At the headquarters of the Wehrmacht, euphoria prevailed. Gen. Eduard Wagner wrote on 15 June: ‘It should really be recorded for the history of our times and of the world how [Wehrmacht chief of staff Franz] Halder sits at the million-scale map and measures off the distances with a metre-rule and already deploys across the Loire. I doubt whether [Gen. Hans von] Seeckt’s synthesis of “cool judgement and warm enthusiasm” has ever found such brilliant reality as in the General Staff in this campaign … However, in spite of everything the Führer has earned the glory, for without his determination things would never have reached such an outcome.’
On the evening of 12 June, Weygand proposed seeking an armistice. Reynaud suggested that he and his ministers might retain office in exile, but Marshal Philippe Pétain dismissed the notion. On the 16th, Reynaud accepted that most of his ministers favoured capitulation, and resigned in favour of Pétain. The marshal broadcast to the French people next morning: ‘It is with a heavy heart I say to you today that it is necessary to stop fighting.’ Thereafter, few French soldiers saw much purpose in sacrificing their lives on the battlefield.
Yet there were occasional gallant, futile stands. An infantry battalion near Châteauneuf stubbornly held its positions. Another episode became enshrined in the legend of France: as columns of refugees and deserters from the army fled across the Loire, the commandant of the French cavalry school at Saumur, a hoary old warhorse named Col. Daniel Michon, was ordered to deploy his 780 cadets and instructors to defend the area’s bridges. He assembled them all in Saumur’s great amphitheatre and announced: ‘Gentlemen, for the school it is a mission of sacrifice. France is depending on you.’ One pupil, Jean-Louis Dunand, who had abandoned architectural studies in Paris to become a cadet, wrote exultantly to his parents: ‘I am so impatient to be in the fight, as are all my comrades here. Times a hundred times more painful await me, but I am prepared to meet them with a smile.’
The local mayor had already lost his own soldier son on the battlefield. Knowing that Pétain intended surrender, he pleaded with Michon not to make ancient Saumur a battlefield. The colonel contemptuously dismissed him: ‘I have an order to defend the town. The honour of the school is at stake.’ He sent away his eight hundred horses, and deployed the cadets in ‘brigades’, each led by an instructor, on a twelve-mile front at likely Loire crossing places; they were reinforced by a few hundred Algerian infantry trainees and army stragglers, supported by a handful of tanks. Just before midnight on 18 June, when leading elements of the German cavalry division led by Gen. Kurt Feldt approached Saumur, they were greeted by a barrage of fire. A German officer advanced beside a French prisoner carrying a white flag, in an attempt to parley. But this provoked shots and explosions which killed both men. Thereafter, as German artillery began to bombard Saumur, fierce little battles erupted the length of the line.
Some of the defenders acted with a heroism no less memorable because it was self-consciously theatrical. A cadet, Jean Labuze, questioned the order to hold until the last, saying despairingly, ‘One is ready to die, but not to die for nothing.’ His officer responded, shortly before himself being killed: ‘No one dies for nothing. We shall all die for France.’ Another officer, at Milly-le-Meugon, roused the parish priest from his bed at midnight in order that his pupils might be shriven before facing death; some two hundred took communion in the darkened village church before fighting resumed. The Loire bridges around Saumur were blown by the defenders, and throughout 19 and 20 June, repeated German attempts to cross in small boats were beaten off.
But the invaders instead crossed the river up-and downstream, outflanking Saumur; the last positions held by men of the cavalry school, around a farmhouse at Aunis three miles south-west of the town, were overwhelmed. Scores of cadets and instructors were wounded or killed, including the former architectural student Jean-Louis Dunand. Another of the dead at Aunis was a young soldier named Jehan Allain, before the war a rising organist and composer: Allain had already won a Croix de Guerre in Flanders, experienced evacuation from Dunkirk and returned from England to fight again, before meeting his death. Sheets of an unfinished musical composition were found in the saddlebag of his motorcycle.
Even as the battles around Saumur were being fought, disgruntled soldiers and civilians looked on, mocking and upbraiding the defenders for their folly, and for causing needless slaughter. But following France’s surrender, as unhappy old Colonel Michon abandoned his positions and led a column westwards in the hope of continuing the struggle elsewhere, patriots embraced the story of his little stand. At Saumur at least, they said, some soldiers had behaved with honour; monuments were erected to such men as Lt. Jacques Desplats, who died with his beloved Airedale terrier Nelson defending the island of Gennes under Michon’s command. Militarily, the actions of 19–20 June meant nothing. Morally, to the people of France they eventually came to mean much.
Most of the army meanwhile awaited captivity. Lt. George Friedmann, a philosopher in civilian life, wrote: ‘Today among many French people, I do not detect any sense of pain at the misfortunes of their country … I have observed only a sort of complacent relief (sometimes even exalted relief), a kind of base atavistic satisfaction at the knowledge that “For us, it’s over,” without caring about anything else.’ The French political right applauded the accession of the Pétain regime to power, one of its adherents writing to a friend: ‘At last we have victory.’ As the marshal himself travelled the country in the months following the armistice, he was greeted by huge, hysterically applauding crowds. They believed that nothing the Nazis might do could be as terrible as the cost of continuing a futile struggle. The fact that Churchill persuaded the British people to an alternative judgement, to defiance of perceived reality, prompted enduring French envy, resentment, bitterness.
The conquest of France and the Low Countries cost Germany almost 43,000 killed, 117,000 wounded; France lost around 50,000 dead, Britain 11,000; the Germans took 1.5 million prisoners. The British were granted one further miraculous deliverance, a second Dunkirk. After the BEF’s escape, Churchill made the fine moral but reckless military decision to send more troops to France, to stiffen the resolve of its government. In June, two ill-equipped divisions were shipped to join the residual British forces on the Continent. After the armistice, because the Germans were overwhelmingly preoccupied elsewhere, it proved possible to evacuate almost 200,000 men from the north-western French ports to England, with the loss of only a few thousand. Churchill was fortunate thus to be spared the consequences of a folly.
Britain’s ambassador to France, Sir Ronald Campbell, wrote in valediction after the collapse: ‘I should … describe France as a man who, stunned by an unexpected blow, was unable to rise to his feet before his opponent delivered the “coup de grace”.’ In the decades that followed French defeat, there was intense debate about alleged national decadence, which had caused such an outcome. That summer of 1940, the Bishop of Toulouse thundered: ‘Have we suffered enough? Have we prayed enough? Have we repented for sixty years of national apostasy, sixty years during which the French spirit has suffered all the perversions of modern ideas … during which French morality has declined, during which anarchy has strangely developed.’
Modern staff-college war games of the 1940 campaign sometimes conclude with German defeat. This causes a few historians to argue that Hitler’s triumph on the battlefield, far from being inevitable, might have been averted. It is hard to accept this view. In the years that followed the 1940 débâcle, the German army repeatedly demonstrated its institutional superiority over the Western Allies, who prevailed on battlefields only when they had a substantial superiority of men, tanks and air support. The Wehrmacht displayed a dynamic energy entirely absent from the 1940 Allied armies. Contrary to popular myth, the Germans did not conquer France in accordance with a detailed plan for blitzkrieg – lightning war. Rather, commanders – and especially Guderian – showed inspired opportunism, with results that exceeded their wildest expectations. If th
e French had moved faster and the Germans more slowly, the outcome of the campaign could have been different, but such an assertion is meaningless.
In 1940 the Germans were not obliged to divert large forces to an eastern front, as they were in 1914 when France was allied with Russia. Despite the indisputable superiority of the invaders’ air arm, Allied defeat was the consequence less of material than of moral inferiority; with rare and isolated exceptions, at every level Allied responses to German initiatives lacked conviction. Winston Churchill was almost alone among Anglo-French directors of the war, as well as among soldiers on the battlefield, in being willing to demand a struggle to the last man. French politicians and generals, by contrast, adopted a rationalist view: they identified limits to the damage acceptable to the population and fabric of their country to avoid bowing to a foreign invader, as often before in history France had been compelled to bow. Relatively few French soldiers felt willing to sacrifice themselves for the cause, because they believed neither in their national leaders nor in their commanders; the country had endured forty-two chronically weak governments between 1920 and 1940. Gamelin wrote as early as 18 May: ‘The French soldier, yesterday’s citizen, did not believe in the war … Disposed to criticise ceaselessly anyone holding the slightest amount of authority … he did not receive the kind of moral and patriotic education which would have prepared him for the drama in which the nation’s destiny will be played out.’
