To Lose a Battle (115 page)

34
. With the exception of the 9th Panzer, arriving from Holland, which would be deployed guarding the Somme flank.

35
. Who, for the four days following Billotte’s accident on the 21st, received no instructions from the French.

36
. The Henschel 123 was the old biplane dive-bomber that was predecessor to the Stuka. That it had to be thrown into the battle at all at Cambrai is further indication of the strain that the Luftwaffe, having suffered heavy casualties among its relatively few Stukas, was temporarily feeling on 21 and 22 May.

37
. The B.E.F. was placed on half rations that day.

38
. Many of those close to Gort felt it was already too late; Brooke confided to his diary on the evening of 23 May: ‘Nothing but a miracle can save the B.E.F. now, and the end cannot be very far off,’ while Ironside wrote in much the same tone ‘I cannot see that we have much hope of getting many of the B.E.F. out now.’

39
. Not, as Weygand and Reynaud claimed at the time, twenty-five miles.

40
. Whether this was owing to poor communications or the precipitancy with which the move had to be made, before ‘Frankforce’ was completely cut off by Rommel, is not quite clear, but it seems that the British Government was also taken by surprise; Ironside comments:

‘Why Gort has done this I don’t know. He has never told us that he was going to do it or even when he had done it.’

41
. Reynaud’s telegram provoked an angry, baffled query from Churchill to Ironside: ‘I must know at earliest why Gort gave up Arras, and what actually he is doing with the rest of his army. Is he still persevering in Weygand’s plan, or has he become largely stationary?… Clearly, he must not allow himself to be encircled without fighting a battle.’

42
. Sent by Churchill to be his personal representative to Paul Reynaud, Spears arrived in Paris on the 25th.

1
. Which now contained virtually all the German armour.

2
. They did not know that by now there was only one battleworthy ‘Matilda’ left in the north.

3
. It is now apparent that German Intelligence, as well as grossly over-estimating the French forces south of the Somme, had reckoned that there was only one quarter of the Allied forces inside the Dunkirk pocket than in fact proved to be the case. But Churchill, too, had been under a similar misapprehension, reckoning at one point that he would be lucky to rescue more than 45,000 men.

4
. Increased to this total as a result of various transfers and additions made during the course of the battle.

5
. The previous day Rommel was awarded the Ritterkreuz by Hitler, principally in recognition of his exploits at Avesnes. He noted that the 7th Panzer’s total losses in the campaign to date amounted to 27 officers killed and 33 wounded, and 1,500 men dead and wounded. ‘That’s about 12 per cent casualties. Very little compared with what’s been achieved,’ commented Rommel. By the end of the month, the division had only 86 tanks fit for operations, of which no more than five were Mark IVs; on the other hand, many of the tanks on the unfit list would be ready for action again in a few days.

6
. In recognition of its heroic defence, the Germans allowed the Lille garrison to march out with full battle-honours on 1 June. But this tragic episode provided one more source of mounting French bitterness towards the British. Blanchard complained to Weygand that, despite his protests, Gort had taken the B.E.F. withdrawal to Dunkirk entirely into his own hands; thus, it was said, the British had left the French First Army in the lurch at Lille.

7
. At first, Churchill’s reaction was far more restrained. He told the House of Commons that he had no intention of passing judgement on the King; and Duff Cooper, the British Minister of Information, declared on the B.B.C. that the Belgians had ‘fought bravely… suffered heavily’, and that it was no time for recriminations. Later, however, under strong French pressure, Churchill swung round to condemning King Leopold in much the same terms as Reynaud. The ancient Lloyd George, with his own bitter memories of the First World War alliance, went even further: ‘You can’, he wrote in a British Sunday, ‘rummage in vain through the black annals of the most reprobate Kings of the earth to find a blacker and more squalid sample of perfidy and poltroonery than that perpetuated by the King of the Belgians.…’ Modern scholarship, however, shows all these views to have been excessively harsh. The posthumous private papers of Lt.-Col. George Davy, head of the British Military Mission at Belgian H.Q., for instance, mention three separate occasions when the Belgians held on
after
the B.E.F. had withdrawn. Referring to these, Brian Bond for one (
op. cit.
, pp. 144, 154) assesses that, by and large, King Leopold’s ‘policy during the campaign was both consistent and honourable’. What was surprising, adds Bond, was ‘the resilience and longevity of accusations which were disputed at the time and subsequently shown to be baseless… the time is long past when the Belgians can be conveniently treated as a scapegoat.’ Amen.

8
. Author’s italics.

9
. At the Commission of Inquiry in 1949, Baudouin admitted that he ‘was certain… on 24 May that the struggle was lost’, and that he considered Weygand was of the same opinion.

10
. The principal source here is Baudouin, who in his role as Secretary was the only one to take notes; caution must therefore be exercised in accepting exactly what transpired.

11
. Referring to Weygand’s own stewardship during the 1930s as French C.-in-C., Reynaud remarks that he ‘took great care not to recognize the responsibility he bore for the “great mistake” which he denounced’.

12
. Of the President of the Republic’s role in these days, Mandel made this caustic comment to Spears: ‘He raises his hands to heaven and weeps.
Il pleure.’

13
. Referring to the Franco-British Declaration signed by Reynaud in London on 28 March (see above p. 227).

14
. Vuillemin, who seems never to have recovered from the shock the Luftwaffe prepared for him on his visit to Germany in 1938, seldom contributed at War Cabinet sessions; instead, says Spears pungently, he ‘just looked on with the bewildered washed-out eyes of an ancient celluloid doll floating on the opaque waters of the bath it seemed bewildered to find itself in.’
Vuillemin, nul comme d’habitude’,
was Baudouin’s verdict.

