical exertions and a night of travel, he was brisk, buoyant, incisive. He made an excellent impression upon all.
The absence of Daladier and his aroma of absinthe was also clearly an improvement.
Weygand’s Plan
The meeting, says Ismay, ‘was short and businesslike’. Weygand described the situation as he had found it on his trip to Ypres, and then once more gave an exposé of his plan. This met with general agreement, and accordingly Weygand retired to draft his ‘General Operation No. 1’,27 which read as follows:
(I) The forces grouped with No. 1 Army Group (the Belgian Army, the B.E.F., and the First Army) will make it their principal task to block the German advance to the sea in order to maintain contact between themselves and the remainder of the French forces.
(II) The German Army will only be stopped and beaten by counter-attacks.
(III) The forces necessary for these counter-attacks already exist in the group, the linear defence of which is much too densely held, and they are:
some infantry divisions of the First Army;
the cavalry corps;
the B.E.F., which must be withdrawn from the line by extending the Belgian sector, and used as a whole.
These counter-attacks will be supported by all the R.A.F. based in France.
(IV) This offensive will be covered on the east by the Belgian Army on the Yser.
The light enemy units which are trying to cause disruption and panic in our rear between the frontier and the Somme, supported by air-raids on our aerodromes and ports, are in a dangerous position and will be destoyed.
Weygand ended his order by declaring that having been ‘rounded up’, the Panzers ‘must not escape again’. One might as well have said the same of the Soviet spy George Blake, after he had been ‘sprung’ from a British maximum security prison.
To write off the seven Panzer divisions which had driven through the Allied armies as ‘light enemy units’ might seem to bear little enough relationship to the facts of life,28 but it was nothing as compared to the telegram Churchill now sent to Gort summarizing the talks at Vincennes:
It was agreed:
1. That the Belgian Army should withdraw to the line of the Yser and stand there, the sluices being opened.
2. That the British Army and the French First Army should attack south-west towards Bapaume and Cambrai at the earliest moment, certainly tomorrow, with about eight divisions,29 and with the Belgian Cavalry Corps on the right of the British.
3. That as this battle is vital to both armics and the British communications depend upon freeing Amiens, the British Air Force should give the utmost possible help, both by day and by night, while it is going on.
4. That the new French Army Group which is advancing upon Amiens and forming a line along the Somme should strike northwards and join hands with the British divisions who are attacking southwards in the general direction of Bapaume.
In the first place, the Belgians had never a
greed to withdraw to the Yser. Secondly, as both Blanchard and Gort could have pointed out to the Allied leaders, how could eight divisions, or 100,000 men, turn their backs on the enemy pressing hard from the east and attack southwards, at a day’s notice? One of the ‘secrets of Marshal Foch’, to which Weygand had archly alluded during his valedictory interview with Gamelin, was that Foch had always known exactly the value of the forces he could throw into battle at any given moment. This was something Weygand clearly did not know on 22 May, despite his journey of the previous day. Thirdly, it was a gross exaggeration to speak of a ‘new French Army Group… advancing upon Amiens’, as Weygand must well have known. The truth was that behind the Somme, between the coast and the Crozat Canal nearly ninety air miles to the east, there were only the five divisions that General Frère had now managed to scratch together in his new Seventh Army, plus the badly mauled 2nd and 5th Light Cavalry, and the newly arrived and unblooded British 1st Armoured Division. In a separate order dispatched by General Georges on the 22nd, these units were summoned up to take their place to the left of General Frère, under command of General Robert Altmayer.30
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