The Last Battle (7 page)

M
AURICE
G
AMELIN WAS PERHAPS
the most deeply affected by the seemingly endless display of the Wehrmacht’s combat power. The diminutive general—he stood barely five feet four inches tall—had spent more than fifty of his seventy-one years as an officer in his nation’s army, a force whose primary raison d’être for at least a generation had been to prevent the exact military catastrophe that had overtaken France in June 1940. And the fact that most of his countrymen seemed to believe that he was solely and personally responsible for France’s defeat and capitulation would have been a bitter pill to swallow for the erstwhile supreme commander of all French armed forces.

Gamelin’s rise to his nation’s highest military post seems, in retrospect, to have been almost preordained. He was born on September 20, 1872, in
his family’s ornate home on Paris’s Boulevard Saint-Germain, literally just across the street from the French ministry of war. His father, Zéphyrin Gamelin, was a general and the army’s controller-general, or senior administrator.
¹⁶
The younger Gamelin was educated at an elite Paris school, where he developed a deep and lifelong interest in art and philosophy, and in 1891 he entered the École Spéciale Militaire de Saint-Cyr, France’s foremost military academy. A gifted student, he graduated at the top of his 449-member class in 1893 and was commissioned a second lieutenant.

Over the following two decades Gamelin proved himself to be both an excellent staff officer and a tactical commander of rare skill. After his initial field assignment in French North Africa, he ascended steadily through the ranks, along the way acquiring such powerful mentors as General Joseph Joffre, commander in chief of the French army in the years leading up to World War I. By November 1913 he was a member of the General Staff’s operations bureau. In that position Gamelin helped develop the mobilization plan the army would put into motion in the event of war, and in March 1914 he was tapped to join Joffre’s personal staff.

While World War I was a bloody tragedy for France, it was a personal triumph for Gamelin. Alternating between important staff positions and field commands, he built a solid reputation as an innovative, highly capable, and politically astute officer who cared about his men and maintained his composure no matter what surprises were thrown at him. The best illustration of the latter attribute was his brilliant command of the 9th Infantry Division during the Germans’ massive spring offensive in 1918. Initially confronted by six enemy divisions, Gamelin ordered a fighting withdrawal that saved his division and, ultimately, allowed him to stop the German advance along the River Oise.

By the time the war ended in 1918, Gamelin was a brigadier general with a chest full of medals—both French and foreign. His wartime successes ensured his continued ascent in the postwar world, and he burnished his already lofty reputation with a series of highly successful assignments. He led the French military mission to Brazil from 1919 to 1925, commanded all French forces in Syria from 1925 to 1928,
¹⁷
and in 1930 was named deputy to General Maxime Weygand, chief of the army general staff. Prime Minister André Tardieu intended Gamelin to be a forward-thinking and relatively liberal counterweight—and eventual successor—to the vastly more conservative Weygand. While the latter favored the complete overhaul and
mechanization of the French army—and was especially fervent about the need to create independent armored units equipped with state-of-the-art tanks
¹⁸
—his notoriously abrasive personality and penchant for publicly belittling politicians foolish enough to disagree with him often negated his sincere efforts to improve his nation’s military readiness.

The Gamelin-Weygand partnership began well; indeed, soon after the former became his assistant in 1930, Weygand referred to him as “a colleague of peerless value.”
¹⁹
Both officers were extremely wary of Germany’s growing military might, and they agreed wholeheartedly on the need to modernize the French army and construct a line of fortifications along the nation’s eastern frontier. But the honeymoon didn’t last long; in February 1931 Weygand became the army’s inspector general, and Gamelin replaced him as chief of staff, and from that point on the two men clashed with increasing frequency over the course, and cost, of France’s military rejuvenation.

For his part, the arch-conservative Weygand found it virtually impossible to deal with the series of leftist prime ministers who came to power from 1932 onward. He believed their internationalist and optimistic views of foreign relations to be naive and possibly subversive, and he strongly felt that their failure to adequately fund the large-scale weapon purchases he considered essential was making France increasingly vulnerable. Though Gamelin agreed with many of Weygand’s proposals, he also knew that alienating the politicians would be counterproductive. Gamelin was thus conciliatory where Weygand was confrontational, hoping to achieve through logic, persuasion, and compromise what would almost certainly not be gained through acrimonious intransigence. This point of view put him at odds with Weygand, who increasingly saw Gamelin as a dangerously indecisive leader whose beliefs and methods—which Weygand saw as holdovers from Gamelin’s World War I service—were perpetuating the army’s weakness and vastly increasing its risks of defeat in any conflict with Germany.

Gamelin’s point of view ultimately prevailed for the simple reason that in January 1935 Weygand reached the mandatory retirement age of sixty-eight. Upon his departure, Gamelin replaced him not only as army chief of staff but also as both army inspector general and vice president of the Supreme War Council.
²⁰
The latter position made Gamelin the peacetime deputy to the minister of war, Louis Maurin. In wartime, the council’s vice president automatically became the commander of all French field armies.

Unfortunately for France, when the time came for Gamelin to actually take up the latter position—often referred to as “generalissimo”
²¹
—he proved consistently unequal to the monumental task facing him. Despite his genuine and consistent efforts during the inter-war years to improve the quality of the French army and the cooperation between military men and politicians, he dithered during the first few months of war. He failed to strike aggressively into Germany and preferred a static defense along the border based on the forts of the impressive, but incomplete, Maginot Line. When the so-called Phoney War ended with the German invasion of France and the Low Countries on May 10, 1940, he was slow to grasp the importance of the German thrust through the Ardennes, a rugged and heavily forested area he firmly believed to be impassable to tanks.

As French defeats mounted, Gamelin reacted by dismissing several of his field commanders, blaming the nation’s reversals on their “incompetence” rather than on his own strategic and tactical blunders. The man who had made a name for himself during the static, grinding bloodbath of World War I and in subsequent colonial wars ultimately proved incapable of responding effectively to Germany’s fast-paced and flexible combined-arms assault. Completely overwhelmed by blitzkrieg warfare, Gamelin continued to flounder until May 18, when Prime Minister Paul Reynaud sacked him and—adding insult to injury—called back Weygand as generalissimo.

Contrary to widespread rumors that he’d killed himself or fled the country,
²²
Gamelin spent the weeks between his dismissal and France’s capitulation to Germany at his home in Paris, tending his roses and listening to the increasingly dire news from the battlefronts. He expected the Nazis to arrest him, of course, when they arrived in the capital; what he hadn’t anticipated was that he’d be taken into custody by fellow Frenchmen. On September 6, 1940—the same day Daladier was seized—Gamelin was visiting his friend Léo-Abel Gaboriaud, editor of the journal
L’Ère nouvelle
, when agents of the Sûreté Nationale
²³
appeared at the door. They explained that they were reluctantly working under orders from the Germans to arrest Gamelin and transport him to the Château Chazeron. Gaboriaud walked with his friend to the waiting car, and, as the officers were about to put him in the backseat, the editor looked at them sternly and said, “The man you have taken into custody and who is leaving with you is alive. I assume he will be alive when he gets to Chazeron.”
²⁴

Though Gaboriaud’s concern for Gamelin’s continued well-being was understandable, the diminutive general made it to Chazeron—and through
the Riom trial—unscathed. While his subsequent incarceration with Daladier and the others in Buchenwald cannot have been salutary, his daily ritual of vigorous calisthenics followed by a few brisk turns around the inside of the small VIP compound’s perimeter ensured that upon his arrival at Schloss Itter he was in reasonably good health for a man his age.

Unfortunately, the same could not be said of the third man Zvonko Čučković saw step out of the Mercedes staff car in the castle’s courtyard.

T
HOUGH JUST SIXTY-FOUR YEARS OLD
, Léon Jouhaux looked a good deal older. The secretary-general of the Confédération Générale du Travail (CGT), one of France’s largest trade unions, had for several months been suffering from a flare-up of the arthritis that had plagued him for decades. More seriously, any sort of stress or anxiety brought on increasingly significant chest pain.
²⁵
Convinced his heart was beginning to fail him but lacking a diagnosis or any sort of medication, the stout labor leader could do little but stoically accept his worsening condition.

Such passive acceptance was a trait new to Jouhaux, for his had not been an easy life.
²⁶
Born in a poor section of Paris in 1879, he’d always been a fighter: first against childhood illness and schoolyard bullies, and for most of his adult life against social injustice in general and the oppression of working people in particular. He’d learned his radical activism from his father, who in 1871 had taken to the streets during the popular uprising that came to be known as the Paris Commune. When Jouhaux was two years old, his father left his job in a central-city slaughterhouse and moved the family to Aubervilliers, a less-crowded suburb, where work in a match factory offered marginally better pay.

The conditions in the new workplace were no better than those in the slaughterhouse, however. Workers toiled long hours in dismal and dangerous conditions, unable to escape the pervasive, toxic, and highly explosive fumes produced by the white phosphorous that was the match heads’ main ingredient. The elder Jouhaux ultimately became a leader in the factory’s nascent labor union and several times led the workers out on strikes meant to force the bosses to improve safety and working conditions. When Léon was twelve, his father’s activism finally led to yet another long-term suspension from the match factory, an event that forced
his intellectually gifted son to leave school and find a job in order to help support the family.

The young Jouhaux first went to work at Aubervilliers’s Central Melting House, a foundry where conditions were miserable. When his father regained his position at the match factory, Jouhaux was able to go back to school, but nine months later his father was again laid off, so the boy took a job at a soap works. At the age of sixteen Léon himself went to work at the match factory, where he immediately joined the union his father had worked so hard to create. From that point on—except for a single year he was able to spend at a vocational school—Jouhaux was, as he later said, “completely caught up in the hard life of the industrial worker.”
²⁷

In 1900 Jouhaux exchanged that form of hard life for another when he was called up for military service. After initial training he was dispatched to Algeria, where he served with the 1st Regiment of Zouaves. However, he was sent home and released from service in 1903 because his father—who had lost and regained his job several more times—had gone blind as a result of his long exposure to white phosphorous. Jouhaux went back to work in the match factory, where in addition to laboring on the production line he also replaced his father on the union’s leadership committee. Sincerely dedicated to improving the lot of all workers, he quickly proved himself to be both a natural leader and a tough negotiator who was not afraid to go toe-to-toe with the bosses and the thugs they hired to break strikes.