CHAPTER 6

The Fall of France

HITLER had won Poland almost as easily as Austria and Czechoslovakia. Although force had to be used instead of being merely brandished and the Russians had to be allowed their share, the operation was swift and was concluded without the intervention of any other power. It might be just the latest in the series of Hitlerian conquests, more expensive and more brutal but essentially not very different. Or it might be the beginning of something much more serious. Hitherto all Hitler’s victories had been in central Europe – in Germany itself (the Rhineland) and then in Austria, Czechoslovakia, Danzig, Memel and Poland. Should he now attack France, even though France had acquiesced in the Polish fait accompli? Hitler was for action now. In the past he had disagreed with his advisers, especially his military advisers, about the reactions and the capacities of the western powers and he had always proved his advisers wrong.

The Polish collapse could be exploited in different ways. There were those who hoped that the reluctance of the western democracies to help Poland would finally eliminate western opposition to German ambitions in central and eastern Europe without the need for a showdown; that the defeat of Poland would be accepted in the west as a defeat for the west too. On the other hand the glittering successes of the Polish campaign were an incitement to a similar campaign in the west, and so long as there was any doubt whether a war against France would have to be fought one day there was also the argument that from the German point of view the sooner it were fought the better. Before the end of September Hitler, without consulting General von Brauchitsch, the Commander-in-Chief of the army, gave the order to prepare for an attack on France that autumn and a directive was issued by OK W on 9 October. Brauchitsch swallowed this usurpation of his functions and got to work, while continuing to argue that a spring offensive would be more prudent because the army needed to train fresh units and because the autumn weather might bog down the tanks and ground the aircraft. In the event an autumn campaign was washed out by the weather and after several postponements it was cancelled. In addressing his service chiefs at the end of November, Hitler, preferring to lay the blame for his disappointment on the human factor, was so abusive about the army that Brauchitsch offered to resign. He was not allowed to – yet. The postponement of the attack had a most important consequence since it gave army leaders the time to urge changes in the German plan of campaign.

The fundamental factors in German planning were the experiences of their forerunners in 1914 and the Maginot Line. The latter was a string of fortified positions, begun in 1929 and guarding the western approaches to France between its Swiss and Belgian frontiers. This line had an awesome reputation but owing to Belgium’s neutrality it stopped short at a geographical point which had little strategic significance. Its existence, however, virtually dictated a German attack through Belgium to the north of it and the question which remained open was the main objective of such an attack. Too much pondering of the campaigns of 1914 had led the German General Staff to plan an attack on a broad front stretching all the way from Luxembourg northwards, with the main weight in the north and the main objective the Channel ports which they had failed to win in the race with which the First World War had opened. This attempt to repeat and improve on the performance of August 1914 reflected a preoccupation with this failure and a special concern with Great Britain rather than France, since the principal value of the ports was their use for submarine warfare against the British Isles. This plan did not aim, primarily at any rate, to knock out the French army as the Polish army had been knocked out and it therefore admitted the prospect of a long and possibly static war. Even if the plan succeeded, the war in France would not be over; and its success was dubious since it involved a direct attack on French and British forces which, if not defeated outright, might stand on prepared lines in northern France and keep themselves supplied through the ports.

General von Manstein, the plan’s most effective critic, had other ideas. He proposed that the main weight of an attack in the north should be on its left wing rather than its right and that the prime object should be the annihilation of the French capacity to resist and not the conquest of the Channel coast or any other terrain; the enemy’s territory in its entirety would become a prize of war as a consequence of the defeat of his armies. Manstein proposed that German forces attacking through the Ardennes should turn southwards as well as northwards and envelop the French to the west of the Maginot Line. Manstein was Chief of Staff to Field Marshal von Rundstedt, whose Army Group A would win the chief role in the campaign if the Manstein concept were accepted. They together urged Brauchitsch, who agreed with them but did not enjoy arguments with the Führer, to press their views on Hitler; and they had a stroke of luck early in January. An officer taking the plans to a headquarters in the west fell in with some air force friends, celebrated the meeting so well that he missed his train, got his friends to fly him on his way but took a wrong course and crashed in Belgium. With the plans in enemy hands there were special grounds for changing them. (The western staffs, however, concluded that the crash had been a fake and the plans planted on them.)

Hitler was prepared to listen. A serious student of military affairs, he liked discussing military problems with those of his generals whom he respected, and Manstein was one of these for the time being. Hitler was not, as he himself imagined, a military genius, but neither was he the ignoramus and bungler that surviving generals subsequently tried to make out. From the career point of view he was an amateur and not a professional military man, but then so were Stalin and Churchill and, for good or ill, Hitler had studied the science of war at least as carefully as the first and possibly with more application than either. But his talents and inclinations were the reverse of what was needed in a supreme commander. He was strongest on detail. He knew the names of bits and pieces of military equipment and what they were for, just as he was also exceptionally well versed in the details of the architect’s craft. He had the mind of a fascinated and perhaps even an inventive quartermaster, but this gift did not make him a strategist and, as a strategist, he was handicapped because his cast of mind was basically political and not military. He put political aims before military sense. His catastrophic fault as a war lord lay even more in attempting the impossible than in his strategy. On this occasion he saw the force of Manstein’s arguments (he may have been thinking independently along similar lines) and accepted his plan with some modifications.

Hitler did not begin his attack in the west with any marked material superiority. The battle of France was won by superior skill and not by the crushing weight of numbers. In the vital department of tanks the Germans were numerically the weaker with some 2,700 against nearly 3,000 French and 200 British. The quality of the tanks on the two sides was about the same. But in tactics and leadership the French and British were outclassed. For many French and British officers the tank was a horseless carriage to be used in the role of a horse rather than a carriage, a mechanized charger, more expensive and less lovable than a horse but performing essentially the same function as the cavalry of a bygone age which had fought closely with the infantry arm along a defined front. But defeat in the First World War and the restrictions imposed by the treaty of Versailles had made the German army more receptive to new ideas. Under General von Seeckt, himself somewhat old-fashioned in his views but willing to encourage novel thinking in others, the German army of 100,000 was re-created on the principles, first, that compensation for small numbers lay in mobility; secondly, that armoured vehicles could provide this mobility in place of the horse; thirdly, that the armour of a tank, unlike that of a medieval knight, was even more valuable in offence than for protection; fourthly, that tanks should be used in massed cohorts – divisions, corps and even tank armies – distinct from the other arms of the service; and finally that, with this combination of speed, weight and numbers, their prime purpose was to penetrate the enemy’s lines and destroy his communications.

This was the Blitzkrieg and it revolutionized not only the handling of armoured forces but also the whole concept of war as a face-to-face contest between rival fronts. The basic ideas were not German. They were developed in the first place by British theorists like Captain B. H. Liddell Hart, Major-General J. F. C. Fuller and Major-General G. le Q. Martel. In Germany the doctrines of these men and later the similar teaching of Charles de Gaulle, published in 1937 and better known in Germany than in France, were studied by Heinz Guderian and other young officers. Before 1933 they were tried out in practice in the USSR under arrangements made clandestinely by Seeckt with the Russian army and government, and although Hitler stopped this collaboration his special interest in armoured warfare encouraged the progressives in the German army and contributed to the formation of the first two Panzer divisions soon after the Nazis took power. In May 1940 the Germans had ten Panzer divisions. (Rather more than half of their tanks were Pkw. Is and IIs, the rest the Pkw. IIIs and IVs which were to become the mainstay of the German armour until the Panther and Tiger began to arrive at the front in 1943. Three divisions with the heaviest punch were equipped with tanks made in Czechoslovakia’s captured factories.)

The Blitzkrieg had also a special place for airborne troops whose task was to seize key points ahead of the advancing armour. Germany’s parachutists so captured the imagination by their novelty that extraordinary steps were taken to defeat them: policemen were armed and trained to deal with them, in Great Britain church bells were to be rung to give warning of their descent and the most fanciful accounts, some of them official, circulated about the guise in which they were likely to do so. But there were far fewer of them than was commonly believed. Hitler had envisaged a war of the future as a ‘sky black with bombers and, leaping from them into the smoke, parachute storm troops, each grasping a machine gun’, but the Germans never had more than one division of parachutists and in their most notable operation – Crete – most of them jumped with pistols or knives and had to search around afterwards for the machine guns which were dropped separately and sometimes far away.

