To Lose a Battle (90 page)

When Huntziger and his co-delegates, dazed and weary from the journey, realized they were being led to Foch’s
wagon-lit
, they were deeply shocked. Together with his Service chiefs, plus Ribbentrop and Hess, Hitler had already arrived at the clearing. In warm sunshine he strode up to the great granite block and meticulously read the inscription on it:

‘
HERE ON THE ELEVENTH OF NOVEMBER
1918
SUCCUMBED THE CRIMINAL PRIDE OF THE GERMAN PEOPLE
…’

Fifty yards away, Shirer was intently studying Hitler’s expression through binoculars:

It is afire with scorn, anger, hate, revenge, triumph. He steps off the monument and contrives to make even this gesture a masterpiece of contempt… Suddenly… he throws his whole body into harmony with his mood. He swiftly snaps his hands on his hips, arches his shoulders, plants his feet wide apart. It is a magnificent gesture of defiance, of burning contempt for this place now and all that it has stood for in the twenty-two years since it witnessed the humbling of the German Empire.

Then Hitler led the way into the railway coach.

After the French delegation had seated itself, Keitel began proceedings by reading out a brief preamble, explaining that the site had been chosen as ‘an act of reparatory justice’. France was now defeated; in her armistice terms, Germany’s
chief aims were to prevent any resumption of hostilities and to provide herself with the requisite conditions for pursuing the war against Britain. When Keitel had finished, at 3.30 p.m., Hitler got up, gave a Nazi salute and marched out to the strains of
Deutschland über Alles.
Keitel now handed the French delegates copies of the German terms. No discussion was to be allowed. Huntziger and his team returned to Paris late that night, and over an infuriatingly bad telephone line relayed the armistice terms to Weygand in Bordeaux. To Pétain, Weygand described the terms as ‘harsh but not dishonouring’. All through the night and most of the next day Pétain’s Cabinet debated the terms. An extension of the deadline was granted, ill-humouredly, by Keitel. Finally, at 8.50 p.m. on Saturday 22 June, the armistice was signed at Réthondes. The shooting would officially end at 35 minutes past midnight on the 25th. In a voice seized with emotion, Huntziger, addressing Keitel, said he hoped that, ‘as a soldier’, the German leader would understand how onerous this moment was for him. Keitel then declared: ‘It is honourable for the victor to do honour to the vanquished.’ He asked those present to stand in silence for a minute, in honour of the fallen on both sides. ‘Military honour,’ commented Weygand, ‘was safe.’

As the delegates emerged from the
wagon-lit
, the observers outside in the clearing felt a drop of rain fall. The skies had become heavily overcast. Soon the drops grew to a violent storm. The few black flags hung out by French householders drooped limp and sodden. The wonderful days of sunshine, ‘Goering’s weather’, that extraordinary run of good fortune which had so assisted the Germans in their conquest, had at last broken with a vengeance. In the darkening sky lay auguries for the future: Britain was not yet suing for peace, and in exactly one year to the day Hitler would be sending his victorious legions to their doom in Russia.

Immediately the armistice had been signed. German engineers prepared to move Foch’s
wagon-lit
in triumph to Berlin.
¹
With a barbarity worthy of Genghis Khan, Hitler decreed that, except for Foch’s statue, the site should be totally razed. He
then set off on a tour of First World War battlefields, together with two old comrades from the company in which he had served as a corporal, taking in some of the Maginot Line forts – like any German tourist – before returning to Berlin to organize the celebrations that would suitably commemorate this astonishing victory. For Hitler, as for many of his soldiers, the war was over. France, the arch-enemy, was prostrate at last; Britain no longer counted, she would fall like a plum from a tree in due course. Russia did not exist; America did not exist. Ever since that day of humiliation at Versailles, it was France alone that had obsessed German thoughts. Karl-Heinz Mende summed them up well when, writing home about the Armistice, he said: ‘The great battle in France is now ended. It lasted twenty-six years.’

The Price

What had been the cost of this earth-shaking last round of the ‘great battle’? When the figures were added up, during the six weeks’ fighting German casualties amounted to

Thus despite repeated Allied and neutral reports of hecatombs of German casualties, the overall total of just over 150,000 was equivalent to not much more than a third of the number of men Germany lost at Verdun in 1916, in one single battle of the First World War. During the three decisive weeks up to Dunkirk, German casualties (as claimed by the Wehrmacht) were reported to have totalled approximately what Britain suffered during the first day of the Somme alone. Even the losses of its élite formations, which had been in the forefront of the battle, were comparatively light (at least by First War standards): Rommel’s 7th Panzer, for example, lost a total of 2,273 in killed and wounded; the Grossdeutschland Regiment, 1,108 (including 221 killed) out of its complement of 3,900 men; and the losses of one of the most constantly engaged infantry divisions, the 3rd, had totalled no more than 1,649. On the other hand, as
the cost of the Wehrmacht’s enormously successful doctrine of ‘leading from the front’, a relatively high proportion of the German dead – 5 per cent – were officers. The strain imposed by the tempo of the campaign also extended its casualties; one was Colonel Werner, commander of the 31st Panzer Regiment (5th Panzer Division), who died of a heart attack shortly after the armistice.

On the Allied side, French losses during the six-week campaign are estimated
²
at somewhere in the region of 90,000 dead, 200,000 wounded and 1,900,000 in prisoners and missing. British total casualties came to 68,111, Belgian 23,350, and Dutch 9,779. While the Luftwaffe lost 1,284 planes, R.A.F. losses amounted to 931, of which 477 were priceless fighters. French losses in the air are difficult to assess. One reasonable French figure puts the number of planes lost in combat at 560, of which 235 were destroyed on the ground. It was months before the victorious Germans could even count up the vast piles of captured war booty of all descriptions. Among the guns taken were some 7,000 French ‘75s’ of First War vintage, many of them only brought out of retirement in the last desperate hours of the battle; nevertheless, slightly modified by the Wehrmacht, four summers later they would be used with deadly effect to halt British and American tanks landing on the Normandy beaches.

Tears and Celebrations

At thirty-five minutes past midnight on the 25th, the cannon ceased firing and something like the silence of the grave descended on France. Already the endless lines of weary, footsore, broken-spirited refugees had begun to retrace their footsteps, to find out what had happened to their homes. Foodstuffs were in seriously short supply, transportation and other public services had broken down, but in some respects French life reverted – at least temporarily – to normality with surprising speed, just as it had done after the defeat of 1870. On the day after the armistice was concluded, a German war correspondent
(Stackelberg), lunching in a restaurant in Lyon, was astonished to observe a bourgeois French family at the next table going through the important ritual of their Sunday lunch as if nothing in the world had happened. They spent approximately half an hour

bent over the menu, discussing the food, and then at length and with great seriousness discussed city gossip. It struck me as remarkable that their thoughts on this day should not assume other lines, but the meal was something very important for them.

Returning to Paris from Compiègne, William Shirer was intrigued to find that along the Seine ‘The fishermen were dangling their lines from the bank, as always. I thought: “Surely this will go on to the end of Paris, to the end of time.” ’ Ilya Ehrenburg also watched Paris coming back to life, in an implausible kind of way:

The Germans bought souvenirs, smutty postcards, pocket dictionaries in the little shops. Notices appeared in restaurants: ‘
Ici on parle allemand.’
Prostitutes lisped ‘
Mein Süsser
’.

In the countryside Simone de Beauvoir registered surprise at the conqueror’s good behaviour; they

did not cut off children’s hands; they paid for their drinks and the eggs they bought on the farms, and spoke politely… As I was reading in a field two soldiers approached me. They spoke a little clumsy French, and assured me of their friendly feelings towards the French people; it was the English and the Jews who had brought us to this sorry pass.

By and large, the German troops appeared to be kind and helpful. The Gestapo, the Sicherheitsdienst, and all the apparatus of Nazi terror had yet to arrive.

Meanwhile, in England, once it was apparent that Hitler was not going to follow up Dunkirk with an immediate invasion, the shock of defeat turned into a kind of relief that, somehow, strangely enough, life had at least become simpler. King George VI spoke for many when he wrote to his mother: ‘Personally, I feel happier now that we have no allies to be polite to and to
pamper.’ There was, after all, something to be said for being ‘in the finals’ – to quote the headline which one Cockney newsvendor chalked up on his stand.

For the victorious German troops in France, the first summer days after the armistice indeed seemed like a halcyon time of insouciant rapture. They clambered up the Eiffel Tower, gazed down at Napoleon’s tomb, clicking cameras everywhere, like tourists of any country at any time. On the wreckage-strewn Channel beaches, they kicked off their jackboots to paddle in the warm water, gazing across at a defiant but impotent enemy. As the cease-fire came into force, the ascetic Halder noted from his desk: ‘Now begins the administrative work.’ War production was cut back, and there was talk of massive demobilization of the Army. It was also a time of mutual congratulation, and of thanksgiving and celebration, rather than of preparation for any further fighting. Even the icy Molotov (while reaching out with one hand for the Baltic States and the Roumanian province of Bessarabia, as Russia’s self-awarded ‘tip’ for her benevolent neutrality) had sent Hitler ‘the warmest congratulations of the Soviet Government on the splendid success of the German Wehrmacht’. On 17 July, the Grossdeutschland paraded in triumph through Paris, to hold a thanksgiving service in Notre-Dame.
³
The next day in Berlin, a victory parade marched through the Brandenburger Tor, for the first time since 1871. Then, on the 19th, Hitler in a solemn ceremony at the Kroll Opera House promoted twelve of his triumphant generals to the rank of Field-Marshal.
⁴
Such an inflation of military pomp had never been seen during the time of the Kaiser; but nor had such victories.

Shadows: the Flaws of Victory

Yet already there were shadows. As young Lieutenant Mende wrote home: ‘I feel full of peace within this enemy country, and yet also I feel a certain anxiety about this not entirely finished war.’ When in the course of the Berlin victory celebrations Hitler remarked to his sober-faced financial wizard: ‘Well, Herr Schacht, what do you say now?’, Schacht, sibyllike, had simply replied: ‘May God protect you!’ Meanwhile, thousands of miles away in Chicago, Roosevelt was being nominated by the Democratic Party to run for a third term. For 28 June, the twenty-first anniversary of the signature of the Versailles Treaty, Hitler had planned a further act of humiliation for prostrated France by holding a massive parade in front of the palace, followed by an oration delivered inside the Hall of Mirrors. But it was cancelled; there were fears (which even Goering could not allay) that the R.A.F. might also attend. Meanwhile, it was not until 17 June, the day of the Grossdeutschland’s thanksgiving ceremony in Notre-Dame, that the O.K.H. issued its first orders for ‘Operation Sea-Lion’ – the invasion of England. Then, on 29 July, Jodl gathered together some of the senior O.K.W. staff officers in a railway restaurant car, ensured that all windows and doors were closed, and informed them that Hitler had it in mind to attack Russia the following spring.

Soon Hitler’s astounding achievements in France would turn to dust as the diamond brilliance of
Sichelschnitt
was shattered by the fatal flaw latent within it. In his appreciation drawn up for the Kaiser, which prepared the ground for the German attack on Verdun in 1916, Falkenhayn, the German Chief of Staff, had recognized Britain to be Germany’s principal enemy. By ‘bleeding white’ the French Army at Verdun, he had argued, Britain’s ‘best sword would be knocked out of her hand’. The U-boat blockade would do the rest, in due course. Now Hitler had succeeded where Falkenhayn and all the Kaiser’s generals had failed. Britain’s ‘best sword’ lay shattered on the ground. But Hitler and the planners of genius who had created
Sichelschnitt
had in reality thought no further ahead than Falkenhayn;
no contingency plan had been prepared whereby a tottering Britain might be invaded immediately after success had been achieved in France. By mid July, when the first O.K.H. plan was drafted, it was already too late. The Germans had missed the bus, as Chamberlain would have said. The two great errors of the otherwise perfect
Sichelschnitt
– this original fault of high strategy, and the tactical fault of the 24 May ‘Halt Order’ which allowed the B.E.F. to escape from Dunkirk – in conjunction added up to one thing. Britain would remain at war, inviolate. And as long as Britain was there, it was inevitable that sooner or later the immense power of the United States would be brought in too. But like so many of his generation of Germans, their vision blinkered by the memories of 1914–18 and of the shame of Versailles, Hitler could see only France and ‘the last decisive battle’ which would have to be fought there.