As the delegates emerged from the wagon-lit, the observers outside in the clearing felt a drop of rain fall. The skies had become heavily overcast. Soon the drops grew to a violent storm. The few black flags hung out by French householders drooped limp and sodden. The wonderful days of sunshine, ‘Goering’s weather’, that extraordinary run of good fortune which had so assisted the Germans in their conquest, had at last broken with a vengeance. In the darkening sky lay auguries for the future: Britain was not yet suing for peace, and in exactly one year to the day Hitler would be sending his victorious legions to their doom in Russia.
Immediately the armistice had been signed. German engineers prepared to move Foch’s wagon-lit in triumph to Berlin.1 With a barbarity worthy of Genghis Khan, Hitler decreed that, except for Foch’s statue, the site should be totally razed. He then set off on a tour of First World War battlefields, together with two old comrades from the company in which he had served as a corporal, taking in some of the Maginot Line forts – like any German tourist – before returning to Berlin to organize the celebrations that would suitably commemorate this astonishing victory. For Hitler, as for many of his soldiers, the war was over. France, the arch-enemy, was prostrate at last; Britain no longer counted, she would fall like a plum from a tree in due course. Russia did not exist; America did not exist. Ever since that day of humiliation at Versailles, it was France alone that had obsessed German thoughts. Karl-Heinz Mende summed them up well when, writing home about the Armistice, he said: ‘The great battle in France is now ended. It lasted twenty-six years.’
The Price
What had been the cost of this earth-shaking last round of the ‘great battle’? When the figures were added up, during the six weeks’ fighting German casualties amounted to
killed 27,074
wounded 111,034
missing 18,384
Thus despite repeated Allied and neutral reports of hecatombs of German casualties, the overall total of just over 150,000 was equivalent to not much more than a third of the number of men Germany lost at Verdun in 1916, in one single battle of the First World War. During the three decisive weeks up to Dunkirk, German casualties (as claimed by the Wehrmacht) were reported to have totalled approximately what Britain suffered during the first day of the Somme alone. Even the losses of its élite formations, which had been in the forefront of the battle, were comparatively light (at least by First War standards): Rommel’s 7th Panzer, for example, lost a total of 2,273 in killed and wounded; the Grossdeutschland Regiment, 1,108 (including 221 killed) out of its complement of 3,900 men; and the losses of one of the most constantly engaged infantry divisions, the 3rd, had totalled no more than 1,649. On the other hand, as the cost of the Wehrmacht’s enormously successful doctrine of ‘leading from the front’, a relatively high proportion of the German dead – 5 per cent – were officers. The strain imposed by the tempo of the campaign also extended its casualties; one was Colonel Werner, commander of the 31st Panzer Regiment (5th Panzer Division), who died of a heart attack shortly after the armistice.
On the Allied side, French losses during the six-week campaign are estimated2 at somewhere in the region of 90,000 dead, 200,000 wounded and 1,900,000 in prisoners and missing. British total casualties came to 68,111, Belgian 23,350, and Dutch 9,779. While the Luftwaffe lost 1,284 planes, R.A.F. losses amounted to 931, of which 477 were priceless fighters. French losses in the air are difficult to assess. One reasonable French figure puts the number of planes lost in combat at 560, of which 235 were destroyed on the ground. It was months before the victorious Germans could even count up the vast piles of captured war booty of all descriptions. Among the guns taken were some 7,000 French ‘75s’ of First War vintage, many of them only brought out of retirement in the last desperate hours of the battle; nevertheless, slightly modified by the Wehrmacht, four summers later they would be used with deadly effect to halt British and American tanks landing on the Normandy beaches.
Tears and Celebrations
At thirty-five minutes past midnight on the 25th, the cannon ceased firing and something like the silence of the grave descended on France. Already the endless lines of weary, footsore, broken-spirited refugees had begun to retrace their footsteps, to find out what had happened to their homes. Foodstuffs were in seriously short supply, transportation and other public services had broken down, but in some respects French life reverted – at least temporarily – to normality with surprising speed, just as it had done after the defeat of 1870. On the day after the armistice was concluded, a German war correspondent (Stackelberg), lunching in a restaurant in Lyon, was astonished to observe a bourgeois French family at the next table going through the important ritual of their Sunday lunch as if nothing in the world had happened. They spent approximately half an hour
bent over the menu, discussing the food, and then at length and with great seriousness discussed city gossip. It struck me as remarkable that their thoughts on this day should not assume other lines, but the meal was something very important for them.
Returning to Paris from Compiègne, William Shirer was intrigued to find that along the Seine ‘The fishermen were dangling their lines from the bank, as always. I thought: “Surely this will go on to the end of Paris, to the end of time.” ’ Ilya Ehrenburg also watched Paris coming back to life, in an implausible kind of way:
The Germans bought souvenirs, smutty postcards, pocket dictionaries in the little shops. Notices appeared in restaurants: ‘Ici on parle allemand.’ Prostitutes lisped ‘Mein Süsser’.
In the countryside Simone de Beauvoir registered surprise at the conqueror’s good behaviour; they
did not cut off children’s hands; they paid for their drinks and the eggs they bought on the farms, and spoke politely… As I was reading in a field two soldiers approached me. They spoke a little clumsy French, and assured me of their friendly feelings towards the French people; it was the English and the Jews who had brought us to this sorry pass.
By and large, the German troops appeared to be kind and helpful. The Gestapo, the Sicherheitsdienst, and all the apparatus of Nazi terror had yet to arrive.
Meanwhile, in England, once it was apparent that Hitler was not going to follow up Dunkirk with an immediate invasion, the shock of defeat turned into a kind of relief that, somehow, strangely enough, life had at least become simpler. King George VI spoke for many when he wrote to his mother: ‘Personally, I feel happier now that we have no allies to be polite to and to pamper.’ There was, after all, something to be said for being ‘in the finals’ – to quote the headline which one Cockney newsvendor chalked up on his stand.
For the victorious German troops in France, the first summer days after the armistice indeed seemed like a halcyon time of insouciant rapture. They clambered up the Eiffel Tower, gazed down at Napoleon’s tomb, clicking cameras everywhere, like tourists of any country at any time. On the wreckage-strewn Channel beaches, they kicked off their jackboots to paddle in the warm water, gazing across at a defiant but impotent enemy. As the cease-fire came into force, the ascetic Halder noted from his desk: ‘Now begins the administrative work.’ War production was cut back, and there was talk of massive demobilization of the Army. It was also a time of mutual congratulation, and of thanksgiving and celebration, rather than of preparation for any further fighting. Even the icy Molotov (while reaching out with one hand for the Baltic States and the Roumanian province of Bessarabia, as Russia’s self-awarded ‘tip’ for her benevolent neutrality) had sent Hitler ‘the warmest congratulations of the Soviet Government on the splendid success of the German Wehrmacht’. On 17 July, the Grossdeutschland paraded in triumph through Paris, to hold a thanksgiving service in Notre-Dame.3 The next day in Berlin, a victory parade marched through the Brandenburger Tor, for the first time since 1871. Then, on the 19th, Hitler in a solemn ceremony at the Kroll Opera House promoted twelve of his triumphant generals to the rank of Field-Marshal.4 Such an inflation of military pomp had never been seen during the time of the Kaiser; but
nor had such victories.
Shadows: the Flaws of Victory
Yet already there were shadows. As young Lieutenant Mende wrote home: ‘I feel full of peace within this enemy country, and yet also I feel a certain anxiety about this not entirely finished war.’ When in the course of the Berlin victory celebrations Hitler remarked to his sober-faced financial wizard: ‘Well, Herr Schacht, what do you say now?’, Schacht, sibyllike, had simply replied: ‘May God protect you!’ Meanwhile, thousands of miles away in Chicago, Roosevelt was being nominated by the Democratic Party to run for a third term. For 28 June, the twenty-first anniversary of the signature of the Versailles Treaty, Hitler had planned a further act of humiliation for prostrated France by holding a massive parade in front of the palace, followed by an oration delivered inside the Hall of Mirrors. But it was cancelled; there were fears (which even Goering could not allay) that the R.A.F. might also attend. Meanwhile, it was not until 17 June, the day of the Grossdeutschland’s thanksgiving ceremony in Notre-Dame, that the O.K.H. issued its first orders for ‘Operation Sea-Lion’ – the invasion of England. Then, on 29 July, Jodl gathered together some of the senior O.K.W. staff officers in a railway restaurant car, ensured that all windows and doors were closed, and informed them that Hitler had it in mind to attack Russia the following spring.
Soon Hitler’s astounding achievements in France would turn to dust as the diamond brilliance of Sichelschnitt was shattered by the fatal flaw latent within it. In his appreciation drawn up for the Kaiser, which prepared the ground for the German attack on Verdun in 1916, Falkenhayn, the German Chief of Staff, had recognized Britain to be Germany’s principal enemy. By ‘bleeding white’ the French Army at Verdun, he had argued, Britain’s ‘best sword would be knocked out of her hand’. The U-boat blockade would do the rest, in due course. Now Hitler had succeeded where Falkenhayn and all the Kaiser’s generals had failed. Britain’s ‘best sword’ lay shattered on the ground. But Hitler and the planners of genius who had created Sichelschnitt had in reality thought no further ahead than Falkenhayn; no contingency plan had been prepared whereby a tottering Britain might be invaded immediately after success had been achieved in France. By mid July, when the first O.K.H. plan was drafted, it was already too late. The Germans had missed the bus, as Chamberlain would have said. The two great errors of the otherwise perfect Sichelschnitt – this original fault of high strategy, and the tactical fault of the 24 May ‘Halt Order’ which allowed the B.E.F. to escape from Dunkirk – in conjunction added up to one thing. Britain would remain at war, inviolate. And as long as Britain was there, it was inevitable that sooner or later the immense power of the United States would be brought in too. But like so many of his generation of Germans, their vision blinkered by the memories of 1914–18 and of the shame of Versailles, Hitler could see only France and ‘the last decisive battle’ which would have to be fought there.
In fact, as one now sees it in the perspective of time, Hitler’s astonishing triumph over France was to be the direct source of his greatest disaster. After France, the mighty warrior nation which had defeated Germany in 1918, had been overthrown with such ease, what nation on earth could stand up to the Wehrmacht? So Hitler in 1941 was convinced that, while reducing his war production and demobilizing part of his forces, and without furnishing his cohorts with any winter equipment, he could knock out Russia in one lightning campaign. But although in many ways their doctrine of war may initially have been as faulty as that of the French, the Russians would be able to make a retreat equivalent to a French withdrawal from Sedan across the Pyrenees and down to Saragossa, before launching any major counter-offensive. What might even Gamelin and Weygand have achieved, had they but disposed of such space over which to manoeuvre and behind which to form fresh armies? Even more lethal to the Germans than their self-assuredness derived from the easy success in France was the supreme reliance Hitler now placed in his own infallibility. He saw himself as having been proved right in his audacity over the cautiousness of his professional advisers during the planning of Sichelschnitt; and, in retrospect, he saw how wrong had been the strategic assessment in battle of even those like Rundstedt whose judgement he trusted most. In his unquenchable animosity towards the O.K.H., he could not admit that it was in fact not he but Halder who during the campaign had been right. So Hitler became less and less inclined to accept the advice of his military experts, and more and more to rely on his own intuition, until finally it led him to the point of no return at Stalingrad.
French Post-mortems
For four grim years, France disappears from the forefront of the battle. ‘The choice is always between Verdun and Dachau,’ wrote a severe French critic of 1940, Jean Dutourd. Unable to face the prospects of another Verdun in 1940, it was indeed Dachau that became France’s fate. In their hundreds of thousands, Frenchmen were shipped off to the concentration camps or to slave labour inside the Reich. With superb psychological cunning, the Nazis divided the conquered country geographically in two, thereby imposing yet another enduring source of division upon those that already plagued France. In the act of liberation, her old and new Allies would inflict at least as much damage upon France’s cities and countryside as had the Luftwaffe, and the prostrate nation could hardly be subjected to greater humiliation. But there were many Frenchmen who did not agree that the final battle to save national ‘honour’, which so obsessed General Weygand, had yet been fought. Using every device and subterfuge they slipped off to join de Gaulle’s Free French in England, or the ‘Normandie-Niemen Squadron’ in Russia; later, with Anglo-American support, the Resistance would rekindle the flame of ‘honour’ inside France itself.
Who, and what, were responsible for France’s catastrophe in 1940? Could the game have been played differently? At what point did disaster become irremediable? The questions are still asked and re-asked, and the answers become no simpler with time. But post-mortems are irresistible. The Riom Trials, held under the auspices of the Vichy Government in 1942, attempted to saddle the blame for the lost war upon earlier French Governments. The questions asked were loaded; no official record was made of the proceedings; the ‘trials’ were finally adjourned and then dropped. Equally inconclusive and incomplete were the 2,500 pages of the ‘Serre Report’, based on the findings of the French official Commission of Inquiry which sat from 1947 to 1951. It did its best to exculpate the politicians of the period, but it could not even agree as to whether it was the breakthrough on Corap’s or Huntziger’s front which precipitated the military catastrophe on the Meuse. However, as this present book has tried to show, more than any individual or set of individuals was to blame. Two doctrines and two philosophies and the past events of a generation were involved. Since the ‘day of glory’ of 14 July 1919, almost every throw of the dice had resulted in advantage to Germany and loss to France. Upon Hitler’s reoccupation of the Rhineland, unchallenged, in 1936, the road to disaster was clearly signposted. Three years later France went reluctantly to war, while she was herself still close to a state of civil war, with morale (as Mandel admitted to Spears during the last days of defeat) ‘sapped by the feeling of the last twenty years that there would be no war because France could not stand another bleeding like that of 1914’, and (in the words of Weygand) with a French Army of 1918 facing a Wehrmacht of 1939.
Before the decisive battle itself opened, there were two other chronological milestones on France’s road to disaster. In August 1939, the signature of the Ribbentrop–Molotov Non-Aggression Pact effectively removed any prospect of Germany’s military potential being split by a war on two fronts; a month later, this was compounded by France’s unwillingness to come to the aid of her solitary Polish ally, by launching an offensive in the west. Thus, from October 1939 onwards, France had no option but to remain on the defensive and wait to be attacked. When the attack came the following May, the preponderance of strength – with all factors taken into account – was immeasurably greater on the German side than at any time during the First World War. Therefor
e, there is a fatalistic view which regards the Battle of France as having been lost even before it was begun. Might France still have been defeated even if the Germans had not marched to the masterly blueprint of Sichelschnitt, if they had simply utilized a crude replay of the Schlieffen Plan of 1914? Possibly.
On the other hand, in war Fate contains many surprises. For all its impressiveness, the Wehrmacht of 1940 was a more fragile instrument, less consistently solid throughout, than the Kaiser’s Army of 1914; nor did it have the same weight of resources behind it. On almost every occasion when Allied troops in 1940 came up against the ordinary infantry divisions which comprised the great mass of the Wehrmacht, they held their own. Acutely limited in their fuel supplies, the Panzers could not have fought a protracted campaign without a major reorganization. Then there is the prime consideration of the steadfastness of the German High Command, about which much has already been said. It is always held that the Younger Moltke lost the First War on the Marne because his nerve failed. Yet there were times during both the Norwegian and the French campaigns when the German High Command of 1940 revealed itself to be potentially little less impressionable than Moltke. What, then, if the steel tip provided by the few Panzer and motorized divisions could have been blunted, that vulnerable wooden spear-shaft slashed into by determined Allied armour-led flank attacks, the nerves of the German High Command shaken by one sharp reverse? Might the German onslaught have been brought to a temporary halt, perhaps long enough for the Allies to reorganize their forces into a more coherent defence? The impact Rundstedt’s Ardennes Offensive of 1944 made upon the Allies indeed suggests how even such a last-gasp effort (and against a far greater relative superiority than the Germans possessed in May 1940) can at least win time.
To Lose a Battle Page 68