To Lose a Battle Read online

  The Reynaud-de Gaulle heresy was assailed from every side. Pétain, his natural pessimism exacerbated by his unhappy experiences as Minister of Defence, considered, pragmatically, that it would be quite impossible to obtain the additional 700 million francs per year that de Gaulle’s armoured contingent would require. Weygand, the retiring Army Chief of Staff, had been so obsessed by the shortage of numbers caused by the ‘hollow classes’ that he was prevented from giving full attention to de Gaulle’s ideas. Of much more consequence were the attitudes of Daladier and Gamelin, the team which would actually lead France into war in 1939. As late as January 1937, Daladier, as Minister of National Defence, is to be found declaring to a Senate Commission that the German Panzers might be all right in the vast unprotected spaces of Eastern Europe, but never against so sophisticated a defence system as that of France. The Spanish Civil War, claimed Daladier, ‘has seen the crumbling of immense hopes based on certain machines’. Outside Madrid the tanks lay ‘pierced like sieves’. ‘Be reassured,’ Daladier added, ‘our fortified works are sufficiently equipped to halt a sudden attack even on Sunday…’ On Whit Sunday three years later, those words – ‘even on Sunday’ – would acquire an historic irony.

  Following Daladier’s exposition, the new Chief of Staff, General Gamelin, rallied to his support with a letter in which he stressed that the development of the anti-tank gun now meant that tanks, unless supported by ponderous artillery, would inevitably be halted, ‘just as infantry is by the machine-gun’. Thus the only conclusion was to scatter armoured divisions among the various old-style infantry corps, ‘that is to say, let them be melted into the dispositif général’. Speaking to the British C.I.G.S., General Sir Cyril Deverell, in 1936, Gamelin echoed Daladier by dismissing the German tanks in Spain as ‘inadequately protected, fit only for the scrap-heap’, adding smugly: ‘All our information shows that it is our doctrine which is correct.’ As further evidence of Gamelin’s fundamental technical miscomprehension, at another time he is quoted as having said (in response to de Gaulle): ‘You cannot hope to achieve real breakthroughs with tanks. The tank is not independent enough. It has to go ahead, but then must return for fuel and supplies.’ Had Gamelin read Guderian, it seems doubtful that he could possibly have maintained this view. Lukewarm about armour, Gamelin never seems to have regarded it as his job to see even the 1936 mechanization programme, such as it was, executed purposefully. Perhaps nothing is more revealing than his own admission in his memoirs, where feebly he regrets not having ‘demanded in 1935 the creation of an independent armoured force… Had I known that the war would not break out before 1939, I would certainly have tackled the problem.’

  In the opposition to Reynaud and de Gaulle, there were also other factors which underline to what extent the political ‘civil war’ in France blinded French leaders to all but internal developments. The immediate reaction of Léon Blum and his allies of the Popular Front to de Gaulle’s ‘professional Army’ was to see in it an armée de coup d’état, by means of which the likes of Colonel de la Rocque might be able to emulate Louis-Napoleon in seizing power. Daladier the Radical had also backed Blum, declaring: ‘… we do not want any professional shock Army, more dangerous than one could believe for the security of the country’, and, apart from a brief policy switch by the Communist Party during the Czechoslovak crisis of 1938, Thorez consistently opposed French military expenditure, for the same motives as Blum. ‘Not a sou for military service,’ he pronounced in 1935, adding in words that were to assume particular significance on the outbreak of war: ‘We ask our followers to penetrate into the Army and fulfil the task of the working class by disrupting the Army.’ Meanwhile, at the opposite end of the political spectrum, the ultra-conservative General Weygand’s view of de Gaulle’s ‘professional Army’ was: ‘What a hot-bed of Communism, this troop of mechanics!’

  So the Reynaud-de Gaulle doctrine received but little support. At the beginning of 1937 a new Army Instruction on the ‘Tactical Employment of Major Units’ came into force, framed by General Georges and bearing the signature of Daladier. Baldly it stated its dogma that ‘technical progress has not appreciably modified, in the tactical sphere, the essential rules laid down by its predecessors’. As before, it was the infantry which was to be ‘entrusted with the principal duty in battle. Protected and accompanied by its own guns and by the guns of the artillery, and occasionally preceded by combat tanks and aviation, etc., it conquers the ground, occupies it, organizes, and holds it.’ With a nostalgic glance back to 1916, it continued that the task of the infantry was ‘particularly dangerous and of outstanding glory’. The Instruction gave its considered opinion that the development of anti-tank guns ‘will result in the employment of tanks only in an attack after the protection and support of a very powerful artillery’ – a belief that was to mislead the French High Command fatally in their assessment of the speed of the German attack in 1940.

