The World at War (14 page)

Ramsay's most optimistic forecast was that he might be able to evacuate 45,000 men, but in the event Hitler halted the advance of his armies and the Channel enjoyed unusual calm between 26 May and 4 June, during which 220,000 British and 120,000 Trench troops were evacuated to England. Nine Allied destroyers and perhaps 200 civilian vessels were lost, and the RAF suffered severe casualties covering the evacuation, unseen and unappreciated by the troops on the beaches. Starting on 5 June, the Germans swung south and Trench resistance collapsed, though not without some heavy
fighting. The Italians opportunistically declared war on 10 June; Paris fell four days later while the French government fled to Bordeaux and formally capitulated on 25 June.

Despite the popular assumption that Dunkirk was Britain's last act on the continent for the time being, 51st Highland Division – in the Maginot line when the fighting started – was later forced to surrender at St Valéry on the coast, and during the final evacuation of British troops from St Nazaire on the Atlantic coast the troopship
Lancastria
was sunk with the loss of over 3,000 lives. Unwilling to take the risk that the French Navy would finish up in German hands and perhaps transform the war at sea, Churchill ordered the Royal Navy to present French warships at Mers el-Kebir in North Africa with an ultimatum to sail to Britain or to a neutral port for internment and, when this was rejected on 3 July 1940, the French fleet was bombarded with the loss of 1,600 lives. This did much to assure America of the strength of British purpose, but both it and the evacuation from Dunkirk cast a long shadow over Franco-British relations.

LAWRENCE DURRELL

Francophile British novelist

I was only twenty-five and my France was the literary France, but it was always pretty hopeless. They're
anti-militarists to a man; they despise uniforms and so on and so forth, and they have been continuously invaded by the Germans but have shown no sign of wanting a piece of German territory – Alsace is a language question rather than a land question – and so they feel much put upon and really not disposed to fight for anyone else. They had this belief that really all wars were contrived by idiots who didn't know how to live, and I wonder – how wrong were they? Particularly the sort of pumpkin-eating Protestant nations like the British and the Germans, who were always worried about territorial problems, and the French just wanted to stay home and eat well and go to bed with their girlfriends.

GORDON WATERFIELD

British journalist in France

I don't think the French people themselves were defeatist. I think the
defeatism and the fifth column – if you can use that term – came at the top, among the politicians. There was a very strong peace movement among certain politicians; some of them were even pro-German and wanted jobs with the Germans. When things went badly this group got larger and became more dominant and got rid of people like Prime Minister Paul Reynaud who was trying to fight. The main trouble was that in the past there had been great animosity against Jewish Prime Minister Leon Blum's government, the 1936–37 Socialist government, and there was a great division in French society. They were frightened that if they called on the people to hold back the Germans, I mean a popular uprising as they had done before in 1871, there would be Communism and revolution. They wanted to keep the civilians out of the war and they made no effort to bring them in, with the result that the civilians had nothing to do and eventually became frightened and joined the refugees.

CAPTAIN ANDRÉ BEAUFRE

French General Staff

It was a period of decay, of very deep decay, probably caused by the excess of the effort during World War One. I think generally speaking we suffered from an illness, which is not peculiar to the French, that of having been victorious and believing that we were right and very clever.

MAJOR GENERAL SIR EDWARD SPEARS

Conservative MP and Churchill's personal representative in France

The whole of the French upper and middle classes — the right, if you like – preferred the idea of the Germans to their own Communists and I think you can call that a very powerful fifth column, and it was worked to death by the Germans.

LAWRENCE DURRELL

You didn't have to walk round these streets and see
'Pourquoi? Pourquoi
?' written on the walls, or the hammer and sickle, to realise that nobody was going to lift a finger, you know, and the German propaganda was jolly good. It had to be a bit unimaginative of the British not to be taken in by it – the Parisians were thoroughly taken in and so we kissed Paris goodbye.

MAJOR GENERAL WALTHER WARLIMONT

Deputy Chief of Wehrmacht Operations

The origins of the
Sickle Stroke plan has to be attributed to General
Erich von Manstein who in autumn 1939 was Chief of Staff of Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt, Army Group A. He was utterly opposed to the earlier plan, which was Hitler's own and which copied the strategy, the World War One
Schlieffen plan, by assembling the bulk of the forces on the northern wing with the intention to conduct the main thrust through Belgium. This was the plan, with few alterations, was held up all through the dark winter of 1939–40, when the start was postponed by Hitler's orders from one week to another, altogether thirteen times because of unfavourable weather. When I returned from a visit to the Western Front and to the headquarters of Army Group A, there General Manstein interviewed me his ideas. My report on my return to Berlin, to the Chief of the Armoured Force Operations Staff and the Chief Military Adviser of Hitler, made a slight impression on him. On the next day, he informed Hitler of these plans. Hitler grasped the value of Manstein's ideas and on 17th February 1940 received the General in Berlin where he listened most attentively. Hitler's fear that the earlier plans had been made known to the enemy gave the impulse to overthrow them and prepare the way for the Sickle Stroke plan. Hitler said, 'Manstein is the only General who understands my own ideas,' already marks the beginning of his later claim that he himself had initiated the plan. Hitler for some time had insisted upon supporting the main thrust in the northern wing by an armoured group of two or three armoured divisions, which was to advance on a narrow strip of open country through Luxemburg on both sides of the Ardennes forest in the direction of Sedan. Manstein's advice had become an entirely new strategy, shifting the centre of gravity from the northern to the southern wing. By reversing these actual facts Hitler and his propaganda took care that the overwhelming success of the campaign was attributed to him as a greatest strategist of all times – this was the slogan of the
German propaganda after the French campaign.

CAPTAIN BEAUFRE

The
French stuck to the foremost lessons of the First World War, the belief in the defensive, the quality of the trenches against tanks. We had tanks in the First World War and we knew all the difficulties of the game while the Germans, who didn't have them, had the feeling of those who were attacked by tanks and had a sort of, let's say, fashion for tanks. And while we considered that the tanks were a little awkward and difficult to use and so on, the Germans were like
nouveaux riches,
you know, when they jumped to the new weapons with the appetite of the starving. That was very normal from both sides: we, having been victorious, were sure of our message; the Germans, having been defeated, copied what they had thought was useful in our methods, which we didn't really feel ourselves.

MAJOR GENERAL WARLIMONT

We were conscious of the French inclination of the
Maginot line thinking, particularly that the French General Staff had not yet adopted military means against a new strategy advocated by British military thinker Basil Liddell Hart, which was founded on mobility and strength of offensive operations, motorised troops strongly supported by special units of the Air Force.

GORDON WATERFIELD

The Phoney War did a lot of harm to the French soldiers, the Maginot line did a lot of harm, the whole idea that this was an impregnable fortress and that all we had to do was just sit there and wait for the Germans to come and shoot them down. I visited the Maginot line and was really rather horrified by the effect it must have had on the soldiers. I visited near Strasburg and the Germans were busy the other side constructing defences on the other side of the Rhine. I said to a colonel – the colonel was very proud of his defences – I said, 'Magnificent concrete this, very good concrete', and I asked, 'Have they got such good concrete on the other side?' 'Oh, no, certainly not.' 'Do you ever think of attacking the other side and destroying their concrete?' 'No, no, that would not be a very good idea.' And then I stayed at an observation post on the Rhine watching the Germans washing and playing football, and I said to the sentry, 'Why don't you shoot them, why don't you shoot at them?' 'No', he said, 'they're behaving perfectly all right – they don't shoot at us, why should we shoot at them?' This was all very well, probably if I'd been a sentry I wouldn't have wanted to stir up trouble. But the generals should have made their men raid to keep up their morale and to test the strength of the Germans, the strength of the fortifications. But this didn't happen.

