To Lose a Battle Read online

  The Maginot Line

  There was an additional factor. From the days of the barbarians onwards, France had constantly lain open to invasion through her vulnerable eastern frontier. With the new rapidity of movement afforded by railways, it had twice been proved, in 1870 as in 1914, that a battle lost in the east could bring the Germans to the very doors of Paris itself within a matter of weeks. In Lorraine and the Nord, France’s most vital industrial centres lay particularly exposed to German aggression, and deprivation of these had so nearly brought defeat in the Great War. Among a nation where the peasant voice still predominated, the soil of France – every square yard of it – assumed sacred qualities; it was the unyielding defence of this which had persuaded the French High Command to adopt such rigid and costly tactics at Verdun. After the stabilization of the fronts in 1914, the French infantry had paid out a steady and prodigious rent in blood just to hold on to that continuous line of ill-protected trenches, stretching from Switzerland to the North Sea. But at least they had held, and by doing so had ensured the inviolability of France’s sacred soil. Supposing now, the Army Commission of 1922 asked itself, France should prepare to defend herself behind not shallow, hastily dug trenches, but a continuous and permanent line of forts even deeper and more sophisticated than those of Verdun? In the event of another German war, would not such a line surely save both lives and the ravaging of French territory? Might not its mere existence pose a formidable deterrent to any aggressive-minded German ruler in the future?

  For seven years the Battle of Verdun was re-fought in the higher councils of French military thought, as argument swayed back and forth over the blueprints for France’s new fortress line. On one premise the majority were agreed from the start: the line must represent a ‘continuous front’. Above all this was the view of Pétain, appointed Inspector-General of the Army after the war, and, as age removed Joffre and Foch from the scene, for many successive years her most influential soldier. He was also the man who had been more closely concerned in the immortal defence of Verdun than any other. But although Pétain, in the years following his trial and disgrace, has come to be regarded in France as a scapegoat for all that was faulty about inter-war military thinking, it is entirely unjust to suggest that he single-handedly laced his Army into a kind of intellectual straitjacket. The French Army donned it all too willingly. For during the past war its officer corps had had no contact with the great fluid movements of the campaign in the East in which so many Germans had taken part nor had they even any direct knowledge of the highly mobile campaigns fought by Allenby and the British in Palestine. ‘We had been haunted,’ wrote a distinguished subsequent Army leader, General Beaufre,3 ‘by the tenacity of the German machine-guns, and the impossibility in which we found ourselves of breaking the enemy front.’ From the lessons of their four years of static warfare, which even the introduction of tanks did disappointingly little to alter, had emerged the doctrine of the ‘continuous front’, to be espoused by the great mass of French military thought, with its experience of no other form of strategy. This, thought the École Militaire all through the 1920s, must prove to be the shape of future warfare; moreover, as shown above, it was a shape peculiarly expedient for the defence of the soil of France. But expediency usually turns out to be a poor strategic guide.

  On 4 January 1930, a vast majority in both chambers of the National Assembly voted for a law accepting the Army’s long-debated plans for a Great Wall on the eastern frontier. André Maginot, who had become one of the Third Republic’s most honourable politicians, happened to be Minister of War at the time; thus it was his name that the fortress line would bear henceforth. For the first phase of its construction, the Assembly voted the immense sum of 3,000 million francs,4 to be spread over four years. Work on the Maginot Line began at once; as Maginot himself stressed, it had to be completed by 1935, the date appointed by the Versailles Treaty for France finally to withdraw her troops from the Rhineland. It was to run from Basle, on the borders of Switzerland, to Longwy, close to where the Belgian, Luxembourg and French frontiers meet; why it was not intended to continue to Dunkirk, thus covering Belgium, will be seen later. The strength and depth of line varied, but for 87 miles it consisted of ‘fortified regions’, guarding two major invasion avenues. One covered a potential assault aimed at Metz and Nancy, while the other faced north to guard the plains of Lower Alsace. Facing directly east, a series of lesser fortifications backed up the wide river barrier of the Rhine. Just behind the frontier, the defences of the two fortified regions began with a series of anti-tank obstacles and barbed wire, backed up by reinforced barracks, known as maisons fortes (‘strong houses’) and pill-boxes, the object of these advance posts being to provide warning of an attack and delay it. At their rear came a deep anti-tank ditch and then the subterranean casemates, and forts which comprised the backbone of the Line. Protected by up to ten feet of concrete, each casemate contained rapid-firing anti-tank guns and machine-guns firing out of underground slits with a 50-degree arc, as well as grenade-throwers to dislodge any enemy infantry approaching by means of dead ground. Their twenty-five-man garrison lived and slept on a floor still deeper under the earth. Superbly blended into their environment, about all that an enemy could see of these concrete casemates were two small nipples formed by the observation cupolas surmounting them.

