To Lose a Battle (22 page)

General Georges

Not least among Gamelin’s motives in establishing this third, buffer-state, H.Q. at Montry was the animosity that existed between himself and Georges, and it seemed to be his deliberate policy to weaken his subordinate’s position by removing the more valuable members of his staff. As Gamelin’s star waned in Government circles and Georges emerged as his logical successor, relations between the two worsened to the point where they could hardly exchange civilities. ‘They are so busy making war on each other,’ a British general quipped in the hearing of Maurois one day, ‘that they have no time to make war on the Germans.’ General Georges himself came of very modest origins – he was said to be the son of a gendarme – and he owed a fine career entirely to professional merit, in no way to intrigue or political pull. In the Great War he had served on the staff in Salonika and had then been picked up by Foch, and it was in his retinue that he had ridden behind the Marshal, as a colonel, in the Victory Parade in 1919. After the war he had commanded a regiment in the Rhineland, later becoming Pétain’s Chief of Staff in Morocco. On 9 October 1934, fate struck a cruel blow at Georges: while accompanying King Alexander of Yugoslavia at Marseilles he was very badly wounded in the chest by the assassin who killed the King and Barthou, the French Foreign Minister. By 1940 he was still visibly suffering from the effect of his wounds; Spears noted that ‘he now invariably wore a woollen glove on one hand, and had been told he must not fly’. Instead, he drove about at high speed in a ‘beautiful and enormous Cadillac car, of which he was justly proud’. Because of Georges’s supposed doubtful associations with the more extremist right-wing factions, Daladier viewed him with mistrust and (so Gamelin claimed) for this reason
would never tolerate him as C.-in-C. of the Army.
⁷
In 1939 Georges’s pessimism about the war was widely known in the French Army; but of the British officers acquainted with him, many considered Georges to be France’s finest soldier. According to Spears, who should have known, he ‘had more influence on Churchill than any other Frenchman’. There were also many senior officers in the French Army who felt that Georges – not Gamelin – should have succeeded Weygand as C.-in-C. in 1935.

Before the war, La Ferté, with its bourgeois houses topped by pretentious turrets that lent them an air of bogus castles, had been a popular summer’ retreat for rich Parisians. Here General Georges had established H.Q. North-East Front at Les Bondons, described by a staff officer as ‘a spacious cottage in an Anglo-Norman style, sited in the middle of a park on a wooded hill which dominated the Marne’, but ‘as little as possible suited to be a command post in time of crisis’. In a leisurely manner, Georges’s staff officers dined at the Hôtel de l’Épée, boasting a renowned chef, M. Truchet, who in 1917 had presided over Pétain’s cuisine. Perhaps on account of the mentally sapping consequence of Georges’s wounds, the atmosphere at Les Bondons struck visitors as being much the same as at Vincennes; here too an order was ‘an excellent basis for discussion’.

Reading General Spears’s incomparable accounts of the French High Command in 1940, one emerges with a feeling of a world grown old and tired. In the military corridors one runs into the same old faces one has encountered a generation earlier. Brigadiers are now army commanders, or Commanders-in-Chief; battalion commanders have divisions or corps; the captains of 1918 are now in command of brigades or divisions. But they have aged. Symbolically, here is Marshal Franchet d’Esperey, the virile hero of 1918, in his wheelchair, now aged eighty-three, and declaring to Spears and Harold Nicolson: ‘Well, gentlemen, you see a ghost revisiting the scenes of his past’; Gamelin, the heir to Joffre, is sixty-eight; Weygand, the shadow of Foch, seventy-three. A French historian, Marc
Bloch, writing at the time describes a perhaps typical senior officer who had gone through the First War as ‘weighed down… by years spent in the office work and conditioned by a purely academic training’. Where then, and who, are the young men, with the young ideas?

Gamelin’s Strategy

In the Entente of 1939, while conduct of the war by sea rested upon Britain’s shoulders, on account of France’s vast military preponderance the planning of land operations devolved in effect upon the French Generalissimo, which seemed a reasonably fair division of labour. Gamelin’s long-range strategy was to wait until, in terms of men and equipment, Britain and France had caught up with the Wehrmacht before launching any serious offensive. This could not be before 1941, at the earliest; by then, who knows, perhaps neutral America might be persuaded once again to come to the rescue. The two overriding considerations behind French strategy remained the same as they had been ever since 1919: to husband French manpower so as not to permit a repetition of the slaughter of 1914–18, and to keep the war away from the sacred soil of France. But what if, while France was building up her potential, Hitler should attack first? This seemed more than likely, in which case the two avenues open to him would be to attack across the common frontier, taking the shortest route to Paris, or to repeat 1914 and sweep through neutral Belgium. In the path of the first route lay the imposing barrier of the Maginot Line; of the second, Belgian neutrality. Given the ruthlessness of Hitler, there could be little doubt as to which barrier was the least daunting; the various
Deuxième Bureau
reports from October 1939 onwards suggested that it was towards the Flemish plains that Hitler was already turning his gaze.

