To Lose a Battle (82 page)

But the most reassuring communication to reach Gort in these days was one from Eden on the 23rd, which read as follows:

Should, however, situation on your communications make this [Weygand Plan] at any time impossible you should inform us so that we can inform French and make naval and air arrangements to assist you should you have to withdraw on the northern coast.

At last, it seemed to show, the Government was beginning to face up to realities. As far as Gort was concerned, here now was an opening for him to act according to his own judgement.

Gort’s judgement was now already formulated. It was that the Weygand Plan would never materialize, that the French would never attack, and that the only hope of preserving anything of the B.E.F. was to fall back on Dunkirk while there was still time.
³⁸
The French Army, at any rate in the northern pocket, was finished. Meanwhile, at Arras, Gort was faced with an immediate, compelling danger. For two days, long after any
hope of resuming its attack had vanished, ‘Frankforce’ had held its own against the bulk of two Panzer divisions. Now, creeping around its flank and rear, Rommel was threatening to encircle it completely. There were only two roads still left available for its extrication. At 0700 on the 23rd, Gort ordered the withdrawal of ‘Frankforce’ and the abandonment of Arras. During that night the British 5th and 50th Divisions pulled back some fifteen miles,
³⁹
behind the Haute Deule Canal north-east of Arras.

In the atmosphere of mounting recrimination between the Allies, the British withdrawal from Arras provoked considerable bitterness. It was said that – despite the fact that General Franklyn had warned the French units on either side of him – Gort had not informed Blanchard of the move.
⁴⁰
It was said that the speed and depth of the British withdrawal jeopardized the French forces in this part of the line. It was said (by Weygand) that it thereby abandoned the start-line for the Weygand Plan’s attack from the north, and that it demoralized the French forces by conveying the impression that the B.E.F. had renounced participation in it. But even assuming that the Weygand Plan still offered any prospect of success by the 24th, if Franklyn had not abandoned the ‘start-line’ of Arras, Rommel would almost certainly have enveloped it that day, plus the better part of two British divisions, as well as the remnants of the French Cavalry Corps. Whatever the truth of the matter, the British withdrawal brought from Paul Reynaud a reproachful and ominous telegram, dispatched to Churchill on the 24th:

You wired me this morning that you had instructed General Gort to continue to carry out the Weygand Plan. General Weygand now informs me that, according to a telegram from General Blanchard, the British Army had carried out, on its own initiative, a retreat of twenty-five miles towards the ports at a time when our troops moving up from the south are gaining ground towards the north, where they were to meet their allies.

This action of the British Army is in direct opposition to the formal orders renewed this morning by General Weygand. This retreat has naturally obliged General Weygand to change all his arrangements, and he is compelled to give up the idea of closing the gap and restoring a continuous front. I need not lay any stress upon the gravity of the possible consequences.
⁴¹

Reynaud’s claims of the southern forces ‘gaining ground towards the north’ was, however, a palpable exaggeration, and there is more than an element of truth in Spears’s
⁴²
countercharge:

I feel certain that Gort’s inevitable withdrawal is being seized upon as an excuse for the fact that no French forces have advanced from the south.

Although on 24 May the Weygand Plan attack was finally fixed for the 26th, Gort’s decision to withdraw across the Deule in fact marked the end both of the Plan and of any sensible hope for a break-out across the Panzer Corridor. Even if there had been no prior retreat from Arras, one is forced to conclude that the 24th would have marked the end of such hopes in any event. For already by the beginning of the 23rd the steel-capped vacuum of the 21st had become what Pertinax aptly describes as a ‘solid-limbed army’. The German infantry divisions had arrived and the Panzers were now deployed to meet any threat of a break-out by the encircled Allied forces, or to thrust in with the
coup de grâce
at a moment’s notice. At every point of the invested perimeter the Allied forces were on the defensive, and there was no prospect of relief from the
south. Even if the Allies could, then, have effected a temporary break-out from the northern ‘pocket’, the counter-attack itself would have been extremely vulnerable to attack on both its flanks by much stronger German forces. From the German point of view, the tenuous ‘Panzer Corridor’ was now inviolable.
Sichelschnitt
had succeeded.

Thus faded the great Allied stratagems for a concerted counter-stroke that would sever the head of the German tortoise. All they had amounted to – the Gamelin Plan, the Ironside Plan, and finally the Weygand Plan with its aim of striking with eight divisions – had been two blows, separated by twenty-four hours, by one British infantry brigade and seventy-four tanks, and one French infantry regiment plus a few light tanks. The British attack at Arras on the 21st was but a straw in the wind, far too light to do more than throw the Germans temporarily off balance; yet the shock it caused indicates what a strong, well co-ordinated and resolutely led effort on 21 May, or preferably earlier, could have achieved. One is tempted to speculate what might have happened if Martel had disposed of even fifty instead of just sixteen ‘Matildas’; if his attack could have been accompanied by one of the excellent French armoured divisions squandered so uselessly early in the battle; and possibly supported by the local aerial superiority which, for the first time in the battle, the Allies were capable of attaining on the 21st. This was the day of extreme danger for the Germans. The thinly lined Panzer Corridor was only twenty-five miles wide south of Arras; the opportunities missed at this time are implicit in a report written by the commander of the French 2nd D.L.M.:

My impression is that if I had my division intact, especially my tanks, I could quite easily reach Cambrai. But all I have is the non-armoured element.

At the same time, one is forced to conclude that, although a harder Allied punch on the 21st might have inflicted heavy losses and have stopped the Germans temporarily, they would have come on again, sooner or later; for by 21 May, in terms of men, material and morale, the French Army had already lost
too much of its striking-power to be able to recuperate. But without venturing on to the hazardous quicksands of speculation, there can be little doubt as to what material results the ‘Frankforce’ attack at Arras
did
achieve. It upset the German timetable for the seizure of the Channel ports, without which the ‘Miracle of Dunkirk’ would have been born dead.

This is what, at this moment of destiny, raised Lord Gort momentarily above the level of the other Allied war leaders. It was on his own responsibility that Gort decided to attack single-handed on the 21st, and on his own responsibility that he decided to disengage on the night of the 23rd and begin the withdrawal that he knew would culminate in evacuation. As far as the overall conduct of the war was concerned, the latter was the most far-reaching decision that could have been taken in May 1940 on the Allied side, and Gort was the only person who could take it. If Gort had been a romantic visionary, a kind of Lawrence, one could conceive that in his imagination he saw those British divisions which he was about to save from the cauldron of Flanders leading the liberation of Europe four summers later. But Gort was not a visionary. Nor was he communicative, and all that can be stated with some certainty is that, by 23 May, he knew that the French Army was finished and that it was his simple duty to save the B.E.F., to fight another day, on some other field. Had the B.E.F. been wiped out in northern France, it is difficult to see how Britain could have continued to fight; and with Britain out of the battle, it is even more difficult to see what combination of circumstances could have aligned America and Stalin’s Russia to challenge Hitler.

Chapter 19

The End in the North

24 May – 4 June

Since the retaking of Arras, it has been reported that Amiens and even Sedan and other important points had been retaken by counter-attacks.

Daily Herald,
25 May

German military circles here tonight put it flatly. They said the fate of the great Allied Army bottled up in Flanders is sealed.

WILLIAM SHIRER
,
Berlin Diary,
25 May

According to an estimate by the French War Ministry, at least 2,000 German aircraft and 1,400 tanks have been lost in the operations in Holland, Belgium and France.

National-Zeitung,
Basle, 26 May

We must be careful not to assign to this deliverance the attributes of a victory. Wars are not won by evacuations.

WINSTON S. CHURCHILL
, speaking to the House of Commons, 4 June

The collapse of the Weygand Plan meant that the campaign was now lost beyond recovery. The ‘decisive battle’ against France of which both Hitler and Manstein had separately dreamed had been fought and won. Henceforth minor ripostes and local actions of extreme gallantry would impose an occasional check upon the German progress to complete victory, but what follows during the next month of hostilities until the inevitable finale in the railway coach at Compiègne is little more than a grim and protracted postscript to the story already unfolded. Of this postscript, its most dramatic episode, the evacuation from Dunkirk, belongs more properly to the first act of the Battle of Britain than to the closing scenes of the Battle of France. Yet to complete the narrative, the events of the remaining weeks before France finally laid down her arms require to be sketched in brief. They begin with the sequel – one of
historical importance, and still a subject of active dispute – deriving from the saga of past discord within the German High Command.

Hitler Orders ‘Halt’

On 24 May, after a day in which hard pressure on the encircled Allied perimeter at all points had culminated in the British withdrawal from Arras, General Ironside observed with puzzlement in his diary:

The German mobile columns have definitely been halted for some reason or other. Rather similar to the halt they made before. It is quite certain that there is very little movement about.

Ironside was correct in his supposition. Early on the 24th Guderian and Reinhardt had secured a number of bridgeheads across the Aa Canal. Guderian was limbering up for his final drive on Dunkirk. Then, like a bolt from the blue, Guderian says:

Hitler ordered the left wing
¹
to stop on the Aa.
It was forbidden to cross that stream. We were not informed of the reasons for this. The order contained the words: ‘Dunkirk is to be left to the Luftwaffe’… We were utterly speechless.

But as it was a ‘Führer Order’ and no reasons had been given for it, Guderian says that this time ‘it was difficult to argue against it’. His Panzers were even instructed to withdraw from the bridgeheads they had established across the Aa. During the course of the Second World War, Hitler committed half a dozen key blunders that were to lose Germany the war. First of all, in planning
Sichelschnitt,
he had failed to contemplate any follow-up plan to invade Britain in the event of a French defeat; and this was compounded by the ‘Halt Order’ of 24 May, which enabled Britain to save the bulk of her armies through Dunkirk. Thirdly came Hitler’s decision to attack Yugoslavia and Greece in the spring of 1941, which cost him valuable campaigning time against Russia. Fourthly, there was the attack on Russia itself;
fifthly, Hitler’s (unnecessary) declaration of war on the United States, which was to bring the whole weight of U.S. power down on top of Germany, instead of Japan; and of course, finally, Hitler’s fateful order to Paulus to stand and fight at Stalingrad. But, in the early stages of the war, nothing could have been more disastrous to the Nazi cause than the Dunkirk ‘Halt Order’, which gave Gort and Churchill those three crucial days in which to fortify the Dunkirk perimeter and prepare for the evacuation; without which miracle Britain, unquestionably, would have been incapable of continuing the war. Many reasons have been given for the ‘Halt Order’: the muddy Flanders terrain, criss-crossed with canals and drainage ditches, was unsuitable for tanks; the Germans had to husband their depleted tank force for the next phase of the battle against the French; Hitler wanted to grant the B.E.F. a ‘golden bridge’ back to England, so as to ease the conclusion of a peace treaty with the British; Goering, discountenanced by the Army’s brilliant successes, had demanded his share of glory for the Luftwaffe; and finally, the vast forces now converging on the compressed Allied pocket were administratively in a tangle. At best these are half-truths. Historians will continue to argue over the motives involved, but the facts seem to be briefly as follows.

On 23 May, Goering had telephoned Hitler at the
Felsennest,
urging him that the moment had come for the Luftwaffe to administer the
coup de grâce
in the north, after which the Army would be required solely to ‘occupy the territory’. He resorted to politico-philosophic arguments, declaring that the ultimate triumph should fall to the ‘National Socialist’ Luftwaffe, rather than to the conservative Army; it came down to a question of Hitler’s own personal prestige as opposed to that of the O.K.H. generals. Goering expressed total confidence that the Luftwaffe could indeed finish the job single-handed. Doubtless the argument made its mark with Hitler, though Jodl, the O.K.W. Chief of Operations, remarked acidly of Goering: ‘He’s shooting his mouth off again.’