The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (277 page)

British soldiers appeared to be immune to the contagion. Their commanders were not defeatist, neither their great-grandfathers nor their fathers had been routed by German troops in 1870 and 1914—and besides, whoever heard of Blighty losing a war?

British officers, however, were worried. One of their strengths, and a source of impotent rage among those who lived under other flags and had to deal with them, was that Englishmen with their background could not be offended by pomposity because their own capacity for arrogance was infinite. In 1914 British officers had told their men, “The wogs”—a pejorative for subjects of the Empire—“begin at Calais.” They were still saying it in 1939, distinctly pronouncing the final
s
in
Calais
while natives gnashed their teeth. Gamelin, reading French aloud at top speed, could never win playing this game with them. They had invented insolence and would leave his hauteur a thing of shreds and patches.

They were, however, concerned about the poilus’ morale. If the Germans came—and despite enemy propaganda no one in authority doubted that they would—these French soldiers would be on the British right. Should they break, the BEF’s flank would be left hanging on air, the ultimate horror of a generation of soldiers wedded to the doctrine of
le front continu
. Again and again they had been told that the French army was “matchless,” a word, it now occurred to them, subject to two interpretations. Certainly few of them could recall seeing its equal in carelessness, untidiness, and lack of military courtesy. General Sir Alan Brooke, a future CIGS now commanding a BEF corps, attended a ceremony as the guest of General André-Georges Corap, commander of the French Ninth Army. In his memoirs he would recall taking the salute: “Seldom have I seen anything more slovenly and badly turned out. Men unshaven, horses ungroomed, clothes and saddlery that did not fit, vehicles dirty, and a complete lack of pride in themselves and their units. What shook me most… was the look in the men’s faces, disgruntled and insubordinate looks, and although ordered to give ‘Eyes left,’ hardly a man bothered to do so.” It would be a distortion, however, to indict the conscripted French soldier for his reluctance to defend the soil of France. The blight went all the way to the top. It was their
généralissime
who expressly forbade poilus from firing on German working parties across the river. “
Les Allemands
,” he said, “
répondront en tirant sur les nôtres
” (“The Germans would only respond by firing on us”).
¹³³

Sumner Welles, the American under secretary of state, accepted an invitation to inspect the Allied front. Welles was touring Europe as a special emissary of FDR, and in Washington he reported that French officers had privately complained to him that their men were undisciplined; unless the Germans attacked soon, they predicted, the poilus would spontaneously disband and go home. If an army’s leaders take a foreigner aside to criticize their own men, something is very wrong. Vigilant French leaders knew it. Not only was there no training; neither Gamelin nor General Georges, Churchill’s friend, ordered exercises at divisional strength to make commanders familiar with the problems of handling large units in the field. General André-Charles-Victor Laffargue later wrote: “Our units vegetated in an existence without purpose, settling down to guard duty and killing time until the next leave or relief.” Longer leaves were granted more frequently, recreation centers established, theatrical troupes summoned from Paris to entertain the troops.
¹³⁴

Nothing worked. Morale continued to decline. General Edmond Ruby, commander of the First Army, was alarmed to find “a general apathy and ignorance among the ranks. No one dared give an order for fear of being criticized. Military exercises were considered a joke, and work unnecessary drudgery.” The next step down was alcoholism. It appears to have descended upon the whole army overnight. “
L’ivrognerie
”—drunkenness—“had made an immediate appearance,” General Ruby noted, “and in the larger railroad stations special rooms had to be set up to cope with it—euphemistically known as ‘halls of de-alcoholizing.’ ” So many men were so drunk in public that commanders began to worry about
civilian
morale.
¹³⁵

Although Churchill believed that the French army would never break, however strong the German assault, in January 1940 he crossed the Channel for a visit to the front. He did not return reassured. The French artillery, he was pleased to find, had been improved “so as to get extra range and even to out-range, the new German artillery.” But he was deeply troubled by “the mood of the people,” which “in a great national conscript force is closely reflected in its army, the more so when that army is quartered in the homeland and contacts are close.” During the 1930s, he later wrote, “important elements, in reaction to growing Communism, had swung towards Fascism,” and the long months of waiting which had followed the collapse of Poland had given “time and opportunity” for “the poisons” of communism and fascism “to be established.” There could be “no doubt,” he observed, that “the quality of the French army” was being “allowed to deteriorate during the winter.” Sound morale in any army is achieved in many ways, “but one of the greatest is that men be fully employed at useful and interesting work. Idleness is a dangerous breeding-ground.” He had observed “many tasks that needed doing: training demanded continuous attention; defences were far from satisfactory or complete, even the Maginot Line lacked many supplementary field works; physical fitness demands exercise.” He had been struck by the “poor quality of the work in hand, by the lack of visible activity of any kind,” and thought the “emptiness of the roads behind the line was in great contrast to the continual coming and going which extended for miles behind the British sector.”
¹³⁶

Colonel de Gaulle also believed the troops needed training and exercise, and urged it in a vigorous report to his superiors. He thought programs should be both intensive and exhausting, partly because the men weren’t fit but also to raise their spirits. Somewhere on its way up to high command his recommendation was lost, which was no surprise to those familiar with the system. In combat a leader’s greatest need is information, and if he is competent he does everything possible to establish a communications system that will survive in the chaos of battle, and, if possible, at least one backup net, for what works well in peacetime maneuvers may disintegrate and vanish when great armies clash in the fog of war.

