We learned this from the works of the English tactician Fuller and the French tactician de Gaulle, analyzing the lessons of World War I.
The French army, with armored strength superior to our own, ignored these Allied thinkers, and scattered thousands of tanks piecemeal among the infantry divisions. This question of how to use the new self-propelled armor had been much disputed between the wars.
We took the right path of Fuller, de Gaulle, and our own Guderian.
Our opponents took the wrong one. The coordination of dive-bombing with these new ground tactics hastened the victory.
The Maginot Line
The world was stunned. For months Western newspapers and magazines had been printing maps of Europe, showing imaginary battle lines for the coming campaign. The French commander-in-chief, Generalissimo Maurice Gamelin, "the world's foremost professional soldier," as the Western journalists called him, was supposed to have a masterly plan to beat us.
In modern war, according to this rumored "Gamelin Plan," industrial firepower gave the defense an advantage over the offense of ten or fifteen to one.
France had spent one and a half million soldiers' lives in World War I proving that the massed infantry attacks of Napoleon no longer worked against machine guns and cannon. There would be no more Verduns. The new concept was to build in peacetime a great wall of linked fortresses with the strongest modern firepower. No matter how many millions of men a future enemy might hurl against this wall, they would all drown in their own blood.
On this theory, France had constructed a chain of fortresses united by underground tunnels, the Maginot Line. If we Germans did not attack, then between the land wall of the Maginot Line and the British sea blockade, the economic life would be choked out of us. Finally the Allied armies would sally forth from the Line to deliver the coup de grace, if revolution did not topple Hitler first, and bring our generals crawling for peace terms, as we had in 1918. So ran the newspaper talk in the West during the sitzkrieg.
Informed military men had a question or two about this Maginot Line. it was indeed a marvel of engineering, but was it not too short?
Beginning at the Swiss Alps, it ran along the French-German border for more than a hundred miles to a place called Longuyon. There it stopped. Between Longuyon and the English Channel, therp, still remained a hole of open level country, the boundary between France and Belgium, at least as long as the Line itself. In 1914, we bestial Germans had attacked through Belgium precisely because this hole offered such a flat fine road to Paris. Couldn't we just go around the famous Maginot Line and come down by that route again?
The proponents of the Gamelin Plan met such questions with ironic smiles.
Yes, to run the Line straight through Belgium to the sea would have been very fine, they said. But that was up to the Belgians, who insisted on preserving their neutrality instead. A for cornpletinq thr" I;the in French territory, it WOLII , had to cut through a hundred thirty miles of important industrial areas. Moreover, at the time when it might have been done, a mood of economy had come over the government. The people wanted shorter hours and higher pay. The cost would have been astronomical. Also, subsurface water in the area made a tunnel system difficult. Also, by then Hitler was in power, and extending the Line might have provoked the bellicose Fuhrer to do something rash.
In short, the wisest military brains in France had decided not to finish the Maginot Line. Instead, there was the Gamelin Plan. If war came, the French and British armies would be poised along the unfortified Belgian border. If the Germans did try to come through there again, the Allies under Gamelin would leap forward and join the tough Belgian army of two hundred thousand men on a strong river line, Given the enormous advantage of defense in modern warfare, a German attack on such a narrow front would bloodily collapse.
Outcome of the Plan
We did attack, though not exactly where the Plan called for us to do so.
Five days later, Generalissimo Gamelin was fired. We were pouring around the north end of the Maginot Line through the supposedly "impassable" Ardennes country, and flooding westward across France.
Thus we cut off the French and British armies which, following the Gamelin Plan, had duly leaped forward into Belgium. Our Eighteenth Army under KOchler was also coming at them from Holland to the north.
They were trapped. On the morning of May 15, the prime minister of France telephoned his defense minister to ask what countermeasures Gamelin was proposing. The minister answered, according to history, "He has none."
