To Lose a Battle

by Alistair Horne

  A complete upset is thus occurring. I wanted to make Army Group ‘A’ the hammer, and Army Group ‘B’ the anvil; but now ‘B’ is to be the hammer and ‘A’ the anvil. Since ‘B’, however, is faced with an organized front, this must necessarily be very costly and take a long time. Another thing, the Luftwaffe, on which so much hope is now being placed, is completely dependent on the weather.

  The whole thing was ‘more wearing to the nerves than the entire organization of the campaign itself.

  Finally, at 1230 on the 26th, Brauchitsch was called to Felsennest. To his great satisfaction, Hitler informed him that he had given orders, though with certain reservations, for the Panzers to advance on Dunkirk again, in order to end the evacuation of the British there. But it would take a further sixteen hours to get them moving again. By then, says Guderian, ‘it was too late to achieve a great victory’. For during the three days the ‘Halt Order’ had been in force, much had happened. Four British divisions and a number of French had managed to escape from the cauldron forming at the bottom of the pocket, around Lille, which they certainly would not have done had Rommel been allowed to continue his encircling thrust. The construction of a tough perimeter defence line guarding a Dunkirk bridgehead was well under way. In Britain, the ‘Dynamo’ evacuation fleet was assembled and, as Hitler informed Brauchitsch, the first embarkations were already being made from Dunkirk. Finally, there came, miraculously, the first break in ‘Goering’s weather’, so crucial to the Luftwaffe if it were to ‘finish the job from the air’. Bad weather grounding the German planes proved Goering’s boast to Hitler to be as disastrously wrong as his promise to save the encircled German troops at Stalingrad in 1943.

  Before leaving this episode, which (as Guderian rightly remarks) was ‘to have a most disastrous influence on the whole future course of the war’, three myths can be usefully dispatched. In the first place, the excuse that the Flanders mud was responsible for the ‘Halt Order’ is supported by none of the German tank experts who fought over the area; Guderian, who should have been able to judge better than anybody else, simply dismisses it as ‘a poor one’. Secondly, the notion of the ‘golden bridge’ offered by Hitler to the B.E.F. now finds few supporters, and certainly stands directly at odds with the very definite orders given to the Luftwaffe, which were the ‘destruction’ of all the encircled enemy forces. The myth in fact appears to have been propagated by Rundstedt’s ex-Chief-of-Staff during his interrogation by Liddell Hart immediately after the end of the war. Thirdly, the fault for the ‘Halt Order’ cannot be placed solely at Hitler’s door. Since the war, German generaldom has been committed for various reasons, which include both self-preservation and professional pride, to blaming every war-time error and crime upon Hitler, and in this instance even Guderian is to be found disputing the view that Rundstedt was responsible for holding up the Panzers. But if anyone was primarily to blame, both on the evidence of the episode itself and of his past performance during the campaign, it was Rundstedt. In his exchange with Hitler he was a completely free agent, not a Party hack just playing back Hitler’s own wishes. Rundstedt’s integrity as a soldier was too great for this. He was an outstanding battle commander, but as a strategist he showed himself throughout to be almost as preconditioned by the experiences of the First World War as his French counterparts. On 24 May, it was the shock of what the British had done, coupled with his ineradicable fears of what the French still could do, which principally decided Rundstedt, and, through him, persuaded Hitler, to halt the Panzers.

  Here, in this disarray within the German High Command, of which the ‘Halt Order’ of 24 May was the culminating episode, lay the Achilles’ heel in Hitler’s superlative machine and its superlative plan. Through it the B.E.F. was to be saved; if the Allies could have taken advantage of this Achilles’ heel by more resolute action earlier in the battle, could still more have been saved?

  The Panzers Move Again

  During the Panzer halt, the German infantry formations were still keeping up an unremitting pressure on all sectors of the encircled area. For the Allies, the principal danger points were in the east along the line held by the rapidly flagging Belgian Army, and at the bottom of the pocket where the French First Army, now commanded by General Prioux, was situated. As King Leopold had finally agreed, following the Ypres conference, the Belgians had withdrawn from the Escaut to the Lys on the 25th, but almost immediately Reichenau’s infantry had broken through the new line on either side of Courtrai. The next day the Belgians were trying to anchor their right wing between Ypres and Roulers. Blanchard, having succeeded Billotte, was urging them to fall back on the Yser – as Weygand had wanted originally. But the Belgian Chief of the General Staff, Michiels, declared that a further retreat was out of the question, and would only result in the disintegration of his units. On the afternoon of the 26th, the Belgian High Command warned Blanchard: ‘The limits of Belgian resistance are very close to being reached.’

  On the rescinding of the ‘Halt Order’, Rommel’s first task was to break across the La Bassée Canal east of Béthune, which was held by the B.E.F. Once again, Rommel had the armour of the 5th Panzer placed under his control. After some hard and costly fighting, by the end of the 27th5 he had broken through the British line. The 5th Panzer surged forward to capture Armentières, while Rommel swung eastwards to meet German infantry advancing from the opposite direction. Nearly half the French First Army was now cut off in a smaller pocket around Lille. For four more days General Molinié fought an immensely courageous but hopeless action (largely with North African troops), which in fact enabled the B.E.F. and the remainder of the First Army to fall back safely into the Dunkirk bridgehead.6 But when the jaws of the trap closed, one of those to be taken (along with some 35,000 French troops) was the valiant General Prioux, captured at his command post in Steenwerck by men of the 4th Panzer. During the fighting, Rommel once again came close to losing another of his nine lives when German heavy shells landed by mistake a few yards from his signals vehicle, killing one of his battalion commanders. On 29 May, the 7th Panzer was pulled out of the line for six days’ rest and reorganization before taking part in ‘Operation Red’. The encirclement of Lille marked the end of Rommel’s role in the first phase of Sichelschnitt.

  Guderian, after the lifting of the ‘Halt Order’, pushed across the Aa Canal to capture Wormhoudt and Bourbourgville on 28 May and Gravelines, midway between Calais and Dunkirk, on the 29th. (Meanwhile Boulogne had been captured on the 25th; Calais on the 26th, after a last-ditch resistance by the Rifle Brigade under Brigadier Nicholson.) Then, like Rommel and the 7th Panzer, Guderian’s XIX Corps was withdrawn to prepare for ‘Operation Red’. Bitterly he remarks of the brakes applied to his Panzers in these critical days:

  What the future course of the war would have been if we had succeeded at the time in taking the British Expeditionary Force prisoner at Dunkirk, it is now impossible to guess.

  French Despair

  Behind the lines in France, the appointment of Weygand and his flight to Flanders had been accompanied by another brief flicker of optimism. It was to be the last. On 23 May, Alexander Werth in Paris observed that the bookstalls along the quais had reopened and that workmen were busy completing the pedestal of one of the statues on the Pont-du-Louvre – which struck him, under the circumstances, as being rather ‘queer’. At a cocktail party two days later he found people expressing confidence that things were ‘going far better’; there was talk that ‘Weygand has organized his Somme front; that the Flanders and Somme armies will, within the next twenty-four or forty-eight hours, join and cut the German pincer, and that Hitler made a mistake in not attacking Paris on 16 May.’ On the 26th, French Army spokesmen were still deriding the ‘armchair strategists’ who concluded that the Flanders armies had been encircled. The following day, Werth recorded a further sign of continuing normalcy in the shape of Picasso – ‘dark jealous mistress and all’ – holding forth at the Café Flore, but now even Colonel Thomas in the Hôtel Cont
inental was half-admitting the loss of Calais, while ‘the juncture of the Somme and Flanders armies is no longer even mentioned’.

  In this last week of May, defeatism began to spread unchecked in France. The signs of despair assumed varied shapes; Vincent Sheean first sensed it on visiting the Quai d’Orsay, when he spotted that one of the grand old huissiers, the guardian dragons defending the portals of French diplomacy, had allowed his heavy silver chain, the badge of service, to fall askew so that it was almost dropping off one shoulder. ‘It was an arrow pointing toward disaster; anybody who ever knew those stiff, proud lackeys of the Third Republic would have known by this that the Republic was dying.’ Arthur Koestler, in between arrests as a suspicious ‘alien’, discerned the advent of despair in

  The onslaught on the railway stations. The disappearance of the buses and taxis from the streets. The melting away of the town, as if infected with consumption. The tommy-guns of the ‘flics’ at the street corners. The peculiar glance of the people in the Underground, with the dim candles of fear lit behind their eyeballs. The parachutist scare. The Fifth Column psychosis.

