The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (312 page)

The Flamingo landed at Le Bourget shortly before noon; the P.M. and his party went straight to the
généralissime’
s GHQ in the Château de Vincennes, an old fort suggestive of
Beau Geste,
guarded by Algerian troops dressed in white cloaks and bearing long curved swords. Weygand, greeting them, “was brisk, buoyant, and incisive,” Churchill wrote. “He made an
excellent impression on us all.” Telling them that the panzers “must not be allowed to keep the initiative, he gave them a detailed description of what instantly became known as the Weygand Plan. It was Gamelin’s Instruction No. 12, too late, though the British had no way of knowing that then. Churchill put it in writing “to make sure there was no mistake about what was settled.” After the
généralissime
and Reynaud approved the text, it was telegraphed to the War Cabinet in London.

Specifically, the plan provided for an attack southward “at the earliest moment, certainly tomorrow,” by eight divisions of the BEF and the French First Army. Simultaneously, a “new French Army Group” of between eighteen and twenty divisions, after forming a line upon the Somme, would “strike northward and join hands with the British divisions who are attacking southward in the general direction of Bapaume.” The more Churchill thought about it, the better he liked it. That evening, Ironside noted, “Winston came back from Paris about 6:30
P.M.
and we had a Cabinet at 7:30
P.M.
He was almost in buoyant spirits, having been impressed by Weygand.”
⁵⁰

The plan was impossible—all of it. The Allied forces in the north could not drive southward; all were heavily engaged with the enemy. And Weygand’s own orders to his divisions in the south merely directed them to recapture local objectives. “The Weygand plan,” as William L. Shirer later wrote, “existed only in the General’s mind.” It may not have existed even there. As Shirer noted, “no French troops ever moved up from the Somme.”
⁵¹

And Gort received no instructions from Vincennes. Indeed, he had heard nothing from GHQ for four days. Learning of this at 4:50 the following afternoon, Churchill called Reynaud—the lines were open again—to ask why. The voices on the other end were incoherent. At 6:00
P.M.
he called again. This time he reached Weygand, who had thrilling news: his new French army in the south had already thrown the Germans back and retaken Amiens, Albert, and Péronne. In Admiralty House, Colville noted that this reversal of fortunes was greeted as “stupendous”; “gloom gave way to elation.”
⁵²

It was a lie. Weygand had known from the beginning that the Allied cause was doomed. His only hope, he had told Georges on May 20, was
“sauver l’honneur des armées françaises”
(“save the honor of the French armies”), whatever that meant. His distrust of England and Englishmen was profound, though not unusual among Frenchmen with his convictions. Reviewing his deception, Colville later concluded that “Weygand was determined… that
we
should go under if
he
did.” It is also possible that he was looking for a scapegoat. If so, he found one, and found him quickly. On Tuesday, the day before Churchill’s flight to Vincennes, Gort had attempted to break the enemy’s encircling line with an attack on the
German flank. He set his sights on Arras and went after it with two British divisions, supported by sixty light French tanks. The enemy commander, then unknown, was Erwin Rommel. The action was unexpected; Rommel reported a “heavy British counterattack with armour.” On Wednesday Gort saw that a heavy German force was preparing to move against both his flanks, and he withdrew.
⁵³

Weygand heard about this Thursday morning. He angrily demanded that Reynaud protest, and the premier sent Churchill—who didn’t even know of Gort’s attack—two reproachful telegrams, which concluded: “General Weygand’s orders must be obeyed.” The
généralissime
put his protest in writing, declaring that “as a result of the British retreat” the drive southward had to be abandoned. It was at this point that Churchill assigned Edward Spears
^*
the delicate task of improving relations between the two allies. Spears was half French and completely bilingual, a Conservative MP who had been a friend of Churchill’s since the Edwardian era. They had been fellow officers in World War I, in which Spears had been wounded four times. He left a striking description of Churchill at the height of the war’s first crisis. Summoned to Admiralty House in the middle of the night he found Churchill:

I
t was more than grave. It was catastrophic. Now all France, like ancient Gaul, was divided into three parts:

In the south,
below the Somme—where Weygand actually planned to make his stand—lay 90 percent of France, including Paris. It was no longer the serene France of those early spring days, however. Spears reported that the roads were choked with refugees, top-heavy wagons, and
“cars with boiling radiators.” Over three hundred thousand poilus, members of military formations which no longer existed, were roaming the countryside; some, he reported, had shot their officers and were “robbing passers-by in the forests near Paris.” French officers, captured by the Germans but given their parole, had returned to their homes, seemed to be enjoying their families, and weren’t even interested in news of the fighting.

In the north,
a desperate amalgam of Allied forces—more than half the BEF, the Belgians, and three French armies—was fighting for survival.

Between the two,
a broadening, solidifying belt of enemy territory stretched across France from the Sedan, in the east, to Abbéville on the coast. Capturing Paris was every German’s dream, and the panzers could have turned that way.

Instead they had wheeled northward and were driving toward the Channel ports, historically England’s last line against invasion.

Churchill was aware of the danger. On the Sunday before his flight to Vincennes, Ironside had warned him that the BEF might soon be cut off from the French, in which case they could only be supplied through Boulogne, Calais, and Dunkirk. Now all three had been heavily bombed by the Luftwaffe the previous night. Dunkirk could not be used; ships sunk by the Nazis blocked its entrance. On Tuesday, Boulogne, directly in the path of the panzers, was reinforced by the 20th Guards Brigade and the Irish and Welsh Guards, the last available army units still in England. It was in vain; the German armored columns were irresistible; on Wednesday, while Churchill was being introduced to Weygand, evacuations were under way there. In his diary, Ironside wrote: “
4 p.m.
Boulogne was definitely gone…. So goes all the people in Boulogne, including the two Guards battalions. A rotten ending indeed.” He added: “Gort is very nearly surrounded…. I don’t see that we have much hope of getting the B.E.F. out.” But the following evening he noted: “The German mobile columns have definitely been halted for some reason or other.”
⁵⁵

Although no one realized it at the time, this was one of the turning points in the war. The “Halt Order”
(Haltordnung),
as it came to be known, has been endlessly debated. Had the panzers continued to advance, evacuation of the BEF would have been impossible. Yet the reasons for the pause seem clear. Rundstedt needed time for the German infantry to catch up with his tanks. Moreover, after fourteen days of offensive action, the men were exhausted and their machines badly in need of repairs.

Hitler lengthened the halt. Two days of downpours had made the Flanders swamps virtually impassable for armored vehicles. General Heinz Guderian, the panzer leader, who had first opposed the halt, conceded that “a tank attack is pointless in the marshy country which has been completely
soaked by the rain…. The infantry forces of this army are more suitable than tanks for fighting in this kind of country.”
⁵⁶

Moreover, the Nazis’ chief enemy continued to be France, and they did not believe they had already defeated what was considered the best army in Europe. Their push toward Paris, they believed, would be long and bloody. They needed to refit for that. Finally, they did not know that they had trapped 400,000 French, Belgian, and British men in the north. Afterward, Luftwaffe general Albert Kesselring said: “Even 100,000 would have struck us as greatly exaggerated.”
⁵⁷

Leaders in both Paris and London continued to debate impractical plans. On Friday, May 24, Weygand bitterly complained that “the British Army has carried out, on its own initiative, a retreat of forty kilometers towards the ports when our troops moving up from the south are gaining ground towards the north, where they were to meet their allies.” In another sharp telegram to London, Reynaud commented that the British action “has naturally compelled General Weygand to modify his arrangements” and that he has been forced to abandon “any idea” of uniting the Allied armies. His Majesty’s Government was disconcerted. Ironside wrote: “Why Gort has done this I don’t know. He has never told us what he was going to do or even when he had done it.” In his reply to Reynaud, Churchill said that “no doubt the action was forced on Lord Gort.” This was “no time for recriminations,” he said, though he conceded that Gort should have kept him informed and that he did not doubt that the French “had grounds for complaint.”
⁵⁸

They had none. Weygand’s troops still weren’t advancing, and Gort had not retreated. However, with each passing hour the commander of the BEF realized that he would have to do something, and soon. His army—the only army Britain had—was in mortal danger, nearly encircled, trapped in a pocket seventy miles from the sea and only fifteen to twenty-five miles across. Their lines of communications had been cut. Their only allies were the Belgians and the remnants of the First French Army. The ports through which the BEF’s two hundred thousand men were supplied were either bombed out or already in enemy hands. The Tommies were down to a four-day supply of ammunition and rations. Panzers were in Gravelines, barely ten miles from Dunkirk, the BEF’s last remaining port of escape. The panzers were closing in, and the Belgians were on the verge of surrender; already their last link with General Alan Brooke’s corps, northeast of Menin, had been broken, creating a breach between which the Nazis would pour once they found it.

Of the Channel ports, only Calais and Dunkirk were still free. The army might be cut off from them at any time. In his diary Brooke wrote: “Nothing but a miracle can save the B.E.F. now, and the end cannot be far off.” The British had lost all confidence in General G. H. Billotte, the
French commander in the north. Ironside, calling at Billotte’s command post on May 20, had been horrified. He wrote of him: “No plan, no thought of a plan. Ready to be slaughtered. Defeated at the head without casualties.
Très fatigué
and nothing doing. I lost my temper and shook Billotte by the button of his tunic. The man is completely beaten.”
⁵⁹

John Standish, the 6th Viscount Gort of Limerick—“Jack” to his fellow generals—was not greatly admired by them. At best, the French said, he would be a good battalion commander. He lacked intellect, said the British staff officers (Gamelin’s intellect had been much admired in London, and even in Berlin). But Gort’s courage was extraordinary. As a Guards officer in the last war, he had won the Victoria Cross, three Distinguished Service Orders, and the Military Cross. He was, if anything, an overdisciplined soldier, and now he faced an excruciating decision. He had heard nothing from Weygand for four days. Ironside had brought him orders from the War Cabinet, specifically forbidding a withdrawal to the sea, telling him, instead, to attack southward. But now he knew that only annihilation awaited him there. In Berlin, Germany’s foreign minister Ribbentrop had already told the press: “The French army will be destroyed and the English on the Continent will be made prisoners of war.” Rommel wrote in his diary: “Now the hunt is up against sixty encircled British, French and Belgian divisions.”

During the afternoon of Saturday, May 25, Gort received a distress signal from Brooke: “I am convinced that the Belgian army is closing down and will have stopped fighting by this time tomorrow. This, of course, entirely exposes our left flank.” Lieutenant General Sir Ronald Adam, the army’s other corps commander, confirmed Brooke. Gort’s reserves were gone. The only British soldiers not engaged with the enemy were two divisions, the 5th and the 50th, which were awaiting orders to open the southern attack the next day. In his command post at Prémesques, he spent most of that afternoon staring at wall maps of northern France and the Channel ports. At 6:30
P.M.
he canceled the offensive and dispatched the 5th Division to plug the gap on Brooke’s flank. Then he wired Eden, telling him what he had done and why he had done it.