To Lose a Battle (60 page)

If our front were broken…
everything was lost
[Reynaud’s italics]. There was no question of a repetition of the Battle of the Marne. We had cast our lot in favour of a continuous front. We had to abide by such a decision.

At 0730 on the 15th, the morning after he had received the French Prime Minister’s first wire, Churchill records:

I was woken up with the news that M. Reynaud was on the telephone at my bedside. He spoke in English, and evidently under stress. ‘We have been defeated.’ As I did not immediately respond he said again: ‘We are beaten; we have lost the battle.’ I said: ‘Surely it can’t have happened so soon?’ But he replied: ‘The front is broken near Sedan; they are pouring through in great numbers with tanks and armoured cars’ – or words to that effect.

Still evidently half-asleep, Churchill replied reassuringly:

‘All experience shows that the offensive will come to an end after a while. I remember the 21st of March, 1918. After five or six days they have to halt for supplies, and the opportunity for counter-attack is presented. I learned all this at the time from the lips of Marshal Foch himself.’ Certainly this was what he had always seen in the past and what we ought to have seen now. However, the French Premier came back to the sentence with which he had begun, which proved indeed only too true: ‘We are defeated; we have lost the battle.’ I said I was willing to come over and have a talk.

After this more alarming communication, Churchill promptly rang up Ironside (who was then in the process of talking to Gort) to relay Reynaud’s message, commenting that the French premier had seemed ‘thoroughly demoralized’ and that he (Churchill) had told him ‘to keep calm’. Ironside informed Churchill that ‘we have no extra demands from Gamelin or Georges, both of whom were calm, though they both considered the situation serious’. Churchill tells us that he now personally ‘rang up General Georges, who seemed quite cool, and reported that the breach at Sedan was being plugged. A telegram from General Gamelin also stated that although the position between Namur and Sedan was serious, he viewed the situation with calm.’ With a candour that would have looked well if encountered in the memoirs of General Gamelin, Churchill admits ingenuously:

Not having had access to official information for so many years, I did not comprehend the violence of the revolution effected since the last war by the incursion of a mass of fast-moving heavy armour.

Thus on 15 May the judgement of Gamelin and Georges prevailed over that of Reynaud in Churchill’s appreciations. At the Cabinet meeting convened to consider the French plea for more fighters, Churchill did not overrule Dowding’s arguments that the home defences should on no account be further weakened. Britain’s decision to hold back her fighter squadrons will ever remain a source of extreme bitterness in France, but the influence exerted upon this decision by the misleading ‘calmness’
of the French C.-in-C.s in these early days cannot be overlooked.

By the morning of the 16th, however – the day of general awakening – Churchill too had begun to appreciate the full grimness of the situation in France. A new S.O.S. sent late on the 15th by Reynaud announced tersely: ‘Last evening we lost the battle. The way to Paris lies open. Send all the troops and planes you can.’ Churchill remarks that, although ‘no clear view could be formed of what was happening, the gravity of the crisis was obvious. I felt it imperative to get to Paris that afternoon.’ Accordingly, at about 1500 hours he flew off in an unarmed Flamingo at a steady 160 m.p.h., accompanied by General Ismay and the Vice-C.I.G.S., General Dill.

Vincennes, 16 May: The News is All Bad

At Vincennes, 16 May began with a seemingly endless succession of dismal tidings. ‘Just as the day of the 15th had been a day of waiting on the fringe of events, so that of the 16th with one blow plunged the command post of the commander-in-chief into the atmosphere of the battle itself,’ says Colonel Minart. After news had come through in the small hours that the Panzers were now nearing Laon, just eighty-two miles from Paris, ‘it was as if the old fort, witness of so many historic scenes, were pounded by the first breakers heralding the tidal wave which was about to engulf France. Never had the situation seemed so grave.’ At 0630 hours, Gamelin issued a desperate order instructing all troops ‘to hold out even when encircled, to constitute centres of resistance’. Still the information being passed on via Georges remained at a minimum, and at 1015 Vincennes learned that telephonic communication with Blanchard’s First Army had been cut off. But there now followed a series of direct communications from the front abruptly bringing Gamelin in immediate contact with the battle. First, Lieutenant-Colonel Ruby of Huntziger’s staff telephoned on his own initiative to report on developments around Stonne, the failure of the 3rd Armoured counter-attack and the sacking of General Brocard. It was the first time since
10 May that any such detailed report had reached Gamelin without being filtered through La Ferté. Almost immediately afterwards a call came in from Amiens, from the Chief of Staff of the Second Region, explaining that he had, ‘in view of the extreme gravity of the situation, decided to get directly in touch with Vincennes’. Giving an itemized account of the German forces which had passed through Montcornet, he then described the ‘withdrawal in disorder of units of all arms’ from Corap’s army into the eastern areas lying under the Second Region’s jurisdiction. Already some 20,000 men, among them fugitives from the 61st Division, had reached Compiègne; another call from the Second Region two hours later elevated the figure to 30,000. Again, this was the first precise news about the Ninth Army to reach Gamelin; coming from a non-combatant command such as the Second Region, it was as grotesque as if a British C.I.G.S. had to rely upon Aldershot Command for information about an enemy invasion of Kent. Finally, towards the end of the morning, General Touchon’s Chief of Staff telephoned to reveal the full extent of the breach the Panzers had made.

Evacuate Paris?

Everything seemed to confirm that the Germans were now moving on Paris at a horrifying speed. Early that morning Reynaud was with Daladier when Gamelin telephoned to warn him that ‘the Germans may be in Paris tonight’. According to Baudouin, Gamelin then disclaimed any responsibility for the safety of the capital, as from midnight – ‘which’, Reynaud observed to Baudouin, ‘is a polite way of washing his hands!’ Gamelin telephoned the same warning to Georges Mandel, at the Ministry for the Colonies, supposedly adding by way of explanation that the Army, ‘permeated with Communism’, had not held. At 1000 the senile Military Governor of Paris, General Hering, evidently in a state of collapse, sent a letter to Reynaud:

Dear Prime Minister,

In the present circumstances, I deem it wise, for the purpose of preventing any disorder, to suggest that you order the evacuation of the Government… I should be obliged if you would inform me of your decision as soon as possible.
⁶

Once again, it is curious to note that, by singling out the danger of civil ‘disorder’, the Governor of Paris obviously sensed at his back the spectre of the Popular Front and of a resurrected Commune as a threat no less great than that of the approaching enemy.

At midday, Reynaud summoned a meeting attended by General Hering, M. Langeron (the Prefect of Police), the leaders of the Senate and Chamber of Deputies – Jeanneney and Herriot respectively – and those Ministers who happened to be available, including Daladier, de Monzie (one of the most committed ‘softs’ in the Cabinet), Dautry, the Minister of Arms Production, and Clemenceau’s old lieutenant, the cold and utterly unshakable Georges Mandel. The French leaders met amid an atmosphere of undisguised panic. Thick columns of smoke arising from Ministries that were already beginning to burn their secret files brought home all too brutally the fact that, for the third time in living memory, Paris was directly menaced by the vile Boche and his diabolical war machine. Could anything now stop it? Everyone spoke at once. Some wild suggestions were put forward, including one that shallow-draught warships should sail up the Seine to defend Paris. Governor Hering explained the measures he had taken to defend the city, but he had no explosives. There was discussion about destroying industrial plants, but this was rejected on the grounds of the working-class riots which such measures might provoke. Reynaud, showing signs of being thoroughly alarmed, had come to the meeting prepared to order that the Government leave Paris for Tours at 4 o’clock that afternoon, and was drafting a proclamation calling upon the populace also to
evacuate the city. But Daladier reckoned that the cure would be worse than the disease, and was resolutely opposed, on psychological grounds, to any Government departure; Dautry declared dramatically ‘we shall fight in the streets and everywhere’; Mandel, who appears throughout to have shown the most self-control,
⁷
was also silently obdurate; finally, de Monzie clinched matters by announcing that there was simply not enough transport to carry out a large-scale evacuation. Another call from Reynaud to Gamelin (who was meanwhile allocating four divisions, plus another three light infantry divisions earmarked for Norway, for the defence of Paris) ascertained that the Government could still have until midnight before deciding about its departure. Reynaud’s resolve now hardened. He declared that the Government ‘ought to remain in Paris, no matter how intense the bombing might be’, though he then added, somewhat delphically, that ‘it should, however, take care not to fall into the enemy’s hands’.

