To Lose a Battle (16 page)

In August 1938, on the eve of the first Czech crisis, General Vuillemin, the Chief of the French Air Staff, accompanied by Brigadier-General François d’Astier de la Vigerie, who in 1939 would be given command of the crucial Northern Zone of Air Operations, paid an official visit to Germany. At Heinkel’s
Oranienburg works, Heinkel, Udet and Milch did everything to impress the Frenchmen, deploying the habitual Nazi technique of bluff combined with reality. After taking him up in an experimental He-100 fighter, Udet told Vuillemin that the model was already in full production, although in fact only three test prototypes existed. Vuillemin was then taken around workshops crammed with He-111 bombers under mass-production, and was heard to murmur as he left: ‘I am shattered!’ On his way back to Berlin with François-Poncet, the French Ambassador, he confessed despondently that ‘should war break out as you expect late in September, there won’t be a single French plane left in a fortnight’. On his return to Paris, Vuillemin’s account of the stupefying power of the Luftwaffe made a profound impression, particularly upon Georges Bonnet, France’s current Foreign Minister.
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The French Air Force

Towards the end of 1935, André Maurois recalls meeting Churchill, who urged him ‘to write one article a day… saying the same thing, to warn France of the decline of her Air Force’. By that time France’s Air Force had decayed for much the same reasons as her Army; only the gap between it and the Luftwaffe over the next five years grew even greater and more irremediable. As with the tanks she inherited from the Great War, France entered the 1930s with a mass of obsolete planes accumulated in the 1920s. Meanwhile aircraft design was moving ahead at an infinitely faster rate even than that of tanks. In 1934, France was fortunate to have a far-sighted and energetic Air Minister, in the shape of General Denain. Realizing the importance of fighters, Denain had ordered a large quantity of Dewoitine fighters, the best of their period, but by 1939 these were already outclassed. After Denain, French aircraft production was stricken with that malaise of the Third Republic, multiplicity of governments, which impeded the formulation of any consistent policy. The aircraft constructors wielded considerable power in the political lobbies. Successive Air Ministers found it hard to refuse their diverse propositions; thus a contract for a prototype would be followed by an order for an uneconomically small number of planes. Then, as often as not, the next Minister would cancel the order. Typically, the selection of each prototype was surrounded with an immense amount of abstract argument, so that it could well be said that the best was the constant enemy of the good so far as French air production was concerned.

As has already been noted, the French aircraft industry in particular suffered from the industrial disturbances which followed the advent of the Popular Front in 1936. The new Minister, Pierre Cot, showed himself at once more concerned with vague dreams of international disarmament and with solving the industry’s problems at home by nationalization than with laying down any solid programme of rearmament. No doubt there were strong arguments for nationalizing the French aircraft industry, but the fundamental disarray into which Cot
threw it was hardly to be made good before the coming of war, while the Air Force itself suffered from his injection of politics into such matters as promotion. Under Cot, the 1936 programme (which only reached the drawing-board stage the following year) resulted in two bombers, a Bréguet and a Potez. 125 of the Potez 633s were ordered in May 1938, but the order was cancelled a short time later. Meanwhile the French Press continued to delude itself and the electorate by boasting, as did
L’Intransigeant:
‘Our Air Force is the strongest in Europe!’ In March 1938 the French Government attempted to implement a crash programme called ‘Plan V’, by which priority was given to fighter and reconnaissance aircraft, but out of 864 aircraft ordered, only one-sixth consisted of attack- and dive-bombing aircraft, and long indecision delayed the production of a three-seater attack-bomber well into 1939. In January 1938, a vigorous new Air Minister, Guy La Chambre, took over, but by then the accumulated chaos of the past was too great for anyone to set right within the eighteen months available. On his appointment, La Chambre reputedly found nothing but a disheartened industry of small workshops of which only one factory alone was equipped for mass-production. As war approached and the production gap with the Luftwaffe appeared hopelessly wide,
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he tried to fill it by means of large-scale purchases from the United States; but even this measure of desperation met with intense opposition from the French aircraft manufacturers’ lobby.

