To Lose a Battle (33 page)

As May brought the unleashing of
Sichelschnitt
ever closer, some remarkable warnings came out of Germany itself, the most accurate of which were received by the Dutch. Colonel Hans Oster, a senior officer in the Abwehr itself and one of the most active and courageous members of the German ‘resistance’,
²³
was an intimate friend of Colonel Sas, the Dutch Military Attaché in Berlin. Four times between November and 10 May he provided Sas with precise warnings of Hitler’s offensive plans; but the Dutch were mistrustful – partly because of the past false alarms, partly because they ardently
wanted
to believe that they would not be attacked. On 3 April, Oster had warned Sas (correctly) of the Norwegian operation; now, on 3 May, he told Oster that Holland was imminently to be attacked. The Dutch informed the Belgians, and took some measures to alert their Army. Sas would meet Oster once again, on the evening of 9 May.

On the Brink

Seldom had there been a more marvellous spring (though few cared to remember that it was just the same wonderful weather,
‘Goering’s weather’, as had accompanied the rape of Poland the previous September). Parisians lingered in the pavement cafés, listening to the strains of
J’Attendrai
and dreaming nostalgically of last year’s holidays. Clare Boothe went into raptures at how

chestnuts burst into leaf on the lovely avenues of Paris, sunlight danced off the opalescent grey buildings, and the gold and grey sunsets, glimpsed through the soaring Arc de Triomphe at the end of the long splendid vista of the Champs-Élysées, brought a catch of pain and pleasure in your throat.

There were art shows in the Grand Palais, racing at Auteuil, and soccer matches between Tommies and
poilus
in the suburbs. ‘The shop windows of van Cleef and Arpels and Mauboussin and Cartier sparkled with great jewels in the sunlight,’ she recalled. ‘And lots of people bought them…’ The Ritz, as usual, was ‘crowded with lovely ladies wearing simple dresses or the smart uniforms of the
Union des Femmes de France
service’. There was also a wealthy Mrs Corrigan who wore a uniform of her own design, embroidered with her motto ‘Bien Venu!’ There were meatless days, sugarless days, liquorless days, no more luxury chocolates and the
pâtisseries
closed three days a week, but none of this made too much difference to Parisian gastronomy. On 2 May, says Fabre-Luce, ‘Parisian society gave its last party. It was a charity gala at the Marigny Theatre…’ The front seats were occupied by such dethroned monarchs as the Duke of Windsor and King Zog of Albania. About the same time, André Maurois found the Academy peaceably working away on its eternal dictionary:

… the definition of the word
aile
led to a passage of arms between Abel Bonnard and Georges Duhamel. The previous edition had called a wing ‘a muscle’. ‘It’s perfectly ridiculous,’ said Bonnard. ‘A wing is a limb.’ ‘On the contrary,’ said Dr Duhamel, ‘a wing is a muscle. What you eat in the wing of a chicken is the muscle, no more and no less…’

And so the argument continued. Could anything, one might have wondered, could anything alter the basic facts of French life?

But underneath this veneer of ‘business as usual’, reality was still all too evident to the discerning. Pierre Mendès-France, returning on leave from Syria at the beginning of May, was shocked at what he found:

Everyone, civilian and military, thought only of organizing his personal life as well as possible in order to get through this seemingly indefinite period without too much risk, loss or discomfort… One heard only of recreation for the Army, sport for the Army, art and music for the Army, theatrical shows for the Army, and so on…

(Meanwhile, in England Lady Astor had caused a stir in the Commons by inquiring about the number of licensed French brothels at the front.) Since January the amount of leave given the French Army had been vastly augmented. In fact, on 7 May, Gamelin had actually restored normal leave throughout the Army. Major Sarraz-Bournet of the
Deuxième Bureau
recounts that ‘Despite the warnings of Colonel Gauché, leave at the beginning of May had not been suspended, even at the
Grand Quartier Général.
I had myself gone off on the eve of Whitsun to go and spend a few days of a brief leave in the Dauphiné…’ But better leave conditions had certainly done little to boost morale. Sarraz-Bournet (whose job was to control postal censorship) detected a belief widespread in the Army by the spring of 1940 that the war would end ‘without battle, by a diplomatic arrangement between the interested Governments… nothing could have been worse for morale’, while Major Barlone from Blanchard’s élite First Army wrote in his diary on 30 April: ‘The General advises us to look after the morale of our men; we must give them some distraction. The postal censorship shows that the men are fed up… ’ Nevertheless, despite all the manifestly disturbing symptoms within the Army, at the beginning of May, General Billotte could still tell some of his corps commanders who had complained to him about arms deficiencies: ‘Why bother yourselves? Nothing will happen before 1941!’

In Germany, rationing had cut food consumption to some 75 per cent of the pre-war average, but nobody was hungry. Over the winter, Joseph Harsch of the
Christian Science Monitor
remarked, Berliners had been kept ‘in good humour’ by a variety of ‘Japanese tumblers, Italian aerial artistes, Hungarian folk orchestras and clever Viennese skits, often at the. expense of the Party great’. After eight months during which they had not been attacked by the Allies, and particularly after the successes of the Norwegian campaign, German nerves were much restored. But still it was hard to find actual enthusiasm for the war. On Easter Sunday (24 March) William Shirer thought the faces of the Berliners ‘looked blank. Obviously they do not like the war, but they will do what they’re told. Die, for instance…’ On 19 April, the eve of Hitler’s fifty-first birthday, Shirer found only some seventy-five people outside the Chancellery waiting for a glimpse of their Führer, whereas in other years ‘there were ten thousand’. On 1 May, Shirer once again visited the Rhine front: ‘all was quiet… Not a single airplane could be seen in the skies.’ His diary continues:

May 7. For three or four days now the German newspapers have been carrying on a terrific campaign to convince somebody that the Allies, having failed in Norway, are about to become ‘aggressors’ in some other part of Europe… Where is Germany going in next? I’m suspicious of Holland, partly because it’s the one place not specifically mentioned in this propaganda campaign…

May 8. Could not help noticing a feeling of tension in the Wilhelmstrasse to-day. Something is up, but we don’t know what…

May 9. Headlines increased in size to-night ‘
BRITAIN PLOTS TO SPREAD THE WAR
’ they roar… it may well be, as many people over here think, that the war will be fought and decided before the summer is over. People somehow seem to feel that the Whitsuntide holidays this week-end will be the last holidays Europe will observe for some time.

At last, Hitler’s Panzers were ready to roll. On 7 May he had allowed Goering to extract one last postponement, on account of the weather, from him – ‘but not a day longer’. Then, on the evening of 9 May, the Luftwaffe announced that ‘the weather on 10 May will be good’. Like the bearer of good tidings to some oriental despot of bygone years, the head of the Meteorological Service earned a gold watch for his favourable report.
Inside the Chancellery and at both O.K.W. and O.K.H. headquarters, however, extreme nervousness prevailed. On the 9th, Halder recorded anxiety aroused by ‘alarming reports’ from Yugoslavia, purporting that French and British tanks had landed there. Nevertheless, that evening Hitler and his entourage embarked on the ‘Führer Special’ from a small railway station near Berlin, heading north. Only after dark would it turn westwards, to bring Hitler to his specially prepared battle H.Q. at Münstereifel, midway between Bonn and the Belgian Ardennes. That night, at 2100 hours,
²⁴
the O.K.W. transmitted the codeword ‘Danzig’ to all the formations waiting expectantly behind the western frontiers of the Reich, signifying that the great offensive was to begin at 0535 hours the next morning. In Berlin, Colonel Sas met his friend, Hans Oster, again – for the last time. Oster remarked that, as there had been so many postponements, it could just happen again; but if, by 2130, no counter-order were given, ‘then this is finally it’. At 2130 the two colonels went to O.K.W. headquarters. Sas waited outside in the darkness. When Oster rejoined him, he told Sas that there had been no counter-order: ‘The swine has gone off to the West Front… Let’s hope that we’ll meet again after the war.’ Using a prearranged code, Sas then telephoned The Hague. An hour and a half later he was rung back by the Dutch Chief of Intelligence, who said, doubtingly, ‘I have just received the very bad news about the operation on your wife. Have you now spoken to all the doctors?’ Sas, much vexed, replied, ‘I don’t understand why you bother me now under these circumstances. You know now. Nothing can be done any more about this operation. I have spoken to all the doctors.’ He ended (though it seems extraordinary that German security should have allowed such a conversation to pass in clear down the telephone line): ‘Tomorrow morning, at dawn, it takes place.’ At three o’clock on the morning of the 10th, belatedly, the Dutch blew up the first of their frontier bridges.

