To Lose a Battle Read online

  Deprived of any ruthless overriding agency such as Goering’s Air Ministry, the French Air Force suffered acutely from being treated as a poor relation by the Army. As Chief of the Defence Staff, General Gamelin was nominally responsible for the well-being of the Air Force, but as a thoroughly conservative Army man, new ideas of air power did not commend themselves to him. His view was that the Air Force should look after itself, and General Vuillemin, Chief of the Air Staff, an elderly bomber pilot not over-endowed with dynamism, obliged by not pestering him. The role of the Air Force was also clearly laid down in the Army’s Instruction on the ‘Tactical Employment of Major Units’: preparation for the attack was to remain the work of the artillery, and only troop concentrations and columns on the march or in retreat at the rear of the battlefield were considered suitable targets for the Air Force. ‘It is convenient,’ said the Instruction, ‘to leave to the Air Force commanders the initiative for launching their attack.’ Here was no question of any intimate liaison between the Army and the Air Force such as Guderian and the Luftwaffe pioneers were developing in Germany.

  One of the most serious faults of French pre-war air policy was its complete inability to appreciate the importance of dive-bombers. As early as the Riff War in the 1920s in Morocco, French airmen had recognized the potentialities of this weapon, and others had fully comprehended the importance of the German dive-bombers in Spain later; but they were in a minority. In his memoirs General Gamelin claims that the Army was in favour of dive-bombers, but that the Air Force opposed them on technical grounds; yet there is no evidence to show that Gamelin ever actively pushed the Army’s views in this instance. Worried by reports from Spain, after much contemplation Vuillemin decided in 1938 to develop the Loire-Nieuport as a dive-bomber. But it was finally considered to be too slow, and only the Navy was equipped with it. Instead, the Air Force went ahead, belatedly, with experiments in vol rasant (ground-level) attack-planes. As a result of this indecision, when 1940 came France possessed a total of only fifty dive-bombers. The belief was that sufficient and fast enough fighters could be made available to destroy the slow dive-bombers and deal with the enemy’s fighter cover as well. But in 1940 France’s most numerous fighter, the Morane 406, was at least 50 m.p.h. slower than the Me-109, and barely able to catch up with the swifter German level bombers; yet because of the backwardness of the French production lines, each Morane required 18,000 man-hours of labour, compared to only 5,000 for the Messerschmitt. Consequently, it was also gravely lacking in numbers. Armed with one cannon and two machine-guns, the Morane carried only enough ammunition for the briefest of encounters. In equipment, the French planes were also inferior in a number of ways. During 1938 some French units were unable to use their guns during any exercise that year owing to constructional defects in their aircraft. By 1939, most French bombers were still not equipped with radio communication, so that once they left the ground they were out of touch. Ground equipment for loading them with bombs was slow and cumbersome, so that much time was wasted in getting them off the ground. In one of its most serious deficiencies by comparison with the Luftwaffe, the French Air Force possessed no proper air-transport facilities, so that in action it was highly immobile.

  One further important function in which the French air defences lagged behind those of Germany was the ground anti-aircraft arm. In Germany this was fully integrated into the Luftwaffe, and its mobility and firepower, particularly of the light flak units which accompanied the Panzers in the forefront of battle, were to have a most important influence in the Meuse crossing of 1940. In France, anti-aircraft defences came under the individual armies, with a separate detachment hived off under the Défense Aérienne du Territoire (D.A.T.). In 1939, when the Luftwaffe possessed seventy-two anti-aircraft regiments, France had only five, and was notably short in the small-calibre 25-mm. and 40-mm. guns essential for protecting ground troops from attacking aircraft – especially Stukas.

  Enter the ‘Fifth Column’

  As the Popular Front continued its reign, so the political chasm in France widened, Blum like so many other thoroughly honourable European leaders of that time remaining blind to the real threat of Hitler until too late. For all its declared raison d’être of presenting an ‘anti-Fascist’ front, it was constantly against the French ‘Fascists’ at home rather than those abroad that the Front concentrated its zeal. When it should have been feverishly stepping up its arms industry, it was preoccupied with social reform, its attitude encouraging and prolonging an indolent and illusory sense of ease among the French workers. On the other hand, the acts of the Popular Front generated in its opponents passions hard for an Anglo-Saxon to comprehend at that time. On the extreme Right, a terrorist group called the Cagoulards made its appearance with a series of bomb outrages. As General Spears remarked of his bourgeois friends in Paris, ‘these people hated the Front Populaire and all it stood for’, and, though he himself could never be accused of left-wing sympathies, he was shocked by their inability ‘to take into account that the very violence of the socialist reaction was due to the selfish, the merciless attitude’ of the patrons. On this subject Spears found that there simply ‘could be no argument’. ‘The revolution is about to break out!’ had been the rallying cry of the French conservatives ever since 1934, and the experience of the stay-in strikes had done much to aggravate their terror. ‘It would be difficult to exaggerate’, stressed the French historian, Marc Bloch, ‘the sense of shock felt by the comfortable classes, even by men who had a reputation for liberal-mindedness, at the coming of the Popular Front in 1936’, while Pertinax describes a divided nation going through ‘an emotional crisis comparable with the Dreyfus Affair, but more fundamental’. Dangerously, the French conservatives, in their alarm, persisted in regarding the enemy within as infinitely more menacing than the monster without. ‘Rather Hitler than Blum’ – became their motto, and in it Hitler himself saw possibilities that he wasted not a minute in exploiting. To the attentive Rauschning he predicted that France ‘in spite of her magnificent Army could, by the provocation of internal unrest and disunity in public opinion, easily be brought to the point where she would only be able to use her Army too late, or not at all’.

  One comes to that most elusive of factors in the fall of France – the bogy figure of Germany’s pre-war ‘Fifth Column’. (The origin of the expression came from the Spanish Civil War, when General Mola boasted that he had four columns outside Madrid, and a fifth inside.) Hitler, says Rauschning, had made a thorough study of Machiavelli’s Il Principe; from which he concluded that ‘a thorough knowledge of the weaknesses and vices of each one of my opponents is the first condition of success in any policy’. To act upon the weaknesses and vices of the Third Republic, Hitler sent to Paris a personal envoy endowed in abundance with the talents praised by Machiavelli – Otto Abetz, who, after France’s defeat, was to become Nazi Ambassador in Paris.9 Abetz, a friend of Ribbentrop who had been won over to the Nazis in 1933, had a French wife and professed deep love and admiration for all things French. ‘I had a liking for the man,’ admitted Jules Romains, the novelist.

  First, he was cheerful… He might have come from French Flanders or Alsace… He represented himself as a real Western German who, by all his natural affinities and cultural tradition, felt a bond with the Western nations. The Belgians, the northern French, the Swiss, they were his brothers. On the other hand, he felt nothing but aversion and mistrust towards the Prussians…

  One recognizes the type.

  Tall and square-shouldered, with reddish-blond hair, a pale face and blue eyes, Abetz swiftly gained acceptance by smart Parisian café society at various echelons. He was a frequent visitor to the chic political salon of Comtesse de Portes, Paul Reynaud’s influential mistress. Skilfully he played upon the snobbishness and anti-semitism of the ruling classes, upon the hatred of Socialism of the nouveau riche bourgeoisie, upon the deep-seated pacifism of the French as a whole. Principal among the Frenchmen in the circle which Abetz collected around him
were Fernand de Brinon,10 a journalist closely associated with Laval and Georges Bonnet, and who was the prime mover of the Comité France-Allemagne, which under cover of intellectual rapprochement between the two countries became an instrument of Nazi propaganda; Jean Luchaire, another journalist, who had once been Frau Abetz’s boss; and Paul Ferdonnet, director of the Agence Prima, who was to establish himself during the war as France’s Lord Haw-Haw, broadcasting propaganda from Stuttgart. Through this circle, Abetz organized flattering trips to Germany for sympathetic French intellectuals, who were also promised enticing contracts and immense German editions for their books. The Comité France-Allemagne sponsored superbly stage-managed reciprocal visits of ex-Servicemen, culminating in moving pledges that there should never again be war between France and Germany. Abetz encouraged, on occasions financed, and generally exploited for his own use such newspapers as Maurras’s L’Action Française and weeklies like Gringoire, Candide and Je Suis Partout which combined a running attack on Republican statesmen and institutions with a violent Anglophobia generally guaranteed to appeal to a wide readership in France. Typical of what Abetz inspired, and France’s Right wing eagerly consumed, was the line that, in case of war, a French victory over Germany would only lead to the ruin of France and the civilized world, since Germany represented the chief rampart against the bolshevization of Europe.

  The direct achievements of Abetz and his circle were not great; neither he nor any other German agency succeeded in creating in pre-war France any large-scale network for espionage, sabotage or subversion and compared with what the world has since come to associate with the Kremlin, all their efforts were as child’s play. But what was important about Abetz’s ‘Fifth Column’ was not what it was, but what other Frenchmen thought, and feared it, to be. Writing in 1941, Élie Bois claimed typically: ‘The traitors did not show themselves, they worked in the deepest shadow, so that the eye of justice should not surprise them. From afar they pulled the strings of puppets, some of whom did not even suspect it, while others, being aware, feigned ignorance.’ These ‘traitors’, claimed Bois, were held together ‘by a truly mystical bond’. Hitler’s cunning propaganda of bluff and double-bluff, just as it made his Army and Luftwaffe seem even more imposing than they really were, helped inflate the sinister spectre of the ‘Fifth Column’. In the last years of peace, Abetz’s work further widened the gulf between Frenchmen; in war, it was to foster belief in the presence of a vast, malignant invisible machine of agents and ‘traitors’ efficiently paralysing the French war effort at every remove. In fact France had no need of villains; she was effectively enough ‘betrayed by what is false within’.

  Fall of the Popular Front

  On 21 June 1937, after the Radicals had deserted him in the Senate, Léon Blum and his Government resigned. The Popular Front lay in fragments. Blum’s refusal to intervene in the Spanish Civil War (despite pressure from his Communist allies), his attempt to come to terms with the patrons by temporarily pegging wages, the ‘Clichy massacre’ whereby six workers had fallen to police bullets, and finally the drab failure of the Great Exhibition of 1937, had provided the nails in the Front’s coffin. Within the next fourteen months, another three Cabinets came and went in France, in what Jacques Chastenet, the French historian, describes as ‘a sombre period marking perhaps the low point of French political life under the Third Republic’.

  But although the Popular Front had disintegrated, the most pernicious of the effects of the ‘civil war’ associated with it remained deeply rooted in France. First, out of the wreckage the Communist Party had emerged immeasurably strengthened, principally at the cost of the Socialists of the moderate and patriotic Blum. In 1922, while the German Communist Party numbered 218,555 members, the French totalled only 60,000. After sinking to an all-time low of 29,415 in 1931 (but polling 6·8 per cent of the electoral votes), already by January 1936 the French Party’s membership had risen to 32,000, and its slice of the nation’s votes to 12·6 per cent; but by the end of 1937 its strength had attained the fantastic figure of 340,000, making it the strongest in the Western world, an ascendancy it would long retain. Not only had the Party gained in numbers; it had also gained vastly in wisdom, tactical skill and striking power. These were factors that were to help the Party survive the rude shock of the Nazi-Soviet non-aggression pact of August 1939, and to lend weight to its assault on the national war effort during the ‘Phoney War’. Secondly, after the psychological and physical upheaval caused to French industry by the Popular Front, its equilibrium could not be restored in time to meet the crash rearmament programme forced upon France in the wake of Munich. And thirdly, though the French Communists stood alone in opposing the Munich settlement and maintained their opposition to Hitler until the new volte-face of August 1939, hatred of the Party and mistrust of Russia, augmented by doubts as to her value as a potential ally, following the 1936 purges within the Red Army, inclined the French bourgeoisie more and more towards appeasement.

  The Rush towards War: 1938–9

  In March 1938, after two years of deceptive passivity since the reoccupation of the Rhineland, during which time his rearmament programme had gone into top gear, Hitler resumed his march of conquest by annexing Austria. At one blow, France with her static population of 42 million was confronted by a Reich of 76 million virile Germans. The powerful frontier defences of France’s principal Continental ally, Czechoslovakia, were now turned. Again Britain and France stood motionless. Hardly had Hitler begun the work of digesting Austria than he was directing his attentions against the Czechs. With ever-increasing momentum, events now swept Europe once again towards the abyss of war. President Beneš appealed to France to stand by her treaty obligations to her ally. The French Government, with Édouard Daladier once more at the helm and that slippery arch-apostle of appeasement, Georges Bonnet, at the Quai d’Orsay, represented a divided and thoroughly pacifist nation. Terrified by General Vuillemin’s recent revelations of German air strength, and doubtful that its defensively organized Army could strike effectively, and without suffering enormous losses, at the Germans protected by their ‘West Wall’, it cast about desperately for some means of evading its obligations. Salvation was granted in the shape of Neville Chamberlain, who obligingly prepared to fly to Germany to offer Hitler any sacrifice of the Czechs that might avert the unspeakable prospect of a renewed war with Germany. Nervously France watched the negotiations at Munich, the Paris bourgeoisie already having fled the capital in their thousands, in cars with mattresses heaped high upon the roofs – a concomitant of panic that would be all too familiar eighteen months later. Then Daladier returned from Munich. Expecting to be lynched, he was astonished to find himself besieged by an enthusiastic crowd at Le Bourget. Simone de Beauvoir recalls that ‘that evening a great wave of rejoicing swept over Paris; people sang and laughed together, lovers clung together…’; while she admitted that she herself ‘was delighted, and felt not the faintest pang of conscience at my reaction. I felt I had escaped death, now and forever.’ The honest Léon Blum represented a wide range of French feeling when he said that he greeted Munich with a mixture of ‘shame and relief’. In the Chamber, only the Communists of Thorez, acting on the latest instruction from Moscow, voted solidly against the Munich sell-out.

  After Munich, France’s whole inter-war strategy of alliances at Germany’s eastern rear lay in ruins. The great Skoda arms complex fell under Hitler’s control, and the bloodless surrender of the Czech ‘Maginot Line’ meant that the full weight of the Wehrmacht could now be deployed against France, if need be. But Poland was next on Hitler’s timetable. In March 1939 he occupied the rump of Czechoslovakia, in flagrant breach of the Munich agreements. Though France remained mutely pacifist, an extraordinary change of heart now swept England; enraged, she at last girded herself for war against Hitler. Chamberlain now extended his ‘guarantee’ to menaced Poland, thereby jettisoning Britain’s traditional policy of non-involvement in East European affairs, and at the same time assuming directio
n of the Franco-British alliance. ‘Here’, said Winston Churchill, ‘was decision at last, taken at the worst possible moment and on the least satisfactory grounds.’ France followed Britain’s lead reluctantly.

  By the summer of 1939, British war production was rapidly catching up with that of Germany, and at last, desperately late, a new sense of urgency began to filter through to France’s stagnant industries. She had a long way to go. Her share of world production had fallen from 6·6 per cent in 1929 to only 4·5 per cent in 1937; because of the plunge in her birth-rate, the number of her workers had decreased, between 1932 and 1938, by nearly a million and a half; while the number of hours worked per year had fallen from 8,000 million in 1933 to 6,000 million in 1937. In that latter year, when Germany was producing 19 million tons of steel, France’s total was only 6·6 million. Although the world slump of the early 1930s had hit her far less hard than Britain, it had also hit France later, so that she was only just shaking off its effects as war approached. In November 1938, a new, energetic and fearless Minister of Finance, Paul Reynaud, assumed office. At once he challenged the French worker’s sacred inheritance from the Popular Front, the forty-hour week. ‘Do you believe,’ he asked in a broadcast, ‘that in today’s Europe France can maintain her standard of life, spend 25,000 million on armaments, and at the same time take two days off every week?’ He followed up with forty-two decrees largely repudiating the Popular Front’s reforms, and reinstating a forty-eight-hour week. On 30 November a twenty-four-hour strike, Communist-inspired, gripped France in protest against Reynaud’s fiats. But the protest was a failure, and a remarkable new vitality began to make itself felt throughout the French economy. Unemployment fell rapidly, and in 1939 French productivity rose 17 per cent compared with the previous year. Would France, however, be granted enough time to set her own house in order?