To Lose a Battle (111 page)

11
. For sheer arrogant folly, the Barthou declaration of 17 April 1934 is hard to beat; A. J. P. Taylor remarks: ‘The French had fired the starting pistol for the arms race. Characteristically they then failed to run it.’ Yet it has its parallel in more recent times, when in 1966 de Gaulle informed the North Atlantic Alliance that henceforth he felt strong enough to dispense with its benefits. There are moments when one feels that – like the Bourbons, only worse – France has learned nothing and forgotten everything.

12
. In retrospect, Gamelin’s torpor becomes all the more criminal when it appears that, as long as two months in advance of the reoccupation of the Rhineland, he had predicted to a French general (Armengaud) the likelihood of Hitler’s move. Flandin, too, is purported to have raised the possibility in a Cabinet meeting of January 1935. Why then did the French Army allow itself to be taken by surprise?

1
. Upon mobilization in August 1939, this number was doubled.

2
. Within a year of the departure of the Allied Control Commission in 1927, Krupp was producing the first tanks, and under the strange, secret alliance with the Soviet Union these were shipped in pieces to Kazan on the Volga, to be put through their paces there.

3
. Later Field-Marshal, and Hitler’s Army C.-in-C. in 1940.

4
. It was significant that the infant Panzer Corps chose to base its procedure on the British Army manual on the use of armour rather than on the French, because of the rigidity of the French links between tanks and infantry.

5
. Terence Prittie,
Germans Against Hitler.

6
. In 1945 Maurras was sentenced to life imprisonment as a collaborator.

1
. ‘Towards a Professional Army’.

2
. At the time, the equally conservative German Army High Command certainly did not agree with this appreciation; but the important thing, from Hitler’s point of view, was that Gamelin did.

3
. An apocryphal story current in Germany told of a worker who thought that he was employed in a pram factory and was asked by his wife to steal pieces from the plant to make her a pram. When the stolen pieces were put together under cover of darkness, he discovered he had constructed not a pram but a Messerschmitt fighter.

4
. Abbreviated from the German
Sturzkampfflugzeug
, ‘dive-attack plane’.

5
. Two other front-line planes engaged in France which should be mentioned in passing were the Dornier 17 medium bomber, nicknamed the ‘Flying Pencil’ – faster than the He-111 but carrying only half its bomb load – and the twin-engined Messerschmitt 110 ‘destroyer’ fighter, which proved highly unsuccessful.

6
. Udet, unable to face the chaos into which the Luftwaffe had fallen, committed suicide in November 1941.

7
. No doubt aided by the exaggeration of Udet, both French and British experts feared the Luftwaffe for the wrong reasons in 1938. While they remained blind to the potential tactical significance of its dive-bombers and fighters, they were hypnotized by the carnage that Goering’s He-111s seemed poised to wreak upon the civil population. In Britain in 1938, the Imperial Defence Committee estimated that the Luftwaffe could drop 3,500 tons of bombs on London within the first twenty-four hours of an attack, while the Ministry of Health was anticipating 600,000 killed and 1,200,000 wounded in the first six months. (In fact, during the whole of the London Blitz only 18,000 tons of bombs were dropped, causing a total of 90,000 deaths over a period of seven months.) The R.A.F., reckoning its fighter force to be below the minimum required for the defence of Britain in 1938, misled the Government (as indeed the exponents of strategic air power have been misleading governments ever since) on the capacity of carpet bombing to win wars, which in turn greatly influenced Chamberlain’s determination not to face war over Czechoslovakia. No doubt, in the event of war in 1938, London (and probably Paris) would have been bombed, for which they were ill prepared, but the damage inflicted could not have been greater than, or indeed as great as, that which Britain suffered during the Blitz, while in 1938 Hitler still had neither Panzers nor Stukas in sufficient quantity (nor were the crews of these yet adequately trained) to risk a decisive campaign against the French Army. On military grounds alone, the passage of time makes Munich increasingly indefensible. As Churchill remarks: ‘The year’s breathing space said to be “gained” by Munich left Britain and France in a much worse position compared to Hitler’s Germany than they had been at the Munich crisis.’

8
. By 1939, German production of first line aircraft was already nudging the 3,000-a-year mark, while France was producing at a rate of perhaps 600 a year.

9
. In 1949, a French military court sentenced him to twenty years’ hard labour.

10
. He later became the Vichy Ambassador to Paris.

1
. Though subsequently he took refuge behind the fact that this accord had never been officially ratified by the two governments.

2
. In fact, the project of a Saar offensive had already existed for a full year, ever since the Czech crisis of 1938.

3
. Literally, ‘war-time godmothers’.

4
. At comparative rates of pay, a British private received 17 francs a day – a source of friction made much use of by Goebbels.

5
. Or what in France is known of course as
‘filer à l’anglaise’
!

1
. Killed in Flanders in 1918. The passage relates to the fighting at Verdun in the summer of 1916.

2
. To the author.

3
. Literally an ‘ivory tower’.

4
. In a letter to the Press after the war (
L’Aurore,
8 November 1949) defending this deficiency, Gamelin challenged: ‘What would we, at this level, have done with a transmitter?’ He added that, in any case, there had been one at the General Staff Headquarters some twenty-two miles away: ‘But we avoided using it so as not to give our position away.’

