To Lose a Battle (79 page)

Army Group ‘A’ has temporarily decreed a halt… of the Panzer movement in the direction of Calais which we ordered yesterday and will only unleash it when the situation at Arras is cleared up… everything depends on getting the infantry quickly up to Arras and westwards.

Finally, the shock received at Arras infected Hitler himself, resulting in a new nervousness which was to contribute directly to the Germans’ greatest failure of the campaign. On the Allied side, the breakdown of the operation finally convinced Gort that the only hope for the B.E.F. was to fall back on Dunkirk, rather than to try to hack its way through to the south, as Ironside and Churchill had hoped.

Weygand Flies North

As Gort was about to launch his ‘Frankforce’ attack, the new French C.-in-C. had departed on his trip to the northern commanders. Once again the journey (in both directions) was such as might have broken the spirit of a far younger man. Arriving at Le Bourget airport with a solitary aide, Weygand found that the authorities there ‘seemed to have heard nothing of this journey. We were sent from one end of the airfield to the other.’ Having wasted an hour in this manner, he took off shortly after dawn with a flight of fighters as escort. The first unmistakable sign that the enemy had broken through to the coast came when, crossing the River Canche,
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his plane was sharply greeted with anti-aircraft fire. A little further on, his escort had to drive off some attacking Messerschmitts. Arriving safely at the airfield of Norrent-Fontes, north-west of Béthune, Weygand found it abandoned as ‘unserviceable’ on account of enemy bombing. He continues:

After wandering past empty hangars in which everything indicated a precipitate departure, at last we met a small soldier, very dirty but with an attractive face, who told us what had happened and asked me what he was to do with 20,000 litres of petrol about which he was greatly concerned, having received no orders.

There was no sign of any transport awaiting the Generalissimo; later it transpired that cars had been sent to collect him from Abbeville, but had arrived to find the city in flames, and returned – narrowly escaping Guderian’s Panzers. At last, however, Weygand and his A.D.C. discovered an ancient military truck, of which the small soldier with the grubby face appeared to be the driver. After some misdirections Weygand found his way to a village with a functioning civilian post office,

where, after long efforts, the postmaster secured communication, abominably bad though it was, with the General Staff of No. I Army Group. In this way I learned that General Billotte had been trying to find me, though nobody could say in what direction he had gone.

Weygand then decided to take off again for Calais. While waiting for the necessary order to be given, and tortured with hunger, he went to an inn in a half-deserted village and ordered an omelette. He was served by a woman whose husband was away at the front, and who told him ‘she did not wish to go away, for she did not know where to go, and what was the use?’ On the wall there was a lithograph of the signing of the Armistice in November 1918, and from it she suddenly recognized Weygand, exclaiming: ‘How can I be frightened now you are here?’ With this small encouragement, Weygand flew on to Calais, where he learned that the King of the Belgians (as C.-in-C. of the Belgian Army) was waiting for himself and Billotte at Ypres town hall. Through roads appallingly encumbered with refugees and Army convoys, Weygand was driven to Ypres, which he reached at 1500 hours. King Leopold had already arrived, but not Billotte – nor Gort. The only British representative there was Admiral Sir Roger Keyes, who was attached to King Leopold. Such was the unpromising confusion surrounding the advent of the new Allied Generalissimo.

