To Lose a Battle (75 page)

Returning to Vincennes, Gamelin’s party (according to Colonel Minart) found that

all activity had practically halted as if on the eve of a move. Everybody, thinking about his own personal affairs, was packing in all haste. The cupboards were practically empty. The ’75 cannon installed in the court had been withdrawn. At the first signal, Vincennes could be evacuated like a fireman’s barracks.

In the setting, a travel-worn General Weygand arrived, at about half past three. He informed Gamelin simply that he had been summouned to Paris by Reynaud, and had been instructed to put himself in the picture. Gamelin described the situation to him. Then, he asked permission to call on Georges. As he left, he remarked to Gamelin enigmatically: ‘You know Paul Reynaud doesn’t like you?’ Weygand was
followed by a visit from a broken General Corap, to whom Gamelin expressed a few sympathetic words and an assurance that his ‘honour as a soldier was beyond question’. Towards nine o’clock that evening, a car arrived bearing an emissary from Reynaud. He handed to Gamelin a letter succinctly announcing his replacement by Weygand, and thanking him for services rendered ‘in the course of a long and brilliant career’.

Early next morning, 20 May, Weygand arrived at Vincennes to take over. In the C-in-C.’s office, overlooking the moat where the Due d’Enghien had been shot, an unusual exchange took place between the two generals – if one may accept Gamelin’s version of it. Gamelin expressed his belief that ‘the execution of my order is the only solution to save the situation’, to which Weygand apparently replied, tapping his notebook, ‘But I have the secrets of Marshal Foch!’ ‘I could have retorted,’ says Gamelin, ‘that I had those of Marshal Joffre and they had not sufficed.’ With hurt feelings, Gamelin noted that during the brief final interview Weygand could not bring himself to express ‘one word coming from the heart’; he did not even seem to recall that ‘it was I who had obtained for him the command in the Levant in August 1939’. On this sadly petulant note Gamelin left Vincennes forever. Weygand thought he was ‘manifestly relieved at being spared a heavy responsibility’. The dismissed Generalissimo said goodbye to no one. A few inquisitive secretaries watched his departure discreetly from the windows. The sentries saluted. Some of those watching felt that the gloomy courtyard at Vincennes had just witnessed yet another execution. Gamelin then returned to the ground-floor flat in the Avenue Foch which he had bought for his retirement, and began mulling over his memoirs. The war went on.

Enter Weygand

The new Commander-in-Chief who now held the waning fortunes of the Allies in his hands was seventy-three at the time of his appointment. Supposedly of Belgian parentage, he was illegitimate and to this day his parentage remains a subject
of speculation. Some have it that he was the offspring of a Belgian industrialist and a Polish woman; others that Leopold II, the exploiter of the Congo, was his father; while a strong faction contend that the unhappy Emperor Maximilian and a Mexican woman were Maxime Weygand’s parents.
¹⁹
Mexican blood would certainly have explained the high cheek-bones and deep-set eyes that gave him an increasingly un-French look as he grew older. A small, dapper man with a foxy face (he reminded one Englishman of an ‘aged jockey’) that revealed a quick intelligence, Weygand had passed into the cavalry through St Cyr. Right at the beginning of the First War he had been picked by Foch, more or less at random, as his Chief of Staff, and had remained with the Marshal, like a constant shadow, until the Armistice, and after. He had thus never commanded troops in battle, and, as Spears remarked of him, between this and being a Chief of Staff was ‘as different as riding in the Grand National from taking photos of its jumps’. On leaving Foch’s side he went to Poland, where his admirers consider him to have been chiefly responsible for the great Polish victory of 1920 against the Russians. In 1923 he was appointed High Commissioner in Syria, and then in 1931 became Commander-in-Chief of the French Army. Retiring in 1935, he was called back in 1939 (by Gamelin) to return to Syria as military commander.

Weygand was very much that particularly French creature, a ‘political general’. He was almost as deeply committed to the Right wing as he was to the Catholic Church. Clemenceau described him as being ‘up to his neck in priests’, and he often seemed to harbour an inquisitional notion that sinful France would be required to suffer for her wickedness. It was also Clemenceau who had once issued the warning: ‘Look out. If ever a
coup d’état
is attempted, it will be by him.’ On more than one occasion Weygand had addressed meetings of de la Rocque’s
Croix de Feu
, and at one time it was whispered that passionate conservatism had carried him as far as relations with
the
Cagoulard
terrorists. Certainly, during the Russo-Finnish War he had been in the van of those anxious to ‘have a go’ at the Bolsheviks. Spears claimed that Weygand had ‘only two preoccupations: his haunting fear of revolution, and his dislike of Reynaud’. Both were to have their effect on his conduct of the war as Generalissimo.
²⁰
Reynaud in his turn had little love for Weygand; about the best thing he could say about him in his memoirs was that he ‘had the gift of explaining things clearly’. Why, then, had Reynaud called forth the elderly general at this most dire moment? He was, in de Gaulle’s caustic words, ‘a brilliant second’ who had never commanded troops in action; he had not had the advantage of studying the German
Blitzkrieg
technique at first hand, as had, for instance, General Huntziger; and out in the Levant he had not kept himself in particularly close touch with events since 10 May.
²¹
The fact was that his selection was first and foremost an act of patriotism, intended by Reynaud to tap and draw strength from the ‘Verdun stream’ flowing through the French soul. In the popular mind, if Pétain represented honour and endurance in adversity, Weygand was still Foch’s right hand – and Foch signified victory and
la gloire.
Not every French soldier, however, was thus impressed; many shared the cynicism of Lieutenant Claude Jamet who, on hearing of the new appointment, wrote in his diary:

Gagamelin. Weygand, on the contrary, he’s pure blood. The spirit of Foch. ‘When in danger, call for Weygand’, etc.… what sluggishness of intellect and heart! And Weygand is summoned, regardless… because Foch is dead. For this ‘modern war’, one might just as well have called for Napoleon, the Great Condé – or Vercingetorix!

Certainly the emotive summoning of Pétain and Weygand to stiffen France’s war effort was one measure that would backfire badly on Paul Reynaud.

Weygand had had a gruelling flight from Syria, his aircraft constantly dogged by misfortune. On the 18th he had hoped to make Tunis in one hop, and then Paris by the evening. But there were strong headwinds, and over Benghazi (then in Italian hands, Italy being a dubious neutral) he was forced to turn back to refuel at Mersa Matruh in Egypt, thereby losing three precious hours. Finally, in landing at Étampes, the undercarriage of the plane collapsed, and Weygand had to creep out through the upper gun turret. Just at that moment there was an air-raid warning, and he did not reach Paris until 1100 hours on the 19th. Despite this harrowing journey for a man of his age, Weygand surprised those who saw him; Alexander Werth thought he ‘looked good in uniform’, in contrast to Pétain who was accompanying him (‘Poor old boy – fancy being dragged into all this at his age.’). On arriving at La Ferté, Captain Beaufre (who admittedly became a lifelong devotee of Weygand) was struck by his displaying ‘a swagger, a passion and a fierce will which contrasted sharply with the pale and curdled calm of his predecessor’. Almost immediately the seventy-three-year-old general astonished his new staff at Montry
²²
by performing a hundred-yard sprint on the lawn.

On his first brief interview with Georges on the 19th, Weygand at once got an idea of just how serious the situation was. In ten days’ fighting the French Army had lost fifteen divisions, and in the north another forty-five were in danger of being thrown into the sea; there were no reserves; the arsenals were almost empty. Between Valenciennes and Montmédy, the gap to be filled measured nearly one hundred miles. The proper moment for a co-ordinated counter-offensive here, assessed Weygand, should have been on the 15th or 16th; therefore it was now too late. As for the unnerved and dejected General
Georges, Weygand decided that he must remain (at least nominally) at his command; it would be too complicated, as well as too demoralizing for the Army, for him to be replaced at this point. But in contrast to Gamelin, from the beginning the actual conduct of the battle would be in his, Weygand’s, hands. Meanwhile Gamelin’s ‘Instruction No. 12’, decreed only that morning (the 19th), was cancelled. Returning from Georges’s H.Q., Weygand had gone to Reynaud’s office in the evening and, having told the Premier that he would accept the ‘heavy responsibility’ cast upon him, added pessimistically: ‘You will not be surprised if I cannot answer for victory, nor even give you the hope of victory.’ As he left, Baudouin inquired about his immediate plans, to which Weygand replied: ‘I am dead tired, for I had only three hours’ sleep at Tunis. I shall begin by getting some sleep.’ All decisions would be postponed to the morrow. Thus passed another twenty-four of the ‘few hours’ remaining to France.

On to the Channel

Monday, 20 May, was the day of Guderian’s triumph. The previous evening he had once more been granted complete freedom of movement, and at midnight he ordered his corps to strike out for Amiens and Abbeville, prefacing his orders with the words: ‘The enemy opposite the corps front has been defeated.’ The latest aerial reconnaissance reports certainly confirmed this view; they could find virtually no Allied formations ahead of the Panzers. On the Allied side, General d’Astier’s patrols spoke of a ‘whirlpool of armour’ about to burst westwards. With the Canal du Nord behind them, there was now no natural barrier between the Panzers and the coast – just mile upon mile of the flat, featureless Picardy plain, a paradise for armoured commanders.

Guderian himself was on the road at 0400 hours with the 1st Panzer, desirous of being present at the historic moment of the capture of Amiens. The morning began with a sharp row involving Colonel Balck, now commanding the 1st Panzer Brigade, who had moved out from the Péronne bridgehead without
waiting to be relieved by the 10th Panzer. His successor, Colonel Landgraf, was enraged by Balck’s casualness, and particularly at his retort: ‘If we lost it, you can always take it again.’ At Albert (a familiar name from the Battle of the Somme), the riflemen formerly commanded by Balck came up against the British troops (the Royal West Kents) for the first time. The 1st Panzer official historian describes them as having ‘fought toughly and bravely without, however, being able to prevent the fall of Albert’. Swinging round the hold-up at Albert, Balck’s tanks were at the gates of Amiens by mid morning, having advanced nearly thirty-five miles.

Never had the armour moved faster. ‘We had the feeling,’ said Kielmansegg, ‘such as a fine racehorse may have, of having been held back by its rider, coldly and deliberately, then getting its head free to reach out into a swinging gallop and speed to the finishing-post as winner.’ William Shirer, who that day had at last been allowed to follow in the wake of the German advance, was fascinated by the spectacle of this army on wheels, which

simply went up the roads… with tanks, planes, artillery, anti-tank stuff, everything… all morning, roads massed with supplies, troops going up… curious, not a single Allied plane yet… and these endless columns of troops, guns, supplies, stretching all the way from the German border… what a target!… Refugees streaming back along the roads in the dust and heat… tears your heart out…

Notwithstanding all the years he had observed the build-up of the new Wehrmacht in Germany, the speed and efficiency with which the German columns moved made a deep impression on Shirer:

It is a gigantic, impersonal war machine, run as coolly and efficiently, say, as our automobile industry in Detroit… thousands of motorized vehicles thundering by on the dusty roads, officers and men alike remain cool and business-like. Absolutely no excitement, no tension. An officer directing artillery fire stops for half an hour to explain to you what he is up to.

On an airfield outside Amiens, the Panzers nearly surprised an R.A.F. unit which had lodged there for the night, and the fighters took off literally in the face of the first German tanks. The city was almost empty; the previous afternoon the last line-of-communication troops had marched out,
²³
accompanied by nuns from the Community of the Holy Family; and, at about the same time, the defeated General Corap was passing through on his way to see Gamelin. Fires caused by the previous day’s bombing had raged all night, and dawn brought the Luftwaffe over again, bombing relentlessly. About all that was left holding Amiens was a battalion of the Royal Sussex Regiment, belonging to the 12th (Territorial) Division, which stood and fought to a finish against Balck’s tanks, and was completely destroyed. By midday the Germans had spread a large Swastika flag in front of the post office, to show the Luftwaffe that the city was in German hands. Methodically, they then pushed on southwards to seize bridgeheads over the Somme, in preparation for Phase Two of the Battle of France. Guderian was there, as intended, to inspect the great city which even Ludendorff had failed to capture in 1918, and somehow found time to visit the cathedral before rushing off to see how the 2nd Panzers were getting on.