CHAPTER 4
France’s battlefield failings were numerous: sluggish decision-making, deficient improvisational skills, poor communications. These were the result of flawed, indeed blundering, decision-making on the part of the nation’s military leadership. It was the army command that lost the Battle of France, not civilian error or a disinclination to fight, let alone faults, real or imagined, in French society as a whole.
The Germans’ conduct of the battle must first be given its due. Hitler’s armies made bold diversionary moves in the north, and these worked better than the Wehrmacht brass had any reason to expect. Airborne assaults against Dutch and Belgian defenses resulted in rapid victories. The Dutch hadn’t wanted to cooperate with anyone, not the French, nor even the Belgians. Hitler sent paratroop units against them, cutting them off before Giraud’s 7th Army arrived and then choking them into capitulation, which took just days to accomplish. The fighting began in the early hours of 10 May, and it was over for the Dutch on 15 May. The Belgians held up better but not by much. A daring glider assault captured what were thought to be near-impregnable fortifications on the Albert Canal; the Belgians had to fall back to the Dyle line much sooner than planned for; and then the Belgian king, never keen on the war to begin with, opted for surrender on 28 May without so much as consulting the French who were now supposed to be allies.1
The Belgians and Dutch hid out from the reality of the Nazi threat until the very last minute. Yet in the history of “the strange defeat” they have received a free pass, whereas the French were taxed at the time and have been since with failures of all kinds. The capitulations of 15 and 28 May, moreover, are reminders that 1940 was not just a French but also an Allied defeat and that France’s responsibility for it needs to be measured accordingly. That said, what mattered most of all was not what happened in the north but what happened in the Ardennes, and here the French had no one to blame but themselves.2
The Germans were every bit as daring there, on the Ardennes front, as they had been against the Dutch and Belgians further to the north. It took just a matter of days to move attacking Panzer armies through the forest. The Meuse was then crossed at three spots: by General Hermann Hoth’s armored corps at Dinant, General Georg-Hans Reinhardt’s at Monthermé, and Guderian’s at Sedan. The Monthermé crossing did not go well, hampered by the rugged terrain and the determined resistance of French troops. It looked like the same might happen at Dinant, but the commanding officer on the scene, General Erwin Rommel, took matters in hand. Tanks were called down to the water’s edge and from there fired straight across, demolishing French pillboxes on the other side and allowing German engineers, working at a fevered pace, to construct a pontoon bridge.
It was the fighting at Sedan, however, that showed off to best advantage what the German military was capable of. The Luftwaffe threw all it had at the enemy, Stuka dive-bombers subjecting the French defensive line to hours of demoralizing bombardment. Rommel had deployed Panzers against French positions on the opposing shore; Guderian made use of flak units that were instructed to lower their guns, training them, not at the sky, but horizontally at the enemy on the far side of the Meuse. German commandos then traversed the river in rubber dinghies, establishing bridgeheads, which were consolidated by elite units of the Grossdeutschland regiment. And last of all came the tanks.
On the French side, the bombing sowed panic among the inexperienced troops. The shrieking of the Stukas was by all accounts terrifying. Rumors of an impending Panzer assault spread along the front, and in some instances the rumor itself, even in the absence of actual Panzers, sufficed to cause French troops to bolt. News of the disarray reached General Georges’s headquarters in the early hours of 14 May, casting a pall on all assembled. “The atmosphere [was] one of a family keeping vigil over a dead member,” as one eyewitness recalled. Georges reported to subordinates what had happened, turned pale, and then slumped into an armchair, silenced by a sob.3 This was warfare of a sort the French had never encountered before, and they were flattened by it.
There is no denying the boldness of the German attack, but note how close run the initial encounters were. Reinhardt’s crossing stalled. The attack at Dinant might have ended up the same way had it not been for Rommel’s improvisational skills. The fighting at Sedan was a more unmitigated success, but that was thanks not only to Guderian’s daring and to the crushing firepower brought to bear on the French but also to the very poor quality of the French troops Guderian confronted—a fortunate coincidence for the German commander.
Demoralizing as the initial breakthrough was, it wasn’t fatal in itself. It is what happened next that turned defeat along a narrow stretch of front into an event yet more catastrophic. The French made efforts to contain the German advance, all of which failed (more on that in a moment), leaving Guderian’s path to the Channel coast open. He was hell-bent on an all-out dash westward, but General von Kleist, Guderian’s commanding officer, ordered him to stop. Kleist worried about a French flanking attack from the south and wanted to allow the infantry time to move up in order to consolidate the gains made by Guderian’s armor. Guderian, however, contrived to circumvent the order, hurtling pell-mell toward the Channel instead, an act of insubordination that luckily for him paid off. The rapidity of the advance cut off the British and French armies stationed in Belgium from the bulk of Allied armies further to the south, in effect slicing Allied forces in two.4 This made possible a crushing victory over France of a kind the Wehrmacht had not anticipated.
For however audacious the German strategy, it is important not to mythologize it. Hitler’s military planners hadn’t imagined flooring the French with a single hammer blow. They hoped for a victory, to be sure, but one that would send the French reeling and afford German armies a foothold on the Channel coast, the better to turn on Britain. In this sense, the Germans too were thinking in terms of a drawn-out conflict, of a long war. It was not until Operation Barbarossa in June 1941 that the kind of combined operations employed in the Ardennes were promoted from a battle plan into an overall strategy designed to obliterate the Soviet enemy at a stroke. In France, the Wehrmacht scored just such a knockout victory, but it was unexpected, as much the result of Guderian’s freelancing as of the brilliance and clairvoyance of German strategy.
Germany’s achievement may not have been quite the stuff of legend, but it was remarkable all the same. Just as remarkable, though, was French bungling. In an era of aerial surveillance, it was impossible to transport massive Panzer armies through the Ardennes without the enemy noticing. French intelligence did indeed take photographs of the tank traffic jam that ensued, sharing them with 9th Army headquarters, but French commanders, convinced that the main attack was coming from elsewhere, refused to believe the evidence.5
More serious than this, though, in fact most serious of all, was the French failure to mount an effective counter-attack once the Germans had managed to get to the other side of the Meuse. The absence of adequate reserves explains the failure in part, but just in part. Of equal importance was the French military’s general slowness to react. Guderian’s attack at Sedan hit French lines at the juncture where Corap’s 9th Army and Huntziger’s 2nd Army met. Both generals mustered efforts to push the Germans back, Corap taking the first stab. He charged General Pierre Lafontaine, a capable tank commander, with the task, but Lafontaine lost precious time waiting on orders and putting an attack column together. He was supposed to go on the offensive the evening of 13 May but ended up postponing until the next morning, and when he did at last move, he was thinking more of containment than of storming at the enemy. The French command then called in airpower to hammer at the Germans, but the decision was taken late, allowing Guderian time to get flak guns into place. The flak fire blunted the aerial assault, in the process downing 41 of the 71 RAF bombers that had been dispatched to the battle zone.6
Slowness of reflexes, though, does not tell the whole story. France’s 2nd Army remained intact. Huntziger had the firepower to do something and in the end got around to taking action, but the gesture was half-hearted at best, with French commanders on the scene revealing themselves all too willing to relapse into the defensive mode. Guderian’s Panzer corps, having crashed across the Meuse and parried Lafontaine’s counterstroke, wheeled to speed westward. Its southern flank now lay exposed, though just for a moment, to Huntziger’s 2nd Army. Units of the 2nd Army, including an armored division, were marshaled for an all-out effort, preparing an attack just where Guderian was most vulnerable. The French commander in charge, General Jean Flavigny, had difficulty, however, assembling the strike force because of poor communications with subordinates and fueling problems with the tanks. He was ready at last to move on 15 May, but initial skirmishes with anti-tank units of the Grossdeutschland regiment upset the timing of Flavigny’s assault. He regrouped but now hesitated to commit to a full-scale attack. The tank units that did go into action fought well but lacked the concentrated punch to break through. At the end of a day of see-saw fighting, a cautious Flavigny decided to settle into defensive positions. This suited Huntziger, who misjudged German intentions, believing that the enemy wanted to turn the Maginot Line rather than head westward toward the sea. And it was a yet greater relief to the Germans, who appreciated more than French commanders how precarious the German position had been. General Hoth, writing after the war, acknowledged that the French had had a fair chance of winning that day. “Flavigny’s counterattack,” he noted, “conducted in a resolute manner, would have transformed defeat into victory.” But Flavigny was not resolute, reverting to the defensive when it was an offensive posture that was called for. Guderian, now unhindered, sped away en route to the Channel.7
This was the moment that the Battle of France was lost.8 There were further attempts to deflect the German advance, to be sure. At Montcornet (about 40 miles west of Sedan), de Gaulle struck at the still-exposed left flank of Guderian’s tank columns as they raced by. This was just the sort of maneuver Kleist had worried about, and de Gaulle’s attack was indeed a success, but it lacked sufficient firepower to knock the enemy off course.
Then, as the Germans neared the coast, one last desperate push was made, a combined Franco-British affair. The idea was for French and British units stationed in Belgium to launch a joint operation south-west into France, hitting the Germans this time on their right flank along the Arras–Cambrai line. It was the British military, fearing the imminent entrapment of the British Expeditionary Force, that promoted the plan, the Chief of Staff, General Edmund Ironside, heading to the continent in person to line up French support. He met on 20 May with General Gaston Billotte, commander of France’s 1st Army group, but the man Ironside encountered—a worn-out sexagenarian too broken in spirit to take any initiative—left Ironside in a fury. His diary recounts what happened next: “I lost my temper and shook Billotte by the button of his tunic. The man is completely beaten.” Billotte’s second-in-command, General Georges-Marie-Jean Blanchard, was more self-possessed and promised to muster a smallish force (generaled, as it happened, by the intrepid Jules Prioux) to back the British up.9 The assault came off on 21 May and to devastating effect. Rommel’s Panzer corps lost more tanks that day than in any preceding encounter. The BEF showed its mettle, but this effort, like de Gaulle’s, amounted to too little, too late.10
What is most striking in this account of France’s defeat is the rigidity of thinking in the French military’s highest ranks. Generals such as Gamelin, Corap, and Huntziger knew what was supposed to happen, and when the battle did not unfold according to plan they were slow to adjust. Even when adjustments were made there was a tendency to relapse into default mode, which was the defensive. This set of attitudes—the inflexibility of mind, the all too deliberate decision-making, the preference for circling the wagonsfaute de mieux—bled down the chain of command. Not every senior officer was affected, not de Gaulle of course nor Jules Prioux, but enough of them were to make a difference.
It did not help speed up decision-making that communications were so complicated and hierarchical.11 Gamelin set up his headquarters at Vincennes to the east of Paris. The next in the chain of command was General Georges based further toward the front at La-Ferté-sous-Jouarre on the Marne. Georges commanded Billotte, who in turn commanded Blanchard, Corap, Giraud, and Huntziger. Front-line officers such as Flavigny, Lafontaine, and de Gaulle were yet one rung or more further down the ladder. There were face-to-face exchanges, but orders were on the whole conveyed by field telephone. As the French waited for information to filter its way up and down the hierarchy, German generals took the initiative. At Dinant, as we have seen, Rommel took personal command of the situation, leading from the front, rather than from field headquarters in the rear,12 while Guderian went one step further, making it up as he went along to the point of insubordination.
Then there were France’s tactical shortcomings. It was not as though the French military had failed to understand the importance of tanks and aircraft to modern warfare; it just didn’t know how to use them as effectively as Hitler’s generals. German tanks massed and swarmed pell-mell, preserving a semblance of coordinated action thanks to radio contact. Not so French tanks, which were deployed in line and required visual communication to remain in touch. In the air, the Germans used bombing in combination with Panzer attack to devastating effect. The French tried to answer back. Strikes against German forces along the Meuse, however, did not succeed—German anti-aircraft fire was just too effective—and after that the Luftwaffe gained air superiority. Airpower had been a weak suit, and now it grew weaker still. It’s not that the French hadn’t manufactured enough planes, but many of them were not yet battle ready and spent the war on the ground waiting to be tested. A portion of France’s air fleet, moreover, was never committed to the fight but kept in reserve to protect North Africa.13 Britain might have been more helpful in the air war, but it was focused on long-range bombing of the Ruhr and, for the rest, on conserving its fighter fleet to protect Britain itself. In all fairness, the RAF fought hard in the Battle of France, losing an estimated nine hundred planes. Had Britain committed yet more of its fighters, the outcome in all likelihood would have been the same, and the additional squadrons sacrificed on the continent would not then have been available for the forthcoming Battle of Britain, with perhaps disastrous consequences. The French, or the French and British together, had the mechanized firepower they needed. The problem was that they just did not know what to do with it.
France’s defeat in 1940 was a military phenomenon, not the inevitable expression of some generalized national malaise or moral deficiency. And it was the army brass, far more than the common fighting man, who deserve the lion’s share of the blame. To be sure, front-line units at Sedan broke and ran. On the other hand, as has been pointed out, the Maginot Line held. It was an extraordinary feat that the BEF remnant, along with tens of thousands of French soldiers, contrived to escape to England via Dunkirk, even while penned in by an enemy boasting air supremacy. Part of the explanation lies in the Führer’s decision not to press the attack, whether because he felt the Luftwaffe by itself was up to handling the situation or because he worried about a counter-attack from Allied armies to the south. But part of the answer also lies in the fierce rearguard resistance put up by French armies, trapped within the Dunkirk pocket, which held the line against the Germans at Lille while the BEF prepared its getaway.14
Even after defeat along the Meuse and in Belgium, the French soldiered on. Reynaud relieved Gamelin of command on 19 May, replacing him with the far more energetic, though even older, Maxime Weygand. With France’s first line of defense near collapse, the new generalissimo set about improvising a second one along the Somme and Aisne rivers. The French had begun to assimilate the lessons of Germany’s first attack and prepared a defense in depth; the French aircraft industry had been working full-out in the meantime, with the result that the Luftwaffe’s air advantage was diminished. The German attack came in June, and it was stopped dead in its tracks for a couple of days. The French, however, were now outnumbered two to one, and the army command had to order a retreat from the Somme on 9 June and from the Aisne the following day.15 Weygand’s armies reeled backward to the Loire, and, complicating an already deteriorated situation yet further, the Italians then decided to get into the fray. Mussolini, sensing France’s impending defeat and hankering for a portion of the spoils, launched an attack on 10 June. Admittedly, the Italian army was not comparable to the Wehrmacht, but Mussolini’s attack was a low blow against a France already doubled over, and the Italian dictator might well hope under the circumstances to gain an advantage. But French defenders were well prepared and gave a good account of themselves, fighting the Italian army to a standstill.16
The Battle of France was now just about over. Reynaud wanted to fight on, but he met with opposition from elements in his cabinet and, buckling to it, resigned on 16 June, turning the reins of power over to Marshal Pétain. Pétain aired a radio speech on 17 June, which informed the public of plans to seek armistice terms from the Germans and called on French armies in the field to stop fighting. The armistice itself was signed on 22 June.
France’s armies had not rolled over in the face of the German onslaught. Indeed, in the space of just six weeks, France had lost 90,000 soldiers killed, this in a nation of just over 40 million souls, a casualty rate that is a moving indicator of the common soldier’s will to fight.17
Still, it was a defeat and a catastrophic one at that. Catastrophic but not, as Marc Bloch called it, “strange,” for there was nothing singular in what happened to France. It was not the sole country to experience defeat in the first years of the war. The Dutch and Belgian debacles in 1940 were yet more ignominious than the French. Britain, though driven from the continent, kept itself together, but then went on to a string of setbacks from Singapore (against the Japanese) to North Africa. The US chalked up its own defeats at the hands of the Japanese, starting with Pearl Harbor and then moving on to the Philippines. As for the Soviet Union, it was almost shattered by Operation Barbarossa. It’s not a happy story: Britain and the US underestimated Japanese military capabilities, and everyone underestimated Hitler’s Germany. Against such a somber backdrop, do France’s battlefield failings stand out in much greater relief than those of anyone else?
France was beaten by the Germans but put up a good fight. Its fate was not so different from that of others who squared off against Axis armies in the war’s first years; and what sealed France’s defeat was not a failure of national nerve or character as much as poor operational and tactical decision-making on the part of the nation’s military elite.
It may be, though, that such a finding still doesn’t let France off the hook altogether, for isn’t a national army always a reflection of the nation it fights for? And from this premise, doesn’t it follow, in light of France’s military collapse in 1940, that there must have been something wrong with French society as a whole? The point has some merit. How policy-makers sized up the nation and its capabilities had a real effect on military planning. The French did not want to fight another war like 1914–18, and so a defensive strategy was favored. This was meant to deter the nation’s enemies and, in case deterrence failed, to minimize France’s casualties. The French army, moreover, was by long-standing tradition a citizen army, made up in large part of conscripts and reservists who did not always have the best training. That was the human material the army brass had to deal with, and they planned accordingly, not demanding too much of soldiers who had limited experience. De Gaulle cast the situation in the harshest light: a stagnant Third Republic threw its weight behind a military doctrine that was “static” in conception. A variant on this theme has been proposed by Tony Judt. He has made the argument that a nation gets the generals it deserves, and by that measure, France’s defeat in 1940 was a judgment on France itself.18
I don’t find these criticisms compelling. On the matter of military doctrine, as we have seen, it was not as though France’s allies and partners had any better strategy to recommend than that of France itself. Indeed, the Dutch, Belgians, and Americans still nurtured hopes in 1939 that they might escape a reckoning with the Nazi war machine altogether. As for the British, more clued in to the necessity of taking the Germans on, they were fully on board with French plans and, even in the wake of France’s defeat, continued looking for ways to avoid a head-on clash with Hitler’s armies. And was French doctrine so flawed in the first place? I have argued that France’s long-war strategy—hold the line, build up resources, then go on the attack—was just the strategy that won the war for the Allies in the end. The problem was that France’s line of defense, unlike the Channel, the Atlantic, or the Russian steppes, did not hold. Now, when it comes to generalship, armies—much as other large-scale institutions, universities included—have internal cultures, not independent of the wider national setting but connected to it in complicated, even oppositional ways. A cadre of first-rate generals is not of necessity proof positive of the high moral caliber or even general efficiency of the surrounding society. Take Nazi Germany itself as an example. Hitler’s armies were well led and fought with exceptional ferocity to the very end. Is that evidence of National Socialism’s superiority as a social system?
A military defeat, however, is never just military but always has a political dimension, and it’s when politics are added into the equation that the real strangeness of the French case stands out. France was not the only nation to confront military catastrophe in the first years of the war. Holland capitulated, but its queen, Wilhelmina, then went into exile in England. The Belgians dealt with the situation a little differently, the Belgian government heading across the Channel while King Leopold remained on national soil. Britain itself gave some thought to seeking an armistice. The issue was debated in a series of cabinet meetings in late May. Lord Halifax, still foreign secretary, pushed for Britain to sound out Hitler on possible terms, while the still new prime minister, Churchill, argued not so much against as for a more temporizing course: soldiering on now to show the Germans what kind of fight the British could put up, in the hope of getting a better deal later when the time came to strike a bargain. Once Churchill settled into office, however, and the nation rallied to him, he charted a more determined, win-the-war course, and there was no further talk of negotiation.19 As for the Soviet Union, a deal was never a realistic option. The Nazis meant to destroy the communist state, and Stalin had no choice but to hang on, a feat he managed to carry off, pulling himself and the USSR together despite devastating initial setbacks.
What did France do by comparison? The French government in 1940 decided to abandon the fight and sue for an armistice, and once the armistice was in place, to remain in the hexagon and undertake an overhaul of the nation’s political institutions. This package of decisions was unique to France, and in this sense the defeat does say something and something important, not just about France’s military but about the Third Republic itself. The regime had a fatal flaw, but it’s not the one often identified. No doubt, French politics were divisive and the members of its political class all too often undistinguished, but what counted most in 1940 was the conduct of the nation’s military and administrative elites. They had never much liked the Republic and found in the political crisis consequent on defeat an opportunity to exploit the regime’s weaknesses against it, to do it in and replace it with an authoritarian order more to their satisfaction.