To Lose a Battle (9 page)

At Verdun the greatest danger experienced by the French forts had been from infantry infiltrating on to their superstructures and working their way underground. Both Douaumont
and Vaux had been lost in this way. To prevent a repetition, the Maginot Line plan incorporated ‘interval troops’, infantry complete with field artillery, which could be moved up to counter any threat to a particular fort or group of forts. These were intended to compensate for what, by definition, the Line lacked – mobility.
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Much has been said about why the Maginot Line failed to save France in 1940, though not always have the right reasons been given. It was enormously costly. Partly owing to errors of construction due to bureaucratic jealousies, the 87 miles of ‘fortified regions’ completed by 1935 had already cost 7,000 million francs, far in excess of the parliamentary estimates. In addition to its construction, the maintenance of the Maginot Line represented a considerable financial burden. For a country plagued by chronic budgetary difficulties and with a powerful Left wing opposed to rearmament in any form, this overall costliness meant that inevitably the French Army would be forced to accept economies elsewhere. The Maginot Line also lacked depth, with its four successive positions never occupying, even in their most advanced state, a belt larger than twelve miles deep. This too was a consequence of expense.

But the most mortal defect of the Line lay not in its depth but its length. Romantically, it came to be dubbed ‘the shield of France’. The essence of a shield, however, is that it can be manipulated to protect any portion of its owner’s body. The Maginot Line obviously was incapable of motion, yet it did not extend to cover what Clausewitz called ‘the pit of the French stomach’, the classical invasion route across the Belgian plains, over which the Schlieffen Plan had so nearly brought total calamity in 1914. By as late as 1935, the motives for not fortifying the remaining 250 miles along the Belgian frontier were only partially related to problems of cost. This extension would have to run right through the heavily industrialized Lille-Valenciennes area which straddles the frontier and would be
immeasurably disruptive as well as costly. A factor carrying even greater weight, however, was that Belgium, mindful of how her neutrality had been outraged by Germany in 1914, remained France’s close ally, so that a fortified line on the French side of her frontier would leave her out in the cold, abandoned on the wrong side of the ramparts. She would then have no option but to return to her former neutrality, and rely upon German morals. Pétain, despite his reputation for defensive-mindedness, made it quite clear when Minister of War in 1934 that, in the event of any German aggression, it was part and parcel of French strategy to ‘go into Belgium’ and to fight an offensive war of movement against the enemy there.
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As the French Army stood in 1934, still with its crushing superiority over the Germans – who had not yet invented the Panzer corps – this strategy made excellent sense, as long as Belgium remained within the alliance. It was also clearly in France’s interest (though she could hardly explain this to the Belgians) to protect her soil by fighting the battle, with all its destructiveness, as far forward of her frontiers as possible.

With the construction of the Maginot Line, the wheel of French military thought, which had started spinning in 1870, performed a fatal full cycle. In 1870, to state it in the simplest terms, France had lost a war through adopting too defensive a posture and relying too much on permanent fortifications. Fortress cities such as Strasbourg, Metz and Paris herself had been simply enveloped by Moltke’s Prussians and besieged one by one. In reaction against this calamitous defeat, France had nearly lost the next war by being too aggressive-minded. Now she was once again seeking safety under concrete and steel. Rapidly the Maginot Line came to be not just a component of strategy, but a way of life. Feeling secure behind it, like the lotus-eating mandarins of Cathay behind their Great Wall, the French Army allowed itself to atrophy, to lapse into desuetude. A massive combination of factors – complacency, lassitude,
deficiencies of manpower and finance – conspired to rust the superb weapon which the world had so admired on that
Quatorze Juillet
of 1919.

The French Army: Men and Arms

By the end of 1935, the eve of France’s first major confrontation with Hitler, her Army was below par both in numbers and quality of manpower. The call-up was just beginning to suffer the full effect of the ‘hollow classes’ caused by the drop in births during the Great War. In Germany, for instance, the 1915 class available for conscription (if it were not for the restrictions imposed by Versailles) amounted to 464,000 men; in France, it was only 184,000, a ratio that would continue right the way through to the Second World War. Yet politics had forced a reduction in the length of military service from three years to one, and hopes that the population deficit of metropolitan France could be made good by a vast colonial army were never quite fulfilled. Thus instead of a total strength of over 300,000 men, about two-thirds of this was the most the French could muster. As far as the hard core of professionals was concerned, there was certainly little enough inducement for good men to stay on. With a captain paid approximately £11 a month, and a major in command of a whole battalion paid only £16,
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officers without private incomes lived in desperate straits. They had no vote, and now that the supreme goal – revenge – had been achieved, wherein resided the glory of an Army career?

Composed of all too many officers whom the previous war had left drained of
élan vital
, the French General Staff allowed itself to become bogged down in bureaucratic methods;
paper-asserie
, as the French call it, the blight to which all armies are susceptible, flourished. It was difficult to see exactly where the power of decision lay. The once omnipotent and cohesive
Conseil Supérieur de la Guerre
(Supreme War Council), from whose members would be designated France’s senior commanders in time of war, no longer filled anything but a consultative
role. Divided by mutual antipathy and jealousies, its generals had little contact with each other; their staffs followed suit, each existing in its own watertight compartment. There was not much discussion on a higher strategic and tactical plane, and what there was tended to follow abstract intellectual paths from which little practical use ever emerged. General Beaufre, writing of his own experiences at that time, states that

At the Ministry of War, the General commanded in theory, but had not the money, the administration, the personnel or the equipment; the Permanent Secretary had the money and the administration, without the responsibility of command; the various departments had personnel and equipment, but neither money nor command. The Minister stood at the head of all this, but could achieve nothing without obtaining unison from the whole orchestra, the complexity of which helped to paralyse all initiatives. The ensemble possessed only one force – that of inertia.

In this state of inertia, the Army tended to rest content with the techniques and equipment of 1918. To a large extent the financial strain imposed on successive military budgets by the Maginot Line provided it with little alternative.
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Although, with the taxis of the Marne and later by her victualling of Verdun along the
voie sacrée
– the ‘sacred road’ – the French Army had pioneered warfare by road, as its post-war mechanical transport aged and was not replaced it regressed to relying for mobility once more on railways – and horses. While other armies (notably the German) were experimenting with radio communications, the French clung to the telephone, even despite the lessons gained from 1914–18, when operations had so often failed after the severing of lines by artillery barrages, and regardless of the new threat to land communications which modern air power and tanks posed. In 1924 the Army decided to replace its automatic rifle and to modify the standard infantry cartridge; the new weapon came into service by 1932, but – typical of the prevailing inertia – the rifle, intended to utilize the same cartridge, was not selected until 1936. As late as 1939,
only a few hundred thousand had been issued. General Weygand, before he retired as Inspector-General of the Army in 1933, had prescribed that five infantry divisions be motorized and a cavalry division be converted into a
Division Légère Mécanique
;
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but otherwise the rest of the Army showed little advance on that which had processed so resplendently through Paris in 1919.

Tanks and Doctrine

There is no weightier problem common to the General Staffs of all peaceably-minded countries in modern times than the decision for what year to plan the re-equipment of its forces with a new armoury.
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Weapons designed too long before the moment of crisis, becoming speedily obsolete, are almost as useless as those that arrive too late. In its tank production policy, the French Army had remained for many years a prisoner of the mass of machines left over from 1918. With the rise of Hitler, it adopted the expedient of building prototypes while year by year postponing their mass-production until such time as the threat of war seemed imminent, a notional date which self-deception and appeasement would constantly defer. So long as Germany obeyed Versailles, binding her not to build tanks, France’s obsolete armour was quite sufficient for her purposes. In any case, she could hardly afford to replace it. But the most insidious long-term consequences – and it would be hard to find any single military factor contributing more directly to the defeat of 1940 – of this residuum lay in the shadow it cast over the development of France’s doctrines of armoured warfare. The bulk of the tanks inherited from the war consisted of the Renault F.T. model, lightly armoured,
slow and strictly limited in operational radius. It was useless against concrete fortifications, or in battle against other tanks; it was predominantly an instrument of infantry support. In the culminating battles of 1918, the F.T.s moved up with the infantry after the usual heavy bombardment. When the infantry had advanced beyond the range of their artillery (and the tanks had run out of petrol), the attackers would consolidate and wait for the guns – drawn by horses – to move up and prepare for the next laborious step forward. At each pause, the hard-pressed Germans were given a respite in which to repair their defences. Never was the rhythm of attack maintained; never were the French tanks, numbering over 4,000 but spread out all along the front, concentrated for a breakthrough; and never did any deep penetration occur. Again and again, in the French communiqués there appeared sentences like the following: ‘The tanks put to flight the defenders, but the infantry did not reach the objective.’ Against an enemy that was already beaten, losses in both tanks and infantry were disheartening, the conclusions drawn discouraging.

In his post-war ‘Instruction’ of 1921, Marshal Pétain, then Supreme Commander, dismissed the future role of armour in two lines: ‘Tanks assist the advance of the infantry, by breaking static obstacles and active resistance put up by the enemy.’ For the next fourteen years this was to remain the accepted creed of the French Army. As at Verdun, the plodding infantryman dominated. But meanwhile, in England, a prophet had arisen with a new and revolutionary concept of warfare. A twenty-four-year-old ex-regular officer invalided out of the Army as a result of gassing on the Somme, Captain Basil Liddell Hart, was invited to help draft the British Army’s post-war infantry training manual. The manual gave him a first opportunity to propound his ‘expanding torrent’ theory of deep, swift penetration as an antidote to the static warfare of 1914–18. As his thoughts evolved, Liddell Hart saw offensive operations being spearheaded by powerful concentrations of fast-moving, wide-ranging tanks, no longer mere adjuncts of foot soldiery, and backed by equally mobile self-propelled guns and infantrymen transported in armoured carriers. Instead of
battering away along a wide sector with the old, methodical siege techniques, the attacker, having probed out a weak spot in the enemy’s defences, would pour through it at top speed with his ‘expanding torrent’ of mobile firepower, creating vulnerable new fronts deep in the defenders’ rear. If Liddell Hart’s theories – and those of his contemporary Major-General J. F. C. (‘Boney’) Fuller – should be proved viable, it obviously meant the death of the ‘continuous front’ school of thought, on which the whole of France’s inter-war strategy was based.

Harried by this awkward and gangling guru and his small band of supporters within the walls, the British Army decided in 1926 to lead the way by establishing an experimental mechanized force. Within two years, however, the conservative factions of the Army ‘Establishment’ reasserted themselves and this force was disbanded. In France, there was an even smaller body of bright young officers who, in Beaufre’s words, found Liddell Hart’s doctrine ‘as dazzling a discovery as the rediscovery of antiquity must have seemed to the men of the Renaissance after the conformist sterilities of medieval scholasticism’. But otherwise, comforted by the unreceptiveness of orthodoxy in England, the shapers of French military policy were able to ignore his teachings. Only elsewhere, in Germany, was their full import immediately grasped. In an attack upon proposals for the creation of an armoured corps, Pétain’s successor as Minister of War, General Maurin, summed up French attitudes prevailing in 1935 when he asked the Chamber of Deputies, amid loud applause, ‘How can we still believe in the offensive when we have spent thousands of millions to establish a fortified barrier? Would we be mad enough to advance beyond this barrier upon goodness knows what adventure!’ Yet if the offensive was damned and its mechanical requisites neglected, how then was the French Army to carry out that essential component of Maginot Line strategy – the march into Belgium – against a presumptively rearmed and reequipped Germany?