To Lose a Battle

by Alistair Horne

  A senior French diplomat dining with Gamelin at the French Embassy on one of his visits to London was amazed to hear the Generalissimo discourse on nothing but philosophy and Italian painting. Joffre, he reckoned, would have been much discountenanced by the tenor of the conversation, while, listening to Gamelin, the diplomat ‘felt a cold draught at my back’. Unashamedly, Gamelin was an intellectual who felt ill at ease in front of the troops (with whom his contacts were certainly kept to a minimum), much preferring the company of his fifteen adulatory staff officers where, says Pertinax, ‘culture was the thing, books on the history of art’. According to de Gaulle, after a visit to the gloomy vaults at Vincennes tenanted by Gamelin, he

  dwelt in an atmosphere very akin to that of a convent, surrounded by only a few officers, working and meditating, completely insulated from current events… In his Thébaïde3 at Vincennes, General Gamelin gave me the impression of a savant, testing the chemical reactions of his strategy in a laboratory.

  Adding to this isolation from the outside world there was the extraordinary fact that Vincennes possessed no radio-communications centre.4

  Gamelin considered experience to be everything, ignoring Frederick the Great’s sally that if this quality ‘were all a great general needs, the greatest would be Prince Eugene’s mules’. To Jules Romains he dwelt upon the grave disadvantage of the Wehrmacht, because ‘I can think of very few of their present generals who fought in responsible posts in 1914–18. Here we are almost all former 1918 divisional commanders…’ The tragedy of Gamelin was not that he misconstrued modern trends through stupidity; certainly, his luminous mind had thought deeply about tanks and their possible effect on warfare, but in a kind of abstract intellectual vacuum, and his private lucubrations had hardly helped provide the French Army with more and better tanks. When Gamelin gave orders, they sounded less like the words of a fighting man calling for vigorous action than topics for academic discussion. Worried about defects in training at the end of 1939, he had simply indicated to his subordinate, General Georges, ‘a few ideas’ phrased in a style which the Quai d’Orsay would have admired, instead of issuing clear-cut instructions. It was hardly surprising that the Army took no notice of these ‘ideas’. According to Paul Baudouin, even Daladier, Gamelin’s political protector, once remarked to General Weygand: ‘When you speak, one has something; as for Gamelin, it is like sand running through one’s fingers’, while the final damning remark about Gamelin, made by Reynaud to Baudouin, was that ‘He might be all right as a prefect or a bishop, but he is not a leader of men.’

  Indeed, as Georges Mandel described him, Gamelin was a kind of ‘military prefect’ who tailored his decisions closely to the whim of the politicians. One of his officers at G.Q.G. recalled how

  when he had to take a decision in the domain which interested me, I often saw him hesitate, postpone his decision to another moment, so as to weigh up all the consequences, and finally to take that which would not expose him to a subsequent conflict with the civilian powers.

  It was with the express purpose of keeping a close feel on the political pulse that, whereas Joffre had stubbornly maintained his G.Q.G. out at Chantilly so as to be beyond Parliamentary interference, Gamelin selected Vincennes. Thus it was that, too close to his political masters, too remote from the zone of operations, Gamelin gravely compromised his authority over the fighting forces.

  French Chain of Command

  The whole French chain of command was anomalous and hardly satisfactory. The Minister of National Defence (which role Daladier filled, as well as being Premier) wielded only nominal power over the Navy and Air Force, and Gamelin as the Chief of Staff possessed no more authority than his political boss. So the French Air Force, under the depressed General Vuillemin, tended to go its own way. Vuillemin had his H.Q. at Coulommiers, outside Paris. Under him came General Têtu, with the title of ‘Officer Commanding the Air Co-operation Forces’, who was supposed to co-ordinate air activities with the Army’s North-East Front H.Q. This front was divided into ‘Zones of Air Operations’, corresponding to the various Army Groups. In theory the arrangement was adequate, but in practice it meant that the individual army commanders found it impossible to obtain a sufficient concentration of air power at the right moment. The fundamental trouble, of course, was the sheer numerical shortage of French aircraft. Of the R.A.F. in France, Air Marshal Barratt’s Advanced Air Striking Force came directly under Bomber Command in England, the Royal Air Force Component of the B.E.F. under the Army Commander, Lord Gort.5

  As Supreme Commander of all French land forces, Gamelin gave direct orders to the armies in the Alps, in Syria and in North Africa. But to the great bulk of the forces grouped together under the Armies of the North-East, Gamelin issued his orders through the intermediary of his deputy, General Georges, who initially bore only the somewhat indefinite title (which had originated under Napoleon, and in the First War had been held, under Joffre, by General de Castelnau) of Major-Général des Armées. On the next level came the commanders of the various Army Groups. No. 1 Army Group, which, stretching from the Channel to the beginning of the Maginot Line, would play the predominant role in the battle for France, was commanded by General Billotte. Among the five armies on Billotte’s front was the B.E.F.; Lord Gort, however, received his orders not from Billotte but from Gamelin, via Georges.6

  It soon became apparent to Gamelin that he could not effectively control overall war strategy and exercise specific command over the Zone of the Armies of the North-East all from one inflated headquarters. On 6 January he effected a reorganization which relieved himself of the direct command of the North-East and handed it to Georges, now entitled C.-in-C. North-East Front. It was a measure that would provide Gamelin with numerous let-outs when it came to writing his memoirs, but somehow it did not improve the efficacy of the French command. While he reserved the right to intervene in an emergency (a right he never exercised in battle until it was much too late), the reorganization meant in fact that Gamelin – in sharpest contrast to his old master, Joffre – removed himself from control of what was almost certain to become the key battle area of the war. Yet Georges, on the other hand, was never vested with full powers or responsibility. The reorganization also resulted in the immediate creation of yet a third headquarters, G.H.Q. Land Forces under General Doumenc, situated in a Rothschild mansion beside the Marne at Montry, midway between Vincennes and Georges’s North-East Front H.Q. at La Ferté-sous-Jouarre, which lay forty miles to the east of Paris. The new H.Q., whose function was to prepare and elaborate orders, was created by fission chiefly from elements of General Georges’s staff, and this breaking-up of offices that had been working well together for several months had particularly lamentable effects. The Deuxième Bureau (Intelligence) was split in two, with its chief, Colonel (later General) Gauché, under Gamelin’s wing at Vincennes and officers compelled to make the trip there from La Ferté every day to obtain his signature for documents. The Troisième Bureau (operations) was also divided, but even more inopportune was its separation from the Quatrième (transport and supply) which was removed completely to Montry, an artificial divorce that had to be rapidly rescinded when the Germans attacked on 10 May. General Doumenc too had to ‘cut himself in two’, directing affairs at Montry in the morning and at La Ferté in the afternoon. Visiting officers from the line, such as General Prioux, commanding the élite Cavalry Corps, were not impressed by what they saw of the new organization; obeying Parkinson’s Law, the various staff adjuncts proliferated like amoebae, creating among themselves bureaux that specialized in agricultural affairs, P.T. and sports. Meanwhile, the inconveniences caused to communications by this splitting up of G.Q.G. encouraged the habit of short-circuiting Gamelin in his Thébaïde altogether.

  General Georges

  Not least among Gamelin’s motives in establishing this third, buffer-state, H.Q. at Montry was the animosity that existed between himself and Georges, and it seemed to be his deliberate policy to weaken his subordinate�
�s position by removing the more valuable members of his staff. As Gamelin’s star waned in Government circles and Georges emerged as his logical successor, relations between the two worsened to the point where they could hardly exchange civilities. ‘They are so busy making war on each other,’ a British general quipped in the hearing of Maurois one day, ‘that they have no time to make war on the Germans.’ General Georges himself came of very modest origins – he was said to be the son of a gendarme – and he owed a fine career entirely to professional merit, in no way to intrigue or political pull. In the Great War he had served on the staff in Salonika and had then been picked up by Foch, and it was in his retinue that he had ridden behind the Marshal, as a colonel, in the Victory Parade in 1919. After the war he had commanded a regiment in the Rhineland, later becoming Pétain’s Chief of Staff in Morocco. On 9 October 1934, fate struck a cruel blow at Georges: while accompanying King Alexander of Yugoslavia at Marseilles he was very badly wounded in the chest by the assassin who killed the King and Barthou, the French Foreign Minister. By 1940 he was still visibly suffering from the effect of his wounds; Spears noted that ‘he now invariably wore a woollen glove on one hand, and had been told he must not fly’. Instead, he drove about at high speed in a ‘beautiful and enormous Cadillac car, of which he was justly proud’. Because of Georges’s supposed doubtful associations with the more extremist right-wing factions, Daladier viewed him with mistrust and (so Gamelin claimed) for this reason would never tolerate him as C.-in-C. of the Army.7 In 1939 Georges’s pessimism about the war was widely known in the French Army; but of the British officers acquainted with him, many considered Georges to be France’s finest soldier. According to Spears, who should have known, he ‘had more influence on Churchill than any other Frenchman’. There were also many senior officers in the French Army who felt that Georges – not Gamelin – should have succeeded Weygand as C.-in-C. in 1935.

  Before the war, La Ferté, with its bourgeois houses topped by pretentious turrets that lent them an air of bogus castles, had been a popular summer’ retreat for rich Parisians. Here General Georges had established H.Q. North-East Front at Les Bondons, described by a staff officer as ‘a spacious cottage in an Anglo-Norman style, sited in the middle of a park on a wooded hill which dominated the Marne’, but ‘as little as possible suited to be a command post in time of crisis’. In a leisurely manner, Georges’s staff officers dined at the Hôtel de l’Épée, boasting a renowned chef, M. Truchet, who in 1917 had presided over Pétain’s cuisine. Perhaps on account of the mentally sapping consequence of Georges’s wounds, the atmosphere at Les Bondons struck visitors as being much the same as at Vincennes; here too an order was ‘an excellent basis for discussion’.