Deprived of any ruthless overriding agency such as Goering’s Air Ministry, the French Air Force suffered acutely from being treated as a poor relation by the Army. As Chief of the Defence Staff, General Gamelin was nominally responsible for the well-being of the Air Force, but as a thoroughly conservative Army man, new ideas of air power did not commend themselves to him. His view was that the Air Force should look after itself, and General Vuillemin, Chief of the Air Staff, an elderly bomber pilot not over-endowed with dynamism, obliged
by not pestering him. The role of the Air Force was also clearly laid down in the Army’s Instruction on the ‘Tactical Employment of Major Units’: preparation for the attack was to remain the work of the artillery, and only troop concentrations and columns on the march or in retreat at the rear of the battlefield were considered suitable targets for the Air Force. ‘It is convenient,’ said the Instruction, ‘to leave to the Air Force commanders the initiative for launching their attack.’ Here was no question of any intimate liaison between the Army and the Air Force such as Guderian and the Luftwaffe pioneers were developing in Germany.

One of the most serious faults of French pre-war air policy was its complete inability to appreciate the importance of dive-bombers. As early as the Riff War in the 1920s in Morocco, French airmen had recognized the potentialities of this weapon, and others had fully comprehended the importance of the German dive-bombers in Spain later; but they were in a minority. In his memoirs General Gamelin claims that the Army was in favour of dive-bombers, but that the Air Force opposed them on technical grounds; yet there is no evidence to show that Gamelin ever actively pushed the Army’s views in this instance. Worried by reports from Spain, after much contemplation Vuillemin decided in 1938 to develop the Loire-Nieuport as a dive-bomber. But it was finally considered to be too slow, and only the Navy was equipped with it. Instead, the Air Force went ahead, belatedly, with experiments in
vol rasant
(ground-level) attack-planes. As a result of this indecision, when 1940 came France possessed a total of only fifty dive-bombers. The belief was that sufficient and fast enough fighters could be made available to destroy the slow dive-bombers and deal with the enemy’s fighter cover as well. But in 1940 France’s most numerous fighter, the Morane 406, was at least 50 m.p.h. slower than the Me-109, and barely able to catch up with the swifter German level bombers; yet because of the backwardness of the French production lines, each Morane required 18,000 man-hours of labour, compared to only 5,000 for the Messerschmitt. Consequently, it was also gravely lacking in numbers. Armed with one cannon and two
machine-guns, the Morane carried only enough ammunition for the briefest of encounters. In equipment, the French planes were also inferior in a number of ways. During 1938 some French units were unable to use their guns during any exercise that year owing to constructional defects in their aircraft. By 1939, most French bombers were still not equipped with radio communication, so that once they left the ground they were out of touch. Ground equipment for loading them with bombs was slow and cumbersome, so that much time was wasted in getting them off the ground. In one of its most serious deficiencies by comparison with the Luftwaffe, the French Air Force possessed no proper air-transport facilities, so that in action it was highly immobile.

One further important function in which the French air defences lagged behind those of Germany was the ground anti-aircraft arm. In Germany this was fully integrated into the Luftwaffe, and its mobility and firepower, particularly of the light flak units which accompanied the Panzers in the forefront of battle, were to have a most important influence in the Meuse crossing of 1940. In France, anti-aircraft defences came under the individual armies, with a separate detachment hived off under the
Défense Aérienne du Territoire
(D.A.T.). In 1939, when the Luftwaffe possessed seventy-two anti-aircraft regiments, France had only five, and was notably short in the small-calibre 25-mm. and 40-mm. guns essential for protecting ground troops from attacking aircraft – especially Stukas.

Enter the ‘Fifth Column’

