The Second World War Page 15
Far to the south that day, General Erwin von Witzleben’s First Army made the first breach in the Maginot Line. This was designed to prevent the French from sending troops up against the southern flank of the Panzer Corridor, even though that flank had begun to be protected by German infantry divisions, arriving exhausted from forced marches.
Colonel de Gaulle launched another attack that day northwards with 150 tanks towards Crécy-sur-Serre. He had been promised fighter cover by the French air force to ward off Stuka attacks, but bad communications meant that they arrived too late. De Gaulle had to pull his battered remnants back across the River Aisne.
Bad liaison between the Allied armies continued, and this led to suspicions that the BEF was already preparing to evacuate. General Lord Gort was not ruling out the possibility, but no plans had been made at this stage. He could not obtain a straight answer from General Billotte on the true situation to their south and what reserves the French had at their disposal. Back in London, General Ironside spoke to the Admiralty to see what small ships they had available.
Even though the British people had little idea of the true gravity of the situation, nervous rumours suddenly increased: that the King and Queen were sending Princess Elizabeth and Princess Margaret Rose to Canada; that Italy had entered the war already and its army was marching into Switzerland; that German paratroopers had landed; and that Lord Haw-Haw (the pro-Nazi William Joyce) was sending secret messages to German agents in Britain through his broadcasts from Berlin.
That Sunday, the last day of General Gamelin’s command, the French government attended a service in Notre Dame to pray for divine intervention. The francophile American ambassador, William Bullitt, was in tears during the ceremony.
General Weygand, small, energetic and with a wizened foxy face, insisted on a good sleep after his long flight from Syria. In many ways this monarchist was a surprising choice since he loathed Reynaud, who had appointed him. But Reynaud, in desperation, was reaching for victorious symbols in the form of Pétain and Weygand, who as Marshal Ferdinand Foch’s deputy was associated with the final triumph of 1918.
On Monday, 20 May, the first day of Weygand’s command, the 1st Panzer Division reached Amiens, which had been heavily bombed the day before. A battalion of the Royal Sussex Regiment, the only Allied force in the city, was annihilated in a doomed defence. Guderian’s force also seized a bridgehead over the River Somme, ready for a subsequent phase of the battle. Guderian then sent the Austrian 2nd Panzer Division on to Abbeville, which it reached that evening. And a few hours later, one of its panzer battalions reached the coast. Manstein’s Sichelschnitt had been achieved. Hitler, beside himself with joy, could hardly believe the news. The surprise was so great that the army high command could not make up its mind what to do next.
On the northern side of the corridor, Rommel’s 7th Panzer Division had pushed forward to Arras, but was halted there by a battalion of the Welsh Guards. That evening, General Ironside reached Gort’s head quarters with an order from Churchill to force his way through the corridor to join up with the French on the south side. But Gort pointed out that the bulk of his divisions were defending the line of the Scheldt and could not be withdrawn at this stage. He was, however, organizing a two-division attack on Arras, but he had no idea what French plans were.
Ironside then went to Billotte’s headquarters. The huge Ironside, finding the French general in a state of total dejection, grabbed him by the tunic and shook him. Billotte finally agreed to launch a simultaneous counter-attack with another two divisions. Gort was deeply sceptical that anything would happen. He was right. General René Altmayer, who commanded the French V Corps ordered to support the British, was simply weeping on his bed, according to a French liaison officer. Only a small force from General Prioux’s fine cavalry corps came to assist.
The British counter-attack round Arras was designed to seize ground south of the city to cut off Rommel’s panzer spearhead. The force consisted principally of seventy-four Matilda tanks from the 4th and 7th Royal Tank Regiment, two battalions of the Durham Light Infantry, part of the Northumberland Fusiliers and the armoured cars of the 12th Lancers. Once again the artillery support and air cover promised for the operation failed to materialize. Rommel himself witnessed his infantry and gunners run for their lives, and the newly arrived SS Totenkopf mechanized infantry division was panic-stricken, but he rapidly brought some anti-tank and anti-aircraft guns into action against the lumbering Matilda tanks. He was nearly killed in the firefight, yet the risks he took intervening like a junior officer almost certainly saved the Germans from a setback.
The other British column was more successful, even though most of their tanks broke down. The German anti-tank shells bounced off the heavy armour of the remaining Matildas, but many of them eventually succumbed to mechanical failure after inflicting considerable damage on German armoured and soft-skinned vehicles. The counter-attack, although courageously carried out, simply did not have the strength or the support to achieve its goal. The failure of the French (with the honourable exception of Prioux’s cavalry) to join the battle convinced British commanders that their army had lost the will to fight. The alliance, to Churchill’s great distress, was now doomed to deteriorate into mutual suspicion and recrimination. In fact the French launched another counter-attack towards Cambrai, but this too had little lasting success.
That morning, the main force of the BEF had been heavily attacked along the Escaut line and fought off the Germans with great determination. Two Victoria Crosses were won during the action. The Germans, unprepared to lose so many men on another attempt, resorted to bombarding the British with artillery and mortars. The whole Allied position was about to collapse due to bad liaison and misunderstandings among the most senior commanders when Weygand called a conference in Ypres in the afternoon. He wanted the British to withdraw so as to launch a stronger attack across the German corridor towards the Somme. But Gort was out of touch and arrived far too late. And Weygand’s agreement with King Leopold III of the Belgians to keep his troops on Belgian territory led to disaster. This was compounded by General Billotte’s death when his staff car ran into the back of a truck packed with refugees. General Weygand and some French commentators later suggested that Gort had deliberately avoided the meeting at Ypres as he was already planning secretly to evacuate the BEF, but there is no evidence of this.
‘The face of war is dreadful,’ a German soldier from the 269th Infantry Division wrote home on 20 May. ‘Towns and villages shot to pieces, plundered shops everywhere, values are trodden on with jackboots, cattle are drifting, abandoned, and dogs are slinking despondently along the houses… We live like gods in France. If we need meat, a cow is slaughtered and only the best cuts are taken and the rest is discarded. Asparagus, oranges, lettuces, nuts, cocoa, coffee, butter, ham, chocolate, sparkling wine, wine, spirits, beer, tobacco, cigars and cigarettes, as well as complete sets of laundry are there in abundance. Due to the long stretches that we have to march we lose contact with our units. With our rifles in our hand we then break open a house and our hunger is sated. Terrible, isn’t it? But one gets used to anything. Thank God that these conditions don’t prevail at home.’
‘By the roads, shattered and burned-out French tanks and vehicles lie in immeasurable rows,’ an artillery corporal wrote to his wife. ‘Of course there are a few German ones among them, but amazingly few.’ Some soldiers complained how little there was to do. ‘There are many, many divisions here who haven’t fired a shot,’ a corporal in the 1st Infantry Division wrote. ‘And at the front the enemy are running away. French and English, equal adversaries in the world war, refuse to take us on now. In truth, our aircraft are in command of the skies. We haven’t seen one enemy aircraft, only our own. Just imagine. Positions like Amiens, Laon, Chemin des Dames are falling within hours. In 14–18 they were fought over for years.’
The triumphant letters home did not mention the occasional massacres of British or French prisoners and even ci
vilians. Nor did they relate the more frequent massacres of captured French colonial troops, especially Senegalese tirailleurs, who fought bravely to the racist fury of German troops. They were shot, sometimes fifty or a hundred at a time, by German formations which included the SS Totenkopf, the 10th Panzer Division and the Grossdeutschland Regiment. Altogether it is estimated that up to 3,000 colonial soldiers were shot out of hand after capture during the Battle of France.
In the rear of the British and French forces, Boulogne was in chaos, with some of the French naval garrison dead drunk, and others destroying the coastal batteries. A battalion of Irish Guards and another of Welsh Guards were landed to defend the town. As the 2nd Panzer Division advanced north towards the port on 22 May, it was ambushed by a detachment of the French 48th Regiment, mainly headquarters personnel manning unfamiliar anti-tank guns. It was a courageous defence in stark contrast to the disgraceful scenes in Boulogne, but they were overwhelmed and the 2nd Panzer Division continued on to attack the port.