In the mayor’s office of Ypres town hall, there ensued what the King of the Belgians described as ‘four hours of confused talking’. Three separate meetings took place that day. The first was between King Leopold, attended by his A.D.C., General van Overstraeten, and General Weygand.
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Outside were waiting three Belgian Ministers – Premier Pierlot, General Denis, the Minister of National Defence, and the immortal Paul-Henri Spaak, then Foreign Minister. Later they alleged that the King had high-handedly refused to allow them to join in the conference and that they had only ‘learned by chance’ that this meeting of Allied commanders was going to take place at all; the King in his turn accused his Ministers of adopting ‘an aggressive and disagreeable attitude’. Consequently, in this state of strain between the Belgian King and his Ministers, accounts of what took place in the meeting with Weygand vary radically. According to Weygand, he told King Leopold that the Belgian Army, now standing on the River Escaut (Scheldt), ‘had remained too long in the east’ and should now retreat further
west as soon as possible – if necessary, as far as the Yser. Leopold said this was impossible; his Army ‘was too tired to do this after the forced marches it had made’. Instead, he seemed to want to ‘form a vast bridgehead at Ostend’. This conflicted diametrically with the project already formulating in Weygand’s mind. He wanted the Belgians to fall back and hold the line of the Yser – as they had done from 1914 onwards – so that, with the left flank shortened and secured, the B.E.F. would be free to strike southwards with all its strength. But this would, of course, mean abandoning all but a few square miles of Belgian territory. General van Overstraeten claims that, on behalf of the King, he objected that it was ‘absolutely necessary to suspend withdrawal because the divisions were beginning to disintegrate under a succession of night retreats – the bane of discipline’. Weygand says that the King refused then to come to any decision: ‘he said he would think it over and let me know later’. Weygand thought he detected signs already of ‘profound discouragement’ in the Belgian King, while Premier Pierlot, who saw Leopold immediately after his tête-à-tête with Weygand, has stated that ‘The King considered the position of the armies in Flanders almost, if not quite, hopeless.’ Certainly, it seems true to say that in refusing to withdraw to the Yser it looked as if King Leopold was, in effect, anticipating defeat.

While this discussion was going on, through the chaos of communications Billotte had at last managed to trace Weygand’s whereabouts and had arrived at Ypres. But there was still no sign of Gort or any of his staff, and Blanchard, who shared an equally vital interest in the plans being discussed, had apparently not been invited. Billotte was to be granted no opportunity to set down his own recollection of what transpired at this second meeting at the Ypres town hall – so, once again, accounts of it vary. Apparently Weygand outlined his projected scheme in the broadest terms; this would be to strike simultaneously southwards from around Cambrai and northwards from the Somme, the two thrusts meeting somewhere in the neighbourhood of Bapaume. According to General van Overstraeten, Billotte then pointed out that the French First Army was in a very confused situation, tired and severely tested,
incapable of launching an attack, and barely capable of defending itself. In his opinion, only the B.E.F. still constituted a powerful offensive force. Weygand comments: ‘I had long been aware of the intelligence, decision, and energy of General Billotte… The fatigues and anxieties of the past two weeks had left a deep mark on him,
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but he realized the capital importance of the manoeuvre to be carried out and shared my view of its urgency.’ But it is questionable whether Billotte gave Weygand the full facts concerning the ‘Frankforce’ attack then in progress – namely, that Blanchard had declared himself unable to launch a two-division attack until the 22nd–23rd, and that Gort had only been able to find one brigade group, with which he was attacking at that very moment. If Blanchard and Gort had been at the Ypres meeting, it seems improbable that Weygand could have returned to Paris harbouring any serious belief that the northern armies could ever attack concertedly on anything like the scale that he would be promising in front of Reynaud and Churchill twenty-four hours later. Once again a French C.-in-C. was to deceive his Government with false hopes.

Gort Misses Weygand: Billotte Mortally Injured

Annoyed that Gort had neither turned up nor sent any explanatory message, Weygand waited in Ypres for him until 1900 hours. ‘I could not go back without meeting him,’ thought Weygand, and despite his undertaking to Reynaud to return to Paris within twenty-four hours, he wondered, ‘Ought I to spend the night where I was and try to succeed better next day?’ At this moment, Admiral Abrial, the French Commander of the Naval Forces of the North, presented himself and, warning Weygand that enemy bombing of airfields had now made it impossible for him to fly out, he offered to place at his disposal a 600-ton torpedo-boat, the
Flore.
Weygand accepted and left
forthwith for Dunkirk. There he embarked in the midst of a violent air-raid, with the
Flore
crossing the harbour at full speed, ‘amidst fountains of water thrown up by bombs falling in the sea, and alongside the quays set alight by incendiaries’. After a detour via Dover, the
Flore
deposited Weygand at Cherbourg shortly after dawn on the 22nd From there he continued his journey, and, still showing no trace of fatigue, reached Paris at about 1000 hours.