The Civilian Front

Meanwhile, sparked off by the panic rife within the French Government and the High Command, for the first time since 10 May alarm had begun to spread among the civil population.

Except for an occasional twinge of uneasy disquiet, life in Paris – and in the provinces for that matter – had run on since 10 May with remarkable normality and calm. Going to see the first night of Bernstein’s
Elvire
on the evening of 10 May, Vincent Sheean recalled that there had been only a score of people in the theatre, and those few ‘wept a good deal’. But thereafter such displays of emotionalism vanished rapidly. The theatres remained open (until 20 May) and flourished. The restaurants were filled, often with functionaries evacuated at the beginning of the war who, bored to death with exile in the provinces, had drifted back to Paris. Shops in the Rue de Rivoli kept up a busy trade in china Aberdeen terriers lifting a leg on a copy of
Mein Kampf.
But there was nothing which
had distracted Parisian minds from the approaching peril more than this particularly wonderful springtime itself. On returning from Brussels, Clare Boothe wrote:

Paris in the spring was still Paris in May-time. The air was sweet and in the gardens of the Luxembourg and the Bois, the unstartled birds sang… in the gilded corridors of the Ritz although now nearly all of them had gone, one or two bosomy old women with bleached hair and painted faces and less imagination than their sisters still minced along cuddling their pedigreed dogs. Taxis tooted on the boulevards, glasses clinked on the marble tops of the bistro tables…

News and Censorship

As a preserver of civilian illusions, hand in hand with the insidious beguilements of the spring of 1940 stalked the shadowy, mute and all-powerful intermediary figure of the French censor. The organs of censorship resided under the Ministry of Information, in the Hôtel Continental. There one of the most powerful figures was the ‘official spokesman’, a Colonel Thomas, whose closely cropped hair, moustache and pincenez reminded one British war correspondent of the unhappy Dreyfus; he was supported by a number of hard-faced ladies who had taken to sporting small imitation scissors in their hats. Right from the opening of hostilities, Gamelin had made it clear that he did not care to have journalists at the front, and every effort had been made to limit their contacts with the fighting troops to a minimum. The experiences of a group of British war correspondents attached to the Second Army on 10 May seem fairly representative. Because of the bureaucracy of censorship, their ‘eve of battle’ stories did not reach London until Huntziger’s men were in full retreat; over the next critical days they were permitted no nearer the front than Vouziers, receiving their news through the medium of a captain in charge of Huntziger’s press section, who addressed them ‘as if giving a conference on military strategy’, and who seems to have been no better informed on events at the front than they themselves. The little extra they were able to glean
of what was really happening came from the incoherent mouths of refugees. Then, when Army H.Q. withdrew from Senuc, they were dispatched back to Paris, a nightmarish train journey lasting eighteen hours during which they were bombed and strafed.

Thus the Allied Press was largely dependent upon the information percolating through Colonel Thomas and his minions, and upon unilluminating official communiqués, while dispatches based on these hand-outs had to be reprocessed, scissored and blue-pencilled in the Hôtel Continental. Often British correspondents found that the copy ultimately reaching their papers at home added up to little more than gibberish. One of the journalists attached to the Second Army, Gordon Waterfield of Reuters, claims that they were forbidden even to mention the existence of refugees, and that when he referred to the Maginot Line as being ‘almost impregnable’, the word ‘almost’ was swiftly excised.

Over the long term, the severity and mendacious editing of French censorship meant that, for historians, documentation of those world-shaking days of May 1940 was even slimmer than it might have been. But its immediate result was the complete deception of the French public, so that when the truth finally seeped through, the impact was all the greater. On the 11th and 12th, there had been nothing disturbing to read in the newspapers. On the 13th, a few fragments of bad news began to find their way past Colonel Thomas, but not enough to cause anxiety. On 14 May, Arthur Koestler picked up
L’Époque
in a train to read Kerillis declare: