To Lose a Battle

by Alistair Horne

  Daladier

  Daladier himself was neither strong nor prepossessing. A fifty-five-year-old widower and son of a baker from Vaucluse in the south, he had taught history before going into politics. He succeeded Herriot as leader of the Radical-Socialist Party in 1935, had been Minister of War almost uninterruptedly since 1932, and Premier both at the time of the Stavisky riots of 1934 and Munich, on each of which occasions he had capitulated to external pressures. Daladier was a stockily-built, energetic man with a dull-brown complexion and a greasy lock of hair that imparted a slight (and deceptive) look of Bonaparte. Under the strain of the Popular Front, he had come to depend increasingly on the more fiery French liquors; writing in all the bitterness of 1940, Vincent Sheean describes him as ‘a dirty man with a cigarette stuck to his lower lip, stinking of absinthe, talking with a rough Marseillaise accent… He had a certain southern eloquence, particularly over the air when he could not be seen.’ While Daladier was still in power, Harold Nicolson wrote in his diary that he looked ‘like a drunken peasant. His face must once have had sharp outlines but now it is blurred by the puffiness of drink. He looks extremely exhausted and has the eyes of a man who has had a bad night. He has a weak, sly smile.’ In the south, his supporters nicknamed Daladier ‘the bull of Vaucluse’, but as Spears remarked acidly, ‘his horns bore more resemblance to the soft feelers of the snail than to the harder bovine variety’. Others said that his was a case of a ‘velvet hand in a glove of iron’, and certainly his rough appearance and violent fits of rage had given him a reputation for strength to which, as both Munich and the Stavisky riots had shown, he was hardly entitled. His strength, such as it was, lay in politics rather than in statecraft, and he excelled in the steamy jungles comprising the political lobbies of the Third Republic. To Pertinax, Daladier – honest but infirm and immensely jealous of his position –epitomized the average Frenchman of his time; he was ‘the image of the last decade of the Republic’. For a nation as reluctantly at war as France, he was certainly not a leader to impart inspiration; in his New Year’s Eve broadcast at the end of 1939, he expressed a desire to spread ‘a ray of joy’ in each home, but all he managed to do was propagate his own gloom. Yet as a political juggler capable of keeping the parties of the Third Republic in some sort of equilibrium, he was indispensable.

  At the beginning of January 1940, Daladier took a weekend off to escape from the political pressures bearing down on him. He was out riding, when his horse slipped on frost-hardened ground and he fell, with his foot caught in the stirrup. For the next months he suffered constant pain and insomnia, which appear to have had their effect upon his control of the Government; Senator Bardoux notes that when he saw Daladier on 6 March he was still limping and seemed ‘even wearier, sadder and less dynamic than a fortnight previously’, while grumbling ‘Nothing is going right.’ Flandin, whose Government had once fallen as a result of a car accident in which he broke his arm, commented caustically that ‘a politician has no right to have accidents’, and on 20 March Daladier fell again – this time politically. Pierre Laval launched the attack, while the killing blow was struck by a Deputy who cried tellingly: ‘The men who were able neither to prevent nor to prepare for war are not now qualified either to stop it or win it…’ After some talk about Daladier being succeded by such ‘softs’ as Chautemps, Laval, or Pétain, President Lebrun called for Paul Reynaud to form the one-hundred-and-ninth Government of the Third Republic.

  Reynaud

  Paul Reynaud was sixty-two when he came to power, for the first time. His family were farmers in the Basses-Alpes, but he had established himself as a successful barrister. He had acquired a connoisseur’s taste for Chinese art, and indeed there was something of the mandarin in his own appearance: dapper, sharp-featured, with eyebrows that seemed to be permanently raised in a quizzical expression. He was very fond of sport – walking, cycling and swimming – and he rather advertised the fact. But the important physical feature of Reynaud was his modest stature. He had most of the attributes of the small man: agility, combativeness, vulnerability to flatterers, the self-confidence that masks a sense of inferiority – and courage. His enemies (and they were many) called him ‘Mickey Mouse’. But to Maurois he was

  a little fighting cock… I liked to see him, when a subject fired his imagination, get to his feet, put his hands in his pockets, throw back his head to raise his short figure to its full height, and hold forth in picturesque and biting phrases like quick hammer blows.

  In debate he showed a brilliant, quick intellect and a devastating logic; but he sought (says Élie Bois) ‘to master, not to charm’, and this with his natural assertiveness and love of battle did not endear him to other politicians of the Third Republic, especially to Daladier, who loathed him. Hardworking and intensely patriotic, Reynaud had never been afraid to swim against the current. From the earliest days he had warned France about Hitler’s designs, in opposition to the Flandins, Lavals and Bonnets, and it was he who had gone against official French military doctrine by taking up the views of de Gaulle. As Minister of Finance in 1938, he had achieved remarkable success in reordering France’s economy after the ravages of the Popular Front; but his tough measures had gained him many more enemies. From September 1939 he had pledged himself to total war against Hitler, though by the time he came to power it was a bit late, in so far as Hitler was himself on the brink of unleashing total war against France.

  As the small voice in the French wilderness, Reynaud represented the equivalent of Churchill, whom he hugely admired; but unfortunately he possessed neither the essential grandeur nor the support. He also was too much a product of the Third Republic, had played the game of musical chairs to its limit, manoeuvring and counter-manoeuvring. More than this, because of the loneliness of the positions he adopted as well as his combative manner, in the Assembly he was a maverick; sitting in the centre, he possessed no party of his own, few intimates, and his judgement in choosing his political ‘friends’ was to prove far from impeccable. Thus, in contrast to the great carte blanche given to Churchill on his accession to power, Reynaud from the start was forced to compromise and tight-rope-walk in his formation of a government.

  But by far the heaviest burden Paul Reynaud had to bear was his mistress, Madame Hélène de Portes. Ambitious, busy women have traditionally exercised a powerful influence behind the scenes of French politics. At the end of the 1930s, there were three who had dominated the stage of the Third Republic. There was Madame Bonnet, nicknamed ‘Madame soutien-Georges’; the Marquise de Crussol, a handsome and youthful-looking blonde who was Daladier’s Egeria and whom the punsters christened ‘la sardine qui s’est crue sole’, on account of the family’s sardine-canning business; and Raynaud’s Comtesse Hélène de Portes, the most powerful of them all and regarded as almost too sinister to be granted a sobriquet, although the wits occasionally referred to her, aptly as ‘the side door’ – ‘la porte à côté’.

  The extraordinary thing about Hélène de Portes is that, of the countless people who knew her, none can satisfactorily explain wherein lay her allure. The practised eye of General Spears describes her as having ‘very good feet and ankles, but her complexion was sallow. Of medium height, she was dark, her curly hair, brushed upwards, looked untidy… Her mouth was big and the voice that issued from it was unharmonious.’ Spears thought she dressed fashionably, but lacked ‘the attractiveness so often found in Parisiennes, that of being bien soignée’. Élie Bois, less vitriolic than most, observed in her a physical attribute which perhaps compensated for her lack of traditional beauty: ‘Her way of walking, quick of step, disclosed that the suppleness of her limbs and the agility of her whole body were maintained by physical exercise.’ But he thought her ‘ardent and ruthless in every way… a match for others at the game of secret slander’. However, he added, ‘she preferred direct attack, haughty, and even violent, for thereby her will to dominate could be more surely exercised’. Giving a woman’s view of Hélène de Portes, Clare Boothe saw her as �
�a dark, homely, talkative little woman, in her late forties. She looked as much like a Hausfrau as a French maîtresse can. She was patriotic, energetic; she had many friends and a lot of notions about everything.’ But to regard her as ‘the Du Barry of France’ was, she thought, as wide of the mark as calling ‘Mrs Eleanor Roosevelt the Cleopatra of the New Deal!’

  What, then, was the secret of her hold over Reynaud? Most probably it resided in his small stature. As a Frenchman remarked to Harold Nicolson in 1941, ‘she made him feel tall and grand and powerful. Had Reynaud been three inches taller, the history of the world might have been changed.’ He needed and depended upon his Hélène, and thrived upon her flattery; she in her turn, dedicated to seeing her hero reach the top of the political ladder, sustained him and goaded him in his own strong ambitions. Their relationship, as someone once remarked, was ‘far more like Diana clinging to her charger than Venus clutching her prey’.

  In the aftermath of France’s defeat, Hélène de Portes came to be regarded by many as an out-and-out Fifth Columnist. Certainly before the war her famous salon had been frequently visited by Otto Abetz and members of the Comité France–Allemagne; she was never a ‘hard’ like Reynaud, and she was strongly anti-British, a tendency which increased as the war went progressively worse for France from 10 May onwards. But in retrospect it seems fair to judge that she was no more of a ‘Fifth Columnist’ than most of the patriotic but self-interested haute bourgeoisie whose shibboleth under the Popular Front had been ‘Rather Hitler than Blum!’ Perhaps the most baneful feature of her relationship with Paul Reynaud was that she held him totally her prisoner, and chivvied him relentlessly until he was simply worn out. Together they lived in Reynaud’s bachelor flat near the Assembly, where much business of state was transacted. She was constantly intervening and interfering, and even in his office Reynaud was never immune from her endless telephone calls. On at least one occasion Madame de Portes was to be found actually seated at his desk, presiding over a gathering of generals, deputies and government officials. Once when André Maurois criticized a political appointment made by his friend, Reynaud admitted: ‘It was not my choice, it was hers.’ Maurois replied: ‘That is no excuse.’ ‘Ah,’ sighed Reynaud, ‘you don’t know what a man who has been hard at work all day will put up with to make sure of an evening’s peace.’

  Another aspect of Madame de Portes’s unfortunate influence behind the scenes was the fact that she was at daggers drawn with the Marquise de Crussol, Daladier’s champion. The rivalry of these women injected poison into the already bad relations between the two most powerful leaders of war-time France. From about January, Hélène de Portes had begun to campaign for Reynaud to oust Daladier, in the clumsiest fashion, filling the salons of Paris with stories of Daladier’s lethargy. This gossip the faithful Marquise promptly passed back to Daladier, duly magnified, until the rift between him and Reynaud became almost intolerable. To Maurois, Reynaud confided grimly: ‘I believe he desires the victory of France, but he desires my defeat even more.’ Of this feud, Churchill was to comment to Spears in despair. ‘What will centuries to come say if we lost this war through lack of understanding?’

  Reynaud Saddled with Gamelin

  The tragedy for France was that Reynaud, the lone operator with no political machine behind him, could not survive without the backing of Daladier in his Cabinet. On the very first day of the new Government, Reynaud was confronted with a vote of confidence. He scraped by with only one vote, so precarious was the balance of the Government about to face Hitler’s onslaught. Reynaud wanted to take over the Ministry of National Defence from Daladier, but he had to renounce it because of his need for his enemy’s support; he wanted to sack Gamelin, but could not, because Gamelin was Daladier’s man; he wanted to bring in Colonel de Gaulle as Secretary to the War Cabinet, but de Gaulle would not serve with Daladier and preferred to return to his tanks.5 Paul Baudouin, a director of the Bank of Indo-China, youngish, good-looking, but a ‘soft’ and a favoured protégé of Hélène de Portes, got the job instead. Bonnet was sacked at last, but later, as part of his complex balancing act, Reynaud was constrained to bring in two extreme right-wingers, Marin and Ybarnegaray. The appointment of the latter, a member of Colonel de la Rocque’s Croix de Feu, was roughly the same as if Churchill had taken Oswald Mosley into his Cabinet. Daladier himself grumbled to Élie Bois: ‘I ought not to have entered this Government. I was tired, worn out… I must get out of it at the first opportunity.’

  It was typical of how self-interest continued to prevail in a France perched on the very brink of disaster. The nation at large was all too discouragingly aware of the ‘swamp of personal jealousies and ministerial appetites’ in Paris. At the front, Major Barlone spoke for many soldiers when he wrote in his diary of the new Government: ‘People see a schemer and a thief in every politician… Our enemies do not waste their time over Parliamentary manoeuvres… Spring is now here, the time of trial is probably at hand, and look what a Government we have!’