With the Maginot Line ‘extension’ between Longwy and the sea still far from reality, Pétain’s prescription of ‘going into Belgium’ to meet a German invasion clearly continued to hold good.
⁸
But now, of course, King Leopold’s rigid neutrality eradicated
any prospect of the French moving, at Belgian invitation, comfortably into their fortifications upon the German frontier as soon as war broke out. There had been no exchange consultations between the two General Staffs. The Belgians based their plans on the hope that they could hold their modern defence system along the Albert Canal, of which the powerful fortress of Eben Emael was the linchpin, at least long enough for the Allies to come to their assistance. But they adamantly declined to provide the Allies with any detailed information about these plans, and requests for French officers to visit defences in civilian clothes were invariably turned down. The same strict neutrality applied also to Holland. Ideally, Gamelin and the French military would have liked to go into Belgium without having to wait for the Germans to move first. But, quite rightly, the politicians were horrified at the impact any French violation of Belgian neutrality might have upon world (and, predominantly, American) opinion. Besides, the possibility of jeopardizing eventual collaboration with the Belgian Army simply could not be entertained, for one of Gamelin’s principal motives for ‘going into Belgium’ at all was the indispensability to France of the Belgian Army’s 700,000 men and twenty-two divisions (plus another ten from Holland in case of her involvement).

On 24 October, Gamelin issued orders to the armies of the North-East Front, telling them to be ready to advance to a defensive position along the Escaut (or Scheldt) River, running from Antwerp to Ghent. In terms of distance of approach march, the ‘Escaut Plan’ represented the most prudent of the Low Countries operations open to the Allies. But it was an awkwardly long line to hold, and at the same time it covered so small a portion of Belgian territory that Brussels would be abandoned and the bulk of the Belgian Army simply left, unsupported, to its fate. General Georges, however, immediately registered the strongest misgivings about any ‘deeper progression into Belgium’. The Army was still not yet sufficiently ready to risk being caught by a German offensive in unprepared positions, far from its bases. Despite Georges’s doubts, on 15 November Gamelin gave out his amended Instruction No. 8,
in which the Allied forces were to move up to the Dyle Line, stretching from Antwerp due south to above Dinant on the Meuse. The Dyle itself was little more than a wide stream, and it involved the French Army going out still further on the Belgian limb. Once again, General Georges expressed his reservations. On the credit side of the original ‘Dyle Plan’, it constituted a shorter line, it protected Brussels and gave a better chance of linking up with the Belgian defenders in their Albert Canal positions, and it committed no more than ten French divisions. Gamelin himself, however, was not satisfied; it made no provision for lending a hand to the Dutch in case of attack.

Towards the end of November, Gamelin requested General Billotte, commander of No. 1 Army Group, to study an extension of the Dyle Plan northwards from Antwerp in the direction of Breda, which lay twice as far from the French frontier as from Germany. On hearing of this new inflationary development of Gamelin’s Belgian strategy, Georges objected vigorously. In the margin of Billotte’s report, he wrote: ‘This is of the order of an adventure… Don’t let’s engage our effectives in this affair’, and on 5 December he sent it on to Gamelin with an accompanying memorandum which contained this highly pertinent and prescient warning:

The problem is dominated by the question of available forces… There is no doubt that our offensive manoeuvre in Belgium and Holland should be conducted with the caution of not allowing ourselves to commit the major part of our reserves in this part of the theatre, in face of a German action which could be nothing more than a diversion.
For example, in the event of an attack in force breaking out in the centre, on our front between the Meuse and Moselle, we could be deprived of the necessary means for a counter-attack…
⁹

Momentarily, Gamelin seems to have been swayed by Georges’s arguments. But as well as the essential military considerations, there was an element of personal honour and pride pushing Gamelin along: humiliatingly, as France’s top soldier, he had
been forced to stand by while Germany crushed first Czechoslovakia and then Poland. His enemies had never ceased taunting him since the French Army’s lethargy during Hitler’s conquest of Poland, and he was determined not to give them cause to say he had cast Belgium and Holland to their fates too. Then, on 10 January, there occurred one of those freak accidents of war which change the destinies of mankind.

The Mechelen Incident

On 9 January a German major of the paratroops employed on an airborne planning staff, by name Hellmuth Reinberger, received a summons to attend a highly secret conference at Second Air Fleet H.Q. in Cologne the following morning. Reinberger was in Münster at the time, some eighty miles distant as the crow flies. That night he was invited to the local air base. After a number of drinks, and some conviviality, the station commander, a reservist major called Hoenmanns, genially proposed to Reinberger that he save him a dreary train journey by flying him down to Cologne. A First War flyer, Hoenmanns had a civil pilot’s licence and wanted to get in a few more flying hours; also he would welcome an excuse to visit his wife and take home some laundry. Reinberger accepted, on condition that weather conditions were perfect.

The next day dawned cloudless, with visibility over the Ruhr up to two and a half miles. The two majors set forth in a tiny Me-108, Reinberger hugging on his knees an imposing yellow pigskin briefcase, which bulged with top-secret documents relating to the air plan of a German operation to invade Holland and Belgium. Suddenly the weather closed in. Hoenmanns realized that he had probably strayed too far west from his course, and accordingly changed direction towards the east. At that moment, the engine inexplicably cut out. Narrowly missing a high-tension line and with both wing-tips ripped off by a row of poplars, Hoenmanns made a skilful forced landing in a snow-covered thicket. A quick investigation of the map revealed that they had landed just inside Belgian territory, near Mechelen, a few miles north of Maastricht. In horror, Reinberger
leapt behind a bush hedge and tried to destroy the vital documents. But his lighter failed. Then an obliging Belgian peasant provided a match, and Reinberger built a small fire into which he fed the papers (always notoriously hard to burn) leaf by leaf. Soon some Belgian troops, under a captain, arrived and arrested Hoenmanns, who pretended that he had flown alone. The column of smoke from behind the thicket betrayed Reinberger, however, and the two majors were marched to a Belgian gendarmerie post. There, through what seems like extraordinary negligence, Reinberger was enabled to have another shot at destroying the documents by thrusting them into a stove. But he was interrupted by the Belgian captain, who rescued what remained. By nightfall, the papers were in the hands of the Belgian G.H.Q.; though badly charred, they contained enough to indicate that the Germans intended thrusting into northern France, via Belgium (and Holland), in what appeared to be a replay of the Schlieffen Plan of 1914.

The ‘Dyle–Breda Plan’

Belgium promptly passed this information on to the Dutch and the French. The French Army was placed in a state of alert. In terrible weather conditions, Billotte’s forces closed up to the Belgian frontier. Momentarily, the Belgian High Command raised the frontier barriers, and it seemed as if the Allies would be ‘invited’ to enter. But swiftly King Leopold reversed the order, sacking his Chief of Staff. Exasperated and despondent, the French Army drew back again. After 15 January, this apparently most menacing of the various false alarms receded into the ranks of the others. But the glimpse it gave of German operational plans proved enough to fix Gamelin in his resolve.
¹⁰
On 20 March he issued a new directive, supplementing the former ‘Dyle Plan’ with the ‘Breda Variant’. Approved by both French and British Governments, this would in fact be the master-plan with which the Allies met the German onslaught
when it came on 10 May. Instead of the ten French divisions (plus the B.E.F.) previously earmarked for Belgian operations, now thirty would be involved, among them the very cream of the French and British Armies: two out of France’s three new armoured divisions, five out of seven motorized divisions and all three of the Light Mechanized Divisions (D.L.M.s). On the extreme left flank the manoeuvre, edging the sea, was placed General Giraud’s Seventh Army of seven first-rate divisions (including one D.L.M.), with the task of being ready to move at top speed through Belgium to link up with the Dutch Army. Hitherto the Seventh Army had constituted a significant part of General Georges’s mobile strategic reserves; Gamelin’s decision to allocate it to the ‘Breda Variant’ was to have the most far-reaching consequences of any part of the Allied Plan. Next in line came Lord Gort’s B.E.F.,
¹¹
which would advance up to the River Dyle roughly between Louvain and Wavre; south of it came General Blanchard’s crack First Army, with the role of holding the Gembloux ‘Gap’ down to the fortress of Namur on the Meuse; while General Corap’s Ninth Army was to wheel forwards to occupy the line of the Meuse where it runs through the Belgian Ardennes, south of Namur. The pivot of the whole manoeuvre would be just north of Sedan, where the Meuse leaves France, and where lay the boundary between the Ninth and Second Armies; to the right of Corap, General Huntziger’s Second Army, stretching from Sedan to the Maginot Line anchor at Longwy, would remain static – as indeed would the rest of the French Army encamped behind
‘le trou’.
In essence, the finalized plan meant that the main striking power of the Franco-British Army was to be committed to whatever might transpire in Belgium and Holland, north of the line Liège–Namur.