Gamelin seems not to have anticipated this obstacle. Indeed, it was almost as though he set out to frustrate his own chain of command and assure his isolation when he was most needed. Poring over documents in Vincennes, on the outskirts of Paris, he never established means of keeping in touch with field commanders. There was no radio at Vincennes. He could telephone Georges, the commander of all forces at the front, whose headquarters were at La Ferté-sous-Jouarre, thirty-five miles away, but he preferred to drive, an hour each way on roads swarming with suburban Paris traffic. In the age of radio and the teletype, it took six hours for an order from Gamelin to reach an air force command—by which time the target would be gone—and
forty-eight hours
to issue a general order to all commands. One French officer described his remote headquarters as a “submarine without a periscope,” and later de Gaulle wrote bitterly: “There he was, in a setting as quiet as a convent [
silencieux comme un couvent
], attended by a few officers, working and meditating without mixing in day-to-day duties. In his retreat at Vincennes, General Gamelin gave the impression of a savant testing the chemical reactions of his strategy in a laboratory.”
¹³⁷

Sir John Slessor of the Air Ministry, one of a series of visitors from London, described the supreme commander as a “nice old man not remotely equal to his enormous job.” Why, then, didn’t the British move to thwart the debacle that lay dead ahead? One reason was that the British troop commitment was much smaller than the French. Another was that in the last war it had taken four years to establish a unified command under Foch. Furthermore, Gamelin had served ably on Foch’s staff. Most members of His Majesty’s Government were Francophiles; they refused to credit the tales of Anglophobia across the water. All, Churchill included, retained their blind faith in the French army, which had taken the worst the Germans could throw at them between 1914 and 1918 and always came back. The poilus of this war were the sons of those in the last. Surely they had inherited the same fighting qualities. But they hadn’t. Unlike their fathers, they preferred to live.

There was also the Maginot Line. Those whose memories do not reach back to the 1930s cannot grasp its enormous reputation before its hour struck.
La Ligne
was considered one of the world’s wonders, and the French never lost an opportunity to polish its image. The French high command celebrated the first Christmas of the war by announcing that they had completed a staggering “work of fortification.” Their goal had been “to double the Maginot Line” and it was “virtually complete…. From the first of this month our new line of fortifications seems to have removed any hope the enemy may have entertained either of crossing or flanking the Maginot Line.”
¹³⁸

An American foreign correspondent asked about the Ardennes. Every staff officer was aware that the forest was unfortified; Hitler knew; Manstein, Guderian, Halder, and Rundstedt knew; and Liddell Hart had known of it for over eleven years. But the American public, the British public, and the French public did not know. A majority were under the impression that the Maginot shielded France from every possible German thrust. At Vincennes an officer in a kepi and flawless uniform of sky blue quoted Pétain—“
Elle est impénétrable
”—with the proviso that “special dispositions” must be made there. The edges on the enemy side would be protected; some block-houses would be installed. The war was nearly four months old, the Maginot Line had been doubled, but the dispositions were not complete. The American asked why. Because at this point the front would not have any depth, he was told, the enemy would not commit himself there. Finally: “
Ce secteur n’est pas dangereux
.”
¹³⁹

Walter Lippmann was received as though he were a head of state; a dozen colonels took him on a tour of the Maginot Line, then accompanied him to Vincennes. Lippmann commented that there was only one thing wrong with the line: it was in the wrong place. The
généralissime
did not understand. What would happen, the American publicist asked, if the enemy attacked in the north, where the line ended at the Belgian frontier? Gamelin was glad he had asked. He was
hoping
the Germans would try that. “We’ve got to have an open side because we need a
champs de bataille
,” he explained. “The Maginot Line will narrow the gap through which they can come, and thus enable us to destroy them more easily.”
¹⁴⁰

Colonel de Gaulle was a
peste
. He had been repeatedly referred to the army manual
Les instructions pour l’emploi des chars
—tanks—which clearly stated that “Combat tanks are machines to accompany the infantry…. In battle, tank units constitute an integral part of the infantry…. Tanks are only supplementary means…. The progress of the infantry and its seizing of objectives are alone decisive.” The role of the tank was to accompany infantry “
et non pour combattre en formations indépendantes
.” Could anything be clearer? He was worse than the aviators, who at least had the decency to remain silent after General Gamelin had told them: “There is no such thing as the aerial battle. There is only the battle on the ground.” Yet here was de Gaulle, turning up in Montry at general headquarters, where most of the General Staff and staff officers could be found, with another of his reports, this one on
les leçons
to be learned from the blitzkrieg in Poland. He wrote: “The gasoline engine discredits all our military doctrines, just as it will demolish our fortifications. We have excellent material. We must learn to use it as the Germans have.”
¹⁴¹

At present, de Gaulle pointed out, French tanks were dispersed for infantry support. It would be wiser, he submitted, to follow the example of the Germans, forming them in armored divisions as the Wehrmacht had done in its Polish campaign, and, indeed, before the Anschluss. His proposals were rejected by two generals—one of whom predicted that even if Nazi tanks penetrated French lines they would face “
la destruction presque complète
.” To this snub the high command added mortal injury to the France de Gaulle loved. Despite the vindication of Guderian’s prewar book
Achtung, Panzer!
in Poland, the French high command decided to sell its tanks abroad. The R-35 was a better tank than any German model. Of the last 500 produced before May 10, 1940, nearly half—235—were sold to Turkey, Yugoslavia, and Rumania, with the result that when the Germans struck only 90 were on the French front. Moreover, while Nazi troops, Stukas, and armored divisions were massing in the Rhineland for their great lunge westward, the generals charged with the defense of French soil gathered representatives of countries not regarded as unfriendly to France and auctioned off 500 artillery pieces, complete with ammunition, and 830 antitank guns—at a time when the French army was desperately short of both weapons.
¹⁴²

The French Ministry of War announced that 100,000 pigeons had been mobilized and housed inside the Maginot Line to carry messages through artillery barrages.