  The real pride of the Maginot Line, however, lay in its forts, which backed up the casemates at an interval of every three to five miles. Ever since Vauban, French engineers have been without rivals in the art of fortification, and the Verdun forts had been masterpieces of their time, but these new concrete and steel monsters were veritable wonders of the modern world. When troops passed through their cavernous gates placed discreetly at the base of some hill, they entered into a Wellsian civilization in which they could live, sleep, eat, work and exercise for many weeks without ever seeing the surface of the earth – not unlike nuclear submariners of today embarking on a voyage under the Pole. Electric trains whisked them from their underground barracks and canteens to their gun turrets; vast power stations, equally underground, provided them with heat and light; powerful compressor plants supplied them with air, and ensured that the forts were proof against poison gas; immense subterranean food stores, reservoirs and fuel tanks would enable them to remain cut off from the rest of the French Army for up to three months. There were three different types of forts, the biggest of which – Category 1 – housed a garrison of up to 1,200 officers and men, and contained between fifteen and eighteen concrete ‘blocks’, each bristling with guns mounted in disappearing turrets and of calibres that ranged from 37 mm. to 135 mm. Each fort was divided in two, connected by deep subterranean galleries lying beyond the penetration of any bomb or shell, and varying between 400 yards and 1½ miles in length. Thus even if one half of the fort should be knocked out, the other half could continue to fight, and each half was so located that it could bring down supporting fire on its twin, its neighbouring forts or casemates.

  At Verdun the greatest danger experienced by the French forts had been from infantry infiltrating on to their superstructures and working their way underground. Both Douaumont and Vaux had been lost in this way. To prevent a repetition, the Maginot Line plan incorporated ‘interval troops’, infantry complete with field artillery, which could be moved up to counter any threat to a particular fort or group of forts. These were intended to compensate for what, by definition, the Line lacked – mobility.5

  Much has been said about why the Maginot Line failed to save France in 1940, though not always have the right reasons been given. It was enormously costly. Partly owing to errors of construction due to bureaucratic jealousies, the 87 miles of ‘fortified regions’ completed by 1935 had already cost 7,000 million francs, far in excess of the parliamentary estimates. In addition to its construction, the maintenance of the Maginot Line represented a considerable financial burden. For a country plagued by chronic budgetary difficulties and with a powerful Left wing opposed to rearmament i
n any form, this overall costliness meant that inevitably the French Army would be forced to accept economies elsewhere. The Maginot Line also lacked depth, with its four successive positions never occupying, even in their most advanced state, a belt larger than twelve miles deep. This too was a consequence of expense.

  But the most mortal defect of the Line lay not in its depth but its length. Romantically, it came to be dubbed ‘the shield of France’. The essence of a shield, however, is that it can be manipulated to protect any portion of its owner’s body. The Maginot Line obviously was incapable of motion, yet it did not extend to cover what Clausewitz called ‘the pit of the French stomach’, the classical invasion route across the Belgian plains, over which the Schlieffen Plan had so nearly brought total calamity in 1914. By as late as 1935, the motives for not fortifying the remaining 250 miles along the Belgian frontier were only partially related to problems of cost. This extension would have to run right through the heavily industrialized Lille-Valenciennes area which straddles the frontier and would be immeasurably disruptive as well as costly. A factor carrying even greater weight, however, was that Belgium, mindful of how her neutrality had been outraged by Germany in 1914, remained France’s close ally, so that a fortified line on the French side of her frontier would leave her out in the cold, abandoned on the wrong side of the ramparts. She would then have no option but to return to her former neutrality, and rely upon German morals. Pétain, despite his reputation for defensive-mindedness, made it quite clear when Minister of War in 1934 that, in the event of any German aggression, it was part and parcel of French strategy to ‘go into Belgium’ and to fight an offensive war of movement against the enemy there.6 As the French Army stood in 1934, still with its crushing superiority over the Germans – who had not yet invented the Panzer corps – this strategy made excellent sense, as long as Belgium remained within the alliance. It was also clearly in France’s interest (though she could hardly explain this to the Belgians) to protect her soil by fighting the battle, with all its destructiveness, as far forward of her frontiers as possible.

