The Test of Courage: (A Biography of) Michel Thomas (10 page)

War had been declared on Germany but little effort was made by either France or Britain to wage it. Belgium and Holland had taken the soft political option of strict neutrality, a decision that would cost them dear. A strong Allied assault at this time might well have scotched Hitler’s dreams of world conquest. The German High Command certainly thought so, and worried throughout the Polish campaign that such an attack to their rear would bring collapse, knowing that any assault by the French would encounter a military screen instead of a real defence.

But the Allies did not even have an offensive plan. France had specifically guaranteed Poland that in case of attack she would launch an offensive counter-attack against Germany with the bulk of her forces. Later, the French government was told by its military leaders that it was impossible to launch such an assault in less than two years, and only then with the help of British troops and American equipment. The British commitment to Poland was general and undefined. The ill-equipped Expeditionary Force of four hundred and fifty thousand men was moved across the Channel to France, while the French Army made a half-hearted, tentative probe towards Saarbriicken (where German defences were strongest).

Even the Maginot Line - the Star Wars system of the day -was only reinforced with reservists. The modernity and scale of the Maginot Line created a false and fatal sense of security among the civilian population, and masked the ossified and almost entirely defensive military thinking that permeated the French Army. While the Poles were cut to shreds, one hundred and twelve divisions of the French Army did nothing. A British general raged, ‘Facing no more than twenty-six German divisions, sitting still and sheltering behind steel and concrete while a quixotically valiant ally was being exterminated!’
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Another war on the scale of the First World War was beyond the imagination of the nation and was deemed impossible. Mobilisation was lethargic and the French Army - the strongest in the world - sat tight, together with its powerful air force. France felt secure behind its great concrete and steel-turreted Maginot Line guarding the two major historical invasion routes. It formed an impregnable defence of ‘fortified regions’ twelve miles deep and stretching ninety miles inland from the Swiss border. It had been in construction since 1930, had cost in excess of five billion francs, and was the greatest system of permanent fortification built since the Great Wall of China.

The Maginot Line included one hundred kilometres of tunnels, four hundred and fifty kilometres of roads and railways, twelve million cubic metres of earthworks, one and a half million cubic metres of concrete, and one hundred and fifty thousand tons of steel. The defences consisted of hundreds of miles of anti-tank obstructions and barbed wire, behind which advance posts of reinforced barracks and pill boxes were placed. Deep anti-tank ditches came next, protecting hundreds of small subterranean casemates that were almost invisible above ground except for the two observation cupolas surmounting them. Every three to five miles there were massive forts, masterpieces of military engineering known as ‘earthscrapers’ because most of their construction was below ground. These fantastic science fiction creations bristled with numerous gun stations that included machine guns, anti-tank guns, heavy mortars and giant howitzers mounted in retractable turrets. Each fort held up to fifteen hundred soldiers, transported from their subterranean concrete barracks to combat stations by electric trains. As the men lived almost entirely underground, the forts were equipped with movie theatres, gymnasiums and recreation areas - even sun-ray treatment rooms. Apart from the vast amount of money needed to construct the Maginot Line, it was enormously costly to maintain. As a result, the remainder of the French Army remained antiquated.
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Jean-Paul Sartre, who was posted to the Maginot Line at the outbreak of the war, and who spent most of his time sending up balloons and watching them through binoculars, wrote: ‘There will be no fighting... it will be a modern war, without massacres as modern painting is without subject, music without melody, physics without matter.’
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In France, this uneasy limbo period of war without battle became known as the
Drôle de Guerre
- the strange war; to the Germans it became
Sitzkrieg
- the sitting war; and to the British, the phoney war. In general, the population of France was greatly relieved at the lack of combat activity, but Michel was depressed to hear the oft-repeated line, ‘What do we care as long as we have our steak and wine?’

Hitler used the lull to prepare for his attack on the west, although wavered when his generals counselled against it. It was a high-risk enterprise with an uncertain outcome. Allied inaction had allowed the Wehrmacht to take Poland cheaply, but France was an entirely different proposition. Hitler, however, was prepared to take the gamble.

On 10 May 1940, the mechanised juggernaut of the German war machine launched
Blitzkrieg
on the west. Eighty-three divisions - with a further forty-seven in reserve - invaded the Low Countries, spearheaded as in Poland by ten Panzer divisions made up of three thousand armoured vehicles, a thousand of which were heavy tanks. Small forces of highly trained airborne troops were dropped by parachute and landed in gliders to capture vital bridges before they could be destroyed, and the defence systems of Belgium and Holland were quickly overrun.

Three days later Panzer tanks crossed the Meuse where it meandered through the heavily wooded Ardennes, which had been pronounced ‘impenetrable’. The armoured column for this thrust was made up of forty-four divisions and was over a hundred miles long, stretching back fifty miles the other side of the Rhine. It advanced so fast and easily that both Hitler and the German High Command became alarmed that they were vulnerable to a French counterattack from the south.

As for the Maginot Line, the German Army simply bypassed it. The bulk of the Allied forces was now exposed to attack from the rear, and there was no option for the British Expeditionary Force except retreat. An army of three hundred and thirty-eight thousand men - including one hundred and twenty thousand French troops - was lifted off the beaches at Dunkirk, much of it by small craft capable of taking only a handful of soldiers. This was made possible by the brave rearguard action of the First French Army who fought until they were surrounded, having been abandoned by their commanding generals who had been ordered to evacuate to England. The retreat had been inevitable, and its execution heroic, but to Frenchmen it seemed that their British ally only showed military verve when it came to scuttling back to their island.

