To Lose a Battle Page 13

  In June 1939 Britain and France opened negotiations at the Kremlin in a desperate bid to put teeth into the Polish guarantee by gaining a Russian commitment. With misgiving (‘I must confess to the most profound distrust of Russia,’ Chamberlain had declared that March) and almost incredible dilatoriness on the part of the Western powers, the talks dragged on through the summer. Marshal Voroshilov, the principal Soviet negotiator, stated that his Government had a ‘complete plan, with figures’ for co-operating over Poland; but what about the others? The British and French delegates had to admit they had neither a plan, nor plenipotentiary powers even to discuss one. All propositions had to be passed back to their respective governments. How many British divisions might be available for dispatch to France? asked Voroshilov. Five infantry and one motorized, came the reply. Blandly, Voroshilov declared that the U.S.S.R. would be ready to put into the field against an aggressor 120 infantry and 16 cavalry divisions, 5,000 heavy and medium cannon, and about 10,000 armoured vehicles. Then what about Poland, the subject of the Allied guarantee? Obstinately, Colonel Beck’s Government declined to permit entry into Poland of the Red Army under any pretext. ‘With the Germans we risk losing our liberty,’ Marshal Smigly-Rydz told the French Ambassador in Warsaw, ‘but with the Russians we would lose our souls.’ As post-war events have shown, his fears were not entirely ill-founded.

  In Paris, that last summer season of 1939 passed with a particularly frenzied brilliance. The official receptions all seemed to have a note of unreality about them, but nothing quite rivalled the July ball held at the Polish Embassy. It appeared as if the women had all been invited for their beauty as much as for their distinction, and the Ambassador, Lukasiewicz, excited the admiration of Paris by leading his staff, barefooted, in a polonaise until three in the morning across the lawn of the Embassy. The dancers were macabrely illuminated by red Bengal lights, and one spectator could visualize Poland herself being consumed in front of his eyes, ‘courageuse et légère, en danses, en fumée…’ Ten days later came the last Quatorze Juillet, an echo full of the splendid panoply of a past age: Foreign Legionnaires, Senegalese, cuirassiers in shining breastplates – and a detachment of British Grenadier Guards in scarlet tunics and bearskins to reassure Frenchmen as to the reality of the Entente. But there was little that offered encouragement for the immediate future. How the facts of life had changed since that jour de gloire of just twenty years ago!

  Meanwhile, in Moscow the Russians had become exasperated by Polish intransigence and Franco-British temporizing, and were finally convinced that the Allies’ object was to involve the U.S.S.R. in a war in which she could expect little or no support from them. On 17 August the talks ground to a halt; but already three days earlier Ribbentrop and Molotov were in negotiation together. On 23 August the shattering news that Nazi Germany and Communist Russia, those apparently irreconcilable foes, had signed a pact of non-aggression. It was a crushing defeat for Anglo-French diplomacy, though at this distance it is difficult to see that this had left Russia any alternative. If Britain stuck to her guarantee to Poland, war seemed inevitable. The Pact sealed the fate of Poland, and for that matter of France too, because now the only military ally she could count on in the East was the valiant but antiquated Polish Army. As Paul Reynaud wrote later, ‘The Allies had lost the game’ – but he might well have added ‘set and match’ as well. France, on holiday, was utterly stupefied by the news of the Russian volte-face, which caught even the Communists momentarily off balance, though L’Humanité hastened to interpret it as a move of ‘peace’. The full moral effects of the shock upon France would only later become felt. In Berlin, William Shirer noted that the Germans were quite bowled over by Hitler’s latest and most astonishing coup. At one blow the German nightmare of a war on two fronts seemed to have been removed. Surely, whatever now happened to Poland, France and Britain would not dare intervene?

  On 28 August, Shirer reported Berliners watching ‘troops pouring through the city towards the east. They were being transported in moving vans, grocery trucks and every sort of vehicle that could be scraped up.’ Three days later, the world heard that the German Army had attacked Poland without warning. On 3 September, a stricken Chamberlain announced that Britain was fulfilling her guarantee to the unhappy Poles. In a France desperately disinclined to ‘die for Danzig’, and even more mindful than Britain of the unreplaced dead of 1914–18, Bonnet still tried to skate upon the slippery ice of appeasement, replying to the outraged protests of Ambassador Lukasiewicz: ‘You don’t expect us to have a massacre of women and children in Paris…’ But the game was up, and France too found herself in the war she had dreaded for so long, with no allies but Britain and Poland, Belgium neutral and the Maginot Line incomplete between Longwy and the sea, her Army strong on paper but weak in fact, her Air Force hopelessly outclassed, and the nation divided.

  Chapter 5

  ‘Queer Kind of War’

  We talked to many of the soldiers. They were sick of the war before it had started… they wanted to go home and did not care a bean for Danzig and the Corridor… They rather liked La France, but they did not actually love her; they rather disliked Hitler for all the unrest he created, but they did not actually hate him. The only thing they really hated was the idea of war.

  ARTHUR KOESTLER, Scum of the Earth

  In London, Berlin and Paris the coming of war was accompanied with none of the hysteria, throwing of flowers or cries of ‘To Berlin!’ that had characterized August 1914. The memories of the Great War were still too recent. The correspondent of the Christian Science Monitor in Berlin, Joseph Harsch, even went so far as to claim that

  the German people were nearer to real panic on 1 September 1939 than the people of any other European country. No people wanted that war, but the German people exhibited more real fear of it than the others. They faced it in something approaching abject terror.

  In France there was no repetition of the mad crushes outside the recruiting offices. On the troop trains, Simone de Beauvoir declares, it was only the Negro colonials who sang, a sharp contrast with 1914. The slogan of the moment – though somewhat forced and accompanied with a resigned shrug of the shoulders – became ‘Let’s get it over with’. But, as Arthur Koestler remarks, ‘it carried no real conviction. It was the grumbling of an entirely exasperated person rather than a programme for which to die…’ Meanwhile, for the third time in seventy years, the Venus de Milo left the Louvre for a safer place. There were air-raid false alarms in Berlin, Paris and London on the first day of war. When the warning first sounded in Paris, Parisians rushed panic-stricken to shelters where women sat stifled and half fainting in their gas-masks. Then soon, as each alarm turned out to be a false one, they began walking around with their masks abandoned at home. Initially, all cinemas and theatres closed; within ten days they were already reopening.

  France Mobilizes

  Up in the forward zone beyond the Maginot Line, peasants, women and children were hastily evacuated to the interior of France, leaving the wretched farm animals to fend for themselves. In the Line itself – henceforth to be known unflatteringly as le trou – the reservists were arriving leisurely, with bottles of mirabelle and kirsch in their packs. Defiant slogans from another age – ‘Ils ne passeront pas!’ and Pétain’s ‘On les aura!’ began to appear on the damp walls; meanwhile the tenants of le trou settled down peaceably to their duties like a vast army of concierges. On the whole, mobilization proceeded smoothly; on the outbreak of hostilities, 67 French divisions – plus the first contingent of five B.E.F. divisions that were arriving in the north – stood on a war footing, as opposed to an initial overall total of 107 German divisions.

  In fact, if anything French mobilization was too efficient. Several vital war industries were brought almost to a standstill by the drafting of skilled technicians. The Bourges arsenal, for example, was so deprived that it was reduced temporarily to delivering only 10 per cent of its monthly quota of shells. At the Renault works, the numbers of wo
rkers fell abruptly from 30,000 to 8,000, and several plants producing the planes that France was to need more desperately than anything else were actually forced to close down. There were also some strange distortions: one large automobile factory which might have been building tanks continued to turn out civilian cars by the thousand throughout the winter of 1939, while, according to André Maurois, when Paul Reynaud after dinner one evening in October decided ‘to make a tour of certain armament factories in the region of Paris, he was astounded to find them closed. They did not work at night…’ On 13 September the French Government appointed Raoul Dautry, a brilliant engineer who had reorganized French Railways in the inter-war period, to co-ordinate French arms production. But the appointment was late; Dautry confided to Maurois that he would be unable to provide the armies with all they required ‘before 1942’. One of Dautry’s first actions was to bring back the conscripted technicians. Soldiers at the front wrote disdainfully of a ‘massive recall of metalworkers to the factories’. Some divisions lost half of their reservist officers and N.C.O.s.

