To Lose a Battle (77 page)

Asking if he could take Gort’s Chief of Staff, Lieutenant-General Pownall, along with him, Ironside then set off in ill humour to see Billotte.

Gort

Like actors in a play, the minor characters of history have their moments when they advance from the rear of the stage to dominate briefly the whole scene in the full glare of the footlights, before receding once more into the background. Now, for the next ten days, the unassuming, bulldog figure of Lord Gort emerges to the fore as the most important in the battle, perhaps in the war at large. At the time, John Standish Surtees Prendergast Vereker, 6th Viscount Gort, was fifty-four years old. After joining the Grenadier Guards in 1905, he had earned an almost legendary reputation for bravery during the First World War. Four times wounded, nine times mentioned in dispatches, he won the Military Cross, the Distinguished Service Order and two Bars, and finally the Victoria Cross, when commanding his battalion at the crossing of the Canal du Nord
in September 1918.
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After the war he held various staff jobs at home and in India, and was C.I.G.S. when selected to lead the B.E.F. Up to that moment he had never commanded any unit larger than a brigade.

Utterly straightforward, with a limited intellect, he had always held himself completely aloof from any kind of extramural intriguing, in marked antithesis to the French ‘political’ generals like Weygand, or the cerebral Gamelin – or, for that matter, to his own forerunner, Sir Douglas Haig. His reaction to the reforming but perhaps too adroit Hore-Belisha (appointed Secretary for War in 1937) was typical: ‘We mustn’t upset the people in the clubs by going too fast.’ Adored among the Brigade of Guards, where he was known by the affectionate but hardly flattering nickname of ‘Fat Boy’, Gort was in the eyes of Brooke, his subordinate (who could be far from uncritical of his superiors)

One of those pre-eminently straight characters who inspired confidence. He could never have done anything small or mean… He had one of those cheerful dispositions full of vitality, energy and
joie de vivre
, and the most wonderful charm, and was gifted with great powers of leadership… I could not help admiring him and had feelings of real and deep affection for him.

But, added Brooke, ‘I had no confidence in his leadership when it came to handling a large force. He seemed incapable of seeing the wood for trees.’ During the winter of the Phoney War, when he should perhaps have been voicing to the British Cabinet his doubt on the French Army and its strategy, Gort had busied himself tirelessly with such details as the proper use of hand-grenades, the art of patrolling at night, small-arms fire, and map-reading in the snow. Visiting his H.Q., Maurois noted in evident surprise:

Never has a generalissimo had a simpler office. A scrawled card, affixed to the door by four thumb tacks, read: ‘Office of the C.-in-C.’ Inside the room, which contained no other furniture, two trestles of white wood supported a bare plank. This was Lord Gort’s work table… Extremely active by nature, he found, in time of war, his only sport and relaxation in walking. He was to be seen at dawn on the muddy roads around Arras, his elbows close to his body, his head thrust forward.

Gort’s French colleagues, as Spears aptly remarks, tended to regard him ‘as a sort of friendly and jovial battalion commander’ – and they treated him as such. Certainly, with his hearty demeanour, the occasionally worried expression, the breeches and the Guardsman’s highly polished knee-boots, Gort did seem the image of the old-style British battalion commander, and to a large extent this was the key both to his character and his actions. On being sent to lead the B.E.F. in 1939, Gort’s instructions from his Government were that he was to take his orders from General Georges, as C.-in-C. North-East Front; but if any order received from the French should appear to Gort ‘to imperil the British Field Force’, he would be at liberty to appeal to the British Government before executing it. Gort had interpreted these instructions with the rigid, unquestioning instinct for loyalty of a Guards battalion commander. Both during the Phoney War and after the German offensive had begun, he had observed much that had disturbed him about the French conduct of affairs, and he clearly resented the offhand way in which Georges and Billotte had never bothered to offer him anything but the minimum of consultation and information – such as the commander of a very junior formation might expect. But the French leaders were his appointed superiors and, true to his instincts, Gort doggedly accepted his lot, without exercising his right to complain or express his misgivings to his own Government. At the same time, as the situation following the German breakthrough became progressively graver, so Gort’s concern grew that Churchill and his Government should appear to be unaware of just how bad things were in France;
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but again, at least until
20 May, Gort was not inclined to challenge the fallacious view of those set above him.

Yet there was much more to Gort than just the laudable virtues of a Grenadier ‘battalion commander’. He was endowed to excess with the single-mindedness which so often accompanies great personal courage, and by the third week in May this single-mindedness had taken the form of a determination to save his B.E.F. from destruction, come what may. A man who had won the V.C. as Gort had would not be deterred from pursuing what he considered to be his line of duty, regardless of the opposition, even if it should include a will as formidable as that of Winston Churchill. In 1914 it was popularly said of Jellicoe that he was the only man who could have ‘lost the war in an afternoon’ (although, in view of the poor subsequent performance of battleships on both sides, this claim may have been somewhat exaggerated); but in 1940 Gort, by 20 May, was certainly the man who, by forfeiting Britain’s only land force, could easily have lost the war at least in a week of afternoons. It was also once said of Jellicoe that he had ‘all Nelson’s qualities except disobedience’. Gort, the Guardsman, would never be disobedient; but in a tight corner, his single-mindedness and courage would make him defiant – which, when clear and realistic directives from above were lacking, would amount to almost the same thing. Over the next week, the responsibility resting on Gort alone would be gigantic. Fortunately, both for Britain – and ultimately for France – events would prove that Gort had the strength to bear it.

Ironside Visits Billotte

On his way to Lens to see Billotte, Ironside had an unpleasant journey. The road was

an indescribable mass of refugees, both Belgian and French, moving down in every kind of conveyance. Poor women pushing perambulators, horsed wagons with all the family and its goods in them. Belgian units all going along aimlessly. Poor devils. It was a horrible sight and it blocked the roads, which was the main difficulty.

At Lens, Ironside found Billotte with Blanchard, the commander of the French First Army. They were both, he said

in a state of complete depression. No plan, no thought of a plan. Ready to be slaughtered. Defeated at the end without casualties.
Trés fatigués
and nothing doing.

There ensued an angry scene. The British C.I.G.S. was also, to foreign eyes, something of a caricature of an Englishman; aged fifty-nine, he had been the original prototype for Buchan’s Hannay and stood 6 ft. 4 in. (inevitably, this had gained him the nickname ‘Tiny’).
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In Army circles he had openly referred to Secretary of State Hore-Belisha as ‘that little monkey’, the Cabinet as ‘the old gentlemen’, and had a healthy, Kiplingesque contempt for those ‘lesser breeds’. In a rage he must have presented a daunting figure before the two distressed French generals of modest stature. Ironside admits he lost his temper, and ‘shook Billotte by the button of his tunic. The man is completely beaten.’ He added contemptuously for the benefit of his diary: ‘There is absolutely nothing in front of them. They remain quivering behind the water-line north of Cambrai while the fate of France is in the balance…’
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He then bulldozed Billotte and Blanchard into accepting the British proposal to attack towards Amiens, and (according to Ironside), ‘Billotte drew himself up to attention to say that he would make an immediate plan to attack and I left him to do it.’ Next, Ironside telephoned Weygand and ‘told him that there was no resolution here and that there was no co-ordination. I told him that Billotte should be relieved.’ Finally it was agreed (with Billotte and Blanchard) that the British and the French First Army would each attack on the 21st with two divisions. That the French were acquiescing only under Ironside’s formidable pressure was obvious; before the C.I.G.S. departed for London, Gort assured him ‘that they would never attack’.

On his return home, the tone of his diary entries show that,
after his experience at Lens, Ironside at any rate regarded the situation in France with more sober realism. He writes: ‘I begin to despair of the French fighting at all. The great army defeated by a few tanks.’ He was increasingly despondent about the prospects facing Gort’s divisions. With perhaps only another four days’ food left, Ironside was doubtful whether they could even fight their way back to the Channel coast:

Situation desperate… Personally, I think we cannot extricate the B.E.F. Only hope a march south-west. Have they the time? Have they got the food?

‘God help the B.E.F.,’ Ironside added bitterly. ‘Brought to this state by the incompetence of the French Command.’ After seeing Churchill on the 21st, he found that the Prime Minister still ‘persists in thinking the position no worse’.

Gort Goes it Alone at Arras

At Wahagnies, Gort pushed ahead with his plan to attack southwards from Arras on the 21st. Co-ordinating the operation was Major-General Harold Franklyn of the 5th Division. Known as ‘Frankforce’, the troops at his disposal nominally consisted of two infantry divisions (the 5th and the 50th) and the 1st Army Tank Brigade; but in the event only a much smaller force could be committed. The infantry divisions had between them only four brigades, instead of the usual three apiece. One from the 5th Division had been detached, partly to relieve the French cavalry on the River Scarpe so that they could join in the attack, and General Franklyn decided to hold its other brigade (the 17th) in reserve until after the first phase had been completed; from the 50th Division, one of its brigades was sent to bolster the defences of the Arras garrison and to hold the river line immediately east of the city. Thus when the operation actually started on the 21st, instead of two British divisions only two battalions (from the 151st Brigade, 50th Division) would in fact initiate the attack. Meanwhile, instead of the one hundred tanks at its disposal, through the mechanical wear and tear of the long marches of the past days,
‘Frankforce’ could only mount a total of fifty-eight Mark I and sixteen Mark II infantry tanks. Both were extremely slow machines, but heavily armoured. The Mark I carried only a medium machine-gun; the Mark II, later christened the ‘Matilda’, was armed with a 2-pounder gun
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and, weighing 25 tons, had the thickest armour of any tank on the battlefields of France. ‘Frankforce’ would be led into battle by Major-General G. le Q. Martel, the commander of the 50th Division and one of Britain’s foremost experts of tank warfare of the inter-war period.

At Gort’s H.Q., what had started life as a limited operation designed simply to disengage Arras had, in the meantime, as a consequence of the forceful pressure applied by Ironside during his visit, imperceptibly escalated to the point where it was now regarded as the first blow in the concerted Allied attempt to close the gap. But none of this was revealed to either Franklyn or Martel. Their orders remained unchanged: to ‘support the garrison in Arras and to block the roads south of Arras, thus cutting off the German communications (via Arras) from the east’. Little thought seems to have been given as to just what enemy strength Martel’s rather slender force might expect to encounter ‘south of Arras’ by the 21st.

After Ironside’s departure, Gort, still harbouring fears that, as he had predicted to Ironside, the French ‘would never attack’, had instructed his liaison officers with Billotte and Blanchard to make it clear that

If our counter-attack was not successful the French and British Armies north of the gap would have their flank turned and could no longer remain in their present positions.

Nevertheless, when at 1800 hours on the 20th there was a conference at Franklyn’s H.Q. to co-ordinate the next day’s operation, no representative arrived from General René Altmayer’s V Corps, which Billotte and Blanchard had undertaken would attack with two divisions east of Arras, in the direction of
Cambrai. Shaken by Ironside’s rage, Blanchard had in fact sent a special liaison officer, Major Vautrin, to Altmayer to urge upon him the importance of attacking simultaneously with the British on the 21st.
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But, Vautrin reported back, ‘General Altmayer, who seemed tired out and thoroughly disheartened, wept silently on his bed.’ He told Vautrin that one had to be realistic, and that

the troops had buggered off, that he was ready to accept all the consequences of his refusal and go and get himself killed at the head of a battalion, but he could no longer continue to sacrifice the army corps of which he had already lost nearly half.

Accordingly, late that night a letter from Blanchard reached Gort telling him that Altmayer would not be able to move until the 22nd or the following night – because the roads were so badly blocked. Instead, Prioux and his Cavalry Corps would lend flanking cover to the west of ‘Frankforce’.