To Lose a Battle (23 page)

Up to the moment of the German onslaught, misgivings lingered in high French circles about the Dyle–Breda Plan.
Following the 10 January alarm, the Belgian General Staff had been persuaded to prepare positions along the Dyle, in case the Allies should be called upon to occupy them; but General Prioux, commanding the Cavalry Corps, which with some of France’s best armoured and mechanized units formed the steel tip of Blanchard’s First Army, had strong doubts on the efficacy of the unreconnoitred defences the Belgians were supposedly erecting in the Gembloux Gap. General Giraud, whose Seventh Army would now have the most ambitious role to perform, complained of the difficulties in a letter to Billotte on 28 March. Billotte, whose No. 1 Army Group held direct responsibility for the whole manoeuvre, had been its most enthusiastic supporter among Gamelin’s subordinates, but he too now backed up Giraud’s reservations. General Vuillemin, always gloomy about German air superiority, had shared General Georges’s pessimism throughout, and Georges himself remained unconvinced. But perhaps because of the lack of communication between him and Gamelin, perhaps because his will-power had been diminished by his ailing health, Georges was impotent to influence the Generalissimo.
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In Britain, too, there were dissenting voices; but with only a handful of divisions in the field (by May 1940, Lord Gort still had no more than nine under his command), it was felt that she should keep quiet and leave the planning to the leaders of France’s invincible Army.
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Gamelin, buried away in his
Thébaïde,
alone remained sublimely confident. On 15 April he dispatched a last letter to dispel Georges’s doubts, once again reiterating that ‘it seemed impossible systematically to abandon Holland to Germany’. In
defiance of the lessons of Poland, he somehow maintained a simple faith in the Dutch and Belgian ability to defend their countries. Far from fearing a German onslaught through the Low Countries, there were occasions when he gave the impression of actually longing for it, for, as he once informed the Government, ‘the enemy would be offering himself to us in open territory’.

It is difficult to conceive, however, with what forces Gamelin saw himself counter-attacking the German thrust which would thus be ‘offering’ itself. In expanding the Dyle Plan to embrace the ‘Breda Variant’ and by committing General Giraud’s Seventh Army to it, Gamelin was being totally loyal to the principles of the ‘continuous front’. But behind this front he retained only the scantiest of reserves. It was all right provided the front
remained
continuous, as it had done from 1914 to 1918. In Gamelin’s final alignment which was to bear the brunt of the German attack of May 1940, roughly thirty divisions were committed to the Dyle-Breda manoeuvre, ten garrison divisions were permanently installed in the Maginot Line, while yet another thirty backed them up as ‘interval troops’, leaving only twenty-two divisions in reserve. Of these twenty-two, seven (including two out of France’s three new armoured divisions) were earmarked for Belgium, and another five allocated to meet a possible German thrust through Switzerland, so that the overall strategic reserve left to General Georges amounted to between ten and thirteen divisions, or practically nothing. That an additional thirty good divisions should have to be employed ‘guarding’ the Maginot Line in itself seemed to point up a grave fallacy in France’s whole strategic plan; as things were to turn out, the crucial phase of the battle would already be lost beyond repair before any of these thirty wasted divisions could be thrown into it.
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Thus the overall picture of General Georges’s North-East Front showed a powerful right flank on
the Maginot Line (absorbing nearly half of all his effectives), and a powerful left flank facing northern Belgium. But the centre, along a front of little less than one hundred miles behind the so-called ‘impenetrable’ Belgian Ardennes, was held by only some four light cavalry divisions (still partly equipped with horses) and ten mediocre infantry divisions of the Ninth and Second Armies – about which more will be said later. And behind them, emptiness.

What a standing temptation the spectacle of this French line, then, so weak in the centre, might present to an opposing captain of audacity and genius!

Polish Lesson Unlearnt

Of all the attitudes struck by the French High Command during the Phoney War, none today seems more incomprehensible than its apparent refusal to take cognizance of the lessons of the Polish campaign. Nothing that had happened to the unhappy Poles made France in any way alter her basic doctrine of war, review the training techniques of combat echelons, or consider possible German offensive plans against her in the light of the strategy that had succeeded so admirably against Poland. It was not as if the French High Command was uninformed. On returning to France in the autumn of 1939, General Armengaud, an Air Force general sent to lead a mission to Poland, and who had closely observed events there, delivered a detailed oral report to Gamelin, which he then followed up with a written memorandum. In this memorandum, he warned how the Wehrmacht in Poland had proved its ability ‘to break through a defensive front inadequately manned’.