  With the construction of the Maginot Line, the wheel of French military thought, which had started spinning in 1870, performed a fatal full cycle. In 1870, to state it in the simplest terms, France had lost a war through adopting too defensive a posture and relying too much on permanent fortifications. Fortress cities such as Strasbourg, Metz and Paris herself had been simply enveloped by Moltke’s Prussians and besieged one by one. In reaction against this calamitous defeat, France had nearly lost the next war by being too aggressive-minded. Now she was once again seeking safety under concrete and steel. Rapidly the Maginot Line came to be not just a component of strategy, but a way of life. Feeling secure behind it, like the lotus-eating mandarins of Cathay behind their Great Wall, the French Army allowed itself to atrophy, to lapse into desuetude. A massive combination of factors – complacency, lassitude, deficiencies of manpower and finance – conspired to rust the superb weapon which the world had so admired on that Quatorze Juillet of 1919.

  The French Army: Men and Arms

  By the end of 1935, the eve of France’s first major confrontation with Hitler, her Army was below par both in numbers and quality of manpower. The call-up was just beginning to suffer the full effect of the ‘hollow classes’ caused by the drop in births during the Great War. In Germany, for instance, the 1915 class available for conscription (if it were not for the restrictions imposed by Versailles) amounted to 464,000 men; in France, it was only 184,000, a ratio that would continue right the way through to the Second World War. Yet politics had forced a reduction in the length of military service from three years to one, and hopes that the population deficit of metropolitan France could be made good by a vast colonial army were never quite fulfilled. Thus instead of a total strength of over 300,000 men, about two-thirds of this was the most the French could muster. As far as the hard core of professionals was concerned, there was certainly little enough inducement for good men to stay on. With a captain paid approximately £11 a month, and a major in command of a whole battalion paid only £16,7 officers without private incomes lived in desperate straits. They had no vote, and now that the supreme goal – revenge – had been achieved, wherein resided the glory of an Army career?

  Composed of all too many officers whom the previous war had left drained of élan vital, the French General Staff allowed itself to become bogged down in bureaucratic methods; paper-asserie, as the French call it, the blight to which all armies are susceptible, flourished. It was difficult to see exactly where the power of decision lay. The once omnipotent and cohesive Conseil Supérieur de la Guerre (Supreme War Council), from whose members would be designated France’s senior commanders in time of war, no longer filled anything but a consultative role. Divided by mutual antipathy and jealousies, its generals had little contact with each other; their staffs followed suit, each existing in its own watertight compartment. There was not much discussion on a higher strategic and tactical plane, and what there was tended to follow abstract intellectual paths from which little practical use ever emerged. General Beaufre, writing of his own experiences at that time, states that

  At the Ministry of War, the General commanded in theory, but had not the money, the administration, the personnel or the equipment; the Permanent Secretary had the money and the administration, without the responsibility of command; the various departments had personnel and equipment, but neither money nor command. The Minister stood at the head of all this, but could achieve nothing without obtaining unison from the whole orchestra, the complexity of which helped to paralyse all initiatives. The ensemble possessed only one force – that of inertia.

