To Lose a Battle (21 page)

Although there was not much to choose in the content of Communist and Nazi propaganda, the former was considerably
more effective. As well as striking a more responsive chord within the nation as a whole, its means of dissemination were vastly superior. Pamphlets seemed to be in circulation everywhere, chain-letters made the rounds at the front, soldiers coming home on leave were got at outside the Gare de l’Est, and there was even a special underground edition of
L’Humanité,
called
Les Soldats contre la Guerre,
expressly designed for the Army’s consumption. Quick to realize the immense value of this ready-made propaganda machine, the Germans did all they could both to aid it and to cash in on its efforts; Luftwaffe planes were employed to drop pamphlets reporting Molotov’s speech of 31 October 1939 in which he had identified himself with Hitler’s peace proposals. In the progressive boredom of the Phoney War, the Communist propaganda slowly began to poison and win back even adherents of the former parties of the Popular Front which had broken with the Communists. More and more the Army was divided, as the other ranks inclined towards the Communist line; while for the officer corps the principal enemy remained ‘the enemy within’ – Communism. It was all very well for Somerset Maugham to write a tract from the azure and gold of Cap Ferrat claiming (for British consumption) German ‘ignorance of the French temper’ when they thought that ‘they were fighting a house divided against itself’, but there was no mistaking just how effectively joint Nazi–Communist propaganda was widening the rifts left by the Popular Front era.

Equally depressing upon French war morale were the more tangible results of that close concomitant of Communist subversion – sabotage. During the Phoney War, numerous slowdowns of mysterious origin struck at France’s war production. Most of the worst cases of actual sabotage appear to have taken place at the Renault (tanks) and Farman (aircraft) works, those old hot-beds of trouble in Paris. A report on the damage wreaked upon Renault’s production of the B.l, France’s gravely needed new heavy tank, itemized: ‘nuts, bolts, various bits of old iron put in the gear-boxes and transmissions… filings and emery-dust in the crank-cases; saw-strokes producing incipient rupture of the oil and petrol ducts, intended to make them fall
to bits after several hours’ running…’ In April 1940, a number of fatal flying accidents led investigators to the Farman factory. Here it was found that on engines ready for delivery a brass wire acting as a lock on the nut which held the petrol feed nozzle in position was severed. After a number of hours’ flying, the nut, stripped of its lock, unscrewed itself with the engine vibration and allowed the petrol to drip on to the white-hot exhaust pipe, which eventually led to a lethal explosion. It was claimed that, under the very eyes of
Sûreté
investigators, a young Communist, Roger Rambaud, was caught in the act, having snipped the locking wires on seventeen out of twenty engines on the test bed. Elsewhere, at a factory producing the 25-mm. anti-aircraft gun – which the Army was to need at least as badly as the B.l tank – one act of sabotage wrote off some two hundred barrels, the normal equipment for four divisions. In the chaos that followed the fall of France, purported acts of sabotage went either unverified or unpunished. Undoubtedly many allegations were exaggerated; but, just as with the shadowy German ‘Fifth Coloumn’, the constant fear of Communist-sponsored espionage and sabotage was to prove almost as effective as the weapon itself.

How many Russian lives, one might well ask in retrospect, were to be forfeited from June 1941 onwards as a direct consequence of the success of the Kremlin’s whole dingy policy towards France in 1939–40?

Chapter 6

Gamelin

What kind of a nation will they make of us tomorrow, these exhausted creatures emptied of blood, emptied of thought, crushed by superhuman fatigue…?

MARC BOASSON
,
¹
At the Evening of a World

One of Napoleon’s marshals once brought him a plan of campaign in which the French Army was neatly and evenly lined up from one end of the frontier to the other. ‘Are you trying to stop smuggling?’ Napoleon asked heartlessly.