  Then he was rearrested, along with the leading German anti-Nazis who had sought refuge in France, some of whom now began to take cyanide.

  General Spears phrased his first reports to Churchill on much the same lines. Churchill, he said,

  had been misinformed when told Paris was getting angry. The city was fast emptying of the well-to-do… the populace was merely bewildered and apathetic. There was absolutely no sign of the effervescence and excitement that had vibrated through the city in the early days of 1914.

  At the same time, from deep within the Maginot Line, Lieutenant Claude Jamet was sadly reflecting:

  In whom – officer or soldier – have I discovered a true sacred fire, a sincere ardour, the dedication of one’s whole being towards one solitary goal? The sole and complete will to ‘make war’ – and to win it? Oh yes, we should be vexed to be beaten… But how can one get worked up about something that one simply cannot imagine?

  On Sunday 26 May, there had been a repetition in Paris of the solemn religious invocations of the previous week. The relics of Ste Geneviève had been displayed in front of the Panthéon, the resting place of the great men of France’s past; but for Senator Bardoux, who was again present, the spectacle there of the ‘stricken and silent crowd, which has lost its voice so that it can longer even sing the Marseillaise and recites the litanies mechanically, is incapable of comforting me. The shadow of 1870 is spreading over the country.’

  Belgium Capitulates

  As the news got around that the B.E.F. was beginning to embark from Dunkirk, French despair was accompanied by an emotional rift, now rapidly widening, between the Allies. Spears, ever sensitive to the prevailing atmosphere after a lifetime of experience in French affairs, says that on his arrival

  for the first time I sensed a break in the relationships between the two nations, no more perceptible than a crack in crystal, but going right through, irreparably. We were no longer one.

  The implications of the widening breach were equally horrifying to neutral observers. ‘I watched with fear the hatred of the French for the English growing by giant leaps and bounds,’ wrote Clare Boothe. ‘Many people now quite openly blamed the whole horrible fiasco on the British High Command.’

  On 28 May, France learned of another cause of rancour. In the small hours of that morning, Belgium had surrendered. Contrary to views widespread among her allies at the time, the Belgian Army (which, designed exclusively for defence, had neither tanks nor planes, and which had been bombed incessantly), had fought gallantly, outnumbered and outmatched, for eighteen days, while its troops watched most of their homes and countryside overrun. On the 25th, King Leopold had issued a resounding exhortation to his soldiers to continue to resist, and they had responded with vigour and courage, but had been driven out of their positions around Ypres by the Luftwaffe’s overwhelming air superiority. The gap they left could have rent a great hole in Gort’s Dunkirk perimeter defences; but it so happened that that day British Intelligence secured one of the few coups of the campaign to date. Highly secret documents captured from a liaison officer to von Bock, C.-in-C. of Army Group ‘B’, revealed that the Germans were planning to attack with two corps into the Ypres gap. Gort immediately, and entirely off his own bat, threw in to plug the hole two divisions, the 5th and 50th, which had previously been earmarked for joining in Weygand’s offensive. It was to be regarded, by the British official historian, as ‘perhaps his most fateful action during the whole campaign’, but it was also to provide one more source of cries of perfide albion! Yet, without it, Dunkirk could not have been held – and who, in the light of history, can say that Gort was wrong?

  The surrender of the Belgian Army on its left did, however, furnish the final blow to Prioux’s First Army in the Lille pocket (it also left a gaping hole between the B.E.F. and the sea); but from the hints dropped by King Leopold and General Michiels for the past several days, it should have been abundantly clear to the French High Command that it was only a matter of hours before Belgium succumbed. Nevertheless, in the despair of the moment, Reynaud reacted with ferocity. Broadcasting to the nation that night, he declared that Leopold had laid down his arms ‘without warning General Blanchard, without a thought or a word for the French or British troops who went to the aid of his country in response to his agonized appeal’. He rated it ‘a deed without precedent in history’.7 Anger towards the defaulting ally swept through France. Listening to Reynaud’s broadcast in a bistro, Gordon Waterfield observed two women burst into tears, crying ‘Les salauds, les salauds!’ Parisians threw Belgian refugees out of their houses, countrymen set fire to their wretched carts, French refugees heckled and buffeted them in stations and on the roads.

  Weygand and the ‘Separate Peace’ Lobby

  Within Paul Reynaud’s Government, the twin viruses of defeatism and anti-British sentiment had established themselves even before they had begun to cast their malaise in wider circles. 24 and 25 May were critical days, and they marked a kind of watershed. Henceforth, Weygand, the ‘political general’, is to be found exerting an influence over French councils far transcending his military functions as Generalissimo; it was he, not Pétain, who first assumed lead of the ‘separate peace’ lobby. At 1030 on the 24th, Weygand arrived for a meeting in the Prime Minister’s office at which Baudouin and Pétain were also present. According to Baudouin, who reveals himself increasingly in support of Weygand, the new C.-in-C. whispered to him on entering: ‘The situation is very serious, for the English are falling back on the ports instead of attacking to the south.’ Weygand claimed that he was not surprised by the British manoeuvre, for on the previous evening General Ironside’s tone over the telephone had made an unfavourable impression upon him. ‘I would willingly have boxed his ears,’ he exclaimed to Baudouin. In the course of his conference with Reynaud, Weygand still appeared to be adhering to his original plan, despite the British withdrawal from Arras. Then, at 1800 hours that evening, Weygand telephoned Baudouin from Vincennes, where he was with General Georges, and asked him to come and see him.

  On Baudouin’s arrival, Weygand confided that the situation caused by the British withdrawal now seemed much graver than it had in the morning, and as a result he saw himself forced to abandon his plan of two days previously. Weygand, says Baudouin, ‘seemed to me overcome by the defection of the English’. He had summoned Baudouin because he wanted him to explain this to Reynaud and also to point out to him the condition in which the French Army would find itself if the forces in the north capitulated. It would then consist of only some fifty divisions, of which eighteen were immobile fortress units, and it would have to hold a front from the Somme to the Maginot Line nearly 350 miles long. Weygand described this remaining force as a ‘wall of sand’ which would soon be pierced by the enemy. He then outlined to Baudouin his plans for the future:

  the French Army ought to resist desperately on the Somm
e and Aisne positions. Then, when the enemy has broken this resistance, what is left of the French Army should continue to fight where it stands until it is annihilated, to save the honour of the French flag.8

  Weygand repeated to Baudouin what he had told Reynaud that morning, namely, that it had been ‘criminal’ for France, the previous September, to have declared war without any of the means for carrying it on. Baudouin then expressed his doubts as to whether the Army’s morale was up to waging any new desperate struggle on the Somme and the Aisne:

  Would it be possible to apply the measures envisaged by the General to save the national honour?

  I said to him, ‘We have only one object – to get France out of the ordeal which she is undergoing so as to allow her, even if defeated in the field, to rise again’… With tears in his eyes, the General told me that he shared my fears.

  After this meaningful exchange, the two men parted in wide agreement with each other. The fateful word ‘armistice’ had never once been mentioned, but, as Reynaud points out, this was clearly what was in both their minds, behind the talk about ‘saving national honour’.9 Weygand had now been in command for just four days.

  At noon on the following day, 25 May, discussions were held in Reynaud’s office lasting two and a half hours. Before they began, Churchill’s emissary, General Spears, had arrived to present his credentials to Reynaud, whom he had known well in the past. Reynaud says Spears, launched in with some acid comments on ‘how British generals always made for harbours’. Spears begged him ‘to set his face against recriminations’, saying that the only hope for France and Britain now was to ‘act together as brothers’:

  Reynaud nodded his head in approval. He got up once or twice, his small figure very erect, the shoulders of his black jacket thrown back, and walked up and down, his hands behind his back. Several times he stretched his neck and turned his head to one side as if putting on too high and too tight a collar. His Chinese eyes, always ready to emphasize his wit with a twinkle, did not smile… He looked not in the least rattled. I said to myself as I had often done before: ‘This is a likeable, gallant little man.’