Their Finest Hour (7 page)

This detailed information came only gradually to hand. But it was already clear that the continuance of fighting on this scale would soon completely consume the British Air Force in spite of its individual ascendancy. The hard question of how much we could send from Britain without leaving ourselves defenceless and thus losing the power to continue the war pressed itself henceforward upon us. Our own natural promptings and many weighty military arguments lent force to the incessant, vehement French appeals. On the other hand, there was a limit, and that limit if transgressed would cost us our life.

At this time all these issues were discussed by the whole War Cabinet, which met several times a day. Air Chief Marshal Dowding, at the head of our metropolitan fighter command, had declared to me that with twenty-five squadrons of fighters he could defend the island against the whole might of the German Air Force, but that with less he would be overpowered. This would have entailed not only the destruction of all our airfields and our air power, but of the aircraft factories on which our whole future hung. My colleagues and I were resolved to run all risks for the sake of the battle up to that limit – and those risks were very great – but not to go beyond it, no matter what the consequences might be.

About half-past seven on the morning of the 15th I was woken up with the news that M. Reynaud was on the telephone at my bedside. He spoke in English, and evidently under stress. “We have been defeated.” As I did not immediately respond he said again, “We are beaten; we have lost the battle.” I said, “Surely it can’t have happened so soon?” But he replied, “The front is broken near Sedan; they are pouring through in great numbers with tanks and armoured cars” – or words to that effect. I then said, “All experience shows that the offensive will come to an end after a while. I remember the 21st of March, 1918. After five or six days they have to halt for supplies, and the opportunity for counterattack is presented. I learned all this at the time from the lips of Marshal Foch himself.” Certainly, this was what we had always seen in the past and what we ought to have seen now. However, the French Premier came back to the sentence with which he had begun, which proved indeed only too true: “We are defeated; we have lost the battle.” I said I was willing to come over and have a talk.

On this day the French Ninth Army, Corap’s, was in a state of complete dissolution, and its remnants were divided up between General Giraud of the Seventh French Army, who took over from Corap in the north, and the headquarters of the Sixth French Army, which was forming in the south. A gap of some fifty miles had in fact been punched in the French line, through which the vast mass of enemy armour was pouring. By the evening of the 15th, German armoured cars were reported to be in Liart and Montcornet, the latter sixty miles behind the original front. The French First Army was also pierced on a five-thousand yards front south of Limal. Farther north all attacks on the British were repulsed. The German attack and the retirement of the French division on their right compelled the making of a British defensive flank facing south. The French Seventh Army had retreated into the Antwerp defences west of the Scheldt, and was being driven out of the islands of Walcheren and South Beveland.

On this day also the struggle in Holland came to an end. Owing to the “Cease Fire” order given by the Dutch High Command at 11
A.M
., only a very few Dutch troops could be evacuated.

Of course this picture presented a general impression of defeat. I had seen a good deal of this sort of thing in the previous war, and the idea of the line being broken, even on a broad front, did not convey to my mind the appalling consequences that now flowed from it. Not having had access to official information for so many years, I did not comprehend the violence of the revolution effected since the last war by the incursion of a mass of fast-moving heavy armour. I knew about it, but it had not altered my inward convictions as it should have done. There was nothing I could have done if it had. I rang up General Georges, who seemed quite cool, and reported that the breach at Sedan was being plugged. A telegram from General Gamelin also stated that, although the position between Namur and Sedan was serious, he viewed the situation with calm. I reported Reynaud’s message and other news to the Cabinet at 11
A.M
., the Chiefs of Staff being present.

On the 16th the German spearheads stood along the line La Capelle-Vervins-Marle-Laon, and the vanguards of the German Fourteenth Corps were in support at Montcornet and Neufchâteatl-sur-Aisne. The fall of Laon confirmed the penetration of over sixty miles inward upon us from the frontier near Sedan. Under this threat and the ever-increasing pressure on their own front, the First French Army and the British Expeditionary Force were ordered to withdraw in three stages to the Scheldt. Although none of these details were available even to the War Office, and no clear view could be formed of what was happening, the gravity of the crisis was obvious. I felt it imperative to go to Paris that afternoon. My colleagues accepted the fact that I must go, and said they would look after everything at home.

* * * * *

We had to expect that the disastrous events on the front would bring new foes upon us. Although there were no indications of a change in Italian policy, the Minister of Shipping was given instructions to thin out the shipping in the Mediterranean. No more British ships were to come homewards from Aden. We had already diverted round the Cape the first convoy carrying the Australian troops to England. The Defence Committee were instructed to consider action in the event of war with Italy, particularly with regard to Crete. Schemes for evacuating civilians from Aden and Gibraltar were put into operation.

* * * * *

At about 3
P.M
. I flew to Paris in a Flamingo, a Government passenger plane, of which there were three. General Dill, Vice-Chief of the Imperial General Staff, came with me, and Ismay.

It was a good machine, very comfortable, and making about a hundred and sixty miles an hour. As it was unarmed, an escort was provided, but we soared off into a rain-cloud and reached Le Bourget in little more than an hour. From the moment we got out of the Flamingo, it was obvious that the situation was incomparably worse than we had imagined. The officers who met us told General Ismay that the Germans were expected in Paris in a few days at most. After hearing at the Embassy about the position, I drove to the Quai d’Orsay, arriving at 5.30 o’clock. I was conducted into one of its fine rooms. Reynaud was there, Daladier, Minister of National Defence and War, and General Gamelin. Everybody was standing. At no time did we sit down around a table. Utter dejection was written on every face. In front of Gamelin on a student’s easel was a map, about two yards square, with a black ink line purporting to show the Allied front. In this line there was drawn a small but sinister bulge at Sedan.

The Commander-in-Chief briefly explained what had happened. North and south of Sedan, on a front of fifty or sixty miles, the Germans had broken through. The French army in front of them was destroyed or scattered. A heavy onrush of armoured vehicles was advancing with unheard-of speed toward Amiens and Arras, with the intention, apparently, of reaching the coast at Abbeville or thereabouts. Alternatively they might make for Paris. Behind the armour, he said, eight or ten German divisions, all motorised, were driving onwards, making flanks for themselves as they advanced against the two disconnected French armies on either side. The General talked perhaps five minutes without anyone saying a word. When he stopped there was a considerable silence. I then asked: “Where is the strategic reserve?” and, breaking into French, which I used indifferently (in every sense): “Où est la masse de manoeuvre?” General Gamelin turned to me and, with a shake of the head and a shrug, said: “Aucune.”

There was another long pause. Outside in the garden of the Quai d’Orsay clouds of smoke arose from large bonfires, and I saw from the window venerable officials pushing wheelbarrows of archives onto them. Already, therefore, the evacuation of Paris was being prepared.

Past experience carries with its advantages the drawback that things never happen the same way again. Otherwise I suppose life would be too easy. After all, we had often had our fronts broken before; always we had been able to pull things together and wear down the momentum of the assault. But here were two new factors that I had never expected to have to face. First, the overrunning of the whole of the communications and countryside by an irresistible incursion of the armoured vehicles, and secondly
no strategic reserve.
“Aucune.” I was dumbfounded. What were we to think of the great French Army and its highest chiefs? It had never occurred to me that any commanders having to defend five hundred miles of engaged front would have left themselves unprovided with a mass of manoeuvre. No one can defend with certainty so wide a front; but when the enemy has committed himself to a major thrust which breaks the line, one can always have, one
must
always have, a mass of divisions which marches up in vehement counter-attack at the moment when the first fury of the offensive has spent its force.

What was the Maginot Line for? It should have economised troops upon a large sector of the frontier, not only offering many sally-ports for local counter-strokes, but also enabling large forces to be held in reserve: and this is the only way these things can be done. But now there was no reserve. I admit this was one of the greatest surprises I have had in my life. Why had I not known more about it, even though I had been so busy at the Admiralty? Why had the British Government, and the War Office above all, not known more about it? It was no excuse that the French High Command would not impart their dispositions to us or to Lord Gort except in vague outline. We had a right to know. We ought to have insisted. Both armies were fighting in the line together. I went back again to the window and the curling wreaths of smoke from the bonfires of the State documents of the French Republic. Still the old gentlemen were bringing up their wheelbarrows, and industriously casting their contents into the flames.

There was a considerable conversation in changing groups around the principals of which M. Reynaud has published a detailed record. I am represented as urging that there should be no withdrawal of the Northern Armies, that on the contrary they should counter-attack. Certainly this was my mood. But here was no considered military opinion.
⁴
It must be remembered that this was the first realisation we had of the magnitude of the disaster or of the apparent French despair. We were not conducting the operations, and our army, which was only a tenth of the troops on the front, was serving under the French command. I and the British officers with me were staggered at the evident conviction of the French Commander-in-Chief and leading Ministers that all was lost, and in anything that I said I was reacting violently against this. There is, however, no doubt that they were quite right, and that the most rapid retreat to the south was imperative. This soon became obvious to all.

Presently General Gamelin was speaking again. He was discussing whether forces should now be gathered to strike at the flanks of the penetration, or “Bulge,” as we called such things later on. Eight or nine divisions were being withdrawn from quiet parts of the front, the Maginot Line; there were two or three armoured divisions which had not been engaged; eight or nine more divisions were being brought from Africa and would arrive in the battle zone during the next fortnight or three weeks. General Giraud had been placed in command of the French army north of the gap. The Germans would advance henceforward through a corridor between two fronts on which warfare in the fashion of 1917 and 1918 could be waged. Perhaps the Germans could not maintain the corridor, with its ever-increasing double flank guards to be built up, and at the same time nourish their armoured incursion. Something in this sense Gamelin seemed to say, and all this was quite sound. I was conscious, however, that it carried no conviction in this small but hitherto influential and responsible company. Presently I asked General Gamelin when and where he proposed to attack the flanks of the Bulge. His reply was: “Inferiority of numbers, inferiority of equipment, inferiority of method” –and then a hopeless shrug of the shoulders. There was no argument; there was no need of argument. And where were we British anyway, having regard to our tiny contribution – ten divisions after eight months of war, and not even one modern tank division in action?

This was the last I saw of General Gamelin. He was a patriotic, well-meaning man and skilled in his profession, and no doubt he has his tale to tell.
⁵

* * * * *

The burden of General Gamelin’s, and indeed of all the French High Command’s subsequent remarks,. was insistence on their inferiority in the air and earnest entreaties for more squadrons of the Royal Air Force, bomber as well as fighter, but chiefly the latter. This prayer for fighter support was destined to be repeated at every subsequent conference until France fell. In the course of his appeal, General Gamelin said that fighters were needed not only to give cover to the French Army, but also to stop the German tanks. At this I said: “No. It is the business of the artillery to stop the tanks. The business of the fighters is to cleanse the skies
(nettoyer le ciel)
over the battle.” It was vital that our metropolitan fighter air force should not be drawn out of Britain on any account. Our existence turned on this. Nevertheless, it was necessary to cut to the bone. In the morning, before I started, the Cabinet had given me authority to move four more squadrons of fighters to France. On our return to the Embassy and after talking it over with Dill, I decided to ask sanction for the despatch of six more. This would leave us with only the twenty-five fighter squadrons at home, and that was the final limit. It was a rending decision either way. I told General Ismay to telephone to London that the Cabinet should assemble at once to consider an urgent telegram which would be sent over in the course of the next hour or so. Ismay did this in Hindustani, having previously arranged for an Indian Army officer to be standing by in his office. This was my telegram: