To Lose a Battle (80 page)

Churchill’s Second Meeting with Reynaud

In Paris that afternoon, Reynaud had made a courageous – indeed, a great – speech before the Senate. For the first time he revealed to France just how grave was the situation. ‘The country is in danger!’ he proclaimed. ‘It is my first duty to tell the Senate and the nation the truth.’ Murmurs swelled into a roar; there were demands for the names of the guilty. The Premier continued, enumerating some of the terrible facts. He spoke of the ‘serious failures’ of the Ninth Army, condemned General Corap and disclosed that ‘through unbelievable faults, which will be punished, bridges over the Meuse were not destroyed’. When he revealed the news that Amiens and Arras had been lost, Alexander Werth in the gallery recorded, ‘A gasp of bewilderment rises from the senators’ benches…’ The air cleared only a little when Reynaud went on to offer a source of hope:

In the midst of our country’s misfortunes we can take pride in the thought that two of her sons, who would have been justified in resting on their laurels, have placed themselves at the nation’s service in this tragic hour: Pétain and Weygand. (
Prolonged cheers.
) Pétain, the victor of Verdun, the great soldier with the human touch, the man who knows how a French victory can come out of a cataclysm. Weygand, Foch’s man, who halted the German onslaught when the front was broken in 1918 and who was afterwards able to turn the tables and lead us to victory… France cannot die. For my part, if some day I were to be told that only a miracle could save France, that day I should say: ‘I believe in the miracle,
²⁴
because I believe in France.’

After Reynaud’s speech, as Senator Bardoux recorded, the atmosphere in the corridors was ‘terrifying… Faces are distorted.
Groups form and re-form…’ Now at last the veils were down.

That evening Reynaud suffered fresh gloomy forebodings as to what would happen if Weygand on his journey should fall into German hands, and to Baudouin he even began to speak of General Huntziger as a possible successor. The following morning (the 22nd) he anxiously waited for Weygand to report in at the Rue Dominique. Despite his arduous experiences of the past twenty-four hours, the seventy-three-year-old Generalissimo arrived full of bounce and launched into his analysis of the situation on an evident note of optimism. ‘So many mistakes have been made,’ he began, ‘that they give me confidence. I believe that in future we shall make less.’ The B.E.F., he declared, apparently without mentioning its engagement at Arras, ‘is in a very good state, for up to the present it has hardly been in action. Some elements in Blanchard’s army have been shaken, but… this army still constitutes a powerful force.’ He then offered to Reynaud the plan he had outlined to King Leopold and Billotte the previous day, namely, the joint thrusts from north and south meeting at Bapaume. In conception, it was roughly the same as Gamelin’s short-lived plan, contained in his ‘Instruction No. 12’ of 19 May; the main differences were that the pincers were to close further to the west, three days later, and it would be a heavier blow. Weygand said that he had ‘thoroughly explained’ his plan ‘to everybody I have seen,
²⁵
I think they understood me, and that I have convinced them. I cannot waste my strength running after armour. It is better to try this manoeuvre of a junction.’ He then concluded
²⁶
with a curiously revealing remark: ‘It will either give us victory or it will save our honour.’ In the coming days, the expression ‘save our honour’ was to appear with increasing regularity on Weygand’s lips, and it indicated which way his thoughts were already beginning to turn. As Colonel Goutard acidly points out: ‘As soon as it became a question of “honour”, we were in a bad way!’

Reynaud declared himself entirely in agreement with Weygand’s project, and informed him that Churchill was due in Paris at 1115. After collecting the British Prime Minister, Reynaud recalls: ‘At midday we went together to the stronghold of Vincennes under a sky whose very beauty seemed implacable in those tragic days.’ On this second visit of immense importance to Paris, Churchill was once again accompanied by the inseparable General Ismay and General Sir John Dill, who was about to succeed Ironside as C.I.G.S. Ismay noted that, despite the change in command since their last visit, ‘the
Beau Geste
flavour of the old fort was just the same – spahis with white cloaks and long curved swords, on guard duty, and the floors and chairs covered with oriental rugs’. (In the light of all these disastrous revelations of the past weeks, how anachronistic the power of the French Army must suddenly have seemed!) But Ismay was at once agreeably surprised by Weygand’s appearance:

He gave the appearance of being a fighter – resolute, decisive and amazingly active, in spite of his wizened face and advanced years. He might have been made of indiarubber. One dared to hope that the Allied armies would now have the leadership that had hitherto seemed lacking.

Churchill admits to having been equally taken by the Generalissimo:

In spite of his physical exertions and a night of travel, he was brisk, buoyant, incisive. He made an excellent impression upon all.

The absence of Daladier and his aroma of absinthe was also clearly an improvement.

Weygand’s Plan

The meeting, says Ismay, ‘was short and businesslike’. Weygand described the situation as he had found it on his trip to Ypres, and then once more gave an exposé of his plan. This met with
general agreement, and accordingly Weygand retired to draft his ‘General Operation No. 1’,
²⁷
which read as follows:

(I) The forces grouped with No. 1 Army Group (the Belgian Army, the B.E.F., and the First Army) will make it their principal task to block the German advance to the sea in order to maintain contact between themselves and the remainder of the French forces.

(II) The German Army will only be stopped and beaten by counter-attacks.

(III) The forces necessary for these counter-attacks already exist in the group, the linear defence of which is much too densely held, and they are:

some infantry divisions of the First Army;

the cavalry corps;

the B.E.F., which must be withdrawn from the line by extending the Belgian sector, and used as a whole.

These counter-attacks will be supported by all the R.A.F. based in France.

(IV) This offensive will be covered on the east by the Belgian Army on the Yser.

The light enemy units which are trying to cause disruption and panic in our rear between the frontier and the Somme, supported by air-raids on our aerodromes and ports, are in a dangerous position and will be destoyed.

Weygand ended his order by declaring that having been ‘rounded up’, the Panzers ‘must not escape again’. One might as well have said the same of the Soviet spy George Blake, after he had been ‘sprung’ from a British maximum security prison.

To write off the seven Panzer divisions which had driven through the Allied armies as ‘light enemy units’ might seem to bear little enough relationship to the facts of life,
²⁸
but it was nothing as compared to the telegram Churchill now sent to Gort summarizing the talks at Vincennes:

It was agreed:

1. That the Belgian Army should withdraw to the line of the Yser and stand there, the sluices being opened.

2. That the British Army and the French First Army should attack south-west towards Bapaume and Cambrai at the earliest moment, certainly tomorrow, with about
eight divisions
,
²⁹
and with the Belgian Cavalry Corps on the right of the British.

3. That as this battle is vital to both armics and the British communications depend upon freeing Amiens, the British Air Force should give the utmost possible help, both by day and by night, while it is going on.

4. That the new French Army Group which is advancing upon Amiens and forming a line along the Somme should strike northwards and join hands with the British divisions who are attacking southwards in the general direction of Bapaume.

In the first place, the Belgians had
never
agreed to withdraw to the Yser. Secondly, as both Blanchard and Gort could have pointed out to the Allied leaders, how could eight divisions, or 100,000 men, turn their backs on the enemy pressing hard from the east and attack southwards, at a day’s notice? One of the ‘secrets of Marshal Foch’, to which Weygand had archly alluded during his valedictory interview with Gamelin, was that Foch had always known exactly the value of the forces he could throw into battle at any given moment. This was something Weygand clearly did
not
know on 22 May, despite his journey of the previous day. Thirdly, it was a gross exaggeration to speak of a ‘new French Army Group… advancing upon Amiens’, as Weygand must well have known. The truth was that behind the Somme, between the coast and the Crozat Canal nearly ninety air miles to the east, there were only the five divisions that General Frère had now managed to scratch together in his new Seventh Army, plus the badly mauled 2nd and 5th Light Cavalry, and the newly arrived and unblooded British 1st Armoured Division. In a separate order dispatched by General Georges on the 22nd, these units were summoned up to take their place to the left of General Frère, under command of General Robert Altmayer.
³⁰

Above all, the enticing vacuum that had existed behind the German spearhead on the 20th and 21st would no longer exist by the 23rd.

Churchill’s Hopes

In Reynaud’s private ear, Churchill complained that four consecutive days had been allowed to pass without Gort receiving any orders whatever. ‘Ever since Weygand had assumed command three days had been lost in taking decisions. The change in the Supreme Command was right. The resultant delay was evil.’ Nevertheless, carried along by the vigour with which Weygand had put his case, the Vincennes meeting (so Ismay records) ‘ended on a note of restrained optimism’. Before he left, Churchill remarked flatteringly to Weygand: ‘There is only one fault in you; you are too young!’

Throughout his career, Churchill would always show himself susceptible to a general who gave the appearance of being a fighter, and Weygand, in sharp antithesis to the pallid intel-lectualism of Gamelin, clearly struck him as such. Shaken as he had been by the dreadful revelations in Paris of 16 May, as the British statesman who had once cried out ‘Thank God for the French Army!’ Churchill still harboured some romantic faith in that Army. Indeed, could this magnificent weapon upon which all the calculations of British European policy had been founded since 1919, could it really be proved a broken reed by the events of just twelve terrible days? As both historian and participant, Churchill retained the memory of Foch and the ‘Miracle of the Marne’ and July 1918 constantly before his eyes. Surely, as on both those occasions, the French Army would spring back again at the eleventh hour? Now, if a
fighting
French general, the spiritual heir to Foch, declared that such an offensive operation was possible, then it must be tried, though without being too pragmatic. And here, as far as experience with practicalities is concerned, Churchill shares some of Weygand’s own limitations. Like Wavell in Greece the following year, Weygand had been plunged into the middle of battle with no previous first-hand knowledge of the speed and momentum
and utter destructiveness of a modern armoured
Blitzkrieg
; similarly, Churchill – and this must always be borne in mind when considering his actions in May 1940 – after those years in the wilderness, remote from the pragmatism of public office, had had less than a fortnight of unrelenting crisis in which to acquaint himself with the practical logistics of an army at war in 1940. Now, Weygand had rekindled Churchill’s faith. In the vivid words of Spears, the Weygand Plan ‘hung like a limp sail from the mast’, but Churchill in his turn, ‘like a new Aeolus, filled it momentarily with the power of his lungs’. (But added Spears, ‘the ship did not move’.)

At 1930 that same night Churchill was back in London and holding a Cabinet meeting. General Ironside noted dejectedly that ‘he was almost in buoyant spirits’. The impression Weygand had made upon him remained markedly observable, and he stuck to his belief in the feasibility of his plan. Some of Churchill’s military advisers, however, were much less happy. Ironside, for one (although, as he was about to be replaced as C.I.G.S., his views no longer counted greatly with Churchill), now completely disillusioned by what he had seen on his visit to Billotte two days previously, thought that ‘when it all came down to things it was still all
projets
’. The B.E.F., he said gloomily, had ‘lost a chance of extricating itself’. But even Churchill’s faith in Weygand’s ‘project’ would begin to wilt in the face of events before many more hours went by.

The Panzers Drive for the Channel Ports

After the well-deserved day of rest forced upon his Panzers, Guderian was on the move again early on the morning of the 22nd. His orders now were to swing northwards and seize the Channel ports. Originally he had wanted to throw the relatively fresh 10th Panzer towards Dunkirk at full speed; this was refused him, on account of ‘Frankforce’s’ attack at Arras on the 21st which had persuaded Kleist to keep the 10th back as Armoured Group reserve, in case the situation worsened.
³¹
Guderian says ‘it was with a heavy heart’ that he changed his plans. The 1st Panzer, bolstered by the Grossdeutschland Regiment, which was now back in the fold after recuperating from the fighting at Stonne, was to head for Calais, while the 2nd swept up the coast to Boulogne. By 0700 hours his forces had crossed the River Authie, some fifteen miles north from Abbeville; though Guderian noted, significantly, that they could not move in full strength since units of both divisions had to be left behind to secure the Somme bridgeheads until the motorized infantry of Wietersheim’s XIV Corps caught up to fill its now familiar relieving role. That afternoon there was fierce fighting on the approaches to Boulogne, and for the first time Guderian recorded being vigorously attacked by Allied aircraft, ‘while we saw little of our own Luftwaffe’. Owing to the speed of the advance, the German tactical air support was now operating at long range at the same time that the battlefield was coming within comfortable radius of the R.A.F. Air Component units relocated in Kent.