To Lose a Battle (3 page)

The expansion, it turned out, helped the United States more than it helped France. Hitler invaded the Low Countries on 10 May 1940. The delivery of American planes had begun the previous December, but assemblage (in Casablanca!) was slow. When the Germans launched their attack, the French Air Force had received fewer than 170 American planes. Despite the limited training time for French crews, the Glenn Martin and Douglas attack bombers acquitted themselves effectively in combat; so did the Curtiss Hawk fighters.
⁹

It was, as so often in those days, too little and too late. Had French purchases of American planes begun earlier, had French assemblage been more efficient, had assemblage taken place in Bordeaux rather than in Casablanca, Germany might not have gained control of the air so quickly. But Guderian’s
Blitzkrieg
smashed through Allied resistance and tipped the balance of the
war in the first week. Did it have to happen that way? Alistair Horne’s graphic account shows how much in the fog of war turned on decisions that might have been made differently.

Had King Leopold of Belgium foreseen the inevitable and permitted the entry of Allied troops before the German attack, or, given Leopold’s obstinacy, had the Allies not sent major forces into Belgium at all… had Georges not vetoed air attacks on the Panzer divisions in the early days of the campaign, and had the Allies possessed more effective bombers, and more of them, to destroy the German pontoons across the Meuse at Sedan… had the French counter-attacked with concerted vigor against Rommel’s and Guderian’s bridgeheads across the Meuse… had Guderian obeyed Hitler’s order of 17 May and halted his hellbent advance into France… had Weygand waited for Gort in Ypres on 21 May or, alternatively, had he not wasted two days in a tour of command posts… had the Allies struck across the thinly lined and overextended Panzer Corridor by 21 May… might not, on such ifs, the German attack have been turned back? Roosevelt told his Cabinet as late as 7 June that, if the French could hold out for three weeks, they would be able to win against the Germans.
¹⁰

The ifs might have helped the Germans even more. Had Gort not acted on his own, attacked at Arras on the 21st, and then begun the withdrawal of British forces toward Dunkirk on the 23rd, and had Hitler not stopped his own Panzers with his halt order of 24 May, would not the Germans have beaten the British to Dunkirk, cut off the British Expeditionary Force, and ended the war in 1940?

Why did France fall? Alistair Horne’s judicious assessment gives full weight to the political decadence of the Third Republic; the obsession of the French rich with the Communist danger and their complacency about fascism; Madame de Portes and the breaking of Paul Reynaud, the anti-Nazi Prime Minister; the fear of another national bleeding like that of 1914-18; the lack of military coordination with the Belgians, the Dutch, and the British; the release of Germany from a two-front war by the Hitler-Stalin Pact. But in the end he generally endorses Weygand’s terse summary, “We have gone to war with a 1918 army against a
German Army of 1939” — and with a 1918 army grown old in rigidity, inefficiency, and confusion. Though the French had more tanks and guns than the Germans, the French General Staff had drawn the wrong military lessons from victory while the German General Staff was drawing the right military lessons from defeat and concluding that the war of position was giving way to the war of movement. The superb set piece with which
To Lose a Battle
begins, the Victory Parade of 14 July 1919, implies and explains the illusions of 1940.

Alistair Horne’s verdict resembles that of Captain Marc Bloch, the great French historian who fought bravely during the fall of France, as he had done in the Great War, joined the Resistance after the French surrender, and was tortured and killed by the Germans in 1944. “Whatever the deep-seated causes of the disaster may have been,” Marc Bloch wrote in 1940, “the immediate occasion… was the utter incompetence of the High Command.”
¹¹

The Battle of France had immediate and drastic impact on the United States. It provided Franklin Roosevelt with the evidence, or a good deal of it, that he needed to press the American military buildup. His Cabinet meeting a week after the Nazi attack, wrote Harold Ickes, the interventionist Secretary of the Interior, “was the longest Cabinet meeting that I can remember.… Our feelings were not very cheerful because all during the week the news from Holland and Belgium and France had been getting worse and worse. The problem with us now is to throw everything into high gear and prepare as fast as we can.”
¹²

The President accelerated his campaign to persuade Congress and the nation of the Nazi threat to the United States. He set forth the strategic implications for the Americas of the Nazi conquest of Europe in a series of speeches and press conferences — before the Pan-American Scientific Congress on the day that Hitler launched his invasion, in a message to Congress on 16 May requesting additional appropriations for national defense, a week after to the Business Advisory Council (“The buffer has been the British Fleet and the French Army. If these two are removed, there is nothing between the Americas and those new forces in Europe”
¹³
), on 26 May a fireside chat on national defense, on
31 May another message to Congress, on 10 June, the day Mussolini brought Italy into the war against a mortally wounded France, in a speech at Charlottesville, Virginia (“the hand that held the dagger has struck it into the back of its neighbor”).
¹⁴

At first, the rush of events in Europe caused a dramatic swing in American opinion. “It is difficult,” the British Library of Information in New York reported to London on 21 May, “to find any parallel in the history of British public opinion to the speed and extent of the change in the American attitude toward the war which has taken place during the last ten days.”
¹⁵
“The past week,” Lord Lothian, the British Ambassador in Washington, cabled the Foreign Office on 24 May, “has brought sudden realization to Washington and a dawning understanding to the country of what elimination of Great Britain would mean to the security of the United States.”
¹⁶
“Moves designed to aid Allies now commands [sic] overwhelming support in Middle West,” Frank Knox, soon to be appointed Secretary of the Navy, wired Roosevelt on 7 June from that citadel of isolationism Chicago. “… My desk is covered this morning with telegrams and letters which show unmistakably this swift trend.”
¹⁷
“For the first time in over a century,” observed Adolf Berle of the State Department, “the country is beginning to get a little frightened.”
¹⁸
“As an old friend,” William Allen White, the Kansas editor, wired the President three days later, “let me warn you that maybe you will not be able to lead the American people unless you catch up with them.”
¹⁹

Isolationists disagreed. Colonel Charles A. Lindbergh denounced the administration for inspiring a “hysterical chatter of calamity and invasion”; the outcome in Europe, he said, was no business of America’s.
²⁰
For the moment such voices were drowned out. “Pro-Ally sentiment has swept forward with such force,” the British Library of Information reported on 12 June, “that isolationist Senators have been left stranded.… Some newspaper men go so far as to predict ‘We’ll be in the war in two months.’ ”
²¹

During these grim days the American President received increasingly desperate cables from Prime Minister Reynaud, pleading for arms and ammunition, for planes — “clouds of planes” —
finally for an American declaration of war. “If you cannot give to France in the hours to come the certainty that the United States will come into the war within a very short time, the fate of the world will change.”
²²
This last proposal was quite unrealistic politically. Perhaps Reynaud hoped, consciously or unconsciously, to put Roosevelt on the spot and thereby distribute blame for French collapse.

Roosevelt responded with salutes to French courage, exhortations to keep up the fight, and assurances that, so long as the French continued resistance, the Americans would continue sending supplies in ever-increasing quantities. Churchill took the exhortations and the assurances as the equivalent of American belligerency. “We feel,” he told Reynaud, “that the United States is committed beyond recall to take the only remaining step, namely, becoming a belligerent in form as she already has constituted herself in fact.”
²³
Reynaud sent Roosevelt a final insinuating appeal: unless the United States went to war, “you will see France go under like a drowning man and disappear after having cast a last look towards the land of liberty from which she awaited salvation.”
²⁴

Roosevelt replied by repeating his admiration for French courage and his pledge of continued assistance. He concluded, however, by making the point about the American Constitution that his ambassadors in Paris and London had been trying to make to Reynaud and Churchill throughout the crisis. “These statements,” Roosevelt said, “carry with them no implication of military commitments. Only Congress can make such commitments.”
²⁵