  Here was one more by-product of France’s bleeding-white of 1914–18, reflected in the scarcity of manpower of 1939. Although we now know that Hitler’s arms industry in 1939–40 was far from being totally geared to the needs of all-out, prolonged warfare, as was generally believed at the time, its shortcomings would only make themselves felt midway through the war; yet by comparison, as Dautry pointed out, it would not be until 1942 that French arms production got into its stride. It was hardly an encouraging picture.

  The ‘Saar Offensive’

  Meanwhile, fortunately it was of course in the east – not against France – that Hitler was concentrating the overwhelming power of the Wehrmacht, which, with terrifying swiftness, was slicing into Poland in two great pincer thrusts. But what were Britain and France doing to help their solitary ally in the east?

  In May 1939 Gamelin had given an undertaking to the Polish High Command1 that immediately on the outbreak of war the French Army would assume the offensive against Germany and that, at the latest by the fifteenth day after mobilisation, it would throw in the full weight of ‘the majority of its forces’. In session with British military leaders after the outbreak of hostilities, Gamelin, however, declared with caution ‘Certainly, we shall do all we can to help the Poles’, but he would not countenance ‘discouraging’ the Army by any hastily prepared offensive.2 Elsewhere he was recorded as promising ‘I shall not begin the war by a Battle of Verdun’, again a revelation of how deeply the defensive mentality was ingrained upon the subconscious of France’s Army leaders. To his deputy, General Georges, Gamelin telephoned a message couched in terms that were hardly those of a Foch: ‘We have a duty to fulfil towards Poland. The method does not exclude action…’ On 4 September Georges signalled Gamelin: ‘All reconnaissance groups have reached the frontier from the Moselle to the Rhine.’ By 7 September French forces had advanced into German territory in the Saar. As the news filtered through the apparatus of censorship and propaganda, the Allied Press promptly interpreted this to signify the launching of a major effort. The Daily Mail spoke of the ‘French Army pouring over the German border’, while the next day the Daily Express headlined: ‘Germany Rushes More Troops to the West.’ On the 9th, the Express announced: ‘France last night began the first big attack on the Siegfried Line’, and on the 12th: ‘France’s secret 70-ton tanks crash through German lines.’ In fact, no more than nine divisions ever took part in the vaunted Saar operation, and their orders were to move up to the outposts of the Siegfried Line and no further. By the 12th, the French had advanced a maximum of five miles on a sixteen-mile front and occupied some twenty abandoned villages; including Spicheren, scene of one of the first of Louis-Napoleon’s defeats in 1870.

  As Fabre-Luce remarked, the Saar ‘offensive’ bore a certain resemblance to an eighteenth-century campaign, where ‘great nations delegated a few companies to measure their arms; the rest of the nation watched and applauded’. Casualties were light, principally caused by mines and booby-traps, and with memories of France’s 1.3 million dead from 1914–18 casting their ponderous shadow, it was strict Army policy to avoid losses at all costs. One regimental diary recorded: ‘X Platoon tried to continue its advance; it was halted by the fire of an automatic weapon. Commenting on this entry a cavalry officer, Marcel Lerecouvreux, remarked acidly: ‘Imagine if in 1918, the attack of 18 July had been halted by a single machine-gun…!’ Meanwhile, for a few minutes each day the guns in the famous Hochwald bastion of the Maginot Line fired desultory rounds, but only the 75-mm. cannon had range enough to reach enemy territory, and after the first shots one of them jammed.

  In the air, the Allied effort to relieve Poland was even more pathetic. Fears of Luftwaffe reprisals against Paris caused the French Government to veto any R.A.F. bombing of Germany, as later Daladier was to bar Churchill’s project ‘Royal Marine’ to float mines down the Rhine – in case Hitler should retaliate by blowing up a Seine bridge. In Britain, when Leo Amery suggested to the House of Commons that the brutality of the German air onslaught against Poland should be countered by incendiary attacks on the Black Forest, the Secretary of State for Air, Sir Kingsley Wood, was aghast: ‘Are you aware it is private property?’ he exclaimed. ‘Why, you will be asking me to bomb Essen next!’ So the R.A.F. was employed in showering tons of non-lethal leaflets on Germany: ‘truth raids’, Sir Kingsley called them; ignominious ‘confetti warfare’ was the view of another M.P., General Spears.

  Poland Abandoned

  The half-hearted Allied efforts resulted in not one single German division being diverted from Poland. There, for all its bravery, the Polish Army – cavalry pitted against tanks and Stukas – was succumbing even more rapidly than the most pessimistic Allied staff officer dared imagine. For the first time the world was beginning to understand the meaning of the word Blitzkrieg; Guderian, now in command of XIX Motorized Corps, which provided the steel tip to one of the encircling pincers, was proving his theories in practice. Watching the Wehrmacht in action from an observation post, William Shirer wrote in his diary:

  Very businesslike they were, reminding me of the coaches of a championship football team who sit on the sidelines and calmly and confidently watch the machine they’ve created perform as they knew all the time it would.

  At the same time, he shrewdly observed how the 500–1b. bombs dropped by Stukas had proved far more lethal to Polish coastal fortifications than heavier battleship shells. On 14 September the German pincers closed behind Warsaw, and that same day Guderian’s Panzers, dashing far ahead of the infantry, reached Brest-Litovsk. Visiting his protégé, Hitler expressed astonishment at the spectacle of a smashed Polish artillery regiment on the Vistula: ‘Our dive-bombers did that?’ ‘No,’ replied Guderian, ‘our Panzers!’ On 17 September, in fulfilment of the secret clauses of the Ribbentrop–Molotov Pact, the Red Army entered eastern Poland. On 28 September, Poland capitulated. She had resisted for twenty-eight days; Gamelin had calculated she would be able to hold out until the spring.

  On 12 September Gamelin, alarmed at the ways things were going in Poland, sent a secret order to General Prételat, the commander of the Saar ‘offensive’, ordering him to halt and assume a defensive posture. When Poland capitulated, the French War Cabinet decided to pull back its forces to the Maginot Line; by 4 October the withdrawal had been completed without a hitch, Gamelin heaving a sigh of relief that the Germans had obliged by letting his forces go peacefully. At least France had made a gesture on behalf of the Poles; thus honour, he felt, was satisfied. Militarily, he excused the withdrawal with the comparison ‘Wasn’t this after all what the Germans did at the start of 1917 in withdrawing on the Hindenburg Line…?’ Speaking to Anthony Gibbs, the British war correspondent, a French general dotted the i’s:

  ‘It was simply a token invasion… We do not wish to fight on their territory. We did not ask for this war!… Now that the Polish question is liquidated’ – he shrugged – ‘we have gone back
to our lines. What else did you expect?’

  Thus ended France’s first and last offensive operation of the war. During it, the morale of the French troops had been promisingly high – ‘We’re starting to invade them!’ wrote an infantry N.C.O. in Lorraine, René Balbaud – but frustration at the subsequent withdrawal was correspondingly great. Out of the experiences gained, the Army settled down to the dubious consolation that German anti-tank shells had been observed to bounce off French tanks. Henceforth it would be Allied war policy to wait either until their war potential matched Germany’s before launching any offensive from French territory, or for a miracle, though it was hard to gauge which, in September 1939, seemed the less remote.