  Thus in the new Instruction, France’s official doctrine of war remained the mixture as before, and this was essentially the blueprint with which she would face Germany in September 1939. The bulk of her tanks still stayed scattered among her infantry divisions; some were (reluctantly) received by the cavalry, but, as Guderian pointed out, the combination of horse and motor presented ‘more disadvantages than advantages’. At the same time, Guderian rightly dismissed France’s new light mechanized divisions as possessing no more striking power than reconnaissance units (though, to some extent, this deficiency would be repaired at the eleventh hour). In the remaining three years before the deluge, slow and halting attempts were made to find a formula for creating French Panzer-type divisions; but when these did arrive they would be too little and much too late. Meanwhile, above it all, the cumbersome system of the High Command, with its duplication of channels and dispersal of powers, continued without reform under the undynamic aegis of General Gamelin. In September 1938, when war threatened over Germany’s confrontation with France’s Czech allies, the Deuxième Bureau informed Gamelin that Hitler’s new Army had definitely gained military superiority over France.2 Thus, in less than twenty years, had the European balance sheet been reversed.

  The New Weapon: Goering’s Luftwaffe

  In 1938 the horizon was further darkened by France’s sudden realization of a terrible new weapon in Hitler’s armoury – the Luftwaffe. As General Spaatz of the U.S.A.F. remarks, ‘It was the German Air Force which dominated world diplomacy and won for Hitler the bloodless political victories of the late 1930s,’ and undeniably it was what provided the ingredient essential to Hitler’s lightning victories in the early part of the war.

  Before Hitler came to power, the Versailles restrictions hit the building up of a German military air force harder than they did the Army; in engine design Germany never caught up with the West the years that were lost between 1918 and 1933. Nevertheless, once again, what the Germans lacked in material they made up for in ingenuity and enthusiasm. Full use was made of the ‘Black Reichswehr’ Pact, in force long before Hitler, to train pilots in Russia. Aircraft designers like Ernst Heinkel and Willy Messerschmitt managed to dodge the Versailles bans either by building planes in plants abroad, or through undercover construction in Germany.3 By 1933 the French were already disquieted by Professor Heinkel’s production of a ‘postal’ plane faster than their fastest fighter. Erhard Milch’s Lufthansa empire provided an invaluable cadre of highly trained pilots, while all over Germany gliding schools were crowded out by eager young trainees. When Hitler made clear his intentions of creating an air force, the members of these schools hitched themselves to the Nazi bandwagon with passion.

  The man to whom Hitler handed responsibility for creating the new Luftwaffe, Hermann Goering, had been the last commander of the famous Richthofen Squadron at the end of the Great War, and he immediately surrounded himself with other war-time fliers, men like Udet, Loerzer and Milch. Combined with Hitler’s daemonic impatience for results, the get-up-and-go attitude to life of these aces paved the way for the
essential early successes of the Luftwaffe; at the same time their fundamental lack of administrative and technical experience would be the cause of its ultimate failure. One thing they all agreed upon was that the Luftwaffe was to be primarily an instrument for rapid conquest in a series of short wars. Here a governing consideration was the limiting factor of Germany’s industrial capacity, and as early as 1936 the Nazis adopted a policy of concentrating upon the mass-production of light and medium bombers, at the expense of heavy four-engined machines and sophisticated fighters which required large quantities of labour and material. The function of the Luftwaffe was seen to be purely offensive, flying in support of the Army in the field, rather than carrying out any long-range strategy of its own. In terms of the war to be fought in France in 1940, this philosophy was to prove ideal, though it would lose the Battle of Britain, and from then on would leave Germany increasingly deficient of air cover when she would most need it. Everything was subordinated to speed in creating the new weapon. Already by 1935, when Hitler first announced its birth, the Luftwaffe mounted 1,000 front-line aircraft and 20,000 officers and men. In March that year the first fighter group, called ‘Richthofen No. 2’, was formed. The same year, the civil Heinkel 111 appeared, followed by its military version a year later, and by 1939, 800 of these bombers had been produced. The forerunner of Messerschmitt’s Me-109, later to become Germany’s standard fighter during much of the war, was shown in 1936, and the following year it shook Britain by winning the London to Isle of Man race. During the summer of 1936 the Luftwaffe took part in the first full-scale joint manoeuvre with the Army, and a young man called Wernher von Braun persuaded Professor Heinkel to carry out experiments in rocket propulsion.

  The secret of the Luftwaffe’s rapid expansion lay to a large extent in its ruthless policy of concentrating on a few types – in marked contrast to France and Great Britain. Always the emphasis was on quantity, if necessary at the expense of quality. New aircraft factories were opened to build machines under licence from bigger firms rather than to develop designs of their own, while Junkers was ordered, to the delight of Heinkel, to abandon his Ju-86 and take on construction of the He-111, which Goering wanted in vast quantities. The hard core of the Luftwaffe was formed of four basic types: the twin-engined He-111, which by 1938 had a top speed of approximately 260 m.p.h. and a range of 1,200 miles, but a bomb load of only about 4,000 lb., and was supplemented in 1939 as the standard German level bomber by the Ju-88, with a top speed of 300 m.p.h.; the Me-109 fighter, which in its 1939 version could top 350 m.p.h. with a battle endurance of about one hour; the Ju-52 transport plane; and the Ju-87 ‘Stuka’4 dive-bomber. As far as France 1940 is concerned, it was these last two which were perhaps most fundamental to the Luftwaffe’s success.5

  The Stuka was the brainchild of Ernst Udet. Udet was a cosmopolitan, bohemian bon viveur with considerable charm, who claimed to have shot down sixty-two Allied aircraft when flying with the Richthofen ‘circus’ (his record was second only to Richthofen’s), and who after the First War had become a stunt flyer for a film company, often performing hair-raising acrobatics in a top hat and tails. In 1936 Goering appointed him Director of the Technical Department of the Air Ministry, then probably the biggest arms concern in the world. Udet made a point of personally testing all new prototypes, and in 1938 won the world speed record of over 400 m.p.h. in a Heinkel 112. In 1933, while working in America, he had flown a Curtiss Hawk at Buffalo, New York, and immediately saw its potential as a dive-bomber. Overnight he became a single-minded convert to the technique of dive-bombing, and persuaded Goering to buy two Curtiss Hawks for Germany, one of which Udet promptly crashed. At first Udet met with the same kind of doubting conservatism which had confronted Guderian and his Panzers, but from the moment of his appointment as the Luftwaffe’s Technical Director, he threw all his weight behind his conviction. Gradually the idea caught on in Germany. At its plant in Sweden, Junkers set to work on a dive-bomber which emerged in 1935 as the Ju-87. The following autumn, a trial was held between the Ju-87 and Heinkel’s rival He-118. The He-118 could not stand up to a power dive; Udet, flying it himself, crashed once again, but emerged safely as usual. Henceforth the Luftwaffe adopted the Ju-87 as its dive-bomber, or Stuka.6

  A single-engined plane whose fixed undercarriage gave it the appropriately sinister aspect of a bird of prey swooping with talons outstretched, the Stuka carried a crew of two. Its top speed was only 200 m.p.h. (later increased to 240 m.p.h.) and its normal radius of action was limited to little more than a hundred miles. It carried three machine-guns and a normal bomb load of only 550 lb., in its earlier versions. But it could place its bombs on a small target with immensely greater precision than could a level bomber. Poorly armoured and slow, its vulnerability was great, both from fighters and ground anti-aircraft fire, provided the gunners were not panicked. Its capacity to demoralize was quickly realized by Udet, who himself added a siren, which he dubbed the ‘trumpet of Jericho’, the howling screech of which when diving was to become all too familiar to Allied troops in the early stages of the Second World War. But the principal significance of the Stuka was that it could provide the essential factor which, up to 1936, had been lacking from Guderian’s Panzer doctrine – mobile artillery. Here, as Guderian himself at once realized, was flying firepower which could be brought to bear swiftly and devastatingly on any target miles behind the battlefront, and without any of the laborious preliminary concentration of gun barrels so deleterious to the element of surprise. Considering the fact that the German Condor Legion was to demonstrate in Spain just how effective dive-bombing could be, it is once again surprising that no serious notice of the new weapon was taken by the leaders of France’s Army and Air Force.

  Second in effectiveness only to the Stuka was that old workhorse transport, the triple-engined Ju-52, Germany’s equivalent to the Dakota. Still in service with some 1970s airlines the Ju-52 first appeared in 1932, and was produced in such large numbers that already by 1936 it had given Junkers the lead over De Havillands as the firm with the largest number of civil planes in operation throughout the world. As many as fifty were used during the Spanish Civil War, both as bombing and as transport planes, ferrying Franco’s troops from Morocco. Experiments were also carried out in Spain at dropping airborne troops from the Ju-52, but the experience with the greatest relevance to France in 1940 lay in the employment of massed Ju-52s as cargo planes bringing up bombs, fuel and spare parts from airfield to airfield. Probably nothing learned from the Spanish Civil War proved of greater value to Hitler’s war machine. Out of it the Luftwaffe gained the true mobility which it would require to maintain its short-range combat planes always in step with the advancing ground troops, a mobility that no other air force in the world possessed at that time.

  In August 1938, on the eve of the first Czech crisis, General Vuillemin, the Chief of the French Air Staff, accompanied by Brigadier-General François d’Astier de la Vigerie, who in 1939 would be given command of the crucial Northern Zone of Air Operations, paid an official visit to Germany. At Heinkel’s Oranienburg works, Heinkel, Udet and Milch did everything to impress the Frenchmen, deploying the habitual Nazi technique of bluff combined with reality. After taking him up in an experimental He-100 fighter, Udet told Vuillemin that the model was already in full production, although in fact only three test prototypes existed. Vuillemin was then taken around workshops crammed with He-111 bombers under mass-production, and was heard to murmur as he left: ‘I am shattered!’ On his way back to Berlin with François-Poncet, the French Ambassador, he confessed despondently that ‘should war break out as you expect late in September, there won’t be a single French plane left in a fortnight’. On his return to Paris, Vuillemin’s account of the stupefying power of the Luftwaffe made a profound impression, particularly upon Georges Bonnet, France’s current Foreign Minister.7

  The French Air Force

  Towards the end of 1935, André Maurois recalls meeting Churchill, who urged him ‘to write one article a
day… saying the same thing, to warn France of the decline of her Air Force’. By that time France’s Air Force had decayed for much the same reasons as her Army; only the gap between it and the Luftwaffe over the next five years grew even greater and more irremediable. As with the tanks she inherited from the Great War, France entered the 1930s with a mass of obsolete planes accumulated in the 1920s. Meanwhile aircraft design was moving ahead at an infinitely faster rate even than that of tanks. In 1934, France was fortunate to have a far-sighted and energetic Air Minister, in the shape of General Denain. Realizing the importance of fighters, Denain had ordered a large quantity of Dewoitine fighters, the best of their period, but by 1939 these were already outclassed. After Denain, French aircraft production was stricken with that malaise of the Third Republic, multiplicity of governments, which impeded the formulation of any consistent policy. The aircraft constructors wielded considerable power in the political lobbies. Successive Air Ministers found it hard to refuse their diverse propositions; thus a contract for a prototype would be followed by an order for an uneconomically small number of planes. Then, as often as not, the next Minister would cancel the order. Typically, the selection of each prototype was surrounded with an immense amount of abstract argument, so that it could well be said that the best was the constant enemy of the good so far as French air production was concerned.

  As has already been noted, the French aircraft industry in particular suffered from the industrial disturbances which followed the advent of the Popular Front in 1936. The new Minister, Pierre Cot, showed himself at once more concerned with vague dreams of international disarmament and with solving the industry’s problems at home by nationalization than with laying down any solid programme of rearmament. No doubt there were strong arguments for nationalizing the French aircraft industry, but the fundamental disarray into which Cot threw it was hardly to be made good before the coming of war, while the Air Force itself suffered from his injection of politics into such matters as promotion. Under Cot, the 1936 programme (which only reached the drawing-board stage the following year) resulted in two bombers, a Bréguet and a Potez. 125 of the Potez 633s were ordered in May 1938, but the order was cancelled a short time later. Meanwhile the French Press continued to delude itself and the electorate by boasting, as did L’Intransigeant: ‘Our Air Force is the strongest in Europe!’ In March 1938 the French Government attempted to implement a crash programme called ‘Plan V’, by which priority was given to fighter and reconnaissance aircraft, but out of 864 aircraft ordered, only one-sixth consisted of attack- and dive-bombing aircraft, and long indecision delayed the production of a three-seater attack-bomber well into 1939. In January 1938, a vigorous new Air Minister, Guy La Chambre, took over, but by then the accumulated chaos of the past was too great for anyone to set right within the eighteen months available. On his appointment, La Chambre reputedly found nothing but a disheartened industry of small workshops of which only one factory alone was equipped for mass-production. As war approached and the production gap with the Luftwaffe appeared hopelessly wide,8 he tried to fill it by means of large-scale purchases from the United States; but even this measure of desperation met with intense opposition from the French aircraft manufacturers’ lobby.