5
. In January 1940, command of the R.A.F. component was transferred to Barratt, although it remained under Gort’s operational control

6
. In fact it was never quite clear whether the ultimate responsibility for the B.E.F. rested with Gamelin or Georges, and in any case Gort’s instructions permitted him to appeal to the British Government before executing any order if it ‘appears to you to imperil the British Field Force’ – which was to prove an important escape clause. From the start, relations between Gort and the French High Command were never promising. According to a British Liaison Officer, Brigadier L.A. Hawes, at their first meeting in 1939, ‘There were no interpreters present and General Gamelin spoke so quickly that I am sure half of what he said was not understood by the British.… Gamelin would talk at great length very rapidly for some minutes about various proposals and General Gort would reply at once:
“D’accord”.’
(from
The Army Quarterly,
July 1971, pp. 445–56).

7
. To some extent, the bad relations between Georges and Gamelin were an extension of the rivalry between their respective political champions, Reynaud and Daladier.

8
. As always, it was of course also very much Britain’s policy not to allow the Belgian coast to fall into enemy hands.

9
. Author’s italics.

10
. Since, as it later turned out, the French Army reacted in precisely the way Hitler wanted it to, for some years even after 1945 suspicions lingered that the Mechelen Incident was a cunning Nazi ‘plant’. It definitely was not.

11
. Explaining his reasons for placing the French Seventh Army on the left of the B.E.F., Gamelin writes in his memoirs that they were ‘not only strategic, but psychological and moral’. Similar doubts at the back of French minds about having the British too close to the Channel and home had also existed in 1914–18, when the French had always managed to keep Haig’s army ‘sandwiched’ between French forces.

12
. Georges, too, seems to have suffered from his share of the unreality afflicting the French High Command, as witness a revealing marginal comment he wrote, in August 1940, to a report on the defeat: ‘In the spring of 1940, did we really have the impression of being poorly prepared?’

13
. Criticizing this silence retrospectively, Churchill remarks that the British War Cabinet ‘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?… 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.’

14
. In his memoirs, Gamelin tries to justify this concentration of forces on the Maginot Line by claiming that ‘Its existence alone guaranteed us, in ths spring of 1940, that, at the moment when the Germans attacked via Luxembourg, Belgium and Holland, they could not at the same time make a decisive effort between Longuyon and Switzerland.’ But this was not an intention that ever for a moment entered Hitler’s mind.

15
. Gamelin, who claims that he had reservations about the Scandinavian venture but ‘did not feel I had the right to stand up, in this domain, against a Government decision’, with extraordinary light-heartedness dismisses the possibility of war with Russia by writing in his memoirs: ‘of course, we could not send forces to fight side by side with the Finns without colliding with the Russians. If we wished to do anything in this direction, one had to accept this consequence…’

16
. His army in Syria was later rounded up by the British.

1
. The Army High Command (O.K.H.) was represented that day by its C.-in-C, Colonel-General von Brauchitsch, and his Chief of Staff, Halder; the Luftwaffe (O.K.L.) by Goering and Jeschonnek; the Navy (O.K.M.) by Admirals Raeder and Schniewind; the Wehrmacht (O.K.W.) by its Chief of Staff, Keitel, and Colonel Warlimont, deputizing for Jodl, the O.K.W. Chief of Operations.

2
. Half their fighting vehicles were temporarily in repair shops.

3
. It was about this time that German cryptologists had broken the French codes, and radio traffic revealed to them that Sedan formed the weak hinge of two French armies composed largely of second-rate reservist units, Corap’s Ninth and Huntziger’s Second. Such a ‘hinge’ is a standing enticement to an attacker, the assumption being that each army always reckons its neighbour is looking after its flank. This is, approximately, what happened to the Egyptians, after Sharon’s Canal crossing in 1973.

4
. Disgraced on trumped-up charges of homosexuality.

5
. A town twenty miles south of Berlin, where, in reinforced concrete buildings, complete with-bomb-proof and gas-proof cellars, the O.K.H. was housed.

6
. Subsequently disgraced on charges of marrying a tart.

7
. Traditionally in Germany, the Chiefs of Staff at various levels occupy positions of relatively greater responsibility vis-à-vis their commanders (especially where planning is concerned) than their British or American counterparts. At the same time, the German Army was then obviously the one body physically capable of deposing Hitler.

8
. One is entitled to wonder whether British or American generals placed in similar conditions would have done better.

9
. Later Military Governor of France, and executed for his role in the 1944 conspiracy.

10
. Typical of Manstein’s attitude to Hitler was his response in 1942, as a Field-Marshal commanding an army in southern Russia, to an overture from the ‘resistance’; he would join in a coup against Hitler, he said – provided he were first allowed to capture Sebastopol.

11
. After the war, Manstein was tried on various war-crimes charges. He was acquitted on the most serious, but sentenced to eighteen years’ imprisonment (reduced to twelve), partly because he rigidly refused to enter any plea of ‘mitigating circumstances’.

12
. This was a fear which in May 1940 was to haunt the German planners incessantly until success was finally achieved.

13
. Under the O.K.H. directive of 29 October, Army Group ‘A’ was allocated only 22 infantry divisions, and ‘B’ 43 divisions, including 9 Panzer and 4 motorized infantry divisions. By 10 May the respective proportions had shifted to: ‘A’, 45⅓ divisions (including 7 Panzer); ‘B’, 29⅓ (including 3 Panzer).

14
. Guderian in fact later went so far as to claim that he had provided the original inspiration for the Manstein Plan.