Their Finest Hour (6 page)

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Mr. Colijn, when as Dutch Prime Minister he visited me in 1937, had explained to me the marvellous efficiency of the Dutch inundations. He could, he explained, by a telephone message from the luncheon table at Chartwell, press a button which would confront an invader with impassable water obstacles. But all this was nonsense. The power of a great State against a small one under modern conditions is overwhelming. The Germans broke through at every point, bridging the canals or seizing the locks and water-controls. In a single day all the outer line of the Dutch defences was mastered. At the same time the German Air Force began to use its might upon a defenceless country. The Dutch hope that they would be bypassed by the German right-handed swing as in the former war was vain.

The case of Belgium requires more searching statement. Several hundreds of thousands of British and French graves in Belgium mark the struggle of the previous war. The policy of Belgium in the years between the wars had not taken sufficient account of the past. The Belgian leaders saw with worried eyes the internal weakness of France and the vacillating pacifism of Britain. They clung to a strict neutrality. In the years before they were again invaded, their attitude towards the two mighty arrays which confronted each other was, officially at any rate, quite impartial. Great allowance must be made for the fearful problems of a small State in such a plight, but the French High Command had for years spoken bitterly of the line taken by the Belgian Government. Their only chance of defending their frontier against a German attack lay in a close alliance with France and Britain. The line of the Albert Canal and other water fronts was highly defensible, and had the British and French armies, aided by the Belgian armies, after the declaration of war, been drawn up on the Belgian frontiers in good time, a very strong offensive might have been prepared and launched from these positions against Germany. But the Belgian Government deemed that their safety lay in the most rigid neutrality, and their only hope was founded on German good faith and respect for treaties.

Even after Britain and France had entered into war, it was impossible to persuade them to rejoin the old alliance. They declared they would defend their neutrality to the death, and placed nine-tenths of their forces on their German frontier, while at the same time they strictly forbade the Anglo-French Army to enter their country and make effective preparations for their defence or for forestalling counter-strokes. The construction of new lines and the anti-tank ditch during the winter of 1939 by the British armies, with the French First Army on their right, along the Franco-Belgian frontier, had been the only measure open to us. It is a haunting question whether the whole policy of Plan D should not have been reviewed upon this basis, and whether we would not have been wiser to stand and fight on the French frontier, and amid these strong defences invite the Belgian Army to fall back upon them, rather than make the hazardous and hurried forward leap to the Dyle or the Albert Canal.

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No one can understand the decisions of that period without realising the immense authority wielded by the French military leaders and the belief of every French officer that France had the primacy in the military art. France had conducted and carried the main weight of the terrible land fighting from 1914 to 1918. She had lost fourteen hundred thousand men killed. Foch had held the supreme command, and the great British and Imperial armies of sixty or seventy divisions had been placed, like the Americans, unreservedly under his orders. Now the British Expeditionary Army numbered but three or four hundred thousand men, spread from the bases at Havre and along the coast forward to the line, compared with nearly a hundred French divisions, or over two million Frenchmen, actually holding the long front from Belgium to Switzerland. It was natural, therefore, that we should place ourselves under their command, and that their judgment should be accepted. It had been expected that General Georges would take full command of the French and British armies in the field from the moment when war was declared, and General Gamelin was expected to retire to an advisory position on the French Military Council. However, General Gamelin was averse from yielding his control as Generalissimo. He retained the supreme direction. A vexatious conflict of authority took place between him and General Georges during the eight months’ lull. General Georges, in my opinion, never had the chance to make the strategic plan in its integrity and on his own responsibility.

The British General Staff and our headquarters in the field had long been anxious about the gap between the northern end of the Maginot Line and the beginning of the British fortified front along the Franco-Belgian frontier. Mr. Hore-Belisha, the Secretary of State for War, raised the point in the War Cabinet on several occasions. Representations were made through military channels. Considering, however, our relatively small contribution, the Cabinet and our military leaders were naturally shy of criticising those whose armies were ten times as strong as our own. The French thought that the Ardennes were impassable for large modern armies. Marshal Pétain had told the Senate Army Commission: “This sector is not dangerous.” A great deal of field work was done along the Meuse, but nothing like a strong line of pillboxes and anti-tank obstacles, such as the British had made along the Belgian sector, was attempted. Moreover, General Corap’s Ninth French Army was mainly composed of troops who were definitely below the French standards. Out of its nine divisions, two were of cavalry, partly mechanised, one was a fortress division, two (61st and 53d) belonged to a secondary category, two (22d and 18th) were not much inferior to active divisions; only two were divisions of the permanent regular army. Here, then, from Sedan to Hirson on the Oise, along a front of fifty miles, there were no permanent fortifications, and only two divisions of professional troops.

One cannot be strong everywhere. It is often right and necessary to hold long sectors of a frontier with light covering forces, but this, of course, should be only with the object of gathering larger reserves for counter-attacks when the enemy’s striking-points are revealed. The spreading of forty-three divisions, or half the mobile French army, from Longwy to the Swiss frontier, the whole of which was either defended by the Maginot Line forts or by the broad, swift-flowing Rhine, with its own fortress system behind it, was an improvident disposition. The risks that have to be run by the defender are more trying than those which an assailant, who is presumably the stronger at the point of attack, must dare. Where very long fronts are concerned, they can only be met by strong mobile reserves which can rapidly intervene in a decisive battle. A weight of opinion supports the criticism that the French reserves were inadequate, and, such as they were, badly distributed. After all, the gap behind the Ardennes opened the shortest road from Germany to Paris, and had for centuries been a famous battleground. If the enemy penetrated here, the whole forward movement of the Northern Armies would be deprived of its pivot, and all their communications would be endangered equally with the capital.

Looking back, we can see that Mr. Chamberlain’s War Cabinet, in which I served and for whose acts or neglects I take my full share of responsibility, ought not to have been deterred from thrashing the matter out with the French in the autumn and winter of 1939. It would have been an unpleasant and difficult argument, for the French at every stage could say: “Why do you not send more troops of your own? Will you not take over a wider sector of the front? If reserves are lacking, pray supply them. We have five million men mobilised.
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We follow your ideas about the war at sea; we conform to the plans of the British Admiralty. Pray show a proper confidence in the French Army and in our historic mastery of the art of war on land.”

Nevertheless we ought to have done it.

Hitler and his generals were in little doubt as to the military views and general arrangements of their opponents. During this same autumn and winter the German factories had poured out tanks, the plants for making which must have been well advanced at the Munich crisis in 1938, and bore abundant fruit in the eight months that had passed since war began. They were not at all deterred by the physical difficulties of traversing the Ardennes. On the contrary, they believed that modern mechanical transport and vast organised road-making capacity would make this region, hitherto deemed impassable, the shortest, surest, and easiest method of penetrating France and of rupturing the whole French scheme of counter-attack. Accordingly, the German Supreme Army Command (O.K.H.) planned their enormous onrush through the Ardennes to sever the curling left arm of the Allied Northern Armies at the shoulder-joint. The movement, though on a far larger scale and with different speeds and weapons, was not unlike Napoleon’s thrust at the Plateau of Pratzen in the battle of Austerlitz, whereby the entire Austro-Russian turning move was cut off and ruined and their centre broken.

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At the signal the Northern Armies sprang to the rescue of Belgium and poured forward along all the roads amid the cheers of the inhabitants. The first phase of Plan D was completed by May 12. The French held the left bank of the Meuse to Huy, and their light forces beyond the river were falling back before increasing enemy pressure. The armoured divisions of the French First Army reached the line Huy-Hannut-Tirle-mont. The Belgians, having lost the Albert Canal, were falling back to the line of the river Gette and taking up their prescribed position from Antwerp to Louvain. They still held Liége and Namur. The French Seventh Army had occupied the islands of Walcheren and South Beveland, and were engaged with mechanised units of the German Eighteenth Army on the line Herenthals – Bergen-op-Zoom. So rapid had been the advance of the French Seventh Army that it had already outrun its ammunition supplies. The superiority in quality though not in numbers of the British Air Force was already apparent. Thus up till the night of the 12th there was no reason to suppose that the operations were not going well.

However, during the 13th Lord Gort’s Headquarters became aware of the weight of the German thrust on the front of the French Ninth Army. By nightfall the enemy had established themselves on the west bank of the Meuse, on either side of Dinant and Sedan. The French G.Q.G. (Grand Quartier General) were not yet certain whether the main German effort was directed through Luxembourg against the left of the Maginot Line or through Maastricht towards Brussels. Along the whole front Louvain-Namur-Dinant to Sedan an intense, heavy battle had developed, but under conditions which General Gamelin had not contemplated, for at Dinant the French Ninth Army had no time to install themselves before the enemy was upon them.

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During the 14th the bad news began to come in. At first all was vague. At 7
P.M
. I read to the Cabinet a message received from M. Reynaud stating that the Germans had broken through at Sedan, that the French were unable to resist the combination of tanks and dive-bombing, and asking for ten more squadrons of fighters to re-establish the line. Other messages received by the Chiefs of Staff gave similar information, and added that both Generals Gamelin and Georges took a serious view of the situation and that General Gamelin was surprised at the rapidity of the enemy’s advance. In fact, Kleist’s Group, with its immense mass of armour, heavy and light, had completely scattered or destroyed the French troops on their immediate front, and could now move forward at a pace never before known in war. At almost all points where the armies had come in contact, the weight and fury of the German attack was overpowering. They crossed the Meuse in the Dinant sector with two more armoured divisions. To the north the fighting on the front of the French First Army had been most severe. The First and Second British Corps were still in position from Wavre to Louvain, where our Third Division, under General Montgomery, had had sharp fighting. Farther north the Belgians were retiring to the Antwerp defences. The French Seventh Army on the seaward flank was recoiling even quicker than it had advanced.

From the moment of the invasion we began “Operation Royal Marine,” the launching of the fluvial mines into the Rhine, and in the first week of the battle nearly 1700 were “streamed.”
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They produced immediate results. Practically all river traffic between Karlsruhe and Mainz was suspended, and extensive damage was done to the Karlsruhe barrage and a number of pontoon bridges. The success of this device was, however, lost in the deluge of disaster.

All the British air squadrons fought continuously, their principal effort being against the pontoon bridges in the Sedan area. Several of these were destroyed and others damaged in desperate and devoted attacks. The losses in the low-level attacks on the bridges from the German anti-aircraft artillery were cruel. In one case, of six aircraft only one returned from the successful task. On this day alone we lost a total of sixty-seven machines, and being engaged principally with the enemy’s anti-aircraft forces, accounted for only fifty-three German aircraft. That night there remained in France of the Royal Air Force only 206 serviceable aircraft out of 474.