  In this state of inertia, the Army tended to rest content with the techniques and equipment of 1918. To a large extent the financial strain imposed on successive military budgets by the Maginot Line provided it with little alternative.8 Although, with the taxis of the Marne and later by her victualling of Verdun along the voie sacrée – the ‘sacred road’ – the French Army had pioneered warfare by road, as its post-war mechanical transport aged and was not replaced it regressed to relying for mobility once more on railways – and horses. While other armies (notably the German) were experimenting with radio communications, the French clung to the telephone, even despite the lessons gained from 1914–18, when operations had so often failed after the severing of lines by artillery barrages, and regardless of the new threat to land communications which modern air power and tanks posed. In 1924 the Army decided to replace its automatic rifle and to modify the standard infantry cartridge; the new weapon came into service by 1932, but – typical of the prevailing inertia – the rifle, intended to utilize the same cartridge, was not selected until 1936. As late as 1939, only a few hundred thousand had been issued. General Weygand, before he retired as Inspector-General of the Army in 1933, had prescribed that five infantry divisions be motorized and a cavalry division be converted into a Division Légère Mécanique;9 but otherwise the rest of the Army showed little advance on that which had processed so resplendently through Paris in 1919.

  Tanks and Doctrine

  There is no weightier problem common to the General Staffs of all peaceably-minded countries in modern times than the decision for what year to plan the re-equipment of its forces with a new armoury.10 Weapons designed too long before the moment of crisis, becoming speedily obsolete, are almost as useless as those that arrive too late. In its tank production policy, the French Army had remained for many years a prisoner of the mass of machines left over from 1918. With the rise of Hitler, it adopted the expedient of building prototypes while year by year postponing their mass-production until such time as the threat of war seemed imminent, a notional date which self-deception and appeasement would constantly defer. So long as Germany obeyed Versailles, binding her not to build tanks, France’s obsolete armour was quite sufficient for her purposes. In any case, she could hardly afford to replace it. But the most insidious long-term consequences – and it would be h
ard to find any single military factor contributing more directly to the defeat of 1940 – of this residuum lay in the shadow it cast over the development of France’s doctrines of armoured warfare. The bulk of the tanks inherited from the war consisted of the Renault F.T. model, lightly armoured, slow and strictly limited in operational radius. It was useless against concrete fortifications, or in battle against other tanks; it was predominantly an instrument of infantry support. In the culminating battles of 1918, the F.T.s moved up with the infantry after the usual heavy bombardment. When the infantry had advanced beyond the range of their artillery (and the tanks had run out of petrol), the attackers would consolidate and wait for the guns – drawn by horses – to move up and prepare for the next laborious step forward. At each pause, the hard-pressed Germans were given a respite in which to repair their defences. Never was the rhythm of attack maintained; never were the French tanks, numbering over 4,000 but spread out all along the front, concentrated for a breakthrough; and never did any deep penetration occur. Again and again, in the French communiqués there appeared sentences like the following: ‘The tanks put to flight the defenders, but the infantry did not reach the objective.’ Against an enemy that was already beaten, losses in both tanks and infantry were disheartening, the conclusions drawn discouraging.

  In his post-war ‘Instruction’ of 1921, Marshal Pétain, then Supreme Commander, dismissed the future role of armour in two lines: ‘Tanks assist the advance of the infantry, by breaking static obstacles and active resistance put up by the enemy.’ For the next fourteen years this was to remain the accepted creed of the French Army. As at Verdun, the plodding infantryman dominated. But meanwhile, in England, a prophet had arisen with a new and revolutionary concept of warfare. A twenty-four-year-old ex-regular officer invalided out of the Army as a result of gassing on the Somme, Captain Basil Liddell Hart, was invited to help draft the British Army’s post-war infantry training manual. The manual gave him a first opportunity to propound his ‘expanding torrent’ theory of deep, swift penetration as an antidote to the static warfare of 1914–18. As his thoughts evolved, Liddell Hart saw offensive operations being spearheaded by powerful concentrations of fast-moving, wide-ranging tanks, no longer mere adjuncts of foot soldiery, and backed by equally mobile self-propelled guns and infantrymen transported in armoured carriers. Instead of battering away along a wide sector with the old, methodical siege techniques, the attacker, having probed out a weak spot in the enemy’s defences, would pour through it at top speed with his ‘expanding torrent’ of mobile firepower, creating vulnerable new fronts deep in the defenders’ rear. If Liddell Hart’s theories – and those of his contemporary Major-General J. F. C. (‘Boney’) Fuller – should be proved viable, it obviously meant the death of the ‘continuous front’ school of thought, on which the whole of France’s inter-war strategy was based.