It was time that was the vital element which – more than weapons, even perhaps more than morale – France most lacked in 1940. After the battle had been engaged, the afternoon of 15 May, the sixth day of fighting, marks the moment of almost certain military defeat. This was the decisive day that saw the failure of the first French counter-attacks, to which had been dedicated the main weight of her armoured reserves, and the day on which it was clear that the Germans could not be prevented from breaking out of their Meuse bridgeheads. For the French armour to have concentrated for a blow effective enough to have halted the Panzers on the 15th, the necessary dispositions would have had to be decreed by the 12th. But with the essential French reserves dispersed as they were in the line-up for the Dyle–Breda Plan’s advance into Belgium, this would have proved virtually impossible. The French ripostes were almost bound to be too late. The speed with which Panzer warfare developed in 1940 certainly proved the validity of the dictum of Moltke the Elder: ‘One fault only in the initial deployment of an Army cannot be made good during the whole course of the campaign.’ On top of this must be added the tremendous significance of the Luftwaffe’s supremacy in the air, which (although later in the war the Germans were able to conduct an imposing defence in the teeth of far greater Allied tactical air superiority) constituted a decisive factor at this stage of the Second World War. Apart from the lethal effect of the close-support Stukas, the Luftwaffe’s far-ranging medium bombers were what finally denied the French High Command the time it needed to commit its reserves to battle, at the right moment and the right place.
The odds against France opposing Sichelschnitt in 1940, with any successful defence and even allowing for the element of the unexpected, remain enormously high. When all is said and done, the strategic brilliance of the German plan and tactical skill with which it was executed will always make it one of the classic campaigns of history. Certainly, few between great powers have ever been determined so swiftly, or so decisively. For a recent comparison, one needs to search back, beyond the defeat of France in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, to Napoleon’s triumph of Austerlitz in 1805.
What Happened to Them? The Victors
So immense were the universal consequences of the Fall of France that one tends to lose sight of the leading actors in the tragedy. On the German side, there were countless thousands of all ranks who, like Rommel’s two ace commanders, Rothenburg5 and Bismarck,6 either fell later in the war or else ended in disgrace with the Nazi hierarchy. Rommel’s own subsequent career is well known; the legendary hero of the desert war yields to the disillusioned Field-Marshal conducting a hopeless defence of northern France against the Allied invasion of 1944, and finally to the critic of the régime forced to take poison or be shot by the Gestapo. Curiously enough, of all the commanders of the ten Panzer divisions which proved so decisive in France, Rommel alone later rose to great prominence; Kirchner, for instance, who had led the enormously successful 1st Panzer, ended the war as a corps commander. On the other hand, his junior, the tough and ruthless Lieutenant-Colonel Hermann Balck, was to become a full general commanding an Army Group in France (in 1944–5), and one of a handful of Germans to be awarded the highest grade of the Ritterkreuz decoration.7
Guderian, promoted Colonel-General in September 1940, was given command of the Second Panzer Army, which he led in the battle for Moscow during the autumn of 1941. After the failure of the campaign, he fell under a shadow and was transferred to the reserve. The strain of the past years had left its mark and in 1942 he began to suffer from heart trouble. Following the bomb attempt of 20 July 1944, Guderian – always politically acceptable to Hitler – was given the job once held by Halder as Chief of the O.K.H. General Staff, until in March 1945 he too was finally dismissed. In poor health in his last years, he died in 1954, aged sixty-six. His portrait still hangs in a place of honour in the barracks of Panzer units of the present-day Bundeswehr. Kleist led the First Panzer Army into the Ukraine in 1941, and became another of Hitler’s Field-Marshals. Manstein was also promoted Field-Marshal and justly came to be rated as Germany’s ablest field commander; he fell into disgrace with the Führer on the same day as Kleist – 30 March 1944.8 Rundstedt led Army Group South at the start of the Russian campaign in 1941, and it was he who (reluctantly) commanded the last German offensive of the winter of 1944–5 – over terrain which he knew so well from 1940. After the war he was imprisoned in England, but released in 1949. He died, aged seventy-eight, in 1953. Hitler’s bête noire, Brauchitsch, was sacked after the failure to take Moscow, when Hitler himself took over command of the O.K.H., thereby ending, once and for all, the independence of the German General Staff. After the war, Brauchitsch was to have been arraigned on war crimes charges, but died (in 1948) before a trial could be held. Franz Halder lost his job in 1942, after yet another disagreement with Hitler; implicated with the ‘resistance’ in the 1944 bomb plot, he was found inside Dachau by the Americans in 1945. Graf von Kielmansegg, a mere Captain on the staff of 1st Panzer Division at Sedan, returned to the German Army after the war, to become a full General commanding the N.A.T.O. Central Forces.
The Vanquished
For the French leaders, defeat was followed by long years of frustration or imprisonment, of recrimination by their compatriots and of attempts to justify their own roles in the battle. Many lived to considerable ages. On his replacement by Weygand, Gamelin had rejoined his wife in their ‘comfortable, modest ground-floor flat in the Avenue Foch which we had bought in 1937, in anticipation of the moment of my retirement’. As the Germans approached Paris, Gamelin wrote to Weygand informing him that he was leaving for his sister’s house in the country; but he would naturally be available to return at any instant. He was hurt to receive no acknowledgement from Weygand. After confinement in various châteaux, from 1943 onwards Gamelin found himself in Buchenwald, together with Daladier, Blum and President Lebrun. All survived, and in 1945 Gamelin threw himself tirelessly into the publication of three hefty volumes of memoirs and apologiae, entitled Servir. He died in 1958, aged eighty-six. General Maxime Weygand, after a brief interlude as Minister of National Defence in Pétain’s Government, was sent to Algeria as Delegate-General. Here he acquitted himself with distinction, maintaining the spirit of the Army there while keeping the Germans at bay. Later he too was imprisoned by the Germans, and later still by his own countrymen, for a short period. He died in 1965, at the venerable age of ninety-eight, mistrustful of the British, and shrewdly alert (though rather deaf) to the very end.
Unlike Gamelin and Weygand, General Georges left no memoirs. Before vanishing finally into oblivion, he reappeared briefly and contentiously in the intrigue-ridden world of Algiers in 1943; the Allies, having imported him from France, soon came to regard him (in the words of Anthony Eden) as ‘a reactionary old defeatist’ and pensioned him off. The unhappy General Corap also made no attempt to justify himself against the charges made publicly by Reynaud, which led him to a nervous breakdown. He was later cleared at the Riom Trials, and died, in silence, at his home in Fontainbleau in 1953. Huntziger, commander on the fatal field of Sedan and leader of the armistice delegation, also had no opportunity to write his side of the battle; he was killed in a plane crash in 1941. Among the French generals taken prisoners-of-war, General Giraud managed to escape9 from Königstein Castle, where he was interned with General Prioux. He too made his way to Algiers and, with American backing, established himself briefly as a rival claimant to de Gaulle for the leadership of the Free French. General Frère died of maltreatment in a German concentration camp.
Of the British participants, Lord Gort, although he had succeeded in saving so many of his men, was shattered by what had happened to the B.E.F. Not favoured by Churchill, he received no further fighting command, whereas his juniors in the B.E.F. – Brooke, Alexander and Montgomery – rose to the highest summits of fame. Probably Churchill was right; Gort was not the man to lead or organize a modern, mechanized Army. But no one deserved greater recognition for the inca
lculable services he had rendered Great Britain, and the Allied cause. Wars, however, ‘are not won by evacuations’. Later, Gort was made Governor-General of Malta at a time when the island’s position seemed hopeless; here, once again, was a challenge for which his tenacious courage was supremely adapted. His career ended as High Commissioner in Palestine at the end of the war; but soon after his appointment his health broke down and he died in 1946, aged sixty.
Reynaud and Pétain
Of all the major figures of this epoch, none seem so closely shrouded in tragedy as the two French Premiers, Reynaud and his successor Pétain. A few days after the armistice, there had been a scandal when two emissaries were caught trying to smuggle out to America gold and jewellery belonging to the Comtesse de Portes – apparently unbeknown to Reynaud. On 28 June, Reynaud was driving in the south of France with the woman for whom he had worked so hard, and whose love was now about all that was left to him. To distract him from his misery, she persuaded him to take the wheel. Almost immediately the car swung off the road, into one of the plane trees lining it. A heavy suitcase hurtled forward from the back of the car to strike Hélène de Portes in the neck. She was killed instantly. Reynaud suffered only minor injuries. When he regained consciousness in hospital and was told of her death, he is said to have remarked simply: ‘Elle était la France.’ The remaining war years Reynaud spent in German prisons, narrowly escaping the fate of his fellow inmate, Georges Mandel. After the war he re-entered politics, devoting himself to the cause of European unity, and once more became a Minister. His first wife having died, he remarried in 1949 (aged seventy-one) and begot three children, the youngest born when he was approaching eighty. Still exercising regularly in the private gymnasium he had constructed in his Paris apartment, Reynaud lived to be eighty-seven. He died in 1966.
Alas for him, Pétain lived to be even older, the receptacle of France’s dishonour, abandoned by his colleagues of the generation which should have been in control of the destiny of France, and later condemned by them for allowing members of the defeated nation to be marched to the Nazi slave-labour camps. As Paul Baudouin deserted him, the old Marshal said with tears in his eyes: ‘Pity me. You are going, but I, at eighty-four, must stay and lead this sort of life.’ Finally, aged ninety-five, he too died in an austere French prison in 1951. By one of the strange quirks of fortune, seven years later at the age of sixty-eight, Pétain’s erstwhile protégé and the man who had gone to continue the fight from England while Pétain capitulated, General de Gaulle, would be summoned back from old age, just like Pétain, to take over the reins of France after younger men had abdicated.
Scars of Battle
In a way, the physcial scars left buy these cataclysmic six weeks of 1940 seem not to have lingered on as did those of Verdun. The court at Vincennes which housed Gamelin’s Thébaïde, though destroyed by the Germans, has been rebuilt; the villages and towns of France seared by the Luftwaffe (and again by the liberating British and Americans) have long since been rebuilt. At Dinant on the Meuse and Bouillon on the Semois, German and French tourists come by the bus-load each summer to visit the pseudo-medieval Citadel and crusader Godefroy de Bouillon’s Keep, perhaps pausing midway to admire the fantastic panorama from Monthermé’s Roche-à-Sept-Heures. But there is little enough to suggest the events of fifty summers ago. Noirefontaine, whence Guderian planned his crossing of the Meuse, became a resting-place recommended by the idyllic Route de Bonheur. At Sedan itself, the battlefield where France’s Third Republic was first engendered and subsequently killed, it is easier to find reminders of the battle of 1870 than of 1940. There are calvaries celebrating the gallant charge of General Margueritte’s cuirassiers and the Maison des Dernières Cartouches at Bazeilles, and there are war memorials and cemeteries dating from 1914–18. But 1940 has left none of the pockmarked, lunar shell-fields and the ghost-ridden atmosphere that one feels will characterize Verdun for all time. Down on the Meuse at Sedan, where the heaviest fighting took place, a few concrete bunkers (now used as cow-stalls by local farmers) still bear the marks of blows delivered by the German flak and tank guns seeking out their embrasures. But all too many of them reveal little sign of damage – a mute testimony to the fact that Grandsard’s ‘B’ reservists did not stand fast like the men of Verdun. In any case the battle did not rest here long enough for the scars to be lasting. At Houx, the weir over which Rommel’s motor-cyclists crept is still there; the island is itself a camping ground, frequented by young Germans whose parents were possibly not born in 1940. It is not easy to discover locals who can recount precisely what happened on the Meuse during those glorious May days.
As the revolutionary nightmare of Paris in May 1968 subsequently revealed, the wounds of political self-division – the heritage of the Commune and the Popular Front, with the schisms of Pétainist-versus-Gaullist now superimposed – lingered long unhealed in France. But where perhaps the invisible scars lie deepest are in the relations between the former allies, Britain and France. After 1945, disillusion and mistrust at the French performance in 1940 played their part in Britain’s determination never again to rely upon other peoples’ forces for her own security. She would loyally contribute to the collective security of NATO, but at the same time she would build her own costly Maginot Line of atomic weaponry and call it the ‘independent deterrent’. (Fortunately, unlike France’s, Britain’s ‘Maginot Line’ has been allowed to lapse into graceful obsolescence without ever being put to the test.) Meanwhile, in the irony of history, it was the Germans who pushed Britain out of the continent of Europe in June 1940; but, within the Common Market framework of the 1960s, it was France who – in 1963 – prevailed upon the Germans not to let Britain back in again.10 Yet this was no accident of fate, nor just the resentment of the once humiliated towards the superciliousness of the unvanquished. In France, the consequences of Dunkirk do not cease to engender suspicion even fifty years on – that, if the going ever gets too tough in Europe, whether in military or economic terms, Britain will always be tempted to pull out, as she did in 1940. Will it ever be said that, in saving the B.E.F. and thus winning the war, Britain perhaps lost the peace for herself?
Though it still remains vivid and fresh in the memories of many older people, historically that May of 1940 now seems to have belonged so much more closely to 1918, to the world of Foch and the Kaiser than the one we live in today. In some respects the figures involved in the great drama of Sichelschnitt are seen to march back and forth across a screen almost as dimly distant as that of the Crimea. The weapons they used have become as outdated as the national causes they represented. How many centuries ago can it have been that Vietnamese fought and died for France at Monthermé, Algerian Tirailleurs at Philippeville, Senegalese at Amiens? How much has changed within these five decades! The French and British Empires have ceased to exist. The German Reich was split into a Soviet satellite and a Western democracy. Both emerging from the Second World War as defeated nations, France and Germany at last discovered a common denominator; in consequence, relations between them have become more harmonious over a longer period than at any time since Louis XIV came to the throne. The Army of a reconditioned but truncated Germany came to provide France (and Britain) with her ‘best sword’ in Europe. In face of a docile and divided Germany, France herself became – at least in appearance, and for the time being – the continent’s most powerful political force west of the Elbe. (And who, at any time during the past fifty years, could have envisaged Frenchmen fearful of a German Army, not because it was strong, but because it might not be strong enough? History plays strange tricks…) But all this is irrelevant. In the modern world, the combined influence of the three chief belligerents of 1940 still adds up to little when weighed against the might of the two super-powers which maintained their neutrality, through military impotence, during the Battle of France.
Back and forth through Dinant and Sedan the prosperous, well-fed burghers of the Common Market flock in their Citroëns and their Mercedes, apparently o
blivious to all the misery perpetrated in this tiny blood-sodden corner of France during the past hundred and twenty years. Watching them it is sometimes hard not to wonder: did the First Sedan, the Battle of Verdun, the Second Battle of Sedan have to be fought before Germany and France would lower the frontier barriers between their two countries? Perhaps Hitler’s blood-curdling prediction in Mein Kampf that Germany would have to fight ‘one last decisive battle’ against France has come true in a sense that he indeed could never have foreseen. Certainly this Franco-German battle must have been the ‘last’; even with the prospects ahead of a reunited, powerful Germany, the facts of life today are such that one cannot possibly conceive of there being any repeat. At last finis seems to have been written to the saga wherein the ancient rivalry between France and Germany set the tempo of world affairs. But at what a cost!
To Lose a Battle Page 69