CAPTAIN BEAUFRE

The whole story was that the war wouldn't be a war of movement. It would be attrition and the result of the war would be like in the First World War, won by indirect operations on the borders, and that is how it mushroomed, all these funny ideas of action against Russia, supposed to be the weak ally, which was entirely foolish. We had a plan to attack Russia through Norway, which led to the landing at Narvik. And we had the plan to raise the Balkans with us by landing at Salonika and join the Yugoslavs, and so on. But all this was dreams and simply foolish.

COLONEL HASSO-ECCARD FREIHERR VON MANTEUFFEL

Panzer troop consultant, German General Staff

We knew that the
French High Command had dispersed his tanks. The French had more, better, heavier tanks than we have but we managed our Panzer Group, as its commander General Paul von Kleist said, 'Don't tap them – strike as a whole and don't disperse.' And so we went with our bulk, we had no care of our flanks and so it was possible, with the work of the Panzer Group, to go to the Channel.

MAJOR GENERAL SPEARS

The French High Command were beneath contempt and this was due to a fundamental dispute between generals Gamelin and Georges. The dispute between those two men was fatal to the whole of the French defence. I knew Gamelin in 1914; he was a very dapper, teasing little man, very sure of himself, and everybody thought he had a great career before him. What ruined him was politics, a desire to get on with one type of politician rather than another. That was fatal as far as he was concerned. Georges was an exceptionally fine soldier but he'd been severely damaged at the time of the 1934 assassination of King Peter of Yugoslavia in Marseilles. He was very badly hurt – the French Foreign Minister was killed and it had affected Georges very profoundly, physically. I was very fond of him but it was very painful to me to see this fall in capacity really due to that most unfortunate incident.

CAPTAIN BEAUFRE

Gamelin's choice of headquarters near Paris reveals what the man was. The enemy were not the Germans; it was the French government with which he had to deal all the time to be protected against manoeuvres to replace him and so on. This was very typical of what he, how he, understood his job. Instead of a fighting general he was a political general.

COLONEL MANTEUFFEL

I think that the French generals have very good training on paper but they have no connection with their troops. Our Air Force had destroyed all telephone cables and so it was impossible to have connection with their troops. But now in this age with motorcycles and cars it is essential to have connection with field commanders.

GORDON WATERFIELD

Well, we did get to some French HQs with only one phone, but the reason for this was that they had not expected a
war of movement. They had expected to be able to sit behind the Maginot line and fight the Germans there – they were not ready with a second line of defence. So when they had to retreat to these chateaux there was no organisation of phones and they were cut off from other units and groups, and this happened almost everywhere.

MAJOR GENERAL SPEARS

When Gamelin came to England he was asked by Churchill where were his reserves and he said, 'I have none' – it was unbelievable. Churchill was absolutely appalled and began to look for means of going on with the war in North Africa, then in Brittany. Anything, you see, to carry on, not to give way. But the French very soon accepted the idea of defeat, really, and surrender. To them it was rather a conception of the old days of royalty when you just exchanged a couple of provinces, paid a certain number of millions and then called it a day, and started off next time hoping you would be more lucky.

MAJOR GENERAL WARLIMONT

The Ardennes and Sedan came to be chosen as the main points of the armoured thrust as it was possible to circumvent the Maginot line and because this way opened up a whole route towards the section of the French positions which was defended by minor forces only. So certainly there were very great difficulties of conducting the armoured troops through the Ardennes forest. They would come by the most careful preparations of the Army General Staff, which justified its claim to have played an important part in the whole plan.

LAWRENCE DURRELL

The French temperament is much more mercurial, much more given to
despondency and so on than the rather phlegmatic British, and also another thing is they happen to live without the Channel between them. It's that damned Channel that's saved us over and over again. We haven't been invaded two or three times; so naturally they'd had a dose of this and didn't like it at all. Then of course the right wing had a sneaking feeling that the Germans might do it better, because the left wing was clearly going to be ruled by the Russians. All that contributed to an indecision, an enormous weakening of potential, so I suppose in the final analysis the morale of the French Army dropped entirely through indecision.