It would be mad [continued Armengaud] not to draw an exact lesson from this pattern and not pay heed to this warning. The German system consists essentially of making a breach in the front with armour and aircraft, then to throw mechanized and motorized columns into the breach, to beat them down to right and left in order to keep on enlarging it, at the same time as armoured detachments, guided, protected and reinforced by aircraft, advance in front of the supporting divisions… in such a way that the defence’s manoeuvrability… is reduced to impotence.

Armengaud considered that of the German armour and aircraft, it was the latter that had been the ‘most decisive’, by impeding the defenders’ manoeuvrability, and by breaching the chain of command ‘in such a way that the command is made blind and cannot get its orders through’. To Gamelin, Armengaud expressed the view that the Germans would attempt a breakthrough in the West, probably near the
centre
of the French front, and that they would then try to fan out to the rear, using a mass of material and aircraft. He thought they would be able to make such a breach very quickly, possibly within forty-eight hours.

For his pains, Armengaud was relegated to an administrative post, as commander of the Paris Air Region, where, he says, he found himself powerless to stem the feckless optimism in high places, which increased as the Polish defeat receded from memory. But Armengaud was evidently also backed up by reports submitted to Gamelin by his
Deuxième Bureau
chief, Colonel Gauché, one of which described how the effects of the German aerial bombardment had ‘resulted in almost complete paralysis of the Polish High Command, which was rendered incapable either of completing mobilization or concentration, or of carrying out reinforcements or supplies, or of executing any kind of co-ordinated manoeuvre’. The
Deuxième Bureau
also pointed out the highly relevant strategic fact that the Germans had aimed
not
at capturing Warsaw, but had sought first and foremost to achieve the total destruction of the Polish Army. Here was certainly one lesson that would prove worth considering in May 1940. On more specific, but equally important, matters, the
Deuxième Bureau
warned the High Command of the effect of German tank guns on the Polish bunkers; these had ‘withstood the fire of 150-mm. guns perfectly, but their machine-guns were often destroyed by shots in the embrasure fired by the tanks. It thus appears that every fortified work must be provided with anti-tank weapons…’ It will be seen how much notice was taken of this warning.

The French High Command attitude to all this was roughly:
‘We are not Poles, it could not happen here.’ General Keller, Inspector-General of Tanks, wrote in answer to a memorandum written by Colonel de Gaulle:

… Even supposing that the present fortified line were breached or outflanked, it does not appear that our opponents will find a combination of circumstances as favourable for a
Blitzkreig
as in Poland. One can see, then, that in future operations the primary role of the tank will be the same as in the past: to assist the infantry in reaching successive objectives.

Thus inflexible remained the military doctrinaires of France. General Huntziger, commanding the ill-fated Second Army, did go to some length to circulate among his command details of the Wehrmacht technique in Poland, but few practical consequences by way of combat training ever seem to have followed.

Finland and other Distractions

No less extraordinary than the French High Command’s studied and arrogant disregard of the lessons of Poland was the astonishing unreality of all the Allied schemes and projects during the Phoney War, of which Gamelin’s delusive optimism is but one facet or syndrome. In both French and British Councils of War, new mad ideas of launching diversionary operations were constantly being thought up. Certainly, in France, the genesis of these schemes lay understandably in the external anxiety of keeping war away from French soil, but all were predicated upon strength which, in early 1940, the Allies simply did not possess, and, worse still, several of them would have brought Russia actively into the war on Hitler’s side, a possibility the folly of which hardly bears thinking about.

