Winds of War (54 page)

The radio news - disaster on disaster in Norway, German drives succeeding, Allied landings failing, the remnants of the Norwegian army retreating into the mountains where the Germans were hunting them down - came to her as dim distant rumors. Reality was only her wet pillow, and the stream of middle-aged sunburned Jews paying condolence calls, and all the endless talk about money problems.

She was shocked back into her senses by two events, one on top of the other: Byron’s return from Europe, and the German attack on France.

* * *

Chapter 24 – Case Yellow

(from WORLD EMPIRE LOST)

The Great Assault

Modern war is characterized by sudden swift changes on the grand scale. In the spring of 1940, seven days sufficed for our German armed forces to upset the world order. On May 10, the English and French were still the victors of Versailles, still masters of the seas and continents. By May 17 France was a beaten, almost helpless nation, and England was hanging on for her life.

On paper, the odds had been heavy against
Fall Gelb
(“Case Yellow”), our plan for attacking France. The figures of the opposing forces had certainly comforted the enemy and disturbed us. But put to the test, Case yellow (revised) brought a big victory. Our soldiers man for man proved superior to the best the democracies had. Our High Command used well the lessons of massed armor and gasoline-engine mobility learned in the defeat of World War I at the hands of British tank battalions. The Anglo-French world hegemony stood unmasked as a mere historical husk. It still commanded the seas and the access to raw materials; its resources for a long war were superior to ours; but without the will to use them these advantages were meaningless. Persia had greater resources than Alexander the Great.

In judging Hitler, historians must recognize that he sensed this weakness of the other side, and that we of the General Staff erred. We assumed that our professional opponents were preparing with due urgency to wage war. But in fact their countrymen would not face realities, and their politicians would not tell the people unpleasant truths. Adolf Hitler gambled the future of Germany, and therefore of Europe, and therefore of the existing world order, on one heavy armed thrust. It succeeded beyond anybody’s expectation, including his own.

Besides ordering the attack over the pessimistic objections of our staff, Hitler also, almost at the last minute, adopted the bold Manstein Plan for an armored strike in force through the bad Ardennes terrain, to turn the left flank of the Maginot Line. This departure from the classic Schlieffen Plan achieved total surprise, and led to Rundstedt’s magnificent race across northern France to the sea. It split the Allies, sent the British fleeing across the Channel in an improvised flotilla of pleasure yachts, coal scows, and fishing boats, and ended the shaky French will to fight. Thereafter we marched south to Paris against fast-crumbling resistance. And so Germany achieved in a few weeks, under a former corporal, what it had failed to do in four years of desperate combat under Kaiser Wilhelm II.

The technical key to our victory in France was simply that we massed our armor into whole spearhead divisions, like iron cavalry, thus restoring speed and movement to the battlefields of the industrial age, supposedly paralyzed forever into trench warfare by the strength and range of mechanical firepower. We learned this from the works of the English tactician Fuller and the French tactician de Gaulle, analyzing the lessons of World War I.

The French army, with armored strength superior to our own, ignored these Allied thinkers, and scattered thousands of tanks piecemeal among the infantry divisions. This question of how to use the new self-propelled armor had been much disputed between the wars. We took the right path of Fuller, de Gaulle, and our own Guderian. Our opponents took the wrong one. The coordination of dive-bombing with these new ground tactics hastened the victory.

The Maginot Line

The world was stunned. For months Western newspapers and magazines had been printing maps of Europe, showing imaginary battle lines for the coming campaign. The French commander-in-chief, Generalissimo Maurice Gamelin, “the world’s foremost professional soldier,” as the Western journalists called him, was supposed to have a masterly plan to beat us.

In modern war, according to this rumored “Gamelin Plan,” industrial firepower gave the defense an advantage over the offense of ten or fifteen to one. France had spent one and one half million soldiers’ lives in World War I proving that the massed infantry attacks of Napoleon no longer worked against machine guns and cannon. There would be no more Verduns. The new concept was to build in peacetime a great wall of linked fortresses with the strongest modern firepower. No matter how many millions of men a future enemy might hurl against this wall, they would all drown in their own blood.

On this theory, France had constructed a chain of fortresses united by underground tunnels, the Maginot Line. If we Germans did not attack, the between the land wall of the Maginot Line and the British sea blockade, the economic life would be choked out of us. Finally the Allied armies would sally forth from the Line to deliver the coup de grâce, if revolution did not topple Hitler first, and bring our generals crawling for peace terms, as we had in 1918. So ran the newspaper talk in the West during the sitzkrieg.

Informed military men had a question or two about this Maginot Line. It was indeed a marvel of engineering, but was it not too short? Beginning at the Swiss Alps, it ran along the French-German border for more than a hundred miles to a place called Longuyon. There it stopped. Between Longuyon and the English Channel, there still remained a hole of open level country, the boundary between France and Belgium, at least as long as the Line itself. In 1914, we bestial Germans had attacked through Belgium precisely because this hole offered such a flat fine road to Paris. Couldn’t we just go around the famous Maginot Line and come down by that route again?

The proponents of the Gamelin Plan met such questions with ironic smiles. Yes, to run the line straight through Belgium to the sea would have been very fine, they said. But that was up to the Belgians, who insisted on preserving their neutrality instead. As for completing the Line in French territory, it would have had to cut through a hundred thirty miles of important industrial areas. Moreover, at the time when it might have been done, a mood of economy had come over the government. The people wanted shorter hours and higher pay. The cost would have been astronomical. Also subsurface water in the area made a tunnel system difficult. Also, by then Hitler was in power, and extending the Line might have provoked the bellicose Führer to do something rash.

In short, the wisest military brains in France had decided not to finish the Maginot Line. Instead, there was the Gamelin Plan. If war came, the French and British armies would be poised along the unfortified Belgian border. If the Germans did try to come through there again, the Allies under Gamelin would leap forward and join the tough Belgian army of two hundred thousand men on a strong river line. Given the enormous advantage of the defense in modern warfare, a German attack on such a narrow front would bloodily collapse.

Outcome of the Plan

We did attack, though not exactly where the Plan called for us to do so. Five days later, Generalissimo Gamelin was fired. We were pouring around the north end of the Maginot Line through the supposedly “impassable” Ardennes country, and flooding westward across France. Thus we cut off the French and British armies which, following the Gamelin Plan, had duly leaped forward into Belgium. Our Eighteenth Army under Küchler was also coming at them from Holland to the north. They were trapped. On the morning of May 15, the Prime Minister of France telephoned his defense minister to ask what countermeasures Gamelin was proposing. The minister answered, according to history, “He has none.”

At an urgent conference in Paris next day at the Quai d’Orsay, Winston Churchill, who had desperately flown over from London, asked Generalissimo Gamelin, “General, where is the reserve – the
masse de manoeuvre
– to bring up against the German breakthrough?”

The world’s foremost professional soldier replied, according to Churchill’s memoirs, “
Aucune
.” (There isn’t any.)

General Weygand relieved him. We took the Maginot Line from behind with no trouble, since the guns pointed the other way; marched off to captivity the French armies found sitting inside the forts and tunnels; transferred all the cannon to the English Channel for use against the British; took all the stored food and equipment in the labyrinth; and left a few light bulbs to illuminate the empty concrete passageways. So the Maginot Lines remains to this day.

The French passed from the stage of historical greatness. Germany’s implacable enemy of the centuries had at last come to grief. Strategically, they had guessed wrong on the use of industrial power in war, and had wasted their national energy and treasure on an enormous tragic joke in steel and concrete: half a wall. Tactically, when General Gamelin said, “
Aucune
,” the military history of France was over.

Shadows on the Victory

In the headquarters of the Supreme Command, the victory over France, while welcome and exhilarating, had its worrisome aspects. Some of us who were present at the signing of the armistice watched with heavy hearts as the Führer danced his little jig of triumph in the sunshine of Compiègne. We were torn between pride in this feat of German arms, this virile reversal of the 1918 defeat, and our inside knowledge of tragic errors the capering Dictator had made or tried to make. There were completely covered up for the world at large by the rosy glow of success. Germany in that hour was like a virgin at a military ball, all radiant with the blushed aroused in her by the admiring eyes of handsome officers, and all unaware of a fatal cancer budding inside her.

