Voices from the Dark Years (4 page)
Read Voices from the Dark Years Online
Authors: Douglas Boyd
The 1,500 refugees predicted by Delthil for the first wave from the north and east of the country turned out to be 2,000, increasing the population of Moissac by 25 per cent. Despite this, local people carried on with their lives. In 1870 and 1914 German guns had shelled Paris, but Moissagais families, except those with a man in uniform, showed little interest in a war to be fought hundreds of kilometres to the north. As he would many times in the next four years, the prefect of the
département
decried the insular attitude of these peasants concerned only with their land and with selling their produce at the best price.
The bubble burst on 10 May 1940, when Hitler launched a three-pronged attack on Holland, Belgium and France. The French had a very efficient intelligence network all along the front that reported troop movements across the Rhine, and signals from their agents in neutral Luxemburg the previous day had warned of the arrival there of storm-troopers disguised as tourists. Woken at 1 a.m. to hear the latest reports, the French Commander-in-Chief General Maurice Gamelin muttered, ‘Take no action,’ and went back to sleep.
Each side had used the eight months of bluff and counter-bluff to build up front-line strength. A major reason for Hitler prolonging the phoney war was that Polish heroism had shot down or severely damaged 30 per cent of the Luftwaffe’s aircraft and Goering needed time to replace pilots and aircraft before launching a new aggression in the west.
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By the beginning of May, with the eastern front secured politically for the moment by the Ribbentrop-Molotov non-aggression pact, Hitler was able to deploy along Germany’s western front 135 divisions, including twelve Panzer divisions with 2,439 tanks and a total of 3,369 warplanes.
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Facing them were 104 French divisions and just fifteen divisions of the BEF, which should have been more than enough to fight a defensive battle in prepared positions, without counting the Dutch and Belgian armies and fortifications that would absorb the first German thrusts. The British government had promised its French allies to build the BEF up to thirty-two divisions and eventually forty-five, but not before 1941 at the earliest.
8
Although French tanks outnumbered the German armour 4:3, less than a third of these were in mobile armoured units due to the failure of the General Staff to rethink this tool of modern warfare along the lines argued for more than a decade by a cavalry colonel named Charles de Gaulle.
Ninety per cent of French artillery pieces dated back to the First World War. 55th Infantry Division, defending the key city of Sedan, did not have a single anti-tank gun capable of stopping a Panzer.
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Thanks to the Depression and the pacifist stance of inter-war governments, particularly Leon Blum’s left-wing Popular Front, the French air force was also poorly equipped. Flying off grass fields with their outdated motors fuelled by 70 or 87 octane fuel, its pilots went up against Messerschmidts and Stukas of the Blitzkrieg-tested Luftwaffe, with little on their side but courage and willingness to die for their country.
It is not true that the French General Staff placed
all
its faith in the supposed impregnability of the Maginot Line fortifications running along the Franco-German frontier from Switzerland in the east as far as Belgium in the west, but that is perversely where its best troops were stationed – and not in the unfortified stretch at the western end of the line.
When Hitler had invaded Poland the previous September, British journalist Nicholas Bodington had been with the French armies on the Alsace-Lorraine frontier with Germany. Taking advantage of the inevitable thinning of the forces ranged against them, the French General Staff had ‘straightened the line’ by ironing out a few kinks, in the process annexing thirty-six German villages which became briefly French after only a few salvoes of artillery from the retreating defenders. It seems that this early success engendered a false sense of superiority in Paris.
In the summer of 1940, with the left flank of the Allied line anchored on the Channel coast and entrusted to Lord Gort’s BEF, the space between it and the Maginot Line was filled by some very second-rate French units, rotated so often that their officers did not know which units were on their flanks, while the men they commanded were less acquainted with their weapons than the picks and shovels they were using to construct makeshift blockhouses and trenches in a too-little, too-late attempt to extend the Maginot Line westwards on the cheap.
It was to this stretch of the front between Longwy at the north-west end of the line and Sedan that General Franz Halder had pointed on a map at OKW – the German Army High Command – six months earlier. ‘Here is the weak point,’ he said. ‘Here we have to go through!’
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Launched on 10 May, the northern thrust of the German attack sliced through the Dutch army, while the central drive took the panzers deep into Belgium and the southern prong of Hitler’s trident drove through the Ardennes Forest of southern Belgium and Luxembourg like an arrow pointing straight at Sedan.
General Erich von Manstein’s
Fall Sichel
, or Operation Sickle, was a classic, fast-moving, massive Panzer offensive with close air cover – that essential feature of successful Blitzkrieg, which the chiefs of both the RAF and the French air force thought a misapplication of air-power. By coming through the theoretically impassable Ardennes forests, Manstein wrong-footed the Allied defence so brilliantly that, three days after the start of the offensive, his advance units were in France.
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Holland surrendered to the inevitable on 15 May. Hearing the news, Premier Paul Reynaud took one look at the war map and telephoned the new British Prime Minister Winston Churchill to say, ‘The battle is lost.’
Far from the sound of the guns, on 18 May Mayor Delthil warned the stunned inhabitants of Moissac to expect a new wave of refugees from the north and east. It was almost a relief for him to have something so mundane to worry about after the weeks of rumours about parachutes dropping on remote areas, of women seen struggling along country roads carrying cases so heavy they
must
have contained weapons, and were obviously storm troopers disguised as nuns – and of mysterious aircraft engines heard at night. At least the refugees were real.
On 28 May, Belgium also surrendered to avoid further useless loss of life. What else could King Leopold’s government have done? One unique political gesture of the little-respected Belgian politicians was to rush through a law authorising the destructions of
état
civil
records of Jewish children to give them the names of non-Jewish adoptive parents. No count exists of how many young lives this saved.
After the panzers of the two northern thrusts regrouped and swung southwards, they poured through the weakest point in the centre of the Allied line. Judging the Battle of France lost, Lord Gort began withdrawing the BEF to the coast in preparation for evacuation by sea before the line of retreat was cut. They nearly missed the boat, literally, after General Heinz Guderian’s tank columns reached the Channel coast near Abbeville on 20 May and swung north to cut off the British from the ports of Calais and Dunkirk. However, Hitler ordered Guderian on 24 May to halt on the canal line just outside Dunkirk while the Luftwaffe wiped out the men on the beaches – which it failed to do. By the end of the seaborne evacuation 198,000 British and 140,000 French and Belgian soldiers, sailors and airmen had crossed the Channel to safety. Such was the elation in Britain that Churchill had to warn his people ‘not to ascribe to this deliverance the character of a victory’.
N
OTES
1.
D. Barlone,
A French Officer’s Diary
(Cambridge: CUP, 1942), pp. 8–11.
2.
T. Kernan,
France on Berlin Time
(New York and Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1941), pp. 223–9.
3.
Ibid., pp. 229–31.
4.
C.D. Freeman and D. Cooper,
The Road to Bordeaux
(London: Readers’ Union & Cresset Press, 1942), pp. 12, 13.
5.
Ibid.
6.
A. Hillgruber,
Hitlers Strategie: Politik und Kriegführung 1940–41
(Bonn: Bernard & Graefe, 1965), p. 38.
7.
Figures quoted in E.R. May,
Strange Victory
(New York: Hill & Wang, 2002), p. 477.
8.
Ibid., p. 309.
9.
Ibid., p. 388.
10.
Ibid., p. 229.
11.
Ibid., p. 309.
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The Germans did not have it all their own way. Among French commanders who bloodied their nose more than once was Colonel Charles de Gaulle, France’s premier advocate of tank warfare. The success with which he practised what he had preached in books between the wars earned a citation from Weygand:
An admirable leader, daring and energetic, on 30 and 31 May he attacked an enemy bridgehead, penetrating more than five kilometres into the enemy lines and capturing several hundred prisoners and valuable materiel.
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However, in the chaos of the German breakthrough not even officers like de Gaulle could do much at the front, so he was recalled to Paris by Reynaud and appointed Under-Secretary for War in a government that was numbed at being abandoned by its only ally.
Reynaud still had 2 million men under arms in the area of conflict but, having taken losses of 92,000 dead and over 200,000 wounded in the brief campaign – against German losses roughly half as severe – his cabinet was irrevocably divided over the course of action to pursue. A minority of six ministers supported his plan to fight on and eventually withdraw to French North Africa and continue the war from there, but Reynaud’s political credit was all but spent. Exactly two months earlier, on 28 March 1940 he had signed an agreement in London under which both British and French governments undertook not to negotiate peace terms unilaterally. Renault had signed without first seeking the approval of his cabinet, which made his signature unconstitutional and not binding on the French government. In any case, as President Lebrun argued after the war at Pétain’s trial, Britain had unilaterally vitiated the agreement on two counts: she had never committed her air force to the common cause and she had withdrawn her ground troops from the conflict without consultation.
In Paris hardly anyone of consequence, inside the cabinet or elsewhere, believed it was still possible to stop the German advance. The great hero of 1914–18, Marshal Henri-Philippe Pétain, told the American Ambassador on 4 June that he firmly believed the British would shortly sign a pact with Germany.
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Although Charles de Gaulle was despatched to London on 5 June with the acting rank of brigadier, there was little he could do there at this stage.
A majority of thirteen ministers in Reynaud’s cabinet wanted to sue for terms immediately, never mind what pieces of paper had been signed with the British, who in their consideration had deserted France in her hour of need. Their position was strengthened by Marshal Pétain as vice-president of the Council of Ministers and General Maxime Weygand, who had replaced Gamelin as Commander-in-Chief of the army after the disastrous first week of the invasion. France’s two senior soldiers, they saw no alternative to an armistice, providing it ‘did not stain French honour’
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or involve handing over the intact French navy, built up and modernised by Admiral of the Fleet Xavier-François Darlan, despite the pacifist policies of inter-war governments.
With the army in full flight and no prepared positions to fall back on, there was nowhere the French army could stand and fight with any reasonable chance of holding a line against so fast-moving an enemy. There was also the question of morale. In the First World War, France and the British Empire each mobilised between 8 and 9 million men against the Central Powers, but the total French casualties had been twice as high as those for the whole Empire. From a population of 40 million, France lost 1,357,800 men killed, with 4,266,000 wounded and another 537,000 taken prisoner or missing in action. At the other end of the scale, the decisive but late entry of the USA into the war cost only a total of 323,018 American casualties, including 116,516 dead.
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