To Lose a Battle Read online

  The President accelerated his campaign to persuade Congress and the nation of the Nazi threat to the United States. He set forth the strategic implications for the Americas of the Nazi conquest of Europe in a series of speeches and press conferences — before the Pan-American Scientific Congress on the day that Hitler launched his invasion, in a message to Congress on 16 May requesting additional appropriations for national defense, a week after to the Business Advisory Council (“The buffer has been the British Fleet and the French Army. If these two are removed, there is nothing between the Americas and those new forces in Europe”13), on 26 May a fireside chat on national defense, on 31 May another message to Congress, on 10 June, the day Mussolini brought Italy into the war against a mortally wounded France, in a speech at Charlottesville, Virginia (“the hand that held the dagger has struck it into the back of its neighbor”).14

  At first, the rush of events in Europe caused a dramatic swing in American opinion. “It is difficult,” the British Library of Information in New York reported to London on 21 May, “to find any parallel in the history of British public opinion to the speed and extent of the change in the American attitude toward the war which has taken place during the last ten days.”15 “The past week,” Lord Lothian, the British Ambassador in Washington, cabled the Foreign Office on 24 May, “has brought sudden realization to Washington and a dawning understanding to the country of what elimination of Great Britain would mean to the security of the United States.”16 “Moves designed to aid Allies now commands [sic] overwhelming support in Middle West,” Frank Knox, soon to be appointed Secretary of the Navy, wired Roosevelt on 7 June from that citadel of isolationism Chicago. “… My desk is covered this morning with telegrams and letters which show unmistakably this swift trend.”17 “For the first time in over a century,” observed Adolf Berle of the State Department, “the country is beginning to get a little frightened.”18 “As an old friend,” William Allen White, the Kansas editor, wired the President three days later, “let me warn you that maybe you will not be able to lead the American people unless you catch up with them.”19

  Isolationists disagreed. Colonel Charles A. Lindbergh denounced the administration for inspiring a “hysterical chatter of calamity and invasion”; the outcome in Europe, he said, was no business of America’s.20 For the moment such voices were drowned out. “Pro-Ally sentiment has swept forward with such force,” the British Library of Information reported on 12 June, “that isolationist Senators have been left stranded.… Some newspaper men go so far as to predict ‘We’ll be in the war in two months.’ ”21

  During these grim days the American President received increasingly desperate cables from Prime Minister Reynaud, pleading for arms and ammunition, for planes — “clouds of planes” — finally for an American declaration of war. “If you cannot give to France in the hours to come the certainty that the United States will come into the war within a very short time, the fate of the world will change.”22 This last proposal was quite unrealistic politically. Perhaps Reynaud hoped, consciously or unconsciously, to put Roosevelt on the spot and thereby distribute blame for French collapse.

  Roosevelt responded with salutes to French courage, exhortations to keep up the fight, and assurances that, so long as the French continued resistance, the Americans would continue sending supplies in ever-increasing quantities. Churchill took the exhortations and the assurances as the equivalent of American belligerency. “We feel,” he told Reynaud, “that the United States is committed beyond recall to take the only remaining step, namely, becoming a belligerent in form as she already has constituted herself in fact.”23 Reynaud sent Roosevelt a final insinuating appeal: unless the United States went to war, “you will see France go under like a drowning man and disappear after having cast a last look towards the land of liberty from which she awaited salvation.”24

  Roosevelt replied by repeating his admiration for French courage and his pledge of continued assistance. He concluded, however, by making the point about the American Constitution that his ambassadors in Paris and London had been trying to make to Reynaud and Churchill throughout the crisis. “These statements,” Roosevelt said, “carry with them no implication of military commitments. Only Congress can make such commitments.”25

  France fell, and “the French collapse,” the British Library of Information reported gloomily to London on 21 June, “has undoubtedly slowed down the progress of sentiments towards more active intervention.” The fall of France, the British observers added six days later, had caused “a sharp recession of the tide” previously flowing toward aid to the Allies. Isolationists now recovered their voices, truculently denied any American stake in the European war, and opposed aid to Britain as detracting from American self-defense. Lord Lothian soon noted “an ebb of defeatism in Congress and press circles… crystallized into the question ‘can Britain resist alone, long enough to justify our backing her and antagonizing Hitler — is it not already too late?’ ”26

  Some Americans thought it was. Anne Morrow Lindbergh, in a widely read book published later that year, sweetly pronounced totalitarianism “the wave of the future.” While her husband predicted Nazi victory and opposed American aid to the democracies, the gentle Mrs. Lindbergh lamented “the beautiful things… lost in the dying of an age,” saw totalitarianism as free society’s predestined successor, discounted the evils of Hitlerism and Stalinism as merely “scum on the wave of the future,” and concluded that “the wave of the future is coming and there is no fighting it… any more than as a child you could fight against the gigantic roller that loomed up ahead of you.”27

  Happily Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt thought otherwise. To lose a battle was not to lose a war. But their way was not strewn with flowers. It is easy for later generations to look back and think that, because it happened, Allied victory was inevitable. In fact, Hitler might well have won. Alistair Horne’s book reminds us of the eternal truth of Maitland’s axiom: “It is very difficult to remember that events now in the past were once far in the future.”

  —ARTHUR SCHLESINGER, JR.

  Preface to 1990 edition

  The great Lewis Namier once observed that history does not repeat itself; it is only the historians who repeat one another. Certain patterns of events, however, do recur, and it is the well-versed student of history (not least, perhaps, the military strategist) who can spot a familiar opportunity when it presents itself, and grab the advantage therein. Hitler’s triumphant campaign against France in 1940 remains a timeless text-book success of epic scale; its lessons, properly assimilated and applied, enabled at least one other nation (whose people had, above all others, suffered so much at Hitler’s hands) to save itself from overthrow, and transform defeat into victory.

  In October 1973, the so-called Yom Kippur (or Ramadan, depending on the point of view) War broke out. Egypt took Israel completely by surprise, swarming across the Suez Canal and utilizing a secret weapon of powerful fire-hoses literally to melt away the high sand-barriers that Israel had erected to protect her outnumbered defenders. For several critical days, it looked as if Israel would be defeated, after suffering heavy losses among her armoured units. Then, suddenly, to the world’s astonishment, there was a remarkable riposte by Israeli mobile units, which re-crossed the Suez Canal and inflicted a decisive defeat upon the superior Egyptian forces.

  The Israeli Army, which regards itself as being one of the best read in military history in the world, and possesses its own publishing house, is carefully selective in printing only works that it deems to hold a direct bearing on Israel’s survival. Thus, after their great success in the 1967 ‘Six Day War’, I was gratified – but somewhat taken aback – when the Israelis purchased my book on the Battle of Verdun, 1916, The Price of Glory, for translation into Hebrew. The ‘Six Day War’ had been a staggering display of Blitzkrieg-style warfare, of the 1940 brand, and I found it hard to see just what lessons Verdun, that grim classic of static warfare, could hold for the highly mobile Israe
li armed forces. However, when I visited Israel for publication of the book, it was explained to me, most patiently, that Israel – in the wake of 1967 – was suffering unacceptable losses from Egyptian artillery bombardments along the Suez Canal, and the Israelis were currently studying all they could about the positional defensive battles of the First World War. I understood. In the ensuing years, the Israeli Army – wisely – followed the German example of 1914–18, as opposed to the French: dig deep and hold your forward lines lightly. So when the Yom Kippur War of 1973 broke out, this correct assessment probably saved Israel, with its tiny manpower resources, untold casualties – if not the war itself.

  Now, it so happened that in 1971, two years before the Yom Kippur War, Israel’s Ministry of Defence publishing house had followed up by translating and publishing in Hebrew the third book of my Franco-German trilogy. To Lose a Battle, with its detailed account of the Manstein Plan, Sichelschnitt, which had given Hitler his blueprint for total victory in that summer of 1940. I thought no more about it. Then when war broke out, in October 1973, I was in Algiers, researching for my new book on the Algerian War, A Savage War of Peace. From Algiers I watched with disquiet as the Egyptians swarmed back across the Suez Canal, taking the Israelis thoroughly by surprise. By not manning their front line with the bulk of their forces (as indeed the French Army might well have done, in either the First or Second World War), the Israelis saved themselves from instant defeat; yet, after the first few days, it still looked as if – at best – Israel faced a costly stalemate; which, to her, would in effect equal defeat in the long term. But, out of the blue, Israel’s dashing General Ariel Sharon1 launched a daring but carefully conceived counter-thrust across the Canal, striking on the hinge of two Egyptian armies and fanning out behind them with deadly consequences.

  From what little I was able to glean from the press reports in Algiers, the Sharon action had elements that made it at once look amazingly familiar: it was a replay of Manstein’s crossing of the Meuse in May 1940, and the military result was nearly as deadly. With one of its principal armies cut off, the Egyptians were forced to seek a cease-fire. Israel was saved.

  Some two years later, I encountered at a London publishing party Israel’s leading military analyst and former Chief of Intelligence, Chaim Herzog. (He was later to become Israel’s President.) We had met some years previously in Israel, and he had now just published his own account of the 1973 campaign, The War of Atonement (Weidenfeld, 1975). When I commented on the similarities to the Manstein Plan of 1940, he smiled knowingly and said something to the effect that, only recently, General Sharon had referred to it, acknowledging a certain indebtedness to To Lose a Battle. Herzog kindly signed a copy of his book for me, adding the laconic but meaningful inscription, ‘In appreciation’.

  I retell this anecdote, not in any intended sense of self-glorification, but simply to illustrate the point that, sometimes, the re-exploration of the past, the study of the lessons of old battles, is not always without profit. In the hands of the enlightened, perhaps history can be made to repeat, if not itself, then certain formulae. Anyway, it may be worth a read.

  It is with this thought in mind that I re-offer this revised edition of To Lose a Battle for publication on the fiftieth anniversary of that cataclysmic year of 1940. This new edition contains some corrections and up-datings. Since it was first published in 1969, numerous other books on the subject have appeared. When I wrote this book, nothing, notably, was known about the ‘Ultra’ secret and its possible influence on the battle. Modern scholarship, too, has come round to a rather more charitable view of King Leopold and poor Belgium’s impossible role in the fighting. Yet the basic ingredients remain the same: on the one side, a brilliant plan and a demonic will to conquer; chronic unpreparedness, muddle and demoralization, and an outdated concept of war, on the other. The story and its lessons stand, little changed.

  Preface to 1979 edition

  When this book was first published it was roughly one hundred years since the Franco-Prussian War began, fifty since Versailles concluded the First World War, and thirty since the first act of the Second World War, the Fall of France. It endeavours to tell the story of the last of these episodes. Although designed to stand firmly on its own feet, it represents the third panel of a triptych of which the other two were The Fall of Paris: The Siege and the Commune 1870–71, and The Price of Glory: Verdun 1916, and is therefore closely linked to the theme of the earlier books. During most of this past hundred years, at least until 1945, the seminal issue in Europe was Franco-German rivalry. Now it is no longer so. As I tried to explain in the Preface to The Fall of Paris, the original ambition of the triptych was to deal with this important chunk of modern European history, woven around three great Franco-German battles, each decisive in its own war, and in wider contexts as well. They are not, essentially, military studies. As the reader will discover from the present book, there are (at least in the author’s view) various after-effects from both 1870–71 and 1916 that have an important bearing on the French defeat of 1940. And so much that has happened since then – is still happening – can find an explanation in the débâcle of 1940.

  In a number of ways, To Lose a Battle has been the most difficult to write of the three books. First of all, it was not easy to decide when the story begins and ends. To start with the crushing superiority of the German Stukas and Panzers on 13 May 1940 leaves a lot unexplained, and the decisive battle was over long before Pétain asked for an armistice – even before the B.E.F. embarked at Dunkirk. After I had finished my researches I finally decided to begin with France’s moment of supreme power, as seen at the Victory Parade of 1919, proceeding to deal with only those factors in the inter-war world which seemed relevant to France’s weakness and Germany’s strength in 1940, and to end the main account with the failure of the last Allied counter-attacks in northern France, during 21–24 May. After this date, for the Germans the campaign was little more than a matter of marching.

  The second, and by far the greatest difficulty of all, concerned source material. The Siege of Paris and the Commune together continued, in the same setting, for nine months, Verdun for ten. Thus in both battles a multitude of chroniclers on either side had the leisure to provide detailed day-by-day accounts of what went on – often of superb quality. In 1870–71, the historian is additionally aided by the presence in Paris of many ‘neutral’ British and American observers whose accounts provide a special dimension of objectivity, while for 1916 the official war histories of either side have long been open to scrutiny. In contrast, the decisive battle for France in 1940 lasted less than two weeks, but covered over two hundred miles in depth alone. Many war diarists, especially on the French side, simply had no opportunity to write up their diaries or even scribble a letter home.

  From the German side, the Allied capture of all Nazi archives certainly provided historians with an unprecedented treasure trove. The French, on the other hand, have not yet published an official history of 1940,1 and the archives at Vincennes are not open to inspection. It is easy to understand French reticence; yet one feels it may be prompted less by what is there, than by what is not there. However, the lack of any French official history is in part compensated for by the plentiful personal accounts of participants granted access to the archives, such as Generals Doumenc (Major-Général of the French General Staff), Roton (General Georges’s Chief of Staff) and Ruby (Chief of Staff to the French Second Army), not to mention the lengthy memoirs by the leaders themselves, Reynaud, Gamelin and Weygand. But because of the pressure and speed of events (if for no other reason), such accounts are often in disagreement, and it is therefore not easy to determine what happened, and when.

  For example, recording General Weygand’s crucial visit to the northern commanders on 21 May (see Chapter 18), both Baudouin and Churchill (neither of whom were there) write that Weygand’s plane was attacked and forced to land at Calais. Weygand himself says he landed unchallenged at Norrent-Fontes, and then flew on to Calais.
After the meeting, Baudouin says Weygand left from Ypres at 4 p.m., by torpedo-boat from Dunkirk to Cherbourg; Churchill says 7 p.m., by submarine to Dieppe; while Colonel Goutard puts the time at ‘between 5 and 6 p.m.’. Churchill and others state that Lord Gort arrived, too late, at the Ypres meeting at 8 p.m.; Benoist-Méchin, ‘about 9 p.m.’. These may seem like hair-splitting points, but they make the historian cautious about accuracy on the bigger issues.

  Napoleon once warned: ‘Above all, be distrustful of eye-witnesses… the only thing my Grenadiers saw of Russia was the pack of the man in front.’ Obviously the advice can be taken too far, and Napoleon’s Grenadiers certainly saw more of the Russian campaign than he would have liked. But one has to be cautious about the fallibility of human memory; with one or two notable exceptions (such as the late Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Barratt, whose reminiscences proved invaluable to me) I have in general restricted myself to what was written at the time or very soon afterwards. Even here, however, one has to exercise caution. For reasons suggested earlier, I found myself forced to lean heavily on German eye-witness accounts of battle operations, such as the crossing of the Meuse. Some, such as Rommel, seldom let one down, even though at times he stole perhaps more than his fair share of the glory. But all too often the National Socialist overtones of the moment, the vaunting of Teutonic deeds and deprecation of the enemy’s – never a reverse, never the sight of a burnt-out German tank – make one recoil in distrust. On the other hand so many of the memoirs of French leaders are but one long apologia, although, set against each other, they too can be revealing.