The cancer already afflicting Germany at that hour, unfelt by all but handful in the innermost circle of command, was amateur military leadership. We had watched the symptoms crop up in the minor Norway operation. Our hope was that our inexperienced warlord, having been blooded in that victory, would steady down for the great assault in the west.

But, six days after the breakthrough, when Rundstedt was rolling to the sea, with Guderian’s panzers in the van and all enemy forces in flight, Hitler had a bad fit of nerves, fearing a French counterattack from the south – no more likely at that moment than a Hottentot counterattack – and halted Rundstedt’s army group for two precious days. Fortunately Guderian wangled permission for a “reconnaissance in force” westward. Thereupon he simply ignored the Führer and blitzed ahead to the coast.

Then followed an incredible tactical blunder. With the British expeditionary force helplessly retreating toward the sea, but far behind in the race and about to be cut off by Guderian’s massed tanks, the Führer halted Guderian on the River Aa, nine miles from Dunkirk, and forbade the tank divisions to advance for three days! To this day nobody has factually ascertained why he did this. Theories are almost as abundant as military historians, but they add little to the facts. During these three days the British rescued their armies from the Dunkirk beaches. That is the long and short of the “miracle of Dunkirk.”

Had Hitler not halted Guderian, the panzers would have beaten the foe to Dunkirk and cut him off. The British would have lost over three hundred thousand men and officers, the bulk of their trained land force, in the Flanders cauldron. I discuss in detail, under my section “Fantastic Halt at the River Aa,” the preposterousness of the excuse that the terrain around Dunkirk was too marshy, and too crisscrossed by hedges and canals, for tank operations. The fact is that finally Guderian did advance, after seventy-two mortal hours in which the first golden chance for quick victory in World War II slipped from our grasp. Hermann Göring’s Luftwaffe was supposed to take over from the halted armored divisions and finish off the British. Perhaps Hitler relished this notion of letting a Nazi air marshal in at the kill, instead of the distrusted Army General Staff. History records what Göring accomplished.

But if final victory was denied us, at least we had vanquished France; that much seemed indisputable. Yet on June 6 even this was momentarily cast in doubt when Hitler had another brainstorm. Paris, he suddenly declared, was not the objective; what our armies should do next was cut southeast in force and capture the Lorraine basin, so as to deny France its coal and armaments industries! Fortunately the momentum of operations was beyond even the Führer’s power to meddle. We took Paris even while a number of divisions went wheeling needlessly into Lorraine.

His Worst Mistake

But worse than all these mistakes – so bad that history will forever stand amazed at the fact – the Wehrmacht arrived at the English Channel without any plan of what to do next! There we were at the sea, millions strong, armed to the teeth, flushed with victory, facing a beaten, disarmed, impotent enemy across a ditch forty miles wide; but our infallible Leader, who had all staff activities so firmly in his grip that nobody could make a move without his nod, had somehow overlooked the slight detail of how one got to England.

Here nevertheless was a moment for greatness, such as comes once in a thousand years. Alexander, Caesar, and Napoleon in their time had made mistakes as major as any of Hitler’s. What they possessed to balance and outweigh these was generalship: the ability to divine and seize a favoring moment with the utmost speed and audacity. Yes, we had no plan for invading England, but had the British had a plan for crossing the Channel from Dunkirk in a scraped-together flotilla of cockleshells? Under the spur of necessity, despite the total disorganization of defeat, despite fierce Luftwaffe bombardment, they had moved three hundred thousand men across the water. Why then could not we, the strongest armed force on earth in the full tide of victory, do a “Dunkirk in reverse,” and throw a force of armored divisions across the Channel to an undefended, helpless shore? There was nothing on the ground in England to oppose our march to London. The rescued expeditionary force was a disarmed rabble; all its equipment lay abandoned in Flanders. The Home Guard was a pathetic raggle-taggle of old men and boys.