The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (311 page)

Churchill may not have
argued
strategy that day, but he proposed one—to hold fast—and it was unrealistic. It was characteristic of him that he always approved of attacks, and seldom retreats, even when, as here, failure to withdraw would mean encirclement and annihilation. Reynaud silenced him by pointing out that all the field commanders, including Lord Gort, believed the French should fall back.
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Churchill was, however, thoroughly justified in asking Gamelin when and where he proposed to attack the flanks of the German bulge. The
généralissime’
s dismaying, unresponsive reply was “inferiority of numbers, inferiority of equipment, inferiority of method,” followed by a hopeless shrug of the shoulders. The
généralissime
saw only one hope of salvation: the commitment of six more RAF squadrons to the battle. It was, he said, the only way to stop the panzers.

Churchill vigorously replied that tanks should be the target of artillery, not of fighter planes; fighters should “cleanse the skies” (
“nett le ciel”
) over the battle. Bombing the Meuse bridges was not a proper job for the RAF; nevertheless they had attempted to do it, at great risk, and had lost thirty-six aircraft. “You can replace bridges,” he said, “but not fighters.” He had just sent four more squadrons, forty-eight planes, and it was vital that Britain’s metropolitan air force be available to command the air over
Britain in order to protect defense factories from the Luftwaffe. Britain had only a limited number of squadrons in England, and, he said, “We must conserve them.” He did not think another six squadrons would “make the difference.”

Daladier replied, “The French believe the contrary.” The discussion became acrimonious. Gamelin had touched a vital nerve. Both sides were, to a degree, disingenuous. What the French really believed was that the British should throw everything they had into the struggle for France, and that if the Allied cause were to lose, both countries should go down together. The British believed that if France went down—and they were beginning to contemplate that possibility—Britain and the Empire should go on alone. That was why Air Chief Marshal Sir Hugh Dowding had put himself on record as “absolutely opposed to parting with a single additional Hurricane.”

At the British embassy that evening, the prime minister weighed the French appeal. He should have rejected it, but his sympathy for them outweighed his reason, and he wired the War Cabinet that they should give this “last chance to the French Army to rally its bravery and strength. It would not be good historically if their requests were denied and their ruin resulted.” The War Cabinet was apprehensive, but it was difficult to say no to the P.M. They reluctantly agreed, provided the Hurricanes returned to English bases each night. In the interests of security this decision was sent to Ismay, a veteran of the Indian army, in Hindi—
“Han,”
for “yes.”
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In Paris the embassy staff assumed that the good news would be telephoned to the French. Churchill insisted upon delivering it in person. “This,” Ismay comments, “was in character.” Churchill reminded him of someone giving children presents and wanting to see the expressions on their faces as they opened their gifts: “He was about to give Reynaud a pearl beyond price, and he wanted to watch his expression as he received it.” To the P.M.’s surprise, the premier had left his office—it was midnight—so he sought directions to his home. That was awkward. Reynaud and his mistress, Mme la Comtesse de Portes, were living in a small apartment on the Place du Palais-Bourbon, hiding from his wife. Nevertheless Churchill and Ismay eventually found him there. Receiving them in his bathrobe, he thanked them profusely. Then Churchill insisted that he summon Daladier, with whom the premier was barely on speaking terms. The war minister left
his
mistress, Mme la Marquise de Crussol, to come and wring their hands in silent gratitude.
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Back in London, the prime minister found nothing but problems defying solution. Another one hundred thousand Belgians had arrived in Britain, begging for shelter, and every report from the Continent told of a continuing
German advance. The P.M.’s mood was defiant. Roosevelt reaffirmed the impossibility of loaning Britain U.S. destroyers. As well, a strict reading of the Neutrality Act of 1939 forced Roosevelt to deny Churchill’s request to send an aircraft carrier to America to pick up some of the more than three hundred Curtiss P-40 fighter planes awaiting shipment. During these months American aircraft purchased by Britain had to be flown to the Canadian border, where, in order to abide by U.S. laws preventing transshipment, they were pushed or towed (often by horse) across the border before continuing on, by ship, to England. The P-40s, Churchill was told, would be ready for delivery in two or three months. After digesting Roosevelt’s decisions, he wrote a cordial reply and then growled to Colville: “Here’s a telegram for those bloody Yankees. Send it off tonight.” It was Trinity Sunday. Clementine attended services at St. Martin-in-the-Fields and returned indignant. The rector had preached a pacifist sermon and Clementine had walked out. Churchill said: “You ought to have cried ‘Shame,’ desecrating the house of God with lies!”
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That evening—May 19—he was to address the nation over the radio. He was driven to Chartwell, soon to be closed for the war’s duration. There he could visit his goldfish, sit in the sun, and reflect, but he found no peace there. He wanted to feed his black swans, but to his consternation he found that foxes had eaten all but one. Then Anthony Eden called. The matter was urgent, and would become more so in the days ahead. Lord Gort had just called. The French army south of the BEF had melted away, leaving a vast gap on the British right. He was in a dilemma. He could leave the Belgians to their fate and fight southward to rejoin the French, or he could fall back on the Channel ports and fight it out with his back to the sea. His preference was to withdraw toward Dunkirk. Ironside had told him that “this proposal could not be accepted at all.” Churchill, always against retreat, agreed. In Dunkirk, he said, the BEF would be “closely invested in a bomb-trap, and its total loss would be only a matter of time.”
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After forty years in the House of Commons, Churchill instinctively swung his head from left to right. That would not do on the BBC, so Tyrone Guthrie of the Old Vic stood behind him and held his ears firmly as he spoke at a desk in a small room, his text illuminated by a green lamp. Addressing the country, he began:

“At last the country is awake and working,” wrote the diehard Tory Tom Jones.

“The hour has struck,” wrote the commander of the Portsmouth Naval Base, Admiral Sir William Milbourne James, “and the man has appeared.”
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Churchill had spoken of the French “genius for recovery and counterattack, for which they have long been famous,” adding, “I have invincible confidence in the French army.” He may have believed it. He had always been an arch-Francophile; in 1916, commanding a British battalion in the trenches, he had worn a poilu’s helmet to show his confidence in England’s ally. Thus far, Fleet Street had supported this view: “One hears,” Mollie Panter-Downes reported in
The New Yorker,
“nothing but admiration for the heroic French resistance.” But Gamelin was no Foch, and his troops were not the soldiers of 1914–1918. After the men on both sides had laid down their arms, a group of American war correspondents toured the scenes of struggle and concluded, in the words of William L. Shirer, that “France did not fight…. None of us saw evidence of serious fighting. The fields of France are undisturbed. There was no fighting on any sustained line… no attempt to come to a halt on a line and strike back in a well-organized counter-attack.”
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The Führer’s
Panzergruppen
had roared down unmined roads, passed unmolested under overlooking heights unsited with artillery. Strategic bridges had been unblown. French prisoners said they had seen no combat; whenever battle seemed imminent, they were ordered to retreat. The Channel ports, notably Boulogne and Calais, had been defended mostly by the British. Shirer thought the defending armies seemed to have been “paralyzed as soon as the Germans made their first break-through. The French, as though drugged, had no will to fight, even when their soil was invaded by their most hated enemy. It was a complete collapse of French society and of the French soul.”
⁴⁵

Even Churchill had begun to have doubts about the French. The day
before his Sunday broadcast, debating whether to send Britain’s 1st Armored Division to Gamelin, he had told Ismay: “One must always be prepared for the fact that the French may be offered very advantageous terms of peace, and the whole weight be thrown on us.” Gamelin himself had all but abandoned hope. Saturday evening he had calmly explained “the causes of our defeat” to Reynaud. It was the ninth day of the battle, and the
généralissime
was ready to quit. Even the hopelessly overmatched Poles had held out for three weeks.
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On Monday, May 20, the 2nd Panzer Division reached Abbéville, at the mouth of the Somme, and Noyelles on the coast. The Germans had cut France in half, thereby trapping a million Allied soldiers in the north, including the Belgian army, more than half the BEF, and the First and Seventh French Armies—France’s best troops. It was a stunning triumph. But it was also the hour of the Nazis’ maximum danger. Their tanks had created a corridor almost two hundred miles long and twenty miles wide, from the Ardennes to the Channel, but they had outdistanced the Wehrmacht’s foot soldiers, and tanks alone could not hold the German gains against determined counterattacks. They would be vulnerable until their infantry arrived in strength.

Hitler knew it and was frightened. In his aerie he envisaged a second Marne, with the French rallying and striking back with a deadly blow. Jodl noted: “The Führer is terribly nervous. He is worried over his own success, will risk nothing and insists on restraining us…. He rages and screams that we are on the way to ruining the whole operation and that we are in danger of a defeat.”

This was, in fact, the critical moment; everything that followed turned upon it. As a disillusioned Churchill told the House of Commons four weeks later:

Gamelin finally saw it. On Sunday he drew up “Instruction No. 12,” ordering two offensives: the troops in the north were to fight south across the tank corridor while French troops on the Somme drove northward, cutting off the 2nd Panzer Division. But on Monday, before he could issue
the orders, Reynaud sacked him and chose seventy-three-year-old General Maxime Weygand as his successor, a short, spruce, fox-faced officer who, as one Englishman said, resembled an “aged jockey.” Weygand had never before commanded troops in battle; he had made his reputation as a staff officer. He was a political general, a monarchist, a hero of the militantly conservative Croix de Feu, and an Anglophobe. Despite his age he was exceptionally vigorous, but he had arrived in Paris exhausted, recalled from Syria; immediately after assuming command he went to bed. Before retiring he canceled Gamelin’s Instruction No. 12.

The situation in the corridor was fluid. Every hour was critical now. The gap between the German armor and its supporting formations was closing. Yet when the new
généralissime
woke, he announced that he would tour the front before making a decision. By the time he returned and reissued the order, the corridor was thick with defenders. After four strenuous days the enemy had strengthened it by rushing infantry and motorized artillery to beef up both sides of it. The chance had passed.

At 6:30
P.M.
Monday, a British officer had wired London that Luftwaffe bombers had severed rail service between Amiens and Abbéville, and that night, panzers at Abbéville cut off the British army’s supply bases and the French armies in the south. Ironside, returning from France Tuesday morning, reported that another enemy tank column had been sighted passing Frévent, “probably making for Boulogne.” There was “nothing wrong with the French troops themselves,” he said, but the commanders seemed “paralyzed.” In his diary he wrote, “Personally I think we cannot extricate the B.E.F…. God help the B.E.F., brought to this state by the incompetence of the French command.” Dill, who was with Georges, telegraphed that a northward drive by the French was “improbable.”
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“In London,” Ismay wrote, “we felt we were being harshly treated by the French High Command… they had told us nothing, and we were completely in the dark.” Aware of the constantly shifting face of the battle, Churchill tried again and again to reach Reynaud by telephone. It was impossible. All lines between Paris and London had been cut. He told Colville, “In all the history of war I have never known such mismanagement.” In his diary Colville commented: “I have not seen Winston so depressed.” Desperate for information, the prime minister, against the advice of the Chiefs of Staff, decided to fly to Paris the following morning, Wednesday, May 22.
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