In London, as 9 May, the 250th day of the war, came to a close, Neville Chamberlain had resigned; in Paris, Paul Reynaud had offered his resignation to President Lebrun, because
Daladier would not let him sack Gamelin. Near Nîmes, Janet Teissier du Cros, a Scotswoman waiting for her French husband to come home on leave, read joyfully in a newspaper she picked up late on the night of the 9th: ‘
Détente en Holland
’. The cock-eyed war was going to last long enough to allow François to enjoy his leave,’ she thought. ‘Nothing else mattered…’ Nearer the front, the staff officers of General Huntziger’s Second Army H.Q. had spent an agreeable evening watching a play performed by the
Théâtre aux Armées
at Vouziers. Gontaut-Biron, a mechanized Dragoon from the Third Army’s 3rd Light Cavalry Division, which was to push into Luxembourg if the Germans attacked, recalled that his evening had been ‘very gay… We played bridge very late into the night. We had no fears about anything, we had been so often told that we would be warned at least twenty-four hours in advance by our Intelligence Service. Towards eleven o’clock in the evening we separated, and went back to our respective quarters…’ That same day, her acute journalistic instinct had persuaded Clare Boothe to fly to Amsterdam: ‘Motoring from Amsterdam to the Hague,’ she recalled, ‘you couldn’t have told there was a crisis, except in the wonderful tulip fields, which had reached their maximum bloom and were about to wither.’ She reached Brussels that night, where she stayed with the American Ambassador, Cudahy. He told her: ‘ “I’ve been on the telephone night and day. But now” – his voice sounded strangely dubious, as though he himself did not quite believe it – “it’s over, thank God. The King has reinstated all his appointments for the week-end…” ’ Near Metz, on that last day of the Phoney War, the Inspector-General of Artillery, General Boris, had comforted artillery commanders of the Third Army by telling them of the modern guns that would be ready ‘next spring’.

The following morning, Friday 10 May, on a tour of inspection of the sector, General Boris heard explosions: ‘Is that a manoeuvre?’ he inquired. ‘
Mon général
, it’s the German offensive,’ came the reply. In Brussels, Clare Boothe was woken up by a maid shaking her: ‘ “Wake up! The Germans are coming again!” ’

So the scene opens on the confrontation of the century, of which the Great War – the Marne, Verdun, the Somme, Pas-schendaele and Amiens – was perhaps but a thunderous overture. On one side, France, a nation divided and with little heart for war, led by a Premier weakened by influenza and his mistress, who had offered his resignation, and by a Generalissimo under suspended sentence; guarded by an Army whose morale was to say the least patchy, weak in numbers and equipment, guided by outdated doctrine and commanded by mediocre leaders, and by an Air Force outclassed in every respect; and supported by a solitary ally who could still only contribute a handful of divisions to the coming battle. On the other side, a revolutionary Germany led by a daemonic prophet possessed of total self-assurance, but supported by professional soldiers many of them nervous, hostile and not sharing their Führer’s certainty of success; equipped with a superlative war machine, but with relatively far fewer élite divisions than the Kaiser’s army which had lumbered into Belgium a generation earlier; and marching to one of the most brilliant war plans of all time – but one so risky that any serious setback to it, any breaking of the steel cutting-edge of Guderian’s Panzers, could but end in another calamitous defeat for Germany.

Part Two

Chapter 9

The Crocus Blossoms

10 May

‘When the crocus blossoms,’ hiss the women in Berlin,
‘He will press the button, and the battle will begin.
When the crocus blossoms, up the German knights will go,
And flame and fume and filthiness will terminate the foe…
When the crocus blossoms, not a neutral will remain.’

A. P. HERBERT, ‘Spring Song’

The Germans Move

From the Eifel Mountains on the night of 9 May, a forty-eight-year-old major-general, Erwin Rommel, commanding the 7th Panzer Division which he had taken over less than three months previously, dashed off a brief note to his wife: