To Lose a Battle

by Alistair Horne

  Episodes such as these multiplied with the panic that spread before the approaching Panzers. In the early days of the fighting, a demolition squad of the Belgian Chasseurs Ardennais was arrested while retreating over the French frontier, disarmed, and placed in grave danger of being shot. In Paris, Fabre-Luce recorded :

  The songstress whom one applauded under a French name is in a concentration camp at the Vel’ d’Hiv; she was German. The professional anti-Nazi whose diatribes against Hitler one used to read in the newspapers has been arrested; he was a spy.

  There were frequent cases of Allied flyers being manhandled, but particularly dangerous was the predicament of the rounded-up ‘aliens’ like Arthur Koestler. From cells bursting with ‘Fifth Columnists’ at Abbeville, twenty-two such prisoners were arbitrarily taken out and shot near the city bandstand. Out of a group of Belgian refugees shot without trial at Abbeville, the Fascist leader, Leon Dégrelle, was one who evidently escaped notice. ‘As for the spy problem, we have solved that,’ one French soldier declared to an American correspondent. ‘We simply shoot all the officers we do not know!’ That this was no idle boast is confirmed by Major Barlone, who wrote in his diary for 22 May: ‘Our orders are to shoot all spies and strangers who are unable to justify their presence’, and later :

  Dispenser Charbonnier, at our hospital, had five persons shot, one a beautiful young girl; by showing lights and curtains of different colours, they had guided German aircraft, signalling to them and thereby causing fires in the neighbouring chemical factory.

  To what extent was there an organized ‘Fifth Column’ working away ahead of the Panzers? Insisted Major Barlone :

  The Fifth Column really does exist; every night blue, green and red lights appear everywhere. A regiment cannot remain two hours in a tiny spot without being invariably bombed with enormous bombs.

  At the time, the vast majority of Frenchmen agreed with him, and certainly the list of deeds attributed to various insidious underground agencies cover an imposing range.5 The stories started in Poland, where it was rumoured that the Volksdeutsch had ambushed Polish troops and insinuated mustard gas into the water the troops washed in, and there were reports of German spy-planes dropping poisoned chocolates and cigarettes.6 In Holland, the fact of the handful of ‘Brandenburgers’ in purloined Dutch uniforms multiplied a thousand times with incredible rapidity. On 16 May, the distraught Dutch Foreign Minister, van Kleffens, himself assured the Press in Paris that parachutists had descended on his country ‘by the thousand’, clad in ‘French, Belgian and British uniforms, in the cassocks of priests and in the garb of nuns or nurses’. Here began the legend of the ‘nuns in hobnailed boots’. In Belgium, the Security Service warned that parachutists in civilian clothes had landed in various places, and it requested that all placards advertising ‘Pasha’ chicory be removed from telegraph poles, etc., because on their reverse side ‘drawings have been found which can give the enemy valuable information’. After the Germans had traversed the Ardennes, word went round in France that they had been able to do so at such speed only because the Fifth Column had prepared secret petrol dumps in advance of the Panzers. The débâcle at Sedan was immediately followed with rumours that the Meuse bridge hàd been abandoned intact to the enemy through treachery;7 that officers detailed to blow them up had been mysteriously shot down by disguised German agents. Here, and on many subsequent occasions, local disasters were attributed to bogus orders telephoned by ‘Fifth Columnists’, and purporting to come from some staff officer, or from the mayor of a village ordering its evacuation. General Spears relates a typical story (told him by Saint-Exupéry, ‘who said he could vouch for its truth’), of how

  a group of the best heavy guns in the French Army, the 155-millimetre Rimaillots, was halted near Laon when a pale-faced Staff Officer appeared declaring he had come post-haste from Corps H.Q. to say that a German Panzer division was converging on them and would be there in a matter of minutes, and the Corps Commander adjured them as good Frenchmen not to allow their guns to fall into enemy hands. Within a few minutes 35 of these priceless guns had been damaged beyond repair. No such order had been sent from Corps H.Q.

  This dissemination of false orders was one of the commonest activities for which the Fifth Column was held responsible, and its consequence was often that orders transmitted by genuine but unidentified officers were simply disobeyed – all adding to the chaos of the French command network.

  Another common allegation was that German agents signalled to invisible aircraft, or to other agents. Looking out from Montmartre one night, Peter de Polnay claims ‘I saw signals in morse all over Paris. The Fifth Column was at work.’ Hans Habe writes of a suspicious sergeant-major who used to disappear mysteriously every evening and whom he claims was later discovered

  giving signals to German planes under the pretext of lighting his pipe. According to some he was shot on the spot by an artillery lieutenant… I never saw him again.

  Only a fraction of these specific allegations of Fifth Column activities has ever been substantiated. None of the works written analytically in the aftermath of the war sustain the legend. Brigadier-General Telford Taylor, who served with the U.S. Army Intelligence in Europe during the Second World War and was later Chief Counsel at the Nuremberg Trials, states that ‘careful investigations… have abundantly proved that in Holland, as in Norway, the reports of subversion and sabotage were uniformly exaggerated and often utterly groundless’. De Jong puts the total number active in Holland at one thousand, including about one or two hundred Dutch citizens. He adds:

  it is worthy of note that in not one of the German documents bearing on the preparations for the offensive is there so much as a single passage referring to such a Fifth Column.

  As in Holland, in Belgium there was a smattering of ‘Rexist’ traitors who may have helped the Germans, and de Jong mentions Abwehr agents who were infiltrated into Belgium as ‘refugees’; these he also numbers at between one and two hundred. In Luxembourg, as has already been seen, the German ‘tourists’ who flowed over the frontier before the invasion did help the Panzers by preventing demolitions and disrupting communications. But apart from a few Abwehr sabotage squads attempting to infiltrate with the refugees – and about whose achievements little is known with accuracy – no serious effort seems to have been made by the Germans to operate a Fifth Column in France. De Jong categorically refutes the myth of ‘bogus orders’: ‘Nowhere has it appeared that false instructions were circulated by the Fifth Column.’8 At least two French generals, Menu and Ruby (who was Huntziger’s Chief of Staff), also scoff at the notion of Fifth Columnists being responsible for the chaos and confusion on the Meuse. Says General Menu:

  We say emphatically that we do not believe in this argument… Was he an agent of the Fifth Column, the officer of X Corps, who telephoned at the end of the afternoon of 13 May that the Panzers were at Chaumont and then at Bulson?… We say: No.

  A Swiss historian, Eddy Bauer, goes as far as to declare: ‘One thing is, however, clear: that in France there never was a Fifth Column.’

  On the German side, out of the welter of personal memoirs and war narratives published since 1945, the sheer absence of allusion to organized Fifth Column work in France is in itself instructive. The Abwehr, to be sure, had its network of ‘V-men’, spies and informers inside France, but these seem to have been strictly limited both in numbers and quality, and for the most part established in haste at the beginning of the war. From its own accounts, the Abwehr depended for its actual intelligence more upon the less romantic forms of espionage, such as aerial reconnaissance and signals interception. The fact is that Canaris’s Abwehr proved itself, throughout most of the war, to be one of the least effective organs of Hitler’s war machine; added to which the German character has seldom shown a marked propensity for the subtler forms of underground warfare.

  There were a number of diverse reasons why the bogy of the Fifth Column became magnified out of all proportion in France. There was t
he impact of Goebbels’s propaganda coupled with the boasts of Hitler himself:

  In the midst of peace [he had declared – or so the faithful Rauschning told the world], troops will suddenly appear, let us say, in Paris. They will wear French uniforms. They will march through the streets in broad daylight. No one will stop them. Everything has been thought out… We shall send them across the border in peace-time. Gradually. No one shall see in them anything but peaceful travellers.

  In this form of psychological warfare, the Nazis were aided in the West by its knowledge of the precedent for subversive actions which the Sudeten Czechs created in 1938; but not least they were also succoured by the panic-inspiring utterances of Allied leaders, such as van Kleffens on the hobnailed nuns, or Reynaud declaring that the Meuse bridges had been captured undestroyed, and proclaiming (on 13 May) that all German combatants caught out of uniform would be shot on sight.9 But, as with the refugee exodus, even the Nazis never quite expected to get such returns with the ‘Fifth Column’ bogy as they did.

  There was also the cumulative effect of Hitler’s string of lightning successes, enhanced by rumours of his armoury of ‘secret weapons’. Surely, there had to be some simple answer to explain these successes? How had Norway and Denmark succumbed so easily? Had Fort Eben Emael been taken by means of some deadly nerve gas or death-ray? Had the Germans crossed the Meuse with some kind of amphibious tank kept afloat by compressed air? Were they using sixty-ton tanks with such heavy armour that nothing could penetrate? These were all stories that made the rounds. But where else could an explanation be found to all these devastating successes? Could it lie in the Fifth Column? In treason?

  ‘Nous sommes trahis!’

  Treason! Faithfully that terrible word reappears on French lips the moment there is a major disaster, revealing one of the less admirable national traits. Gallic pride can never admit that the nation has been collectively at fault; inevitably, she has been betrayed by an individual or a faction. Repeatedly during the Franco-Prussian War, and again in the most adverse moments of 1914–18, the expression ‘Nous sommes trahis’ – ‘We are betrayed’ – rings out sombrely across the ramparts. But the soil had never been more fertile for such an interpretation of France’s woes than in May 1940. Clare Boothe relates a conversation with an elderly Red Cross nurse, who asked her:

  ‘Madame… you are an American?’ I said: ‘Yes,’ and she went on: ‘Then you must tell me the truth: qui nous a trahis? Who has betrayed us?’… That was the first time I heard the word ‘trahi’ (‘betrayed’) in Paris. At first it was no more than a whisper, like the little winds that come in the dim days before the hurricane.

  Then, as the débâcle at the front escalated, it became ‘a sullen roar’. All the suspicions and mutual mistrusts of Third Republic France bred by Stavisky, the Croix de Feu and the Popular Front now surged to the fore. On entering Paris with the victorious German Army at the end of June, William Shirer was assured that there had been ‘treachery in the French army from top to bottom – the Fascists at the top, the Communists at the bottom’. The Left accused the Cagoule10 of having conveniently established arms and fuel dumps for the Germans beyond the Meuse; the Right blamed the catastrophe there on Communist influence. The defeatists and ‘softs’ in the Government were men bought by German money; the right-wing generals were also bought. And so the nightmare fantasy of the pervasive Fifth Column spread, in ever-widening ripples. Even intellectuals such as Simone de Beauvoir seemed prone to believe in it (‘Had there been treachery?’ was her immediate reaction on hearing of Corap’s defeat. ‘No other explanation seemed possible.’), and from London General de Gaulle later cloaked it with historical respectability. For those in high places, treachery and the Fifth ‘Column provided an admirably convenient explanation for otherwise inexplicable disasters. Almost on the last page of his copious memoirs, Gamelin appends, and apparently endorses, a report blaming the break-up of the 55th Division at Sedan on those bogus orders put around by ‘parachutists’, and at the time he made repeated allegations about the responsibility of the Communists. Whatever the Communists may have done to augment demoralization, both inside and outside the French Army, they never, however, constituted a Fifth Column in its conventional sense. It was indeed ‘what is false within’ that principally betrayed France.

  Real or imagined, however, the role played by the ‘Fifth Column’ in the defeat of France should never be underestimated. What it meant to the simple French fighting man was eloquently summed up by René Balbaud, a senior N.C.O.:

  We felt ourselves spied on, betrayed on all sides… When we learned that the Germans had entered France, our first reaction was to think once more of betrayal. We talked of generals being retired, of the Commander-in-Chief being replaced. And so? But, real or imagined, these betrayals all had the same result: collapse of the Army’s morale. We talked of King Leopold… And our aircraft? Vanished into dreamland. Betrayed. And our equipment, said to be tip-top, but which we never saw a sign of? Betrayed. Well, why fight? Everyone we trusted had betrayed us.

  The French Now Know: the Germans Are Heading for the Channel

  18 May was the day that the French High Command at last knew for certain that the Germans were heading for the Channel – that they were swinging away from Paris, while covering their flank defensively along the Aisne. As already noted, on the 16th orders containing the complete itineraries for the Panzers were taken off a badly wounded German colonel near Rethel. There is some mystery about their subsequent fate; the German documents were apparently handed to General Touchon’s (Sixth Army) H.Q., but for some reason – perhaps simply the chaos existing in French channels of communication – they were immediately passed on to La Ferté or Vincennes. On the 17th, the Deuxième Bureau at Billotte’s No. 1 Army Group H.Q. intercepted a German signal in clear which also disclosed that the thrust was aimed at the Channel and not Paris; again, this intelligence does not seem to have made its way promptly back to G.Q.G. That same morning another German staff officer with similarly revealing orders destined for the 1st Panzer was captured by a formation of the French 2nd Armoured Division. The divisional second-in-command, Colonel Perré, set off towards Compiègne to take them to the Ninth Army Commander. General Giraud. But Giraud could not be traced. Colonel Perré also seems not to have thought about transmitting this valuable booty directly to G.H.Q., reasoning that it would arrive too late to be of any use. Thus it was not until well on into the 18th that the sum of all this intelligence reached Georges or Gamelin, confirming the rumours of the previous day. By this time even the Germans were no longer making great efforts to conceal the true objective of Sichelschnitt. Shirer spotted an item in a Berlin newspaper hinting

  that the German armies now converging on Paris from the north-east may not try to take Paris immediately, as they did in 1914, but strike north-west for the Channel ports in an effort to cut off England from France.

  Gamelin Still Hesitates and Pétain Arrives

  The rumours that Hitler was turning away towards the Channel ports had provoked a fleeting, ill-founded elation among Parisians. Shares on the Bourse fluttered briefly upwards. ‘Maybe he’s going to England first’ were the whispers overheard by Clare Boothe. Gamelin himself may not have subscribed to this view, but there was no doubt that on the 18th he struck his staff as being ‘in better form than on the day before. Visibly the Commander-in-Chief had pulled himself together.’ In the mind of the faithful staff officer of Joffre, the man who had actually prepared the orders preluding the immortal victory of the Marne in 1914, a chord was struck. By swinging away from Paris and presenting such a long, open flank, were the Germans about to commit the same error as Kluck in 1914? Thoughts parallel to those which had plagued the minds of Hitler and Rundstedt now began to preoccupy Gamelin. At Vincennes it was sensed that the Generalissimo was about to produce his master-stroke. That afternoon (the 18th) aerial reconnaissance reported a ‘complete vacuum’ in the Laon-Montcornet area immediately behind the cutting tip of the Pa
nzers. But still Gamelin hesitated.

  Visiting La Ferté that morning, Gamelin affects to have found none of the newly regained composure which his own staff were detecting in him. The atmosphere at Les Bondons struck his tidy mind as ‘extremely detrimental to regular ‘work’. In the office of Georges’s Chief of Staff, General Roton, ‘utter disorder’ reigned, with staff officers continually coming and going through it. The situation was hardly better in the room where Georges himself presided, and he betrayed to Gamelin ‘incontestable signs of lassitude’. The monastic Generalissimo wondered how his subordinate could possibly ‘dominate events’ in such an atmosphere of chaos where no reflection was possible. He voiced his misgivings privately to General Doumenc. After making conventional noises of loyalty to Georges, Doumenc expressed agreement and said he thought the time was approaching when Gamelin should take direction of the battle into his own hands. Gamelin replied, ‘Of course, let me know the right moment’ – as if this had not long since passed him by. After a further, inconclusive discussion with Georges about restoring the ‘continuity of the front’, Gamelin was warned that Reynaud and Daladier were coming to visit him at 1500 hours that afternoon, and he sped back to Vincennes.