Inferno, p.9
Inferno, page 9
2. The Fall of France
ON THE EVENING OF 9 May 1940, French troops on the Western Front heard “a vast murmuring” in the German lines; word was passed back that the enemy was moving. Commanders chose to believe that this, like earlier such alarms, was false. Though the German assault upon Holland, Belgium and France began at 4:35 a.m. on 10 May, it was 6:30 before the Allied C-in-C, Gen. Maurice Gamelin, was awakened in his bed, five hours after the first warning from the outposts. Following the long-anticipated pleas for assistance that now arrived from governments in Brussels and The Hague, neutrals in the path of the German storm, Gamelin ordered an advance to the river Dyle in Belgium, fulfilling his longstanding contingency plan. The British Expeditionary Force’s nine divisions and the best of France’s forces—twenty-nine divisions of First, Seventh and Ninth armies—began rolling northeastwards. The Luftwaffe made no serious attempt to interfere, for this was exactly where Hitler wanted the Allies to go. Their departure removed a critical threat to the flank of the main German armies, which were thrusting forward further south.
The defences of Holland and Belgium were smashed open. In the first hours of 10 May, glider-landed Luftwaffe paratroops secured the vital Eben Emael fort, covering the Albert Canal—built by a German construction company which obligingly provided its blueprints to Hitler’s planners—and two bridges across the Maas at Maastricht. Even as Churchill took office as Britain’s prime minister, German spearheads were rolling up the Dutch army. Meanwhile, southwestwards, some 134,000 men and 1,600 vehicles, of which 1,222 were tanks, began threading their way through the Ardennes forest to deliver the decisive blow of the campaign against the weak centre of the French line. Germans joked afterwards that they created “the greatest traffic jam in history” in the woods of Luxembourg and southern Belgium, forcing thousands of tanks, trucks and guns along narrow roads the Allies had deemed unsuitable for moving an army. The advancing columns were vulnerable to air attack, had the French recognised their presence and importance. But they did not. From beginning to end of the struggle, Gamelin and his army commanders directed operations in a miasma of uncertainty, seldom either knowing where the Germans had reached, or guessing whither they were going.
Disproportionate historical attention has focused upon the operations of the small British contingent, and its escape from Dunkirk. The overriding German objective was to defeat the French army, by far the most formidable obstacle to the Wehrmacht. The British role was marginal; especially in the first days, the BEF commanded the attention of only modest German air and ground forces. It is untrue that France’s defence rested chiefly on the frontier fortifications of the Maginot Line: the chief purpose of its bunkers and guns was to liberate men for active operations farther north. Scarred by memories of the 1914–18 devastation and slaughter in their own country, the French were bent upon waging war somewhere other than on their own soil. Gamelin planned a decisive battle in Belgium, heedless of the fact that the Germans had other ideas. The French C-in-C’s gravest mistake in the early spring of 1940 had been to move the French Seventh Army to the left of the Allied line in anticipation of the Belgian incursion.
French vanguards crossed into Holland to find that the Dutch army had already retreated too far northeastward to create a common front, while the Belgian army was falling back in disarray. Gamelin’s formations fought hard in the significant battles that followed in Belgium: although short of antiaircraft and antitank guns, they had some good tanks, notably the SOMUA S35. In a long slogging match at Hannut between 12 and 14 May, 165 panzers were knocked out, for the loss of 105 French tanks. The French front on the Dyle remained unbroken. But its defenders were soon obliged to fall back, because they found their right flank turned. The Germans, gaining possession of the Hannut battlefield, were able to recover and repair most of their damaged armour.
For the first two days of the campaign, the French high command was oblivious of its peril: a witness described Gamelin’s demeanour as positively jaunty, “striding up and down the corridor in his fort, with a pleased and martial air.” Another observer spoke of the C-in-C as “in excellent form with a big smile.” Now sixty-seven years old, as Marshal Joseph Joffre’s chief of staff in 1914 he had been widely perceived as the architect of France’s triumph in the Battle of the Marne. A self-consciously cultured figure, he enjoyed discussing art and philosophy; also intensely political, he was much more popular than his future successor, the splenetic Maxime Weygand. Gamelin’s crippling weakness was an instinct for compromise: he strove to avoid making hard choices. Anticipating “une guerre de longue durée,” a protracted confrontation on the frontier of France, he and his subordinates were confounded in May 1940 by events unfolding at a speed beyond their imaginations.
