by Geert Mak
In the afternoon of that same historic day of 10 May, 1940, Winston Churchill was appointed prime minister of the United Kingdom. Five days later, at 7.30 on Wednesday morning, he was roused from his sleep by a telephone call from the French premier, Paul Reynaud. Disaster was pending. At least seven German armoured divisions had unexpectedly broken through the Ardennes and were now rolling through the countryside close to the town of Sedan. Behind them were trucks full of infantry. It was, Reynaud feared, the beginning of the end. And that, indeed, is how France was overwhelmed by more than 1,800 tanks of General Rundstedt's Heeresgruppe A, backed by some 300 Stuka dive bombers, that came storming into the country through the ‘impassable’ Ardennes.
The next day, when Churchill – who had quickly flown to Paris after Reynaud's call – looked out the window at the French ministry of foreign affairs, he saw a remarkable sight:‘Outside in the garden of the Quai d'Orsay clouds of smoke arose from large bonfires, and I saw from the window venerable officials pushing wheelbarrows of archives onto them.’ He sent the French an additional ten fighter squadrons, but reluctantly, knowing that soon he would be needing every one of them in order to survive.
Chapter TWENTY-SIX
Dunkirk
IN THE MIDDLE OF THE ROLLING FORESTS OF THE ARDENNES, CLOSE to the village of Brûly-de-Pesche, is a tall block of concrete amid the trees, weathered and overgrown, with two thick iron doors and a little peep-hatch. Around here people call the structure l'abri de Hitler, and during the first week of June 1940 this was indeed the Führer's makeshift headquarters.
The photographs in the little museum make it look like a holiday in the woods of Brûly: a relaxed Hitler consulting with his generals in front of the barracks; the group in front of the village church where they all watched newsreels every day; the same group, laughing, at the edge of the field where Göring is about to start up his plane; the entire HQ staff listening to the radio on 17 June as Pétain announces the French surrender. (Hitler afterwards slapped his thighs in pleasure, his usual way of expressing glee, but regrettably there are no pictures of that.)
Rarely has a military campaign run as smoothly as the German invasion of May 1940. Contrary to what is often assumed, the Allied forces were at least as strong as the Germans, if not stronger. Hitler was fighting with fewer than ninety divisions. The French alone had more divisions than that stationed along the eastern border, to say nothing of over forty British, Polish, Belgian and Dutch divisions. The Allies had combined access to twice as much heavy artillery and one and a half times as many tanks. To be sure, the Germans had an impressive air force with at least 4,000 planes, while the Allies had no more than 1,200. That typifies the decisive difference: the Allies thought in terms of the last war, the Germans in terms of the next.
With their Maginot Line the French had prepared themselves for an old-fashioned sitzkrieg, while the Germans came with a concept that revolved around mobility and speed: the blitzkrieg. Their army no longer advanced at the speed at which a man or a horse could walk, but at the speed of a car, thirty or forty kilometres an hour. Their airborne landings and paratrooper campaigns – in the western Netherlands, for example – were unlike anything seen before. Their ultramodern Stukas sowed panic everywhere. In the wake of the advance hung the penetrating smell of dead bodies referred to by the German officers as ‘the perfume of battle’. At 7 a.m. on 20 May, 1940, two tank divisions from General Guderian's 19th Army Corps rolled out of Péronne in a westerly direction. By 10.00 they had reached the town of Albert. A little group of British soldiers tried to stop them there, with a barricade of cardboard boxes. At 11.00 the Germans reached Hédauville, where they were confronted by a British artillery battery armed only with dummy shells. At noon the first division took Amiens, where Guderian briefly paused to view the famous cathedral. The second division thundered on. By 4 p.m. they had reached Beauquesne, where they seized the entire map archive of the British expeditionary forces. At 9.00 that evening they reached Abbeville at last, and saw the sea by the dying light of day.
On that one day in May, in a single movement, they had cut through all the Allied positions. The British, the Belgians and the French 7th Army – more than a million men in all – were caught helplessly with their backs to the North Sea. The civilians fled en masse: in June 1940, a quarter of the French population was on the run.