The German attack in the west opened on 10 May simultaneously against the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg and France. In the Netherlands the weight of the attack was directed against Rotterdam. Its airfield, Waalhaven, was seized by parachute troops who also captured the intervening bridges over the Maas. The main bridge in the centre of the city was seized by units which landed by it in seaplanes. A subsidiary attack on airfields near The Hague was unsuccessful. On the 14th Rotterdam was still holding out. The Germans summoned it to surrender and parleys ensued. At this point the heart of the city was heavily bombed; within a few minutes great destruction was caused and 980 were killed. Nothing like this had been seen in the war so far. Two hours later the city capitulated and on the 15th the Dutch laid down their arms everywhere. The bombing of Rotterdam has been regarded as a piece of unprincipled savagery and vandalism, but there were perhaps extenuating circumstances. The air attack seems to have been made in ignorance of the parleys which were in train and in spite of German attempts to cancel it, and when the bombers appeared German commanders on the spot tried to signal to them to desist and did succeed in making a part of the force sheer off: but doubts have more recently been cast on this attempted explanation.

In Belgium the attack began with one of the most original strokes of the war. The conquest of Belgium involved crossing a series of waterways, notably the Meuse (or Maas) and the Albert Canal which branches off the Meuse just south of Maastricht on a north-westerly course towards Antwerp. Maastricht, which is on the Dutch side of the frontier between Belgium and Holland, is only twelve miles from the German border. Just south of it and in Belgium lay the great fortress of Eben Emael, a wedge-shaped hill unassailable except from the sky and commanding the end of the Albert Canal and three vital bridges over it. In the early hours of 10 May forty-one gliders took off from German airfields with 363 men for an operation which they had rehearsed many times. Two of the gliders came to grief on the way but the rest arrived silently over Eben Emael and in the first glider-borne attack in history captured the fort and its 1,200 defenders and two of the three bridges with the loss (to the attackers) of only five lives.

As soon as the German attack in the west was known, French and British forces began to move forward to make contact with the Belgian army on the line of the River Dyle and so create an unbroken line of resistance to the Germans from the English Channel to the borders of Switzerland. Owing to Belgium’s neutrality advance planning had been dangerously meagre, so much so that positions which French forces were to occupy had not been prepared for them. Almost immediately the allied line was punctured farther south. The entire British Expeditionary Force and half the French army, which had moved into Belgium, were cut off. German armour under General Erwin Rommel proved that the Ardennes were not the obstacle to tanks which had been supposed and on 12 May German units, having broken through a sector which was lightly held by second-class divisions, found themselves on French soil north of Sedan. The next day they were across the Meuse at a number of points and after only one more day they had prised open a fateful gap fifty miles wide between two French armies. General Georges, commanding the north-eastern fronts under a cumbrous arrangement as a semi-independent subordinate of the Commander-in-Chief, General Maurice Gamelin, ordered a redisposition on the basis of a false report that French forces were in flight: the general who sent the report shot himself the next day, Georges suffered a nervous collapse (he had been ill for years) and two days later a third general was dismissed for losing his nerve. The Germans advanced 200 miles in a week. One million refugees were footing it along the roads and across country.

In three days the R A F lost half of the 200 bombers which it was operating in France – the highest loss percentage which it ever suffered – and the French air force was extinguished. The French First Army, the British Expeditionary Force to its left and the Seventh French Army further north still were cut off from the rest of the French armies, and French and British reinforcements moving up to the Dyle line were ordered to suspend their advance. On the following day, 16 May, with the Dutch already out of the war, the plan for Belgium having miscarried and the Germans racing into France, Gamelin disclosed to an Anglo-French council of war in Paris that he had no reserves left. His predicament was of his own making. He had neglected to create a reserve before war began, even though one of the main objects of building a defensive position like the Maginot Line was to avoid having to string men out along a long static line and so be able to hold them in a mobile reserve instead. Gamelin had done the opposite, committing his troops to fixed positions from which he could not easily switch them when the need arose. He had compounded this basic mistake by allowing men to go on leave from 7 May in spite of accurate warnings from reliable sources of the date and place of the German attack. Three days later French soldiers hurrying to rejoin their units failed to find them before they were overwhelmed. Yet Gamelin had all the same a small reserve of eight infantry divisions; but it was behind the Lorraine and Rhine fronts.

From the Meuse the German armour pushed on for the coast with powerful and efficient air support. They reached it on 20 May. Instead of a Franco-Anglo-Belgian line containing the Germans there was a German line stretching from Germany to the sea and cutting the allied forces in two. This German line was a thin one, for the German forces which had made it were comparatively small and had advanced far ahead of their supporting formations. The problem for the German high command was to consolidate the line and produce plans for dealing with the two distinct allied forces to the north and the south of it. The problem for the allies was to try to break the line and re-establish contact between their disrupted armies.

Reynaud, who had never had confidence in Gamelin and had been on the point of dismissing him when news of the German invasion arrived, replaced him on 19 May with General Maxime Weygand, a soldier full of honour but also of years (72). Reynaud also appointed another and even older hero, Marshal Philippe Pétain (85), to be Deputy Prime Minister. Weygand’s fame and barely diminished sprightliness infused some hope into headquarters staffs but he was powerless to rectify Gamelin’s cardinal error. He could not in the midst of a battle create a reserve. He inherited from Gamelin a plan to attack the German corridor simultaneously from north and south but postponed its execution while he made a tour of headquarters. This tour wasted precious days (whether telephone communications were destroyed or overlooked is not clear) and largely failed to achieve its aim, since of the two principal commanders north of the corridor, one, Lord Gort, failed by accident to keep his appointment with Weygand and the other, General Billotte, was killed – also accidentally – immediately after it. But in any case Gort, acting on Gamelin’s earlier orders and apparently unaware of Weygand’s cancellation of them, shot his bolt prematurely and was checked by the Germans, so that by the time Weygand put the plan in motion again there was no response from the north. The effect therefore of supplanting Gamelin at this late stage was added confusion: an attack from the north at a time when the complementary attack in the south had been stayed, and consequently no possibility of an attack from the north when the new Commander-in-Chief was ready to give the signal for attack in the south. The German line became unpierceable (if it was not so already) and the Germans were able to consider in comparative leisure how they would complete the campaign. If on 20 May, when they reached the sea, there had been some doubt about whether their victories so far had been decisive, the next few days showed that no effective counter-attack could be launched against them and that, whichever way they turned first, they could outnumber the allied divisions on either front by at least two to one.

Yet they were undecided about how to proceed. The allied armies, although disrupted and disjointed, had fought well. The German generals hardly perceived the extent of their triumph. They were anxious to reinforce their forward units and nervous about the large French armies on their southern flank. The first thing to do was to mass their own forces once more. To the south there was need for caution. To the north there was no need for speed since the allied armies were surrounded and the idea that any great number of them could escape by sea entered nobody’s head. So after covering 300 miles to reach the Channel in three days the Germans took over three weeks to go another thirty miles up the coast. Rundstedt, although delighted by the dashing successes of his younger subordinates, was taken aback by the speed of his victory, decided not to press his luck too far and ordered his Army Group to halt and regroup.

But Brauchitsch was ready to let the Panzers push on without delay and round up the allied forces to the north, while plans for the subjugation of the rest of France were being worked out. He was angered by Rundstedt’s order. On the day of the order, 24 May, Hitler arrived at Rundstedt’s headquarters. The plan which, at Manstein’s urging, Hitler had adopted early in the year, had emphasized the prior importance of a southward rather than a northward sweep after a breakthrough. Presumably Hitler still had Manstein’s basic reasoning in mind. He endorsed Rundstedt’s order and as a result the German armour halted for three days, facing north but motionless. These days were an invaluable respite for the allied armies trapped between the Germans on the Somme and other German armies in Belgium – and the main cause of the salvation of so many men from Dunkirk.

Hitler’s motives in blunting his attack on them have been one of the principal enigmas of the war. Among his motives were two different, even contradictory, considerations. Faced with a force which was now mainly British his ambivalence about Great Britain may have reasserted itself. He had no plan for continuing the war against Great Britain and expected it to make peace after France had been beaten. There was nothing to be gained by pounding the British forces on the continent and then incarcerating what was left of them. On the other hand he was under pressure from Goering to leave the rest of this battle to the Luftwaffe. Goering had taken little part in the Battle of France. The Luftwaffe was engaged in close support of the armies; the independent role of Commander-in-Chief of the Luftwaffe had, with the exception of the few days’ operations against Holland, been eclipsed. Moreover Goering himself had been suffering from one of his recurrent bouts of drug-taking (to which he had become addicted since drugs had been prescribed for a painful leg wound sustained in the 1923 putsch) and upon emerging from this enforced retreat he was all the more eager for action and distinction. Like Mussolini, he figured that the time was now or never. Although Goering’s pleas to leave it to the Luftwaffe and Hitler’s political preoccupations with Great Britain could hardly be reconciled, they did have one thing in common: halt the Panzers. That they were stayed by Hitler out of some fellow feeling for the British is implausible and belied by the fact that, although he reined in his tanks, he gave no comparable order to restrain the Luftwaffe from strafing the cornered British.

The allied forces were in a bag round Dunkirk. Boulogne had been lost on 25 May and Calais the next day after a whole day’s pounding by artillery, Stukas and tanks. At Dunkirk the evacuation and the Luftwaffe’s attacks both began on 27 May. The first results were very discouraging for the beaten troops who, fiercely battered in the town and on the beaches, bitterly reproached the R A F for not protecting them. Then the weather came to their help. With rain half the day on the 29th and fog and rain all day on the 30th the Luftwaffe’s onslaughts were restrained and the evacuation rate rose to eight times what it had been on the first day. But on 1 June it turned fine and evacuation by day had to be suspended. By this time the men waiting on the beaches were suffering extreme physical and nervous exhaustion and many of those who got off were sunk in the sea before they reached the other side of the Channel. But in an astonishing rescue operation by large and small craft of every description, by which the British Admiralty had hoped at the outset to save perhaps 100,000 men, more than three times that number – 338,226 – were brought away from Dunkirk.

The Belgian army was forced to lay down its arms soon after the operation began, but many French and other allied combatants escaped with the British (one third of those rescued were not British). The last British troops were taken off on 2 June but the British flotillas returned to collect Frenchmen for two more nights. The Germans were left with 40,000 prisoners. In France a further 190,000, mostly belonging to rear formations, were later evacuated from Normandy and Bordeaux, but an attempt to withdraw the British 51st Division from St Valéry failed, partly because of fog. Altogether over 558,000 (again one third non-British) were evacuated from different parts of the continent into Great Britain. This was a triumph for the British navy and a corresponding defeat for Goering, although the result might have been different if the Luftwaffe had been able to operate at full strength in the Dunkirk area on more days than the weather permitted. Significantly for the future the R A F lost over Dunkirk fewer aircraft than the Luftwaffe. British fighters, flying from bases nearer to the battle area than the German bases, took heavy toll of the Luftwaffe’s bombers and Stukas.

On 5 June, the day after the close of the Dunkirk operations, the Germans launched from the Somme–Aisne line a series of attacks to the south which (together with a secondary attack through Alsace) destroyed the French army. They had spent the interval since 20 May debating whether to bring the weight of their armour to the west or east of Paris. The debate serves only to show how unsure the Germans still were about the hard facts of the situation, for in truth it did not much matter which they did. They reached the Seine at various points in three days, entered Paris on 14 June and spread rapidly into the farthest corners of France. The French army fought them – up to the bitter end French units continued to put up tough resistance in spite of the physical and psychological shocks which they had suffered – but was incapable of stopping them. The only conceivable hope of avoiding complete defeat lay with Great Britain. France, defeated and despairing, could no longer rely on itself. It turned to its ally. On the ground the British contribution had always been conceived as ancillary. The British Expeditionary Force might help the French army but could neither be a substitute for it nor rescue it. In the air, however, the British had more to offer. When the campaign opened the R A F committed thirty-nine squadrons to the battle. Ten of these were obsolescent medium bombers which were so badly mauled in daylight operations that they had to be regrouped as six squadrons within a week. The remainder were fighters (including ten Hurricane squadrons) and reconnaissance. The Hurricane force was almost doubled in the next few days but the French government appealed for still more. A first request for ten squadrons was refused. Instead heavy bombers were ordered to attack the Ruhr and then the advancing German armies. On 16 May six more fighter squadrons were detailed to the battle in France, although these aircraft had to operate from bases in Kent. Thenceforward the British squadrons engaged in France were progressively withdrawn to English bases as airfields in France were overrun. By 20 May only a token force remained. On 2 June Reynaud asked for twenty more squadrons, an impossible request. The British government provided a modest reinforcement but as the days passed and it became increasingly clear that Weygand could not turn the tide of battle, the British cabinet had to harden its heart against sending aircraft to France simply to be lost. By 11 June Weygand was himself prophesying the end at any moment. His exhausted divisions were engaged at all points, he had no reserves, and Reynaud’s plea for a massive air attack to save the day was painfully unrealistic.

Churchill had seen for himself the writing on the wall as early as 16 May when he made the first of five visits to France during the campaign. On that first visit he heard Gamelin’s gloomy assessment and observed his gloomy mien. Outside the conference room old men with wheelbarrows were burning secret papers. Churchill faced the unexpected horror of the total collapse of his only ally. A week later, on his second visit, Churchill found that the dejected Gamelin had been replaced by Weygand but only a few days later Gort abandoned all thought of an offensive and decided to withdraw the entire British Expeditionary Force to the coast; Churchill’s third visit on the last day of May took place during the fighting at Dunkirk. By the time he returned again on 11 June Great Britain had no troops on the continent, Italy had entered the war, the French government had left Paris and the meeting had to take place at Briare on the Loire. Two days later the last of these meetings was held at Tours, where the government was bivouacking on its flight to the south with Ministries and Embassies dispersed in old châteaux round about.

Churchill was throughout fervently anxious to do everything possible for France and keep it in the war. Fighting the Germans without a continental ally would pose huge new problems. In addition, Churchill’s generous impulses urged him now, as they urged him later on over convoys to the USSR, to go to the brink of what was wise and practicable in order to help an ally. But other voices counselled otherwise. During May and June the Air Staff became more and more alarmed about losses in France. Scarce and precious Hurricanes were being lost at the rate of twenty-five a day when the factories were delivering new ones at the rate of four a day. At one moment the Commander-in-Chief of Fighter Command, Air Marshal Sir Hugh Dowding, went so far as to say that he could not answer for the defence of Great Britain and would resign if more fighters were committed to the battle in France. By the time of Churchill’s last two visits to France the real question was not how to help in that battle but what terms to try to exact before agreeing to France’s inevitable surrender.

At Tours Churchill refused to release France from its promise not to make a separate peace. He promised that there would be no recrimination and that Great Britain would, in victory, see that France recovered its full dignity and greatness if it fought on. But Reynaud’s cabinet reshuffle of 19 May – a move which he came to regret – had put too many doves among the hawks. Pétain, supported by Weygand and some of the civilian members of the cabinet, was in favour of giving up the fight. They had no hope for themselves and no belief that Great Britain could do anything to help them. On 15 June, with the Germans now in Paris and the French government in Bordeaux, Reynaud proposed that the French army should lay down its arms (as the Dutch had done) but that the government should remain at war and move, with the fleet and air force, to North Africa. The generals and their supporters expressed horror at this idea which would cast the whole odium of defeat on the army. Besides, the losses suffered at the beginning of the campaign made it possible to argue that there was nothing left to carry on with. The Under Secretary for War, Charles de Gaulle, supported Reynaud and those civilian members of the cabinet still anxious to fight on. De Gaulle had earlier urged Reynaud to move his government to Quimper in Brittany rather than Bordeaux in the hope that this could be a first step to a further move overseas and a refusal to surrender. Reynaud’s proposal was approved by a majority of the cabinet but the Prime Minister hesitated, unwilling to insist on a course disapproved by the generals. He hoped that by the next day Pétain could be persuaded to talk Weygand round. Instead Pétain resigned.

When the cabinet met again on the 16th Reynaud had received from Churchill Great Britain’s consent to Franco-German armistice negotiations on condition that the French fleet should first sail to British ports; Churchill also urged safe passage for Polish and Czechoslovak troops to Africa. But at the last moment de Gaulle telephoned to Reynaud a new proposal from Churchill for the continuation of the war on the basis of a Franco-British political union and common citizenship after the war and a pledge of total British support. This strange plan, which would have revived the abortive union effected by Henry V by the treaty of Troyes in 1420, seems to have been devised by French and British officials, notably Jean Monnet and Arnold Toynbee with the support of Lord Vansittart. It was regarded by most of the French cabinet as irrelevant to France’s plight. Perhaps the British cabinet, in endorsing the plan, anticipated the French reaction, for had it been otherwise Great Britain might have found itself committed to military actions which would have lost the war as well as to a political course which would have baffled the British people. Reynaud, upon seeing that the argument among his colleagues was going against the idea, resigned that day (the 16th). Pétain took his place, formed a new government during the ensuing night and immediately sued through Spain for an armistice. But the fighting went on for another six days and so did the talk about moving to Africa. Preparations were made to transport Ministers, members of parliament and others, but nobody actually gave the word to go and so in the end nobody went – except as refugees. The opponents of the idea kept the Germans informed about what was going on and urged them to produce acceptable armistice terms as quickly as possible. After a preliminary meeting between Hitler and Mussolini at Munich terms were presented. They were accepted after what was virtually an ultimatum requiring unconditional French acceptance and on 22 June at Compiègne, surrounded by the memories and even part of the furniture of the armistice scene of 1918, France signed. Two days later a separate agreement was signed with Italy which, in one of the cheapest and least exhilarating conquests of modern times, acquired Nice and part of the Savoy.

Ten days after the signing of the armistice of Compiègne Great Britain took drastic action against the French fleet. The fall of France threatened the naval balance in the Mediterranean. Together the French and British fleets had dominated that sea. Without a French ally, and with other seas to command as well, Great Britain faced a serious Italian challenge. Although marginally superior in battleships (seven against six) and possessing two aircraft carriers against none, the British Mediterranean fleet was significantly outnumbered in cruisers and destroyers. Italy had the largest submarine fleet in the world and ten land-based aircraft for every one which the R A F could spare for the Mediterranean theatre. If, in addition, the French fleet actively joined the war on the Axis side Great Britain might well be swept from the Mediterranean.

The armistice terms originally provided for the recall of all French ships to French metropolitan ports where they were to be demobilized under German or Italian supervision – Germany undertaking not to use them except for coastal defence and mine-sweeping. The French negotiators wished to secure the right to demobilize their vessels in colonial ports and on this issue the Germans proved not unrelenting – presumably because their control over ships in distant ports was in any event limited. The armistice terms were amended to provide for demobilization in any port outside that part of France which the Germans proposed to occupy. But the fate of the French fleet was of such cardinal importance to Great Britain that the British government decided that it must be placed permanently beyond German clutches or be destroyed.

Admiral Darlan had ordered his captains on 24 June to ensure that their vessels should in no circumstances fall into German hands, but the British did not grasp the full significance of this signal, which was made available to them only in abbreviated form. Some French ships were in British ports and these were painlessly disarmed; others were in French waters; but most were in African harbours – Alexandria, Bizerta, Mers-el-Kebir (Oran), Algiers, Casablanca, Dakar. At Alexandria diplomatic interchanges between the British and French admirals resulted in the disarming of the ships by the French themselves, but in the western Mediterranean the issue was decided by gunfire. Admiral Gensoul’s force at Mers-el-Kebir included two of the most powerful capital ships afloat, Strasbourg and Dunquerque. On 3 July Admiral Somerville delivered to Gensoul an ultimatum giving him four choices: to join Great Britain in the war, to sail with reduced crews and under British control to internment in a British port, to sail under British escort for demilitarization in a French Caribbean port or to United States custody, or to scuttle within six hours. Somerville told Gensoul that if he refused all four courses the British would use whatever force might be necessary to prevent the French ships from falling into German hands. Somerville was empowered to accept a French proposal, if it were made to him, to demilitarize the ships where they were provided this could be done in six hours and under his supervision and in such a way as to keep them out of service for at least a year even at a fully equipped dockyard. This last proposition was not known to Gensoul.

When Gensoul received these terms his fleet was already almost under British fire and, affronted by this manoeuvre, he told the French Admiralty only about the fourth choice put to him. The Admiralty promised to send help. Some hours later Gensoul proposed to Somerville to demilitarize his ships at Mers-el-Kebir and, if threatened by the Germans or Italians, to sail for Martinique or the United States; he said that the disembarkation of crews had already begun. But the day was wearing on and Somerville, who had been instructed to bring matters to a conclusion before night fall, shortly after wards opened fire. Action was broken off but then renewed when Strasbourg put to sea. Strasbourg and twelve other vessels made good their escape to Toulon. Dunquerque went aground. Two other battleships were disabled. Nearly 1,300 Frenchmen were killed.

In the Caribbean French ships were damaged and put out of action for the rest of the war. At Dakar in West Africa the battleship Richelieu was slightly damaged but played a part in thwarting an expedition by British and Gaullist forces in September. This venture, based on faulty intelligence about the inclinations of the local French authorities who had opted for Vichy, began with an attempt by a few Gaullists who were landed in two light aircraft and one motorboat to talk the authorities into changing sides. When this mission failed the supporting British naval force began a two-day bombardment which was then abandoned because the French did not give in at once. They were, as it happened, about to do so when the attack was stopped and the attackers sailed away.

These episodes, although minor ones in the retrospect of the history of the war, planted a sting in Anglo-French relations which was to endure for a generation. Great Britain, so it seemed to many Frenchmen, acted at the time of France’s abasement to take away from France all that the Germans had left to be taken – its navy and its colonies. But for Great Britain the immobilization of the French fleet was as necessary as the evacuation from Dunkirk to enable the war to be carried on from the British Isles themselves and in the Mediterranean.

The collapse of France in 1940 was first and foremost a military defeat although, as we shall see in a later chapter, there was more to it than that. The French forces were badly equipped, badly trained and badly led. They had not been modernized after the First World War because the military and political chiefs of the Third Republic had based their policies more on hope than on preparation. They had hoped after 1919 that Germany had been as much sickened by war as France and would not start another one, and later they had postponed rearmament and re-equipment because post-depression economics gave them an added reason for doing so. In the vital sectors of tanks and aircraft, industry was producing too many types and too few machines. French tanks were too lightly armoured to survive and their tactics were obsolete. The air force had adopted a modernization plan in 1934 but four years later, when the Czech crisis came, its first line strength was below 1,400 (half the size of the Luftwaffe) and only one in ten of these aircraft belonged to the 1934 programme. Transport, clothing and light weapons were all in short supply, although nobody could say exactly how short. Commanders from Gamelin downwards were paralysed by a well-founded pessimism. In the circumstances the French forces fought surprisingly well.

The defeat of France was the high-water mark of the German army – and something more. The Germans had beaten the French as easily as they had beaten the Poles. From one angle these were two separate examples of the superiority of German arms. But the two events did not strike contemporaries that way. The defeat of Poland was no surprise. Nobody expected the Poles to hold the German army for long. Theirs was a much smaller, much less up to date and much less skilful force. But the French army was one of the great armies of the world and France itself stood – if any single country could be said so to stand – as the embodiment of western civilization. The fall of France was much more than a military decision. It was a portentous distortion of history, all the more shattering because its completeness led nearly everybody to suppose that it was final and irreversible: the post-war resurrection of France and its re-emergence as one of the few countries in the world capable of conducting an independent foreign policy and as a nuclear power were in 1940 all but inconceivable. Whereas the defeat of Poland had been a tragedy which further shifted the balance of power in Europe Hitler’s way, the fall of France opened an abyss of uncertainty for the whole continent and shook the imagination as perhaps nothing had shaken it since the victory of the Turks at Mohacs in 1526.