Approaching the German border towards sundown, we avoided the Maastricht-Aachen road because the German Embassy in Brussels had told our Germans that the Reich customs people there would be very strict with us; and our two cars were loaded down with booty purchased with marks forced on the French at the thievish rate of twenty francs to one mark. The German officers and officials had raided Paris, buying suits, Scotch woollens for making suits, handbags, silk stockings, perfumes, underwear, etc. We drove around for hours trying to find a lonely customs post. The nearer to the border we approached, the more nervous the Germans became. An officer of the High Command—one of the most decent Germans I know—kept pointing out to me how embarrassing it would be for him, in uniform, to be caught red-handed bringing in so much booty. He said his fellow officers had been abusing their opportunities so scandalously that Hitler himself a few days before had issued a blunt order to the customs guards to seize everything found on returning officers or men. I finally offered to take the blame, if it came to a showdown, and explain to the customs people that the booty was all mine.
The little valley east of Liège was green and cool in the late afternoon, and there was little trace of the war except for one destroyed village and the blown-up bridges of the main railroad line to Aachen. Finally we arrived at the German border. Our chauffeur, a private, who had certainly bought his share of the booty in Paris, became so nervous he almost ran down and killed the customs officer. But our High Command officer spoke convincingly and fast, and we got through with our plunder.
Arrived in Aachen just in time to catch the night train to Berlin. Stiff and cold from fatigue and lack of sleep, I slumped into my upper berth and fell immediately into a heavy slumber. This was about ten p.m. About eleven thirty I was awakened by a furious shrieking of the sirens. By the noise, I could tell we were in a station (Duisburg, I later learned). The siren had hardly stopped before the train got off with a tremendous jerk and gathered speed so rapidly I thought some of the curves would surely derail us. I was now fully awakened and not a little scared—to be perfectly honest. Above the noise of the train, I could hear the British bombers flying low, then diving still lower, and obviously trying to get us. (Kerker said next morning he saw them from the car window.) Apparently the British in the end gave our train up as small fry, which it was. I felt no bomb explosions, at least. The sound of the British planes died away. Our engineer slowed down the train to a reasonable speed. I went back to sleep.
BERLIN, June 27
To sum up:
Make some reservations. That it is too early to know all. That you didn’t see all, by any means. And all that.
But from what I’ve seen in Belgium and France and from talks I’ve had with Germans and French in both countries, and with French, Belgian, and British prisoners along the roads, it seems fairly clear to me that:
France did not fight.
If she did, there is little evidence of it. Not only I, but several of my friends have driven from the German border to Paris and back, along all the main roads. None of us saw any evidence of serious fighting.
The fields of France are undisturbed. There was no fighting on any sustained line. The German army hurled itself forward along the roads. Even on the roads there is little sign that the French did any more than harry their enemy. And even this was done only in the towns and villages. But it was only harrying, delaying. There was no attempt to come to a halt on a line and strike back in a well-organized counter-attack.
But since the Germans chose to fight the war on the roads, why didn’t the French stop them? Roads make ideal targets for artillery. And yet I have not seen one yard of road in northern France which shows the effects of artillery fire. Driving to Paris over the area where the second German offensive began, an officer from the High Command who had missed the campaign kept mumbling that he could not understand it, that up there on that height, dominating the road and providing wonderful artillery cover with its dense woods, the French must have had the sense to plant a few guns. Just a few would have made the road impassable, he kept repeating, and he would order us to stop while he studied the situation. But there had been no guns on those wooded heights and there were no shell-holes on or near the road. The Germans had passed along here with their mighty army, hardly firing a shot.
The French blew up many bridges. But they also left many strategic ones standing, especially over the Meuse, a great natural defence because of the deepness, the steepness of the valley, and its wooded cover. More than one French soldier I talked to thought it was downright treachery.
At no point in France and at only two or three in Belgium did I see a road properly mined, or, for that matter, mined at all. In the villages and towns the French had hastily thrown up tank-barriers, usually of blocks of stone and rubbish. But the Germans brushed them aside in minutes. A huge crater left by an exploded mine could not have been brushed aside in a few minutes.
D. B. in Paris, having seen the war from the other side, concludes that there was treachery in the French army from top to bottom—the fascists at the top, the Communists at the bottom. And from German and French sources alike I heard many stories of how the Communists had received their orders from their party not to fight, and didn’t….
Many French prisoners say they never saw a battle. When one seemed imminent, orders came to retreat. It was this constant order to retreat before a battle had been joined, or at least before it had been fought out, that broke the Belgian resistance.
The Germans themselves say that in one tank battle they were attacked by a large fleet of French tanks after they had themselves run out of ammunition. The German commander ordered a retreat. After the German tanks had retired some distance to the rear, with the French following them only very cautiously, the Germans received orders to turn about and simulate an attack, firing automatic pistols or anything they had out of their tanks, and executing complicated manœuvres. This they did, and the French, seeing an armada of tanks descend upon them, though these were without ammunition, turned and fled.
One German tank officer I talked to in Compiègne said: “French tanks in some ways were superior to ours. They had heavier armour. And at times—for a few hours, say—the French tank corps fought bravely and well. But soon we got a definite feeling that their heart wasn’t in it. When we learned that, and acted on the belief, it was all over.” A month before, I would have thought such talk rank Nazi propaganda. Now I believe it.
Another mystery: After the Germans broke through the Franco-Belgian border from Maubeuge to Sedan, they tell that they continued right on across northern France to the sea hardly firing a shot. When they got to the sea, Boulogne and Calais were defended mostly by the British. The whole French army seemed paralysed, unable to provide the least action, the slightest counter-thrust.
True, the Germans had air superiority. True, the British didn’t provide the air power they could and should have provided. Yet even that does not explain the French debacle. From what one can see, the effectiveness of the air force in this war has been over-emphasized. One read of the great mass air attacks on the Allied columns along the roads. But you look in vain for the evidence of it on the roads. There are no bomb craters. True, the German technique was first to machine-gun the troops and then, when they’d scattered to the side of the road, to bomb the sides (thus sparing the road when they wanted to use it later). But you also see little evidence of this. A crater here and there along the roadside or in a near-by field—but not enough to destroy an army. The most deadly work of the German air force was at Dunkirk, where the British stopped the Germans dead for ten days.
On the whole, then, while the French here and there fought valiantly and even stubbornly, their army seems to have been paralysed as soon as the Germans made their first break-through. Then it collapsed, almost without a fight. In the first place the French, as though drugged, had no will to fight, even when their soil was invaded by their most hated enemy. There was a complete collapse of French society and of
the French soul. Secondly, there was either treachery or criminal negligence in the High Command and among the high officers in the field. Among large masses of troops Communist propaganda had won the day. And its message was: “Don’t fight.” Never were the masses so betrayed.
Two other considerations:
First, the quality of the Allied and German commanding officers. Only a few weeks ago General Sir Edmund Ironside, chief of the British Imperial General Staff, was boasting to American correspondents in London of the great advantage he had in possessing several generals in France who had been division commanders in the World War, whereas all the German generals were younger men who had never commanded more than a company in the last war. Sir Edmund thought the World War experience of his older generals would tell in the end.
It was an idle boast and no doubt the general regrets it now in the light of what has happened. True, the commanding officers of the German army are, for the most part, mere youngsters compared to the French generals we have seen. The latter strike you as civilized, intellectual, frail, ailing old men who stopped thinking new thoughts twenty years ago and have taken no physical exercise in the last ten years. The German generals are a complete contrast. More than one not yet forty, most of them in the forties, a few at the very top in their fifties. And they have the characteristics of youth—dash, daring, imagination, initiative, and physical prowess. General von Reichenau, commander of a whole army in Poland, was first to cross the Vistula River. He swam it. The commander of the few hundred German parachutists at Rotterdam was a general, who took his chances with the lieutenants and privates, and was in fact severely wounded. All the big German tank attacks were led in person by commanding generals. They did not sit in the safety of a dug-out ten miles behind the lines and direct by radio. They sat in their tanks in the thick of the fray and directed by radio and signalling from where they could see how the battle was going.
And as was to be expected from youth, these young generals did not hesitate at times to adopt innovations, to do the unorthodox thing, to take chances.
The great trouble with the Allied command—especially the French—was that it was dominated by old men who made the fatal mistake of thinking that this war would be fought on the same general lines as the last war. The rigidity of their military thinking was fixed somewhere between 1914 and 1918, and the matrix of their minds was never broken. I think this helps to explain why, when confronted by the Germans with a new type of war, the French were unable to adjust themselves to countering it.
It wasn’t that these tired old men had to adapt themselves to a revolutionary kind of warfare overnight. One of the mysteries of the campaign in the west is that the Allied command seems never to have bothered to learn the lesson of the Polish campaign. For in Poland the German army revealed the tactics it would use in the lowlands and France—parachutists and Stukas to disrupt communications in the rear, and swift, needlelike thrusts with Panzer divisions down the main roads through the enemy lines, pushing them ever deeper and then closing them like great steel claws, avoiding frontal attack, giving no opportunity for frontal defence along a line, striking far into the enemy’s rear before he could organize for a stand. Eight months elapsed between the Polish campaign and the offensive in the west, and yet there is little evidence that the generals of Britain and France used this precious time to organize a new system of defence to cope with the tactics they watched the Germans use in Poland. Probably they greatly underestimated the fight the Polish army put up; probably they thought it had been merely a badly armed rabble, and that against a first-rate army like the French, entrenched behind its Maginot Line, the new style of warfare would beat its head in vain. Had the Maginot Line really extended from Sedan to the sea, this attitude might have been justified. But as the Allies knew, and as the Germans remembered, the Maginot Line proper stopped some miles to the east of Sedan.
The second consideration is the fantastically good morale of the German army. Few people who have not seen it in action realize how different this army is from the one the Kaiser sent hurtling into Belgium and France in 1914. I remember my surprise at Kiel last Christmas to find an entirely new esprit in the German navy. This esprit was based on a camaraderie between officers and men. The same is true of the German army. It is hard to explain. The old Prussian goose-step, the heel-clicking, the “Jawohl” of the private when answering an officer, are still there. But the great gulf between officers and men is gone in this war. There is a sort of equalitarianism. I felt it from the first day I came in contact with the army at the front. The German officer no longer represents—or at least is conscious of representing—a class or caste. And the men in the ranks feel this. They feel like members of one great family. Even the salute has a new meaning. German privates salute each other, thus making the gesture more of a comradely greeting than the mere recognition of superior rank. In cafés, restaurants, dining-cars, officers and men off duty sit at the same table and converse as men to men. This would have been unthinkable in the last war and is probably unusual in the armies of the West, including our own. In the field, officers and men usually eat from the same soup kitchen. At Compiègne I had my lunch with a youthful captain who lined up with the men to get his rations from a mobile “soup cannon.” In Paris I recall a colonel who was treating a dozen privates to an excellent lunch in a little Basque restaurant off the avenue de l’Opéra. When lunch was over, he drew, with all the care of a loving father, a plan for them to visit the sights of Paris. The respect of these ordinary soldiers for their colonel would be hard to exaggerate. Yet it was not for his rank, but for the man. Hitler himself has drawn up detailed instructions for German officers about taking an interest in the personal problems of their men. One of the most efficient units in the German army at the front is its post office which brings letters and packages from home to the men, regardless of where they are, and which attends to the dispatch of letters and packages from the men home in record time. There are few German soldiers who have not dispatched in the last days silk stockings and perfume home to their families through the free facilities of the army post office.
One reason for the excellent morale of the troops is their realization that they and not the civilians back home are receiving the best treatment the nation can afford. They get the pick of the food and clothing available. In the winter the homes of Germany may not be heated, but the barracks are. The civilians in the safe jobs may not see oranges and coffee and fresh vegetables, but the troops see them every day. Last Christmas it was the soldiers who sent food packages home to their families, and not the reverse. Hitler once said that as a private of the last war he would see to it that the men in the new army benefited by the lessons he had learned. And in this one case, at least, he seems to have kept his promise.
BERLIN, June 28
A word about something the Germans will shoot me for if the Gestapo or the Military Intelligence ever find these notes. (I hide them about my hotel room here, but even an amateur detective could find them easily enough.)
I have been shocked at the way the German army in Belgium and France has been abusing the Red Cross sign.
The other day when we were within forty miles of Paris, we stopped at a big army gasoline dump to refuel our cars. Forty or fifty army oil trucks were drawn up under the trees of an orchard. Several of them were plastered with huge Red Cross signs. Many of the ordinary trucks with canvas tops which were being used to carry drums of oil had red crosses on their sides and roofs and indeed looked like Red Cross ambulances. A German officer apparently noticed me taking in this shameless misuse of the Red Cross sign. He hurriedly bundled us into our cars and got us off.
This may explain why the Luftwaffe has not respected the mark of the Red Cross on the Allied side. Göring probably figures that the Allies are doing just what he does. This may explain something the correspondents who went into Dunkirk the other day told me. The thing that shocked them most there was the sight of the charred remains of a long line of British and F
rench Red Cross ambulances drawn up on the quay. They had been about to unload the wounded on some ships, it was evident, and then the Stukas had come over and bombed them with explosive and incendiary bombs. The burnt bodies of the wounded still lay in the ambulances. No German pilot, the correspondents observed, could have failed to see the large Red Cross marks on the top of the ambulances.
I noticed too in Belgium and France many German staff officers riding up and down in cars marked with the Red Cross.
Today was the twenty-first anniversary of the signing of the Treaty of Versailles. And the world it created appeared to be gasping its swan-song today as German troops reached the Spanish border, and Soviet troops marched into Bessarabia and Bukovina. In Paris last week I learned on good authority that Hitler planned a further humiliation of France by holding a victory parade before the Palace of Versailles on this twenty-first anniversary day. He would make a speech from the Hall of Mirrors, where it was signed, proclaiming its official end. For some reason it was called off. It is to be held, instead, in Berlin, I hear.
Official comment on Russia’s grabbing Bessarabia and Bukovina from Rumania today was: “Rumania has chosen the reasonable way.”
The nomination of Willkie gets three lines in the Berlin press today. It refers to him as “General-Direktor” Willkie.
One or two American representatives of American press associations spoke so strongly to Dr. Boehmer, the Propaganda Ministry press chief, about our radio scoop on the armistice at Compiègne that he assured them I had not been allowed to use a German transmitter but must have got my story out over “some French station.” Actually we used a German transmitter and one located just outside of Berlin at Zeesen, as Dr. Boehmer no doubt knows.
Berlin Diary: The Journal of a Foreign Correspondent 1934-1941 Page 38