Irène Némirovsky wrote reflectively in 1941, looking back on the collapse: ‘For years, everything done in France within a certain social class has had only one motive: fear … Who will harm them the least (not in the future, not in the abstract, but right now and in the form of kicks in the arse or slaps in the face)? The Germans? The English? The Russians? The Germans won, but the beating has been forgotten and the Germans can protect them. That’s why they’re “for the Germans”.’ Very few Frenchmen in 1940 and afterwards followed the example set by tens of thousands of Poles – fighting on in exile, even after their country had been defeated. Only in 1943–44, when it became plain that the Allies would win the war and German occupation had proved intolerably oppressive, did French people in large numbers offer significant assistance to the Anglo-Americans. In the years of Britain’s lonely defiance, French forces offered determined resistance to Churchill’s armies and fleets wherever in the world they encountered them. Few even among those who did not fight against the British chose instead to fight with them: the French aircraft carrier Béarn, for instance, laden with precious American fighter planes, took refuge in the French Caribbean colony of Martinique from June 1940 until November 1942.
Among the shocked spectators of the collapse of France was Stalin. Molotov sent Hitler a dutiful telegram offering congratulations on his capture of Paris, but in Moscow the Nazi triumph provoked horror. All Soviet strategic calculations had been founded upon an expectation that a protracted bloodbath would take place on the Continent, which would drastically weaken Germany as well as the Western Powers. A Russian diplomat in London later remarked indiscreetly that, while most of the world weighed Allied and German casualties against each other, Stalin added the two together to compile an assessment of his own balance of advantage. Nikita Khrushchev described the fury of Russia’s warlord at Pétain’s surrender: ‘Stalin was in a great agitation, very nervous. I had seldom seen him in such a state. As a rule he seldom sat in his chair during meetings, usually he kept walking. On this occasion he was literally running around the room, swearing terribly. He cursed the French, cursed the English, [demanding]: “How come they allowed Hitler to thrash them?”’
Stalin probably expected eventually to fight Germany, but anticipated at least two or three years’ grace before a showdown. The Soviet Union had embarked on a massive rearmament programme that was still far from fulfilment. Stalin believed that Hitler gained too many material advantages from their relationship to breach the Nazi–Soviet Pact, at least until Britain was occupied. The German navy enjoyed access to north Russian ports. Vast quantities of corn, commodities and oil flowed from the Soviet Union to the Reich. Even after the French surrender Stalin remained anxious to avoid provocation of his dangerous neighbour, and constructed no major fortifications on his western frontier. Instead, he exploited the chaos of the moment to increase his own territorial gains. While the eyes of the world were fixed on France, he annexed the Baltic states, where in the year that followed the NKVD conducted savage purges and mass deportations. From Romania, he took Bessarabia, which had been Russian property between 1812 and 1919, and the Bukovina. At least 100,000 Romanians, and perhaps as many as half a million, were deported to Central Asia, to replace Russian industrial workers conscripted into the army. Amid events in the west, few people outside the world’s foreign ministries noticed the human catastrophe created by Stalin in the east; to that extent, Hitler’s lunge across western Europe served Soviet interests. But Russia’s warlord recognised the outcome as a calamity almost as alarming for his own nation as for the vanquished Western Powers.
Italy entered the war alongside Hitler on 10 June, in a shamelessly undignified scramble for a share of the spoils. Benito Mussolini feared Hitler and disliked Germans, as did many of his fellow countrymen, but he was unable to resist the temptation to secure cheap gains in Europe and the Allied African empires. Mussolini’s conduct inspired the derision of most of his contemporaries, friends and foes alike: he coupled himself to Hitler because he sought for his country a splendour he knew Italians could not achieve alone; he wanted the rewards of war, in return for a token expenditure of blood. To his intimates in May and June 1940, he repeatedly expressed hopes that a thousand or two Italians might be killed before a peace settlement with the Allies was signed, to pay for the booty he wanted.
On the eve of commencing hostilities with France, Mussolini asserted privately his intention to declare war, but not to wage it. Unsurprisingly, this minimalist approach precipitated a fiasco: on 17 June, when the French had already asked for an armistice, he abruptly ordered an attack on the Franco–Italian border in the Alps. The Italian army, wrong-footed by the sudden transition from manning fixed positions to launching an offensive, was briskly repulsed. The Duce’s delusions and confusion of purpose persisted thereafter: he expressed hopes that the British would not make peace until Italy had been able to make some show of contributing to their defeat, and that the Germans would suffer a million casualties before Britain was overrun. He wished to see Hitler victorious, but not all-powerful. All his dreams would perish in a fashion that would have rendered Mussolini an object of pity and ridicule, had not his delusions cost so many lives.
On 20 June, Franz Halder wrote complacently: ‘I just cannot comprehend what more the political leadership could want of us, and which of its wishes have remained unfulfilled.’ Hitler’s army adjutant Col. Georg Engel recorded: ‘The C-in-C [Gen. Walther von Brauchitsch] had his hour of triumph with the Führer when he announced the end of operations and preparations for an armistice. He briefed the F[ührer] on the urgent need either to make peace with Britain or to prepare and carry out an invasion as soon as possible. The Führer is sceptical and considers Britain so weak that, after bombing, major land operations will be unnecessary. The army will move in and take up occupation duties. The F[ührer] comments that “One way or another … [the British] will have to accept the situation.”’
Among the more unlikely spectators of the German victory parade in Paris on 22 June was a bewildered nineteen-year-old English girl, Rosemary Say, who found herself trapped in the French capital:
The war machine rolled down the Champs Elysées: gleaming horses, tanks, machinery, guns and thousands upon thousands of soldiers. The procession was immaculate, shining and seemingly endless … like a gigantic green snake that wound itself around the heart of the broken city, which waited pathetically to be swallowed up. There was a huge crowd of onlookers, most of them silent but some cheering. My [neutral American] companions were like small boys: calling out the n
ames of different regiments, exclaiming at the modern tanks and whistling at the wonderful horses. I was quiet, fully conscious that I was caught up in a moment of history. Even so, I felt no grand emotions … But as the hours passed and the seemingly endless spectacle continued, I began to feel a little ashamed at having accepted the invitation. I thought of my family and friends back in London, and of the fears for the future they must have.
Before the Germans attacked in the west, the Allies had wanted a long war, believing this would serve their best interests by enabling them to mobilise both American support and their own industrial resources against Hitler. The fall of Norway, Denmark, France, Belgium and Holland seemed to show that instead, the Nazis had achieved a swift and conclusive triumph. Few people anywhere in the world saw that Germany’s armistice with France, signed in the historic railway carriage at Compiègne on 22 June, marked not an end, but a beginning. The scale of Hitler’s ambitions, and the stubbornness of Churchill’s defiance, had yet to reveal themselves.
Britain Alone
RAF fighter pilot Paul Richey, wounded in France, was flown home by mail plane in the first days of June: ‘I looked down on the calm and peaceful English countryside, the smoke rising not from bombed villages, but lazily from cottage chimneys, and saw a game of cricket in progress on a village pitch. With my mind still filled with the blast and flame that had shattered France, I was seized with utter disgust at the smug contentedness England enjoyed behind her sea barrier. I thought a few bombs might wake up those cricketers, and that they wouldn’t be long in coming either.’ Richey echoed the resentment many men and women feel, on coming fresh from the horrors of war to encounter those spared from them. He was right that the people of southern England would not long enjoy their cricket undisturbed. But, when summoned from their pitches, almost without comprehension until their national leader enthroned their experience in majestic prose, they inflicted upon Hitler’s Germany one of the decisive repulses of history.
All Hell Let Loose Page 11
