To Lose a Battle (4 page)

Now, it so happened that in 1971, two years before the Yom Kippur War, Israel’s Ministry of Defence publishing house had followed up by translating and publishing in Hebrew the third book of my Franco-German trilogy.
To Lose a Battle
, with its detailed account of the Manstein Plan,
Sichelschnitt
, which had given Hitler his blueprint for total victory in that summer of 1940. I thought no more about it. Then when war broke out, in October 1973, I was in Algiers, researching for my new book on the Algerian War,
A Savage War of Peace.
From Algiers I watched with disquiet as the Egyptians swarmed back across the Suez Canal, taking the Israelis thoroughly by surprise. By not manning their front line with the bulk of their forces (as indeed the French Army might well have done, in either the First or Second World War), the Israelis saved themselves from instant defeat; yet, after the first few days, it still looked as if – at best – Israel faced a costly stalemate; which, to her, would in effect equal defeat in the long term. But, out of the blue, Israel’s dashing General Ariel Sharon
¹
launched a daring but carefully conceived counter-thrust across the Canal, striking on the hinge of two Egyptian armies and fanning out behind them with deadly consequences.

From what little I was able to glean from the press reports in Algiers, the Sharon action had elements that made it at once look amazingly familiar: it was a replay of Manstein’s crossing of the Meuse in May 1940, and the military result was nearly as deadly. With one of its principal armies cut off, the Egyptians were forced to seek a cease-fire. Israel was saved.

Some two years later, I encountered at a London publishing party Israel’s leading military analyst and former Chief of Intelligence, Chaim Herzog. (He was later to become Israel’s President.) We had met some years previously in Israel, and he had now just published his own account of the 1973 campaign,
The War of Atonement
(Weidenfeld, 1975). When I commented on the similarities to the Manstein Plan of 1940, he smiled knowingly and said something to the effect that, only recently, General Sharon had referred to it, acknowledging a certain indebtedness to
To Lose a Battle.
Herzog kindly signed a copy of his book for me, adding the laconic but meaningful inscription, ‘In appreciation’.

I retell this anecdote, not in any intended sense of self-glorification, but simply to illustrate the point that, sometimes, the re-exploration of the past, the study of the lessons of old battles, is not always without profit. In the hands of the enlightened, perhaps history can be made to repeat, if not itself, then certain formulae. Anyway, it may be worth a read.

It is with this thought in mind that I re-offer this revised edition of
To Lose a Battle
for publication on the fiftieth anniversary of that cataclysmic year of 1940. This new edition contains some corrections and up-datings. Since it was first published in 1969, numerous other books on the subject have appeared. When I wrote this book, nothing, notably, was known about the ‘Ultra’ secret and its possible influence on the battle. Modern scholarship, too, has come round to a rather more charitable view of King Leopold and poor Belgium’s impossible role in the fighting. Yet the basic ingredients remain the same: on the one side, a brilliant plan and a demonic will to conquer; chronic unpreparedness, muddle and demoralization, and an outdated concept of war, on the other. The story and its lessons stand, little changed.

Preface to 1979 edition

When this book was first published it was roughly one hundred years since the Franco-Prussian War began, fifty since Versailles concluded the First World War, and thirty since the first act of the Second World War, the Fall of France. It endeavours to tell the story of the last of these episodes. Although designed to stand firmly on its own feet, it represents the third panel of a triptych of which the other two were
The Fall of Paris: The Siege and the Commune 1870–71
, and
The Price of Glory: Verdun 1916
, and is therefore closely linked to the theme of the earlier books. During most of this past hundred years, at least until 1945, the seminal issue in Europe was Franco-German rivalry. Now it is no longer so. As I tried to explain in the Preface to
The Fall of Paris
, the original ambition of the triptych was to deal with this important chunk of modern European history, woven around three great Franco-German battles, each decisive in its own war, and in wider contexts as well. They are not, essentially, military studies. As the reader will discover from the present book, there are (at least in the author’s view) various after-effects from both 1870–71 and 1916 that have an important bearing on the French defeat of 1940. And so much that has happened since then – is still happening – can find an explanation in the débâcle of 1940.

In a number of ways,
To Lose a Battle
has been the most difficult to write of the three books. First of all, it was not easy to decide when the story begins and ends. To start with the crushing superiority of the German Stukas and Panzers on 13 May 1940 leaves a lot unexplained, and the
decisive
battle was over long before Pétain asked for an armistice – even before the B.E.F. embarked at Dunkirk. After I had finished my researches I finally decided to begin with France’s moment
of supreme power, as seen at the Victory Parade of 1919, proceeding to deal with only those factors in the inter-war world which seemed relevant to France’s weakness and Germany’s strength in 1940, and to end the main account with the failure of the last Allied counter-attacks in northern France, during 21–24 May. After this date, for the Germans the campaign was little more than a matter of marching.

The second, and by far the greatest difficulty of all, concerned source material. The Siege of Paris and the Commune together continued, in the same setting, for nine months, Verdun for ten. Thus in both battles a multitude of chroniclers on either side had the leisure to provide detailed day-by-day accounts of what went on – often of superb quality. In 1870–71, the historian is additionally aided by the presence in Paris of many ‘neutral’ British and American observers whose accounts provide a special dimension of objectivity, while for 1916 the official war histories of either side have long been open to scrutiny. In contrast, the decisive battle for France in 1940 lasted less than two weeks, but covered over two hundred miles in depth alone. Many war diarists, especially on the French side, simply had no opportunity to write up their diaries or even scribble a letter home.

From the German side, the Allied capture of all Nazi archives certainly provided historians with an unprecedented treasure trove. The French, on the other hand, have not yet published an official history of 1940,
¹
and the archives at Vincennes are not open to inspection. It is easy to understand French reticence; yet one feels it may be prompted less by what is there, than by what is not there. However, the lack of any French official history is in part compensated for by the plentiful personal accounts of participants granted access to the archives, such as Generals Doumenc (
Major-Général
of the French General Staff), Roton (General Georges’s Chief of Staff) and Ruby (Chief of Staff to the French Second Army), not to mention the lengthy memoirs by the leaders themselves, Reynaud, Gamelin and Weygand. But because of the pressure and speed
of events (if for no other reason), such accounts are often in disagreement, and it is therefore not easy to determine what happened, and when.

For example, recording General Weygand’s crucial visit to the northern commanders on 21 May (see
Chapter 18
), both Baudouin and Churchill (neither of whom were there) write that Weygand’s plane was attacked and forced to land at Calais. Weygand himself says he landed unchallenged at Norrent-Fontes, and then flew on to Calais. After the meeting, Baudouin says Weygand left from Ypres at 4 p.m., by torpedo-boat from Dunkirk to Cherbourg; Churchill says 7 p.m., by submarine to Dieppe; while Colonel Goutard puts the time at ‘between 5 and 6 p.m.’. Churchill and others state that Lord Gort arrived, too late, at the Ypres meeting at 8 p.m.; Benoist-Méchin, ‘about 9 p.m.’. These may seem like hair-splitting points, but they make the historian cautious about accuracy on the bigger issues.

Napoleon once warned: ‘Above all, be distrustful of eye-witnesses… the only thing my Grenadiers saw of Russia was the pack of the man in front.’ Obviously the advice can be taken too far, and Napoleon’s Grenadiers certainly saw more of the Russian campaign than he would have liked. But one has to be cautious about the fallibility of human memory; with one or two notable exceptions (such as the late Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Barratt, whose reminiscences proved invaluable to me) I have in general restricted myself to what was written at the time or very soon afterwards. Even here, however, one has to exercise caution. For reasons suggested earlier, I found myself forced to lean heavily on German eye-witness accounts of battle operations, such as the crossing of the Meuse. Some, such as Rommel, seldom let one down, even though at times he stole perhaps more than his fair share of the glory. But all too often the National Socialist overtones of the moment, the vaunting of Teutonic deeds and deprecation of the enemy’s – never a reverse, never the sight of a burnt-out German tank – make one recoil in distrust. On the other hand so many of the memoirs of French leaders are but one long apologia, although, set against each other, they too can be revealing.

Inevitably, there is much in this book that will be hurtful to French
amour propre.
Although many of the studies emanating from France herself could scarcely be more scorching, the French, perhaps more than most nations (and particularly at this time of resurgent nationalism), tend to regard outsiders writing about their history as the
voyeur
who peeps through other people’s bathroom keyholes. And indeed, it is almost impossible for any Briton fully to comprehend the lingering wounds left by invasion and defeat in a nation as proud as France.

Again, Dutchmen and Belgians and my own countrymen too may criticize me for dealing too briefly with their part in the Battle of France; Americans may feel that I should have said more of their role in the inter-war period, and of the 1940 exchange of communications between Reynaud, Churchill and Roosevelt. I can only excuse myself by repeating that this is, like
The Fall of Paris
and
The Price of Glory
, primarily a story about France and Germany.

Acknowledgements

During my researches on this book, I was once again accorded much indispensable help, with the utmost courtesy, by Dr Rohwer and Herr Haupt of the Bibliothek für Zeitgeschichte in Stuttgart and by M. Hornung of the Bibliothèque de Documentation Internationale Contemporaine of the University of Paris. Of the libraries and archives in England, the vast collection of books and periodicals owned by the Imperial War Museum proved invaluable, and I am additionally most grateful for privileges granted me by the Ministry of Defence Library, Professor Michael Howard of King’s College, London, Captain Sir Basil Liddell Hart, The Royal United Service Institution, and the London Library. In Germany, the Bundesarchiv proved a source of much vital material, and in France I am grateful to Colonel Le Goyet of the Service Historique de l’Armée at Vincennes for his answers on certain specific points. Among the people who have helped in various ways, and given advice or the benefit of their own memories, I should particularly like to record my thanks to Major-General Sir Edward Spears (who in his classical reminiscences on the French scene in two world wars deserves to rate as the Suetonius of our times), Captain Sir Basil Liddell Hart, Colonel A. Goutard, Mrs Clare Boothe Luce, the late Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Barratt, M. Gaston Palewski, M. Edouard Leng, Constantine FitzGibbon, and Colonel G. B. Jarrett.

I am beholden to Mr K. C. Jordan,
F.R.G.S.
for maps, and I and my publishers wish to thank the following for their kindness in giving permission for the use of copyright material:

Collins, Sons & Co. Ltd, for extracts from
The Rommel Papers
, edited by B. H. Liddell Hart; Michael Joseph Ltd, for extracts from
Panzer Leader
, by Heinz Guderian; and Mr William Shirer, for extracts from
Berlin Diary.

Throughout the sifting of research material, I was enormously helped by the painstaking diligence of Mr Peter Bradley. Among
those who read the manuscript and offered valuable suggestions, I am particularly grateful to Major-General the Hon. Miles Fitzalan-Howard, who scrutinized it with a professional eye, and also to Mr Philip Whitting, as well as to my editors in London and New York, Mr Alan Maclean, Mr Richard Garnett and Mr Harry Sions, to whom I am indebted not only for their arduous work on the manuscript but also for their sustaining encouragement over the past many months. I owe a special debt of thanks to Mrs Angus Nicol for typing the manuscript, several times, in addition to providing invaluable assistance in a multitude of other ways – often at impossible hours. I am deeply appreciative of the unfailing kindness of my old friend, Mr William F. Buckley, Jr, who at a critical moment in production provided a haven of peace; and finally my wife deserves special mention for acting as map-reader during tours of the battlefields, but above all for putting up with nearly ten years of battles.

Unlike some of the principals in this story, however, the author realizes that for any disasters in the end result he has nobody but himself to blame.

London, Ashington, Château de Rougemont
1967–8

Part One
1919–40

Chapter 1

Grandeur and Misery of Victory
¹