On 30 November, her demands for concessions to help secure the approaches to Leningrad having been refused, Russia attacked Finland. Hitting back, the gallant Finns captured Western imagination by inflicting defeat after defeat upon the ponderous Red Army. In England, Transport House
condemned with angriest indignation ‘the criminal conspiracy of Stalin and Hitler’, while (according to the
Daily Sketch
) at Buckingham Palace a large-scale map of Finland soon displaced one of the Western Front in the King’s office. But in France emotions reached fever pitch: prayers were offered in the Madeleine for Marshal Mannerheim; ladies knitted vests for Finnish soldiers; gala charity performances in aid of the Finns were held at the Opéra and in the Carlton at Cannes. Here was a
real
war, a man’s war that one could get excited about! ‘The fortified front of Karelia,’ wrote Fabre-Luce, ‘evoked simultaneously the Maginot Line and a season of winter sports. It was like a highly seductive glossy magazine for skiing amateurs, obliged this year to remain at their hearth-sides.’ From the squalor of the concentration camp at Vernet, French attitudes struck Arthur Koestler rather less favourably; the treatment of each Finnish success as ‘victories of France’ reminded him of ‘a
voyeur
who gets his thrills and satisfaction out of watching other people’s virile exploits, which he is unable to imitate’.

Ideologically, French emotions were compounded of several ingredients. At their highest, Russia’s attack was regarded as just one more repellent act of aggression by the totalitarian powers; and had not France, that same September, entered the lists as champion of the spirit of the League of Nations? But, more powerfully, among the bourgeoisie and the Right wing there were those animosities left lingering by the Popular Front, and exacerbated by the Ribbentrop-Molotov deal. Here the ‘Winter War’ presented prospects of a holy crusade against Bolshevism infinitely more appealing than the
drôle de guerre
against the dormant and untroublesome Hitler. The Assembly, from which the Communist Deputies had just been purged, became strongly interventionist. Senator Bardoux, an independent Radical charged with ‘sounding out the British’, represented a fair section of French bourgeois opinion when he wrote in his diary for 23 December:

The Russian disaster in Finland is a capital event. Henceforth, far from trying to split Germany and Russia, we must, on the contrary, weld them together more tightly, for a weak ally is a ball-and-chain and opens a breach in the common front. We must enter into it resolutely. By intervening to aid Finland we shall create, together with the neutrals and Italy [he added hopefully], the definitive bloc. It is possible to offer the Crimea to Hitler, to utilize the Ukrainians, the Transcaucasians and the Persians. We can roll up everything, all the way to the Caucasus…

As the Finns continued to defeat the apparently decrepit Soviet war machine, serious thoughts of intervention spread to the military planners. An expeditionary force landed at the Norwegian port of Narvik could lend a hand to the Finns by marching across northern Sweden, while at the same time a mortal blow would be struck at Hitler by depriving him of the Swedish iron-ore supplies essential to his war economy. Here would be a fine sideshow to distract Hitler’s gaze from France!

On 15 January, Gamelin wrote to Daladier proposing the opening of a front in Scandinavia. Throughout the winter discussions volleyed back and forth between London and Paris, while the slopes at Chamonix became carpeted with British officers and men learning to ski. Briefly, Chamberlain with his declared anti-Communist bias favoured this happy means to ‘kill two birds with one stone’, but as the full gravity of the undertaking sank in, the British Government began to try to exercise prudence upon its more impetuous ally.
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Meanwhile – fortunately for all concerned – the Norwegian and Swedish Governments stalwartly rejected every overture for the expedition to pass through their territory. By March, however, Parliamentary pressure upon Daladier was such that, without consulting Britain, he informed the Finns that France would be prepared to brush aside Norwegian and Swedish objections. On the 11th, he told Halifax he would resign unless Britain toed the line. The French, wrote Ironside (the British C.I.G.S.) in disgust, ‘are absolutely unscrupulous in everything’, while the
following day he recorded that the Chamberlain Cabinet – ‘a bewildered flock of sheep’ – had reluctantly acceded to the Narvik expedition. Then, on 13 March, Finland signed peace with Russia. By a matter of days, if not hours, Britain and France had been saved from a war with Russia as well as Germany. As Colonel Josiah Wedgwood remarked in the Commons, ‘It would have been the maddest military adventure upon which this country had ever embarked.’ But in France there was bitter disappointment; in his diary, Major Barlone recorded: ‘it is a heavy moral defeat for the Allies. I realize this when I talk to the men, who are bewildered by the inactivity of the Allies… We are disheartened.’ And this ‘moral defeat’ was enough to cause the fall of the Daladier Government.