France fell, and “the French collapse,” the British Library of Information reported gloomily to London on 21 June, “has undoubtedly slowed down the progress of sentiments towards more active intervention.” The fall of France, the British observers added six days later, had caused “a sharp recession of the tide” previously flowing toward aid to the Allies. Isolationists now recovered their voices, truculently denied any American stake in the European war, and opposed aid to Britain as detracting from American self-defense. Lord Lothian soon noted “an ebb of defeatism in Congress and press circles… crystallized into the
question ‘can Britain resist alone, long enough to justify our backing her and antagonizing Hitler — is it not already too late?’ ”
²⁶

Some Americans thought it was. Anne Morrow Lindbergh, in a widely read book published later that year, sweetly pronounced totalitarianism “the wave of the future.” While her husband predicted Nazi victory and opposed American aid to the democracies, the gentle Mrs. Lindbergh lamented “the beautiful things… lost in the dying of an age,” saw totalitarianism as free society’s predestined successor, discounted the evils of Hitlerism and Stalinism as merely “scum on the wave of the future,” and concluded that “the wave of the future is coming and there is no fighting it… any more than as a child you could fight against the gigantic roller that loomed up ahead of you.”
²⁷

Happily Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt thought otherwise. To lose a battle was not to lose a war. But their way was not strewn with flowers. It is easy for later generations to look back and think that, because it happened, Allied victory was inevitable. In fact, Hitler might well have won. Alistair Horne’s book reminds us of the eternal truth of Maitland’s axiom: “It is very difficult to remember that events now in the past were once far in the future.”

—A
RTHUR
S
CHLESINGER
, J
R
.

Preface to 1990 edition

The great Lewis Namier once observed that history does not repeat itself; it is only the historians who repeat one another. Certain patterns of events, however,
do
recur, and it is the well-versed student of history (not least, perhaps, the military strategist) who can spot a familiar opportunity when it presents itself, and grab the advantage therein. Hitler’s triumphant campaign against France in 1940 remains a timeless text-book success of epic scale; its lessons, properly assimilated and applied, enabled at least one other nation (whose people had, above all others, suffered so much at Hitler’s hands) to save itself from overthrow, and transform defeat into victory.

In October 1973, the so-called Yom Kippur (or Ramadan, depending on the point of view) War broke out. Egypt took Israel completely by surprise, swarming across the Suez Canal and utilizing a secret weapon of powerful fire-hoses literally to melt away the high sand-barriers that Israel had erected to protect her outnumbered defenders. For several critical days, it looked as if Israel would be defeated, after suffering heavy losses among her armoured units. Then, suddenly, to the world’s astonishment, there was a remarkable riposte by Israeli mobile units, which re-crossed the Suez Canal and inflicted a decisive defeat upon the superior Egyptian forces.

The Israeli Army, which regards itself as being one of the best read in military history in the world, and possesses its own publishing house, is carefully selective in printing only works that it deems to hold a direct bearing on Israel’s survival. Thus, after their great success in the 1967 ‘Six Day War’, I was gratified – but somewhat taken aback – when the Israelis purchased my book on the Battle of Verdun, 1916,
The Price of Glory
, for translation into Hebrew. The ‘Six Day War’ had been
a staggering display of
Blitzkrieg
-style warfare, of the 1940 brand, and I found it hard to see just what lessons Verdun, that grim classic of static warfare, could hold for the highly mobile Israeli armed forces. However, when I visited Israel for publication of the book, it was explained to me, most patiently, that Israel – in the wake of 1967 – was suffering unacceptable losses from Egyptian artillery bombardments along the Suez Canal, and the Israelis were currently studying all they could about the positional defensive battles of the First World War. I understood. In the ensuing years, the Israeli Army – wisely – followed the German example of 1914–18, as opposed to the French: dig deep and hold your forward lines lightly. So when the Yom Kippur War of 1973 broke out, this correct assessment probably saved Israel, with its tiny manpower resources, untold casualties – if not the war itself.