However, across the Atlantic in the United States strong emotions were already stirring in the breasts of its leading men. It was at once realised that the bulk of the British Army had got away only with the loss of all their equipment. As early as June 1 the President sent out orders to the War and Navy Departments to report what weapons they could spare for Britain and France. At the head of the American Army as Chief of Staff was General Marshall, not only a soldier of proved quality but a man of commanding vision. He instantly directed his Chief of Ordnance and his Assistant Chief of Staff to survey the entire list of the American reserve ordnance and munitions stocks. In forty-eight hours the answers were given, and on June 3 Marshall approved the lists. The first list comprised half a million .30 calibre rifles out of two million manufactured in 1917 and 1918 and stored in grease for more than twenty years. For these there were about 250 cartridges apiece. There were 900 “soixante-quinze” field guns, with a million rounds, 80,000 machine-guns, and various other items. The Chief of Ordnance, Major-General Wesson, was told to handle the matter, and immediately all the American Army depots and arsenals started packing the material for shipment. By the end of the week more than six hundred heavily-loaded freight cars were rolling towards the Army docks at Raritan, New Jersey, up the river from Gravesend Bay. By June 11 a dozen British merchant ships moved into the bay and anchored, and loading from lighters began.
By these extraordinary measures the United States left themselves with the equipment for only 1,800,000 men, the minimum figure stipulated by the American Army’s mobilisation plan. All this reads easily now, but at that time it was a supreme act of faith and leadership for the United States to deprive themselves of this very considerable mass of arms for the sake of a country which many deemed already beaten. They never had need to repent of it. As will presently be recounted, we ferried these precious weapons safely across the Atlantic during July, and they formed not only a material gain, but an important factor in all calculations made by friend or foe about invasion.
The month of June was particularly trying to all of us, because of the dual and opposite stresses to which in our naked condition we were subjected by our duty to France on the one hand and the need to create an effective army at home and to fortify the Island on the other. The double tension of antagonistic but vital needs was most severe. Nevertheless we followed a firm and steady policy without undue excitement. First priority continued to be given to sending whatever trained and equipped troops we had in order to reconstitute the B.E.F. in France. After that our efforts were devoted to the defence of the Island—first, by reforming and re-equipping the Regular Army; secondly, by fortifying the likely landing-places; thirdly, by arming and organising the population, so far as was possible; and of course by bringing home whatever forces could be gathered from the Empire. It was not men that were lacking but arms. Over 80,000 rifles were retrieved from the communications and bases south of the Seine, and by the middle of June every fighting man in the Regular forces had at least a personal weapon in his hand. We had very little field artillery, even for the Regular Army. Nearly all the new 25-pounders had been lost in France. There remained about five hundred guns and only 103 cruiser, 114 infantry, and 252 light tanks. Never has a great nation been so naked before her foes.
Apart from our last twenty-five fighter squadrons, on which we were adamant, we regarded the duty of sending aid to the French Army as paramount. The movement of the 52nd Lowland Division to France, under previous orders, was due to begin on June 7. These orders were confirmed. The leading division of the Canadian Army, which had concentrated in England early in the year and was well armed, was directed, with the full assent of the Dominion Government, to Brest, to begin arriving there on June 11 for what might by this time already be deemed a forlorn hope. That we should have sent our only two formed divisions, the 52nd Lowland Division and 1st Canadian Division, over to our failing French ally in this mortal crisis, when the whole fury of Germany must soon fall upon us, must be set to our credit against the very limited forces we had been able to put into France in the first eight months of war. Looking back on it, I wonder how, when we were resolved to continue the war to the death, and under the threat of invasion, and France was evidently falling, we had the nerve to strip ourselves of the remaining effective military formations we possessed. This was only possible because we understood the difficulties of the Channel crossing without the command of the sea or the air, or the necessary landing-craft.
We had still in France, behind the Somme, the 51st Highland Division, which had been withdrawn from the Maginot Line and was in good condition. There was also our 1st (and only) Armoured Division, less the tank battalion and the support group, which had been sent to Calais. This however had lost heavily in attempts to cross the Somme as part of Weygand’s plan. By June I it was reduced to one-third of its strength, and was sent back across the Seine to refit. At the same time nine infantry battalions, armed mainly with rifles, were scraped together from the bases and lines of communication in France. They had very few anti-tank weapons, and neither transport nor signals.
On June 5 the final phase of the Battle of France began. We have seen how the German armour had been hobbled and held back in the Dunkirk battle, in order to save it for the final phase in France. All this armour now rolled forward upon the weak and improvised or quivering French front between Paris and the sea. It is here only possible to record the battle on the coastal flank, in which we played a part. The Tenth French Army tried to hold the line of the Somme. On June 7 two German armoured divisions drove towards Rouen. The French left, including the 51st Highland Division, were separated from the rest of the front, and, with the remnants of the French IXth Corps, was cut off in the Rouen-Dieppe cul-de-sac.
We had been intensely concerned lest this division should be driven back to the Havre peninsula and thus be separated from the main armies, and its commander, Major-General Fortune, had been told to fall back if necessary in the direction of Rouen. This movement was forbidden by the already disintegrating French command. Repeated urgent representations were made by us, but they were of no avail. It was a case of gross mismanagement, for this very danger was visible a full three days before.
On June 10, after sharp fighting, the division fell back, together with the French IXth Corps, to the perimeter of St. Valery, expecting to be evacuated by sea. During the night of the 11th–12th fog prevented the ships from evacuating the troops. By morning on the 12th the Germans had reached the sea-cliffs to the south and the beach was under direct fire. White flags appeared in the town. The French corps capitulated at eight o’clock, and the remains of the Highland Division were forced to do so at 10.30 a.m. 8,000 British and 4,000 French fell into the hands of the 7th Panzer Division, commanded by General Rommel. I was vexed that the French had not allowed our division to retire on Rouen in good time, but had kept it waiting till it could neither reach Havre nor retreat southward, and thus forced it to surrender with their own troops. The fate of the Highland Division was hard, but in after years not unavenged by those Scots who filled their places, re-created the division by merging it with the 9th Scottish, and marched across all the battlefields from Alamein to final victory beyond the Rhine.
About eleven o’clock on the morning of June 11 there was a message from Reynaud, who had also cabled to the President. The French tragedy had moved and slid downward. For several days past I had pressed for a meeting of the Supreme Council. We could no longer meet in Paris. We were not told what were the conditions there. Certainly the German spearheads were very close. I had had some difficulty in obtaining a rendezvous, but this was no time to stand on ceremony. We must know what the French were going to do. Reynaud now told me that he could receive us at Briare, near Orleans. The seat of government was moving from Paris to Tours. Grand-Quartier-Général was near Briare. Nothing loth, I ordered the Flamingo to be ready at Hendon after luncheon, and, having obtained the approval of my colleagues at the morning Cabinet, we started about two
o’clock.
This was my fourth journey to France; and since military conditions evidently predominated, I asked Mr. Eden, now Secretary of State for War, to come with me, as well as General Dill, the C.I.G.S., and of course Ismay. The German aircraft were now reaching far down into the Channel, and we had to make a still wider sweep. As before, the Flamingo had an escort of twelve Spitfires. After a couple of hours we alighted at a small landing-ground. There were a few Frenchmen about, and soon a colonel arrived in a motor-car. I displayed the smiling countenance and confident air which are thought suitable when things are very bad, but the Frenchman was dull and unresponsive. I realised immediately how very far things had fallen even since we were in Paris a week before. After an interval we were conducted to the château, where we found Reynaud, Marshal Pétain, General Weygand, the Air General Vuillemin, and some others, including the relatively junior General de Gaulle, who had just been appointed Under-Secretary for National Defence. Hard by on the railway was the Headquarters train, in which some of our party were accommodated. The château possessed but one telephone, in the lavatory. It was kept very busy, with long delays and endless shouted repetitions.
At seven o’clock we entered into conference. There were no reproaches or recriminations. We were all up against brute facts. In effect, the discussion ran on the following lines: I urged the French Government to defend Paris. I emphasised the enormous absorbing power of the house-to-house defence of a great city upon an invading army. I recalled to Marshal Pétain the nights we had spent together in his train at Beauvais after the British Fifth Army disaster in 1918, and how he, as I put it, not mentioning Marshal Foch, had restored the situation. I also reminded him how Clemenceau had said: “I will fight in front of Paris, in Paris, and behind Paris.” The Marshal replied very quietly and with dignity that in those days he had a mass of manœuvre of upwards of sixty divisions; now there was none. He mentioned that there were then sixty British divisions in the line. Making Paris into a ruin would not affect the final event.
Then General Weygand exposed the military position, so far as he knew it, in the fluid battle proceeding fifty or sixty miles away, and he paid a high tribute to the prowess of the French Army. He requested that every reinforcement should be sent—above all, that every British fighter air squadron should immediately be thrown into the battle. “Here,” he said, “is the decisive point. Now is the decisive moment. It is therefore wrong to keep any squadrons back in England.” But in accordance with the Cabinet decision, taken in the presence of Air Chief Marshal Dowding, whom I had brought specially to a Cabinet meeting, I replied: “This is not the decisive point and this is not the decisive moment. That moment will come when Hitler hurls his Luftwaffe against Great Britain. If we can keep command of the air, and if we can keep the seas open, as we certainly shall keep them open, we will win it all back for you.”* Twenty-five fighter squadrons must be maintained at all costs for the defence of Britain and the Channel, and nothing would make us give up these. We intended to continue the war whatever happened, and we believed we could do so for an indefinite time, but to give up these squadrons would destroy our chance of life.
Presently General Georges, the Commander-in-Chief of the Northwestern Front, arrived. After being apprised of what had passed, he confirmed the account of the French front which had been given by Weygand. I again urged my guerrilla plan. The German Army was not so strong as might appear at their points of impact. If all the French armies, every division and brigade, fought the troops on their front with the utmost vigour a general standstill might be achieved. I was answered by statements of the frightful conditions on the roads, crowded with refugees harried by unresisted machine-gun fire from the German aeroplanes, and of the wholesale flight of vast numbers of inhabitants and the increasing breakdown of the machinery of government and of military control. At one point General Weygand mentioned that the French might have to ask for an armistice. Reynaud at once snapped at him: “That is a political affair.” According to Ismay, I said: “If it is thought best for France in her agony that her Army should capitulate, let there be no hesitation on our account, because whatever you may do we shall fight on for ever and ever and ever.” When I said that the French Army, fighting on, wherever it might be, could hold or wear out a hundred German divisions, General Weygand replied: “Even if that were so, they would still have another hundred to invade and conquer you. What would you do then?” On this I said that I was not a military expert, but that my technical advisers were of the opinion that the best method of dealing with a German invasion of the Island of Britain was to drown as many as possible on the way over and knock the others on the head as they crawled ashore. Weygand answered with a sad smile: “At any rate I must admit you have a very good anti-tank obstacle.” These were the last striking words I remember to have heard from him. In all this miserable discussion it must be borne in mind that I was haunted and undermined by the grief I felt that Britain, with her 48,000,000 population, had not been able to make a greater contribution to the land war against Germany, and that so far nine-tenths of the slaughter and ninety-nine-hundredths of the suffering had fallen upon France and upon France alone.
After another hour or so we got up and washed our hands while a meal was brought to the conference table. In this interval I talked to General Georges privately, and suggested first the continuance of fighting everywhere on the home front and a prolonged guerrilla in the mountainous regions, and secondly the move to Africa, which a week before I had regarded as “defeatist”. My respected friend, who, although charged with much direct responsibility, had never had a free hand to lead the French armies, did not seem to think there was much hope in either of these.
I have written lightly of the happenings of these days, but here to all of us was real agony of mind and soul.
At about ten o’clock everyone took their places at the dinner. I sat on Reynaud’s right and General de Gaulle was on my other side. There was soup, an omelette or something, coffee and light wine. Even at this point in our awful tribulation under the German scourge we were quite friendly. But presently there was a jarring interlude. The reader will recall the importance I had attached to striking hard at Italy the moment she entered the war, and arrangements had been made with full French concurrence to move a force of British heavy bombers to the French airfields near Marseilles in order to attack Turin and Milan. All was now in readiness to strike. Scarcely had we sat down when Air Marshal Barratt, commanding the British Air Force in France, rang up Ismay on the telephone to say that the local authorities objected to the British bombers taking off, on the grounds that an attack on Italy would only bring reprisals upon the South of France, which the British were in no position to resist or prevent. Reynaud, Weygand, Eden, Dill, and I left the table, and, after some parleying, Reynaud agreed that orders should be sent to the French authorities concerned that the bombers were not to be stopped. But later that night Air Marshal Barratt reported that the French people near the airfields had dragged all kinds of country carts and lorries on to them, and that it had been impossible for the bombers to start on their mission.
Presently, when we left the dinner table and sat with some coffee and brandy, M. Reynaud told me that Marshal Pétain had informed him that it would be necessary for France to seek an armistice, and that he had written a paper upon the subject which he wished him to read. “He has not,” said Reynaud, “handed it to me yet. He is still ashamed to do it.” He ought also to have been ashamed to support even tacitly Weygand’s demand for our last twenty-five squadrons of fighters, when he had made up his mind that all was lost and that France should give in. Thus we all went unhappily to bed in this disordered château or in the military train a few miles away. The Germans entered Paris on the 14th.
Early in the morning we resumed our conference. Air Marshal Barratt was present. Reynaud renewed his appeal for five more squadrons of fighters to be based in France, and General Weygand said that he was badly in need of day bombers to make up for hi
s lack of troops. I gave them an assurance that the whole question of increased air support for France would be examined carefully and sympathetically by the War Cabinet immediately I got back to London; but I again emphasised that it would be a vital mistake to denude the United Kingdom of its essential Home defences.
After some fruitless discussion about a counter-attack on the Lower Seine, I expressed in the most formal manner my hope that if there was any change in the situation the French Government would let the British Government know at once, in order that we might come over and see them at any convenient spot, before they took any final decisions which would govern their action in the second phase of the war.
We then took leave of Pétain, Weygand, and their staff, and this was the last we saw of them. Finally I took Admiral Darlan apart and spoke to him alone. “Darlan, you must never let them get the French Fleet.” He promised solemnly that he would never do so.
Lack of suitable petrol made it impossible for the twelve Spitfires to escort us. We had to choose between waiting till it turned up or taking a chance in the Flamingo. We were assured that it would be cloudy all the way. It was urgently necessary to get back home. Accordingly we started alone, calling for an escort to meet us, if possible, over the Channel. As we approached the coast the skies cleared and presently became cloudless. Eight thousand feet below us on our right hand was Havre, burning. The smoke drifted away to the eastward. No new escort was to be seen. Presently I noticed some consultations going on with the captain, and immediately after we dived to a hundred feet or so above the calm sea, where aeroplanes are often invisible. What had happened? I learned later that they had seen two German aircraft below us firing at fishing-boats. We were lucky that their pilots did not look upwards. The new escort met us as we approached the English shore, and the faithful Flamingo alighted safely at Hendon.
The Second World War Page 38
