Modern Times: The World From the Twenties to the Nineties (72 page)

Bloch noted that, whatever the deep-seated causes, the immediate one was ‘the utter incompetence of the high command’. It is now known that General Gamelin was suffering from syphilis, which may explain the inability to make up his mind, lack of concentration, failing memory and delusions of grandeur which he exhibited during the campaign.
⁸²
But the paralysis of senior officers was general. Bloch describes his own Army Group commander, General Blanchard, sitting ‘in tragic immobility, saying nothing, doing nothing, but just gazing at the map spread on the table between us, as though hoping to find on it the decision he was incapable of taking.’
⁸³

As a military gamble the attack on France was a complete success. It began on 10 May and six weeks later, on 22 June, France signed an armistice which gave Hitler everything he wanted. The ratio of casualties – 27,000 German dead to 135,000 for the Allies – gives some indication of the magnitude of the German victory. On 10 June Italy had entered the war on Germany’s side, and the terms of France’s armistice with Mussolini, signed on 24 June, included the withdrawal of the French colonies from the war. Three days later Stalin invaded Romania and seized the provinces of Bessarabia and Bukovina; he had already appropriated the Karelian
isthmus from Finland in a capitulation signed on 12 March. He was in every military sense Hitler’s ally, though not his co-belligerent.

France rapidly inclined towards the Nazi camp. Disarmed by the socialists, betrayed by the fascists and, still more, by the Communists, and now deserted by the Right and the Centre, the Third Republic collapsed, friendless and unmourned. At Riom, a series of trials, against a background of approval or indifference, condemned those judged
les résponsables
for the defeat: Daladier, Reynaud, Blum, Gamelin, Mandel, Guy la Chambre and others – in effect a verdict against the kind of parliamentary politics practised in France.
⁸⁴
The armistice had been signed by Maréchal Henri Philippe Pétain, and he was now invested with
pleins pouvoirs
by the rump parliament in the new capital set up in Vichy. His dictatorship had been long in coming. He had been a 1914–18 war hero and had dominated French military policy 1920–36, so in fact was as responsible as any for the
dégringolade.
But he was the most popular French general because his men felt they were less likely to be killed under his command than anyone else’s. He was stupid. His books were ghosted for him by clever young officers. But he had the simple dignity of the French peasant (his father had been one). When
Le Petit Journal
held a survey in 1935 to find whom the French would most like as their dictator, Pétain came top. Second was Pierre Laval, a former socialist of the Mussolini type, whom Pétain now made Prime Minister.
⁸⁵

Pétain quickly became the most popular French ruler since Napoleon. He incarnated anti-romanticism, the anxiety to relinquish historical and global duties, the longing for a quiet and safe life which now swept over France. He was a compulsive womanizer: ‘Sex and food are the only things that matter,’ he said. But the Church worshipped him. Cardinal Gerlier, the French primate, announced:
‘La France, c’est Pétain, et Pétain c’est la France.’
⁸⁶
In a sense it was true. He was treated like royalty. Peasants lined the rails along which his train passed. Women held out their babies for him to touch. An official report notes that at Toulouse in November 1940 a women hurled herself in front of his car to stop it so she might have the chance of touching his hand. The Prefect turned to Pétain to apologize, but found the Marshal gently asleep (he was eighty-five), ‘without’, said the report, ‘losing his dignity or his sovereign bearing’.
⁸⁷
In 1934 he had quarrelled with one of his colonels, Charles de Gaulle, who refused to write a book for him unacknowledged. Now, as Under-Secretary for War, de Gaulle refused to accept the armistice and on 5 August Britain signed an agreement with his Free French movement; but only 35,000 joined him. In its early days, the Vichy regime, composed of soldiers and civil servants,
with the politicians left out, generated genuine euphoria in France, as had Hitler’s in Germany in 1933.

Hitler had no difficulty in turning Vichy into an ally. On 3 July 1940, lacking adequate reassurances, the Royal Navy was instructed to sink the French fleet in Oran and other North African ports. Two days later Pétain broke off relations with Britain, and thereafter Vichy drifted inexorably into the Nazi camp, where she was ruthlessly treated as a milch-cow. Some 40 per cent of France’s industrial production, 1,500,000 workers and half France’s public sector revenue went to the German war-economy.
⁸⁸

Hitler was less lucky with Spain. Franco was determined to keep out of war, which he saw as the supreme evil, and especially a war waged by Hitler in association with Stalin, which he felt incarnated all the evils of the century. He declared strict neutrality in September 1939. He advised Mussolini to keep out too. He felt he had to shift to ‘non-belligerency’ on 13 June 1940, which he described as ‘a form of national sympathy with the Axis’.
⁸⁹
But as the price for entering the war he pitched his demands impossibly high: Oran, the whole of Morocco, huge territories in West Africa, massive quantities of war supplies and equipment to attack Gibraltar and defend the Canaries. When he met Hitler at Hendaye on 23 October 1940 he not only increased these demands but greeted his German benefactor with icy coldness verging on contempt. As he was himself a professional soldier, and Hitler an amateur – not even a gentleman, a corporal! – he treated Hitler’s customary military
tour d’horizon
with unconcealed contempt. They talked, wrote Hitler’s interpreter Paul Schmidt, ‘to or rather at one another’ until two in the morning and failed to agree on anything whatever. Hitler later told Mussolini he would rather have two or three teeth out than go through that again.
⁹⁰

One of Franco’s collateral reasons for refusing to join Hitler was his belief that Britain had no intention of making peace. Perhaps Hitler’s biggest single misjudgement was his failure to appreciate the depth of the hostility he had aroused in Britain. The main object of his
Blitzkrieg
in France was not to destroy the French army, which he felt he could do any time he wished, but to shock Britain into making terms. On 21 May, the same day he took Arras, he said he wanted ‘to sound out England on dividing the world’.
⁹¹
His decision to halt his armour outside Dunkirk at the end of the month, which allowed the bulk of the British Expeditionary Force to be evacuated from the beaches, was taken for military reasons but may have been prompted by the desire to open up a line of discussion with London. On 2 June, as the last
BEF
units were preparing to embark, he told the staff of Army Group
A
in Charleville that he wanted a ‘reasonable peace
agreement’ with Britain immediately so that he would be ‘finally free’ for his ‘great and real task: the confrontation with Bolshevism’.
⁹²
With the French campaign over, he spoke on 30 June of the need to give Britain one more ‘demonstration of our military power before she gives up and leaves us free in the rear for the East’.
⁹³
He continued to cling to the illusion that Britain might compromise into the late autumn. ‘The Führer is obviously depressed,’ noted an observer on 4 November, impression that at the moment he does not know how the war ought to continue.’
⁹⁴
He was waiting for a signal from London that never came.

In fact Britain became decisively more bellicose in the course of 1940. Where France chose Pétain and quietism, Britain chose Churchill and heroism. There were perfectly sound economic and military reasons for this bifurcation. Unlike France, Britain did not elect a popular front government in the mid-1930s, and the deflationary policies of the Baldwin—Chamberlain governments, though painful, eventually permitted her to make a substantial economic recovery. Although Britain’s unemployment in the early 1930s was much higher than France’s, there is evidence to show that much of it was voluntary as a result of the relatively high level of benefit, more than 50 per cent of average wages.
⁹⁵
The economy was much healthier than it appeared in left-wing propaganda. Almost throughout the 1930s the building industry was expanding, producing over 3 million new houses, adding 29 per cent to the total stock, including a record 400,000 in one twelve-month period (1936–7).
⁹⁶
The decline in union power following the failure of the General Strike in 1926, and subsequent anti-union legislation, made it possible, when the worst of the slump was over, for Britain to adopt new technologies with a speed impossible in the 1920s. Indeed for Britain the inter-war period culminated in a phase of innovatory expansion.
⁹⁷
Numbers employed in the new electrical-electronics industry rose from 192,000 in 1930 to 248,000 in 1936 and Britain was the first country to create a National Grid. The chemical and petro-chemical industry expanded rapidly, with exports rising 18 per cent 1930–8. Employment in the aircraft industry had risen from 21,000 in 1930 to 35,000 in 1935, even before rearmament got under way. The number of cars produced more than doubled from 237,000 in 1930 to 508,000 in 1937.
⁹⁸
These advances were all directly relevant to war-production capacity.

It is true that, in rearming, Britain experienced many set-backs and had to import machine-tools, for instance, from America, Hungary and even Germany itself.
⁹⁹
But in certain key areas, especially aero-engines and above all radar, which was to prove of decisive importance both in air- and sea-power, Britain had important technological leads over Germany.
¹⁰⁰
Rearmament accelerated in 1939 and by mid-194C Britain was producing more aircraft, and training more air-crews, than
Germany. There were thus solid physical reasons for the transformation of Britain’s mood in 1940. The emergence of Churchill, who became Prime Minister and Minister of Defence (an important conjunction Lloyd George had never been able to achieve in the First World War) on 7 May, was thus natural. His resolution, energy and oratory – he used this last gift to astonishing effect just at the point when Hitler, his greatest rival in this respect, voluntarily relinquished it – were a bonus. By the summer of 1940 he was at least as popular in Britain as Pétain in France, and more popular than Hitler now was in Germany.
¹⁰¹

Churchill, though romantic and pugnacious, was not unrealistic. He knew Britain, even with the Commonwealth, could not beat Germany. He assumed that sooner or later the United States would be obliged to intervene: therein lay his hope. Whatever he might say in public he did not altogether rule out a tactical deal with Hitler. On 26 May 1940 Chamberlain’s diary notes that Churchill told the War Cabinet ‘it was incredible that Hitler would consent to any terms that we could accept though if we could get out of this jam by giving up Malta and Gibraltar and some African colonies he would jump at it’. The Cabinet Minutes record him saying ‘if Herr Hitler was prepared to make peace on the terms of the restoration of German colonies and the overlordship of Central Europe’, it would be considered but ‘it was quite unlikely he would make any such offer’.
¹⁰²
But this is the only evidence of his willingness to parley. Hitler’s peace offers did not get through. According to the diary of ‘Chips’ Channon
MP
, then in the government, the Foreign Office did not even transcribe Hitler’s speeches.
¹⁰³

Paradoxically, after the fall of France any possibility of a negotiated peace ended, and Churchill’s political position improved steadily. He got his first big cheer from the Conservative benches on 4 July when he announced the action against the French fleet at Oran: hitherto, he noted, ‘it was from the Labour benches that I received the warmest welcome’. The death from cancer of Chamberlain removed his only really dangerous opponent, and on 9 October Churchill was elected to succeed him as Conservative leader. But he was neither able nor anxious to purge the regime of the elements who had destroyed the Raj in India, neglected defence and appeased Hitler. He told Cecil King, director of the
Daily Mirror:

It was all very well to plead for a government excluding the elements that had led us astray of recent years, but where was one to stop? They were everywhere – not only in the political world, but among the fighting service chiefs and the civil service chiefs. To clear all these out would be a task impossible in the disastrous state in which we found ourselves. In any case if one were dependent on the people who had been right in the last few years, what a tiny handful one would have to depend on! No: he was not going to run a government of revenge.
¹⁰⁴

Churchill’s decision had important and baleful implications for the post-war composition and attitudes of the Conservative Party. But at the time it was prudent. Britain’s foreign, defence and Commonwealth policies in the inter-war period had been conducted with reckless misjudgement, but Churchill himself had been a principal agent of them in the 1920s and though his record from 1930 onwards was virtually flawless, he rightly judged that an enquiry would absolve no one (least of all his new Labour allies) and would destroy the new and fragile unity over which he now presided. His magnanimity was justified. Despite the many disasters to come, Churchill’s authority was never seriously challenged and of all the wartime governments his was, in combining authority with popularity, by far the strongest and most secure. It was this, more than any other factor, which allowed Britain to maintain the illusion of global presence and superpower status which was preserved until the Potsdam settlement in 1945.