A Patriot's History of the Modern World (57 page)

It must be noted that the mobilized French Army in 1940 numbered 2,776,000 men, and her Army of the Interior, 2,224,000.
²⁷
Although British, French, Dutch, and Belgian forces enjoyed a substantial numerical superiority in ground troops over the Germans on the eve of battle, they were dispersed, uncoordinated, and lacked joint training. The Germans placed fewer than 2.5 million men on the Western Front, while the Allied total was more than 3.5 million. The French even had more and better tanks than the Germans, including 405 medium Char-Bs, the best tank on the battlefield, but rendered relatively harmless through poor tactics.

While the Allies enjoyed superior forces in the field, the Germans possessed forward-looking military strategists and tacticians. Lieutenant General Erich von Manstein, chief of staff to General Gerd von Rundstedt, commander of Army Group A, which would bear the brunt of the fighting, had introduced a plan that departed radically from the old Schlieffen wheel, still the basic plan of the German High Command. Where Schlieffen pivoted south to pin French forces against German units on the border with his “swinging door,” von Manstein, with support from panzer general Heinz Guderian, commander of the elite armored 19th Army Corps, devised a rapid stab through the Ardennes toward the English Channel to isolate the Allied northern armies. When two German officers fell into Belgian hands on January 10 carrying the First Air Fleet's Operation Order of
Fall
Gelb
(“case yellow”), which contained details of an army-strength attack into Belgium west of Maastricht and airborne assaults between the Meuse and Sambre rivers on January 14, the Belgians opened their borders to French troops, and the French battle plan was exposed. Von Manstein himself was removed from his position, probably due to his opposition to the current version of
Fall Gelb,
and made commander of an infantry corps then forming in Silesia (thereby sent into obscurity). Politicking through Hitler's adjutant, Rudolf Schmundt, von Manstein obtained an audience with Hitler on February 17 where he was able to present his plan. Hitler was immediately persuaded, and, after following the plan, the Germans were able to cut off the British and French as they rushed pell-mell northeast into Belgium to meet the originally planned German attack. France was doomed.
²⁸

Major operations began on May 10, 1940, through the Netherlands, where a botched attempt to parachute forces into the Hague cost the Luftwaffe
Transportgruppen almost 50 percent of their strength and half of the paratroopers involved in the operation. The bombing of Rotterdam occurred four days later, a tragedy of errors wherein attempts to cancel the German bombing of a Dutch force already negotiating its surrender resulted in bombing the city through an obscuring cloud of smoke and haze. More than eight hundred Dutch citizens died, the legend that no city was safe from German terror bombing was born, and the Dutch were finished.

At the same time, Germany established bridgeheads into Belgium behind unprecedented tactical bombing by the Luftwaffe and then, farther south, punched through the Ardennes against little resistance. The famed
Blitzkrieg
(“lightning war”) did not come about by design. Quite the opposite, it was forced on the Germans as an “inspired, high-risk improvisation, a ‘quick military fix' to the strategic dilemmas, which Hitler and the German military leadership had
failed
to resolve up to February 1940.”
²⁹
Germany could win only wars of fire and maneuver, not wars of attrition. In fact, throughout the assault on Belgium and France, panzer columns including 1,200 tanks and nearly 550 other armored vehicles stretched one hundred miles long and would have been astonishingly vulnerable to Allied air attacks had any been launched. Physical demands on the tankers and drivers were so great that thousands of doses of “tank chocolate,” a variant of amphetamines, were handed out. Nor had weapons planning provided the Nazis with superior tanks. Quite the contrary, German panzers were lightly armed and the French had far more powerful tanks. Germany was, in fact, still relying heavily on
Americans
for her armor: as late as 1939, Adam Opel's company—taken over by General Motors in 1929—and Ford were Germany's largest producers of tanks, and, of course, German armor benefited greatly from the acquisition of several hundred Czech tanks.
³⁰

Two of the French army's weakest divisions were posted in the critical Sedan hinge, in the Ardennes where the Maginot Line was replaced by the Belgian border. The 71st Infantry had only two regular army officers, and while regular divisions fought bravely in spots, reservists were hopelessly outclassed by the Germans, especially once panzers smashed holes in the French lines. Methodical trench-warfare tactics were of little use in a moving battle of improvisation and chaos for which the French were entirely unprepared. Armored units bypassed numerous pillboxes, panicking French units who heard rumors that Germans were already behind them. However, the popular image of Germans always advancing behind armored spearheads is incorrect. Breaching the Meuse at Sedan, for example, required
German infantry to cross the river in rubber rafts, taking the high ground beyond so
pioneers
(engineers) could build bridges for armor. In those cases, superior German leadership and cohesiveness at the small-unit level carried the day.

French officers were no better than their men in adapting to the fast-moving fog of war. General Erwin Rommel's 7th Panzer Division, which breached the defenses of the French 9th Army at Dinant in twenty-four hours, captured 10,000 French in two days and was struck by how quickly they capitulated. In one case, hundreds of French officers marched to detention for miles without a guard. A German reporter asked how it was possible that “these French soldiers, with their officers, so completely downcast, so completely demoralized, would allow themselves to go more or less voluntarily into imprisonment.”
³¹
Even some of the colonial troops, particularly the Moroccans, held out longer than veteran French units.

Guderian, meanwhile, had turned his panzer divisions northwest in an advance toward the English Channel at Abbeville on the Somme. With their tanks possessing superior radio communication, the Germans—with their smaller guns and lighter armor—were faster and more nimble. At one point Rommel charged through the French 5th Motorized Division, which had lined its tanks up in an overnight bivouac right in his path. Only three of the French tanks escaped. All this should have added up to an astounding victory, and it did, but the rapidity of the movements was unnerving to the Fuehrer. As was evident in Poland, Norway, and now in France, Hitler tended to lose his nerve in a crisis, this time raging that the advance was too fast, and, as General Franz Halder noted, he “keeps worrying about the south flank…and screams that we are on the way to ruin.”
³²
Hitler should have been more trusting (a trait invariably absent in dictators), for at the time Hitler's generals were still willing to use their own initiative under the long-established German command principle of subordinate independence, and they ignored his attempts to retard their advance.
³³

Even as Hitler stormed about the “ruin” that his generals might cause, French prime minister Paul Reynaud, a bantam little man with unceasing energy, telephoned the new British prime minister Winston Churchill, who had replaced Neville Chamberlain when the first German tanks rolled into Belgium. Reynaud somberly informed Churchill, “We have been defeated. We are beaten; we have lost the battle.”
³⁴
Cut off from the French interior and driven against the coast at Dunkirk, more than 338,000 men were evacuated on 861 ships to England from May 27 to June 4; the bulk of
them British but also nearly 140,000 French, plus Poles, Belgians, and a few Dutch troops. One fourth of the vessels were sunk in the “miracle at Dunkirk,” the largest and most successful military evacuation by sea in history. Churchill, however, glumly noted, “Wars are not won by great evacuations.”

Top French officers soon issued searing indictments of their nation's troops, including General Maurice Gamelin, who complained, “The French soldier, yesterday's citizen, did not believe in the war…. Too many failures to do their duty in battle have occurred…. The rupture of our [force] dispositions has too often been the result of an every-man-for-himself attitude at key points.”
³⁵
Intended for the eyes of Édouard Daladier, France's minister for national defense, Gamelin's assessment arrived after Daladier had already been relieved of that position by Paul Reynaud. Gamelin himself was soon given the hook, only nine days after the German attack commenced. The embodiment of a senior officer corps desperate to dodge blame for the fiasco, Gamelin was sixty-seven years old, small and heavy-set, and famous for his bland imperturbability. His replacement, General Maxime Weygand, had never held a field command and was even older (seventy-three). After the surrender in June, France's generals blamed one another for the rout. Despite their failures as military leaders, however, the “defeated generals and untried admirals were…among the biggest political winners in 1940; they became members of France's new ruling class.”
³⁶

Churchill flew to Paris on May 16, while the French government was already frantically burning its archives and preparing to evacuate. He met with Reynaud, Daladier, and Gamelin, all standing around a table as if it were a coffin, shrouded in utter dejection. They stared grimly at a map showing the Germans pouring through at Sedan. An optimistic Churchill asked, “Where is the strategic reserve?” and, again in French, “
Où est la masse de manoeuvre
?” General Gamelin turned, shrugged and said, “
Aucune
” (“There is none”).
³⁷
Undeterred, Churchill asked where and when Gamelin proposed to counterattack the bulge, only to have Gamelin soberly state, “Inferiority of numbers, inferiority of equipment, inferiority of method.”
³⁸
He was correct only on the last count, and might have added, “inferiority of leadership, inferiority of will.”

When Churchill again visited France on June 11–12, his fourth visit since Hitler's invasion of Poland, he met first with Weygand, Reynaud, and others at the French General Headquarters. Weygand, reputed to be the
illegitimate son of Empress Carlota of Mexico (the daughter of Belgian King Leopold) and General Alfred van der Smissen, was a monarchical Catholic possessed of an intense dislike of parliamentary governments. He asked Churchill to send all available air power from Britain, but the prime minister refused: he needed the Royal Air Force for the defense of England, he announced. Furthermore, Churchill told all present that Britain planned to fight on—alone, if necessary. The French simply didn't believe him.
³⁹
World War I Marshal Henri Philippe Pétain, who would soon surrender and head what would become the Vichy government, “was mockingly incredulous” at Churchill's intention to go it alone. Paris would not even attempt to mount a resistance.
⁴⁰
The best Churchill could do was secure a promise from Admiral Jean François Darlan that the Germans would never get the French Navy.

Churchill returned the following day to meet with French officials at Tours, where the government was then located. Reynaud asked that France be released from her obligation to fight on so French honor could be upheld. Churchill would not agree and stated, “At all events England would fight on. She had not and would not alter her resolve: no terms, no surrender…death or victory.”
⁴¹
Reynaud, unmoved, said, “We cannot count on American help. There is no light at the end of the tunnel…. We have no choice.”
⁴²
Three days later, he resigned and went into hiding with his mistress; soon thereafter he plowed his car into a tree, killing his mistress and injuring himself. While recuperating before being arrested, Reynaud confided to the American ambassador, “I have lost my country, my honor and my love.”

When Churchill returned to England, he delivered one of the most powerful and memorable speeches in history to the House of Commons on June 18:

A month and two days after the panzers rolled into Belgium, France declared Paris an open city. To defend it, as General Weygand later wrote, “would have condemned the city to irreparable loss of human lives and of national treasures.”
⁴⁴
On June 22, France signed the Second Armistice at Compiègne, in the same railroad car in which Germany had signed the 1918 armistice, and established German and Italian zones of occupation. The National Assembly voted on July 10 to give eighty-four-year-old Marshal Philippe Pétain the position of prime minister of the Third Republic and grant him extraordinary powers that allowed him to govern in line with German wishes. Pétain's collaborationist government, located at Vichy in the south of France, did something no other conquered or puppet government in all of Europe did—it voluntarily rounded up Jews and shipped them to Germany.