To Lose a Battle (59 page)

Such were the confusion and duplication of duties existing in the French command network, that it is still not entirely clear as to who was ultimately responsible – Gamelin or Georges – for the various orders sent out during the crucial days of 10 to 15 May. If, as Generalissimo, Gamelin was not aware of the specific measures Georges was taking to counter the German threat on the Meuse, the responsibility for this rests upon him, just as, in the final analysis, he cannot escape blame for
allowing
Georges to keep him so incompletely informed as to the real state of affairs at the front. But Gamelin
must
have been aware at least of the movements of Army reserves ordered by Georges, and assuming this then either he should have intervened if he disapproved of these movements, or else one has to conclude that they had his tacit support. Gamelin never did intervene, for which, in his memoirs, he advances the rather feeble reason ‘that a commander-in-chief executes badly what he does not understand’.
²
On the other hand, nothing in his
copious apologia indicates that he would have handled his reserves other than Georges did. Thus although he may criticize (
ex post facto
) the tardiness with which Georges dispatched his reserves, it seems fair to accept that Gamelin did endorse the direction in which they were sent. Having established this, it may be useful briefly to summarize the troop movements between 10 and 15 May for which Gamelin and Georges were jointly responsible.

Altogether seventeen divisions and two brigades, representing more than 300,000 men, received orders committing them to battle. On 10 May the 1st Armoured was sent to the First Army; 11 May, two more divisions to First Army, and another two dispatched to protect the northern flank of the Maginot Line; 12 May, yet another two divisions to First Army, two (the 3rd Armoured and 3rd Motorized) to Second Army,
³
while one (the 53rd) was removed from direct control of the Ninth Army and sent to back up the front behind Mézières. On 13 May, one division (the 2nd Armoured) was sent to First Army, and one (the 36th) to Ninth Army, but only to replace the 53rd removed from it the previous day, and in fact events overtook the 36th before it could ever reach its destination, so that it remained stuck on the Aisne. On the 14th, out of nineteen different movement orders, sixteen involved a change of direction, and among these no less than seven divisions had their missions altered within twenty-four hours, the consequences of which were to prove particularly disastrous to such units as the 53rd Division and the 2nd Armoured. That same day the 14th Division (under de Lattre) was sent to bolster the Ninth Army; but, like the 36th, it too never arrived and was left holding the Aisne under Touchon’s command. By the end of the 14th, orders had been issued dispatching to Huntziger’s Second Army eight fresh divisions, with the object of preventing any rolling-up
of the Maginot Line from the north; of these, half were to remain unemployed during the decisive battle. Finally, on 15 May, one division (the 1st North African) was detached from First Army and sent down to reinforce the Ninth. Thus the total reinforcements ordered up by the French High Command read as follows:

To First Army:
5 divisions, of which 3 were subsequently redirected.
s
To Second Army:
8 divisions, 4 of which played no part in the decisive battle.

By contrast, however, the Army most sorely in need of reinforcement – Corap’s Ninth – did not receive one single division until 15 May, when it was far too late. Nothing could illustrate with greater clarity how completely Georges and Gamelin had been deceived by the ‘matador’s cloak’, how completely they had misread German intentions. And the end of the deception was not yet in sight.

At Vincennes, 15 May hag begun with renewed fears of a German left hook on the Maginot Line via Switzerland, with Intelligence from Berne reporting the situation along the German frontier now to be ‘critical’. It was, says Colonel Minart, ‘a gloomy day, interminable, smelling of death’. The communiqués arriving from La Ferté continued to be non-committal, but their very laconicism was becoming increasingly suspect, while liaison officers dispatched from Vincennes were treated with a marked brusqueness. On liaison duty between Vincennes, La Ferté and Doumenc’s headquarters staff at Montry himself that day, Minart sensed ‘that our command organization was steadily breaking down, and that a paralysis was creeping up, hour by hour’. Within the grim fortress it was more than ever like being in ‘a submarine without a periscope’. Nevertheless, ugly rumours direct from the front were beginning to filter through to Vincennes in increasing quantity. Although at meals ‘everything was done to avoid painful subjects’, what Minart describes as ‘the obsessing perspective of defeat’ made its way, unspoken, through the dark corridors of
G.Q.G. The nervous tension that day was further played upon by mysterious comings and goings, private telephone conversations between Gamelin and Georges, and a call from Reynaud’s office purporting to relate to an urgent intervention made to the British Government. Gamelin himself, though still externally serene, gave the appearance of a man ‘stricken by a dull and pervasive fear’, and increasingly sought the insulation afforded by his
chef de cabinet,
Colonel Petitbon, and his A.D.C.s. Still he declined to intervene directly in the battle.

At La Ferté, General Georges’s attention during 15 May appears to have been principally concentrated on the fighting around Stonne and Flavigny’s belated counter-attack. That evening, at 1700 hours, he personally telephoned the commander of XVIII Corps holding Huntziger’s
right
wing, with the emphatic order: ‘You must hold at all costs the anchor position Inor–Malandry. Upon this can depend the whole outcome of the war.’ Inor–Malandry was the line upon which Huntziger had disastrously fallen back during the night of the 14th; its significance was that it protected the northern flank of the Maginot Line, for which purpose Georges had sent those eight divisions. Herein lay the key to Georges’s thoughts that day. First it had been the threat to the Gembloux Gap; now it was the outflanking threat to the Maginot Line which stood paramount in Georges’s mind. Meanwhile, as Guderian, preparatory to his swing westward, was on the defensive at Stonne, the reports reaching Georges from Huntziger sounded as if the French were more than holding their own in this sector. Gradually, towards the evening of the 15th, a new note of quite ill-founded hope seems to have begun to replace the terrible debility that Georges had displayed the previous day. On the basis of Georges’s renewed optimism, Gamelin was inspired to conclude that day’s signal to the C.-in-C.s of the North African and Levant theatres with the following absurdly unrealistic summary:

To sum up, the 15th seems to show a lessening in intensity of enemy action, which was particularly violent on the 14th. Our front, which was ‘shaken’ between Namur and the area west of Montmédy, is gradually pulling itself together.

Gamelin: ‘Suddenly His Eyes Were Opened’

That evening, Gamelin delivered a similarly encouraging report to the War Cabinet. But at about 2030, shortly after Daladier, the Minister of National Defence, had returned from the meeting to his office in the Rue Saint-Dominique, Gamelin was on the telephone with an entirely different note in his voice. For the first time the Joffrian sang-froid, the sugary tone of reassurance which he customarily reserved for his political masters, had vanished. What combination of events and intelligence led to this sudden change of heart is not quite clear; in all probability it was caused by a report from a G.Q.G. staff officer, Lieutenant-Colonel Guillaut. Gamelin had dispatched Guillaut that day as his personal liaison officer to the Ninth Army, the only occasion so far when he had adopted such a measure, and reporting back Guillaut stated that

The disorder of this Army is beyond description. Its troops are falling back on all sides. The Army General Staff has lost its head. It no longer knows even where its divisions are. The situation is worse than anything we could have imagined… The roads are choked with routed troops.

According to Pertinax, up to this moment Gamelin ‘seems to have cherished the illusion that everything could be “patched up”. Suddenly his eyes were opened.’ Now he knew the Germans had consummated their breakthrough, while the major part of the French reserves were irrevocably committed, or had already been partly destroyed. William Bullitt, the American Ambassador, was with Daladier when Gamelin telephoned from Vincennes. Obviously caught off balance by the change in the Generalissimo’s demeanour and the tale of disaster that he had to tell, Daladier was heard by Bullitt to exclaim: ‘No, what you tell me is not possible! You are mistaken; it’s not possible!’ When the extent of the catastrophe revealed by Gamelin had sunk in, Daladier shouted again down the telephone: ‘We must attack soon!’ ‘Attack! With what? I have no more reserves.’ The conversation ended with the following exchange:

‘Then it means the destruction of the French Army?’

‘Yes, it means the destruction of the French Army!’

Daladier then demanded an explanation, after which Gamelin stated: ‘Between Laon and Paris I do not have a single corps of soldiers at my disposal.’

Within an hour of this dramatic conversation, General Georges at La Ferté was receiving the first ‘stupefying’ news that Reinhardt’s Panzers had reached Montcornet. For the French High Command, the whole picture was suddenly transformed. No longer was the main threat pointing at the Maginot Line, but – of course – at Paris herself! Late that night a meeting was convened by Paul Reynaud in the Ministry of the Interior, at which Daladier, General Hering, the elderly Military Governor of Paris, and Lieutenant-Colonel Guillaut, representing Gamelin, were present. In a thoroughly panicky atmosphere the first measures for defending the capital, and for the possible evacuation of the Government, were discussed. To begin with, the decision was taken to withdraw forty squads of Gardes Mobiles from the armies and place them at the disposal of General Hering – to maintain order in Paris.
⁴

Reynaud Takes a Hand

Meanwhile, the head of the civil Government, Paul Reynaud, had already arrived independently at his own sombre conclusions on the Battle of the Meuse – and much earlier than his discredited Generalissimo. At 1745 on 14 May, Reynaud had wired an urgent message to Churchill in London. The chronological context of this message needs to be noted carefully; it was sent
before
anyone in Paris could possibly have known that Rommel had smashed the counter-attack by the 1st Armoured;
before
Reinhardt had broken out from Monthermé;
before
Flavigny had launched his action towards Sedan; only a matter of hours after Guderian himself had made up his mind to swing westwards; and while General Georges was still very much preoccupied with the notional threat developing against the Maginot Line. Said Reynaud to Churchill:

Having just left the War Cabinet, I am sending you, in the name of the French Government, the following statement:

The situation is indeed very serious. Germany is trying to deal us a fatal blow
in the direction of Paris
[author’s italics]. The German Army has broken through our fortified lines south of Sedan…

Between Sedan and Paris, there are no defences comparable with those in the line which we must restore at almost any cost…

The Germans could only be stopped, Reynaud concluded, by isolating the Panzers ‘from their supporting Stukas’. And for this, more fighters were desperately needed. ‘It is essential,’ Reynaud urged Churchill, ‘that you send immediately ten additional squadrons. Without such a contribution, we cannot be certain that we shall be able to stem the German advance.’

On having Reynaud’s wire relayed to him, General Ironside, the British C.I.G.S., ordered that a liaison officer be sent direct to Georges’s H.Q. ‘to find out what the real situation is’; but later that day he noted that ‘we could get nothing out of’ either Gamelin’s or Georges’s H.Q. Reynaud, he thought, was being ‘a little hysterical’. There is no doubt that the French leader was not in a good state, physically or mentally. He had not shaken off the depressing aftermath of his influenza; the strain of the previous weeks of political juggling had told on him; and his condition was not improved by Madame de Portes constantly importuning him with suggestions for running the war, and France, or with requests for advancement for friends or sons of friends. Élie Bois describes him in these days as being

worse than haggard. The nervous mannerism peculiar to him – a jerky movement of the head from right to left – was more in evidence than usual. His voice was weary and the brilliance of his glance unhealthy.

Because of the estrangement existing between Reynaud and the Generalissimo, whom he had been on the brink of sacking, his communications with Vincennes were just as unsatisfactory as Gamelin’s with Georges. Paul Baudouin tells of an absurd situation when, having heard from his Military Secretary, Colonel Villelume, of Corap’s collapse on the morning of the 15th, Reynaud had been

unwilling to telephone direct to General Gamelin in order to avoid a breach with M. Daladier, who is hypersensitive in matters of this sort… He therefore rang up Daladier to ask him what were Gamelin’s counter-measures, to which Daladier replied, ‘He has none.’

After Colonel Villelume had in fact rung up Vincennes for information, Gamelin’s
chef de cabinet,
Colonel Petitbon, snapped back: ‘If this goes on, I shall not give any information at all.’
⁵
From the start, however, Reynaud, in his profound distrust of Gamelin, had relied upon his own ‘spies’. The information they brought him, compounded with his small man’s hyperdeveloped intuition, led him to conclusions closer to reality, even though they may have been tinged with ‘hysteria’, than either Gamelin or Georges. When he told Churchill on the 14th that the defences between Sedan and Paris had been ‘broken’, he also spoke with the technical knowledge of a Cassandra who had long preached, and studied, the possibilities of armoured warfare. He knew that