CHAPTER 2
It was France, however, that was knocked out of the war, not Great Britain, the United States, or the Soviet Union. Pétain’s lament about a paucity of allies was too quick: France had partners enough. One more in the shape of the Soviet Union would no doubt have made a significant, even decisive difference (not that Pétain himself would have favored such a course), but this was not, as we have seen, a viable option. The more desperate circumstances post-Operation Barbarossa would reweight the calculations of Western policy-makers not yet swept away by Hitler’s armies, but their number by then no longer included the French.
Yet if Pétain was wide of the mark on the matter of allies, perhaps he got it right when it came to military preparedness and the state of national morale. Fears of German military superiority and doubts about the steadiness of public opinion did indeed cause French statesmen to falter in both 1936 and 1938. Do not such fears and doubts demonstrate that all was not in order in the house of France? Recent work on the subject suggests a less doleful conclusion. In fact, on the matter of rearmament, there is now building consensus that the French effort was nothing short of “extraordinary.”1 Once again, moreover, it is worth asking who got it right anyhow. Were other nations that much better prepared than the French to take on the Nazis?
There’s no denying that the French military was in a sorry state in the mid-1930s. In 1928 military service had been cut to one year, resulting in a general reduction in the number of men under arms at any one time. France’s army was no more than half a million strong in 1930, and the professional core was a good deal smaller than that, not much larger in fact than the truncated army permitted the Germans under the terms of the Versailles Treaty. Professionals did not so much constitute a combat-ready fighting force as a training cadre tasked with turning green conscripts into something like soldiers in the short time period permitted. Factor in the shrunken state of investment in arms production, the consequence of Depression-era budget cutting, and the picture grows darker still. France’s army in the mid-1930s was undermanned, ill trained, and short on modern weaponry.2 None of this would have mattered so much were it not for Nazi Germany, which had made rearmament a top priority, boosting the portion of the national income set aside for military spending from just under 1 percent in 1933 to 10 percent in 1935.3
France did not turn a blind eye to what was happening across the Rhine. In 1935 the term of military service was doubled from one year to two, and with the coming of the Blum government, the pace of arms spending picked up. There is more than a little irony in this. Vichy wanted to blame the defeat of 1940 on a lack of preparedness and battened on Léon Blum as the culprit-in-chief. The regime mounted a show trial in Riom, central France, in 1942 to make its case. There is no doubt that Blum, a socialist of deep convictions, had no truck with militarism and held war in horror. Yet he held Nazism in greater horror, and under Blum’s administration 14 billion francs were poured into weapons manufacture. As one historian has put it: “… when it came to public expenditure, the Popular Front did more for guns than for butter.”4 Blum oversaw the semi-nationalization of the aircraft industry. The move was designed to rationalize a sector fragmented among numerous small firms, concentrating productive capacity that in turn would facilitate aircraft manufacture on a mass scale.5 The reorganization proved disruptive at first but began to pay dividends in 1938–9. The Daladier administration that took office in the spring of 1938 ratcheted up arms production, and it was the weaponry of modern warfare—tanks and airplanes—that got the most attention.6 On the eve of war, the French army had achieved rough numerical equality to the Germans in armor.7 France’s air force was still smaller than the Luftwaffe, but the situation was not altogether bleak. French aircraft production was accelerating at a rate the Nazis could not match, and by early 1940, France and Britain together were churning out a higher total of warplanes than Germany.8 In 1938, France’s air arm was not yet a match for the Reich’s, but it was on course to becoming so by 1941.9 In the meantime, purchased US aircraft made up part of the difference, not to mention the Royal Air Force, which was a formidable force in its own right spearheaded by the redoubtable Spitfire fighter plane.