  Yet for all the political ligaments binding him and restricting his movements, Reynaud himself, with his little man’s combativeness, came to power just as dedicated to waging war with a fresh bellicosity as Clemenceau had been. One of his first acts was to go to London to sign, on 28 March, a joint declaration with the British, pledging that neither country would conclude a separate peace without the agreement of the other, an undertaking to which Daladier had long been reluctant to commit himself.6 Then, on 12 April, Reynaud, who had been infuriated by Gamelin’s showing over Norway, determined to precipitate a crisis here. To Baudouin he remarked: ‘It would be criminal to leave this nerveless philosopher at the head of the French Army.’ He was, he said, ‘hesitating between General Georges and General Weygand’. But in the Cabinet, Daladier immediately ranged himself behind Gamelin, and threatened to resign himself if there were any change. Reynaud was stymied. Baudouin claims he came out of the meeting ‘thunderstruck by the pitiful spectacle of the Prime Minister’s impotence to break the political chains which bound him’. At a Cabinet Meeting on 23 April, Reynaud once again remained silent. On the 27th, Reynaud told Baudouin that the time for procrastination was over; he would take action within the next two or three days. But President Lebrun, whose whole-hearted support would be indispensable to Reynaud, merely passed him a message, telling him to ‘be patient. Time will settle many things.’ Indeed it would. Then on 28 April, Reynaud collapsed with influenza. He was confined to his bed for a week, and Gamelin was saved a second time. On returning to his office, still shaky, Reynaud now prepared for a final offensive against his commander-in-chief.

  Notices went out on the evening of 8 May for a Cabinet meeting the next morning. Reynaud arrived with a bulky file, from which he read for two hours. According to Élie Bois, his colleagues, many of whom had not seen him for a fortnight, ‘found him much altered, thinner, feverish of eye, unsteady of voice’. He closed with a warning that France, if she persisted in the errors which had encompassed the Norwegian operation, would almost certainly lose the war. Gamelin could not be left in charge. There followed a painful two-minute silence before Lamoureux, the Minister of Finance, rallied to Reynaud. Daladier counter-attacked vigorously. Reynaud wound up the session by stating that, in view of the opposition, he considered the Government as having resigned and would inform the President accordingly. All that afternoon of the 9th discussions went on at the Élysée. The next day the Germans attacked. A third respite was granted Gamelin.

  Meanwhile, in London, in the midst of questions about such grave matters as Kentish sheep being frightened by aircraft, Scottish hotels over-charging for coffee and the advertising of patent medicines in stamp books, the Commons was concluding its great debate on Norway. Chamberlain was finished. On 10 May, just as Hitler’s Panzers were plunging into Holland and Belgium, Churchill became Prime Minister. In those lapidary words, he remarked: ‘I was conscious of a profound sense of relief. At last I had the authority to give directions over the whole scene. I fel
t as if I were walking with destiny…’ Britain had at last found her war leader, and he embarked upon his task with the undivided support of parliamentarians; but there were many government matters concerning the conduct of war which were strange to him and would necessarily and perilously remain outside his grasp for some time. How different though, was the scene in France on 10 May. Indubitably, time had ‘settled’ matters, but not in the way Lebrun might have hoped. Here was a government in the throes of dissolution, a commander-in-chief under suspended sentence.

  The Opposing Forces: Tanks

  For employment in Sichelschnitt, by May Hitler could count upon 136 out of the Army’s 157 divisions, of which no more than a third qualified as first-rate offensive material. The Wehrmacht was by no means yet the superb instrument it would have become by the time of Barbarossa the following year. Most of its infantry divisions depended, to an astonishing extent, on horse transport (each division containing 5,375 horses to 942 motor vehicles, and consuming 50 tons of hay and oats a day – compared to only 20 tons of motor fuel), and many were hardly combat-fit. With its steel tip of only ten Panzer divisions and a handful of élite motorized infantry divisions, it could indeed be likened to a spear with a vulnerable wooden shaft. Against Hitler’s 136 divisions, France’s North-East Front was now held by 94 French divisions of mixed value,7 plus 10 British, augmented by a further 22 Belgian divisions and 10 Dutch (though, despite Gamelin’s hopes, these latter were able to exert a minimal influence in the battle) – a total also of 136, so that in numbers alone the Germans did not possess the kind of overwhelming superiority which the Allies required to crush the Wehrmacht later in the war.