Second World War, The

by Corrigan, Gordon

  Without office, but as a Privy Councillor and a member of various committees not without influence, he became the leading, or at least the noisiest, opponent of appeasement and when war was declared in 1939 he was recalled to the Cabinet as, again, First Lord of the Admiralty. According to Churchill, a signal was sent from the Admiralty to all ships: ‘Winston is back’. No trace of this signal has ever been found and nobody but Churchill has ever admitted to seeing it. One cynic has suggested that, if it was ever sent, it was in exasperation rather than jubilation. An armed forces minister is supposed to oversee the broad direction of the service of which he is the political head. He is not there to usurp the functions of the admirals, generals or air marshals, who have spent a lifetime preparing to wage war. Churchill, who always fancied himself a great strategist and tactician, took to ordering individual ships about and behaving as if he was the admiral commanding the Home Fleet – and indeed every fleet. The results were near disastrous. Aircraft carriers were sent off to hunt for submarines without escort vessels; destroyers and battleships were sent hither and thither with Churchill personally deciding where each ship should go. The impression was one of great and purposeful activity: the reality was chaos and muddle. It was Churchill who interpreted the German naval activity preparatory to invading Norway as an attempt to break out, and Churchill who insisted that the British convoy en route to Narvik should be split. When it was eventually clear even to him that the Norwegian expedition had failed, he argued (fortunately unsuccessfully) that the remnants of the Territorial brigade should remain in Norway with instructions to wage guerrilla warfare.

  As prime minister, Churchill sacked generals and admirals who would not tell him what he wanted to hear and insisted on involving British forces in adventures that should never have been contemplated. After a meeting on 8 May 1943, General Sir Alan Brooke, who had become Chief of the Imperial General Staff (professional head of the British Army) after Churchill had sacked his predecessor, General Sir John Dill, for refusing to pander to the prime minister’s whims, recorded in his diary: ‘A thoroughly unsatisfactory meeting at which he [Churchill] again showed that he cannot grasp the relationship of various theatres of war to each other. He always gets carried away by the one he is examining and in prosecuting it is prepared to sacrifice most of the others. I have never, in the one and a half years that I have worked with him, succeeded in making him review the war as a whole and to relate the importance of the various fronts to each other.’24 Meanwhile, Beatrice Webb, in her diary, thought him ‘egotistical, bumptious, shallow-minded and reactionary, but with a certain personal magnetism, great pluck and some originality, not of intellect but of character. More of the American speculator than the English aristocrat.’

  Churchill may have been the ‘man who won the war’, as was claimed in the 1945 election campaign, but he was also the man who nearly lost it by refusing to listen to sound advice and by allowing his emotions to rule his head. Had Churchill confined his activities to inspiring the people of Britain and of Britain’s allies, and not tried to run the war single-handedly, then his iconic status might be justified, but his entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography by Paul Addison probably has him absolutely right:

  Among his contemporaries, only the most narrow-minded denied him great qualities: volcanic energy, physical and mental courage, eloquence and vision, humanity and wit. Almost all conceded that he possessed elements of genius. But he was, they concluded, a genius manqué whose more brilliant qualities were offset by serious flaws: supreme egotism, an adventurer’s love of daring but perilous courses of action, poor judgement of men, erratic changes of course, susceptibility to rhetoric and flights of the imagination.

  As it was, on 10 May 1940, a month after their initial landings in Norway and Denmark, the Germans launched Fall Gelb, Case Yellow, the attack on Holland, Belgium, Luxembourg and France. In 1936 Belgium had withdrawn from her treaty relationship with France, whereby the latter guaranteed Belgium’s territorial integrity, in the naive belief that a declaration of neutrality in any future European war would be enough to ensure that belligerents left her alone. Unfortunately, if you are a Belgian, anyone wanting to invade Western Europe will inevitably choose to trample through your front garden – it is an inescapable fact of geography – and, while any threat from the East might well have dissuaded Germany from adventures in the West, in 1940 there was, thanks to the Russo-German pact, no threat from the East. It was never supposed that the Maginot Line would be impossible to breach, but it was hoped that it would hold up an attacker (and presumably a German attacker) long enough for French mobilization to take place and for a counter-stroke to be mounted. The French were not incapable of working out that the Germans would be unlikely to attack the Line directly; they would instead come through Holland, Belgium and Luxembourg, where, in order not to compromise Belgian neutrality, the Line did not run. There would, in other words,be a rerun of 1914. Then the Schlieffen Plan had failed – there were not enough troops, the Kaiser’s army could not march fast enough and the logistic chain could not keep up – but now the German army could move on wheels and tracks and it was supported by the Luftwaffe.

  After some very secret discussions with the Dutch and the Belgians, neither of whom wished to provoke German aggression, it was agreed that a German invasion of those countries would trigger the French Plan D with Breda Variant. This would see the French advance along the Channel coast as far as Breda to link up with the Dutch and secure the estuary of the River Scheldt; the Belgians would hold along the Albert Canal and then withdraw to the River Dyle from Antwerp and Louvain; the British would hold the Dyle from Louvain down to Wavre, where 125 years previously they had held off Napoleon Bonaparte during a campaign in which the Prussians had been their allies; and the French would again defend as far as the northern end of the Maginot Line. For their part, the Germans postponed the start date for Case Yellow twenty-nine times, and, had it not been for Hitler and some imaginative German staff officers, the Allied assessment of German intentions would have been about right, for the original Case Yellow was indeed not very different from a motorized Schlieffen.

  The military intention was to seize enough of Holland, Belgium and northern France to provide air bases for an eventual attack on England and to protect the economically vital Ruhr, considered (rightly) to be a priority target for RAF bombers; political ends would include the return of Alsace and part of Lorraine to Germany and frontier adjustments. To Hitler this was not sufficiently decisive: he wanted more, including an all-out defeat and occupation of Holland, Belgium and France. At the same time, Lieutenant-General Erich von Manstein, Chief of Staff of Colonel-General Gerd von Rundstedt’s Army Group A, who thought the whole plan was pedestrian and unimaginative, was seeking a way to achieve rapid results by capitalizing on what the German army was good at – all-arms cooperation, rapid redeployment, flexibility and communications – while compensating for its weaknesses in numbers and quality of armoured vehicles. Manstein was convinced that the answer was to send one army group (B, commanded by Colonel-General Foder von Bock) into Holland and Belgium, which would attract the weight of the Allies north, and then to send a second army group (Rundstedt’s A) in a narrow armoured thrust through the Ardennes forest in southern Belgium, with the aim of cutting the Allied forces in two, while a third army group (C, commanded by Colonel-General Ritter von Leeb) would take on the Maginot Line to fix its defenders (around 400,000 men) in position and prevent them from being used elsewhere. Once the French, British and Belgian armies in the north were destroyed, the Germans would regroup and send Army Groups A and B south to deal with the French armies in central and southern France, thus also outflanking the Maginot Line. Initially, Manstein’s ideas got nowhere: the generals were trying to persuade their political masters that a negotiated settlement was preferable to all-out war, but one of Hitler’s army liaison officers visiting Army Group A was lobbied by Manstein and took the plan back to OKW and showed it to Hitler, who,
having now told his generals that the shilly-shallying was to cease, ordered that the Manstein plan be adopted.

  The stalemate of the so-called Phoney War had allowed both sides to build up their strengths. The German army pushed ahead with mechanization while the French completed their mobilization and the British moved more troops to France and to the British Expeditionary Force (BEF). Once the French had completed mobilization, they had available in Europe fifty-one regular and thirty-seven reserve divisions. Of these, ten divisions were on the Italian border and twelve were in fortresses on the Maginot Line, leaving sixty-five divisions for operations. The French Commander-in-Chief, the sixty-eight-year-old General Maurice-Gustave Gamelin, was convinced that the French Army was not yet ready for offensive operations, particularly if the Rhine and the German defensive West Wall were to be negotiated, and to the great disappointment of the Poles authorized only very minor, and ineffective, incursions across Germany’s western frontier. Gamelin had cultivated Daladier, the leftist French prime minister who with Chamberlain had signed the Munich agreement in September 1938, but Daladier resigned in March 1940 because of his government’s refusal to back him in supporting the Finns against the Soviet Union in the Winter War of 1939–40, and Paul Reynaud, his successor, had little confidence in Gamelin. The two men’s relationship went from suspicion and distrust to outright hostility.

  On 10 May 1940, A-Tag for Fall Gelb, the Germans had available 131 infantry divisions and ten armoured divisions, while their opponents had 138 (ninety-seven French, twenty Belgian, thirteen British and eight Dutch) infantry, three armoured and seven cavalry divisions. Even if we discount one of the British divisions locked up with the French in the Maginot Line, and the Dutch and the Belgians on the grounds that they were supposedly neutral and there had been no, or very little, joint planning, the infantry numbers were still reasonably even. The Germans fielded 2,445 tanks, of which only 627 were Panzer Mks III and IV while the rest were either Mk I (armed only with machine-guns), Mk II (with an ineffective 20mm cannon) or inferior captured Czech models. The French had 3,063 tanks and the British 310, not only a numerical advantage but a qualitative superiority too, as 625 of the French tanks were the Somua and Char B, both proper tanks packing a good punch and as well armoured as the German Mks III and IV. All things being equal, the Allies should have had no problem in holding off a German offensive.

  All things, however, were not equal. It was the French and British press that first described the German tactics as Blitzkrieg, lightning war, and that is certainly what it looked like to those on the receiving end. But there was nothing magic about Blitzkrieg and the Germans did not invent it. Blitzkrieg was simply a refined version of all-arms cooperation where the infantry, armour, artillery, engineers and aircraft all worked together to produce shock on the battlefield. It was not designed just to kill, although of course it did, but to get inside its opponent’s decision-making cycle, to unbalance him, to get him on the back foot and keep him there. It depended on all the various components trusting each other, the use of initiative by junior commanders, a sound understanding of battle drills by all involved and good communications. It was invented, if such a thing can be invented, by the British in the first war, when their last great offensive, one that forced a German surrender, jumped off with the Battle of Amiens on 8 August 1918. Then the infantry, working closely with tanks and with artillery close up, stormed through the German defences. The engineers were following, ready to bridge rivers and destroy obstacles, while aircraft flew overhead in support of the ground troops or ranged further afield, attacking enemy stores dumps, railheads, forming-up places and communications. Strongpoints were bypassed – they could be dealt with later – and the infantry poured through weak points identified by themselves, the tanks or airborne observers. Yet, and the point bears repetition, it was the defeated Germans who had analysed the lessons of Amiens, honed them and incorporated them into their own tactical doctrine. It was not that the British and the French did not understand the principles of Blitzkrieg, simply that the Germans had prepared more thoroughly for it and proved much better at it. By the time the French were able to react to what the Germans were doing in May and June 1940, it was too late – the battle had moved on and the situation had changed irrevocably.

  The Allies enjoyed superiority in both quantity and, for the last time in the war, quality of tanks. But the Germans concentrated theirs and made full use of armour’s ability to move fast and deliver a decisive blow, whereas French doctrine was to use far too many tanks to support the infantry, with the result that they became little more than gun platforms on tracks. There were also far too few genuinely mobile armoured divisions in the French Army, although that commanded by the then Colonel de Gaulle, later to become a major irritant to both Churchill and Roosevelt, did as well as it could; it was, however, short of infantry and, when it went on the offensive, could not be reinforced. As for the British, while it was true that theirs was the only army that had (almost) evicted the equine from the battlefield,* most of the infantry still had to march – years of neglect and underfunding could not be overcome in the mere twelve months since rearmament had begun. And anyway, British doctrine was largely irrelevant since the BEF had only a few real tanks† with a two-pounder gun rather than a machine-gun and a reasonable thickness of armour.

  In both numbers and performance of aircraft, the Germans were also well ahead. The Luftwaffe was a modern, tactical air force, structured for just this sort of short, sharp campaign, while most of the French aircraft were obsolescent and the British – wisely, as it turned out – were not prepared to commit their bomber force at this stage and held back most of their fighters for the air defence of the UK.

  * * *

  Contrary to what is invariably stated in saloon-bar discussions, nobody had ever said that tanks could not come through the Ardennes, a range of hills and forests lying between Luxembourg, southern Belgium and the River Meuse around the French city of Sedan. Moving tanks and wheeled vehicles through the Ardennes was not easy then and it would not be easy now but it was and is perfectly possible. What people did think and did say was that it would not be possible to get all the various components of a striking force through the Ardennes rapidly enough to be effective before the defenders tumbled to what was going on and reacted to it. They were very wrong. The Germans had carried out a thorough reconnaissance of possible routes through the woods, sometimes with staff officers in civilian clothes cycling along them, and in a marvel of traffic control they sent Panzer Group von Kleist, with 134,000 men and 42,000 vehicles, wheeled and tracked, sixty miles from the German border to the Meuse in three days.25 Ten days later, on 20 May, Major-General Erwin Rommel’s 7 Panzer Division reached the Channel coast at Abbeville.

  Meanwhile, in the north the German attack on Holland and Belgium precipitated the Allied advance into Belgium, although the Breda Variant never came off. The British and French took up a defensive position along the River Dyle, and the Belgians, their frontier fortresses taken out by German glider and parachute troops, were driven back from the Albert Canal. On 13 May the Dutch royal family and government were removed to England, and the Dutch Army surrendered on 15 May. As German attacks intensified, the Allies were pushed back from the Dyle to the River Scheldt and then to the River Lys. On 17 May, after a visit by Churchill intended, rather unfairly, to put a chilli up the collective bottom of the French, the prime minister, Reynaud, appointed the eighty-four-year-old Marshal Philippe Pétain, the hero of Verdun in 1916 and hitherto ambassador to Spain, as deputy prime minister, and on 19 May, when it was increasingly apparent to everyone* that the German thrust through the Ardennes was getting very near the coast and appeared unstoppable, Reynaud sacked Gamelin and replaced him with the seventy-three-year-old General Maxime Weygand. It is never a good idea to change commanders in mid-battle,† and there was now even more military constipation than before. The German gamble – if gamble it was – had come off: responding too late to the Ardennes spearh
ead, which had now become a spear, the Allies were incapable of cutting the German corridor and were now themselves cut in two, with the forces in the north unable to cooperate with those in the south. All that remained now was for the Germans to deal with the British, the Belgians and the northern French, and then to turn south into Central France.

  One of the disadvantages of having a small professional army is that it will nearly always fight as part of a coalition, and the numerically smaller partner in that coalition will perforce have to follow the lead of the larger. The BEF could not operate independently, but only as part of an Allied army and a rather small part at that. (In fact, only five of the British divisions were regular, and four of the Territorial divisions were completely unfit for frontline service.) It rapidly became obvious to the British, or at least to the British on the spot – those in London, particularly those who did not wear uniform, took a little longer – that they had placed far too much faith in the supposed strengths of the French Army. Some French units were ill-disciplined and their morale was poor, only two French armoured divisions were up to strength and planning was pedestrian. Some French units were well led, their morale was excellent and they were highly effective: the trouble was that they were nearly always in the wrong place, and, when they were moved to where they could make a difference, once again it was too late.

  As early as 15 May, Reynaud had told the British that the road to Paris was open and the battle was lost. Nevertheless, an Anglo-French counterattack to the south against the German corridor was planned for 26 May, but on 25 May the Belgians had been forced to retreat, leaving a huge gap in the Allied line which, if not closed, would allow the Germans to get in behind the British and cut them off from the Channel ports. Throughout history any British army operating on the Continent, whether that of King Henry V, Marlborough, Wellington or John French, has had to consider the Channel ports and keep open the routes to and from them. It is through those ports that British armies are reinforced and resupplied, and through them that a beaten army can be removed by the Royal Navy to fight somewhere else another day. The British only had one army in 1940 and, if they broke it, they did not have another. The two divisions that would have taken part in the (almost certainly abortive) counter-attack were switched to close the gap. The commander of the BEF, General Viscount Gort VC, DSO, MC, did this entirely on his own initiative and contrary to orders from London, and on 26 May ordered a withdrawal towards Dunkirk, the only port from which an evacuation could take place and to which the roads were still open. By doing so, he saved the BEF as a cadre around which future armies could be built, and he got precious little thanks for it. Gort and his staff had been planning for a possible withdrawal since 19 May, and after it had begun the British government, now at last aware of the impending debacle, ordered Operation Dynamo, the evacuation of the BEF from Europe. At midnight on that same day Belgium surrendered – and, despite the opprobrium directed at the King of the Belgians by both the French and British, there was nothing else he could have done.