Berlin Diary (75 page)

Many French prisoners say they never saw a battle. When one seemed imminent, orders came to retreat. It was this constant order to retreat before a battle had been joined, or at least before it had been fought out, that broke the Belgian resistance.

The Germans themselves say that in one tank battle they were attacked by a large fleet of French tanks after they had themselves run out of ammunition. The German commander ordered a retreat. After the German tanks had retired some distance to the rear, with the French following them only very cautiously, the Germans received orders to turn about and simulate an attack, firing automatic pistols or anything they had out of their tanks, and executing complicated manœuvres. This they did, and the French, seeing an armada of tanks descend upon them, though these were without ammunition, turned and fled.

One German tank officer I talked to in Compiègne said: “French tanks in some ways were superior to ours. They had heavier armour. And at times—for a few hours, say—the French tank corps fought bravely and well. But soon we got a definite feeling that their heart
wasn’t in it. When we learned that, and acted on the belief, it was all over.” A month before, I would have thought such talk rank Nazi propaganda. Now I believe it.

Another mystery: After the Germans broke through the Franco-Belgian border from Maubeuge to Sedan, they tell that they continued right on across northern France
to the sea hardly firing a shot. When they got to the sea, Boulogne and Calais were defended mostly by the British. The whole French army seemed paralysed, unable to provide the least action, the slightest counter-thrust.

True, the Germans had air superiority. True, the British didn’t provide the air power they could and should have provided. Yet even that does not explain the French debacle. From what one can see, the effectiveness of the air force in this war has been over-emphasized. One read of the great mass air attacks on the Allied columns along the roads. But you look in vain for the evidence of it on the roads. There are no bomb craters. True, the German technique was first to machine-gun the troops and then, when they’d scattered to the side of the road, to bomb the
sides
(thus sparing the road when they wanted to use it later). But you also see little evidence of this. A crater here and there along the roadside or in a near-by field—but not enough to destroy an army. The most deadly work of the German air force was at Dunkirk, where the British stopped the Germans dead for ten days.

On the whole, then, while the French here and there fought valiantly and even stubbornly, their army seems to have been paralysed as soon as the Germans made their first break-through. Then it collapsed, almost without a fight. In the first place the French, as though drugged, had no will to fight, even when their soil was
invaded by their most hated enemy. There was a complete collapse of French society and of the French soul. Secondly, there was either treachery or criminal negligence in the High Command and among the high officers in the field. Among large masses of troops Communist propaganda had won the day. And its message was: “Don’t fight.” Never were the masses so betrayed.

Two other considerations:

First, the quality of the Allied and German commanding officers. Only a few weeks ago General Sir Edmund Ironside, chief of the British Imperial General Staff, was boasting to American correspondents in London of the great advantage he had in possessing several generals in France
who had been division commanders in the World War, whereas all the German generals were younger men who had never commanded more than a company in the last war. Sir Edmund thought the World War experience of his older generals would tell in the end.

It was an idle boast and no doubt the general regrets it now in the light of what has happened. True, the commanding officers of the German army are, for the most part, mere youngsters compared to the French generals we have seen. The latter strike you as civilized, intellectual, frail, ailing old men who stopped thinking new thoughts twenty years ago and have taken no physical exercise in the last ten years. The German generals are a complete contrast. More than one not yet forty, most of them in the forties, a few at the very top in their fifties. And they have the characteristics of youth—dash, daring, imagination, initiative, and physical prowess. General von Reichenau, commander of a whole army in Poland, was first to cross the Vistula River. He swam it. The commander of the few hundred German parachutists at Rotterdam was a general, who
took his chances with the lieutenants and privates, and was in fact severely wounded. All the big German tank attacks were
led
in person by commanding generals. They did not sit in the safety of a dug-out ten miles behind the lines and direct by radio. They sat in their tanks in the thick of the fray and directed by radio and signalling from where they could see how the battle was going.

And as was to be expected from youth, these young generals did not hesitate at times to adopt innovations, to do the unorthodox thing, to take chances.

The great trouble with the Allied command—especially the French—was that it was dominated by old men who made the fatal mistake of thinking that this war would be fought on the same general lines as the last war. The rigidity of their military thinking was fixed somewhere between 1914 and 1918, and the matrix of their minds was never broken. I think this helps to explain why, when confronted by the Germans with a new type of war, the French were unable to adjust themselves to countering it.

It wasn’t that these tired old men had to adapt themselves to a revolutionary kind of warfare overnight. One of the mysteries of the campaign in the west is that the Allied command seems never to have bothered to learn the lesson of the Polish campaign. For in Poland the German army revealed the tactics it would use in the lowlands and France—parachutists and Stukas to disrupt communications in the rear, and swift, needlelike thrusts with
Panzer
divisions down the main roads through the enemy lines, pushing them ever deeper and then closing them like great steel claws, avoiding frontal attack, giving no opportunity for frontal defence along a line, striking far into the enemy’s rear before he could organize for a stand. Eight months elapsed between the
Polish campaign and the offensive in the west, and yet there is little evidence that the generals of Britain and France used this precious time to organize a new system of defence to cope with the tactics they watched the Germans use in Poland. Probably they greatly underestimated the fight the Polish army put up; probably they thought it had been merely a badly armed rabble, and that against a first-rate army like the French, entrenched behind its Maginot Line, the new style of warfare would beat its head in vain. Had the Maginot Line really extended from Sedan to the sea, this attitude might have been justified. But as the Allies knew, and as the Germans remembered, the Maginot Line proper stopped some miles to the east of Sedan.

The second consideration is the fantastically good morale of the German army. Few people who have not seen it in action realize how different this army is from the one the Kaiser sent hurtling into Belgium and France in 1914. I remember my surprise at Kiel last Christmas to find an entirely new
esprit
in the German navy. This
esprit
was based on a camaraderie between officers and men. The same is true of the German army. It is hard to explain. The old Prussian goose-step, the heel-clicking, the “
Jawohl
” of the private when answering an officer, are still there. But the great gulf between officers and men is gone in this war. There is a sort of equalitarianism. I felt it from the first day I came in contact with the army at the front. The German officer no longer represents—or at least is conscious of representing—a class or caste. And the men in the ranks feel this. They feel like members of one great family. Even the salute has a new meaning. German privates salute each other, thus making the gesture more of a comradely greeting than the mere recognition of superior rank. In cafés, restaurants, dining-cars, officers
and men off duty sit at the same table and converse as men to men. This would have been unthinkable in the last war and is probably unusual in the armies of the West, including our own. In the field, officers and men usually eat from the same soup kitchen. At Compiègne I had my lunch with a youthful captain who lined up with the men to get his rations from a mobile “soup cannon.” In Paris I recall a colonel who was treating a dozen privates to an excellent lunch in a little Basque restaurant off the avenue de l’Opéra. When lunch was over, he drew, with all the care of a loving father, a plan for them to visit the sights of Paris. The respect of these ordinary soldiers for their colonel would be hard to exaggerate. Yet it was not for his rank, but for the man. Hitler himself has drawn up detailed instructions for German officers about taking an interest in the personal problems of their men. One of the most efficient units in the German army at the front is its post office which brings letters and packages from home to the men, regardless of where they are, and which attends to the dispatch of letters and packages from the men home in record time. There are few German soldiers who have not dispatched in the last days silk stockings and perfume home to their families through the free facilities of the army post office.

One reason for the excellent morale of the troops is their realization that they and not the civilians back home are receiving the best treatment the nation can afford. They get the pick of the food and clothing available. In the winter the homes of Germany
may not be heated, but the barracks are. The civilians in the safe jobs may not see oranges and coffee and fresh vegetables, but the troops see them every day. Last Christmas it was the soldiers who sent food packages home to their families, and not the reverse. Hitler once said
that as a private of the last war he would see to it that the men in the new army benefited by the lessons he had learned. And in this one case, at least, he seems to have kept his promise.

B
ERLIN
,
June
28

A word about something the Germans will shoot me for if the Gestapo or the Military Intelligence ever find these notes. (I hide them about my hotel room here, but even an amateur detective could find them easily enough.)

I have been shocked at the way the German army in Belgium and France has been abusing the Red Cross sign.

The other day when we were within forty miles of Paris, we stopped at a big army gasoline dump to refuel our cars. Forty or fifty army oil trucks were drawn up under the trees of an orchard. Several of them were plastered with huge Red Cross signs. Many of the ordinary trucks with canvas tops which were being used to carry drums of oil had red crosses on their sides and roofs and indeed looked like Red Cross ambulances. A German officer apparently noticed me taking in this shameless misuse of the Red Cross sign. He hurriedly bundled us into our cars and got us off.

This may explain why the Luftwaffe has not respected the mark of the Red Cross on the Allied side. Göring probably figures that the Allies are doing just what he does. This may explain something the correspondents who went into Dunkirk the other day told me. The thing that shocked them most there was the sight of the charred remains of a long line of British and French Red Cross ambulances drawn up on the quay. They had been about to unload the wounded on
some ships, it was evident, and then the Stukas had come over and bombed them with explosive and incendiary bombs. The burnt bodies of the wounded still lay in the ambulances. No German pilot, the correspondents observed, could have failed to see the large Red Cross marks on the top of the ambulances.

I noticed too in Belgium and France many German staff officers riding up and down in cars marked with the Red Cross.

Today was the twenty-first anniversary of the signing of the Treaty of Versailles. And the world it created appeared to be gasping its swan-song today as German troops reached the Spanish border, and Soviet troops marched into Bessarabia and Bukovina. In Paris last week I learned on good authority that Hitler planned a further humiliation of France by holding a victory parade before the Palace of Versailles on this twenty-first anniversary day. He would make a speech from the Hall of Mirrors, where it was signed, proclaiming its official end. For some reason it was called off. It is to be held, instead, in Berlin, I hear.

Official comment on Russia’s grabbing Bessarabia and Bukovina from Rumania today was: “Rumania has chosen the reasonable way.”

The nomination of Willkie gets three lines in the Berlin press today. It refers to him as “
General-Direktor
” Willkie.

One or two American representatives of American press associations spoke so strongly to Dr. Boehmer, the Propaganda Ministry press chief, about our radio scoop on the armistice at Compiègne that he assured them I had not been allowed to use a German transmitter but must have got my story out over “some French
station.” Actually we used a German transmitter and one located just outside of Berlin at Zeesen, as Dr. Boehmer no doubt knows.