To Lose a Battle (91 page)

In fact, as one now sees it in the perspective of time, Hitler’s astonishing triumph over France was to be the direct source of his greatest disaster. After France, the mighty warrior nation which had defeated Germany in 1918, had been overthrown with such ease, what nation on earth could stand up to the Wehrmacht? So Hitler in 1941 was convinced that, while reducing his war production and demobilizing part of his forces, and without furnishing his cohorts with any winter equipment, he could knock out Russia in one lightning campaign. But although in many ways their doctrine of war may initially have been as faulty as that of the French, the Russians would be able to make a retreat equivalent to a French withdrawal from Sedan across the Pyrenees and down to Saragossa, before launching any major counter-offensive. What might even Gamelin and Weygand have achieved, had they but disposed of such space over which to manoeuvre and behind which to form fresh armies? Even more lethal to the Germans than their self-assuredness derived from the easy success in France was the supreme reliance Hitler now placed in his own infallibility. He saw himself as having been proved right in his audacity over the cautiousness of his professional advisers during the planning of
Sichelschnitt
; and, in retrospect, he saw how wrong had been
the strategic assessment in battle of even those like Rundstedt whose judgement he trusted most. In his unquenchable animosity towards the O.K.H., he could not admit that it was in fact not he but Halder who during the campaign had been right. So Hitler became less and less inclined to accept the advice of his military experts, and more and more to rely on his own intuition, until finally it led him to the point of no return at Stalingrad.

French Post-mortems

For four grim years, France disappears from the forefront of the battle. ‘The choice is always between Verdun and Dachau,’ wrote a severe French critic of 1940, Jean Dutourd. Unable to face the prospects of another Verdun in 1940, it was indeed Dachau that became France’s fate. In their hundreds of thousands, Frenchmen were shipped off to the concentration camps or to slave labour inside the Reich. With superb psychological cunning, the Nazis divided the conquered country geographically in two, thereby imposing yet another enduring source of division upon those that already plagued France. In the act of liberation, her old and new Allies would inflict at least as much damage upon France’s cities and countryside as had the Luftwaffe, and the prostrate nation could hardly be subjected to greater humiliation. But there were many Frenchmen who did not agree that the final battle to save national ‘honour’, which so obsessed General Weygand, had yet been fought. Using every device and subterfuge they slipped off to join de Gaulle’s Free French in England, or the ‘Normandie-Niemen Squadron’ in Russia; later, with Anglo-American support, the Resistance would rekindle the flame of ‘honour’ inside France itself.

Who, and what, were responsible for France’s catastrophe in 1940? Could the game have been played differently? At what point did disaster become irremediable? The questions are still asked and re-asked, and the answers become no simpler with time. But post-mortems are irresistible. The Riom Trials, held under the auspices of the Vichy Government in 1942, attempted to saddle the blame for the lost war upon earlier French
Governments. The questions asked were loaded; no official record was made of the proceedings; the ‘trials’ were finally adjourned and then dropped. Equally inconclusive and incomplete were the 2,500 pages of the ‘Serre Report’, based on the findings of the French official Commission of Inquiry which sat from 1947 to 1951. It did its best to exculpate the politicians of the period, but it could not even agree as to whether it was the breakthrough on Corap’s or Huntziger’s front which precipitated the military catastrophe on the Meuse. However, as this present book has tried to show, more than any individual or set of individuals was to blame. Two doctrines and two philosophies and the past events of a generation were involved. Since the ‘day of glory’ of 14 July 1919, almost every throw of the dice had resulted in advantage to Germany and loss to France. Upon Hitler’s reoccupation of the Rhineland, unchallenged, in 1936, the road to disaster was clearly signposted. Three years later France went reluctantly to war, while she was herself still close to a state of civil war, with morale (as Mandel admitted to Spears during the last days of defeat) ‘sapped by the feeling of the last twenty years that there would be no war because France could not stand another bleeding like that of 1914’, and (in the words of Weygand) with a French Army of 1918 facing a Wehrmacht of 1939.

Before the decisive battle itself opened, there were two other chronological milestones on France’s road to disaster. In August 1939, the signature of the Ribbentrop–Molotov Non-Aggression Pact effectively removed any prospect of Germany’s military potential being split by a war on two fronts; a month later, this was compounded by France’s unwillingness to come to the aid of her solitary Polish ally, by launching an offensive in the west. Thus, from October 1939 onwards, France had no option but to remain on the defensive and wait to be attacked. When the attack came the following May, the preponderance of strength – with all factors taken into account – was immeasurably greater on the German side than at any time during the First World War. Therefore, there is a fatalistic view which regards the Battle of France as having been lost even before it was begun. Might France still have been defeated even if the
Germans had not marched to the masterly blueprint of
Sichelschnitt
, if they had simply utilized a crude replay of the Schlieffen Plan of 1914? Possibly.

On the other hand, in war Fate contains many surprises. For all its impressiveness, the Wehrmacht of 1940 was a more fragile instrument, less consistently solid throughout, than the Kaiser’s Army of 1914; nor did it have the same weight of resources behind it. On almost every occasion when Allied troops in 1940 came up against the ordinary infantry divisions which comprised the great mass of the Wehrmacht, they held their own. Acutely limited in their fuel supplies, the Panzers could not have fought a protracted campaign without a major reorganization. Then there is the prime consideration of the steadfastness of the German High Command, about which much has already been said. It is always held that the Younger Moltke lost the First War on the Marne because his nerve failed. Yet there were times during both the Norwegian and the French campaigns when the German High Command of 1940 revealed itself to be potentially little less impressionable than Moltke. What, then, if the steel tip provided by the few Panzer and motorized divisions could have been blunted, that vulnerable wooden spear-shaft slashed into by determined Allied armour-led flank attacks, the nerves of the German High Command shaken by one sharp reverse? Might the German onslaught have been brought to a temporary halt, perhaps long enough for the Allies to reorganize their forces into a more coherent defence? The impact Rundstedt’s Ardennes Offensive of 1944 made upon the Allies indeed suggests how even such a last-gasp effort (and against a far greater relative superiority than the Germans possessed in May 1940) can at least win time.

It was
time
that was the vital element which – more than weapons, even perhaps more than morale – France most lacked in 1940. After the battle had been engaged, the afternoon of 15 May, the sixth day of fighting, marks the moment of almost certain military defeat. This was the decisive day that saw the failure of the first French counter-attacks, to which had been dedicated the main weight of her armoured reserves, and the day on which it was clear that the Germans could not be prevented
from breaking out of their Meuse bridgeheads. For the French armour to have concentrated for a blow effective enough to have halted the Panzers on the 15th, the necessary dispositions would have had to be decreed by the 12th. But with the essential French reserves dispersed as they were in the line-up for the Dyle–Breda Plan’s advance into Belgium, this would have proved virtually impossible. The French ripostes were almost bound to be too late. The speed with which Panzer warfare developed in 1940 certainly proved the validity of the dictum of Moltke the Elder: ‘
One
fault only in the initial deployment of an Army cannot be made good during the whole course of the campaign.’ On top of this must be added the tremendous significance of the Luftwaffe’s supremacy in the air, which (although later in the war the Germans were able to conduct an imposing defence in the teeth of far greater Allied tactical air superiority) constituted a decisive factor at this stage of the Second World War. Apart from the lethal effect of the close-support Stukas, the Luftwaffe’s far-ranging medium bombers were what finally denied the French High Command the time it needed to commit its reserves to battle, at the right moment and the right place.

The odds against France opposing
Sichelschnitt
in 1940, with any successful defence and even allowing for the element of the unexpected, remain enormously high. When all is said and done, the strategic brilliance of the German plan and tactical skill with which it was executed will always make it one of the classic campaigns of history. Certainly, few between great powers have ever been determined so swiftly, or so decisively. For a recent comparison, one needs to search back, beyond the defeat of France in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, to Napoleon’s triumph of Austerlitz in 1805.

What Happened to Them? The Victors

So immense were the universal consequences of the Fall of France that one tends to lose sight of the leading actors in the tragedy. On the German side, there were countless thousands of all ranks who, like Rommel’s two ace commanders, Rothenburg
⁵
and Bismarck,
⁶
either fell later in the war or else ended in disgrace with the Nazi hierarchy. Rommel’s own subsequent career is well known; the legendary hero of the desert war yields to the disillusioned Field-Marshal conducting a hopeless defence of northern France against the Allied invasion of 1944, and finally to the critic of the régime forced to take poison or be shot by the Gestapo. Curiously enough, of all the commanders of the ten Panzer divisions which proved so decisive in France, Rommel alone later rose to great prominence; Kirchner, for instance, who had led the enormously successful 1st Panzer, ended the war as a corps commander. On the other hand, his junior, the tough and ruthless Lieutenant-Colonel Hermann Balck, was to become a full general commanding an Army Group in France (in 1944–5), and one of a handful of Germans to be awarded the highest grade of the Ritterkreuz decoration.
⁷

Guderian, promoted Colonel-General in September 1940, was given command of the Second Panzer Army, which he led in the battle for Moscow during the autumn of 1941. After the failure of the campaign, he fell under a shadow and was transferred to the reserve. The strain of the past years had left its mark and in 1942 he began to suffer from heart trouble. Following the bomb attempt of 20 July 1944, Guderian – always politically acceptable to Hitler – was given the job once held by Halder as Chief of the O.K.H. General Staff, until in March 1945 he too was finally dismissed. In poor health in his last years, he died in 1954, aged sixty-six. His portrait still hangs in a place of honour in the barracks of Panzer units of the present-day Bundeswehr. Kleist led the First Panzer Army into the Ukraine in 1941, and became another of Hitler’s Field-Marshals. Manstein was also promoted Field-Marshal and justly came to be rated as Germany’s ablest field commander; he fell into disgrace with the Führer on the same day as Kleist – 30 March 1944.
⁸
Rundstedt led Army Group South at the
start of the Russian campaign in 1941, and it was he who (reluctantly) commanded the last German offensive of the winter of 1944–5 – over terrain which he knew so well from 1940. After the war he was imprisoned in England, but released in 1949. He died, aged seventy-eight, in 1953. Hitler’s
bête noire
, Brauchitsch, was sacked after the failure to take Moscow, when Hitler himself took over command of the O.K.H., thereby ending, once and for all, the independence of the German General Staff. After the war, Brauchitsch was to have been arraigned on war crimes charges, but died (in 1948) before a trial could be held. Franz Halder lost his job in 1942, after yet another disagreement with Hitler; implicated with the ‘resistance’ in the 1944 bomb plot, he was found inside Dachau by the Americans in 1945. Graf von Kielmansegg, a mere Captain on the staff of 1st Panzer Division at Sedan, returned to the German Army after the war, to become a full General commanding the N.A.T.O. Central Forces.

The Vanquished

For the French leaders, defeat was followed by long years of frustration or imprisonment, of recrimination by their compatriots and of attempts to justify their own roles in the battle. Many lived to considerable ages. On his replacement by Weygand, Gamelin had rejoined his wife in their ‘comfortable, modest ground-floor flat in the Avenue Foch which we had bought in 1937, in anticipation of the moment of my retirement’. As the Germans approached Paris, Gamelin wrote to Weygand informing him that he was leaving for his sister’s house in the country; but he would naturally be available to return at any instant. He was hurt to receive no acknowledgement from Weygand. After confinement in various châteaux, from 1943 onwards Gamelin found himself in Buchenwald,
together with Daladier, Blum and President Lebrun. All survived, and in 1945 Gamelin threw himself tirelessly into the publication of three hefty volumes of memoirs and apologiae, entitled
Servir.
He died in 1958, aged eighty-six. General Maxime Weygand, after a brief interlude as Minister of National Defence in Pétain’s Government, was sent to Algeria as Delegate-General. Here he acquitted himself with distinction, maintaining the spirit of the Army there while keeping the Germans at bay. Later he too was imprisoned by the Germans, and later still by his own countrymen, for a short period. He died in 1965, at the venerable age of ninety-eight, mistrustful of the British, and shrewdly alert (though rather deaf) to the very end.