It is worth underlining in this connection how rapid and massive the French military build-up was. France’s military budget skyrocketed from 12.8 billion francs in 1935 to 93.7 billion francs in 1939. The nation was investing 2.6 times as much on armaments production on the eve of the Second World War as it had on the eve of the First.10 The quality of France’s new weaponry, moreover, was on the whole respectable, if not first rate. The Morane interceptor lacked the speed of the Messerschmitt 109, but when it came to fighter planes France’s Dewoitine 520 was said to be superior to any of its German counterparts. There was no better medium tank in the world than France’s SOMUA. The heavier Char B was a yet more formidable machine, but its small fuel capacity limited its range of action, and French tanks in general did not come equipped with effective radio communications.11 Not least of all, France’s late-decade armaments boom had a major side benefit: it helped bring an effective end to the Depression. Unemployment, the textile sector apart, all but disappeared. Daladier’s May 1938 devaluation and his disciplinary labor policies—in November he gutted Popular Front legislation limiting the work week to forty hours—boosted investor confidence. Capital that had fled France came flooding back, a morale booster for policy-makers who now had the cash resources to finance a war over the long haul.12
But perhaps this scenario is too up-beat. It may be that France did a lot to rearm, but didn’t the effort come too late? It was catching up to the Germans, but the French still were not a match for them in 1940. And in any event, it’s been argued, when measured against Britain’s own build-up, France’s looks a lot less impressive, even a failure—so there’s a lot less room for congratulation than I have allowed.13
The problem with the “too late” argument is its focus on France in isolation. The French by themselves were not and would never have been Germany’s military equal. The French, however, did not fight alone, and so the issue needs to be restated: Was Germany better equipped for war in May 1940 than France and its allies? The answer to this question is a qualified no. Once war was declared, the Belgians and Dutch abandoned neutralism and at last aligned with Britain and France. Together, the four powers fielded more divisions than the Germans. France by itself had almost as many tanks as the Wehrmacht, but France was not by itself: it was reinforced by a British ally with a tank force of its own, however modest in size. As for airpower, the Luftwaffe outstripped France’s air force by a wide, albeit shrinking, margin, but not the combined air fleets of France and Britain together. Numbers, of course, do not tell the whole story. French tanks were impressive war engines, but they had design flaws, and a lot would depend on how they were used. France’s warplanes were outclassed by Germany’s, but the British had a fighter fleet second to none, as the Battle of Britain would in due course demonstrate. Once again, much would depend on how the Allies exploited the weaponry at their command. The Germans, then, may have enjoyed a qualitative edge in armaments, but that edge was not so great as to be decisive in itself. What mattered was deployment. This was a question not of rearmament policy but of tactical doctrine, a separate (though not unrelated) set of issues that will be taken up presently. For the moment, it’s clear that the combined Allied rearmament effort, as of 1939–40, was at least satisfactory and that France’s contribution in men and tanks was far greater than anyone else’s.
The Allies had caught up to the Germans, but more than that: in a year or two, Allied productive capacity, now running full throttle, threatened to swamp Germany’s own war effort hands down. The German high command was aware of this and did not relish the prospect of war. The Führer, however, wanted a fight, convinced that aggression was the surest path to getting his way. He had courted war over Czechoslovakia and was disappointed when it didn’t come, and he was ready to do so again at the earliest opportunity. German war planners acceded to the Führer’s will and, if there was to be war, judged it better to take the gamble now before the Allies grew too strong. Even then, a war-hungry Hitler had to bear down on his underlings to get them to accelerate their preparations.
It may be that the Allies were ready enough to fight in 1939. The accusation still stands, though, that France did not do as good a job getting ready for war as Great Britain. But why fix on Britain as the standard of success? Why not include the Soviet Union, the United States, or even Germany itself in the discussion?
The Soviets did not have much to boast about. Stalin, as we have seen, subjected the Red Army to a thoroughgoing purge in 1937–8. The resultant disarray explains in part the Soviet Union’s poor performance in the Russo-Finnish War of 1939–40. And still there was turmoil in the senior ranks: as late as June 1941 a full three-quarters of Red Army officers had been on active service for less than a year.14 This is not to say that the Soviets did not undertake a massive military build-up. Military spending accounted for roughly 10 percent of the national budget in the early 1930s, a figure that shot up to 25 percent in 1939, and the number of men under arms quadrupled over the same period, skyrocketing from 1 to 4 million.15 On the weapons front, France’s defeat spurred Stalin to speed up tank procurement, a wise decision, though note how late it came. As for the air force, its sorry state had little to commend it. The overall picture, despite important strides, was not an encouraging one, and the Soviet brass knew it. In May 1940, Generals Zhukov and Timoshenko drafted a report on the state of the Soviet armed forces. As one historian summed up the team’s findings: “the army on the whole did not display particular vigilance, battle-readiness, steadfastness in defense …”16
That said, the Soviets were a good deal better prepared for war than the United States. At the time of the Battle of France, the American army had an estimated 245,000 men under arms, making it the twentieth largest in the world, just behind the Dutch. A peacetime draft was instituted some months later, but congressional support was precarious. The measure came up for renewal in August 1941 and passed the House of Representatives by a single vote, this as the Wehrmacht was sweeping across the Soviet Union and Japan’s armies were making ever deeper advances into Southeast Asia.17 But, of course, the United States at this stage had no intention of involving itself in a ground war of any magnitude. American policy-makers understood war preparedness less as a question of manpower than one of hardware. The United States, it was judged, needed ships and planes most, and so that is where the American build-up began. Munich, as we have seen, marked a first turning point, although how great was the change can be overstated. At the outset of the war in Europe, the United States was spending just a meager 1.4 percent of gross national product (GNP) on defense.18 But then came the fall of France, which had as sobering an effect on US decision-makers as it had on their Soviet counterparts. In the period 1937–40 the American government had ordered a total of eight battleships; in the aftermath of the French defeat, it ordered an additional nine. The enactment of Lend-Lease in March 1941 spurred on the pace. America was now spending over 11 percent of GNP on defense, but an additional point still needs to be made.19 At the time of Operation Barbarossa, the United States was just beginning to show what its military-industrial complex was capable of, yet for the moment the “cupboard was almost bare.” The necessary arms were in production but not ready for use, and America’s enemies were conscious of how things stood. The United States, according to Japanese estimates, had almost three times more warship tonnage under construction than Japan did in 1941, and the conclusion that followed from this was a simple one: the US was unready now, but it would not be unready for much longer. The December attack on Pearl Harbor, of course, was the consequence of such calculations, a stinging defeat for the United States.20 Much as the Franco-British build-up prompted the Nazis to preemptive action, so did the American build-up spur on the Japanese. The United States, it may be ventured, was less prepared for the onslaught it ended up facing than the French and British, but then again, America did not have the Wehrmacht to deal with (not for another few years), and it benefited from the buffer of a vast ocean that kept its adversary beyond striking distance of the US mainland.
On the matter of adversaries, it is well worth considering just how prepared the Germans themselves were. In the pre-war years, the French overestimated German military might time and again and, when defeat came, tended to explain it as the inevitable outcome of an unequal fight. France, a nation of peasants and shopkeepers, was just no match for the German industrial dynamo. Yet Germany had a peasantry of its own, larger in absolute terms than the French peasantry, and it also had a small-business and artisanal sector that was far from negligible. As for German “military might,” the Wehrmacht fielded what amounted to two armies in the Second World War, a mechanized, fast-striking force and a much larger and slower-moving one made up of foot soldiers and horses. The massive, multi-million-man army that was hurled against the Soviet Union in June 1941 was composed in one part of the former but in three parts of the latter.21
All the same, there is no denying the staggering wallop the Wehrmacht had the capacity to deliver. The German army’s punch derived in good measure from Hitler’s unrelenting determination to assemble a military machine with the advanced weaponry and firepower to crush all opponents. In the first two years of the Nazi regime, the share of national income devoted to armaments shot up from 1 to 10 percent, and that percentage was doubled by 1939, a much higher rate of military spending than in either France or Great Britain. The build-up had come at a heavy cost to consumption, to be sure, which threatened to stoke public discontent. Hitler brushed such concerns aside, convinced that he had the means to keep opinion in check: morale-boosting parades of military hardware, a steady diet of diplomatic and military victories, and the promise of more of the same to come. Where grandiosity and saber-rattling failed, moreover, there was always fear.22 Dampened consumption, foreign policy adventurism, and authoritarian methods: these were essential ingredients of Hitler’s rearmament drive, a recipe just not available to the Allied democracies.
But several additional points bear keeping in mind. The German rearmament drive has been characterized as a “punctuated chaos.”23 It was almost derailed by a financial crunch in 1937, which required all the wizardry of Hitler’s economics minister, Hjalmar Schacht, to resolve. A second crisis threatened in the summer of 1939. Shortages of raw materials and of manpower had brought the German war machine to a “critical threshold.” The Nazi-Soviet pact and the access to Soviet resources it opened up gave promise of future relief. At the same time, however, the British and French armaments industries had kicked into high gear, seconded by the United States. Germany was working harder than its enemies just to stay a half-step ahead, if that. Finally, well armed as the Germans were, this did not make them invincible. The Polish campaign of 1939 was an undoubted victory, but the victory was won against a much smaller opponent, and the Soviet Union had helped out by launching its own invasion of Poland. Even so, the Reich got a bruising in the fight. A full quarter of the Wehrmacht’s tank force had been destroyed or knocked out.24 Germany’s military commanders did not look forward to the prospect of a battlefield confrontation with France, and for good reason.
Looking eastward, France’s rearmament push does not appear such a dismal failure. Still, maybe compared to Britain’s it was. On one level, the issue is a false one. If France possessed an ally that was yet more productive in arms than it was, this was welcome news, just as it was welcome news for Britain (and not a token of its shortcomings) that the United States, the most dynamic arms manufacturer of them all, stood by its side in the aftermath of the French defeat. Having well-equipped allies is a plus. Nonetheless, it is fair to ask whether Britain was making a disproportionate contribution to the common arms effort. This would be proof of a sort that a France in decline was incapable of keeping up its side of the bargain. Britain got into the business of rearming later than France, and even then, the British remained skittish about committing ground forces to the continent, a reluctance that did not evaporate until after the Prague coup in March 1939.25 The escalating international crisis at last prompted Britain to impose a limited draft in April and then general conscription five months later, a breakthrough measure by British, albeit not French, standards. Universal military service had been the rule in France since the early years of the Third Republic.
That Britain was a latecomer to the mobilization against Hitler does not mean that in the end it did not do an effective job rearming. There were recriminations in Britain, as in France, after the disaster of 1940. The British Expeditionary Force had come close to total destruction, and the hunt was on for the “guilty men” responsible, with the Treasury identified as the prime suspect. Its stinginess was said to have throttled British rearmament, the poor quality of British equipment in turn accounting for the BEF’s near catastrophe. Historians have set the record straight. By 1939, Britain was in fact matching the Germans weapon for weapon in tank and aircraft production.26
From here, though, the argument has sometimes been taken a step further to suggest that the British path to rearmament was superior to the French. The British effort, it is said, was more sensitive to trade union interests, and it was better organized.27 There is something to be said for the first point. Daladier took on and defeated organized labor in November 1938, in contrast to Britain’s Tory governments which, once they got serious about rearmament, made an effort to work in collaboration with the trade unions. On the other hand, solicitousness toward organized labor, while good news for social harmony, is not the sine qua non of productivity. The Nazis and Soviets managed to rearm without benefit of independent trade unions. As for France itself, 1938 was indeed a setback for organized labor but not for the nation’s arms drive, which heated up in the months following. Workers may have grumbled, but they did not strike, and there was little industrial sabotage.28 On the matter of organization, Britain had learned a useful lesson from the Great War: the sooner munitions production was rationalized the better. In August 1939, before the next war had even begun, British authorities set up a Ministry of Supply. But France did much the same in October, a mere two months later, and the man placed in charge, Raoul Dautry, was a senior civil servant of exceptional organizational abilities. It is just not clear how much of an advantage, if any, the British enjoyed in this regard. Even conceding that Britain had an edge vis-à-vis the French in arms production circa 1939, the difference was a matter of degree, not of kind. It does not mean that France was failing, just that an ally was having success, a cause not for invidious comparisons but for rejoicing.
What is striking is how taken aback the world was by France’s sudden defeat. The Panzer commander Heinz Guderian, as we have seen, described it in miraculous terms. The United States reacted by redoubling its own rearmament effort, Stalin by scrambling to appease a Germany now roaring at its gates. No one, however, was more crushed by the catastrophe than the French people themselves. Propagandists had promised them victory: “We will prevail because we’re the strongest,” as the slogan went. But had the French public ever believed in the war effort in the first place?
The question of public morale is not easy to evaluate. Pétain, of course, knew no such hesitations. He believed he had an intuitive grasp of the national psyche and did not like what he saw when he looked into France’s soul. Too much self-gratification had weakened the nation’s martial fiber. Defeat was the near inevitable result and the sole remedy a regime of national atonement and regeneration. To General Maxime Weygand, commander-in-chief at the moment of France’s final collapse, the problem was pacifism. The nation’s left-wing schoolteachers had propagandized against military virtues for twenty years, forming an entire generation too weak-willed to shoulder the burden of France’s defense. Historians, of course, eschew such expressions of reactionary penitentialism, but they do make use of words such as pacifism and malaise, “national identity crisis,” and decadence to characterize the French state of mind in the years preceding the war.29
These are exaggerations. No doubt, the national mood had darkened in the 1930s. France saw itself as “a land of asylum,” willing to welcome Europe’s tired and hungry, provided they in turn were willing to embrace French ways. Indeed, no country in interwar Europe took in more refugees. A deepening depression in the decade, however, generated a backlash. Laws were passed that made it difficult for the recently naturalized to gain access to “overcrowded” professions such as law and medicine. The influx of refugees fleeing Hitlerian oppression ratcheted up the xenophobic mood. Moviemakers complained about a Semitic invasion that stole jobs from the native-born. The director Marcel L’Herbier pinpointed Blum’s accession to power in 1936 as a turning point. That was the moment when “Jewish immigrants” had taken over the movie industry, “remaking it in their image which is assuredly not our own.”30 Then came the Spanish Civil War. Defeated loyalists poured into France late in the decade, prompting heated debates about how to handle them, debates that culminated in the building of a network of internment camps.
Remember, too, how scarred France was by the ravages of the Great War. There were reminders everywhere of what the fighting had cost: monuments to the dead, subway seats reserved for the mutilated, posters and movies recalling the sacrifices made. Veterans’ organizations—massive and well organized—preached a message of patriotic pacifism. Such sentiments found loud echoes in parliament among the so-called “mous,” literally softies, a clique of a hundred or so deputies who favored a prudent, appeasing foreign policy. Nor were the mous marginal men. Their number included figures of note and reputation—former Prime Minister Pierre Laval, Camille Chautemps who served a brief stint as premier himself from June 1937 to March 1938, and Georges Bonnet, as of April 1938 and until the outbreak of hostilities France’s minister of foreign affairs. The latter two were Radicals, members of France’s governing party par excellence, which played a key part in every French administration from 1932 until the war. Waverers and peace-at-any-price appeasers, while a minority, occupied a strategic position in France’s political class.
Last of all, there is the question of anti-communism. The participation of the French Communist Party (the PCF) in the Popular Front made it a force to reckon with both in and out of parliament. France’s communists were to all appearances steadfast defenders of the anti-fascist line, a commitment that the signing of the Nazi-Soviet pact did not at first alter. PCF deputies voted to finance the war effort in early September 1939. Yet before the month was out, Moscow loyalists in the party had begun to align themselves with Stalin’s new policies, repudiating the war as an imperialist exercise. Prime Minister Daladier seized the occasion to dissolve the PCF and arrest forty or so Communist deputies who refused to renounce the party’s change of line. Communists, who had labored for much of the 1930s to position themselves as members in good standing of the national community, were now tarred as national pariahs.
Public opinion, on this account, was a cauldron of prejudice: anti-Semitic, defeatist, and anti-communist. It’s easy enough to see why the French, so burdened, were unable to mount a concerted war effort and why, once rocked by defeat, they were seduced by the siren calls of Vichy authoritarianism. This picture is not so much false as one-sided, and it is worth querying at the same time whether French opinion, fissured as it was, was so unique in this respect.
The French public did not savor the prospect of hostilities with the Axis powers, but there were clear signs in 1938–9 that it had begun to grasp and to accept that just such a war might be necessary. Mussolini’s fascist regime, sensing French weakness post-Munich, did not conceal that it had an eye on France’s North African possessions and even on Corsica and the Savoie. Daladier answered back, making clear France’s determination to protect its Mediterranean presence, touring Tunisia and Corsica to underscore the point. The French public applauded the prime minister’s decisiveness, and its resolve was further stiffened by Hitler’s Prague coup. A public opinion poll undertaken in the summer of 1939, one of the first of its kind, asked respondents how France ought to reply in the event Hitler seized the Free City of Danzig, as he had threatened to do. Seventy-six percent of those polled wanted Germany stopped and were prepared to sanction the use of force to that end, as against just 17 percent who preferred peace at any price.31
For much of the 1930s, the streets of Paris had been a battleground where left and right fought, sometimes with bare knuckles, for control of public space. There had been right-wing, anti-parliamentary riots in February 1934 that left more than a dozen dead. The left answered back with a series of mass marches that criss-crossed the city in a show of anti-fascist determination. A different, less confrontational climate prevailed in the years just before the war. The crowds turned out in the summer of 1938 to welcome the King and Queen of England, in Paris on a visit. That November marked the twentieth anniversary of the 1918 armistice, and Daladier, who was a veteran of the Great War himself, made sure that the event was commemorated with the appropriate public fanfare. Then in July 1939 began the celebration of the French Revolution’s 150th anniversary, marked by a round of well-orchestrated parades and public displays that were still unfolding even as the war broke out. It’s hard to tell how deep the new patriotic consensus ran, but one historian has written of the French public’s “mood of quiet, guarded optimism” in the face of the looming threat of war, another of its consent to the possibility of armed conflict.32 What is certain is that once hostilities did break out, no more than a handful of conscripts refused the call to the colors, and in the course of the fighting that ensued there was not a single significant instance of mutiny.
This is not to say that morale ran high, just that France entered the war far less hobbled than is often supposed. Some of the credit for this must go to the prime minister, Edouard Daladier. For a start, he was no René Viviani. Viviani was prime minister when the Great War began. He had made a name for himself in younger days as a socialist lawyer but then had gone on to an unremarkable career in parliament as a fence-sitting pol. If second-rank leadership in a moment of trial is proof of national decomposition, then it was France in 1914, not 1940, that was in trouble. As for Daladier himself, he was, though no Roosevelt or Hitler, a popular figure. He knew how to use the public airwaves, making a favorable impression with listeners who appreciated his down-home, regional accent (he was from the south of France), and distinguished record of military service (he was a combat veteran who had finished the Great War as a captain, having begun it as a private). To be sure, Daladier was not a man of iron will. Munich, when he had bent to the British, proved that. Yet he could give the appearance of taking charge. He had faced down the trade unions and Mussolini and, in September of 1939, seemed ready to take on Hitler. Once the war was under way, Daladier joined in ganging up on anti-war communists, an all too easy mark to be sure, but he also maneuvered to rein in the peace lobby, demoting Bonnet from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which he took over himself, to the Ministry of Defense. The defeatists were quieted for the time being, although they continued to plot.
The picture, then, on the eve of the war was a mixed one: France was not rudderless. It had a capable, if not first-class leader, and public opinion stood behind him. The appeasers were not making noises, but they would when the opportunity presented itself. And the depth of the public’s commitment to the war effort remained to be tested.
The glass was but half full in France, yet was it that much fuller elsewhere? It was not in the US. In June 1940, at the very moment of France’s defeat, 64 percent of the American public opposed entry into the war. Such anti-interventionist sentiment was stoked by the America First Committee, formed that September by students at Yale Law School. The organization, whose membership soon came to number in the hundreds of thousands, lobbied hard to keep public opinion roused against Roosevelt’s foreign policy, and the America Firsters were not just a crackpot crew. Yale Law School’s student body yielded a pair of first-class recruits in Kingman Brewster, a future Yale president, and Gerald Ford, a future president tout court.33
In Britain, on the other hand—and it was Britain, apart from France that mattered most—opinion had given up on appeasement by the war’s outbreak. The turn had been slow in coming, but it was decisive. Chamberlain, still prime minister when Hitler invaded Poland, might well have orchestrated a second Munich had not the weight of public opinion pressured him to do otherwise.34 This very fact, though, points to a second, less heartening conclusion: the general public may have come round to recognizing the necessity of war, but not so elements of the British elite who were a good deal cooler about the prospect.35 In 1933 the Oxford Union had voted by a wide margin a pacifist resolution that “This House will in no circumstances fight for its King and Country.” The notorious Cliveden set—an influential coterie of well-born and well-placed appeasers, so named for the home of Lady Nancy Astor where they gathered—was not just anti-war but downright pro-German. Then there was the Conservative Party itself, which (Winston Churchill and a small group of like-minded colleagues apart) hewed to the appeasement line, taking its cue from the appeaser-in-chief Neville Chamberlain. Although he led Britain into conflict, Chamberlain did so with the utmost reluctance, remaining an apostle to the end of cutting a deal with Hitler. It was Chamberlain who said of Czechoslovakia at the time of Munich: “How horrible, fantastic, incredible it is that we should be digging trenches and trying on gas-masks here because of a quarrel in a far-away country between people of whom we know nothing.” It was he who, as the Polish crisis began to unfold, did not want to declare war on Germany, and he again, abetted by fellow appeasers in the cabinet, who ran a dithering war effort until May 1940 when, sick and dis-credited, he was at last brought down in the Commons with the damning oratory of the Conservative MP Leo Amery ringing in his ears: “You have sat too long here for any good you have been doing. Depart, I say, and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go.”
The French public had come round to an acceptance of the possibility of war sooner than the British, though not with the same hardened sense of purpose. Political elites were divided in both countries. France’s mous were a significant, though for the moment chastened, force. In Britain, the appeasers still occupied the high ground of decision-making power when war began, even if their grip had begun to slip under pressure from a belatedly aroused opinion. On the matter of leadership, however, the differences between the two allies were more stark. Daladier was ready to take the fight to Hitler in a way Chamberlain never was. If waffling, appeasing leadership is the sure sign of a nation in crisis, then the decadent power when the war broke out was Great Britain at least as much as France.
The Soviet Union and Germany too for that matter were in no better shape. The Soviet elite, of course, had been purged into submission by a decade of terror, and Stalin was no more merciful to the general public. He feared the USSR’s border populations as pools of potential disloyalty. During the years 1936–8, 800,000 non-Russians were deported from the western borderlands to Central Asia. When the Soviets moved into Poland in 1939, 400,000 Poles met a similar fate, as did “several hundred thousand” Balts in 1940.36 The ever paranoid Stalin did not trust the men he worked with or the minority peoples of the Soviet Union. Hitler, by contrast, boasted a supreme self-confidence, never doubting that he was a man of destiny. The German public, it was reported, did not welcome the prospect of war at the time of the Munich crisis, and as the threat of hostilities loomed once more in 1939, the American newspaper correspondent William Shirer noted the almost visible defeatism on the faces of people in the Berlin streets, but Hitler was not deterred. He was a go-for-broke gambler ready to wager that victory would wash away all trepidations. Such recklessness maddened the Führer’s military entourage, however, and in 1938 and again in 1939, staff officers plotted to overthrow him. The chief of the German general staff, Franz Halder, took to carrying a concealed pistol around, intending, should he ever summon the needed courage, to assassinate the Nazi dictator.37 Nothing came of any of this, but the fact still remains: the Soviet Union and Germany were riven with plots and purges. They were dictatorships that ran roughshod over doubting or unreliable populations with a mixture of bravado and brutality. In comparison, France in 1939 had little to be ashamed of.
Looking from the vantage of September of that year, it is not at all evident that France was bound to lose the war that lay ahead. Its strategic position was not as strong as in 1914: Germany after all did not have to worry in a serious way about a two-front war. Still, France had a redoubtable ally in Great Britain (reinforced as the war got started by belated Belgian and, to a lesser degree, Dutch cooperation). France also had access, in a way it had not in 1914, to American armaments production, which was gathering momentum at a startling pace. In weapons and men, the Allies were a close match for the Germans—more than a match when it came to sea power, less than one when it came to the air. France’s finances were sound and its economy, thanks to the military build-up, humming. The politics of the 1930s had been turbulent and polarized, currents of xenophobia and anti-communism running deep in segments of opinion and the political class; but in answer to repeated Axis bullying, there had been a patriotic resurgence. The nation’s political leaders may not have been great statesmen, yet they were able enough, skillful and often well-meaning parliamentarians such as democracies are wont to produce. There were nay-saying defeatists, to be sure, but as of 1939 at least, the peace-at-any-price faction had been reduced to backroom maneuvers. France was as ready for war as any of the major belligerents, readier than the US and Soviet Union, at least as ready as Great Britain and Germany.
So why then did France lose and lose in such spectacular fashion? When the war began in earnest, matters of doctrine, battle planning, and on-the-ground operations took center stage. I have argued that France’s glass was half full when it came to the matter of war-preparedness. The glass empties out altogether, however, the deeper the military side of the equation is delved into.