  Reading General Spears’s incomparable accounts of the French High Command in 1940, one emerges with a feeling of a world grown old and tired. In the military corridors one runs into the same old faces one has encountered a generation earlier. Brigadiers are now army commanders, or Commanders-in-Chief; battalion commanders have divisions or corps; the captains of 1918 are now in command of brigades or divisions. But they have aged. Symbolically, here is Marshal Franchet d’Esperey, the virile hero of 1918, in his wheelchair, now aged eighty-three, and declaring to Spears and Harold Nicolson: ‘Well, gentlemen, you see a ghost revisiting the scenes of his past’; Gamelin, the heir to Joffre, is sixty-eight; Weygand, the shadow of Foch, seventy-three. A French historian, Marc Bloch, writing at the time describes a perhaps typical senior officer who had gone through the First War as ‘weighed down… by years spent in the office work and conditioned by a purely academic training’. Where then, and who, are the young men, with the young ideas?

  Gamelin’s Strategy

  In the Entente of 1939, while conduct of the war by sea rested upon Britain’s shoulders, on account of France’s vast military preponderance the planning of land operations devolved in effect upon the French Generalissimo, which seemed a reasonably fair division of labour. Gamelin’s long-range strategy was to wait until, in terms of men and equipment, Britain and France had caught up with the Wehrmacht before launching any serious offensive. This could not be before 1941, at the earliest; by then, who knows, perhaps neutral America might be persuaded once again to come to the rescue. The two overriding considerations behind French strategy remained the same as they had been ever since 1919: to husband French manpower so as not to permit a repetition of the slaughter of 1914–18, and to keep the war away from the sacred soil of France. But what if, while France was building up her potential, Hitler should attack first? This seemed more than likely, in which case the two avenues open to him would be to attack across the common frontier, taking the shortest route to Paris, or to repeat 1914 and sweep through neutral Belgium. In the path of the first route lay the imposing barrier of the Maginot Line; of the second, Belgian neutrality. Given the ruthlessness of Hitler, there could be little doubt as to which barrier was the least daunting; the various Deuxième Bureau reports from October 1939 onwards suggested that it was towards the Flemish plains that Hitler was already turning his gaze.

  With the Maginot Line ‘extension’ between Longwy and the sea still far from reality, Pétain’s prescription of ‘going into Belgium’ to meet a German invasion clearly continued to hold good.8 But now, of course, King Leopold’s rigid neutrality eradicated any prospect of the French moving, at Belgian invitation, comfortably into their fortifications upon the German frontier as soon as war broke out. There had been no exchange consultations between the two General Staffs. The Belgians based their plans on the hope that they could hold their modern defence system along the Albert Canal, of which the powerful fortress of Eben Emael was the linchpin, at least long enough for the Allies to come to their assistance. But they adamantly declined to provide the Allies with any detailed information about these plans, and requests for French officers to visit defences in civilian clothes were invariably turned down. The same strict neutrality applied also to Holland. Ideally, Gamelin and the French military would have liked to go into Belgium without having to wait for the Germans to move first. But, quite rightly, the politicians were horrified at the impact any French violation of Belgian neutrality might have upon world (and, predominantly, American) opinion. Besides, the possibility of jeopardizing eventual collaboration with the Belgian Army simply could not be entertained, for one of Gamelin’s principal motives for ‘going into Belgium’ at all was the indispensability to France of the Belgian Army’s 700,000 men and twenty-two divisions (plus another ten from Holland in case of her involvement).

  On 24 October, Gamelin issued orders to the armies of the North-East Front, telling them to be ready to advance to a defensive position along the Escaut (or Scheldt) River, running from Antwerp to Ghent. In terms of distance of approach march, the ‘Escaut Plan’ represented the most prudent of the Low Countries operations open to the Allies. But it was an awkwardly long line to hold, and at the same time it covered so small a portion of Belgian territory that Brussels would be abandoned and the bulk of the Belgian Army simply left, unsupported, to its fate. General Georges, however, immediately registered the strongest misgivings about any ‘deeper progression into Belgium’. The Army was still not yet sufficiently ready to risk being caught by a German offensive in unprepared positions, far from its bases. Despite Georges’s doubts, on 15 November Gamelin gave out his amended Instruction No. 8, in which the Allied forces were to move up to the Dyle Line, stretching from Antwerp due south to above Dinant on the Meuse. The Dyle itself was little more than a wide stream, and it involved the French Army going out still further on the Belgian limb. Once again, General Georges expressed his reservations. On the credit side of the original ‘Dyle Plan’, it constituted a shorter line, it protected Brussels and gave a better chance of linking up with the Belgian defenders in their Albert Canal positions, and it committed no more than ten French divisions. Gamelin himself, however, was not satisfied; it made no provision for lending a hand to the Dutch in case of attack.

  Towa
rds the end of November, Gamelin requested General Billotte, commander of No. 1 Army Group, to study an extension of the Dyle Plan northwards from Antwerp in the direction of Breda, which lay twice as far from the French frontier as from Germany. On hearing of this new inflationary development of Gamelin’s Belgian strategy, Georges objected vigorously. In the margin of Billotte’s report, he wrote: ‘This is of the order of an adventure… Don’t let’s engage our effectives in this affair’, and on 5 December he sent it on to Gamelin with an accompanying memorandum which contained this highly pertinent and prescient warning: