With Wings Like Eagles (11 page)

Others, including the prime minister, still retained hope that France would survive the initial disaster of the war, as it had survived the Battle of the Marne by a hairbreadth in 1914, when the Parisian taxis had shuttled General Joseph-Simon Gallieni’s troops from the Gare des Invalides to the front in time to save France. Churchill, however poorly he spoke French, was a devoted, passionate Francophile, and although the writing was, all too clearly, on the wall, his generous nature and his romantic impulses prevented him from seeing, at first, the full and shameful extent of the French military and political collapse. Throughout most of his lifetime, France had been Britain’s only European ally; he himself had commanded an infantry battalion in the trenches in France in what was still called the Great War; many of the senior French generals and not a few of the politicians were his friends. Accordingly, Churchill was profoundly and sincerely reluctant to leave France in the lurch. Dowding, however, shared none of these emotions, nor the illusions that they kindled in the prime minister’s breast. He had never had much confidence in the idea that the Maginot Line or the French army would stop the Germans, still less any confidence in the French air force, which he knew was poorly equipped and trained, and possessed neither modern fighters, nor radar, nor an efficiently organized fighter control organization. Dowding took it for granted that the Germans would attack Britain as soon as they gained possession of the French, Dutch, and Belgian airfields; that Britain’s survival would depend on his fighters; and that every fighter and every fighter pilot sent to France directly weakened his strength. He did not believe that his Hurricanes—his few Spitfires were too valuable to even consider sending to France—could stop or even slow down the German advance, or that their presence would restore the morale of the French army. The British fighters in France were flying from makeshift, primitive airfields, without radar and fighter control to guide them; the French had no modern antiaircraft guns to protect the fields; and a long, tenuous supply line went all the way back to the Channel ports (which were now being taken one by one by the Germans) and was dependent on the French railways and road system, both prime targets for German bombers. Fuel, equipment, ammunition, and spares seldom reached the places where they were most needed through the chaos of the French retreat, which led to the rapid wastage of British aircraft and pilots for no gain whatsoever.

The French, not surprisingly, saw the matter from a different point of view. Lord Gort’s British Expeditionary Force had been too small to make a difference in the major land battle, and had in any case returned to Britain via Dunkirk, leaving the French army to fight on alone, with lessening cohesion and rapidly sinking morale. Nobody in France seriously expected the British to summon up an army of many divisions overnight and ship them to France, but the one thing they did have, apart from the Royal Navy, was a powerful modern air force. Now, in the view of the French government, at the supreme moment of crisis, was the time to send it into battle, to give the French army a breathing space in which to establish a viable line of defense.

What the French wanted most was fighters, despite the fact that an eight-gun Hurricane was powerless against a tank, and the reason for this has to be explored, for it was to become the major issue between the British and French governments, and between Churchill and Dowding. The military alliance between Britain and France was a relatively recent historical development, an unusual happy interlude in a 900-year history of mutual warfare, rivalry, and contempt—a history that still made many Britons and most of the French uneasy. Old prejudices die hard and slowly, and the fact that the French and the British had fought on the same side in the Crimean War and in World War I had done nothing to erase the French people’s memory of Crécy, Agincourt, Trafalgar, and Waterloo or their suspicion of “perfidious Albion,” or to reduce British contempt for the “frogs.” Nowhere were these feelings stronger than among the senior officers of the armed forces of both nations—indeed, after World War I the air defenses of Great Britain had been built up with France in mind as the potential aggressor, until Germany revived sufficiently to resume that role.

One effect of this long-standing hostility between the two allies was that the parties behaved toward each other, as in a bad marriage, with exaggerated politeness and a total lack of frankness. Thus, although it was clear enough that French generalship had failed spectacularly and that the French army had, with a few signal exceptions,
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fought very badly indeed, where it had fought at all, the British were deeply reluctant to say so, and since their own small army had distinguished itself so far only by conducting a well-disciplined retreat and a providential evacuation, they were in any case in no position to criticize France. As for the French, a proud nation with a rich tradition of military
gloire
second to none, and fresh memories of victory in World War I, they themselves naturally did not jump to the conclusion that their troops had fought badly or that their generals had bungled. They looked for another reason, and found it in the fact that the Germans controlled the air.

The French government and generals agreed that this was the problem. Although the Germans had not in fact launched a serious bomber campaign against French cities, they had used their Stukas as airborne artillery, as well as for strafing the roads. Retreating soldiers and civilian refugees alike, jamming France’s road system, had been terrified by the sudden appearance of German dive-bombers—one of Udet’s shrewdest moves had been to fit the Ju 87 with a siren that gave out a banshee howl as it dived, sowing panic among all who heard it. Though the actual number of deaths caused by the
Luftwaffe
in France was low, particularly compared with the casualties that France had suffered in World War I, the psychological effect was enormous, spread mostly in the form of horrifying rumors, which paralyzed the government, eroded the already doubtful morale of the army, and terrified the civilian population. It also served as a simple, all-purpose explanation for France’s defeat—not only had the British not done their share of the fighting; they had also failed to provide enough fighters to protect the French army.

This subject had already come up during a dramatic early-morning telephone call between the two prime ministers, Paul Reynaud and Winston Churchill, on May 15, only five days after the king had asked Churchill to form a government. “We have been defeated,” Reynaud said, in English, when Churchill picked up the telephone by his bedside. “The front is broken near Sedan.”
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The way to Paris, Reynaud warned, was open.

The next day, following the grim news of the surrender of the Netherlands, Churchill flew to Paris to meet with Reynaud and the French war cabinet at the Quai d’Orsay. The meeting was not made any more cheerful by the sight, through the window, of “venerable officials pushing wheel-barrows of archives” of state documents into the garden and dumping them into “large bonfires,”
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from which the smoke rose high above the French ministry of foreign affairs. The glum admission of the French commander in chief, General Gamelin, that he possessed no strategic reserve with which to stage a counterattack, and his obvious belief that the war was lost, was followed by a vigorous demand from him, and from all the French present, for more squadrons of fighters from Britain. General Gamelin pointed out that only the fighters could stop the German tanks—a belief which was to be repeated at every Anglo-French meeting until the end, and stubbornly contradicted by Churchill. It is difficult to see how Gamelin imagined that fighters could stop tanks. The Mark I Hurricane had no provision for bomb racks; nor had the pilots any training in attacking targets on the ground. Also, the .303-caliber bullets of the British fighters’ eight guns would have bounced harmlessly off a tank’s armor. What the French needed to do was to dig in their own field artillery, the famous
soixante-quinze
, which had served them so well in World War I and which, with its rapid rate of fire, high velocity, and flat trajectory, was still capable of disabling a
Panzerkampfwagen
II or III, the type of tank that then constituted the bulk of the German armor. Fighter planes, even if the British had them in abundance, would not have stopped the advance of the German panzer divisions, although they might of course have helped with the Stukas. However, whatever differences existed between General Gamelin, Prime Minister Reynaud, and Monsieur Daladier, who was the minister of national defense and war (and the differences were considerable), on this subject they were as one—
now
was the moment to send every fighter to France. Churchill, during the telephone conversation from his bed with a distraught Reynaud the pervious day, had agreed to send four more squadrons of Hurricanes to France. Now, faced with the signs of collapse all around him, both in the room and outside in the garden, and moved by the plight of the French, he agreed to seek the British War Cabinet’s consent to send another six squadrons as well. “It would not be good historically if their requests were denied and their ruin resulted,”
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Churchill cabled from the British embassy, and late that same night he was driven to Reynaud’s apartment to tell him that all ten squadrons would be sent the following day. Reynaud had already retired to bed and emerged in his dressing gown, leaving his mistress, the formidable Hélène de Portes (whom one wit described as “the only man in the government”), in the bedroom to listen behind the door.

It was a moment of high emotion, perhaps the most dramatic and positive in a succession of increasingly difficult and depressing meetings between the French and the British prime ministers; but on the other side of the Channel, when he heard the news, it alarmed an already apprehensive Air Chief Marshal Dowding, and set off an equally difficult disagreement between the British prime minister and the Commander-in-Chief of Fighter Command.

Probably no subject in history has been written about in such detail as the relationship between the British and French governments from May 10, when the Germans attacked, to June 22, when the French government, by then headed by the aged, defeatist Marshal Pétain, signed an armistice with Germany. In the English-speaking world, the account of those calamitous events that has fixed our view of what happened is Winston Churchill’s. His was, after all, the central role in the drama; he himself drafted (with considerable care and thought for the opinion of posterity) most of the important documents and cables on the British side; he alone survived the war victorious to tell the story. Nearly half of
Their Finest Hour
, Volume II of Churchill’s
The Second World War
, is devoted to the fall of France, and they are perhaps the most dramatic and compelling pages in the entire six volumes, as full of light, shadow, emotion, and human detail as history can be, a Shakespearean tragedy rendered in the Gibbonesque prose style of which the prime minister was the undisputed master.
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On the British side, almost everybody else who was involved has written about it, in memoirs, published diaries and letters, but it is Churchill who still dominates the scene now, as he did then—after all, it was not only “their” finest hour, it was
his
.

A whole book—indeed a sizable and distinguished one
†
—has been written about the way Churchill subtly and sometimes not so subtly shaped his description of events and artfully edited the documents at his disposal when it came time to write “his” history of the war. Nowhere in the six volumes and nearly 2 million words of
The Second World War
does he go to more trouble to build a case for himself than on the subject of the fighter squadrons he wanted to send to France, and Dowding’s objections to doing so. Indeed, it is perhaps the only place in the whole massive structure—which won him the Nobel Prize for Literature—where one can hear the stage machinery creaking and clanking as Churchill tries to escape blame and diminish the strength of Dowding’s opposition, one of the very few episodes about which Churchill appears to feel, if not shame, then at least a certain embarrassment.

To understand why, it is necessary to consider the size, scope, and purpose of the RAF presence in France, to which, from the very beginning, Dowding had forcefully presented his objections regarding his fighters. It had always been the government’s intention to send a British Expeditionary Force (BEF) to France in the event of war with Germany, and it was also a firm commitment made, with whatever reluctance, to the French. The BEF, which would eventually include nine divisions, was to take its place in the “line of battle” on the French frontier, centered on Lille, with the French Seventh Army on its left and the French Ninth Army on its right, and in the event of a German breach of Dutch and Belgian neutrality, was to advance to the Dyle River and hold a line from Louvain to Wavre.
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It was understood that the BEF would need its own air support, and to supply that the RAF had created what became known as the Royal Air Force Component of the British Expeditionary Force (a bit of a mouthful, sometimes shortened to “the Component”), to consist of five squadrons of Lysanders for reconnaissance and communications work, four squadrons of Blenheim twin-engine light bombers, and four squadrons of Hurricanes, to be increased by six more “if necessity arose.” All these were based at airfields in northern France, behind the BEF. As it became apparent just how weak the French
Armée de l’Air
was, a further British force, known as the Advanced Air Striking Force (AASF), was dispatched to France, with ten squadrons of Battle single-engine bombers and twin-engine Blenheims, and two further squadrons of Hurricanes, all to be stationed farther south, behind the Ardennes and the Maginot Line, and to serve as a bombing force to support the French and British armies. Together, these made up a considerable though ill-assorted force of aircraft, spread out over dozens of widely separated airfields in northeastern France. Both the Component and the AASF came under the overall command of Air Marshal A. S. Barratt, who in theory could, if he thought it necessary, “request” assistance from Bomber Command in Britain.
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