Military Misfortunes
Page 28
The central teachings of the high command on the nature of future war were incorporated into two instruction manuals: Provisional Instructions on the Tactical Employment of Large Units, published in 1921, and Instructions on the Tactical Employment of Large Units, published in 1936. Both emphasized the preponderance of firepower in combat and underlined the importance of central command controlling the battle as it unfolded. The expectations built up in the army as a result of the latter proposition were, as we shall see, to be grievously disappointed once war actually began. Generally, both sets of regulations denied any place for initiative and stressed the overriding importance of adhering to a formulaic scheme of battle that would unfold in predetermined stages. The injunction in the 1936 Instructions that “audacious solutions . . . should be executed methodically” conveniently exemplifies the limitations of official thought during these years.41
The picture of future war built up in the various training manuals and instructions issued to the French army during most of the interwar period was one in which the measured, remorseless application of national strength would eventually grind down an opponent. The defense of prepared positions, against which the enemy’s offensive strength would dissolve, was the foundation of victory. Offensives would only be carried out after careful preparation and with heavy material superiority. When they were unleashed, attacks would have a number of “phases” each consisting of two or more “bounds.” Where the offensive came up against serious opposition, the French were not taught to infiltrate the weak spots but to outflank the obstacle and then destroy it.42 This predictive scenario of future war, based heavily on a blinkered perception of the key features of World War I, catered to many national prejudices and worries but in doing so it forced the army into a mold that made if vulnerable to the techniques simultaneously being devised across the Rhine.
Although the current of official opinion flowed strongly in one direction, an occasional attempt was made to swim against the tide and suggest that France adopt a system of military organization more akin to the Germans. By far the most significant example of such heterodox thinking was Charles de Gaulle’s Vers l’armée de métier (Toward a professional army), published in 1934. Turning his back on France’s long tradition of mobilizing huge numbers of conscripts to form mass armies of infantry, de Gaulle (who had never seen an armored division when he wrote) proposed the creation of a force of six divisions each combining tanks, mobile artillery and motorized infantry and totalling a mere 100,000 men. Such a force would be “a terrible mechanical system of fire, of shock, of speed and of camouflage” which could go into action instantaneously instead of having to go through the cumbrous process of calling-up reserves, mobilization and deployment.45 De Gaulle’s visionary ideas were treated as a blueprint, not as a speculative stimulus to fresh thinking, and were rejected on a variety of grounds that ranged from the political—such an army could easily be the instrument for a right-wing coup against the government—to the economic—that France lacked the fuel for such a force and could not be sure of maintaining the necessary supplies.
When the German army struck, France was in the worst of all possible positions: losing faith in the established predictive paradigm, it had not yet replaced it with an alternative. During the latter part of the 1930s the French army had begun cautiously to experiment with tanks operating independently of infantry. Provisional instructions for the employment of tanks in war were drawn up in December 1937 and June 1938. They envisaged large numbers of tanks being used in surprise attacks on extended fronts and foresaw operations designed to penetrate enemy positions, to counterattack, to disrupt and demoralize a retreating opponent, and to turn an enemy flank.44 A decision taken late in 1938, after the Munich crisis, to create two armored divisions in 1940—a development hastened, as we have seen, by the onset of war—seemed to point in the direction of a new war scenario and an anticipation of the future that differed significantly from the notion of something resembling a rerun of World War I. But these developments were scarcely underway before the army was caught up in war. Hindered by the lack of productive capacity of French industry from accelerating programs of motorization and mechanization, and therefore unable to redirect the mental world of the French army toward a new style of warfare, Gamelin adopted an “equivocal stance” and prepared his army for both offensive and defensive operations.45
Any anticipation of the shape of future war ought logically to be based, at least in part, on how a probable enemy is likely to fight. During 1937–38, on lecture tours to French bases, Major Schlesser of the counterintelligence service took the opportunity to visit each garrison library and check up on whether anyone was reading the French translation of Guderian’s book Acbtung Panzer, which his department had distributed free. He found that not a single copy had been opened.46 If this report accurately illustrated the ignorance of the bulk of the French officer corps about German military techniques, the same was not the case at higher levels. From the 1920s onward, the French were well aware that German doctrine was oriented towards the offensive. By 1937 French military intelligence knew, as a result of its monitoring of German maneuvers, of the war of movement being practiced on the other side of the Rhine; and a detailed analysis of Guderian’s ideas on war, which was completed in May 1939, made it transparently plain that the Germans put a high premium on mobility and surprise. In terms of its general predictions of German military behavior, French military intelligence has been claimed to have been “detailed, comprehensive, and competent.”47
The impact of German ideas on the French before September 1939 was slight partly because of the firmness of the foundations on which France had built its own doctrine. It was further diminished by the calculation that the German style of mechanized warfare might play into French hands. On the eve of the war the official view was that great advantages could well accrue to France once the enemy attack was launched:
If our formations are well adapted to the situation and to the terrain, our flank guards vigilant, the depth [of our defense] sufficient, our antiaircraft and antitank weapons well posted at all times; if our officers demonstrate the spirit of quick decision, solid nerves and sure reactions—then it is the German who will be caught in his own trap, for he will have compromised the equilibrium of his forces for a premature action—and we will, from that moment on, have acquired over him a first and serious advantage and an indisputable moral ascendancy.48
This comforting conclusion both negated the value of attempting to anticipate the enemy’s actions and placed a heavy responsibility on the army to cope with novel conditions when the time came. It also assumed a weapons inventory that France did not possess.
