To Lose a Battle (30 page)

Another aspect of Madame de Portes’s unfortunate influence behind the scenes was the fact that she was at daggers drawn with the Marquise de Crussol, Daladier’s champion. The rivalry of these women injected poison into the already bad relations between the two most powerful leaders of war-time France. From about January, Hélène de Portes had begun to campaign for Reynaud to oust Daladier, in the clumsiest fashion, filling the salons of Paris with stories of Daladier’s
lethargy. This gossip the faithful Marquise promptly passed back to Daladier, duly magnified, until the rift between him and Reynaud became almost intolerable. To Maurois, Reynaud confided grimly: ‘I believe he desires the victory of France, but he desires my defeat even more.’ Of this feud, Churchill was to comment to Spears in despair. ‘What will centuries to come say if we lost this war through lack of understanding?’

Reynaud Saddled with Gamelin

The tragedy for France was that Reynaud, the lone operator with no political machine behind him, could not survive without the backing of Daladier in his Cabinet. On the very first day of the new Government, Reynaud was confronted with a vote of confidence. He scraped by with only one vote, so precarious was the balance of the Government about to face Hitler’s onslaught. Reynaud wanted to take over the Ministry of National Defence from Daladier, but he had to renounce it because of his need for his enemy’s support; he wanted to sack Gamelin, but could not, because Gamelin was Daladier’s man; he wanted to bring in Colonel de Gaulle as Secretary to the War Cabinet, but de Gaulle would not serve with Daladier and preferred to return to his tanks.
⁵
Paul Baudouin, a director of the Bank of Indo-China, youngish, good-looking, but a ‘soft’ and a favoured protégé of Hélène de Portes, got the job instead. Bonnet was sacked at last, but later, as part of his complex balancing act, Reynaud was constrained to bring in two extreme right-wingers, Marin and Ybarnegaray. The appointment of the latter, a member of Colonel de la Rocque’s
Croix de Feu
, was roughly the same as if Churchill had taken Oswald
Mosley into his Cabinet. Daladier himself grumbled to Élie Bois: ‘I ought not to have entered this Government. I was tired, worn out… I must get out of it at the first opportunity.’

It was typical of how self-interest continued to prevail in a France perched on the very brink of disaster. The nation at large was all too discouragingly aware of the ‘swamp of personal jealousies and ministerial appetites’ in Paris. At the front, Major Barlone spoke for many soldiers when he wrote in his diary of the new Government: ‘People see a schemer and a thief in every politician… Our enemies do not waste their time over Parliamentary manoeuvres… Spring is now here, the time of trial is probably at hand, and look what a Government we have!’

Yet for all the political ligaments binding him and restricting his movements, Reynaud himself, with his little man’s combativeness, came to power just as dedicated to waging war with a fresh bellicosity as Clemenceau had been. One of his first acts was to go to London to sign, on 28 March, a joint declaration with the British, pledging that neither country would conclude a separate peace without the agreement of the other, an undertaking to which Daladier had long been reluctant to commit himself.
⁶
Then, on 12 April, Reynaud, who had been infuriated by Gamelin’s showing over Norway, determined to precipitate a crisis here. To Baudouin he remarked: ‘It would be criminal to leave this nerveless philosopher at the head of the French Army.’ He was, he said, ‘hesitating between General Georges and General Weygand’. But in the Cabinet, Daladier immediately ranged himself behind Gamelin, and threatened to resign himself if there were any change. Reynaud was stymied. Baudouin claims he came out of the meeting ‘thunderstruck by the pitiful spectacle of the Prime Minister’s impotence to break the political chains which bound him’. At a Cabinet Meeting on 23 April, Reynaud once again remained silent. On the 27th, Reynaud told Baudouin that the time for procrastination was over; he would take action within the next two or three days. But President Lebrun, whose whole-hearted
support would be indispensable to Reynaud, merely passed him a message, telling him to ‘be patient. Time will settle many things.’ Indeed it would. Then on 28 April, Reynaud collapsed with influenza. He was confined to his bed for a week, and Gamelin was saved a second time. On returning to his office, still shaky, Reynaud now prepared for a final offensive against his commander-in-chief.

Notices went out on the evening of 8 May for a Cabinet meeting the next morning. Reynaud arrived with a bulky file, from which he read for two hours. According to Élie Bois, his colleagues, many of whom had not seen him for a fortnight, ‘found him much altered, thinner, feverish of eye, unsteady of voice’. He closed with a warning that France, if she persisted in the errors which had encompassed the Norwegian operation, would almost certainly lose the war. Gamelin could not be left in charge. There followed a painful two-minute silence before Lamoureux, the Minister of Finance, rallied to Reynaud. Daladier counter-attacked vigorously. Reynaud wound up the session by stating that, in view of the opposition, he considered the Government as having resigned and would inform the President accordingly. All that afternoon of the 9th discussions went on at the Élysée. The next day the Germans attacked. A third respite was granted Gamelin.

Meanwhile, in London, in the midst of questions about such grave matters as Kentish sheep being frightened by aircraft, Scottish hotels over-charging for coffee and the advertising of patent medicines in stamp books, the Commons was concluding its great debate on Norway. Chamberlain was finished. On 10 May, just as Hitler’s Panzers were plunging into Holland and Belgium, Churchill became Prime Minister. In those lapidary words, he remarked: ‘I was conscious of a profound sense of relief. At last I had the authority to give directions over the whole scene. I felt as if I were walking with destiny…’ Britain had at last found her war leader, and he embarked upon his task with the undivided support of parliamentarians; but there were many government matters concerning the conduct of war which were strange to him and would necessarily and perilously remain outside his grasp for some time. How
different though, was the scene in France on 10 May. Indubitably, time had ‘settled’ matters, but not in the way Lebrun might have hoped. Here was a government in the throes of dissolution, a commander-in-chief under suspended sentence.

The Opposing Forces: Tanks

For employment in
Sichelschnitt
, by May Hitler could count upon 136 out of the Army’s 157 divisions, of which no more than a third qualified as first-rate offensive material. The Wehrmacht was by no means yet the superb instrument it would have become by the time of Barbarossa the following year. Most of its infantry divisions depended, to an astonishing extent, on horse transport (each division containing 5,375 horses to 942 motor vehicles, and consuming 50 tons of hay and oats a day – compared to only 20 tons of motor fuel), and many were hardly combat-fit. With its steel tip of only ten Panzer divisions and a handful of élite motorized infantry divisions, it could indeed be likened to a spear with a vulnerable wooden shaft. Against Hitler’s 136 divisions, France’s North-East Front was now held by 94 French divisions of mixed value,
⁷
plus 10 British, augmented by a further 22 Belgian divisions and 10 Dutch (though, despite Gamelin’s hopes, these latter were able to exert a minimal influence in the battle) – a total also of 136, so that in numbers alone the Germans did not possess the kind of overwhelming superiority which the Allies required to crush the Wehrmacht later in the war.

In the crucial matter of armour, figures have varied wildly; on 10 May, the French
Deuxième Bureau
estimated that the Germans had 7,000 to 7,500 tanks, a vastly inflated figure which came to be extensively used in France by way of excuse for what was to follow. According to Guderian, Germany’s ten Panzer divisions should have had 2,800 tanks, but in reality had only 2,200; as a reliable figure based on German archives,
one could, however, accept a total of just over 2,400 and well under 3,000.
⁸
For the number of Franco-British tanks available to the North-East Front, Gamelin himself gives a total of 3,432 modern vehicles, while Colonel Goutard, a generally trustworthy source, puts the Allied total ‘in the region of 3,000’, and the most recent estimate (by General de Cossé Brissac, former head of the French Army’s
Service Historique
) calculates the French total alone at ‘3,100 of which 2,285 were modern’. Thus, in overall tank numbers, the French and British jointly were actually superior.

Nor in quality of tanks was the gulf between the Wehrmacht and the Allies quite so wide as it had been two years previously. The mainstay of the German Panzer divisions was the light Mark II tank, which carried only a 20-mm. cannon; more than 1,400, or over half the total Panzers, were Marks I or II, while there were only 349 of the medium Mark III tanks, which carried a 37-mm. gun, and only 278 of the new 24-ton Mark IV, carrying a low-velocity 75-mm. gun. Against this, the French possessed their new, heavy (33-ton) ‘B’ tank – possibly the best of any nation in 1940 – and the fast, medium (20-ton) ‘Somua’. The ‘B’ tank mounted a 47-mm. gun in a revolving turret and a 75-mm. mounted in the hull,
⁹
and had armour thicker than any German tank; the ‘Somua’ also mounted the high-velocity 47-mm. gun, with better penetrative power than any other gun of the period, and the numbers of these two tanks, despite all the delays in French production, totalled 800, or more than the Marks III and IV possessed by the Germans. (In addition, the 100 British infantry tanks in France were also more heavily armoured than their German counterparts, and their 2-pounder gun more potent than the Germans’ 37-mm.) The defects of the ‘Somua’ and ‘B’ tanks were that their turrets were operated by one overworked commander-loader-gunner, compared with the two- or three-man turrets of the British and Germans; the 75-mm. of the ‘B’ tank (fired and aimed by the
driver) could only be pointed laterally by moving the tank itself; and French gun-sights were inferior. The other modern models of tank principally employed by the French were the R.35 (Renault, model 1935) and the H.35 (Hotchkiss, model 1935), still mounting an old-fashioned, stubby 37-mm. gun that was useless against armour.

But the gravest defects of the French tanks still lay, as has been mentioned earlier, in their poor operating range and the fact that four-fifths of them carried no radio. Thus was their mobility badly impaired. Still weightier than any technical advantage, however, was the superiority of the German Panzer crews in training and doctrine. During the
Anschluss
of 1938, many German tanks
¹⁰
had broken down on the way to Austria and there was chaos on the roads. In the meantime, however, Hitler had had two years and two campaigns – Czechoslovakia and Poland – in which to put this right. He had not wasted his opportunities. Finally, worst of all, of course, was the way in which the French tanks were scattered: 700 to 800 in the cavalry divisions or D.L.M.s, 1,500 to 1,700 dispersed in independent battalions under the infantry. The remainder belonged to the three new armoured divisions, only formed in 1940,
¹¹
and each contained just half as many tanks as the ten powerful Panzer divisions into which was concentrated all the German armour.

In anti-tank weapons, the German 37-mm. gunners would be hard pressed to make an impression on the heavier French tanks. But the much superior French 47-mm. was in such short supply that only sixteen divisions possessed any at all; the few that existed were drawn by fifteen-year-old converted tractors,
but the ammunition was carried in trucks, so that the guns could move across country but not their ammunition. The older 25-mm. lacked punch, weighed half a ton and depended largely on horse transport. It too was short in numbers, with Corap’s Ninth Army (which would need them most desperately) possessing only half of the established number of 25-mms. The situation in anti-tank mines was even worse; by some extraordinary omission, not one had been ordered in France before the war, and by May 1940 they were just beginning to reach the front-line forces. In artillery, France was numerically superior, with 11,200 guns to 7,710. But still as reliant upon the horse, so pathetically vulnerable from the air, as it had been in 1918, the French artillery was equipped with none of the self-propelled guns to be found in every German Panzer division.

Aircraft

In anti-aircraft weapons, France’s position was particularly deplorable. According to General Roton, ‘on 10 May we possessed 17 guns of 90-mm. calibre’. Of light anti-aircraft, so vital in defence against dive-bombers, only 22 French divisions were equipped with the 20-mm. Oerlikon, and their allocation was a mere twelve pieces each; 13 other divisions had the new French 25-mm. anti-aircraft gun (six each), but these had only begun to arrive at the end of April, hardly time enough to give the crews adequate training. There were 39 batteries kept in reserve at Army level; otherwise the remainder of France’s anti-aircraft defence was made up of 75-mms. left over from 1918. In contrast, against a total of just over 1,500 weapons, the Germans could mount 2,600 of the powerful 88-mm., and 6,700 light flak with which each Panzer and motorized division was plentifully endowed.

It was of course in the air that the most blatant inferiority of the Allies lay. By the spring of 1940, the Luftwaffe stood nearly at its peak. Despite the efforts of Raoul Dautry, in April the French aircraft industry was still only producing sixty planes a month,
¹²
the same quantity it had produced during
September 1939. The relative merits of the opposing aircraft have already been discussed; in numbers the balance was now as follows: