To Lose a Battle Read online

  Finally, what was the point of the war? Since the fall of Poland, no kind of declaration of war aims had been put out by either the British or French Government. Why not? Lerecouvreux notes that the question ‘Why are we fighting?’ was constantly raised by the troops, but it was ‘never answered by the officers, nor did they ever attempt it. By comparison, in 1914, it was quite simple: “We are fighting because we have been attacked and in order to retake Alsace and Lorraine.” ’ Yet although the French High Command must have been well aware how much lower morale was than in 1914, and of its causes, it did absolutely nothing about it – even to the extent of trying to improve the deplorable mail service; its inefficiency at the beginning of the war meant some troops remaining six weeks without news of their families. Perhaps the reason for inertia lay in Gamelin’s subsequent mild apologia: ‘I realize that as I spent my time exclusively with staff officers, I was not in sufficiently close touch with the spirit of the country and the troops.’

  The Propaganda War

  In its state of boredom and malaise, the French Army was eminently susceptible to the propaganda directed at it by Dr Goebbels and his experts. Throughout the Phoney War, each side made up for the lack of shells it fired at the other by a constant barrage of words. Across the Rhine, huge rival hoardings and loudspeakers confronted one another. French troops did not fire on the enemy’s artifices by order; the Germans reciprocated, possibly because they found French propaganda so utterly risible. Its general tenor was to be found in the posters plastered all over France which contained a map of the world displaying the vast areas covered by the French and British Empires, overprinted with the slogan ‘We shall win because we are the stronger.’ This was backed up by attributing, each month, some new project of conquest to the Germans; when nothing happened, an Allied victory was then claimed. Another popular line widely disseminated, both for internal and external consumption, was Daladier’s boast at the beginning of 1940: ‘In 1914, we suffered 100,000 killed during the first four months. This time we have only lost 2,000’; while steady favourites were the themes that Germany was either on the brink of revolution, or of starvation induced by the Royal Navy’s blockade. Hardly less fantastical was the story recorded by Clare Boothe, much publicized by the French Press, of a miraculous spring in Lorraine which evidently ‘started flowing exactly three months before the end of the Franco-Prussian War of 1870. It flowed again in August 1918. On February 19th, 1940, the miraculous spring began to flow once more. “Will Germany collapse by the end of May?” asked the papers.’ If most of the French propaganda seemed insulting to so intelligent a people, to Allied sympathizers among the neutrals in Germany its sheer grotesqueness was one of the most depressing features of life.

  We heard over Paris Mondiale [wrote Joseph Harsch from Berlin] that Berlin was on the verge of starvation, and then went out and ate meals at any one of a dozen Berlin restaurants which were all a man could eat… We read in copies of English newspapers which came through the American Embassy that the German Army was undertrained… that it still employed the technique of the mass charge of herds of men with officers driving them forward from behind…

  On the other hand, German propaganda was adroit, direct and immensely effective. It was based on three hypotheses: the Frenchman’s lack of interest in the war, his hereditary dislike and distrust of ‘perfidious Albion’, and the damage done to an already divided France by the Nazi–Soviet non-aggression pact. Again and again it pounded out the simple, torpor-inducing theme which increasingly reflected the wishes of a large portion of the French Army: ‘You remain in your Maginot Line, we will stay in the West Wall.’ Undoubtedly the most accomplished performer in the propaganda war was Otto Abetz’s old ally, Paul Ferdonnet, who had run off to Germany and whose ‘Lord Haw-Haw’-style broadcasts earned him the sobriquet ‘the traitor of Stuttgart’. He shocked French troops by his extraordinary knowledge of their movements. René Balbaud noted how in December Ferdonnet announced that his division was going back to rest, giving the identity of the division due to replace it; both quite correctly. On another occasion, he warned a certain corps commander that the wives and mistresses of officers under his command were joining them for the weekend in nearby towns. The general’s inquiries proved Ferdonnet to be quite right. Ferdonnet’s slogans, such as ‘Les Anglais donnent leurs machines, les Français donnent leurs poitrines’, stuck easily in the mind. Over the radio and their frontier loudspeakers, the Germans played cunningly on the French love of music; Gaston Palewski, then an Air Force officer and later a leading Gaullist, admitted to the author that the programmes piped from Germany used to be far and away the best the French forces could receive. Then would come the slogans: ‘Don’t transform France into a vast field of battle… don’t listen to perfidious England… Your feet are cold in this mud… La France aux Français!’ Then some more of Tino Rossi singing Marinella. Meanwhile, crudely pungent cartoons would flutter down from aircraft; in November, Lieutenant Jamet picked up one, entitled ‘The Bloodbath’. The first picture showed a little Frenchman and a large, pipe-smoking ‘Tommy’ standing on the edge of a blood-filled pond; in the second, the two were preparing to jump in, but the third revealed that the Frenchman alone had dived, leaving the Tommy standing on the bank; in the fourth, the Frenchman was up to his neck in blood while his ally walked away laughing. Another cartoon, which struck a lively chord, depicted British officers in Paris fondling half-naked women while a poilu kept watch in the Maginot Line. Occasionally this kind of meretricious appeal backfired; General Spears relates how the Germans once put up an enormous hoarding, informing ‘soldiers of the Northern Provinces’ that the licentious British soldiery was ‘sleeping with your wives, raping your daughters’. But the French regiment opposite promptly riposted: ‘We don’t give a bugger, we’re from the South!’

  There was, however, no mistaking the impact made by this artful propaganda onslaught. Already by mid November, Jamet noted down in his diary that the common catchword had become ‘Have you seen the English?’, adding that ‘Anglophobia seems to be almost universal in the French Army.’ Meanwhile, behind the lines, while the Government had been prompt to ban Communist newspapers on the outbreak of war, such crypto-Fascist organs as Je Suis Partout and Le Petit Parisien continued to flourish with their blatantly anti-British, anti-semitic lines. Neville Chamberlain was depicted as being in the hands of the war-lusting British Jewry, while cartoons of British soldiers, philandering with French wives and sweethearts as their men drilled for ten sous a day appeared under captions identical to those showered down in German leaflets.

  In all the German armoury of psychological warfare against France there was, however, no weapon of greater potency than that with which – at the end of August 1939 – Hitler had been presented by the non-aggression pact with Stalin. To many intelligent non-Marxist Frenchmen, mindful of how vital Russia’s assistance had been in 1914, hopes of victory had vanished with her defection to the Nazi camp; the leadership of the Communist Party, however, had been just as paralysed by the brutal shock of the Kremlin’s volte-face. For a month, during which Stalin was cynically grabbing his share of the Polish booty, the Communist Party awaited new orders. Meanwhile, it was forced to perform, in the eyes of Arthur Koestler, like ‘one of those conjurers on the stage who can produce an egg from every pocket’. The first consequences were the physical dissolution of the last bonds of the Popular Front – though its effects were still felt. On 25 September, the C.G.T. broke once again with the Communists. Léon Blum, who, however misguided in the past, was a patriot through and through, stood squarely behind the war effort and renounced his former allies. ‘They are defeatists,’ he declared, adding sadly: ‘We can’t deal with these people at all. I know them well – there is nobody who has been more thoroughly fooled by them than I have…’ From the ranks of the Communist Party itself, during the first three months of the war, twenty-one Deputies and one Senator quit in disgust, as well as a large number of mayors, councillors and trade un
ionists. Into Party H.Q. flowed telegrams such as the following: ‘Since Polish invasion, consequence of Hitler–Stalin Pact, await your condemnation in vain…’ The Party suffered a severe setback. But the great accretion of power and tactical experience gained during the period of the Popular Front enabled it to survive, much aided by the maladroitness of Daladier’s Government.

  On 27 September the French Government decreed the dissolution of the Communist Party. Between 5 and 10 October, thirty-five of its Deputies were locked up, Thorez (having deserted from the Army to avoid arrest) was deprived of his citizenship, L’Humanité was closed down, and youths were sentenced to two years’ imprisonment for circulating Communist pamphlets. Ilya Ehrenburg, the Pravda correspondent, complained that ‘in reality the bourgeois was taking its revenge on the workers for the fear they had inspired in 1936’, and indeed the fact that throughout the Phoney War no comparable attempt was ever made to round up the Right wing’s pro-Nazi sympathizers, or to close down such malevolent rags as Le Petit Parisien, did lend force to his assertion. Measures against the Communists bore a strong resemblance to the fear-inspired ‘spy-mania’ which had swept Paris in 1870, and again in 1914. Together with the known Communists, the police in their zeal arrested thousands of non-Communist ‘suspicious’ foreigners, many of whom, dedicated anti-Nazis, were themselves refugees from Hitler’s concentration camps. Arthur Koestler, among those rounded up, describes the French concentration camps into which these unfortunate ‘scum of the earth’ were flung as being ‘even below the level’ of those from which they had escaped in Germany; about the only difference was that ‘in Vernet people were killed for lack of medical attention; in Dachau they were killed on purpose’. It took the inmates of Vernet a long time to understand ‘this general and puzzling outburst of hatred against those who had been the first to fight the common enemy’, says Koestler, ‘and when we understood it, it laid bare one of the main psychological factors which finally led to the suicide of France.’

  Of the French Communists he met during his internment, Koestler remarks how they represented several million of ‘the toughest, most active and most violently anti-Nazi part of the French working class… the best fitted to give an example of comradeship and reckless sacrifice in the struggle’. In their state of utter bewilderment and disillusion at Stalin’s volte-face, they could have been wooed to join in the common crusade against Nazism. ‘It was murderous stupidity on the part of the French Government,’ argues Koestler, ‘to start a police pogrom against the Communist rank and file, instead of seizing this unique opportunity to win them over.’ Oppression of the Communists and martyrdom of its leaders did in fact only help close the ranks of the party; nothing could have rendered it greater service than the banning of L’Humanité and Ce Soir, as Léon Blum for one realized. Already by the end of October 1939, L’Humanité was beginning to appear illicitly, while with great effectiveness Thorez continued to direct the Party, clandestinely, from a refuge in Belgium.

  On 1 October 1939, Édouard Herriot, the Radical Socialist President of the Assembly, received a letter from the banned Communist Deputies, urging that Hitler’s ‘peace proposals’ be seriously examined by the Government. This marked the formulation of Moscow’s new policy for the French Communist Party: all-out resistance to the continuation of the war. Later a tract by Georgi Dimitrov, the powerful Secretary of the Comintern, calling for an end to this ‘war of plunder’, was passed by hand from factory to factory, as well as being widely distributed among the French Army. On Armistice Day 1939, Communist peace pamphlets appeared demanding ‘Who in France would want to fight to reconstitute a Poland of reactionary and Fascist colonels?’ Others found in factories at this time proclaimed in one breath ‘Vive Stalin! Vive Hitler!’ Constant play was made of the theme that, for the French proletariat, there remained but one enemy, the bourgeoisie. ‘Away with this Government of misery and servility to the bankers of the City of London!’ cried another pamphlet. For Communist propaganda, as for Goebbels, Britain provided target number one. Always trying to create hostility between French and British troops, it harped upon the differences in pay between the two armies. As late as May Day 1940, when the German Blitzkrieg was poised for its lunge into the Low Countries, the Communists launched a last offensive against the ‘imperialist war’, in which, among other things, they charged France with having descended to the rank of a ‘British Dominion’.

  Although there was not much to choose in the content of Communist and Nazi propaganda, the former was considerably more effective. As well as striking a more responsive chord within the nation as a whole, its means of dissemination were vastly superior. Pamphlets seemed to be in circulation everywhere, chain-letters made the rounds at the front, soldiers coming home on leave were got at outside the Gare de l’Est, and there was even a special underground edition of L’Humanité, called Les Soldats contre la Guerre, expressly designed for the Army’s consumption. Quick to realize the immense value of this ready-made propaganda machine, the Germans did all they could both to aid it and to cash in on its efforts; Luftwaffe planes were employed to drop pamphlets reporting Molotov’s speech of 31 October 1939 in which he had identified himself with Hitler’s peace proposals. In the progressive boredom of the Phoney War, the Communist propaganda slowly began to poison and win back even adherents of the former parties of the Popular Front which had broken with the Communists. More and more the Army was divided, as the other ranks inclined towards the Communist line; while for the officer corps the principal enemy remained ‘the enemy within’ – Communism. It was all very well for Somerset Maugham to write a tract from the azure and gold of Cap Ferrat claiming (for British consumption) German ‘ignorance of the French temper’ when they thought that ‘they were fighting a house divided against itself’, but there was no mistaking just how effectively joint Nazi–Communist propaganda was widening the rifts left by the Popular Front era.

  Equally depressing upon French war morale were the more tangible results of that close concomitant of Communist subversion – sabotage. During the Phoney War, numerous slowdowns of mysterious origin struck at France’s war production. Most of the worst cases of actual sabotage appear to have taken place at the Renault (tanks) and Farman (aircraft) works, those old hot-beds of trouble in Paris. A report on the damage wreaked upon Renault’s production of the B.l, France’s gravely needed new heavy tank, itemized: ‘nuts, bolts, various bits of old iron put in the gear-boxes and transmissions… filings and emery-dust in the crank-cases; saw-strokes producing incipient rupture of the oil and petrol ducts, intended to make them fall to bits after several hours’ running…’ In April 1940, a number of fatal flying accidents led investigators to the Farman factory. Here it was found that on engines ready for delivery a brass wire acting as a lock on the nut which held the petrol feed nozzle in position was severed. After a number of hours’ flying, the nut, stripped of its lock, unscrewed itself with the engine vibration and allowed the petrol to drip on to the white-hot exhaust pipe, which eventually led to a lethal explosion. It was claimed that, under the very eyes of Sûreté investigators, a young Communist, Roger Rambaud, was caught in the act, having snipped the locking wires on seventeen out of twenty engines on the test bed. Elsewhere, at a factory producing the 25-mm. anti-aircraft gun – which the Army was to need at least as badly as the B.l tank – one act of sabotage wrote off some two hundred barrels, the normal equipment for four divisions. In the chaos that followed the fall of France, purported acts of sabotage went either unverified or unpunished. Undoubtedly many allegations were exaggerated; but, just as with the shadowy German ‘Fifth Coloumn’, the constant fear of Communist-sponsored espionage and sabotage was to prove almost as effective as the weapon itself.

  How many Russian lives, one might well ask in retrospect, were to be forfeited from June 1941 onwards as a direct consequence of the success of the Kremlin’s whole dingy policy towards France in 1939–40?

  Chapter 6

  Gamelin

  What k
ind of a nation will they make of us tomorrow, these exhausted creatures emptied of blood, emptied of thought, crushed by superhuman fatigue…?

  MARC BOASSON,1 At the Evening of a World

  One of Napoleon’s marshals once brought him a plan of campaign in which the French Army was neatly and evenly lined up from one end of the frontier to the other. ‘Are you trying to stop smuggling?’ Napoleon asked heartlessly.

  THEODORE DRAPER, The Six Weeks War

  As the spring of 1940 approached, French eyes, military and civilian, turned instinctively towards the Château de Vincennes, wondering what new Allied strategy was being evolved behind its grim walls. Here Henry V of England had died, and as one of France’s favourite execution grounds it was against these walls that the Duc d’Enghien, Mata Hari and the last of the Communards had died. One of the most forbidding castles in all France, to Spears it ‘seemed to drip with blood’. Despite its sombre historical associations, Vincennes, on the east n outskirts of Paris, was now the home for the Grand Quartier Général (G.Q.G.) of General Maurice Gamelin, Chief of the General Staff of National Defence and, since the outbreak of war, Supreme Commander of all French land forces. Descended on his mother’s side from an old military family of Alsace-Lorraine, Gamelin had passed first out of St Cyr in 1891, and entered the Algerian Tirailleurs. In 1914 he had been on Joffre’s operations staff and had drawn up the orders on which rested the victory of the Marne; in 1916 (then aged forty-four) he became both one of the youngest and most competent French divisional commanders; by 1918 he had generally come to be regarded as the outstanding officer of his ‘promotion’. Already having reached the age-limit of sixty-eight at the beginning of 1940, Gamelin was a small sandy-haired man usually clad in tight tunic and high-laced boots. To André Maurois, ‘his short, stiff moustache, his small eyes and thin-lipped mouth gave him an indecipherable aspect, which no spontaneous gesture served to clarify. He had neither the sparkling vivacity of Foch nor the massive geniality of Joffre.’ Nor was Gamelin, he might have added, adorned with the coldly imposing presence of Pétain. Britain’s 6 ft. 4 in. C.I.G.S., General Ironside, rather patronizingly regarded his opposite number as a nice little man in well-cut breeches. (In less polite terms, Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Barratt, the former commander of the Advanced Air Striking Force, described Gamelin2 as ‘a button-eyed, button-booted, pot-bellied little grocer’.) Modest and unassuming, Gamelin’s ideal inconspicuousness as Joffre’s Chief of Operations had led Jules Romains, in his famous novel Verdun, to base upon him his characterization of ‘Lieutenant-Colonel G—’, a model staff officer. General Spears recalls him from 1914, following Joffre ‘like a shadow’, and it was upon his former master that Gamelin seemed to model himself. His blue eyes certainly gave an impression of calm serenity; but he possessed none of the solid basis for Joffre’s legendary imperturbability – and in any case this attribute, carried to excess, had ultimately cost Joffre his job, and nearly France the war, in 1916. Like Joffre, Gamelin was tacìturn; but whereas the explanation often given for Joffre’s silence was that he simply had nothing in his mind, this was certainly not the case with the cerebral Gamelin. When Gamelin did speak, he had a habit of clasping his hands and moving them as if giving a benediction; indeed, there was something faintly monkish about him, which could never have been said of Joffre.