After September 1, 1939, France needed accurate intelligence about Germany’s capabilities, as well as general prognostications about the broad shape of possible conflict. Three questions had to be answered: How large a force could Germany put into the field? Where would it attack? And when? French military intelligence was responsible for gathering the information upon which to answer them. Its critics have blamed it for failing on all counts49; its defenders have claimed that its work was the closest thing to human perfection that could ever be attained.50 As we shall see, the intelligence services got some things right and others wrong; but as the evidence that the Germans were about to attack through the Ardennes became ever stronger, they faced the difficult task of persuading Gamelin to change his mind on the basis of inconclusive fragments of evidence that had to compete with his preferred strategy of fighting in Belgium, to which he was heavily committed.
French intelligence was most successful in predicting the order of battle of the German land forces in May 1940. It estimated that the Wehrmacht could field 110 to 115 infantry divisions and 10 to 12 Panzer divisions, whereas the actual figures were 117 and 10 respectively. However, when it came to counting tanks the French went wildly astray. Just before the battle of France opened, military intelligence predicted an attack of 4,700 German tanks, but on May 15 it rai
sed its estimate to between 7,000 and 7,500.51 This was three times the real size of the German tank force, which numbered 2,574. When asked why his predictions had increased so massively, the head of military intelligence was reported as replying, “It is what you call a ‘covering’ intelligence report, in case things go wrong.”52 French estimates of the size of the Luftwaffe were equally pessimistic. As a result of grossly overestimating the productive capacity of the peacetime German air industry, the French reckoned in June 1939 that their enemy already had over 9,000 planes. In fact, the Germans were able to put 3,500 planes into battle on May 10, 1940, somewhat more than double the numbers of French machines available but very many fewer than expected. The fact that the main French failures in “bean-counting” occurred in exactly those categories of weapons that gave the Blitzkrieg its awesome material and psychological force meant that morale in the higher echelons was weakened even before battle began.
In trying to forecast where the Germans would attempt to break through the Allied front, the French confronted the awkward fact that the choice was wide. The options available to Germany included attacking Holland or Belgium; assaulting the Maginot line while simultaneously carrying out flanking operations in southern Belgium and Luxembourg; breaking the neutrality of Switzerland to outflank the Maginot line from the south; and crossing the Ardennes. Even when information began to point ever more unequivocally to the Ardennes as the probable site of the German attack, the intelligence services had to convince Gamelin that their predictions outweighed his strategic preferences. This they failed to do.
The fact that the German war plans changed in February 1940 made it extremely difficult for military intelligence to gather accurate information in time to be able to persuade the high command to redirect its gaze away from central Belgium and reposition major units in the target area. However, on March 22, Colonel Paul Paillole, head of the German section of French counterintelligence, reported that the Germans had suddenly begun to study the routes from Sedan to Abbeville and were paying particular attention to roads, bridges and water obstacles. From this he concluded that “an attack through Belgium towards the Channel is imminent.”53 Warnings from the Belgians that the Germans seemed to be turning their attention to the Ardennes area were passed to the French high command early in March and repeated on April 14. Two days earlier French counterintelligence had learned from a double agent that the Germans were focusing their interest on the corridor from Sedan to Amiens. On April 13 these facts were reported not to Gamelin but to Georges, commander in chief of the northeast front.54 This unfortunate decision, probably taken as a consequence of the deep rivalry between Gamelin and Georges, deprived the supreme commander of a vital piece of corroborative information.
In the last days of “phony war” warnings of the impending German assault began to flood in. On April 30 the French military attaché in Berne reported that the German attack was set for May 8–10 and that its focus would be Sedan. The following day French counterintelligence at Berne, relying on a Swiss source, confirmed the dates and reported that although the whole of the front would be attacked, including the Maginot Line, the main effort would come around Sedan. Also on May 1, Paul Thümmel, a member of the German military intelligence service and an agent for the Czechs, reported through The Hague that the German offensive would begin on May 10.55 In the last week before the attack, the Dutch military attaché in Berlin received three warnings of its imminence from no less a person than General Hans Oster, second in command of the German military intelligence service, the last of them at 9:50 P.M. on the evening of May 9.56
Although considerable, the information which pointed to a German attack on the Ardennes was too disparate to form an incontrovertible case. It was not and never could be overwhelming; after all, the Germans were planning a simultaneous attack on Holland and Belgium as well as through the Ardennes. The best that could be said with certainty—and French military intelligence did say it—was that an attack on the Maginot Line or through Switzerland was unlikely without good warning. The scraps of information reaching the various Allied intelligence services-not all of which seem to have reached the French supreme commander-were not enough to outweigh the conglomeration of reasons that led him to focus his attentions elsewhere. The Ardennes was perceived as being extremely difficult to penetrate: An analysis undertaken in 1927 had reached the conclusion that it would take an enemy nine days to cross it, and its impenetrability was reconfirmed by Pétain in 1934 and by Gamelin himself in 1936.57 Gamelin also had his own strategic preoccupations; the Dyle plan was proposed partly because he feared that the Germans might attack Holland only, and one of his overriding concerns seems to have been to pick a battleground where French, Belgian, Dutch, and British forces could act in combination.
The weight of evidence pointing to a German attack in the Ardennes, which Gamelin ignored, has been described as “formidable.”58 The difficulty in basing firm predictions on it was that it was far from conclusive. It also formed but one piece of a jigsaw puzzle the French were trying to piece together out of a mass of contradictions. Thus, for example, the warnings of French military intelligence that Germany was gathering its strength for an attack in the west had to be set against the report of the former French military attaché in Berlin that it would be impossible for Germany to attack in the west until autumn 1940 at the earliest.59 France was also the victim of a skillful German campaign of deception, culminating in a speech by Goering saying that the Germans intended to attack the Maginot Line in two places between May 5 and 15.60 Nevertheless, there were good enough grounds for Gamelin to reassess the defensibility of the Ardennes, and enough time for him to have reinforced the line with better troops than those of General Andre-Georges Corap’s Ninth Army. In this respect the French intelligence services provided him with as much as it was reasonable to expect in the way of predictive certainties.
Failure to Adapt
For Frenchmen the most humiliating fact about the disastrous campaign of 1940 was the ease with which the Germans swept their armies aside. “This few weeks’ campaign, which led to a defeat so total and so sudden,” wrote General André Beaufre, “was from first to last an endless surprise exposing our inability to cope with the enemy’s torrential advance or find any answer to it.”61 For the French army and air force the campaign was a total failure without even the smallest redeeming feature. Where the French were more or less a numerical match for the Germans—in men and tanks—they performed abysmally. Their national pride in tatters in June 1940, they at once began to search for scapegoats. The politicians of the interwar years were a convenient target for vilification by a regime that had supplanted them, and when the Vichy government began their trial at Riom the scope of the investigation was carefully restricted so that it excluded any examination of the military conduct of the war. In the political atmosphere of the day the need to spare the feelings of the generals and their troops had a higher priority than the search for truth.
In fact, it is impossible to explain France’s collapse in 1940 without analyzing the performance of command as well as of those who obeyed its instructions. As regards the former, some judgments about the quality of the men who occupied high rank are unavoidable. It is just as important, however, to examine the organizational structure within which the generals had to operate and the systems by which they functioned. For, as we have learned, separating individuals from their working environment leaves important features of military misfortune unexplained. Judgments about the performance of French troops must be tempered by consideration of the resources available to them and the preparation they were given.
The failure of the French high command to rise to its obligations in May 1940 was itself a complex matter. In essence, it was a consequence of the personal deficiencies of a number of highly placed individuals, the defects of the structure within which they acted, and the inadequacies of the system by which they sought to operate. Failure in each of these three aspects of command was likely to be
costly, though not necessarily fatal; failure in all three simultaneously put a weight of responsibility on the troops themselves that they were quite unable to bear. In large measure, the troops failed to adapt to the demands of the campaign of 1940 because their senior officers failed them.
Gamelin seems to have been acutely conscious of the weaknesses of his position and of the forces at his command from the moment the war began. Writing to Gauché of French military intelligence in September 1939, he remarked that “never in any period of her history has France been engaged in a war in conditions which are initially so unfavorable.”62 Premier Paul Reynaud, who was on the point of sacking Gamelin on May 9, 1940, called him a “nerveless philosopher” and raged at his impassivity and inertia during the Norwegian campaign: “He’s a prefect, he’s a bishop, but he’s absolutely not a commander.”63 There is no doubt that, once the fighting began, Gamelin’s inertia deprived his subordinates of the guidance they needed—a guidance that, as we have seen, the interwar regulations led them to expect. There was also a deep gulf of political suspicion between premier and supreme commander, for Gamelin was the protégé of Reynaud’s predecessor and rival, Daladier, who had stayed on in the government as minister of national defense, whereas the premier was known to favor General Georges.