The two Guards battalions there had few anti-tank guns, and were soon forced to withdraw into the town and then to an inner perimeter round the port. As it became clear that they could not hold Boulogne, British rear-echelon personnel began to be evacuated by Royal Navy destroyers on 23 May. An extraordinary battle developed with British warships entering the port and taking on German panzers with their main armament. But the French commander, who had been ordered to fight to the last man, was outraged. He accused the British of desertion, and this did much to embitter relations further between the Allies. It also made Churchill determined to defend Calais, come what may.
Calais, although reinforced with four battalions and some tanks, stood little chance of holding out despite the order that there would be no evacuation ‘for [the] sake of Allied solidarity’. The 10th Panzer Division called in Stukas and Guderian’s heavy artillery on 25 May and began to bombard the old town where the remnants of the defenders had withdrawn. The defence of Calais continued throughout the next day. The flames of the burning town could be seen from Dover. French troops fought until they ran out of ammunition. The French naval commander decided to surrender, and the British, who had suffered massive casualties, had no option but to do the same. The defence of Calais, although doomed, had at least slowed the 10th Panzer Division’s advance along the coast towards Dunkirk.
In Britain civilian morale was steady, largely through ignorance of the true state of affairs across the Channel. But Reynaud’s reported remark that ‘only a miracle can save France’ caused great alarm on 22 May. The country had suddenly started to wake up. The Emergency Powers Act was widely welcomed, along with the arrest of Sir Oswald Mosley, the leader of the British Union of Fascists. Mass Observation noted that in general the mood was more determined in villages and rural areas than in large towns, and that women were much less confident than men. The middle classes were also more nervous than the working class: ‘The whiter the collar, the less the assurance,’ it was said. In fact, the greatest proportion of defeatists was among the rich and the upper classes.
Many people became convinced that wild rumours, such as the notion that General Gamelin had been shot as a traitor or had committed suicide, were being spread deliberately by some fifth column. But Mass Observation reported to the ministry of information that the ‘evidence before us at the moment suggests that most rumours are passed on by idle, frightened, suspicious people’.
On 23 May, General Brooke, commander of II Corps, wrote in his diary: ‘Nothing but a miracle can save the BEF now and the end cannot be very far off!’ But, fortunately for the British Expeditionary Force, the failed counter-attack at Arras had at least made the Germans rather more cautious. Rundstedt and Hitler insisted that the area had to be secured before the advance began again. And the delay to the 10th Panzer Division at Boulogne and Calais meant that Dunkirk had not been captured behind the backs of the BEF.
On the evening of 23 May, Generaloberst von Kluge halted the thirteen German divisions along what the British called the Canal Line on the western side of what was becoming the Dunkirk pocket. This ran for just over fifty kilometres from the Channel along the River Aa and its canal via Saint-Omer, Béthune and La Bassée. Kleist’s two panzer corps urgently needed maintenance work on their vehicles. His panzer group had already lost half its armoured strength. In three weeks, 600 tanks had been destroyed by enemy action or had suffered serious mechanical trouble, which represented just over a sixth of the entire German force on all fronts.
Hitler approved this order the following day, but it was not his personal intervention, as has so often been believed. Generaloberst von Brauchitsch, the commander-in-chief of the German army, backed by Halder, gave the order on the night of 24 May to continue the advance, but Rundstedt, with Hitler’s support, insisted that the infantry should catch up first. They wanted to preserve their panzer forces for an offensive across the Somme and the Aisne before the main bulk of the French army had a chance to reorganize itself. An advance across the canals and the wetlands of Flanders seemed to them an unnecessary risk when Göring claimed that his Luftwaffe could deal with any British attempt at evacuation. Although they marched at a rapid tempo, the German infantry divisions had struggled to catch up with the panzer formations. It is a striking fact that the BEF and most of the French formations possessed far more motor transport than the German army, in which only sixteen divisions out of 157 were fully motorized. All the rest had to rely on horses to pull their artillery and baggage.
