To Lose a Battle (18 page)

‘Queer Kind of War’

We talked to many of the soldiers. They were sick of the war before it had started… they wanted to go home and did not care a bean for Danzig and the Corridor… They rather liked La France, but they did not actually love her; they rather disliked Hitler for all the unrest he created, but they did not actually hate him. The only thing they really hated was the idea of war.

ARTHUR KOESTLER
,
Scum of the Earth

In London, Berlin and Paris the coming of war was accompanied with none of the hysteria, throwing of flowers or cries of ‘To Berlin!’ that had characterized August 1914. The memories of the Great War were still too recent. The correspondent of the
Christian Science Monitor
in Berlin, Joseph Harsch, even went so far as to claim that

the German people were nearer to real panic on 1 September 1939 than the people of any other European country. No people wanted that war, but the German people exhibited more real fear of it than the others. They faced it in something approaching abject terror.

In France there was no repetition of the mad crushes outside the recruiting offices. On the troop trains, Simone de Beauvoir declares, it was only the Negro colonials who sang, a sharp contrast with 1914. The slogan of the moment – though somewhat forced and accompanied with a resigned shrug of the shoulders – became ‘Let’s get it over with’. But, as Arthur Koestler remarks, ‘it carried no real conviction. It was the grumbling of an entirely exasperated person rather than a programme for which to die…’ Meanwhile, for the third time in seventy years, the Venus de Milo left the Louvre for a safer place. There were air-raid false alarms in Berlin, Paris and London on the first day of war. When the warning first sounded in Paris, Parisians rushed panic-stricken to shelters where women sat stifled and half fainting in their gas-masks. Then
soon, as each alarm turned out to be a false one, they began walking around with their masks abandoned at home. Initially, all cinemas and theatres closed; within ten days they were already reopening.

France Mobilizes

Up in the forward zone beyond the Maginot Line, peasants, women and children were hastily evacuated to the interior of France, leaving the wretched farm animals to fend for themselves. In the Line itself – henceforth to be known unflatteringly as
le trou
– the reservists were arriving leisurely, with bottles of mirabelle and kirsch in their packs. Defiant slogans from another age –
‘Ils ne passeront pas!’
and Pétain’s
‘On les aura!’
began to appear on the damp walls; meanwhile the tenants of
le trou
settled down peaceably to their duties like a vast army of
concierges.
On the whole, mobilization proceeded smoothly; on the outbreak of hostilities, 67 French divisions – plus the first contingent of five B.E.F. divisions that were arriving in the north – stood on a war footing, as opposed to an initial overall total of 107 German divisions.

In fact, if anything French mobilization was
too
efficient. Several vital war industries were brought almost to a standstill by the drafting of skilled technicians. The Bourges arsenal, for example, was so deprived that it was reduced temporarily to delivering only 10 per cent of its monthly quota of shells. At the Renault works, the numbers of workers fell abruptly from 30,000 to 8,000, and several plants producing the planes that France was to need more desperately than anything else were actually forced to close down. There were also some strange distortions: one large automobile factory which might have been building tanks continued to turn out civilian cars by the thousand throughout the winter of 1939, while, according to André Maurois, when Paul Reynaud after dinner one evening in October decided ‘to make a tour of certain armament factories in the region of Paris, he was astounded to find them closed. They did not work at night…’ On 13 September the French Government appointed Raoul Dautry, a brilliant
engineer who had reorganized French Railways in the inter-war period, to co-ordinate French arms production. But the appointment was late; Dautry confided to Maurois that he would be unable to provide the armies with all they required ‘before 1942’. One of Dautry’s first actions was to bring back the conscripted technicians. Soldiers at the front wrote disdainfully of a ‘massive recall of metalworkers to the factories’. Some divisions lost half of their reservist officers and N.C.O.s.

Here was one more by-product of France’s bleeding-white of 1914–18, reflected in the scarcity of manpower of 1939. Although we now know that Hitler’s arms industry in 1939–40 was far from being totally geared to the needs of all-out, prolonged warfare, as was generally believed at the time, its shortcomings would only make themselves felt midway through the war; yet by comparison, as Dautry pointed out, it would not be until 1942 that French arms production got into its stride. It was hardly an encouraging picture.

The ‘Saar Offensive’

Meanwhile, fortunately it was of course in the east – not against France – that Hitler was concentrating the overwhelming power of the Wehrmacht, which, with terrifying swiftness, was slicing into Poland in two great pincer thrusts. But what were Britain and France doing to help their solitary ally in the east?

In May 1939 Gamelin had given an undertaking to the Polish High Command
¹
that immediately on the outbreak of war the French Army would assume the offensive against Germany and that, at the latest by the fifteenth day after mobilisation, it would throw in the full weight of ‘the majority of its forces’. In session with British military leaders after the outbreak of hostilities, Gamelin, however, declared with caution ‘Certainly, we shall do all we can to help the Poles’, but he would not countenance ‘discouraging’ the Army by any hastily prepared offensive.
²
Elsewhere he was recorded as promising ‘I shall not
begin the war by a Battle of Verdun’, again a revelation of how deeply the defensive mentality was ingrained upon the subconscious of France’s Army leaders. To his deputy, General Georges, Gamelin telephoned a message couched in terms that were hardly those of a Foch: ‘We have a duty to fulfil towards Poland. The method does not exclude action…’ On 4 September Georges signalled Gamelin: ‘All reconnaissance groups have reached the frontier from the Moselle to the Rhine.’ By 7 September French forces had advanced into German territory in the Saar. As the news filtered through the apparatus of censorship and propaganda, the Allied Press promptly interpreted this to signify the launching of a major effort. The
Daily Mail
spoke of the ‘French Army pouring over the German border’, while the next day the
Daily Express
headlined: ‘Germany Rushes More Troops to the West.’ On the 9th, the
Express
announced: ‘France last night began the first big attack on the Siegfried Line’, and on the 12th: ‘France’s secret 70-ton tanks crash through German lines.’ In fact, no more than nine divisions ever took part in the vaunted Saar operation, and their orders were to move up to the outposts of the Siegfried Line and no further. By the 12th, the French had advanced a maximum of five miles on a sixteen-mile front and occupied some twenty abandoned villages; including Spicheren, scene of one of the first of Louis-Napoleon’s defeats in 1870.

As Fabre-Luce remarked, the Saar ‘offensive’ bore a certain resemblance to an eighteenth-century campaign, where ‘great nations delegated a few companies to measure their arms; the rest of the nation watched and applauded’. Casualties were light, principally caused by mines and booby-traps, and with memories of France’s 1.3 million dead from 1914–18 casting their ponderous shadow, it was strict Army policy to avoid losses at all costs. One regimental diary recorded: ‘X Platoon tried to continue its advance; it was halted by the fire of an automatic weapon. Commenting on this entry a cavalry officer, Marcel Lerecouvreux, remarked acidly: ‘Imagine if in 1918, the attack of 18 July had been halted by a single machine-gun…!’ Meanwhile, for a few minutes each day the guns in the famous Hochwald bastion of the Maginot Line fired desultory rounds, but
only the 75-mm. cannon had range enough to reach enemy territory, and after the first shots one of them jammed.

In the air, the Allied effort to relieve Poland was even more pathetic. Fears of Luftwaffe reprisals against Paris caused the French Government to veto any R.A.F. bombing of Germany, as later Daladier was to bar Churchill’s project ‘Royal Marine’ to float mines down the Rhine – in case Hitler should retaliate by blowing up a Seine bridge. In Britain, when Leo Amery suggested to the House of Commons that the brutality of the German air onslaught against Poland should be countered by incendiary attacks on the Black Forest, the Secretary of State for Air, Sir Kingsley Wood, was aghast: ‘Are you aware it is private property?’ he exclaimed. ‘Why, you will be asking me to bomb Essen next!’ So the R.A.F. was employed in showering tons of non-lethal leaflets on Germany: ‘truth raids’, Sir Kingsley called them; ignominious ‘confetti warfare’ was the view of another M.P., General Spears.

Poland Abandoned

The half-hearted Allied efforts resulted in not one single German division being diverted from Poland. There, for all its bravery, the Polish Army – cavalry pitted against tanks and Stukas – was succumbing even more rapidly than the most pessimistic Allied staff officer dared imagine. For the first time the world was beginning to understand the meaning of the word
Blitzkrieg;
Guderian, now in command of XIX Motorized Corps, which provided the steel tip to one of the encircling pincers, was proving his theories in practice. Watching the Wehrmacht in action from an observation post, William Shirer wrote in his diary:

Very businesslike they were, reminding me of the coaches of a championship football team who sit on the sidelines and calmly and confidently watch the machine they’ve created perform as they knew all the time it would.

At the same time, he shrewdly observed how the 500–1b. bombs dropped by Stukas had proved far more lethal to Polish coastal fortifications than heavier battleship shells. On 14 September
the German pincers closed behind Warsaw, and that same day Guderian’s Panzers, dashing far ahead of the infantry, reached Brest-Litovsk. Visiting his protégé, Hitler expressed astonishment at the spectacle of a smashed Polish artillery regiment on the Vistula: ‘Our dive-bombers did that?’ ‘No,’ replied Guderian, ‘our Panzers!’ On 17 September, in fulfilment of the secret clauses of the Ribbentrop–Molotov Pact, the Red Army entered eastern Poland. On 28 September, Poland capitulated. She had resisted for twenty-eight days; Gamelin had calculated she would be able to hold out until the spring.

On 12 September Gamelin, alarmed at the ways things were going in Poland, sent a secret order to General Prételat, the commander of the Saar ‘offensive’, ordering him to halt and assume a defensive posture. When Poland capitulated, the French War Cabinet decided to pull back its forces to the Maginot Line; by 4 October the withdrawal had been completed without a hitch, Gamelin heaving a sigh of relief that the Germans had obliged by letting his forces go peacefully. At least France had made a gesture on behalf of the Poles; thus honour, he felt, was satisfied. Militarily, he excused the withdrawal with the comparison ‘Wasn’t this after all what the Germans did at the start of 1917 in withdrawing on the Hindenburg Line…?’ Speaking to Anthony Gibbs, the British war correspondent, a French general dotted the i’s:

‘It was simply a token invasion… We do not wish to fight on their territory. We did not ask for this war!… Now that the Polish question is liquidated’ – he shrugged – ‘we have gone back to our lines. What else did you expect?’

Thus ended France’s first and last offensive operation of the war. During it, the morale of the French troops had been promisingly high – ‘We’re starting to invade
them
!’ wrote an infantry N.C.O. in Lorraine, René Balbaud – but frustration at the subsequent withdrawal was correspondingly great. Out of the experiences gained, the Army settled down to the dubious consolation that German anti-tank shells had been observed to bounce off French tanks. Henceforth it would be Allied war policy to wait either until their war potential matched
Germany’s before launching any offensive from French territory, or for a miracle, though it was hard to gauge which, in September 1939, seemed the less remote.

In Germany, the Wehrmacht leaders observed France’s supineness in the West with mixed amazement and relief. Aware of their own Army’s unreadiness for full-scale war, they had viewed Hitler’s lunge into Poland as one more lunatic gamble; when Britain and France declared war, they were terrified that this time Hitler’s bluff had been called and that immediately they would face a powerful breakthrough offensive in the West. According to General Westphal, during the whole Polish campaign the frontier from Aachen to Basle was held by no more than twenty-five reserve, militia and depot divisions, with not one single tank under their command and enough ammunition for only three days’ battle. At the Nuremberg trials, Milch declared that the Luftwaffe’s stock of bombs had been so small that the Polish campaign had consumed half of it, while Jodl (the Wehrmacht Chief of Operations) claimed that, because of ammunition shortages, in Poland ‘we only managed solely because there was no battle in the West’. The Siegfried Line, despite Hitler’s boasting, was nothing like as formidable as the Maginot, and was far from complete; according to his Chief of Staff, when Rundstedt inspected it for the first time, ‘he laughed’. If the French had seriously attacked it in September 1939, their troops would at least have gained the training which was to prove so badly lacking eight months later, while many responsible German generals believed (and indeed still do) that the French could have reached the Rhine within a fortnight, and possibly have won the war. From Berlin, Joseph Harsch reckoned that German morale ‘was probably no better able to withstand the shock of invasion in September 1939’ than French morale the following summer. Probably he exaggerated, possibly he was right; but both Harsch and the German generals ignored the fact that Gamelin’s Army no longer possessed the offensive capacity of Foch’s of twenty years previously, let alone the
will
of Joffre’s of the Marne. Hitler, the amateur, alone knew, and in being right he had won his first crucial war-time round against Germany’s professional soldiers.