PART II
CHAPTER 3
Marc Bloch was among the first to say it, and the point has now become well-nigh axiomatic: France was still fighting the Great War in 1940, a war of position that placed a premium on defense, concentrated firepower, and entrenched strongholds.1 There was no greater symbol of such a backward-looking mindset than the Maginot Line, a network of concrete bunkers and fortifications that stretched mile after mile along France’s border with Germany from Luxembourg to Switzerland. To Bloch’s initial charge has been added a second, just as damning in its way: the determination of France’s military planners to make sure that the bulk of the fighting took place elsewhere. This war, unlike that of 1914–18, should not be decided on French soil but in Eastern Europe where France was content to let the Poles stand or fall alone; or in Belgium where the French planned, once hostilities had got started, to relocate their most battle-ready units. Let others know first-hand the devastations of modern warfare; this time, France meant to spare itself the worst.2
The Germans too had learned lessons from the Great War: that the tank was a fearsome weapon and massed armor more fearsome still. The creation of Panzer armies made possible the concentration of striking power, the better to punch a hole in enemy lines and, the hole once punched, to capitalize on the advantage with an unprecedented speed. Add in dive-bombers to demoralize front-line opponents and sow disorder in the enemy’s rear, and motorized infantry to consolidate the gains made: the combination made for a new kind of war, conducted at a lightning pace for which the French were just not prepared.
French military strategists hadn’t moved with the times, but maybe that was because they were an aging lot. Senior officers in 1939 were on average eight to ten years older than their German counterparts.3 The issue of motorized attack divisions had in fact come up for debate in the 1930s, with an obstreperous young colonel, Charles de Gaulle, making the case in favor. But he was outmaneuvered (and outranked) by the octogenarian Marshal Pétain who was a firm believer in the supremacy of defensive warfare, a conviction bolstered by his experience as commanding officer at Verdun in 1916.
The received wisdom is hard on the Maginot-mindedness of the French, seen as symptomatic of an officer class (not to say an entire society) grown wary of taking the initiative and out of touch with a fast-paced, mechanized modern world. France was a sitting duck, and to make matters worse, far worse, Hitler struck at the unfortunate French where they were most vulnerable—through the Ardennes forest. The war began in September 1939. Hitler invaded and conquered Poland, paused to repair or replace damaged equipment, and then turned westward, attacking Holland and Belgium first. France, as its battle plan called for, advanced a substantial portion of its armed forces into Belgium and Holland, while the rest hunkered down behind the Maginot Line. The Ardennes were located at the hinge point in France’s defensive front, at the weld linking the Maginot Line and French units positioned on Belgian territory. The area, moreover, was not that well defended and for understandable reasons. This was forestland, hard to penetrate and maneuver in, and there was also a river to cross, the Meuse, all in all not the most propitious terrain for an armored assault. Yet this is where Hitler decided to attack in May 1940, a high-risk move that paid off, catching the French by surprise. The choice was consonant with the go-for-broke temperament that made the Führer so difficult for more run-of-the-mill politicians and generals to deal with.
It may have been bad luck for the French that Hitler attacked where he did in 1940. Yet what followed in the wake of the attack was not bad luck but to all appearances further evidence of France’s failings as a nation. French troops panicked in the face of the initial Panzer assault. As German motorized divisions then raced westward, cutting a sickle-shaped path en route to the English Channel, the French proved incapable of moving with sufficient speed and decision to mount an effective counter-attack to contain the enemy drive. The end result was the entrapment of France’s armies in Belgium and of the British Expeditionary Force stationed there as well. They would in the end be evacuated from Dunkirk to Britain in late May and early June, with Marc Bloch among the evacuees. It was a phenomenal rescue effort that in common memory has redounded more to Britain’s credit than to France’s. A total catastrophe was thus averted (it is well worth pondering what Britain would have done had its expeditionary force in fact been destroyed), but that was not saying much. The Germans had routed France’s armies in Belgium; the Maginot Line was circumvented; and the nation’s heartland now lay exposed to a German advance southward. Frightened civilians, Belgian and French but French in the main, took to the roads. The government abandoned Paris for safer quarters to the south-west, first in the Touraine and then, yet further away, at Bordeaux. The haste was so great that it wasn’t possible to pack up everything. Officials at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs burned papers in the Ministry courtyard, creating a plume of smoke visible to alarmed neighborhood residents. The government’s precipitous departure spurred on the civilian exodus, which in the end swelled to over 8 million. Here then was a nation in disintegration: its armies crushed, its civilians in flight, and its government on the run.4
This is the usual story: it is not wrong, but it is partial. Much, but not all, of what it leaves out makes the French defeat look a good deal less “strange” than Bloch and others who borrowed from him imagined. Let’s start with French strategic planning. The Maginot Line seemed like a good idea at the time. It was named after André Maginot, minister of defense in 1928, when the line’s construction was begun. France was then scaling back its military apparatus, and the Maginot Line served that purpose well. It cost money to erect for sure, but a frontier defended by fortifications required a smaller manpower investment than a frontier defended by soldiers alone. In the actual fighting of 1940, the Germans never made a full frontal assault on the line but, crashing through the Ardennes, outflanked it from the west before eventually enveloping it. Even then, entrapped French armies put up ferocious resistance. The hopelessness of the situation forced an eventual surrender, but the Maginot Line itself was still standing at the end; not one of its major fortresses was captured in the fighting, and in this sense the line did what it was supposed to do.5
Yet, if the Maginot Line wasn’t such a bad idea, why not extend it all the way to the English Channel? For a number of reasons. The Ardennes were thought to be impassable, and so there seemed no need for fortified positions in that sector. As for France’s northern borders, the terrain there was flat and soft, not suitable for heavy fortifications anchored deep in the soil. The north, moreover, was a major industrial region, home to critical mining and metal-making industries. A pitched battle here, with artillery barrages and bombing runs, would disrupt production, crippling France’s war effort in the process. Anyhow, extending the line along the Belgian border would send the wrong message to the Belgians themselves. France needed allies and still wanted to woo Belgium into a military partnership. Insert a concrete barrier between the two nations, and the Belgians would no doubt conclude that they were being left to look after themselves, indeed abandoned.6
Such reasoning, sound as it was, still left unresolved the problem of how to defend France’s northern frontier, a conundrum complicated by Belgium’s proclamation of neutrality in 1936. Belgium, it turns out, was not as neutral as all that, and its military planners remained in secret contact with their French counterparts, plotting together what to do in the event of war. The two powers had a clear enough idea how the fighting was supposed to unfold. If, as expected, Germany invaded Belgium, Belgium’s own system of fortifications along the Albert Canal and Dyle River would slow the German advance, allowing the French just enough time, moving at top speed, to reinforce the Belgians. The Belgian and French armies, fighting side by side along a single, continuous front, would thus force the Germans to fight a “methodical battle” on terrain of Belgian and French choosing. The two powers made sure that the terrain in question was prepared, peppering it with bunkers, barricades, and minefields believed sufficient to bring any German assault to a standstill.7
The Franco-Belgian plan of battle, like the idea of the Maginot Line itself, was not so misconceived as all that. It presupposed that French troops were ready to make a rapid bolt northward, and indeed they were. France’s armies in this sector were fully motorized and ready to move. In fact, French units were more motorized on average than German ones.8 The French had learned something about mobile warfare after all, a good deal more than used to be thought.
As for the idea of fighting a set-piece battle on prepared ground, it wasn’t altogether a bad one. In May 1940 the main German thrust, of course, ran through the Ardennes, but it was decided at the same time to launch a diversionary attack into Belgium through the so-called Gembloux Gap, a swath of flat terrain well suited to mobile warfare and to that extent favorable to the Germans. But the French had anticipated that the Germans might strike somewhere in the vicinity and were ready, calling up armored columns of their own, spearheaded by the fearsome SOMUA tank. In the series of encounters that followed, all France’s tactical weaknesses were on display. French tanks formed static battle lines that swift German open-field maneuvers were able to disrupt; the French lacked adequate radio equipment, making it hard for them to communicate and regroup, whereas the better-equipped Germans knew no such difficulties. Yet the outcome of the battle turned out to be a draw and, on some accounts, an outright victory for the French.9 The German attack at the Gembloux Gap, of course, was not the main push but a feint, which may have made a difference in favor of the French. That said, the outcome gives a hint of what French armies could do when attacked where they expected.
For all the defensive-mindedness of France’s initial scheme of battle, French military planners did indeed envision an eventual changeover to offensive operations. The idea was to blunt Germany’s opening onslaught, using the breathing room gained to undertake a massive military build-up of the kind the French, British, and American economies working together could sustain, but never the German. Once overwhelming superiority in materiel had been achieved, then would come the moment to go on the attack and to crush the Germans by superior force of arms.
Such was the state of French military thinking at the outbreak of the war. Planners had devised a strategy that made sense for a nation like France, an industrial demo-cracy freighted with all too vivid memories of a previous world war that had cost it, proportionate to its population, more men than any other combatant save Serbia. The Germans, in thrall to a high-rolling Führer, might stake everything on an offensive spearheaded by ideology-fueled elite units, but was such an option available to the French? France’s was a republican army under the ultimate command of elected politicians bound to be frugal with French lives. Experience taught that offensive operations risked huge losses. It was more prudent not to ask too much of citizen soldiers just called up; better to hold the line until France’s industrial might, seconded by that of Britain and America, came into full play—and then make the decisive strike.10
And truth to tell, no one had a better strategy ready to hand. The British had no objection to the French scheme. They were content to contribute a modest expeditionary force to help out on the ground and to play what they believed to be a yet more critical role in the air, dispatching bomber squadrons over the Ruhr to devastate German industrial capacity.11 Such was the British idea: to stymie Germany on the land and cripple its war machine from above, leaving the enemy vulnerable to a final knock-out blow, all at minimal cost in blood to Britain itself. For the slaughter of the Great War had taught Britain a lesson or two as well: that it was better not to attack the enemy head-on but to hit him on the flanks or in the rear, relying on technology rather than manpower to deliver the most punishing blows. In the event, Britain was lucky not to suffer the fate that befell the French. It was saved by the rescue and evacuation of the BEF remnant at Dunkirk, by an English Channel impenetrable to Panzer attack, and by the RAF that beat off the Luftwaffe, assuring British air superiority over England itself and scotching German plans for an invasion of the home islands as a result. In a sense, though, even France’s defeat did not alter by much Britain’s overall strategic outlook. The United States, once in the war and under pressure from the Soviets to open a second front, advocated an all-out assault on the continent. The British remained loath to go straight at the Germans, preferring more roundabout maneuvers instead, and for a while they succeeded in coaxing the Americans to go along. The Allies first undertook landings in North Africa and Italy before the American Chief of Staff, General George Marshall, insisted on no further delays in making D-Day happen.12 There was one thing America’s entry into the war did not change, however: Britain’s commitment to heavy bombing. On this point, British and American military strategists saw eye to eye, and Britain remained committed as ever to pummeling Germany from the air, so much so that the man in charge of Britain’s Bomber Command from 1942, Sir Arthur Harris, earned himself the nickname “Bomber Harris.”
By 1942, of course, both the USSR and the United States were in the war. At the outset, neither was at all prepared for what was coming. The Soviets had constructed fortifications along the new frontiers acquired in 1939–40, at the same time ramping up armaments production on a colossal scale. Stalin believed he had adequate breathing room and that the Western powers would keep the Germans busy for the time being. But the unanticipated rapidity of France’s defeat made plain that he had less breathing room than he thought. And then war games in January 1941 exposed just how unready for actual combat the Soviet Union’s armed forces were. Stalin’s confidence faltered. The Soviet Union bristled with weaponry, and the Soviet dictator hoped that this would suffice to deter the Germans. But in the event that it didn’t, Stalin bent over backward not to undertake any action Hitler might construe as provocative. Intelligence reports were received that the Germans were contemplating a summer offensive and in June 1941 that German troops were in fact massing on Soviet borders. But even then, despite the urging of his generals, Stalin refused to authorize anything more than a partial mobilization lest the Germans take umbrage.
When the Germans launched Operation Barbarossa on 22 June, the attack confounded Soviet war planners in every way. The Soviets had anticipated a one-front assault, a drive toward Kiev in all likelihood, but the Germans came on three fronts at once, pushing not just toward the south-east but toward Moscow and Leningrad as well. Stalin thought he would have a few weeks to mobilize, but the Germans did not give him the time. Not least of all, Soviet strategists had imagined they would be able to blunt the initial German push and then go on the offensive themselves. Instead, the Germans, reproducing what they had done in France but on a yet grander scale, executed a series of sickle-cut maneuvers, enveloping one Soviet army after another at a terrifying pace. In the first six months of fighting, the Soviets lost two hundred divisions, sustaining a mind-boggling 4 million casualties in the process.13 The Soviet Union’s strategic unpreparedness and the scale of its initial defeats were far greater than those of France. Yet the Soviets in the end held fast, whereas the French did not. A portion of the credit must go to Stalin himself, the keystone of the Soviet system; although he buckled, he did not break. In the end, though, it was geography that mattered most. The Soviet Union was big enough to cede territory to the Germans equivalent to many Frances and yet still retain adequate room and resources to carry on the fight. The English Channel was Britain’s Maginot Line, the Russian steppes the Soviet Union’s.
America too had natural defenses, vast oceans on either side of it. It is pointless to insist further on the United States’ lack of readiness for the war. Roosevelt wanted to back up the French and British, but he never imagined sending actual US troops to the continent, and so no attention was given to the matter until the fall of France created a sense of urgency. In the aftermath of Pearl Harbor, US strategists got down to planning operations for the transport of troops overseas, but it was not until spring of 1942, in secret negotiations with the British, that America settled on an overall strategic design aimed at defeating Germany first before turning to Japan. The problem, of course, was how to bring off such a feat. Sheltered behind its Atlantic redoubt, the US kicked war production into high gear, churning out trucks, tanks, and jeeps on a scale sufficient to equip not just its own fast-expanding military establishment but the British and Soviet armies as well. Germany did its best to interrupt the transfer of American-made manufactures overseas, mounting a devastating U-boat campaign against Allied shipping, but it lost the Battle of the Atlantic, a fatal defeat that made possible a massive build-up of arms and armies in Britain. The pressure was released first in a series of flanking maneuvers—in Morocco and Sicily—and then in a head-on assault at Normandy. Once Hitler’s Atlantic wall was breached, the better-equipped Anglo-Americans wore down the Germans, burying them in an avalanche of tanks and bombs. This was the so-called American way of war: the US during the Second World War in effect reinvented General Grant’s grinding strategy against the Confederacy in the American Civil War for twentieth-century purposes.14 In fact, it was the Soviet military that did most of the grinding, but the point is still a valid one. The Third Reich may well have had the most battle-effective armies in the world,15 but it was no match in a long war against an Allied coalition that enjoyed overpowering industrial supremacy.
But wait a moment: wasn’t just such a long-war strategy France’s own in the first place? Once France was so swiftly out of the fight, Great Britain had no evident way forward against Hitler. It had thrown in its strategic lot with France, but now that its ally was on the sidelines, the best the British could do was to hang on, which they did with a stoic heroism. The Soviet Union had geared its own military thinking around offensive operations, but Hitler got the jump on the Soviets and sent them reeling. The US, when it got into the fight, was willing at least for a while to follow Britain’s strategic lead, hammering away at Hitler’s Fortress Europe from the margins. But by 1942–3 a winning strategy had begun to take shape, premised on the Allies’ capacity to pound the German military machine into submission over time. It had been necessary first to stave off defeat before it became possible to imagine a way to victory, and this is just what happened. The English Channel held. The Russian plains cushioned the Soviet Union against Germany’s Panzer attacks. And the Atlantic Ocean did the same for the US against Hitler’s U-boats.16 What went wrong for the French was not the consequence of a flawed strategic plan: that plan suited France’s capabilities well enough, and no one had a better one. What in fact went wrong was that France’s defensive line did not hold.
A closer examination of the events of 1939–40, from the outbreak of the war to the onset of the German invasion, will provide a partial explanation of why this should have been so. Civilian error plays a part in this story, as does France’s defensive posture that led to missed opportunities. Far more consequential, however, were last-minute changes in battle plans both on the German side and on the French, changes that hugely strengthened Hitler’s hand and just as significantly weakened that of France.
On the matter of civilian error, France’s wartime administrations, first Daladier’s and then, from March 1940, Paul Reynaud’s, have been reproached many times over for their willingness to engage in energy-wasting, diversionary adventures. In the Finnish-Soviet winter war of 1939–40, the French, of course, tilted in Finland’s favor. There was talk of taking matters a step further, even to the point of declaring war on the Soviet Union. Failure to act in time to forestall a Soviet victory in fact cost Daladier the premiership. He was succeeded by Reynaud, who did not intend to suffer the same fate. In May 1940, in anticipation of a German attack on Norway, the French mounted a joint preemptive strike with Great Britain, the two powers sending troops to secure the Norwegian port of Narvik.
Neither adventure reflected well on the good judgment of the civilian leadership. It is incredible that the French even considered getting into a war with the Soviets when they were already engaged against the Germans, and so it is well worth wondering why French policy-makers gave themselves over to such misconceived schemes. Was it a sign that Daladier and Reynaud had become unhinged, getting cold feet about the long-war strategy and grasping at ploys that promised, however implausibly, a quick exit from the conflict?17
There are reasons to think otherwise. After many months of nerve-rattling inactivity, there was growing public and political pressure on France’s civilian leadership to do something, anything. Daladier took aim at the Soviet Union, which played well with anti-communists in parliament (a broad coalition that spanned the usual left/right divide); where anti-communism was concerned he didn’t need much prodding anyhow. The objective was in part to interrupt the flow of Soviet military materiel to the Germans, and there were proposals in this connection to bomb the Soviet oilfields in far-distant Baku. The Norwegian expedition was similarly conceived to disrupt German supply lines, although in this case it was the blocking of Swedish iron-ore shipments, not the flow of oil, that was at issue. Both schemes had an economic rationale that meshed with the Allies’ wider strategy of squeezing the enemy’s productive capacity. The Soviet gambit was the more hare-brained of the two, but of course nothing at all came of it. The Norwegian expedition was given the go-ahead and turned out to be a fiasco.
The French, though, were not alone to blame. Anger against the Soviet Union in 1939–40 swept up the British as well, including, not least of all, Winston Churchill. The failure of the Narvik expedition, which the British were involved in as much as the French, drove Chamberlain from office in May, creating the opportunity for Churchill to take over; but there is an irony here, for Churchill himself had been a major booster of the Norwegian scheme.18 France’s civilian leadership in 1939–40 was no more unhinged than Britain’s. In any event, however misguided the Finnish and Norwegian affairs, they weren’t decisive. The French lost the war in France, not in Scandinavia.
As for missed opportunities, the most important one was no doubt France’s failure to initiate offensive operations at the war’s very outset while Germany was engaged against Poland. There is wide agreement that the Reich was vulnerable at this moment. General Halder, the Chief of Staff, himself acknowledged as much, conceding that he lacked adequate means to stop the French had they acted with urgency to occupy the Ruhr.19 Germany, moreover, continued to remain vulnerable for a period thereafter. The invasion of Poland may have been a walkover, but it was a costly one, immobilizing, as noted, a full quarter of Germany’s armored units.20 Yet the French, ever wedded to the defensive, opted not to seize the initiative.
The consequences of such passivity were unfavorable to the French twice over. France itself settled into a waiting mode. This was the so-called drôle de guerre, and it was detrimental to both military and civilian morale. Soldiers, dug in at the front, had too much time on their hands. There were efforts made to keep the troops busy reinforcing positions, but the mix of boredom and nervous anticipation that prevailed ate into the front-line soldier’s fighting spirit. Back in Paris, such nervous anticipation translated into political squabbling and intensifying pressures to take action. As we have seen, these resulted in the Finnish and Norwegian blunders, both of which cost France’s wartime leadership a damaging loss of prestige. The Germans, in the meantime, did not squander the pause that the drôle de guerre afforded but profited from it to reequip and come up with a proper plan of campaign against the French.
It may well be that France could have won the war in September–October 1939. Even to entertain such an idea, of course, is to concede a lot: that French diplomacy, whatever its failings, hadn’t set the nation up for certain defeat, that France’s rearmament drive was not a matter of too little too late. And while the army was idling during the drôle de guerre, France’s arms industries were not, in particular where aircraft production was concerned.21 It isn’t then as though nothing useful to the war effort got done.
Most important of all, just because France missed a chance to win in the fall of 1939 did not mean it had to lose in the summer following. No doubt, all the waiting around allowed political differences, which the Polish crisis had for the moment submerged, to bubble up once again. The mous grew more assertive, agitating to deflect opinion away from the anti-German effort in favor of an anti-communist war against the Soviet Union. Yet that war never happened, and one historian has even written of a “stiffening of resolve” throughout the civilian sector in the spring of 1940 that turned into a veritable “national awakening” (sursaut national) once the actual fighting got started and France itself was under invasion.22 Last of all, it is true that the Germans in many respects made better use of the reprieve afforded by the drôle de guerre than did France, but they almost didn’t. Hitler was just as zealous about going on the attack as the French were about waiting on events. He wanted in fact to launch an offensive in November 1939 at a time when the post-Poland refitting of the Wehrmacht was not yet complete; and worse still from the German point of view, the plan of attack at that time had not yet fixed on the Ardennes as the main target but on points further north where the French lay in wait.23 Had Hitler got his way, the Battle of France might have turned out differently, but the dissuasive efforts of his generals and above all inclement weather put a damper on the Führer’s self-destructive impetuosity, allowing time for better-thought-out preparations.
This is just what the Germans did. Over a period of months they fine-tuned a battle plan, Fall Gelb, which, far more than French bickering and wavering, was to make the real difference. The plan went through four iterations, all of which envisioned a massed armor attack. What varied was the locus of the main thrust, the first three versions fixing it north of the Ardennes as the French had anticipated all along. Indeed, thanks to a remarkable intelligence coup, the French got wind of just these early plans. Hitler, it will be remembered, wanted to invade in November 1939 but agreed to a postponement until the following January, which was still a crazy idea given the winter weather conditions. On the eve of the scheduled assault, a German aircraft carrying an officer in possession of the battle plan veered off course in heavy fog and crash-landed on Belgian territory at Mechelen. Belgian intelligence services captured and interrogated the officer, getting a clear look at where German operational thinking then stood, and that information found its way eventually into French hands. It is not certain that the Mechelen incident caused the Germans, their scheme of attack now revealed, to adjourn their invasion plans yet again, but for whatever reason they did in fact decide in favor of further delay. Hitler now began to reconsider how he wanted the German offensive to play out and in this he was abetted by General Erich von Manstein, a senior officer but not a member of the general staff. It was Manstein (in collaboration with Guderian) who concocted the idea of an invasion through the Ardennes, an idea judged reckless enough by the general staff itself that General Halder did what he could to sideline Manstein. Manstein reached the Führer by back channels, and Hitler, true to his own impulsive nature, liked what the general proposed. In February 1940 the Manstein variant of Fall Gelb was adopted as official policy, and the German general staff, Halder included, then made the scheme their own.24
It was a high-risk operation to say the least. The Ardennes were not hospitable to tanks, and in the course of the actual invasion a massive traffic jam developed, exposing the German strike force to potentially devastating aerial bombardment. As for securing bridgeheads on the Meuse, all the daring and initiative of the very best German troops were required to accomplish this. It helped first that the Germans outnumbered the French on the spot by forty-five divisions to eighteen, and that the troops the Germans were facing were not of top quality.25 Two French armies were stationed on the Ardennes front, General Charles Huntziger’s 2nd Army and General André Corap’s 9th Army, composed in good measure of reservists and greenhorns. Hitler’s decision to attack here was inspired, but not so much so that any of the Führer’s generals were ready to predict a certain, let alone crushing, German victory.
No, it required considerable French assistance to make that outcome happen, assistance that came first in the form of a fateful misstep on the part of General Maurice Gamelin, commander of France’s armies at the outbreak of the war. Efforts have been made in recent years to refurbish Gamelin’s reputation. He was no doubt a top-flight organizer who had conceived an overall defensive scheme that had a good chance of success and who had made sure that the army had the military means—the arms and men—to carry it out.26 Even so, it is hard to find a good excuse for the decision he took in the spring of 1940 to make adjustments to France’s battle plan.
French military strategists never doubted that the main thrust of the German attack would come from the north. The Belgian army might slow down such an assault but could not stop it without French backup, and this the French meant to supply. The initial plan called for sending motorized French units northward no further than the Escaut River, there to staunch a German advance already slowed but not halted by Belgian resistance along the Albert Canal and Dyle River. Once the war got started, however, the Belgians acted to beef up their own defenses with such speed that Gamelin became convinced he would have time to deploy French troops all the way to the Dyle River itself, and in November orders were issued to that effect. So far so good. The Mechelen affair dispelled whatever residual doubts may have lingered about the locus of the German main thrust, emboldening Gamelin to pursue a yet more ambitious scheme. Once the German assault got started, he now envisioned racing an entire army, in the event General Henri Giraud’s 7th Army, all the way to Breda in Holland, just north of the Belgian/Dutch border. If the north was to be the scene of the main fighting, why not have some of France’s best units near at hand? As Gamelin saw it, the so-called Breda variant also promised political dividends not to be passed up. There was always nagging doubt about how much cooperation to expect from the Belgians in the event of war, but above all from the ultra-neutralist Dutch. Gamelin wagered that the transfer of Giraud’s army to the Dutch/Belgian frontier would in a quite literal way induce France’s hesitant northern neighbors to get in line under French command. And extending the line that much further northward might be reassuring to France’s English ally as well. The Breda variant would guarantee the security of the English Channel, all of it and not just a part, and so insure the home islands against the dangers of cross-Channel invasion.27
Why the gambit was such a mistake is not hard to explain, above all with the benefit of hindsight. Giraud’s army, initially stationed near Reims, was made up of some of France’s “most mobile and modern units.” Imagine such a force available for counter-attack against Germany’s charge across the Meuse. An over-confident Gamelin, however, deployed the 7th Army well to the north, leaving the front stripped of reserves in what turned out to be the decisive sector. Gamelin’s subordinates from his second-in-command, General Alphonse Georges, on down understood the risks and remonstrated against the plan, but Gamelin would not be deterred.28
France at the outbreak of the war in 1939 had stood a fair chance of winning. The odds slimmed, however, in the months that followed. Waiting on events had not helped, nor had the distractions of the Norwegian expedition. Yet what made the biggest difference were changes in battle plan undertaken on both sides. Hitler embraced the Fall Gelb, Gamelin the Breda variant. More than anything else, it was senior-level military decision-making, German as well as French, that set France up for defeat.
Yet, even so, this did not mean that the outcome of the Battle of France was decided in advance. It still had to be fought, and in the fighting the French had opportunities to turn the situation around.