The British had another stroke of luck. A German staff car was captured, containing documents which showed that the next attack would come in the east near Ypres, between the Belgian forces and the British left flank. Lord Gort was persuaded by General Brooke that he should move one of his divisions, which had been allocated for another counter-attack, round to plug this gap.
On hearing that the French could not mount an attack across the Somme, Anthony Eden, as secretary of state for war, instructed Gort on the night of 25 May that the safety of the BEF must be the ‘predominant consideration’. He should therefore withdraw towards the Channel coast for evacuation. The War Cabinet, now forced to face the fact that the French army could not recover from its collapse, had to consider the implications of Britain fighting on alone. Gort had already warned London that the BEF was likely to lose all of its equipment and he doubted that more than a small proportion of its forces could be evacuated.
Eden did not know that an increasingly harassed Reynaud had been ambushed by Marshal Pétain and General Weygand. Pétain had been in touch with Pierre Laval, a politician who loathed the British and was awaiting his chance to replace Reynaud. Laval had made contact with an Italian diplomat to sound out the possibility of negotiating with Hitler through Mussolini. Weygand, the commander-in-chief, blamed the politicians for a ‘criminal lack of prudence’ in going to war in the first place. Supported by Pétain, he demanded that France’s guarantee not to seek a separate peace should be withdrawn. Their priority was to preserve the army to maintain order. Reynaud agreed to fly to London the next day to consult with the British government.
Weygand’s hope that Mussolini could be persuaded to stay out of the war through the promise of more colonies, and that he might negotiate a peace, was completely misplaced. Hitler’s claim that he had achieved victory provoked a hesitant Mussolini into telling the Germans and his own general staff that Italy would enter the war soon after 5 June. Both he and his generals knew that Italy was incapable of any effective offensive action. They did, however, consider an attack on Malta, but then decided that it was unnecessary since they could take over the island as soon as Britain collapsed. During the following days, Mussolini is supposed to have said: ‘This time I’ll declare war, but I won’t wage it.’ The chief victims of this disastrous attempt at sleight of hand were to be his woefully under-equipped stage armies. Bismarck had once remarked, with one of his pithy comments, that Italy had a large appetite but poor teeth. It would prove disastrously true in
the Second World War.
On the morning of Sunday, 26 May, as British troops pulled back towards Dunkirk under a heavy storm–‘thunderclaps mingled with the booming of the artillery’–the War Cabinet met in London unaware of Mussolini’s intentions. Lord Halifax raised the possibility that the government should consider approaching the Duce to find out what terms Hitler might be prepared to accept for peace. He had even met the Italian ambassador privately the previous afternoon to sound him out. Halifax was convinced that, with no prospect of assistance from the United States in the near future, Britain was not strong enough to resist Hitler alone.
Churchill replied that British liberty and independence were paramount. He had used a paper prepared by the chiefs of staff entitled ‘British Strategy in a Certain Eventuality’–a euphemism for French surrender. This discussion paper envisaged British options for fighting on alone. Some aspects were unduly pessimistic as things turned out. The report assumed that most of the BEF would be lost in France. The Admiralty did not expect to get off more than 45,000 men, and the chiefs of staff feared that the Luftwaffe would destroy the aircraft factories in the Midlands. Other assumptions were over-optimistic: for example, the chiefs of staff predicted that Germany’s war economy would be weakened by a shortage of raw materials–a strange assumption if Germany were to control most of western and central Europe. But the main conclusion was that Britain could probably hold out against invasion, providing the RAF and the Royal Navy remained intact. This was the vital point to support Churchill’s argument against Halifax.
Churchill went off to Admiralty House to have lunch with Reynaud, who had just flown over to London. It was clear from what Reynaud said that General Weygand’s wildly favourable view of the situation just a couple of days previously had now swung to outright defeatism. The French were already contemplating the loss of Paris. Reynaud even said that, although he would never sign a separate peace, he might be replaced by somebody who would. He was already under pressure to persuade the British–‘in order to reduce proportionately our own contribution’–to hand over Gibraltar and Suez to the Italians.