THEODORE DRAPER
,
The Six Weeks War

As the spring of 1940 approached, French eyes, military and civilian, turned instinctively towards the Château de Vincennes, wondering what new Allied strategy was being evolved behind its grim walls. Here Henry V of England had died, and as one of France’s favourite execution grounds it was against these walls that the Duc d’Enghien, Mata Hari and the last of the Communards had died. One of the most forbidding castles in all France, to Spears it ‘seemed to drip with blood’. Despite its sombre historical associations, Vincennes, on the east n outskirts of Paris, was now the home for the
Grand Quartier Général
(G.Q.G.) of General Maurice Gamelin, Chief of the General Staff of National Defence and, since the outbreak of war, Supreme Commander of all French land forces. Descended on his mother’s side from an old military family of Alsace-Lorraine, Gamelin had passed first out of St Cyr in 1891, and entered the Algerian
Tirailleurs.
In 1914 he had been on Joffre’s operations staff and had drawn up the orders on which rested the victory of the Marne; in 1916 (then aged forty-four) he became both one of the youngest and most competent French divisional commanders; by 1918 he had generally come to be regarded as the outstanding officer of his
‘promotion’. Already having reached the age-limit of sixty-eight at the beginning of 1940, Gamelin was a small sandy-haired man usually clad in tight tunic and high-laced boots. To André Maurois, ‘his short, stiff moustache, his small eyes and thin-lipped mouth gave him an indecipherable aspect, which no spontaneous gesture served to clarify. He had neither the sparkling vivacity of Foch nor the massive geniality of Joffre.’ Nor was Gamelin, he might have added, adorned with the coldly imposing presence of Pétain. Britain’s 6 ft. 4 in. C.I.G.S., General Ironside, rather patronizingly regarded his opposite number as a nice little man in well-cut breeches. (In less polite terms, Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Barratt, the former commander of the Advanced Air Striking Force, described Gamelin
²
as ‘a button-eyed, button-booted, pot-bellied little grocer’.) Modest and unassuming, Gamelin’s ideal inconspicuousness as Joffre’s Chief of Operations had led Jules Romains, in his famous novel
Verdun,
to base upon him his characterization of ‘Lieutenant-Colonel G—’, a model staff officer. General Spears recalls him from 1914, following Joffre ‘like a shadow’, and it was upon his former master that Gamelin seemed to model himself. His blue eyes certainly gave an impression of calm serenity; but he possessed none of the solid basis for Joffre’s legendary imperturbability – and in any case this attribute, carried to excess, had ultimately cost Joffre his job, and nearly France the war, in 1916. Like Joffre, Gamelin was tacìturn; but whereas the explanation often given for Joffre’s silence was that he simply had nothing in his mind, this was certainly not the case with the cerebral Gamelin. When Gamelin did speak, he had a habit of clasping his hands and moving them as if giving a benediction; indeed, there was something faintly monkish about him, which could never have been said of Joffre.

A senior French diplomat dining with Gamelin at the French Embassy on one of his visits to London was amazed to hear the Generalissimo discourse on nothing but philosophy and Italian painting. Joffre, he reckoned, would have been much discountenanced by the tenor of the conversation, while, listening to Gamelin, the diplomat ‘felt a cold draught at my back’. Unashamedly,
Gamelin was an intellectual who felt ill at ease in front of the troops (with whom his contacts were certainly kept to a minimum), much preferring the company of his fifteen adulatory staff officers where, says Pertinax, ‘culture was the thing, books on the history of art’. According to de Gaulle, after a visit to the gloomy vaults at Vincennes tenanted by Gamelin, he

dwelt in an atmosphere very akin to that of a convent, surrounded by only a few officers, working and meditating, completely insulated from current events… In his
Thébaïde
³
at Vincennes, General Gamelin gave me the impression of a savant, testing the chemical reactions of his strategy in a laboratory.

Adding to this isolation from the outside world there was the extraordinary fact that Vincennes possessed no radio-communications centre.
⁴

Gamelin considered experience to be everything, ignoring Frederick the Great’s sally that if this quality ‘were all a great general needs, the greatest would be Prince Eugene’s mules’. To Jules Romains he dwelt upon the grave disadvantage of the Wehrmacht, because ‘I can think of very few of their present generals who fought in responsible posts in 1914–18. Here we are almost all former 1918 divisional commanders…’ The tragedy of Gamelin was not that he misconstrued modern trends through stupidity; certainly, his luminous mind had
thought
deeply about tanks and their possible effect on warfare, but in a kind of abstract intellectual vacuum, and his private lucubrations had hardly helped provide the French Army with more and better tanks. When Gamelin gave orders, they sounded less like the words of a fighting man calling for vigorous action than topics for academic discussion. Worried about defects in training at the end of 1939, he had simply
indicated to his subordinate, General Georges, ‘a few ideas’ phrased in a style which the Quai d’Orsay would have admired, instead of issuing clear-cut instructions. It was hardly surprising that the Army took no notice of these ‘ideas’. According to Paul Baudouin, even Daladier, Gamelin’s political protector, once remarked to General Weygand: ‘When you speak, one has something; as for Gamelin, it is like sand running through one’s fingers’, while the final damning remark about Gamelin, made by Reynaud to Baudouin, was that ‘He might be all right as a prefect or a bishop, but he is not a leader of men.’

Indeed, as Georges Mandel described him, Gamelin was a kind of ‘military prefect’ who tailored his decisions closely to the whim of the politicians. One of his officers at G.Q.G. recalled how

when he had to take a decision in the domain which interested me, I often saw him hesitate, postpone his decision to another moment, so as to weigh up all the consequences, and finally to take that which would not expose him to a subsequent conflict with the civilian powers.

It was with the express purpose of keeping a close feel on the political pulse that, whereas Joffre had stubbornly maintained his G.Q.G. out at Chantilly so as to be beyond Parliamentary interference, Gamelin selected Vincennes. Thus it was that, too close to his political masters, too remote from the zone of operations, Gamelin gravely compromised his authority over the fighting forces.

French Chain of Command

The whole French chain of command was anomalous and hardly satisfactory. The Minister of National Defence (which role Daladier filled, as well as being Premier) wielded only nominal power over the Navy and Air Force, and Gamelin as the Chief of Staff possessed no more authority than his political boss. So the French Air Force, under the depressed General Vuillemin, tended to go its own way. Vuillemin had his H.Q. at Coulommiers, outside Paris. Under him came General Têtu, with the title of ‘Officer Commanding the Air Co-operation Forces’, who was supposed to co-ordinate air activities with the
Army’s North-East Front H.Q. This front was divided into ‘Zones of Air Operations’, corresponding to the various Army Groups. In theory the arrangement was adequate, but in practice it meant that the individual army commanders found it impossible to obtain a sufficient concentration of air power at the right moment. The fundamental trouble, of course, was the sheer numerical shortage of French aircraft. Of the R.A.F. in France, Air Marshal Barratt’s Advanced Air Striking Force came directly under Bomber Command in England, the Royal Air Force Component of the B.E.F. under the Army Commander, Lord Gort.
⁵

As Supreme Commander of all French land forces, Gamelin gave direct orders to the armies in the Alps, in Syria and in North Africa. But to the great bulk of the forces grouped together under the Armies of the North-East, Gamelin issued his orders through the intermediary of his deputy, General Georges, who initially bore only the somewhat indefinite title (which had originated under Napoleon, and in the First War had been held, under Joffre, by General de Castelnau) of
Major-Général des Armées.
On the next level came the commanders of the various Army Groups. No. 1 Army Group, which, stretching from the Channel to the beginning of the Maginot Line, would play the predominant role in the battle for France, was commanded by General Billotte. Among the five armies on Billotte’s front was the B.E.F.; Lord Gort, however, received his orders not from Billotte but from Gamelin, via Georges.
⁶

It soon became apparent to Gamelin that he could not effectively control overall war strategy
and
exercise specific command over the Zone of the Armies of the North-East all from one inflated headquarters. On 6 January he effected a reorganization which relieved himself of the direct command of the North-East and handed it to Georges, now entitled C.-in-C. North-East Front. It was a measure that would provide Gamelin with numerous let-outs when it came to writing his memoirs, but somehow it did not improve the efficacy of the French command. While he reserved the right to intervene in an emergency (a right he never exercised in battle until it was much too late), the reorganization meant in fact that Gamelin – in sharpest contrast to his old master, Joffre – removed himself from control of what was almost certain to become the key battle area of the war. Yet Georges, on the other hand, was never vested with full powers or responsibility. The reorganization also resulted in the immediate creation of yet a third headquarters, G.H.Q. Land Forces under General Doumenc, situated in a Rothschild mansion beside the Marne at Montry, midway between Vincennes and Georges’s North-East Front H.Q. at La Ferté-sous-Jouarre, which lay forty miles to the east of Paris. The new H.Q., whose function was to prepare and elaborate orders, was created by fission chiefly from elements of General Georges’s staff, and this breaking-up of offices that had been working well together for several months had particularly lamentable effects. The
Deuxième Bureau
(Intelligence) was split in two, with its chief, Colonel (later General) Gauché, under Gamelin’s wing at Vincennes and officers compelled to make the trip there from La Ferté every day to obtain his signature for documents. The
Troisième Bureau
(operations) was also divided, but even more inopportune was its separation from the
Quatrième
(transport and supply) which was removed completely to Montry, an artificial divorce that had to be rapidly rescinded when the Germans attacked on 10 May. General Doumenc too had to ‘cut himself in two’, directing affairs at Montry in the morning and at La Ferté in the afternoon. Visiting officers from the line, such as General Prioux, commanding the élite Cavalry Corps, were not impressed by
what they saw of the new organization; obeying Parkinson’s Law, the various staff adjuncts proliferated like amoebae, creating among themselves bureaux that specialized in agricultural affairs, P.T. and sports. Meanwhile, the inconveniences caused to communications by this splitting up of G.Q.G. encouraged the habit of short-circuiting Gamelin in his
Thébaïde
altogether.