To Lose a Battle (2 page)

2. The opposing forces (10 May 1940)

3. The Meuse crossings (12–13 May)

4A. The Dinant crossing (13–14 May)

4B. The Sedan crossing (13–14 May)

5. The Panzer breakthrough (15–17 May)

6. The Panzer ‘corridor’ (18–21 May)

7. Counter-attack at Arras (21–23 May)

8. Encirclement of the northern armies (21–31 May)

9. The last phase (5–22 June)

Foreword to 1990 edition

General Maurice Gamelin,
Time
told its readers in a cover story on 14 August 1939, “is head of what, by almost unanimous acclaim, is today the world’s finest military machine.”
¹
“An incomparable machine,” Winston Churchill had called the French army two years earlier.
²
Yet the world’s finest military machine, the great incomparable, disintegrated in six short weeks before Hitler’s onslaught in the lovely spring of 1940.
To Lose a Battle
, Alistair Horne’s fine book on the fall of France, so effectively joins a masterful account of the fighting with incisive political analysis and brilliant portraiture that in twenty years it has achieved the status of a classic.

For Americans old enough to recall the fall of France,
To Lose a Battle
will bring back many memories. The war of 1914–1918 — the Great War, as we called it then — had left the United States in a mood of disillusion, and the Great Depression, by turning America inward, reinforced ancient instincts of isolationism. When a new European war broke out in September 1939, most Americans hoped that the Western Allies would win, but still regarded the conflict in Europe as from a great, almost impassable, distance. For centuries, as ex-President Herbert Hoover put it, there had surged through the twenty-six nations of Europe “the forces of nationalism, of imperialism, of religious conflict, memories of deep wrongs, of age-old hates, and bitter fears.… With a vicious rhythm these malign forces seem to drive nations like the Gadarene swine over the precipice of war.”
³

Some Americans, however, saw a definite American stake in the European conflict. Foremost among them was the President of the United States. Franklin Roosevelt combined the balance-of-power realism of his kinsman Theodore Roosevelt with the
collective-security idealism of Woodrow Wilson, the President he had served as Assistant Secretary of the Navy during the Great War. The Great Depression made the domestic economy Roosevelt’s first priority, but nonetheless he followed the rise of Hitler with acute foreboding.

So Roosevelt refused at the London Economic Conference of 1933 to sacrifice his national recovery program to European demands for an international gold standard; but, as he subsequently wrote the aggrieved British Prime Minister, “I am concerned by events in Germany, for I feel that an insane rush to further armaments in Continental Europe is infinitely more dangerous than any number of squabbles over gold or stabilization or tariffs.”
⁴
When Stafford Cripps came to luncheon in 1935 and assured Roosevelt that in the end Germany would wriggle out of any actual fighting, the president wrote ironically to William C. Bullitt, his ambassador in Moscow, “He told me, with a straight face, that Hitler does not feel he can count on the German people to back him up in a war.”
⁵

German aggression, Roosevelt believed, was bound to threaten the national security of the United States. His annual message to Congress in January 1936, with its condemnation of “autocratic institutions that beget slavery at home and aggression abroad,”
⁶
began Roosevelt’s long labor of popular education to prepare the American people to meet the danger. Then and later, his hands were tied by the rigid congressional neutrality policy that, over his objections, prohibited arms shipments to all belligerents, victims of agression as well as agressors. Roosevelt persevered. His “quarantine” speech of 1937 was another step in his campaign. Neville Chamberlain, the British Prime Minister, thereafter rebuffed gestures of co-operation, believing that Roosevelt’s policy ran athwart his own program of appeasement.

The French government, less persuaded of the virtues of appeasement and alarmed by the growth of Hitler’s Luftwaffe, sent Baron Amaury de La Grange to the United States in January 1938 to buy American military aircraft. As La Grange reported to Paris, he found Roosevelt “well informed about what is going on in Germany and… completely in favor of all measures that
the French Government might believe necessary to reinforce its air formation.” He added that “as long as the White House is occupied by Mr. Roosevelt, who is Francophile and fears German expansion,” there was hope of repeal or sympathetic interpretation of the neutrality restrictions.
⁷

Although La Grange was disappointed to find that the American aircraft industry was not yet up to producing modern combat planes, he recommended that orders be placed for improved models. Little was done, however, until Munich, when Édouard Daladier, now the French Prime Minister, sent Jean Monnet on a second air mission to the United States. With the ardent co-operation of Henry Morgenthau, Jr., the American Secretary of the Treasury, Monnet laid the basis for large-scale French (and soon English) purchase of American planes — a development seized by Roosevelt as a means of promoting the expansion of American military aircraft production. Ironically, Paul Reynaud, as French Finance Minister, opposed plane purchases in America lest they deplete France’s gold reserves. (He changed his mind when he became Prime Minister in 1940.) In the end, the Anglo-French orders of nearly $70 million (nearly one billion in current dollars) quadrupled American aircraft capacity
⁸
— more than an isolationist Congress was willing to do.