In Picardy I look up Lucienne Gaillard, president of the Association Nationale des Anciens Combattants de la Résistance. ‘Come right away,’ she said on the phone. ‘We're just having a board meeting.’
At her house beside the little grey church of Saint-Blimont, three older men are sitting around the table. She introduces them to me one by one: ‘He was in the Maquis, he was in the Resistance, and he's here because his father was executed.’
‘And you?’
‘At a certain point this whole house was full of British and American pilots. You must realise, I was only fifteen at the time, but I looked quite grown up for my age.’
The table is covered with sheets of paper, neatly typed minutes, careful calculations from the bookkeeper.
‘Ah, the funding. In the 1950s we had 1,000 members,’ she tells me, ‘now barely 130. Every year there are fewer.’
For the men of Saint-Blimont the war began when the mobilisation notices were posted, on 2 September, 1939. ‘My father worked in the sugar factory, he didn't have to go. Otherwise we didn't notice much of anything, not until 26 May, 1940, that is. I still remember it clearly, it was on a Sunday, the day of my First Communion. We were coming out of the church when we heard the cannons at Abbeville. We left a few days later, like everyone else. Everyone was fleeing south, by car, on horseback, in carts and pushing prams. The panic was truly amazing, all the fear from 1914–18 came back to the surface. My father had a car. We slept along the road in rubbish dumps, in the hay. My mother was heavily pregnant. She finally gave birth in Limoges.’
Saint-Blimont emptied out almost completely. Of the 20,000 inhabitants of Évreux, barely 200 remained at home. In Lille, nine out of every ten houses were empty. There were only 800 people left in Chartres. On Monday, 10 June, there were at least 20,000 people waiting at the Gare d'Austerlitz in Paris for one of the infrequent trains going south. The afternoon papers bore huge headlines: Italy had entered the war, Italian troops had invaded the south of France. Two days later, the Swiss journalist Edmond Dubois stumbled upon an abandoned herd of cattle in the middle of Paris, their lowing echoing in the deserted streets. By the end of that week, when the Germans rolled into Paris, almost three quarters of the three million Parisians had fled. When Albert Speer visited Reims on 26 June he found a ghost town, its shutters clattering in the wind. ‘As though the lives of the townspeople had, for one mad moment, stood still; on the tables one still saw glasses, plates and cutlery, untouched meals.’
Six to ten million French people fled their homes. The American journalist Virginia Cowles drove from Paris to Chartres, and everywhere along the road she saw cars that had run out of petrol. Old people, too ill or too tired to move on, lay exhausted on the ground. Halfway up a hill, a bakery van had stalled. At the wheel was a woman. While the cars behind her began honking their horns, she climbed out of the car and, surrounded by her four children, begged for fuel. No one did a thing. Finally, three men pushed the van into the deep ditch beside the road. The van fell on its side with a loud crash, the family possessions that had been tied to the roof rolled across the field. The woman screamed. Everyone drove on. It was hard to believe, Cowles wrote, that these were the citizens of Paris, the descendants of those who had fought tooth and nail for their liberty and had stormed the Bastille with their bare hands. ‘For the first time I began to understand what had happened to France. Morale was a matter of faith.’
In London, Jean Monnet – who had by now risen to be head of the Anglo-French Coordination Committee, launched a daring, last-minute emergency plan: he wanted France and Great Britain to become one. A joint pool of shipping space had alread
y been set up, just as in the First World War, but this time Monnet wanted to go much further. In a memorandum of less than five pages he proposed that the two countries become united: their armies, their governments, their parliaments, their economies, their colonies, the whole lot. The two countries could then no longer surrender independently. In the worst case, the 250,000 French soldiers still fighting in the west of the country could be evacuated to England, and fight on under the flag of the new union. The French fleet, by the same token, could sail to British ports and begin the struggle anew from there.
Operating jointly, Monnet reasoned, France and Great Britain had so many more resources than Germany that, in the longer term, they could never lose the war. Especially not if they could count on support from the United States. Monnet's intentions were more than a mere gesture born of desperation. ‘For us,’ he stated later, ‘the plan was not simply an opportunist appeal or a merely formal text: it was an act which, with good luck, could have changed the course of events for the good of Europe. This is still my opinion today.’
Monnet had an excellent relationship with both Churchill and Reynaud, and his idea, unusual though it may have been, was given serious consideration. ‘My first reaction was unfavourable,’ Churchill wrote in his war diaries. But when he introduced the proposal to the cabinet, he saw to his amazement how ‘staid, solid, experienced politicians of all parties engaged themselves so passionately in an immense design whose implications and consequences were not in any way thought out.’ Finally, Churchill agreed that the plan should be explored, as did de Gaulle – who had come to England on his own authority – and Reynaud.
That June, the decision-making suddenly speeded up. Monnet drafted his proposal on Thursday, 13 June. The next evening he already had a correction to make: ‘Paris might fall’ became ‘Paris has fallen’. On Sunday, 16 June the final communiqué was drawn up.‘At this most fateful moment in the history of the modern world … The two governments declare that France and Great Britain shall no longer form two nations, but one, single Franco-British union.’
Early that evening de Gaulle flew with the document from London to Bordeaux, the seat of the French government at the time. Churchill and a few members of the cabinet were to make the crossing to France that night by cruiser, to add their signatures. But while the British ministers were at Waterloo Station, already in the train for Southampton, the news came through that Reynaud had resigned. The French government had rejected the proposed union, and the war was decided. Pétain had been appointed premier. ‘It's all over,’ de Gaulle told Monnet on the phone. ‘There is no sense in pressing further. I am coming back.’ Churchill got off the train and went home. On that same night, 120 German bombers attacked England for the first time. Nine British civilians were killed, the first.
Paul Reynaud could have been the same kind of leader as Churchill. He regarded Hitler as the Genghis Khan of the modern age, he demanded total dedication and promised that his government would ‘summon together and lead all the forces of France’ in continuing the struggle. The problem was, most of the French loathed him. He had opposed Munich – which had cost him the support of the moderate conservatives. He was in favour of the war – which had cost him the support of the right. He was a centrist democrat, but he survived only by grace of the socialist opposition's support.
By means of all kinds of manoeuvres – one of which was to appoint Pétain to the post of vice-premier – he tried to broaden support for his cabinet. But he was inept enough to draw in more and more tired defeatists. ‘You have no army,’ Pétain sneered at the British minister of war, Anthony Eden.‘What could you achieve where the French army has failed?’ During those weeks Churchill flew back and forth to France at least four times, desperately trying to convince the French to keep fighting. He suggested that they, with large-scale support from the British, set up a huge guerrilla organisation. ‘It is possible the Nazis may dominate Europe, but it will be a Europe in revolt.’ It was to no avail. Pétain felt that a guerrilla war would mean ‘the destruction of the country’. General Weygand claimed that, after the French Army capitulated, Britain would open negotiations with Hitler within the week, and that it would have ‘its neck wrung like a chicken’.
On Sunday, 16 June, when Reynaud presented the French cabinet with the plan drawn up by Monnet, Churchill and de Gaulle, he was laughed at. Pétain called the union with Great Britain ‘a marriage to a corpse’. Other members of the cabinet feared that France would assume the status of a British colony. ‘Then rather a Nazi province. We know, at least, what that involves.’ Next it was proposed that the government begin negotiations with the Germans. The idea of forming a government in exile in North Africa had already been swept from the table by Pétain. He wanted, he said, always to ‘remain with the people of France, to share their suffering and misery’. Imperceptibly, he had begun to twist things around: he was the true patriot, those who went into exile and continued the struggle from abroad were the traitors. Later, de Gaulle was actually sentenced – in absentia – to death.
Reynaud had no desire to stand by and watch it happen. On Monday morning, 17 June, the French heard Pétain's high voice on the radio stating that Reynaud had resigned, that he was his successor and that he would arrange a ceasefire with the Germans as quickly as possible. The French Army surrendered, burned its banners, buried its dead and – in so far as it was still possible – slunk off in the direction of home.
Before me lies a dishevelled, yellowed booklet, published in 1946 by the Société des Éditions Franc-tireur under the title L’étrange défaite. It is little more than an essay, written in summer 1940 ‘in a deep rage’ by the French medievalist Marc Bloch. Bloch, a Jew and a Resistance fighter, died in front of the firing squad six months later. But his brilliant, unadulterated fit of rage from summer 1940 still forms the basis for almost every historical analysis of what is known as the ‘May War’.
The French defeat of 1940 is generally seen these days as one of the crucial developments in the Second World War. It not only cleared the way for Hitler's occupation of Western Europe, but also for his campaigns to the east, his deportations, his slave-labour camps and his extermination industry. It is such a central event in the twentieth century that we have come to think of it as an inevitability. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Bloch's account displays, first of all, complete bafflement. For the Europe of that day, the German victory was entirely unexpected. No one, including the Germans, imagined that this campaign could succeed so easily. The Wehrmacht's chief of staff, General Halder, wrote to his wife as late as 11 May that most of his colleagues considered the whole expedition ‘idiotic and reckless’. Even Hitler was counting on a fairly prolonged struggle.
Among the French, on the other hand – and Bloch emphasises this forgotten aspect again and again – the mood was one of enormous self-confidence. In September 1939, a top French official reported to his superiors that ‘no one, or almost no one, in the population has doubts about victory, even if they are afraid of the price to be paid.’ People even wondered whether Hitler would actually dare to begin an offensive against France. In hindsight, this wilful arrogance was one of the chief reasons for the defeat.
Other reasons, Bloch says, were found in the field of military strategy: the inflexibility of the French commanders, the inferior cooperation with the British and the disregard for information from intelligence services. It was not courage that the French lacked. At Lille, in June, the French fought fiercely to provide cover for the British retreat at Dunkirk. At Saumur, the 2,500 lightly armed cadets at the military academy had succeeded for two days in halting the advance of a German armed division, albeit with heavy losses. The statistics, too, speak of a great deal of forgotten heroism. During those first six weeks of war, 124,000 Frenchmen were killed, and more than 200,000 were wounded: that is roughly twice the number of German casualties and three times those of the British.
Then Bloch points to a final cause: in May 1940,
France was anything but a united and unified nation, determined to fight the aggressors down to the last man. Bloch describes the ranks of the French Army as he and his fellow officers experienced them: ‘Lieutenants: friends. Captains: comrades. Commanders: colleagues. Colonels: rivals. Generals: enemies.’ On the political scene, things were no different.
In early August, Lucienne Gaillard crossed back over the line of demarcation between Vichy France and occupied France.‘It was no joke getting home. Our house had been looted while we were gone. Everything had been turned upside down.’ Her father couldn't bear the thought of his country being occupied, even though he had returned to the German part of France. He began, with minor acts of sabotage, on his own. Later he formed a group, derailed German munitions trains, joined up with de Gaulle and provided shelter for stranded pilots. But during those first years he was above all lonely and bitter. ‘To him, Vichy equalled treason.’
During those six fateful weeks, one miracle took place: Dunkirk. The German drive went so quickly as to overwhelm not only the Belgians and the French, but also the Germans themselves. Just as General Guderian's 19th Armoured Division was about to spring the trap and drive the British into the Channel, Hitler ordered them to halt. ‘We were speechless,’ Guderian said later. There was almost no resistance. The advance posts could already see the steeples of Dunkirk. The delay lasted three days. In that way, Hitler gave the British precisely enough time to evacuate their defeated army from Dunkirk.
The rescue operation had all the elements of a heroic drama. A bizarre fleet consisting of naval vessels, rickety fishing boats, old lifeboats, pleasure craft, brown-sailed Thames barges and a sea of private yachts was tossed together with lightning speed. Between 28 May and 4 June, 1940, this allowed 220,000 British soldiers and 120,000 Frenchman, plus 34,000 vehicles, to be brought back to England. As well as 170 dogs, for no British soldier was willing to leave behind his mascot.