15
. On 21 May it had in fact been agreed that the R.A.F. should henceforth support the armies in the norm, with d’Astier’s Z.O.A.N. backing the Somme and Aisne fronts. During the last week of May virtually the whole of the R.A.F. Bomber Command’s strength of some 500 bombers was continuously employed. The official R.A.F. history states that, from 22 May onwards, ‘something like two hundred fighter sorties a day were flown from England over northern France’. Some of Dowding’s most treasured possessions, the Spitfire squadrons earmarked for the defence of Britain, were even drawn into the battle by the end of May. In the course of the whole campaign, only ten out of Britain’s total of fifty-three fighter squadrons were not engaged in France; of these ten, two were committed in Norway, three were night-fighters and two were non-operational. Though General Vuillemin may not have been aware of it, the Germans certainly noticed R.A.F. intervention in the battle in the north from 22 May onwards. Jacobsen and Rohwer write:

‘… for the first time VII Air Corps was compelled to admit that its Stukas had suffered heavy losses from the unexpected appearance of numerous British fighter planes. Many R.A.F. planes until now held back for the defence of the United Kingdom had obviously been flown from their bases in south-east England, and taken part in the air war on the Continent. With this, the situation in the air suddenly grew critical.’

Meanwhile, as far as the French air effort was concerned, as late as 30 May the Minister of Air, M. Laurent-Eynac, revealed that, in all but fighters, the French Air Force was actually
stronger
in numbers dian on 10 May; 660 aircraft had been lost, but 571 new machines had been delivered. According to French sources, by the Armistice of 22 June the French Air Force was
still
stronger and better equipped than it had been on 10 May. Spears put overall French losses in Air Force personnel at only 350; this would compare, if correct, widi 1,192 R.A.F. personnel, many of them hard to replace pilots.

16
. As Secretary to the War Cabinet, Baudouin’s official status was that of Under-Secretary.

17
. The German High Command itself erroneously estimated that the encircled Allied forces in the north totalled no more than 100.000 all told.

18
. Some bomber
Gruppen
could now only put fourteen to sixteen aircraft in the air, instead of thirty.

19
. General Blanchard followed on 1 June.

20
. It was also at that meeting that Churchill delivered one of his greatest orations, with the intent of boosting the morale of the French Government. ‘The peoples of France and Britain,’ he declaimed, ‘were not born to slavery, nor can they endure it. It is impossible that a temporary Nazi victory should bring to a final conclusion the glorious histories of France and Britain.’ Britain, he insisted, would ‘carry on with the war if every building in France and Great Britain is destroyed. The British Government is prepared to wage war from the New World if through some disaster England herself is laid waste. The British people will fight on until the New World re-conquers the Old. Better far that the last of the English should fall fighting and
finis
be written to our history than to linger on as vassals and slaves.’

21
. Spears,
op.cit.
, pp.288–9.

22
. Bond,
op.cit.
, p. 181.

23
. Spears,
op.cit.
, p. 361.

24
. Lewin,
Ultra Goes to War,
p. 11.

25
. Lewin,
op.cit.
, p. 70.

26
. Lewin,
op.cit.
, p. 71.

27
. Hinsley,
British Intelligence in the Second World War,
vol.i, p. 144.

1
. Together with Hitler, Brauchitsch and the O.K.H. had also moved westwards on to Belgian territory, west of Givet on the Meuse.

2
. Containing the 9th, 10th, 3rd and 4th Panzers.

3
. The XXXIX and XLI Panzer Corps, containing Guderian’s old 1st and 2nd Panzers and Reinhardt’s 6th and 8th.

4
. According to Weygand’s figures, French losses up to the fall of Dunkirk amounted to the equivalent of
24 infantry divisions (including 6 out of 7 motorized);
3 out of 3 D.L.M.s;
2 out of 5 Light Cavalry Divisions (D.L.Cs);
1 armoured division.

5
. By the end of May, Rommel in fact had only 86 tanks (of which just 5 were Mark IVs) fit for operations, out of his complement of 218. But many of the remainder were back on the road within the next few days.

6
. Four years and a few weeks later, Speidel, now a Lieutenant-General, was defending Paris against the Americans and Free French as Chief of Staff, Army Group ‘B’. After ending the war in a Gestapo prison camp, he returned to Paris in 1951 to negotiate the rearmament of Federal Germany. In 1957 he was in Paris again, as the first German Commander of Allied Land Forces in Europe.

7
. Four armies totalling 400,000 men.

8
. A squadron of R.A.F. Wellingtons, sent to Marseilles to bomb northern Italy, found, however, that it also had to contend with the French; lorries were driven on to the airfield to prevent the bombers taking off, in anxiety at possible Italian reprisals against French targets.

9
. Spears records that, in this moment of extreme gravity, ‘fancy came to my rescue… I saw Big Ben with a French General’s cap on, marking time at the double, chiming the last quarter of an hour incessantly, at ever accelerating speed, while the dial of the clock became Weygand’s face.’

10
. Whether or not a French continuation of the war in North Africa would have been swiftly followed up by a German invasion, and therefore disastrous to the Allies in the long run, lies beyond the scope of the present book.

11
. This repetition of history is interesting. One of the considerations urging General Trochu and the French leaders to hasten capitulation to the Prussians in January 1871 had been the threat of left-wing revolt in Paris – which, indeed, came to pass.

12
. This was, in fact, his eleventh-hour proposal for an indissoluble Franco-British Union.

13
. It was hardly surprising that de Margerie was in the habit of characterizing her, uncharitably, as ‘ugly,
mal soignée
, dirty, nasty and half-demented, and a sore trial to me’.