The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (307 page)

Although he did not see them, he faced grave problems. Napoleon had warned his commanders against forming a picture—deciding in advance what the enemy was going to do. That is precisely what Gamelin had done. It never occurred to him that the Germans, having watched one great plan fail in 1914, might have formed another. Gamelin had also overlooked an ominous change in Belgium’s rulers. In the last war King Albert had been a mighty ally, but in 1936, his son, Leopold III, had astonished Europe by renouncing his country’s military alliance with France and Britain. In any new war between Germany and France, he declared, Belgium would be neutral—as though such an absurdity were possible. He had actually gone so far as to fortify his border with France, and had told the French that an extension of
Le Maginot
to the North Sea would be looked upon in Belgium as an unfriendly gesture.
⁸⁴

But Gamelin’s greatest error was his assumption that warfare had not changed since the Armistice in 1918. His
Conseil Supérieur
took the same view, although there were a few vigorous dissenters, among them Colonel de Gaulle. De Gaulle was making a pest of himself, insisting that the French must study the swift Nazi conquest of Poland with tanks. Tanks, he said, had revolutionized battle; new strategies were needed to turn them back. As early as November 11, 1939, he had sent General Headquarters an aide-mémoire on the lessons of the Polish campaign, chiefly the need for fluidity on the battlefield, specifically the formation of a mechanized shock corps
(armée de métier),
soldiers specially selected and trained to lead an attack. Unless France followed the German example, he predicted, the gasoline engine would demolish French military doctrines even as it demolished fortifications.

But his superiors thought him absurd. One of them asked the others, Suppose the Boche panzers did burst through the lines. Where would they refuel? None of them reflected on the fact that since 1918, thousands of filling stations had appeared in northern France. To them they were irrelevant. After all, these petrol stations—which, like 91 percent of the automobiles in the country, had not existed in 1918—were there to serve civilian automobiles, not German panzers. The fact that both cars and tanks used the same fuel was disregarded.

Some war correspondents, haunted by the spectacle of the Führer’s
armored columns crushing the gallant Poles, remained troubled, but at Gamelin’s
grand quartier général
they were told sharply that a replay of the blitzkrieg here was impossible. General Dufieux, the army’s retired commander of tanks, declared that Nazi armored units could not “hurl themselves unsupported against our lines and penetrate deeply without facing complete destruction.” Another senior officer chided the foreign press for its doubts: “Ah, my fellows, how naive you are!” A war of movement across the dry Polish plains, yes. But through the Ardennes, through the Dutch floods, through the Belgian defenses, through the Maginot—through the tank-traps and barbed wire and casemates, in the face of our powerful air force—that was absurd.”
⁸⁵

In adopting the strategic defensive, the French high command was expressing the caution of a France whose World War I wounds were still unhealed. All the great battles had been fought on French or Belgian soil, and 1,315,000
poilus
(“hairy,” “virile”) had been killed in action—27 percent of all men between the ages of eighteen and twenty-seven, a figure that does not include the wounded: those left blind, or legless, or armless, or with no limbs at all. The survivors lacked the strength or the will to lift the tricolor again. Unlike generations of Frenchmen gone before them, they understandably felt no craving for grandeur, no desire for Gallic supremacy in Europe. They did not want to lose this war, but neither did they much crave victory. In fact, they did not even
want
victory. France had no war aims. Everything desirable, as they saw it, was already French. They asked for nothing from the Germans but peace.

Thus the decision to leave the initiative to the Nazis was more political than military.
Le Maginot
was as much a state of mind as a fortified line; when Daladier’s government fell that March, conduct of the war was entrusted to Paul Reynaud only after he promised to undertake no offensive against the enemy. The idea of attacking Germany was, the deputies agreed, preposterous. After the Polish collapse, the most bellicose had lost heart. In the
Chambre des Députés,
all political parties became defeatist. Even before Hitler could deliver another
Friedensrede,
a peace speech calling on the Western allies to end the war now that he had enslaved another country—he had been posing as a prince of peace for seven years—the Communist delegation in the
Chambre
demanded that the deputies debate the “proposals for peace which are going to be made.” Alexis Léger, the secretary-general of the Foreign Office, told the American ambassador William Bullitt: “The game is lost. France stands alone against the three dictatorships. Great Britain is not ready. The United States has not even changed the neutrality act. The democracies are again too late.” Alfred
Sauvy concluded simply that the country had “refused the war” (
“on refusait la guerre”
).
⁸⁶

But this was not a chess match, where a gambit could be refused. And Hitler would deliver no proposals of peace on the upcoming weekend of May 10. He intended to deliver something else entirely.

The timidity of the French high command had exasperated Churchill ever since the war’s outbreak. They had rejected every initiative suggested by him—bombing the Ruhr, for example, or mining the Rhine—on the grounds that it might invite Nazi reprisals. “This idea of not irritating the enemy,” he later wrote, “did not commend itself to me…. Good, decent, civilized people, it appeared, must never themselves strike until after they have been struck dead.” This Gallic trepidation even ruled out air reconnaissance, which defies understanding because the Luftwaffe was overflying French lines every day. Had Allied planes done the same in early May, they would have been astonished at enemy preparations below. Eight military bridges had been thrown across the Rhine, and three armored columns stretched back from the river for one hundred miles.
⁸⁷

In fact, one French pilot did see the buildup on the evening of the eighth of May. He was over the Ruhr, returning from a propaganda mission, dropping leaflets urging the German people to overthrow Hitler and thus bring peace. Above Düsseldorf he looked down and saw a sixty-mile line of tanks and trucks headed for the Ardennes. They were driving with their lights on. He reported his discovery. It was dismissed as not credible.

This was not the first time such intelligence had been dismissed, but it would be the last. Five months earlier, as Europe slept away the winter, a German airplane carrying two staff officers was blown off course and forced to land in Belgium. The officers tried, and failed, to burn the papers they carried, which happened to contain OKW’s revised operation orders for the invasion of the Low Countries, including a thrust through the Ardennes. British intelligence perused the captured papers. The high arts of deception and double-cross being well practiced by both the Germans and the British, it was concluded that the papers were a plant, a ruse, and therefore, unbelievable.
⁸⁸

On Thursday morning, May 9, the 250th day of the war, Chamberlain faced the bitter truth: he was through. The debacle in Norway had finished him. It had become obvious that Britain needed an all-party national government, and Labour refused to serve under him. Given the huge Tory majority in the House, a legacy of the general election of 1935, the new
prime minister would have to be a Conservative. The party’s leadership wanted Lord Halifax, the foreign secretary. So did Chamberlain. So did the King. However, Tory backbenchers and Labour MPs leaned toward the first lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill. Halifax bowed out. Telephoning London from his battalion, Randolph Churchill asked for news. His father told him: “I think I shall be Prime Minister tomorrow.”
⁸⁹

A
t 9:00
P.M.
that night Hitler issued the code word “Danzig.”

The mightiest army in history was ready, and at 4:19
A.M.
on Friday, May 10, 1940, more than two million German soldiers in coalscuttle helmets surged forward. The Wehrmacht was crossing the frontiers of Belgium, Holland, and Luxembourg, attacking on a front extending from the North Sea to the Swiss frontier. Hitler had repeatedly sworn never to violate their neutrality, but he meant to conquer France, and the Low Countries were in his way.
⁹⁰

At 5:30
A.M.
Belgium asked the Allies for help. Gamelin phoned General Alphonse Georges, his field commander in the northeast.

Georges asked: “Well, General, is it the Dyle operation?”

Gamelin said: “Since the Belgians are calling on us, do you see what else we can do?” (
“Que nous puissons faire autre chose?”
) Georges replied: “Obviously not.”

Gamelin sealed it: “We must go into Belgium!” (
“Nous devons entrer en Belgique”
). Five minutes later Georges ordered five French armies and the British Expeditionary Force across the frontier. There was some unpleasantness with the Belgian border guards, who hadn’t been told of the decision in Brussels. One official demanded visas from the British 3rd Division—the divisional commander, Major General Bernard Montgomery, put him under arrest—and on several roads Belgian obstacles, erected to block a French invasion, still barred the way. None slowed the Allied troops, now plunging ahead.
⁹¹

The BEF was in high spirits. Tommies blew kisses as they passed smiling women and, wrote Clare Boothe, who was there, “stuck up their thumbs in the new gesture they had, which meant ‘O.K., everything’s fine.’ ” They were singing “Roll Out the Barrel,” a Czech drinking song that had been popular since Munich, nineteen months earlier, and a ballad based on an Australian folk song:

They also sang songs their fathers had sung a generation ago: “Tipperary,” “Keep the Home Fires Burning,” and “Pack Up Your Troubles in Your Old Kit Bag.” Among older officers there was a remarkable mood of déjà vu. In the
New York Times,
Drew Middleton wrote: “It was almost as if they were retracing steps taken in a dream, they saw again faces of friends long dead and heard the half-remembered names of towns and villages.”
⁹²

By evening the best trained of the Allied troops were deep in both Belgium and Holland. Here, Gamelin assured everyone, was the German
schwerpunkt
—the strategic center of effort as defined by Prussian staff doctrine.

His blunder was fatal.

At Hitler’s eyrie at Bad Münstereifel, twenty-five miles southwest of Bonn, the Führer danced with joy. His generals could scarcely believe their luck. General Adolf Heusinger excitedly scrawled in his diary: “They have poured into Belgium and fallen into the trap!”
⁹³

T
he upcoming Sabbath was Whitsuntide, traditionally part of a long holiday weekend for Englishmen, and celebrated by Christians as the day the Holy Spirit descended upon Christ’s disciples. Londoners were impressed when, on Friday, having learned of the attack upon the Low Countries, their government canceled the bank holiday; it meant, wrote Mollie Panter-Downes for
The New Yorker,
“The government is really getting a move on.” No reliable news was coming out of the Low Countries, and that was bad. Yet Britons were calm; no excited crowds took to the streets. Panter-Downes wrote: “It takes a good, stiff dose of adversity to release the formidable strength in what Harold Nicolson called ‘the slow grinding will power of the British people.’ To that has been added the quickening realization that they are fighting for their lives.”
⁹⁴