Military Misfortunes

by Eliot A Cohen

  On the day war broke out Gamelin installed himself at Vincennes as supreme commander, appointing Georges commander in chief of land forces and of the northeastern theater. Two days later Gamelin formally gave Georges authority over the British Expeditionary Force. Having removed himself from direct control of the battle—which, in any case, he would find it hard to exercise since his headquarters at Vincennes lacked a radio—Gamelin now confused the chain of command yet further. In October, aware that he was due to retire in eleven months’ time and anxious to maneuver Georges into a position that would hinder him from making a bid for the post of inspector general of the army, Gamelin demoted him and created a third headquarters organization, G.H.Q. Land Forces, under General André Doumenc.64 Among the many unfortunate consequences of this administrative replication was the fact that the military intelligence section was split into two separate halves, one with Doumenc and the other with Georges, which did nothing to improve coordination between intelligence and planning.

  When the battle for France began, the scattered locations of the headquarters for the three armies made coordinating their activities almost impossible. Gamelin was at Vincennes, just east of Paris; Georges was at La Ferté-sous-Jouarre, 40 miles east of the capital; and Doumenc was at Montry on the Marne, midway between the two. Vuillemin commanded the air force from St. Jean les deux Jumeaux, near La Ferté; and Admiral Jean Darlan was at naval headquarters at Maintenon southwest of Paris. To add further complexity to what was already a cumbrous chain of command, Georges appointed Billotte coordinator of Allied forces in the north on May 11, 1940, after the battle had started, so that he could concentrate on the Franco-German border and Switzerland, leaving operations in Belgium to his new subordinate. As well as weakening the command structure, this move diminished the prospects for Allied cooperation since neither the Belgians nor the British regarded Billotte as a person of much account.65

  The command structure developed for the French air force was no less cumbersome, and once war began it created even greater confusion than that afflicting the army. Before the war a structure was devised according to which the commander of the air forces in the northeast theater, General H. E. Mouchard, would receive his operational orders from the commander in chief of the air force, General Vuillemin, and from Georges as the theater land commander. Then in February 1940 Mouchard was sacked, and a new cooperation air force on the northeastern front under General Têtu was created.66 His command was in turn subdivided into a number of zones of aerial operations that corresponded to those of the army groups of the northeastern front. When the fighting started, the commanders of the zones of aerial operations found themselves having to act on orders emanating from four different sources: from their army group commander, from Têtu, from Billotte, and from Vuillemin. The air war quickly dissolved under the twin impact of the Luftwaffe and a mass of contradictory orders.

  Between September 3, 1939, and May 10, 1940, Gamelin sent Georges 140 general communications. Over the next nine days he sent none, despite his reservations about how Georges was handling the battle.67 On the morning of May 19, Doumenc telephoned the supreme commander to tell him that the moment had come for him to intervene. Gamelin then sat down and wrote out a “Secret and Personal Instruction” recommending a counterattack from north and south to slice off the columns of Panzers already nearing the Channel coast. The best that can be said for this suggestion is that it came four days too late. That same evening Reynaud sacked Gamelin and replaced him with Weygand. After first attempting to cut the German “corridor,” the new supreme commander contributed to the strategic confusion by deciding to defend Paris and then changing his mind and falling back to the Caen-Dôle line.

  While Gamelin was displaying such damaging inertia, his subordinates were frantically trying to repair the harm done by the advancing Germans. Communications were poor, so that commanders generally lacked up-to-date and accurate information and depended heavily on the civilian telephone net. In some cases, even this luxury was not available: at Doumenc’s headquarters news arrived from all quarters by telephone, and once an hour it was relayed to supreme headquarters at Vincennes by dispatch rider.68 In the field, divisional and army headquarters moved repeatedly, often over distances of no more than 20 to 35 kilometers. These short retirements reflected the attempt by Georges and Billotte to sew together a line of resistance as quickly as possible; however, since the Germans moved faster than the French, these moves never traded enough space to win the necessary time to organize a stand.

  Under the pressure of remorseless enemy attacks the French command system broke down at all levels. At its apex Gamelin was inert, “suspended,” in John Cairns’ words, “between ignorance of the enemy’s intention and inability to marshal a counterattack let alone a counteroffensive.”69 Generals in command of armies and army groups attempted to cope with the rapidly changing circumstances they faced and the shortage of timely and accurate information by “getting forward” to see for themselves: General Henri Giraud, having found a headquarters at Bohain with buried telephone cables, abandoned it to get forward to battalion headquarters.70 This understandable but unfortunate response to the unforeseen broke up the command structure by removing vital portions of it at critical moments. As a result, French divisional commanders often found that they were simultaneously out of contact with their superiors and their subordinates.

  One of the reasons why senior commanders acted in this apparently irresponsible way—and therefore one of the causes of their failure—was shortage of field intelligence about the enemy. Captured intelligence information was often transmitted too slowly up the chain of command to have any operational effect.71 But in essence, field intelligence was in short supply. On May 1 the Germans changed the key settings on their Enigma ciphering machine, and the new ones took three weeks to break. Captured documents did produce some useful information, but it was generally a case of too little, too late. The Germans, in contrast, had a comprehensive knowledge of Allied dispositions, thanks to documents captured in Norway and the decryption of French military traffic.72

  When the campaign in France is considered in the light of the dominant prewar doctrines that had shaped the French army it is possible to see how strongly these preconceived ideas influenced the actions of men who were getting little or no clear guidance from the high command. Corap’s immediate response to the German penetration of his front on May 19 was to try to contain it by recreating a stable front line in order to be in a position to launch a counterattack. Jean Flavigny, the general commanding XXI Corps south of Sedan, presented with a golden opportunity on May 14 to attack the soft southern flank of Guderian’s Panzers as they swung west to start their drive to the sea, instead broke up one of only four armored divisions in the French order of battle “so as to block every road and path down which the German armor might come.”73 Mistakes such as these were repeated many times as French commanders reacted to the unexpected by turning for succor to a doctrine that had deprived them of their reflexes.74 Because the defenders’ counterstrokes were so few in number and so weak in execution, the outcome of the campaign of 1940 seems to have turned largely on French military fragility. Without the remarkable imbalance between the combat performance of the two parties, it would not qualify for inclusion in our catalog of military misfortunes—even if the outcome had been the same.

  Not merely did Gamelin and Weygand fail to command—they also failed to coordinate the allied armies alongside which they fought. The question of command of the Allied troops had deliberately been left unresolved, as Gamelin believed nothing would be possible until the battle actually began. The Belgians’ refusal to cooperate with Britain or France until the Germans had crossed their frontier created considerable resentment. Commenting on the Dyle plan, the British chief of the imperial general staff, complained:

  We have to undertake a movement from a prepared position across a very flat plain to lines of obstacles which have in no way been prepared. All to help a country t
o resist invasion, and a country which is so terrified of infringing its own neutrality that it will make no preparations.75

  The British field commander, Lord Gort, and his chief of staff, General Henry Pownall, were even more deeply prejudiced against the Belgians, from whom they anticipated the worst.76 Nor were they much better disposed toward the French, so that both the proposed Anglo-French joint attack around Arras on May 21 and Weygand’s abortive plan to get both armies to launch a simultaneous drive on Cambrai on May 24–25 failed largely through poor cooperation. Perhaps Georges might have been able to weld the Allied forces into a greater unity had he remained in command of the entire northeastern theater, though his performance under stress makes this seem unlikely. But the real fault was not that of any single individual—rather it was the consequence of an inadequate system and an imperfect organization that allowed division to triumph over cooperation.

  While the failures of the generals were rapidly brushed under the carpet, those of their troops became magnified to a point at which the entire cause of the collapse was held to be the deep moral malaise that gripped the French people in 1940. “The plain truth was,” writes one English author, “that the French had no stomach for another war.”77 In the aftermath of defeat, the idea that the war was lost because the bulk of the French population had lost the will to defend themselves and their country—and even that they assisted the enemy by sabotaging production in weapons factories—quickly took deep root, not least because it satisfied the need to find a general, all-embracing, and comprehensive explanation for total military failure.

  The case for a failure of will and widespread moral contamination rests heavily on some major but isolated acts of industrial sabotage and on the activities of the Communist press during May and June 1940. Some cases of sabotage undoubtedly did occur at the Farman aircraft factory and the Renault tank works, where scrap iron was dumped in gearboxes and transmissions, and petrol and oil pipes were partially sawed through. More demonstrably widespread was Communist party propaganda, transmitted chiefly through its daily newspaper L’Humanité, which called throughout May and June 1940 for a “government of peace.” However, the most recent and authoritative analysis of French public opinion has found no evidence that antimilitarism had an adverse effect on behavior in combat. Until June 1940, there were no serious cases of sabotage beside those at the Renault and Farman works. Neither peasant nor political pacifism was present in the armies during the autumn of 1939, although there was a strong sense of the preciousness of French blood. This is scarcely surprising in view of French experiences in the First World War and the decline in the birthrate during the first decades of the century. Military morale certainly fell during the early months of 1940 due to inactivity and uncertainties about the reasons for the war, and the army failed to counter this demoralization: In all units except the air force, cavalry, and motorized troops, training often took place on only one in every three days. Nonetheless, in early May morale was excellent among the cavalry, mechanized troops, tanks, and artillery and very good in almost all active units. When the fighting began French regimental commanders fully expected their men to hold firm under fire.78

  One of the major reasons why these expectations were so dramatically disappointed was that French soldiers were taken completely by surprise by the way in which the enemy used tanks and airplanes together to create a whirlwind of fire, noise, and movement. The troops were totally unfamiliar with combat under these circumstances, having been prepared to fight a war of position.79 In the first weeks of the war, seeking desperately to stem the onrushing German tide, the French high command issued orders that made no sense whatever to men who had not been trained for a war of movement. Weygand’s general order to the troops on May 25 demanded that they meet infiltration with counterinfiltration and instructed them, if they were cut off, to form a “hedgehog” and turn themselves into breakwaters to check the advancing tide of the enemy.80 How they were to do this was left entirely to improvisation, since no such tactics had formed part of their training. Significantly, the French units performed much better in the battles on the Somme and the Aisne in early June—before the “two-handed” attack that cut off Paris—when they were fighting a holding battle of the kind with which they were familiar from training and exercises.

  The failure of the French air force to adapt to circumstances in 1940 was partly due to an inadequate command structure and system. It was also the consequence of its unresolved struggle with the army over whether it would have an independent strategic role in war or cooperate tactically with the land forces. From the early 1920s soldiers took the view that there was no such thing as independent “air war,” and airmen riposted with a vision of heavy aerial strategic bombardments of military and civilian targets that alone might win a war—following the ideas of the Italian air theorist General Giulio Douhet.81 Burdened with the tasks of cooperating with the land forces (primarily by acting as observers for the artillery), combating enemy planes, and carrying out strategic bombing by way of reprisal, in 1933 the air force made the extraordinary and ill-judged decision to develop a machine that could carry out any and all of these roles. The result was the BCR: a two-engine, eight-ton, under-armed and underpowered dinosaur. Specialized fighters, which were developed from 1936 on and were just entering service in 1940, reflected the late turn away from the BCR and were obsolescent by the time they went into combat: The Morane 445, the main French fighter, was 50 mph slower than the ME-109 and only fractionally faster than the Do 17 bomber. Even the best French fighter in 1940—the American Curtiss P 36—could only intercept German bombers with difficulty since they were almost as fast as it was.82

  After its turn away from the multipurpose airplane, the French air force found itself under heavy pressure in the late 1930s to make air-land cooperation its main role. In September 1937 Air Minister Pierre Cot derided independent air action as leading to the pursuit of “uncertain objectives” and committed the air force to closer collaboration with the army.83 Although his successor, Guy La Chambre, also insisted that the air force participate fully in the land battle, the policy was unacceptable to Vuillemin, and after a bitter dispute in 1938 the outcome was to divide the air force into two components: cooperative forces attached to land commanders, and independent reserves. In 1940, therefore, 40 percent of France’s air resources were allocated for observation, and fighters were tasked with protecting spotter planes, covering troop movements, and guarding commercial routes. Thus, with its fighters scattered, it was impossible for the French air force to win local air superiority against the swarms of ME-109s. The legacy of the interwar debates and divisions was that—in the air—adaptation to meet the German threat was well-nigh impossible.

  The French were seriously underequipped in a number of respects besides air power. Throughout the campaign they were chronically short of antiaircraft guns. There were also shortages of 25-mm antitank guns; munitions of all kinds, especially armor-piercing rounds; heavy artillery and tractors; and lorries.84 One of the few weapons of which there was more than a sufficiency was the obsolete prewar “75” French field gun: in May 1940 there were still 5,667 of them left over from World War I.85 After June 4 the material imbalance between the two sides was even greater: In the battle for France, the Germans had twice as many divisions as their opponents and nine times as much armor, as well as an even greater superiority in the air.

  An old military adage says: “There are no such things as bad troops, only bad officers.” This is wholly inadequate an explanation for poor combat performance, but behind it lies an important truth. In certain circumstances—and the fall of France is a quintessential example of those circumstances—soldiers can be called on to compensate for failures in prewar and wartime leadership by fighting well. If they are to do this, clear and effective command is essential; but so are adequate preparation to meet the task at hand and sufficient modern equipment to do the job. The rank and file of the French army—and air force—lacked all three
essentials in May and June 1940, and as a result they were unable to cope with the burden thrust upon them. In these circumstances their failure was hardly a dishonorable one.

  CONCLUSION

  A catastrophe is, as we have seen, the most complex kind of disaster to befall any military organization. It is at one and the same time the easiest to recognize and the most difficult to explain. Thus, many of the studies that have addressed the fall of France are imbued with a sense of the interplay of a number of factors whose interrelationships and relative responsibilities for the final outcome are difficult to determine.86 The failure to provide a satisfactory analytic definition of catastrophe has resulted in a frequent retreat to oversimplification as a way out of this dilemma.

  The idea that, during May and June 1940, a chain of events began to hook together that, at a certain point, became unbreakable and pointed inexorably to defeat for France, has encouraged some authors to try to identify a particular day as the “moment of defeat,” after which everything the French did was to no avail.87 There is a partial truth here. Crucial moments certainly did occur during the course of the campaign, but what makes them important is not what they were or when they occurred, but what they illustrate—that there were particular difficulties in coping with the German attack that magnified the importance of individual setbacks.

  Another response to the catastrophe has been the view that things were wrong at such a deep level inside the French army that material shortages were not a fundamental issue in explaining the defeat; that—as one author has recently suggested—another thousand airplanes (which would have almost doubled the size of the active French air force) would have made no difference to the outcome.88 This is far from being self-evident, and certainly a thousand more antiaircraft guns, skillfully sited, could have had a significant effect on the battle.