As the Popular Front continued its reign, so the political chasm in France widened, Blum like so many other thoroughly honourable European leaders of that time remaining blind to the real threat of Hitler until too late. For all its declared
raison d’être
of presenting an ‘anti-Fascist’ front, it was constantly against the French ‘Fascists’ at home rather than those abroad that the Front concentrated its zeal. When it should have been feverishly stepping up its arms industry, it was preoccupied with social reform, its attitude encouraging and prolonging an
indolent and illusory sense of ease among the French workers. On the other hand, the acts of the Popular Front generated in its opponents passions hard for an Anglo-Saxon to comprehend at that time. On the extreme Right, a terrorist group called the
Cagoulards
made its appearance with a series of bomb outrages. As General Spears remarked of his bourgeois friends in Paris, ‘these people hated the
Front Populaire
and all it stood for’, and, though he himself could never be accused of left-wing sympathies, he was shocked by their inability ‘to take into account that the very violence of the socialist reaction was due to the selfish, the merciless attitude’ of the
patrons.
On this subject Spears found that there simply ‘could be no argument’. ‘The revolution is about to break out!’ had been the rallying cry of the French conservatives ever since 1934, and the experience of the stay-in strikes had done much to aggravate their terror. ‘It would be difficult to exaggerate’, stressed the French historian, Marc Bloch, ‘the sense of shock felt by the comfortable classes, even by men who had a reputation for liberal-mindedness, at the coming of the Popular Front in 1936’, while Pertinax describes a divided nation going through ‘an emotional crisis comparable with the Dreyfus Affair, but more fundamental’. Dangerously, the French conservatives, in their alarm, persisted in regarding the enemy within as infinitely more menacing than the monster without. ‘Rather Hitler than Blum’ – became their motto, and in it Hitler himself saw possibilities that he wasted not a minute in exploiting. To the attentive Rauschning he predicted that France ‘in spite of her magnificent Army could, by the provocation of internal unrest and disunity in public opinion, easily be brought to the point where she would only be able to use her Army too late, or not at all’.

One comes to that most elusive of factors in the fall of France – the bogy figure of Germany’s pre-war ‘Fifth Column’. (The origin of the expression came from the Spanish Civil War, when General Mola boasted that he had four columns outside Madrid, and a fifth inside.) Hitler, says Rauschning, had made a thorough study of Machiavelli’s
Il Principe
; from which he concluded that ‘a thorough knowledge of the weaknesses and vices of each one of my opponents is the first condition of
success in any policy’. To act upon the weaknesses and vices of the Third Republic, Hitler sent to Paris a personal envoy endowed in abundance with the talents praised by Machiavelli – Otto Abetz, who, after France’s defeat, was to become Nazi Ambassador in Paris.
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Abetz, a friend of Ribbentrop who had been won over to the Nazis in 1933, had a French wife and professed deep love and admiration for all things French. ‘I had a liking for the man,’ admitted Jules Romains, the novelist.

First, he was cheerful… He might have come from French Flanders or Alsace… He represented himself as a real Western German who, by all his natural affinities and cultural tradition, felt a bond with the Western nations. The Belgians, the northern French, the Swiss, they were his brothers. On the other hand, he felt nothing but aversion and mistrust towards the Prussians…

One recognizes the type.

Tall and square-shouldered, with reddish-blond hair, a pale face and blue eyes, Abetz swiftly gained acceptance by smart Parisian café society at various echelons. He was a frequent visitor to the chic political salon of Comtesse de Portes, Paul Reynaud’s influential mistress. Skilfully he played upon the snobbishness and anti-semitism of the ruling classes, upon the hatred of Socialism of the
nouveau riche
bourgeoisie, upon the deep-seated pacifism of the French as a whole. Principal among the Frenchmen in the circle which Abetz collected around him were Fernand de Brinon,
¹⁰
a journalist closely associated with Laval and Georges Bonnet, and who was the prime mover of the
Comité France-Allemagne
, which under cover of intellectual rapprochement between the two countries became an instrument of Nazi propaganda; Jean Luchaire, another journalist, who had once been Frau Abetz’s boss; and Paul Ferdonnet, director of the Agence Prima, who was to establish himself during the war as France’s Lord Haw-Haw, broadcasting propaganda from Stuttgart. Through this circle, Abetz
organized flattering trips to Germany for sympathetic French intellectuals, who were also promised enticing contracts and immense German editions for their books. The
Comité France-Allemagne
sponsored superbly stage-managed reciprocal visits of ex-Servicemen, culminating in moving pledges that there should never again be war between France and Germany. Abetz encouraged, on occasions financed, and generally exploited for his own use such newspapers as Maurras’s
L’Action Française
and weeklies like
Gringoire, Candide
and
Je Suis Partout
which combined a running attack on Republican statesmen and institutions with a violent Anglophobia generally guaranteed to appeal to a wide readership in France. Typical of what Abetz inspired, and France’s Right wing eagerly consumed, was the line that, in case of war, a French victory over Germany would only lead to the ruin of France and the civilized world, since Germany represented the chief rampart against the bolshevization of Europe.