A World at Arms (28 page)

The second defect of the Allied plan, which became evident only in the course of the fighting, was closely related to the first. If the French and British forces were to move effectively into the Low Countries in order to assist them in stemming a German onrush, these forces would have to be relatively mobile and well equipped. In other words, the best and most mobile units of the French army and practically the whole British Expeditionary Force would be committed in the face of a German attack which turned out to be aimed differently from Allied expectations, thereby playing unwittingly into Germany’s hands by assuring that it would be the most mobile and effective units that were cut off by the German thrust across the Ardennes to the coast. Under these circumstances, defeat in the initial battle would mean
not
a new line of defense further back than the Allies had hoped to hold, but disaster. This last point was made doubly sure by the faulty strategy of the French supreme commander, General Gamelin, who both insisted, against the advice of his generals, that the main French reserve, the French 7th Army, be assigned to the rush into Holland at the extreme left flank, and also that half of
the total French forces available be assigned to the Maginot Line, so that there were no readily available reserves of any kind.

The German attack which began on May 10 can most easily be described by a review which goes from north to south. In the north, the attack on Holland included the use of German troops in Dutch uniforms, a substantial employment of paratroopers which, however, failed to seize on the first day the centers of population and government at which they were aimed, and an essentially unopposed movement by substantial German forces across the border. The retreat of the Dutch army was, as already mentioned, directed away from, rather than toward, the advancing forces of the Allies, with the result that it was quickly completely cut off by the Germans. Before the Dutch army surrendered on May 15, two events occurred which would affect the subsequent course of the war.

In the first place, the Queen and her government left Holland for England so that thereafter a Dutch government-in-exile would continue on the side of the Allies, a matter of considerable importance, given the strategic location of the Dutch colonial empire in South America and Southeast Asia and the large size of the Dutch merchant fleet. Secondly, the invasion itself (along with that of Belgium and Luxembourg) opened up the whole question of restraints on warfare in the modern world. The Dutch had not been involved in World War I and had greatly helped German citizens in the difficult times after their defeat of 1918. To show their gratitude, the Germans carried out a ruthless bombing attack on the city of Rotterdam on May 14, destroying the old city core and killing hundreds of civilians in a deliberate move designed to terrorize the Dutch into surrender.

The German air force had destroyed the city of Guernica during the Spanish civil war in April of 1937 by an attack etched into the world’s consciousness by Pablo Picasso’s famous painting. The Luftwaffe had repeated this approach in the bombing of Warsaw and other Polish cities, but these were events and places distant from the consciousness of Allied leaders in the West. The latter had imposed the strictest constraints on their own bombers, but they had already considered the possibility of reducing these if the Germans broke the neutrality of the Low Countries.
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Now the Germans had done so in the most flagrant way and had used their air force in an obviously deliberate assault on civilian targets. The restraints on Allied bombing policy were lifted thereafter, and German cities eventually reaped the whirlwind sowed by the Luftwaffe. Ironically the first major air raid on a German city occurred when German planes by mistake bombed
Freiburg in southwest Germany on May 10, 1940; and the German government claimed this proved first that the French and later that the British had begun with the bombing of civilian targets!
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A special monument in central Rotterdam commemorates those who died in this air attack designed to cow the civilian population, but those who set the world on fire would see their own roofs bum.

In the same hours and days that the storm broke over Holland, the Germans attacked a Belgium they had promised to respect for the second time in the century. Paratroopers and glider troops seized key river crossings and the forts guarding the critical routes into central Belgium. In World War I, the Germans in an especially notorious incident had burned down the library of the University of Louvain; rebuilt in the interwar years, it was again set on fire, this time by German artillery.
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Belgian units fought bravely against the invaders, but coordination with the arriving French and British armies was abysmal. The Belgian government, still imagining that it could earn points from the Germans, complained about British troops moving through the “open” city of Brussels, a symbol of attitudes that had vanished by the time British soldiers returned in 1944.
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As the German assault pushed forward into Belgium and the French front was pierced further south, the Belgian military leaders, and especially King Leopold, began to reconsider their position. The King in particular was unwilling to follow the example either of Belgian King Albert in 1914 or of the Queen of the Netherlands in 1940. Rather than leave the country, against the advice of his government he remained there as a prisoner while the Belgian army surrendered unconditionally to Germany on May 28.
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This action was in part the result of a calamitous French defeat further south, but contributed to the deepening Allied disaster and greatly complicated the situation of the Belgian government, which now moved into exile. That government would, as will be shown, waver briefly in the summer but eventually remain in the war, controlling the Belgian Congo with its great mineral resources, particularly copper and uranium. King Leopold remained a German prisoner and abdicated in 1951.

The decisive German thrust, however, came not in the north where the advancing German forces were soon engaging the French and British units which had hurried forward to join the Belgians and the Dutch, but through Luxembourg and southern Belgium into northern France over roads through the Ardennes. The thin screen of French forces holding this sector was quickly pierced, and already on May 13 the first German spearheads had crossed the Meuse river. The
German armored units pushing forward rapidly from these crossings threatened to cut off the whole Allied northern flank. Although some of the French units engaged in this encounter fought bravely, the initial German breakthrough was never seriously threatened, or even halted, before it reached the Channel coast in the night of May 20-21, ten days after the initial attack had been launched and one week after the crossing of the Meuse 150 miles away. How could such a victory be won so quickly?

Several factors combined to enable the Germans to win not only quickly but relatively easily. The shrewd and daring handling of the concentrated German armored formations, effectively supported at critical moments by the tactical employment of the German air force, gave the major impetus to this victory; but two critical errors of the French command contributed immensely to the inability of the Allies to cope with the breakthrough once they had discovered what was really happening.

In the first place, the French Commander-in-Chief, General Maurice Gamelin, had left such large forces in and behind the Maginot Line and deployed such substantial elements at the far left flank for a useless dash into Holland that there was no substantial reserve force available to push either into the gap or against the flanks of the German spearhead. Unlike World War I, when time and again initial breakthroughs had been contained by moving reserves to hold a new front, there were no such forces available in time on this occasion. That left the other possibility, used in the prior conflict to supplement the use of reserves: the redeployment of units already in the front elsewhere. Exploiting this possibility was vitiated by the second great mistake of Gamelin, a mistake to which, it should be noted, the allies of France contributed.

In spite of the terrible experience of 1918, when the absence of unity of command had almost led to the defeat of the Western Allies, no effective, functioning, Allied command structure existed in 1939-40. In fact, the French had not even organized their own command system so that it could work with minimal efficiency. There is no need to go into the rivalries and confusions affecting the French command, especially the unclarified relationship of Gamelin to the key field commander, General Alphonse Georges, or the equally confused command relations below Georges. The key point is that there was no time for the leisurely sorting out of incompetents, no opportunity to bring forward new ideas, no clear vision of needed measures, no ruthless will to impose order upon the chaos of demoralized headquarters. That under these circumstances some of the
French units broke in battle is not nearly as astonishing as the fact that so many of them fought so well. In World War I it had been said, with at least some degree of justice, that the British soldiers fought like lions but were led by donkeys. In the first stage of World War II, this description best characterized the French.
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None of this should be taken to imply that British leadership was especially inspired. Already during the winter, what can only be called a conspiracy of generals, War Office and Foreign Office civilians, together with court circles, had caused the dismissal of the Secretary of State for War, Leslie Hore-Belisha, one of the few driving persons in the Cabinet, in retaliation for his shaking up a British military establishment at least as torpid as the French.
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The commander of the British Expeditionary Force, Lord Gort, was an extraordinarily brave man, but he became almost paralyzed by the first signs of Allied defeat. Many of his key subordinates rose to critical commands later in the war; he himself would be assigned to govern first Gibraltar and then Malta, where a steady hand but no wider responsibilities were involved.

The French and British air forces were unable to destroy the bridges critical to the German advance, but that inability reflected a lack of both interest in and
real
training for ground support operations, a problem that would bedevil Allied air forces for years into the war. The two Allied air forces fought well but with diminished strength and from inadequate or distant bases as the land battle raged.
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Much was made at the time and in some of the post-war literature about the refusal of the British to employ their last reserves of fighters in the campaign, but nothing suggests that adding to the inadequately based and supported air forces would have accomplished much beyond robbing the British of the planes they would need so desperately to cover the evacuation from Dunkirk, soon to be discussed, and to defend the home island against the Nazi onslaught thereafter–both operations carried out from home bases.

The efforts of the French and British to cut off the German
armored spearhead by attacking from north and south before German infantry could catch up with their own advancing armor failed. Neither push had the strength and the two pushes never had the coordination necessary for real hope of success. The process of coordination was complicated not only by an incoherent command structure in the north but also by a change in leadership at the center of the French military. Earlier, the French government of Edouard Daladier had fallen on March 20, in part because of the collapse of all French hopes tied to the cause of Finland when the latter had made peace with the Soviet Union on March 13. The British ambassador to Paris, Sir Eric Phipps, wrote sadly to Lord Halifax that with Daladier there had fallen a leader all out for victory and in his opinion the only French politician of complete integrity.
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The new Prime Minister, Paul Reynaud, was thought to be both more flamboyant and activist, a man who had the reputation of being a strong anti-Nazi, and who signed an agreement with Britain that neither would make a separate peace with Germany. Though strong in intention, he would be wavering in implementation, and there is substantial evidence that under the influence of his mistress, Madame de Portes, his resolution weakened in June.
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He had been about to fire General Gamelin when the German invasion of the Low Countries became known and refrained from doing so under those circumstances. A few day later, however, as the dimensions of the disaster became clearer, he replaced Gamelin with General Maxime Weygand–who had first to fly back from Syria–and simultaneously he himself took over the Ministries of National Defense and War from Daladier. It fell to Weygand to try to stem the German onrush, but in the event he could neither coordinate the needed counter-attack quickly enough nor reinvigorate the reeling French forces.
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It was argued at the time and provided a useful excuse for many that a “fifth column” of subversives played a major role in the speedy German advance and Allied collapse. There can be no doubt that the confusion caused by German soldiers in Dutch uniforms on the one hand and the anti-war propaganda conducted by the French Communists on the other made their contribution to weakening the resistance to German might, but the basic factor was surely that a poorly led and badly coordinated Allied force was pierced at a critical point by concentrated German armor and was never able to regain even its balance, to say nothing of the initiative.

The immediate problem facing the Allies was what to do in the north and south as their forces were separated from each other by the German thrust to the coast, while the Germans had to decide
how best to deal with the two enemy forces remaining in the field. The interaction of the answers the two sides gave to these questions determined the course of the rest of the campaign. In the north, the British decided that Allied inability to break through the tier of German forces separating them from the south required an effort to evacuate as much of the cut-off army as possible while preparing a renewed buildup of British forces alongside the French in the south. The War Cabinet in London first learned of the German breakthrough across the Meuse on May 14;
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in subsequent days they followed the situation with increasing anxiety. As it became clear that communication with the south could not be regained, a desperate effort was made to withdraw the British Expeditionary Forces to the coast and evacuate by sea. This possibility had been first canvassed as early as May 19; it was put off in favor of a last attempt to break through to the south, became inevitable once the Belgians capitulated on May 28. but had looked like the most plausible course already by May 25. The real question was, would it be possible to stage a fighting retreat to the coast and ship out the troops–presumably without their equipment–alongside French forces fighting with them?