In Europe (53 page)

Six to ten million French people fled their homes. The American journalist Virginia Cowles drove from Paris to Chartres, and everywhere along the road she saw cars that had run out of petrol. Old people, too ill or too tired to move on, lay exhausted on the ground. Halfway up a hill, a bakery van had stalled. At the wheel was a woman. While the cars behind her began honking their horns, she climbed out of the car and, surrounded by her four children, begged for fuel. No one did a thing. Finally, three men pushed the van into the deep ditch beside the road. The van fell on
its side with a loud crash, the family possessions that had been tied to the roof rolled across the field. The woman screamed. Everyone drove on. It was hard to believe, Cowles wrote, that these were the citizens of Paris, the descendants of those who had fought tooth and nail for their liberty and had stormed the Bastille with their bare hands. ‘For the first time I began to understand what had happened to France. Morale was a matter of faith.’

In London, Jean Monnet – who had by now risen to be head of the Anglo-French Coordination Committee, launched a daring, last-minute emergency plan: he wanted France and Great Britain to become one. A joint pool of shipping space had already been set up, just as in the First World War, but this time Monnet wanted to go much further. In a memorandum of less than five pages he proposed that the two countries become united: their armies, their governments, their parliaments, their economies, their colonies, the whole lot. The two countries could then no longer surrender independently. In the worst case, the 250,000 French soldiers still fighting in the west of the country could be evacuated to England, and fight on under the flag of the new union. The French fleet, by the same token, could sail to British ports and begin the struggle anew from there.

Operating jointly, Monnet reasoned, France and Great Britain had so many more resources than Germany that, in the longer term, they could never lose the war. Especially not if they could count on support from the United States. Monnet's intentions were more than a mere gesture born of desperation. ‘For us,’ he stated later, ‘the plan was not simply an opportunist appeal or a merely formal text: it was an act which, with good luck, could have changed the course of events for the good of Europe. This is still my opinion today.’

Monnet had an excellent relationship with both Churchill and Reynaud, and his idea, unusual though it may have been, was given serious consideration. ‘My first reaction was unfavourable,’ Churchill wrote in his war diaries. But when he introduced the proposal to the cabinet, he saw to his amazement how ‘staid, solid, experienced politicians of all parties engaged themselves so passionately in an immense design whose implications and consequences were not in any way thought out.’ Finally,
Churchill agreed that the plan should be explored, as did de Gaulle – who had come to England on his own authority – and Reynaud.

That June, the decision-making suddenly speeded up. Monnet drafted his proposal on Thursday, 13 June. The next evening he already had a correction to make: ‘Paris might fall’ became ‘Paris has fallen’. On Sunday, 16 June the final communiqué was drawn up.‘At this most fateful moment in the history of the modern world … The two governments declare that France and Great Britain shall no longer form two nations, but one, single Franco-British union.’

Early that evening de Gaulle flew with the document from London to Bordeaux, the seat of the French government at the time. Churchill and a few members of the cabinet were to make the crossing to France that night by cruiser, to add their signatures. But while the British ministers were at Waterloo Station, already in the train for Southampton, the news came through that Reynaud had resigned. The French government had rejected the proposed union, and the war was decided. Pétain had been appointed premier. ‘It's all over,’ de Gaulle told Monnet on the phone. ‘There is no sense in pressing further. I am coming back.’ Churchill got off the train and went home. On that same night, 120 German bombers attacked England for the first time. Nine British civilians were killed, the first.

Paul Reynaud could have been the same kind of leader as Churchill. He regarded Hitler as the Genghis Khan of the modern age, he demanded total dedication and promised that his government would ‘summon together and lead all the forces of France’ in continuing the struggle. The problem was, most of the French loathed him. He had opposed Munich – which had cost him the support of the moderate conservatives. He was in favour of the war – which had cost him the support of the right. He was a centrist democrat, but he survived only by grace of the socialist opposition's support.

By means of all kinds of manoeuvres – one of which was to appoint Pétain to the post of vice-premier – he tried to broaden support for his cabinet. But he was inept enough to draw in more and more tired defeatists. ‘You have no army,’ Pétain sneered at the British minister of war, Anthony Eden.‘What could you achieve where the French army has failed?’ During
those weeks Churchill flew back and forth to France at least four times, desperately trying to convince the French to keep fighting. He suggested that they, with large-scale support from the British, set up a huge guerrilla organisation. ‘It is possible the Nazis may dominate Europe, but it will be a Europe in revolt.’ It was to no avail. Pétain felt that a guerrilla war would mean ‘the destruction of the country’. General Weygand claimed that, after the French Army capitulated, Britain would open negotiations with Hitler within the week, and that it would have ‘its neck wrung like a chicken’.

On Sunday, 16 June, when Reynaud presented the French cabinet with the plan drawn up by Monnet, Churchill and de Gaulle, he was laughed at. Pétain called the union with Great Britain ‘a marriage to a corpse’. Other members of the cabinet feared that France would assume the status of a British colony. ‘Then rather a Nazi province. We know, at least, what that involves.’ Next it was proposed that the government begin negotiations with the Germans. The idea of forming a government in exile in North Africa had already been swept from the table by Pétain. He wanted, he said, always to ‘remain with the people of France, to share their suffering and misery’. Imperceptibly, he had begun to twist things around:
he
was the true patriot, those who went into exile and continued the struggle from abroad were the traitors. Later, de Gaulle was actually sentenced –
in absentia
– to death.

Reynaud had no desire to stand by and watch it happen. On Monday morning, 17 June, the French heard Pétain's high voice on the radio stating that Reynaud had resigned, that he was his successor and that he would arrange a ceasefire with the Germans as quickly as possible. The French Army surrendered, burned its banners, buried its dead and – in so far as it was still possible – slunk off in the direction of home.

Before me lies a dishevelled, yellowed booklet, published in 1946 by the Société des Éditions Franc-tireur under the title
L’étrange défaite
. It is little more than an essay, written in summer 1940 ‘in a deep rage’ by the French medievalist Marc Bloch. Bloch, a Jew and a Resistance fighter, died in front of the firing squad six months later. But his brilliant, unadulterated fit of rage from summer 1940 still forms the basis for almost every historical analysis of what is known as the ‘May War’.

The French defeat of 1940 is generally seen these days as one of the crucial developments in the Second World War. It not only cleared the way for Hitler's occupation of Western Europe, but also for his campaigns to the east, his deportations, his slave-labour camps and his extermination industry. It is such a central event in the twentieth century that we have come to think of it as an inevitability. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Bloch's account displays, first of all, complete bafflement. For the Europe of that day, the German victory was entirely unexpected. No one, including the Germans, imagined that this campaign could succeed so easily. The
Wehrmacht
's chief of staff, General Halder, wrote to his wife as late as 11 May that most of his colleagues considered the whole expedition ‘idiotic and reckless’. Even Hitler was counting on a fairly prolonged struggle.

Among the French, on the other hand – and Bloch emphasises this forgotten aspect again and again – the mood was one of enormous self-confidence. In September 1939, a top French official reported to his superiors that ‘no one, or almost no one, in the population has doubts about victory, even if they are afraid of the price to be paid.’ People even wondered whether Hitler would actually dare to begin an offensive against France. In hindsight, this wilful arrogance was one of the chief reasons for the defeat.

Other reasons, Bloch says, were found in the field of military strategy: the inflexibility of the French commanders, the inferior cooperation with the British and the disregard for information from intelligence services. It was not courage that the French lacked. At Lille, in June, the French fought fiercely to provide cover for the British retreat at Dunkirk. At Saumur, the 2,500 lightly armed cadets at the military academy had succeeded for two days in halting the advance of a German armed division, albeit with heavy losses. The statistics, too, speak of a great deal of forgotten heroism. During those first six weeks of war, 124,000 Frenchmen were killed, and more than 200,000 were wounded: that is roughly twice the number of German casualties and three times those of the British.

Then Bloch points to a final cause: in May 1940, France was anything but a united and unified nation, determined to fight the aggressors down to the last man. Bloch describes the ranks of the French Army as he and his fellow officers experienced them: ‘Lieutenants: friends. Captains:
comrades. Commanders: colleagues. Colonels: rivals. Generals: enemies.’ On the political scene, things were no different.

In early August, Lucienne Gaillard crossed back over the line of demarcation between Vichy France and occupied France.‘It was no joke getting home. Our house had been looted while we were gone. Everything had been turned upside down.’ Her father couldn't bear the thought of his country being occupied, even though he had returned to the German part of France. He began, with minor acts of sabotage, on his own. Later he formed a group, derailed German munitions trains, joined up with de Gaulle and provided shelter for stranded pilots. But during those first years he was above all lonely and bitter. ‘To him, Vichy equalled treason.’

During those six fateful weeks, one miracle took place: Dunkirk. The German drive went so quickly as to overwhelm not only the Belgians and the French, but also the Germans themselves. Just as General Guderian's 19th Armoured Division was about to spring the trap and drive the British into the Channel, Hitler ordered them to halt. ‘We were speechless,’ Guderian said later. There was almost no resistance. The advance posts could already see the steeples of Dunkirk. The delay lasted three days. In that way, Hitler gave the British precisely enough time to evacuate their defeated army from Dunkirk.

The rescue operation had all the elements of a heroic drama. A bizarre fleet consisting of naval vessels, rickety fishing boats, old lifeboats, pleasure craft, brown-sailed Thames barges and a sea of private yachts was tossed together with lightning speed. Between 28 May and 4 June, 1940, this allowed 220,000 British soldiers and 120,000 Frenchman, plus 34,000 vehicles, to be brought back to England. As well as 170 dogs, for no British soldier was willing to leave behind his mascot.

The historical accounts are marked by great discrepancies. ‘My own feelings are rather of disgust,’ a British veteran wrote years later to Walter Lord, one of those who wrote the history of that event. ‘I saw officers throw their revolvers away … I saw soldiers shooting cowards as they fought to be first in a boat.’

‘Their courage made our job easy,’ a naval man wrote about exactly the same situation. ‘I was proud to have known them and to have been of their generation.’ According to two officers of the local command, the organisation around Dunkirk was ‘absolute chaos’, a ‘debacle’, a ‘disgrace’. But one liaison officer saw Dunkirk as proof that ‘the British were an invincible people’.

Today, in 1999, Dunkirk is a seaside resort like any other, with a huge plastic play-castle where ‘Les Colettes’ perform, shrieking children, perspiring mothers, ice-cream parlours and ugly apartment buildings, all of it imbued with a routine breathlessness that goes on day after day, a life off which the past rolls like water off a duck's back.

The beach at Dunkirk is one of those spots in Europe's history where things were truly touch-and-go, where some little thing, an error of judgement on the part of a single individual, determined the course of history. For what was it that persuaded Hitler to order his troops to halt, at precisely the moment when they could have delivered their opponents the
coup de grâce
? What are we to think of this order?

First of all: Dunkirk was crucial for the British, but for the Germans it was only secondary. The eyes of the entire German staff were turned on Paris. After the debacle of 1914, it was that city which they wanted to seize as quickly as possible. Other reasons lay in the military strategy: Guderian's 19th Armoured Division simply moved too fast, there was too little to cover its flanks, provisions became a problem, a brief pause was needed. Furthermore – as shown by survey maps found later – the German high command mistakenly assumed that the area around Dunkirk was extremely swampy, and that their tanks would become hopelessly bogged down there. Hitler was highly susceptible to such warnings: after all, during the First World War he had seen with his own eyes how entire divisions had become stuck in the mud in this part of Europe.

According to some historians, there was another, psychological explanation for Hitler's actions: he may have consciously wished to allow the British to escape, because in this first phase of the war he was still hoping to strike a compromise with Britain. The British were to get off the continent, no matter what that took, but they were to be allowed their own independence and their empire. He considered a destroyed, disintegrating United Kingdom to be a far greater risk. The evacuation of British troops
at Dunkirk, as Runstedt and others concluded, was therefore not Hitler's mistake, but, deep in his heart, his desire.