The British, for their part, increasingly viewed the French with contempt. Panic gripped the nation. As the Germans pushed towards Paris, and the government left for Bordeaux, it is estimated that as many as ten million of France’s citizens took to the road. Entire cities became ghost towns as old men, women and children in cars, carts and wheelbarrows choked every highway and byway in the push south.

In the meantime, the French Army was left in total chaos, often falling back to find their new positions already occupied by the Germans. French soldiers surrendered in such great numbers they became the greatest problem the German Army faced in its advance. Soldiers threw away their weapons and even stripped off their uniforms. There were instances of the murder of officers who ordered their men to stand and fight, and the inhabitants of one village lynched a tank officer who attempted to defend them. One and a half million prisoners were taken and sent back to Germany.

A French colonel who had long espoused mobile armoured warfare found himself in command of a tank division that did not exist. Scraping together a few tanks, he assembled three battalions and set out to reconnoitre the military situation. ‘Along the roads from the north flowed lamentable convoys of refugees. I noticed among them many soldiers without arms. At this spectacle of a lost people and a military rout, and from the reports of the scornful insolence of the Germans, I was filled with a terrible fury. It was too awful! The war was starting unbelievably badly. But we would have to continue it. If I lived I would fight on wherever I could as long as necessary until the enemy was defeated and the stain wiped out.’
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The defiant colonel survived to become General de Gaulle, leader of the Free French.

There were a few honourable exceptions in which French troops fought tenaciously. The two thousand five hundred cadets of the Cavalry School at Saumur, despite being vastly outnumbered and fielding only training weapons, held up the German Army and its Panzers along a twenty-six-kilometre front on the Loire for two days. When one group of cadets holding an island in the river was finally overrun by a greatly superior force, the men lay down their weapons, lit cigarettes and refused to raise their hands. A small Alpine force of three divisions held off thirty-two of Mussolini’s divisions, while on the Côte d’Azur the Italian invasion was thwarted by an NCO and seven men.
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Despite the dangerous and difficult times, Michel’s relationship with Suzanne grew ever closer. It did not cross his mind at this time that France would not somehow continue the struggle; the government could move to north Africa, the colonial divisions remained unscathed, and the navy and the air force was intact. He still expected to be called upon by French intelligence, and often discussed with Suzanne the inevitable separation and wondered how long the war might last. They turned the subject over endlessly. How long would they be apart? Would it be months or years? Would Michel be wounded... or killed?

One night, as they lay in bed talking about their future, Michel asked how Suzanne felt about having a relationship with another man. If they were separated for years it was a possibility and they should discuss it. She answered quickly that Michel was her one and only lover whom she adored, and it was unthinkable that she should go with anyone else. There was a pause. Suzanne then said thoughtfully that she could only possibly imagine one situation in which she would give herself to another man.

‘What do you mean?’ In the darkness Michel was all attention as he waited for her to continue.

‘If you were ever captured and imprisoned, and your life was in danger, or if you faced execution, I would do everything in the world to save you. And if the only way to save you was to sleep with another man then, yes, I would do it.’

‘How could you ever think of such a thing?’ Michel asked heatedly. The idea of such a compromise appalled him. ‘How could you expect me to owe my life and my freedom to such an act? I wouldn’t be able to live with myself. Or with you. I would not want to owe my freedom to this. The only thing such an act would achieve would be to make things impossible between us. It would be a betrayal of trust. All you would accomplish would be to break us up. It would not save me -1 would leave you and return to captivity.’

Suzanne said nothing. She had not seen him so angry since she had suggested the conversion of convenience in Vienna in order to get papers. She knew him well enough to know that he meant what he said. A strained silence came between them and neither spoke until they fell asleep. The subject was never brought up again.

Political surrender followed military collapse with unseemly haste. ‘It is with a heavy heart I tell you today that it is necessary to stop the fighting,’ Marshal Henri Philippe Pétain announced over the radio on 17 June. The much-loved and respected eighty-four-year-old hero of the First World War, victor of the battle of Verdun, had been brought into the French government in desperation and given full executive powers. The old soldier had the status in France of a demigod, and was considered an incarnation of France in human form, and now it was hoped he would be her saviour. ‘I have made a gift of my person to France,’ he said generously, and now in his thin, quavering, old woman’s voice he announced that he was asking the Germans for an armistice. He also baldly articulated his future policy of collaboration - a word then untainted with the shame it came to embrace. In Germany, at the news of France’s suit for armistice, Hitler literally danced for joy.

In fact, there had not even been a vote to determine whether there should be an armistice or a fight to the finish. But no public figure raised a voice to condemn the armistice, and Pétain solemnly intoned, ‘At least our honour is safe.’ The French Navy and Air Force were intact, and there were soldiers still in combat in the field, but Pétain had announced an end to the fighting before he knew if Germany’s conditions for an armistice were acceptable. The Germans had not even had time to answer the request.

It was a precipitous and disastrous statement the marshal later tried to excuse as misunderstood, but the troops took the marshal at his word and tens of thousands gladly abandoned their weapons. The roadsides and ditches of northern France became strewn with rifles, pistols and helmets. ‘The war is over!’ the soldiers called to one another. ‘Why get killed when the war is over?’ Entire regiments sat in their barracks awaiting the arrival of the Germans. One impatient corps commander actually surrendered over the phone. Many of the population seemed more inclined to oppose their own troops than the invading army. At Vienne, the mayor threatened to loose a thousand of the town’s women on a general attempting to dynamite a strategic bridge over the Rhône. Generals who continued to resist were actually reprimanded by the High Command, and one officer on the Maginot Line who insisted ‘as a matter of honour’ that his soldiers fight their way out through the German lines, was shot in the back. Generals who suggested moving land, naval and air forces to continue the battle from north Africa were rebuked by Pétain himself.