At an urgent conference in Paris next day at the Quai d'Orsay, Winston Churchill, who had desperately flown over from London, asked Generalissimo Gamelin, "General, where is the reserve-the masse de manoeuvre-to bring up against the German breakthrough?"
The world's foremost professional soldier replied, according to Churchill's memoirs, "Aucune." (There isn't any.) General Weygand relieved him. We took the Maginot Line from behind with no trouble, since the guns pointed the other way; marched off to captivity sferred all the the French armies found sitting inside the forts and tunnels; tran cannon to the English Channel for use against the British; took all the stored food and equipment in the labyrinth; and left a few light bulbs to illuminate the empty concrete passageways. So the Maginot Line remains to this day.
The French passed from the stage of historical greatness.
Germany's implacable enemy of the centuries had at last come to grief.
Strategically, they had guessed wrong on the use of industrial power in war, and had wasted their national energy and treasure on an enormous tragic joke in steel and concrete: half a wall. Tactically, when General Gamelin said, "Aucune," the military history of France was over.
Shadows on the Victory
In the headquarters of the Supreme Command, the victory over France, while welcome and exhilarating, had its worrisome aspects.
Some of us who were present at the signing of the armistice watched with heavy hearts as the Fuhrer danced his little jig of triumph in the sunshine of Compagne. We were torn between pride in this feat of German arms, this virile reversal of the 1918
defeat, and our inside knowledge of tragic errors the capering Dictator had made or tried to make. These were completely covered up for the world at large by the rosy glow of success. Germany in that hour was like a virgin at a military ball, all radiant with the blushes aroused in her by the admiring eyes of handsome officers, and all unaware of a fatal cancer budding inside her.
The cancer already afflicting Germany at that hour, unfelt by all but a handful in the innermost circle of command, was amateur military leadership-We had watched the symptoms crop up in the minor Norway operation. Our hope was that our inexperienced warlord, having been blooded in that victory, would steady down for the great assault in the west.
But, six days after the breakthrough, when Rundstedt was rolling to the sea, with Guderion's panzers in the van and all enemy forces in flight, Hitler had a bad fit of nerves, fearing a French counterattack from the south-no more likely at that moment than a Hottentot counterattack-and halted Rundstedt's army group for two precious days.
Fortunately Guderion wangled permission for a "reconnaissance in force" westward. Thereupon he simply ignored the Fuhrer and blitzed ahead to the coast.
Then followed an incredible tactical blunder. With the British expeditionary force helplessly retreating toward the sea, but far behind in the race and about to be cut off by Guderion's massed tanks, the Fuhrer halted Guderion on the River Aa, nine miles from Dunkirk, and forbade the tank divisions to advance for three days/ To this day nobody has factually ascertained why he did this. Theories are almost as abundant as military historians, but they add little to the facts.
During these three days the British, rescued their armies from the Dunkirk beaches. That is the long and short of the miracle of Dunkirk."
Had Hitler not halted Guderian, the panzers would have beaten the foe to Dunkirk and cut him off. The British would have lost over three h
undred thousand men and officers, the bulk of their trained land force, in the Flanders cauldron. I discuss in detail, under my section "Fantastic Halt at the River Aa," the preposterousness of the excuse that the terrain around Dunkirk was too marshy, and too crisscrossed by hedges and canals, for tank operations. The fact is that finally Guderion did advance, after seventy-two mortal hours in which the first golden chance for quick victory in World War II slipped from our grasp.
Hermann Goering's Luftwaffe, was supPoed to take over from the halted armored divisions and finish off the British. Perhaps Hitler relished this notion of letting a Nazi air marshal in at the kill, instead of the distrusted Army General Star4. History records what Goering accompliehed.
But if final victory was denied us, at least we had vanquished France; that much seemed indisputable. Yet on June 6 even this was momentarily cast in doubt when Hitler had another brainstorm. Paris, he suddenly declared, was not the objective; what our armies should do next was cut southeast in force and capture the Lorraine basin, so as to deny France its coal and armaments industries! Fortunately the momentum of operations was beyond even the Fuhrer's power' to meddle.