Approximately an hour after Weygand left Ypres, Gort arrived. Previously, both King Leopold and General van Overstraeten had urged that efforts be made to bring Gort to the meeting, since nothing could be decided without his views being known. In vain, Overstraeten had tried to reach him on the telephone and then had driven with Admiral Keys to Hazebrouck, where Gort was thought to be. Eventually he was tracked down to his new command post, at Prémesques, between Lille and Armentières, where he had just moved from Wahagnies. According to Gort, all he knew of Weygand’s visit was a signal from Churchill to Keyes, copy to Gort, received the previous night (the 20th), which stated simply ‘Weygand is coming up your way tomorrow to concert action of all forces.’ A message sent by the British mission at French G.Q.G., warning that Weygand would land at Norrent-Fontes at 0900 hours, apparently miscarried; there is no record of its receipt either at B.E.F.’s G.H.Q. or Gort’s command post. Meanwhile, he had spent the whole day waiting for notification of Weygand’s whereabouts. Until Overstraeten’s intervention, no one on the French side seems to have thought of sending messengers to scour the countryside for the British commander.

Weygand was to go into German captivity still believing that Gort ‘had purposely abstained from coming to the Ypres conference’. To this day, Gort’s absence remains a matter of acute controversy in France. Did he stay away in a state of pique because Altmayer had not materialized at the ‘Frankforce’ conference the previous night, and because the French had failed to participate in the Arras attack? J. Benoist-Méchin
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suggests
that Gort deliberately absented himself, because he had already become ‘a partisan of evacuation’, and any involvement in Weygand’s offensive schemes would have placed him ‘in an inextricable position’. On Gort’s side, there is the fact of the appalling communications and the signal which never arrived; he had just shifted his command post, on the 21st, and his preoccupation both with the Arras counter-attack and the awkward predicament of two of his corps on the Escaut front would seem to offer sufficient excuse for not attempting to track down Weygand.
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But principally, any such complex devious thinking as Benoist-Méchin attributes to Gort is simply out of character.

The failure of Gort and Weygand to meet on the 21st was in any event disastrous. At Ypres the third meeting of the day took place between Billotte and Gort, at which Billotte relayed Weygand’s intentions. Gort in turn reported on the not very encouraging progress of the Arras operation, pointing out that all his available reserves were now committed. The Belgians were finally persuaded to fall back from the Escaut to the Lys, so as to relieve British divisions for Weygand’s offensive. But this was a poor compromise; as the map reveals, the Lys line hardly offered any shortening of the front, and Gort reckoned that the switch-over could not be completed in time for the relieved divisions to attack before 26 May at the earliest. As the last meeting ended, King Leopold informed his waiting Ministers that Gort had agreed to co-operate in Weygand’s offensive, but

The British General considers that the chances of the manoeuvre in which he is going to take part are practically nil. The situation is desperate.

Thus in effect nothing specific had been decided about the proposed offensive. The Belgians had not committed themselves to withdrawing to the Yser. Gort had not heard anything that
might restore his faith in the capacity of the French First Army to join effectively in an attack, and the Belgians had certainly given him no confidence in the security of his left flank. Weygand had returned to Paris thoroughly mistrustful of Gort, and imbued with notions which Gort could swiftly have persuaded him were impracticable, had the two men but met in Ypres. The meetings broke up, according to Overstraeten, in a very depressed atmosphere.

There then followed yet another of the tragic twists of fate that had seemed to dog the Allies from the very beginning of hostilities. Shortly after the Ypres conference, some young British officers were about to appease their hunger by sharing out a bottle of milk found in a nearby farmhouse. Abruptly the door opened and in came a senior French general. Spotting the milk he exclaimed ‘
Ah! Du lait! Excellent!
’ and without any further formality grabbed the bottle, drained it, and then departed before the Britons could register their indignation. This was Billotte, and it was probably the last time he was seen alive by any member of the B.E.F. Carrying him on through the darkness to brief Blanchard about Weygand’s intentions, a few hours later Billotte’s car apparently skidded and ran into the back of a refugee lorry. The driver, who was wearing a steel helmet, survived; Billotte, not so protected, was gravely injured, and after lying in a coma for two days, died. His removal from the scene could hardly have been more catastrophic for the Allies. He was the only French or British commander with the northern armies who knew of Weygand’s plan at first hand,
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and he was the one person in whom both Gort and King Leopold still had some confidence. With Billotte fighting for his life, another three days were allowed to elapse before the badly shaken Blanchard was confirmed as his successor, and General Prioux was then moved up to command the First Army. Thus in these crucial days there was to be no co-ordinating hand to harness the three Allied armies in the north to the ‘Weygand Plan’. Meanwhile, demoralizing rumours swiftly ran round the
French camp that the unfortunate Billotte had committed suicide.
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