To Lose a Battle (85 page)

President Lebrun
¹²
now intervened to voice for the first time the unspoken thought in the mind of Weygand and his supporters. What if the French armies were scattered and destroyed as Weygand envisaged? ‘Of course,’ he said,

we have signed engagements
¹³
which prevent us from concluding a separate peace, but if Germany makes any relatively advantageous offer we ought nevertheless to examine it closely and objectively.

Weygand expressed sympathy with the President’s point of view, and thought that the Government ought to take up this issue with the British right away. Pétain questioned whether there was in fact complete reciprocity of obligations between the two countries; after all, had not Britain put only ten divisions into the field while eighty French divisions were fighting? On the same theme, General Vuillemin of the Air Force
¹⁴
stated that while the French were losing some thirty machines a day, R.A.F. fighters had hardly been engaged at all. Although at times B.E.F. troops on the ground might have shared the same view, it was hardly a true picture. Nevertheless, Vuillemin continued that there were only sixty-five British fighters on the Continent while six hundred were kept in England for the defence of the island. ‘It is said,’ he claimed, ‘that during the last three days the English have sent a hundred fighters a day over the Continent, but I have not been able to verify the statement. I do not know in any detail what has been done by the English fighters in France.’
¹⁵
M. Campinchi, the Minister of the Marine, injected the ingenious suggestion that, if France wanted to conclude a separate peace without British consent, she might be freed of her obligations if the present French Government, which had signed the joint declaration, were
simply to resign. The session ended with Reynaud announcing that he would fly at once to London and that he would explain France’s military plight clearly to Churchill. Weygand and his supporters urged that Reynaud should specifically raise the question of the Franco-British Declaration. There was no discussion of whether, in the event of defeat in France, the French Government might follow the example of the other invaded nations and go into exile in London, or elsewhere.

As a result of these meetings of the 25th, Reynaud says, ‘if I did not know all, at least I knew… that Pétain and Weygand were in favour of asking for an armistice on the day the battle of France was lost, and of allowing the Government to be captured in Paris’. In London the next day, he relayed to Churchill the full gravity of France’s dilemma and the problem now confronting him from the ‘softs’ within his own Government. He also expressed concern that Mussolini was about to bring Italy into the war against France. What could Britain do to help here? Reynaud declared his own determination to fight on to the end, but he declined to raise the delicate issue demanded by Weygand. At 1930 that evening he was met at Le Bourget by Baudouin, who at once asked him:

‘What did you say of the necessity in which we may shortly find ourselves of breaking off the fight? In what conditions will the English free us from our promise?’ ‘I was not able to put the question,’ he replied. I told him that he had done wrong; that he had not fulfilled the mission with which the War Committee had entrusted him.

If so junior a Minister
¹⁶
expressed himself in these terms to the Prime Minister of France, it is in itself indicative of the growing ascendancy of Paul Baudouin. Behind Baudouin one may descry the shadowy agency of the Comtesse de Portes, his political patroness, indefatigable, inflamedly anti-British and already dedicated to a separate peace, but (for once) apparently unable to use the weapons of the boudoir to influence her lover, Reynaud, determined as he now was on fighting to the end.

During Reynaud’s absence in London, Pétain had called upon Baudouin. He revealed to Baudouin that he too did not believe in a fight to the finish. The old Marshal who had gained his reputation for husbanding the lives of his men at Verdun thought that it was ‘easy and stupid to talk of fighting to the last man; it is also criminal in view of our losses in the last war and of our low birthrate’. He felt that a part of the Army must be saved; for without it ‘to maintain order a true peace is impossible’. In the days to come, these last words were to correspond faithfully with Weygand’s own views.

From the South: the Last Allied Attack

Thus in Paris the days of 24–26 May saw the crystallization of a ‘separate peace’ lobby, of which its hard core was formed by the Weygand–Pétain–Baudouin axis. It was a turning-point in the affairs of France. From now on the lobby would be increasingly conscious of its combined strength against Reynaud. It was also the time when the fire which Churchill had thought he detected in Weygand on the 22nd finally flickered out. On the 27th, the long-awaited effort from the south began. Under the reinstated General Grandsard (formerly of X Corps), the 7th and 4th Colonial Infantry divisions, backed by a scattering of Somuas, attacked towards Amiens. They got to within sight of the city, apparently causing the German defenders some passing anxiety; then, after suffering heavy losses, the French colonial troops (many of them Senegalese with no battle-training) were thrown back to their start-line by an enemy counter-attack. On the 28th, de Gaulle executed his third offensive action with customary courage and dash, supported by the British 51st (Highland) Division, this time against the German bridgehead around Abbeville. De Gaulle claims:

there was an air of victory on the battlefield. Everyone held his head high. The wounded smiled. The guns barked joyously. The Germans before us had fallen back after a pitched battle.

Five hundred German prisoners were claimed, but once again the attack petered out on the second day, without the German bridgehead having been erased, and certainly without any incursion having been made into the Panzer Corridor. The
French forces along the Somme now resumed their defensive posture.

Herewith faded the last Franco-British offensive effort, and the final flicker of the ‘Weygand Plan’. Its author had lost hope well before it began. On the 29th, while de Gaulle was still attacking towards Abbeville, Weygand presented a memorandum to the War Cabinet in which he made an unfavourable comparison with the lost war of 1870. At that time, when the regular armies had been crushed, France had been able to raise
ad hoc
forces which had ‘prolonged the resistance for five months and saved the honour of France’. Now, even if the equipment were available for fresh armies, ‘the enemy would not allow us the time to organize them’. Pétain congratulated Weygand on his memorandum, and approved its contents. Weygand then said to Reynaud: ‘I hope to stand on the Somme–Aisne line, but it is my duty to tell you that I am not sure of being able to do so.’ His meaning was now abundantly clear; he would fight one more battle, ‘to save the honour of France’, and then that would be the end. Reynaud replied to Weygand’s memorandum with a resolute written rejoinder in which, for the first time, he declared his intention of continuing the war, if necessary, from North Africa.

Dunkirk

During these days, Gort, with dogged determination and deflected neither by Blanchard’s pleas nor Churchillian growls, was beginning the evacuation from Dunkirk of the force upon which would depend the immediate safety of Britain, and the ultimate salvation of France. Although Gort had been acting (at any rate until 26 May) in direct opposition to his will, Churchill wrote of him later in
The Second World War
in magnanimous terms:

Confident in his military virtue, and convinced of the complete breakdown of all control, either by the British and French Governments or by the French Supreme Command… In all this Lord Gort had acted upon his own responsibility. But by now we at home, with a somewhat different angle of information, had already reached the same conclusions.

Accordingly, on the 26th Gort received official notice from the War Office ‘to operate towards the coast forthwith’. Few then held hopes of saving more than a fraction of the B.E.F.; Ironside was reckoning in private that the British would be lucky to get out 30,000 men,
¹⁷
and Gort himself signalled back in reply to the War Office’s instruction of the 26th: ‘I must not conceal from you that a great part of the B.E.F. and its equipment will inevitably be lost even in best circumstances.’ On 28 May Churchill warned the House of Commons to ‘prepare itself for hard and heavy tidings’. Certainly, without Gort’s decision to disengage from Arras and without Hitler’s ‘Halt Order’ to the Panzers, the probability is that few in excess of Ironside’s pessimistic calculation would have been rescued.

The story of the ‘miracle of Dunkirk’ has been told and retold. Little needs to be added here. During the three-day respite afforded by the halting of the Panzers, Gort had managed to throw up a strong protective shell around the Dunkirk bridgehead. But it was in the air that the holding of the bridgehead was predominantly decided. The R.A.F. now threw in every single plane available. Day and night its bombers blasted the attacking Germans, while fighter pilots flew sometimes as many as four sorties a day. Altogether the British fighter cover totalled 2,739 sorties while the evacuations lasted. For the first time since the campaign began, the cruelly beautiful ‘Goering’s weather’ that had so aided the Luftwaffe now deserted it; during at least half of the nine-day epic of Dunkirk, fog and bad visibility limited flying. On the good days the Luftwaffe, considerably weakened by the losses and strain of three weeks constantly on the offensive,
¹⁸
found itself sorely pressed by the furious concentrations of aircraft that the R.A.F., flying from bases just across the Straits of Dover, was able to put in the air
over Dunkirk. Only two days, 27 May and 1 June, did the Luftwaffe enjoy outstanding success. Each day that went by proved Goering’s boast that he could ‘finish the job’ to be a little further from realization.

By the evening of 27 May, the disappointing total of only 7,669 men had been embarked from Dunkirk. But the next day the Royal Navy began to be reinforced by the vast armada of small boats collected from all over the South Coast of England, and that day’s figure reached 17,804. On the 29th, the arrival of French warships helped hoist the day’s results to 47,310; and so on, until a peak of 68,014 was reached on 31 May. That day Gort himself sailed for England, having been issued strictest orders by Churchill to hand over to one of his corps commanders as soon as the B.E.F. left in France was down to the equivalent of three divisions.
¹⁹
That same day, Churchill was in Paris again attending a meeting of the Supreme War Council and was able to tell it that the astonishing figure of 165,000 men had already been evacuated. Weygand promptly questioned, in what Spears describes as a ‘high, querulous and aggressive’ voice, ‘But how many French? The French aie being left behind?’ When Churchill revealed that only 15,000 of these had been French, not unnaturally there were resentful comments. (In fact, it transpired that Blanchard – to Gort’s amazement – had received
no orders
from Weygand to begin evacuating French troops until 29 May.) At the meeting of the 31st, Churchill promptly decreed that henceforth the evacuations should proceed on equal terms between the British and the French –
‘bras dessus bras dessous’
as he put it in his robust French.
²⁰
Spears recalled how a great hush fell on the room,
silencing French misgivings (temporarily, at least), as Churchill with tears in his eyes declared: ‘We are companions in misfortune; there is nothing to be gained from recrimination over our common miseries.’
²¹
Churchill was as good as his word; over the next three days of the evacuation, 98,000 French were embarked, as against 20,000 British. In the opinion of Brian Bond,
²²
more French could have been got out ‘had they been organized at the right place and the right time’. But, in the view held by many Frenchmen, those French soldiers were holding the perimeter until the last British had left.

By the morning of 3 June, the last British troops were embarked; but the Royal Navy still made one more heroic effort, and took off another 26,000 French to make a total of about 53,000 since the last British troops had left; ‘a gesture of comradeship,’ says Bond ‘which was widely recognized by French writers’. By now the Germans were within a mile and a quarter of the sea, but still held back by a courageous French rearguard. At dawn the next day, the last ship left Dunkirk, taking with it a final contingent of French soldiers. The remarkable total of 337,000 men, of whom 110,000 were French, had been got out of the
Sichelschnitt
trap, at a cost of six British and two French destroyers, as well as many lesser craft. But the knowledge that 30,000 French troops, the last of the rearguard, had to be abandoned to the Germans, in addition to the many thousands forced to surrender in the Lille pocket, was to provide another lasting source of anti-British bitterness in French hearts.

Although, as Churchill warned the House of Commons on 4 June, ‘Wars are not won by evacuations’, Dunkirk will always be regarded by the British as one of the great triumphs of the island race. But to the French, for whom, in any case, water was a hostile rather than a friendly element, Dunkirk could only represent defeat, and desertion by an ally. ‘The British lion seems to grow wings when it’s a matter of getting back to the sea,’ wrote the anglophobe Admiral Darlan. ‘We no longer belonged to one society bounded by the same horizon,’ recorded the half-French General Spears; ‘A lifetime steeped in French
feeling, sentiment and affection was falling from me. England alone counted now.’
²³
For a great many years, Dunkirk – the nadir of the wartime alliance (until, perhaps, the British sinking of the French fleet at Mers-el-Kebir later in the year) – would continue to plague the heart of Franco-British relations. But it was Hitler who, in terms of overall war strategy, suffered the most injurious defeat at Dunkirk.