Reappraisals (31 page)

Professor May has written an accessible and impeccably scholarly account of a major moment of the century. There are some wonderful vignettes (e.g., of Neville Chamberlain writing to his sister on March 12, 1939, three days before Hitler seized Czechoslovakia: “Like Chatham, ‘I know that I can save this country and I do not believe that anyone else can’”), and the detail, especially for Germany, is copious and illuminating.

The main direction of the argument is not perhaps altogether new: Donald Cameron Watt and others have described the diplomatic and domestic background to Hitler’s attack on France; the French setting in 1940 was exhaustively charted by Jean-Louis Crémieux-Brilhac; and the story of the battle has already been told more than once.
⁷
But May gives his predecessors full and due credit, and his own interpretation would for the most part be accepted by them in turn. It is generally agreed that Hitler was a successful gambler who had to overcome the caution of his own staff, just as it is now thought that France could have forced and fought a long war had she had better generals. Nothing
needed
to be as it was.

Professor May’s emphasis upon the element of chance in the outcome of the battle of France leads him to some rather ambitious counterfactual hypotheses. If the French had anticipated the Ardennes offensive, he writes in his introduction, “it is more than conceivable that the outcome would have been not France’s defeat but Germany’s and, possibly, a French victory parade on the Unter den Linden in Berlin.” This is no casual aside. Four hundred pages later May stakes an even greater claim: “Absent defeats in battle in May 1940, France was in no more danger of moral collapse than Britain, it seems to me, and in less danger than Germany.” If her armies had been set back in 1940, Nazi Germany “might have imploded.” I think some of these claims are exaggerated and ill conceived, but the insistence upon contingency is salutary. It isn’t enough to point to Vichy or even to interwar French domestic squabbling if one wants to explain the distinctively fortuitous actions of May 1940. And if things had gone differently, then much else would be changed too.

Here, however, the problems begin. May writes, “If the war had been fought where the French expected it to be fought, it would have gone much more as they expected it to go.” Well, yes. As evidence he cites the brief success of one of France’s better generals, Georges Blanchard. On May 13 at Hannut, southeast of Brussels, some of his armored units under General René Prioux met and briefly overcame their German opposite numbers. This leads May to speculate on what might have been if Blanchard’s First Army had been in the right place at the right time: French tanks
could
beat German Panzer units.

But I can add “ifs” of my own. Blanchard’s armored divisions were France’s best soldiers, and in Belgium they overcame not Rommel’s Panzer IVs but smaller, weaker Panzer Is and IIs. If they had faced more than a secondary German force, they might have fared a lot worse. And even if they had done well, all the other factors would still be in place. May asks what might have happened if Blanchard’s forces had pressed ahead with their initial success. But they didn’t. Would they have done so even if they had beaten the main German army? It wasn’t part of Gamelin’s “plan,” and like the ill-fated Marshal Bazaine in 1870, he stuck to it unwaveringly. And if Prioux had been defeated, the French would still have had no strategic reserve, poor supplies, an inefficient chain of command, etc. A rout would probably have ensued.

It thus requires a long chain of one-directional “ifs” to reach a point at which a decisive French victory becomes not only possible but likely. One would have to unravel not just one or two chance outcomes but the complex sequence of decisions and personalities and practices that put chance on the side of the Germans and not the French. I have nothing against the Cleopatra’s Nose approach to crucial historical choices: If Lenin had not been shipped across Germany to the Petrograd Finland Station in 1917, then twentieth-century history would indeed look very different. But although Germany’s victory undoubtedly hinged on Hitler’s insights into French weakness, the failings that he detected (and that his generals missed) can only be explained in their broader context. That is the trouble with much counterfactual speculation: It takes the last move in a sequence, correctly observes that it might have been very different, and then deduces either that all the other moves could also have been different or else that they don’t count.

But for all the other moves to have been different in the required way, we need a parallel universe. And for them not to count, we need to distort the historical context. Professor May is intensely sensitive to the crosscurrents and pressures of German domestic affairs, which made Hitler vulnerable; he all but ignores political turbulence in France. This bolsters his assertion that Hitler could have been brought down by defeat and that France could easily have won, but it is hardly a balanced treatment. Whenever Nazi generals express doubts or dissent, May takes their anxiety at face value; when French generals show comparable apprehension or pessimism, he interprets it as instrumental rhetoric, designed to pad the military budget. When French generals or politicians are optimistic about their situation, however, he takes this for good coin. He emphasizes French technical strengths and downplays or dismisses talk of cynicism or social division.

This asymmetrical treatment sets the scene for a narrative in which the German victory is a surprise and the French defeat a chapter of accidents. But it misses much of the relevant story. Why, after all, were most French generals such bunglers? Why, for example, did Gamelin restore normal leave for the French army on May 7, 1940—a transcendently incompetent move? Why did Huntziger refuse air cover to his troops at Sedan, leaving an open target for the morale-destroying attacks of the Stukas? If good generals could have done better by their country, it is their absence that needs explaining.

A clue is to be found in a September 1940 photograph of the council of ministers at Vichy. There sits General Huntziger, two places away from Pétain and wearing the same self-satisfied look as his master.
⁸
Three months after the worst defeat in French history, the men directly responsible for it were comfortably ensconced in a regime that their defeat helped to install. General Maxime Weygand, who replaced Gamelin in command for the last days of the debacle, was the first minister of national defense at Vichy. His primary concern in the waning hours of the battle was not the German army but a possible Communist uprising in Paris upon the heels of a defeat. Such men may not have expected to lose the war, but they resigned themselves to defeat all the quicker because they did not regard the Germans as the greatest threat.

Weygand, like Pétain, was old enough to remember the Paris Commune of 1871, and it haunted his generation of reactionary and monarchist officers. The France that they were sworn to defend did not, in their eyes, include the political Left, successors to the Communards whose martyrdom was commemorated in eastern Paris every spring. Even Gamelin, an apolitical general by prevailing French standards, was not immune. As early as May 16, with the battle not yet lost, he was preparing his excuses. The army, he told the politicians, had collapsed because of Communist penetration.
⁹

May misses this because he is unconcerned with domestic disputes, believing that by the late 1930s the corrosive hatreds of earlier years had been set aside and France was as stable and united as Britain, if not more so. But it was in October 1937 that the eminently respectable
Nouvelles économiques et financières
was sneering at the “Jew Blum,” “our ex-prime minister whose real name is Karfunkelstein.” In April 1938, after the Anschluss, Pierre Gaxotte (later of the Académie Française) was still describing Blum as “a disjointed un-French puppet with the sad head of a Palestinian mare. . . . Between France and this cursed man, we must choose. He is the very incarnation of everything that sickens our flesh and our blood. He is evil. He is death.”
¹⁰

In
Scum of the Earth
Arthur Koestler wrote of the vicious nationalist hatreds and threats swirling around France in the months preceding the battle of France. And from no less a source than Charles de Gaulle we have contemporary testimony to the partisan, paranoid, hate-filled atmosphere of the French parliament during the installation of Paul Reynaud’s government on March 21, two months before the German invasion. If Ernest May believes that France in May 1940 was a nation resolute, united, and in a condition to face the German threat, he is deeply mistaken.
¹¹

The Communists had not forgiven Blum for his failure to intervene on behalf of the Spanish loyalists in 1936; for his insistence on compromise in the Popular Front legislation of that year; and perhaps above all for his success in preserving the French Socialist Party following the schism with the Communists in December 1920. In December 1940 they approached the Vichy authorities with an informal offer to testify against Blum at his forthcoming show trial. (Fortunately for the French Communist Party’s future standing, their proposal was ignored.) The unions were still seething in resentment at Daladier’s November 1938 laws abrogating the labor reforms of 1936. Anti-Fascism, which might once have been an effective motive for unity, had been undermined and corroded by successive governments’ obsession with not alienating Mussolini, to whom France continued to look for support until the very eve of defeat. The army was riddled with conspirators—May makes no mention of the Cagoule, the shadowy officers’ plot scotched by Interior Minister Marx Dormoy (for which he was later murdered by the Vichy Milice). Anti-foreign and anti-Communist legislation was in place by September 1939, long before Pétain came to office.

Above all, the French lacked confidence. For twenty years they had been reminded by politicians and generals of the failure of the French population to grow, of the trauma of the Great War, of the need to avoid another conflict. When it came time in 1940 to assure the French that they were as brave, as well equipped, as strong, and as confident as their foes, these same politicians and generals sounded understandably hollow. A collective fear and self-doubt had been instilled in the nation, adding an irrational dimension to the country’s all-too-real shortage of men.

May himself quotes the British ambassador in Paris in September 1938 claiming “all that is best in France is against war,
almost
at any price.” When war broke out a year later, Brigadier Edward Spears, bilingualand warmly Francophile, reported home that “many French people . . . argue . . . that . . . they have perhaps been duped and are fighting for England.”
¹²
Did everything and everyone somehow come together in the next six months? Of course not.

None of this sufficiently explains what happened when the Panzers crashed through the woods at Sedan. But without it we don’t have any explanation at all. Is it necessary to abandon the constraints of the political and cultural setting in order to engage in fruitful counterfactual speculation? I don’t think so. Nor do I see why good military history need ignore the political and social background in order to keep faith with the fortunes of war. As it happens, there is a classic work of military history which encompasses all these concerns, and it is highly germane to Professor May’s theme.

In Michael Howard’s account of the Franco-Prussian War, first published in 1961, the events of 1870-71 closely anticipate those of May 1940.
¹³
On both occasions the French displayed strategic confusion, planning for an offensive but waiting to be attacked; as Friedrich Engels observed in July 1870, when the war began, if the French didn’t take the offensive their declaration of war made no sense. Yet in 1870 as in 1939, the generals made a pointless advance into the neighboring Saarland, then retreated and waited upon events. The tactical and administrative failings were also strikingly similar: At seventy years’ distance French generals twice failed to understand railway timetables, put men and supplies in the right place, concentrate troops effectively, organize retreats, or communicate among themselves—mistakes their predecessors had already made in Emperor Napoléon III’s Italian campaign of 1859. Both Michael Howard and Marc Bloch write of the “chaos” of mobilization. And in 1870 as in 1940 German officers proved more flexible, took more initiative, and adapted better to changing circumstances.

On neither occasion were the French at a significant technical disadvantage. Indeed, in 1870 they had the new
chassepot
breech-loading rifles, superior to anything the Germans could field. But French soldiers weren’t trained in the use of the new weapon (one is reminded of Sartre’s description of the “respectful terror” with which French reservists in 1939 handled weapons they had never even seen before being mobilized). Thousands of the guns were left forgotten in obscure and poorly sited arms dumps. The French were as deficient in intelligence gathering in 1870 as they would be in 1940, with the result that they were constantly wrong-footed by German movements. Moltke, like his successors in Hitler’s general staff, believed in bypassing French defensive positions whenever possible; together with the French habit of exaggerating enemy numbers, this led the static French armies to surrender even before giving battle.

The outcome of the Franco-Prussian War, when huge French armies were surrounded and captured at Sedan and Metz, was as much a shock to the French and the rest of Europe as was the battle of 1940: “The completeness of the Prussian success in 1870 thus astounded the world,” Michael Howard writes. Meanwhile the nineteenth-century generals were as determined as their successors to avoid a social revolution even at the cost of national surrender. But some of them appreciated the scale of their humiliation and tried, like General Bourbaki, to salvage their honor by taking their lives (no comparable sense of shame is recorded for the men of 1940).