We took Paris even while a number of divisions went wheeling needlessly into Lorraine.
His Worst Mistake
But worse than all these mistakes-so bad that history will forever stand amazed at the fact-the Wehrmacht arrived at the English Channel without any Plan of what to do next! There we were cit the sea, millions strong, crammed to the teeth, flushed with victory, facing beaten, disarmed, impotent enemy across a ditch forty miles wide; but our infallible Leader, who had all staff activitie, so firmly in his grip that nobody could make a move without his nod, had somehow overlooked the slight detail of how one got to England.
Here nevertheless was a moment for greatness, such as comes once in a thousand years. Alexander, Caesar, and Napoleon in their time had made mistakes as major as any of Hitler's. What they possessed to balance and outweigh these was generalship: the ability to divine and seize a favoring moment with the utmost speed and audacity. Yes, we had no plan for invading England, but had the British had a plan for crossing the Channel from Dunkirk in a scropedtogether flotilla of cockleshells? Under the spur of necessity, despite the total disorganization of defeat, despite fierce Luftwaffe bombardment, they had moved three hundred thousand men across the water. Why then could not we, the strongest armed force on earth in the full tide of victory, do a "Dunkirk in reverse," and throw a force of armored divisions across the Channel to an undefended, helpless shore? There was nothing on the ground in England to oppose our march to London. The rescued expeditionary force was a disarmed rabble; all its equipment lay abandoned in Flanders. The Home Guard was a pathetic raggle-raggle of old men and boys.
Opposing our invasion would have been the Royal Air Force and the British fleet, two formidable fighting organizations. But had Hitler seized the first moment in June, using every available vessel afloat in western and northern Europe-there were thousands-to hurl an invasion body across the Channel, the fleet would have been caught by surprise, as it had been in the Norway operation. We would have been across before it could mass to counterattack.
The aerial Battle of Britain would have been fought out in the skies over the Channel, under conditions vastly more favorable to the Luftwaffe.
Assuredly we would have taken very heavy losses. The attack phase and the supply problem would have cost dearly. Again we would have been staking all on one throw. But in the hindsight of history, what else was there to do? I have several times requested in writing, from American and German archivists, a copy of a draft memorandum I wrote in June 1940, outlining for headquarters discussion a plan for exactly such an immediate cross-Channel assault. My requests have gone unanswered. The memorandum is only a curiosity, and I have no way of knowing whether it has actually survived. At the time Jodl returned it to me without a single word, and that was the end of it.
The Aborted Invasion
Seelwew (Sea Lion), the invasion scheme scrambled together in the ensuing months, proved an exercise in leisurely futility. Forcing the Channel, once the British had caught their breath and fortified their coast, needed a complex buildup. Hitler never really pushed it.
Against England he had lacked the greatness to dare all; and we gradually saw that he lacked the stomach to dare much.
He merely allowed Goering to waste his Luftwaffe over the British aerodromes far inland, while the army and the navy frittered away weeks that stretched through the summer, disputing over the operation plan, and passing the buck back and forth. In the end, "Sea Lion" was abandoned. Germany certainly had A the industrial plant and the military strength to mount the invasion, but not the leadership. Wen an ounce more of boldness in battle might have won a worlci, Hitler faltered; and the professional generals were all in impotent subjection to this amateur.
That was the real "triumph" of the Fuhrerprinzip in the summer of 1940. In retrospect, the wrong leader danced the jig.
TRANSLATOR'S NOTE: Roon's biting discussion of the Maginot Line and the French leadership leaves little more to be said.
My friends in the Royal Navy stoutly deny that even in lune the Germans could have made it across the Channel. They would have thrown in every last ship they had, of course, to drown the invaders. It is a moot point, but in my judgment Roon makes out a fair case. The U-boats, which he does not mention, would have wreaked havoc in the narrow Channel against a defensively positioned fleet. Roon is on weaker ground in blaming Hitler for the lack of staff plans for an invasion. Had they had a feasible one ready, he might have activated it, as he did the Manstein Plan. Apparently, there was in the files a sketchy naval staff study, and nothing more. The German General Staff in World War II had a strange tendency not to see beyond the next hill, or maybe they preferred not to look.-V.H.
BIG GERMAN BREAKTHROUGH IN BELGIUM!
Still Not Our Fight, Declares Lacouture AssiNc a newsstand on the corner of Fifth Avenue and Fifty-seventh PStreet, where a fresh stack of afternoon papers fluttered under a cobblestone, Janice Lacouture said to Madeline, "Oh gawd, there's Daddy again, sounding off. Won't your folks be impressed!" Madeline was helping her shop for her trousseau.
Rhoda, Pug, and Byron were due at three o'clock in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, aboard the cruiser Helena. Janice's first encounter with Warren's mother was much on her mind, far more so than the bad war news.
A rough May wind swooped along the avenue, whipping the girls skirts and hats. Madeline clutched a package with one hand and her hat with the other, peering at the two-column photograph of Congressman Isaac Lacouture on the Capitol steps, with three microphones thrust in his face. "He's handsome, you know," she said.
"I hope you'll like him. He's really an awfully smart man," Janice said, pitching her voice above the wind. "Actually the reporters have pushed him further than he ever intended to go. Now he's way out on a limb."
Madeline had redecorated the little flat. The walls were pale green, with cream-and-green flowered draperies. New Danish teak furniture, austere and slight, made the place seem roomier. jonquils and irises in a bowl on the dining table touched the place with spring and youth, much as the two girls did when they walked in. It was not a flat where one expected to find a Communist boyfriend. Indeed Madeline had long since discarded the poor popeyed trombone player in brown-something Janice had been relieved to learn. Her current boyfriend was a CBS lawyer, a staunch Roosevelt man and very bright, but going bald at twenty-six.
She called her telephone answering service, briskly jotted notes on a pad, and slammed the receiver down. "Rats. I can't go with you to meet my folks, Janice, after all. Isn't that a pain? Two of the amateurs have loused out. I have to spend the afternoon listening to replacements. Always something!" She was clearly quite pleased with herself at being kept so busy. "Now. Do you happen to know a man named Palmer Kirby? He's at the Waldorf and he says he's a friend of the family." Janice shook her head.
Madeline rang him and
liked his voice with his first words; it had a warm humorous resonance. "You are Rhoda Henry's daughter? I saw your name in the book and took a chance."
"Yes, I am."
"Good. Your family was very hospitable to me in Berlin. Your mother wrote me they'd be arriving today. I just thought they might be tired and at a loose end, their first evening in New York. I'd like to take all of you to dinner."
"That's kind of you, but I don't know their plans. They won't arrive till one or so."
"I see. Well, suppose I make the dinner reservations? If your folks can come, I'll expect you all in my suite at six or so. If not, just give me a ring, or your mother can."
"I guess so, sure. Thank you. Warren's fiancee is visiting me, Mr.
Kirby."
"Ike Lacouture's daughter? Excellent. By all means bring her."
Off Madeline went, brimming with zest for existence, while Janice changed into warmer clothes for the Navy Yard.
Madeline was now the "program coordinator" of The Walter Field Anwteur Hour. Walter Field, an old ham actor, had stumbled into great radio popularity with the hackneyed vaudeville formula of amateur entertainment. Suddenly made rich, he had gone into a whirl of big real estate deals, and just as suddenly dropped dead. Hugh Cleveland had stepped in as master of ceremonies. Madeline still fetched chicken sandwiches and coffee for him, but she now also interviewed the amateurs.
Herman Wouk - The Winds Of War Page 45