The Germans had committed seventeen divisions to demonstrate against the Maginot Line in the south, twenty-nine to seize Holland and northern Belgium, and forty-five, including seven panzer, to attack in the centre, then swing northwest towards the Channel coast after crossing the Meuse, cutting off the French and British in Belgium. Only half of the German attacking troops were fully trained, and more than a quarter were reservists aged over forty. The principal burden of defeating the French army rested upon 140,000 men of the panzer and mechanised divisions making the vital thrust across the Meuse. The first German troops reached the river at 2:00 p.m. on 12 May, having seen scarcely a French soldier since they broke clear of the Ardennes; they had thus far conducted a march rather than an attack. The Meuse line was defended by reservists of Charles Huntziger’s Second Army. On the morning of 13 May, these French troops suffered a devastating bombardment by more than a thousand Luftwaffe aircraft, attacking in waves. This, the first such attack of their war, did little material damage but impacted severely on morale. A soldier wrote: “The noise of their engines is already enormous and then there is this extraordinary shrieking which shreds your nerves … And then suddenly there is a rain of bombs … And it goes on and on! Not a French or British plane to be seen. Where the hell are they? My neighbour, a young bloke, is crying.”
A French staff officer at Sedan wrote: “The gunners stopped firing and went to ground, the infantry cowered in their trenches, dazed by the crash of bombs and the shriek of the dive-bombers; they had not developed the instinctive reaction of running to their anti-aircraft guns and firing back. Their only concern was to keep their heads well down. Five hours of this nightmare was enough to shatter their nerves.” Soldiers, like most human beings in all circumstances, react badly to the unexpected. Through the long winter of 1939–40, there had been no attempt to condition the French army to endure such an ordeal as it now experienced.
Most of the command telephone system was destroyed in the air attacks. Early that evening of 13 May, there was a “tank panic” three miles south of Sedan. The local commanding general left his headquarters to investigate wild shouting outside, and found a scene of chaos: “A wave of terrified fugitives, gunners and infantry, in cars, on foot, many without arms but dragging kitbags, were hurtling down the road screaming ‘The tanks are at Bulson.’ Some were firing their rifles like lunatics. General Lafontaine and his officers rushed in front of them, trying to reason with them and herd them together, and had lorries put across the road … Officers were mixed in with the men … There was mass hysteria.” Some 20,000 men decamped in the Bulson panic—six hours before German forces crossed the Meuse. In all probability, their flight was prompted by frightened men mistaking French tanks for enemy ones.
The first German river-crossing parties suffered heavily at the hands of French machine gunners, but handfuls of determined men reached the western shore in dinghies, then waded through swamps to attack French positions. A sergeant named Walther Rubarth led a group of eleven assault engineers to storm a succession of bunkers with satchel charges and grenades. Six of the Germans were killed, but the survivors opened a breach. Panzergrenadiers ran across an old weir linking an island to the two banks of the Meuse to establish a foothold on the western side. By 5:30 p.m., German engineers were building bridges, while rafts ferried equipment across. Some French soldiers were already retreating, indeed fleeing. At 11:00 p.m., tanks began clattering across the first completed pontoons: the German sappers’ achievement was as impressive as that of the assault troops.
The French response was painfully sluggish, absurdly complacent. It was suggested to General Huntzinger that the German assault was unfolding like that on Poland. He shrugged theatrically: “Poland is Poland … Here we are in France.” Told of the Meuse crossings, he said: “That will mean all the more prisoners.” Earlier that day, Gamelin’s headquarters declared: “[It] is still not possible to determine the zone in which the enemy will make his main attack.” But that night Gen. Joseph Georges, commanding the northeastern front, telephoned Gamelin to say that there had been a rather serious upset—“un pepin”—at Sedan. At 3:00 a.m. on 14 May, a French officer described the scene at Georges’s headquarters: “The room was barely half-lit. Major Navereau was repeating in a low voice the information coming in. General Roton, the chief of staff, was stretched out in an armchair. The atmosphere was that of a family in which there has been a death. Georges got up quickly … He was terribly pale. ‘Our front has been broken at Sedan! There has been a collapse.’ He flung himself into a chair and burst into tears.” An officer described Gen. Georges Blanchard, commander of First Army, “sitting in tragic immobility, saying nothing, doing nothing, but just gazing at the map spread on the table between us.”
The decisive moment of the campaign came later that morning. The German crossing of the Meuse need not have been calamitous, had it been reversed by a swift counterattack. But French troops assembled lethargically, then advanced hesitantly and piecemeal. Attacks by 152 bombers and 250 fighters of the RAF and the French air force failed to damage the German bridges, while costing heavy losses—31 of 71 British bombers failed to return. Flight Lt. Bill Simpson’s single-engined Battle caught fire when it crashed, and he was dragged half naked from the flaming wreckage by his crew. Sitting shocked on the grass nearby, he stared at his hands “with unbelieving terror … The skin hung from them like long icicles. The fingers were curled and pointed, like the claws of a great wild bird—distorted, pointed at the ends like talons, ghostly thin. What would I do now? What use would be these paralysed talons to me for the rest of my life?”
By nightfall on 14 May three French formations around Sedan had collapsed, their men fleeing the battlefield. One of these was the 71st Division. A notorious episode passed into legend, of one of its colonels who sought to check fleeing men and was swept aside by soldiers crying: “We want to go home and get back to work! There is nothing to do! We are lost! We are betrayed!” Some modern historians question the reality of this incident. Pierre Lesort, another officer of the same formation, retained a different and more heroic memory of the day: “I saw very well, about 800–1000 metres on my left, an artillery battery … which never stopped firing at the diving Stukas which ceaselessly attacked it; I can still see the little round clouds which its guns created in the sky around the swirling planes which continuously dispersed and returned … As for the reactions of the machine-gunners in my company, we never stopped shooting desperately at the planes.” Yet Lesort acknowledged the progressive erosion of morale: “It must be said that this control of the sky by the Germans for these two days made the men discontented and impatient. At the start it was just a sort of grumbling: ‘Christ, there are only German planes, what the hell are ours doing?’ But on the following days … one felt the growth of a kind of helpless resentment.”
Through the succeeding days, French armour launched desultory attacks on the Meuse bridgehead from the south. Gamelin and his officers made another disastrous and probably irrecoverable mistake: they failed to grasp the fact that von Rundstedt’s spearheads did not intend to continue their advance west into the heart of France, but instead were racing north, for the sea, to cut off the British and French armies in Belgium. The Germans’ “expanding torrent” was now advancing across a front sixty miles wide. The French Ninth Army, charged with defending the region, had almost ceased to exist. The advancing panzer columns were acutely sensitive to the risk of an Allied counterattack on their flanks, but the French high command lacked the will or the grip to initiate such action, as well as means to carry it out. It is mistaken to suppose that the French army offered no significant resistance to the German offensive in 1940: some of Gamelin’s units made energetic and successful local attacks, and paid a heavy price in casualties. But nowhere did the French deliver assaults of sufficient weight to halt the racing thrusts of von Rundstedt’s armour.
Pierre Lesort described “an immediate impression of total disorder and shameful despair. Belongings pushed on bikes, helmets and guns out of sight, and the appearance of dazed vagrants … By the side of the road a man was standing alone, immobile. Wearing a black cap and short cassock: a military chaplain … I saw that he was crying.” Another soldier, Gustave Folcher, wrote of encounters with men of broken units from the north: “They told us terrible things, unbelievable things … Some had come from as far as the Albert Canal … They asked for something to eat and drink; poor lads! They streamed on endlessly; it was a piteous sight. Ah, if those enthusiasts who go and watch the magnificent military parades in Paris or elsewhere could have seen on that morning this other army, the real one … perhaps they would understand the suffering of the soldier.”
A SENSE OF UNREALITY at first pervaded French public consciousness as the familiar world began to disintegrate. The Russian-born Jewish writer Irène Némirovsky described in her autobiographical novel of 1940–41, Suite française, the disbelieving response in Paris to news of stunning German advances: “Even though the reports were terrible, no one believed them. No more so than if victory had been announced.” But as the truth began to be understood, panic swept the nation. Among the most terrible aspects of those days was the massed flight of civilians, which impacted as disastrously on military communications as upon soldiers’ morale. The people of eastern France had suffered German occupation in 1914; they were determined to escape another such experience. Much of the population of Rheims fled, only one-tenth of Lille’s 200,000 inhabitants stayed in their homes, and just 800 of Chartres’s 23,000 people remained after the cathedral city was heavily bombed. Many places became ghost towns.
Throughout eastern and central France, army units found themselves struggling to deploy for action amid huge columns of desperate humanity. Gustave Folcher wrote:
The people are half-mad, they don’t even reply to what we ask them. There is only one word in their mouths: evacuation, evacuation … What is most pitiful is to see entire families on the road, with their livestock they force to follow them, but that they finally have to leave in some cattle-pen. We see wagons drawn by two, three or four beautiful mares, some with a young foal which follows at the risk of being crushed every few metres. The wagon is driven by a woman, often in tears, but most of the time it’s a kid of eight, ten or perhaps twelve years old who leads the horses. On the wagon, on which furniture, trunks, linen, the most precious things, or rather the most indispensable things, have been hastily packed up, the grandparents have also taken their place, holding in their place a very young child, even a newborn baby … The children look at us one by one as we overtake them, holding in their hands the little dog, the little cat or the cage of canaries they didn’t want to be separated from.
Eight million French people abandoned their homes in the month following the onset of the German assault, the greatest mass migration in western European history. Those families who stayed in Paris found themselves repeatedly driven into shelters by alarms: “They had to dress their children by torchlight,” wrote one of those who experienced them.
Mothers lifted small, warm, heavy bodies into their arms: “Come on, don’t be afraid, don’t cry.” An air raid. All the lights were out, but beneath the clear, golden June sky, every house, every street was visible. As for the Seine, the river seemed to absorb even the faintest glimmers of light and reflect them back a hundred times brighter, like some multi-faceted mirror. Badly blacked-out windows, glistening rooftops, the metal hinges of doors all shone in the water. There were a few red lights that stayed on longer than the others, no one knew why, and the Seine drew them in, capturing them and bouncing them playfully on its waves.
In the week that followed the German crossing of the Meuse, the invading armies maintained an almost ceaseless advance, while the Allies conducted in slow motion every activity save retreat. The British held the French overwhelmingly responsible for their predicament, but some of Gort’s officers adopted a more enlightened view, understanding that their own BEF had little to be proud of. “After a few days’ fighting,” wrote an Irish Fusiliers officer, John Horsfall, “part of our army was no longer capable of coordinated measures, either offensive or defensive … We could not lay these … to the charge of our politicians, [they were] failings that were strictly our own … Within our army the fault lay in the mind, and really one must wonder what the Staff College was about in those pre-war years.”
The disparity between the battlefield performance of the German and Western Allied armies would prove one of the great enigmas not merely of the 1940 campaign, but of the entire conflict. Thomas Mann once described Nazism as “mechanised mysticism.” Michael Howard has written: “Armed as they were with all the military technology and bureaucratic rationality of the Enlightenment, but fuelled by the warrior-values of a largely invented past, it is not surprising that the Germans held the world at bay through two terrible wars.” Though these remarks reflect important truths, they seem an incomplete answer to the question: why was the Wehrmacht so good? Its senior officers had fought in World War I, but for more than a decade thereafter the German army was almost moribund. It gained no interwar combat experience. Meanwhile, many British rankers as well as officers participated in low-intensity operations on the North-West Frontier of India, or in Irish or colonial skirmishes.
