To Lose a Battle (71 page)

The stories, widespread at the time, of a vast malevolent network of ‘Fifth Columnists’ mingling with the refugees and transmitting bogus instructions to propagate terror also rarely stand up to examination. Louis de Jong, a Dutchman who made a sober and careful assessment of the whole ‘Fifth Column’ background, goes so far as to declare of France : ‘In not a single concrete case have we any evidence that the flight of the population was furthered by false orders circulated by enemy agents.’ It is impossible to avoid the conclusion that many of the allegations in this context stemmed from an instinct on the part of the authorities to explain away their own failings. Often it was the very people who should have attempted to curb the mass panic who led the exodus. Accounts of the scene behind the Ninth Army front frequently refer to gendarmes passing through the villages and telling inhabitants ‘You must leave.’ At the huge Pechiney works near Compiègne, the managing director (according to Senator Bardoux) took the entire factory into flight with him. In the north, Saint-Exupèry, watching the refugees teem past as if ‘a boot had scattered an ant-hill’, asked them:

‘Who ordered you to evacuate?’

It was always the mayor, or the schoolteacher, or the mayor’s clerk. One morning at three the order had run through the village : ‘Everybody out!’

They had been expecting this. For two weeks they had seen the passage through their village of refugees who no longer believed in the eternity of their homes… The villagers were on the move. And no one so much as knew why.

And so the chain reaction passed from hamlet to village, from town to city. In view of the appalling dislocation the refugee hordes caused the Allied war effort, it was a grave failure
on the part of the French and Belgian Governments not to have taken drastic measures. They could, for instance, have stopped the sale of petrol, closed the Belgian frontier completely to civilian traffic, and used the radio to
order
the population to remain at home, instead of as a means to fill the ether with tranquillizing dance music and untruthful communiqués.

No less powerful a ‘secret weapon’ in Hitler’s armoury was the much-vaunted ‘Fifth Column’ – or the
belief
in its sinister ubiquity. ‘Spy-mania’ had gripped France during the darkest moments of defeat in both 1870 and 1914, but never more devastatingly than in 1940. Shortly after the collapse of the Ninth Army, a group of journalists were trying to make their way out of Cambrai. Percy Philip of the
New York Times
was dragged out of a train by some soldiers after it had been bombed, his war correspondent’s uniform, blue eyes and fair hair having given rise to suspicions that he was a German parachutist. He was about to be shot out of hand when some gendarmes arrived and confirmed that his papers were in order. But they would take no responsibility for his safety, because of the ‘dangerous mood’ of the crowd. Philip finally escaped with the aid of three French Army doctors. About the same time, Maurice Noël of
Le Figaro
was seized while bicycling through a French village. Like the
tricoteuses
of the Revolution and the harpies thrown up by the Commune, women seem to have led the mob, shrieking, ‘The newspapers have told us to kill all parachutists.’ An Arab soldier announced to Noël: ‘I can tell by your accent that you are not a Frenchman.’ Then the police intervened. On searching him they found a box of white powder which Noël carried as a remedy for indigestion. At once the crowd shouted : ‘There it is! There is the explosive!’ To demonstrate that it was not, Noël lit a match, but before he could put it to the bicarbonate of soda three police officers and a dozen bystanders flung themselves on him, ‘in a desperate attempt to save the police station from total destruction’. Noël was only saved by the intervention of a courageous mayor.

Episodes such as these multiplied with the panic that spread
before the approaching Panzers. In the early days of the fighting, a demolition squad of the Belgian Chasseurs Ardennais was arrested while retreating over the French frontier, disarmed, and placed in grave danger of being shot. In Paris, Fabre-Luce recorded :

The songstress whom one applauded under a French name is in a concentration camp at the Vel’ d’Hiv; she was German. The professional anti-Nazi whose diatribes against Hitler one used to read in the newspapers has been arrested; he was a spy.

There were frequent cases of Allied flyers being manhandled, but particularly dangerous was the predicament of the rounded-up ‘aliens’ like Arthur Koestler. From cells bursting with ‘Fifth Columnists’ at Abbeville, twenty-two such prisoners were arbitrarily taken out and shot near the city bandstand. Out of a group of Belgian refugees shot without trial at Abbeville, the Fascist leader, Leon Dégrelle, was one who evidently escaped notice. ‘As for the spy problem, we have solved that,’ one French soldier declared to an American correspondent. ‘We simply shoot all the officers we do not know!’ That this was no idle boast is confirmed by Major Barlone, who wrote in his diary for 22 May: ‘Our orders are to shoot all spies and strangers who are unable to justify their presence’, and later :

Dispenser Charbonnier, at our hospital, had five persons shot, one a beautiful young girl; by showing lights and curtains of different colours, they had guided German aircraft, signalling to them and thereby causing fires in the neighbouring chemical factory.

To what extent
was
there an organized ‘Fifth Column’ working away ahead of the Panzers? Insisted Major Barlone :

The Fifth Column really does exist; every night blue, green and red lights appear everywhere. A regiment cannot remain two hours in a tiny spot without being invariably bombed with enormous bombs.

At the time, the vast majority of Frenchmen agreed with
him, and certainly the list of deeds attributed to various insidious underground agencies cover an imposing range.
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The stories started in Poland, where it was rumoured that the
Volksdeutsch
had ambushed Polish troops and insinuated mustard gas into the water the troops washed in, and there were reports of German spy-planes dropping poisoned chocolates and cigarettes.
⁶
In Holland, the
fact
of the handful of ‘Brandenburgers’ in purloined Dutch uniforms multiplied a thousand times with incredible rapidity. On 16 May, the distraught Dutch Foreign Minister, van Kleffens, himself assured the Press in Paris that parachutists had descended on his country ‘by the thousand’, clad in ‘French, Belgian and British uniforms, in the cassocks of priests and in the garb of nuns or nurses’. Here began the legend of the ‘nuns in hobnailed boots’. In Belgium, the Security Service warned that parachutists in civilian clothes had landed in various places, and it requested that all placards advertising ‘Pasha’ chicory be removed from telegraph poles, etc., because on their reverse side ‘drawings have been found which can give the enemy valuable information’. After the Germans had traversed the Ardennes, word went round in France that they had been able to do so at such speed only because the Fifth Column had prepared secret petrol dumps in advance of the Panzers. The débâcle at Sedan was immediately followed with rumours that the Meuse bridge hàd been abandoned intact to the enemy through treachery;
⁷
that officers detailed to blow them up
had been mysteriously shot down by disguised German agents. Here, and on many subsequent occasions, local disasters were attributed to bogus orders telephoned by ‘Fifth Columnists’, and purporting to come from some staff officer, or from the mayor of a village ordering its evacuation. General Spears relates a typical story (told him by Saint-Exupéry, ‘who said he could vouch for its truth’), of how

a group of the best heavy guns in the French Army, the 155-millimetre Rimaillots, was halted near Laon when a pale-faced Staff Officer appeared declaring he had come post-haste from Corps H.Q. to say that a German Panzer division was converging on them and would be there in a matter of minutes, and the Corps Commander adjured them as good Frenchmen not to allow their guns to fall into enemy hands. Within a few minutes 35 of these priceless guns had been damaged beyond repair. No such order had been sent from Corps H.Q.

This dissemination of false orders was one of the commonest activities for which the Fifth Column was held responsible, and its consequence was often that orders transmitted by genuine but unidentified officers were simply disobeyed – all adding to the chaos of the French command network.

Another common allegation was that German agents signalled to invisible aircraft, or to other agents. Looking out from Montmartre one night, Peter de Polnay claims ‘I saw signals in morse all over Paris. The Fifth Column was at work.’ Hans Habe writes of a suspicious sergeant-major who used to disappear mysteriously every evening and whom he claims was later discovered

giving signals to German planes under the pretext of lighting his pipe. According to some he was shot on the spot by an artillery lieutenant… I never saw him again.

Only a fraction of these specific allegations of Fifth Column activities has ever been substantiated. None of the works
written analytically in the aftermath of the war sustain the legend. Brigadier-General Telford Taylor, who served with the U.S. Army Intelligence in Europe during the Second World War and was later Chief Counsel at the Nuremberg Trials, states that ‘careful investigations… have abundantly proved that in Holland, as in Norway, the reports of subversion and sabotage were uniformly exaggerated and often utterly groundless’. De Jong puts the total number active in Holland at one thousand, including about one or two hundred Dutch citizens. He adds:

it is worthy of note that in not one of the German documents bearing on the preparations for the offensive is there so much as a single passage referring to such a Fifth Column.

As in Holland, in Belgium there was a smattering of ‘Rexist’ traitors who may have helped the Germans, and de Jong mentions Abwehr agents who were infiltrated into Belgium as ‘refugees’; these he also numbers at between one and two hundred. In Luxembourg, as has already been seen, the German ‘tourists’ who flowed over the frontier before the invasion did help the Panzers by preventing demolitions and disrupting communications. But apart from a few Abwehr sabotage squads attempting to infiltrate with the refugees – and about whose achievements little is known with accuracy – no serious effort seems to have been made by the Germans to operate a Fifth Column in France. De Jong categorically refutes the myth of ‘bogus orders’: ‘Nowhere has it appeared that false instructions were circulated by the Fifth Column.’
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At least two French generals, Menu and Ruby (who was Huntziger’s Chief of Staff), also scoff at the notion of Fifth Columnists being responsible for the chaos and confusion on the Meuse. Says General Menu:

We say emphatically that we do not believe in this argument…
Was he an agent of the Fifth Column, the officer of X Corps, who telephoned at the end of the afternoon of 13 May that the Panzers were at Chaumont and then at Bulson?… We say: No.

A Swiss historian, Eddy Bauer, goes as far as to declare: ‘One thing is, however, clear: that in France there never was a Fifth Column.’

On the German side, out of the welter of personal memoirs and war narratives published since 1945, the sheer absence of allusion to organized Fifth Column work in France is in itself instructive. The Abwehr, to be sure, had its network of ‘V-men’, spies and informers inside France, but these seem to have been strictly limited both in numbers and quality, and for the most part established in haste at the beginning of the war. From its own accounts, the Abwehr depended for its actual intelligence more upon the less romantic forms of espionage, such as aerial reconnaissance and signals interception. The fact is that Canaris’s Abwehr proved itself, throughout most of the war, to be one of the least effective organs of Hitler’s war machine; added to which the German character has seldom shown a marked propensity for the subtler forms of underground warfare.

There were a number of diverse reasons why the bogy of the Fifth Column became magnified out of all proportion in France. There was the impact of Goebbels’s propaganda coupled with the boasts of Hitler himself:

In the midst of peace [he had declared – or so the faithful Rauschning told the world], troops will suddenly appear, let us say, in Paris. They will wear French uniforms. They will march through the streets in broad daylight. No one will stop them. Everything has been thought out… We shall send them across the border in peace-time. Gradually. No one shall see in them anything but peaceful travellers.

In this form of psychological warfare, the Nazis were aided in the West by its knowledge of the precedent for subversive actions which the Sudeten Czechs created in 1938; but not least they were also succoured by the panic-inspiring utterances of Allied leaders, such as van Kleffens on the hobnailed
nuns, or Reynaud declaring that the Meuse bridges had been captured undestroyed, and proclaiming (on 13 May) that all German combatants caught out of uniform would be shot on sight.
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But, as with the refugee exodus, even the Nazis never quite expected to get such returns with the ‘Fifth Column’ bogy as they did.

There was also the cumulative effect of Hitler’s string of lightning successes, enhanced by rumours of his armoury of ‘secret weapons’. Surely, there had to be some simple answer to explain these successes? How had Norway and Denmark succumbed so easily? Had Fort Eben Emael been taken by means of some deadly nerve gas or death-ray? Had the Germans crossed the Meuse with some kind of amphibious tank kept afloat by compressed air? Were they using sixty-ton tanks with such heavy armour that nothing could penetrate? These were all stories that made the rounds. But where else could an explanation be found to all these devastating successes? Could it lie in the Fifth Column? In treason?