The Second World War (13 page)

German anxieties paled by comparison with those of the Allies. The Belgians, for the second time in the century, faced the prospect of defeat and occupation. The British were confronted by the fear of losing their only army – and large parts of their air force – if they continued to stand by their allies on a collapsing battle line. The French foresaw their army breaking into two, the better part falling victim to encirclement in Belgium and the northern departments, while the remnants struggled to form a new and doubtfully defensible front on the approaches to Paris. The potential for disaster loomed as large as in 1914 but the crisis was actually more acute. Then the French army had suffered defeat in the Battle of the Frontiers but retreated in good order under an imperturbable commander; in 1940 it was retreating in disorder, a disorder which grew worse daily under the nominal orders but not the effective command of a general who was surrendering to events. On 16 May Paul Reynaud, the French Prime Minister, sent for new men: to the Madrid embassy for Philippe Pétain, hero of Verdun, to join him as his deputy; to Syria for Maxime Weygand, chief of staff to Foch in the victory campaign of 1918, as a replacement for Gamelin. Both were very old – Weygand, at seventy-three, five years older than Gamelin, Pétain older still – but at this moment of agony their heroic reputations seemed a reassurance that something might yet be snatched from the yawning jaws of defeat.

Gamelin was now discredited. In Paris on 16 May he conferred with Reynaud and Winston Churchill – Prime Minister since 10 May, when the House of Commons had withdrawn its confidence from Neville Chamberlain – and admitted that he had no troops available to stem the German onrush. ‘I then asked, “Where is the strategic reserve?” ’ Churchill recorded. ‘General Gamelin turned to me and, with a shake of his head and a shrug, said “Aucune” [“There is none”]. There was a long pause. Outside in the garden of the Quai d’Orsay clouds of smoke arose from large bonfires and I saw from the window venerable officials pushing wheelbarrows of archives on to them.’ (The burning of official papers was to be a token of apprehended defeat at capitals and headquarters throughout the Second World War.) ‘I was dumbfounded. . . . It had never occurred to me that army commanders having to defend five hundred miles of engaged front would have left themselves unprovided with a [strategic reserve]. . . . What was the Maginot Line for?’

Churchill left for England promising to send six additional squadrons of British fighters to join the few already in France. However, so complete was German air superiority that fighter reinforcements could make no difference at this stage of the battle. What was needed was the strategic reserve he had discovered did not exist. Weygand, who assumed command from Gamelin on 20 May, attempted to improvise one by proposing (‘the Weygand Plan’) on 21 May that the encircled Allied forces north of the German break-in should co-ordinate convergent attacks against the Panzer corridor with the French armies still operating to its south. This reflected a correct appreciation of how to deal with
Blitzkrieg
and had in fact been proposed by Gamelin two days before, but the authority to execute it was lacking. Georges was now a broken man, while Billotte, to whom he had delegated authority, was killed in a motor accident on 21 May. The troops were lacking too. De Gaulle had attempted another vain counter-attack with his depleted 4th Armoured Division on 19 May; and on 21 May two British divisions, supported by two tank battalions, succeeded in denting the flank of the Panzer corridor at Arras, so alarming Rommel, commanding on the spot, that he estimated he had been attacked by five enemy divisions. However, these formations represented almost the whole Allied force available to Weygand for manoeuvre. The Ninth Army had disintegrated. The First Army and the BEF were constricted between the North Sea and the advancing Germans. The as yet unengaged French armies south of the Panzer corridor lacked transport, tanks and artillery. Meanwhile, after the German high command’s hesitation of 17 May, the Panzers had driven on. By 18 May they were driving across the battlefields of the First World War, skirting the river Sambre on their northern flank and the river Somme on the south. On 20 May Guderian’s divisions reached Abbeville at the mouth of the Somme, thus effectively dividing the Allied armies into two.

These were heady days for Heinz Guderian. He was dedicated to the development of the Panzer arm and even before Hitler’s rise to power was an advocate of what would be called
Blitzkrieg
. Frustrated by the timidity of his own high command – Brauchitsch, abetted by Halder, represented the fainthearts – he had had to restort to subterfuge in evading its orders to proceed with caution after crossing the Meuse. His creative disobedience had not yet won a great victory; he and the whole of the German Panzer force would have difficulty in achieving it. On 20 May Hitler reviewed plans for ‘Case Red’, the advance into the French heartland which would complete ‘Sickle Stroke’ and also complete the destruction of the French army – as long as the Panzer arm was kept intact. So it was that the British counter-attack at Arras, which had so alarmed Rommel, now alarmed Hitler once again. Rundstedt, commanding Army Group A, agreed with him that the Panzers had advanced too far for safety and should not proceed until the slower-moving infantry had lined the ‘walls’ of the Panzer corridor against a repetition of the Arras surprise. Brauchitsch, supported by Halder, now abandoned his earlier caution, urged that the Panzers should press home their attacks against the encircled Allies in the north, and even tried to transfer command of part of the striking force from Rundstedt to Bock, the situation of whose Army Group B, advancing on a front through Belgium, had now aroused Hitler’s anxiety. When Hitler learned of the attempt on 24 May, however, he cancelled it and reiterated his refusal to allow the Panzers to press into the coastal lowlands which he claimed, from his own trench experience of the First World War, were quite unsuitable for armoured operations.

Hitler’s ‘stop order’ would keep the Panzers halted for two whole days, until the afternoon of 26 May – two days which in retrospect have been deemed strategically decisive for the outcome of the Second World War. Unbeknown to the Germans, the British government had on 20 May decided that part of the BEF might have to be evacuated from the Channel ports and had instructed the Admiralty to begin assembling small ships on the British south coast to take them off. The operation would be codenamed ‘Dynamo’. It was not yet to comprehend a full-scale evacuation; the government still hoped that the BEF, with the French First Army, would be able to break through the Panzer corridor to join the surviving bulk of the French armies on and south of the Somme – which was the point of the Weygand Plan. However, the BEF was itself becoming wearied by its battle in Belgium which had entailed a fighting withdrawal from the Dyle to the Schelde, and Gort was increasingly concerned by his responsibility for safeguarding Britain’s only army. On 23 May he had received an assurance from Anthony Eden, who was serving as War Minister, that the government would make naval and air arrangements to assist them should they have to withdraw on the northern coast. On the same day he concluded that the Weygand Plan could not be realised for lack of troops, tanks and aircraft, and withdrew from Arras the two divisions which had attacked Rommel with such effect on 21 May. ‘Nothing but a miracle can save the BEF now,’ Alan Brooke, commanding Gort’s II Corps, wrote on 23 May; but on that day Gort’s decision to disengage and draw the BEF back towards the coast in effect laid the basis for its salvation.

For Hitler had anticipated events. He was right to fear that the Panzers would get bogged down in the canals and rivers around Dunkirk, to which port Gort now directed the BEF. He was wrong to give the ‘stop order’ when he did, two days before the British – and a substantial portion of the French First Army – reached the watery sanctuary of the ‘Canal Line’. When the stop order was revoked on 26 May that part of the Allied army he most wanted and needed to destroy was – temporarily – safe. Protected by the Aa Canal and the Colme Canal, the fugitive enemy could start embarking in the flotillas of destroyers and small boats which Admiral Bertram Ramsay began to send cross-Channel from the headquarters of Operation Dynamo that same day. Hitler had been assured by Goering that the Luftwaffe would prevent any evacuation from the Dunkirk pocket. During 24-26 May its aircraft did indeed raise havoc inside it and would continue to do so as long as the evacuation lasted, until 4 June. But it could not stop the evacuation ships closing the shore – the total it sunk was six British and two French destroyers in nine days of air attack – nor could it reduce the resistance of the Dunkirk defenders, many of them French, many of those French colonials, who gave ground with extreme reluctance against concentric German attack.

The Belgian army was forced into a capitulation north of the Dunkirk pocket at midnight on 27 May. It surrendered in almost exactly the same area where, in 1914, it had been able to consolidate a defensive position and continue the fight until 1918. Then, however, it had been supported by French and British armies which remained intact and combatant. Now, unfairly condemned for deserting them by allies who were themselves on the point of collapse, it had no option but to ask for terms. So, too, shortly would the divisions of the French First Army which were encircled at Lille and running out of ammunition. So bravely had they fought that, when they marched out to surrender on 30 May, the Germans rendered them the honours of war, playing them into captivity with the music of a military band. It was significant evidence of the fighting spirit of the French army of 1940 that a large proportion of these stalwarts were not French at all, but North African subjects of the French empire.

The evacuation of the BEF – and the French troops in the Dunkirk pocket who could be got to the beaches – was now in full swing. Only 8000 were got off on 26-27 May; but on 28 May, as the fleet of naval ships and civilian small craft standing in to the shore grew, 19,000 were embarked. On 29 May 47,000 were rescued; on 31 May, the day Gort himself left for England, 68,000. By 4 June, when the last ship drew away, 338,000 Allied soldiers had been saved from capture. The number included almost the whole manpower of the BEF less its temporarily irreplaceable equipment, and 110,000 French soldiers, the majority of whom on arriving in England were immediately transhipped and returned to French ports in Normandy and Brittany to rejoin the rest of the French army still in the field.

This now consisted of sixty divisions, some survivors of the battle on the Meuse, some withdrawn from the Maginot Line; only three were armoured, all much depleted, particularly de Gaulle’s 4th Armoured, which on 28-30 May had once again tried but failed to dent the flank of the Panzer corridor, this time near Abbeville. Two British divisions remained in France: the 1st (and only) Armoured Division and the 51st Highland Division, defending the coast west of Dunkirk (the British rifle regiments committed to the defence of Calais had already been overwhelmed). Against them the Germans deployed eighty-nine infantry divisions and fifteen Panzer and motorised divisions, the latter organised into five groups, each of two Panzer and one motorised divisions. These Panzer-motorised combinations formed powerful offensive instruments, which provided the model for the tank-infantry formations with which offensive operations would be conducted throughout the Second World War and, indeed, ever since. The Luftwaffe continued to deploy about 2500 strike aircraft, fighters and bombers, which they could now operate from captured airfields close to the battle line. The French air force, though reinforced by machines hastily purchased from the United States, and supported by 350 aircraft of the RAF, could only operate some 980.

Weygand, his ‘plan’ having collapsed, now pinned his hopes for resistance on the defence of a position which would be called the ‘Weygand Line’. The resilient old general had not yet abandoned hope; he had even outlined a defensive scheme which mirrored that of the German offensive plan in its modernity. The ‘Weygand Line’, running from the Channel coast along the line of the rivers Somme and Aisne to join the Maginot Line at Montmédy, was to be held as a ‘chequerboard’ of ‘hedgehogs’ (NATO would adopt a similar scheme for the defence of the Central Front in Germany in the 1970s). The ‘hedgehogs’ – villages and woods – were to be filled with troops and anti-tank weapons and to continue resistance even if bypassed by enemy spearheads.

The theory was excellent, the practice lamentable. The Weygand Line broke almost as soon as it was attacked by the right wing of the Panzer array between Amiens and the coast on 5 June. The fault lay not with the fighting spirit of the French troops, which had greatly revived, but with their material weakness. They were outnumbered and lacked tanks, effective anti-tank weapons and air cover. Colonials and reservists fought with equal valour. ‘In those ruined villages’, wrote Karl von Stackelberg, ‘the French resisted to the last man. Some hedgehogs carried on when our infantry was twenty miles behind them.’ On 5 and 6 June the Germans were stopped dead at several points and even suffered crippling tank losses. If the Weygand Line had had ‘depth’, the German advance might have been held by its outposts, but, once its crust was broken, there were no troops behind it to seal off the breach or counter-attack. Rommel, leading the 7th Panzer Division across country when it was checked by hedgehogs commanding the roads, quickly found a way into the rear and was directed by the headquarters of Bock’s Army Group B, to which he was now subordinate, to turn towards the coast and encircle the defenders of the Weygand Line’s left wing from the rear; in the process he would force the surrender of the last British infantry division left in France, the 51st Highland.

On 9 June Rundstedt’s Army Group A moved to the attack on the Aisne. Led by Guderian’s Panzer group of four armoured and two motorised divisions, it was briefly checked, notably by the resistance of the French 14th Division under General Jean de Lattre de Tassigny, a future Marshal of France, whose reputation for defiance in the teeth of defeat was established that day. Yet on the Aisne, as on the Somme, the Germans were now too strong for any display of French courage to hold them in check. The previous evening Pétain, the Deputy Prime Minister, told his former chief of staff, Bernard Serrigny, that Weygand foresaw the possibility of holding the line for three days at most and that he himself intended to ‘push the government to request an armistice. There is a meeting of the Central Committee tomorrow. I shall draft a proposal.’ Serrigny warned that the next day would be too late. ‘Action should be taken while France still has the façade of an army and Italy has not yet come in. Get a neutral to intervene in the approach. Roosevelt seems the obvious choice. He can bring his power to bear on Hitler.’