All Hell Let Loose: The World at War 1939-1945

The Norwegians committed themselves to fight, to buy time for Allied assistance to come. Next day, the 11th, Haakon and his son Prince Olav were communing with their ministers when the Germans bombed and strafed Nybergsund in an attempt to decapitate the national leadership. The politicians threw themselves into a pigsty while the king and his aides took cover in a nearby wood. No one was killed, and though the Norwegians were shaken by the Heinkels’ repeated machine-gunning, their resolve remained unbroken. Haakon was shocked to see civilians exposed to German fire. ‘I could not bear to watch…children crouching in the snow as bullets mowed down the trees and branches rained down on them,’ he said. He declared that never again would he seek refuge in a place where his presence imperilled innocents.

Monarch and politicians briefly discussed seeking sanctuary in Sweden, a notion favoured by the prime minister. Haakon would have none of this, and Norway’s leaders moved to Lillehammer to continue the struggle. Poor, broken old Gen. Laake was replaced as commander-in-chief by the courageous and energetic Gen. Otto Ruge, to whom a British officer paid the supreme compliment of asserting that he resembled a master of foxhounds. Norway’s belated mobilisation was chaotic, since its southern depots and armouries were in German hands, but most of the 40,000 men who responded were passionate patriots. Frank Foley, the British Secret Service’s man in Oslo, cabled tersely: ‘You cannot conceive pitiable condition material this army, but men fine types.’ In the weeks that followed, some Norwegians played heroic parts in their nation’s defence. The country had few large towns; much of its population was scattered in communities beside deep-sea fjords, connected by narrow roads passing through defiles between mountain ranges. German, British and French commanders, surprised to find themselves fighting in Norway, were alike reduced to assembling intelligence about the battlefield by buying Baedeker travel guides from their local bookshops in Berlin, London and Paris.

The Invasion of Norway (#ulink_7ad1938d-63fb-5a95-a117-d1adfbca280e)

The makeshift Anglo-French landing forces sent to Norway in the weeks following the German invasion defied parody. Almost every effective unit of the British Army was deployed in France; only twelve half-trained Territorial battalions were available to cross the North Sea. These were dispatched piecemeal, to pursue objectives changed almost hourly. They lacked maps, transport and radios to communicate with each other, far less with London. They disembarked with few heavy weapons or anti-aircraft guns, their stores and ammunition jumbled in hopeless confusion aboard the transport ships. The soldiers felt wholly disorientated. George Parsons landed with his company at Mojoen: ‘Imagine how we felt when we saw a towering ice-capped mountain in front of us standing about 2,000 feet high. We south London boys, we had never seen a mountain before, most of us had never been to sea.’

Ashore, even where German troops were outnumbered, they displayed greater energy and better tactics than the Allies. A Norwegian officer, Colonel David Thue, reported to his government that one British unit was composed of ‘very young lads who appeared to come from the slums of London. They have taken a very close interest in the women of Romsdal, and engaged in wholesale looting of stores and houses…They would run like hares at the first sound of an aircraft engine.’ The British Foreign Office reported in the later stages of the campaign: ‘Drunk British troops…on one occasion quarrelled with and eventually fired upon some Norwegian fishermen…Some of the British Army officers…behaved “with the arrogance of Prussians” and the naval officers were…so cautious and suspicious that they treated every Norwegian as a Fifth Columnist and refused to believe vital information when it was given them.’

It is hard to exaggerate the chaos of the Allies’ decision-making, or the cynicism of their treatment of the hapless Norwegians. The British government made extravagant promises of aid, while knowing that it lacked means to fulfil them. The War Cabinet’s chief interest was Narvik and the possibility of seizing and holding a perimeter around it to block the German winter iron-ore route from Sweden. Narvik fjord was the scene of fierce naval clashes, in which both sides suffered severe destroyer losses. A small British landing force established itself on an offshore island, where its general resolutely rejected the urgings of Admiral Lord Cork and Orrery, the peppery, monocled naval commander, to advance against the port. Cork sought to inspirit the soldier by marching ashore himself; a notably short man, he was obliged to abandon both his reconnaissance and his assault ambitions when he immediately plunged waist-deep into a snowdrift.

In London, strategic debate increasingly degenerated into shouting matches. Churchill shouted loudest, but his extravagant schemes were frustrated by lack of means to fulfil them. Ministers argued with each other, with the French, and with their service chiefs. Coordination between commanders was non-existent. In the space of a fortnight, six successive operational plans were drafted and discarded. The British were reluctantly persuaded that some show of assisting the Norwegians in defending the centre of their country was indispensable politically, if futile militarily. Landings at Namsos and Åndalsnes were executed in confusion and prompted relentless German bombing, which destroyed supply dumps as fast as they were created and reduced the wooden towns to ashes. At Namsos, French troops looted British stores; there were vehicle crashes caused by conflicting national opinions about right-and left-hand road priority. On 17 April Maj. Gen. Frederick Hotblack had just been briefed in London to lead an assault on Trondheim when he suffered a stroke and collapsed unconscious.

The British 148 Brigade, whose commander defied instructions from London and marched his men to offer direct support to the Norwegian army, was mercilessly mauled by the Germans before its three hundred survivors retreated by bus. A staff officer dispatched from Norway to the War Office to seek instructions returned to tell Maj. Gen. Adrian Carton de Wiart, leading another force: ‘You can do what you like, for they don’t know what they want done.’ British troops fought one engagement in which they acquitted themselves honourably, at Kvan on 24–25 April, before being obliged to fall back.

Thereafter in London, ministers and service chiefs favoured evacuation of Namsos and Åndalsnes. Neville Chamberlain, self-centred as ever, was fearful of bearing blame for failure. The press, encouraged by the government, had infused the British people with high hopes for the campaign; the BBC had talked absurdly about the Allies ‘throwing a ring of steel around Oslo’. Now, the prime minister mused to colleagues that it might be prudent to tell the House of Commons that the British had never intended to conduct long-term operations in central Norway. The French, arriving in London on 27 April for a meeting of the Allied Supreme War Council, were stunned by the proposal to quit, and demurred fiercely. Reynaud returned to Paris claiming success in galvanising Chamberlain and his colleagues: ‘We have shown them what to do and given them the will to do it.’ This was fanciful: two hours later, the British evacuation order was given. Pamela Street, a Wiltshire farmer’s daughter, wrote sadly in her diary: ‘The war goes on like a great big weight which gets a bit heavier every day.’

The Norwegian campaign spawned mistrust and indeed animosity between the British and French governments which proved irreparable, even after the fall of Chamberlain. To a colleague on 27 April, Reynaud deplored the inertia of British ministers, ‘old men who do not know how to take a risk’. Daladier told the French cabinet on 4 May: ‘We should ask the British what they want to do: they pushed for this war, and they wriggle out as soon as it is a matter of taking measures which could directly affect them.’ Shamefully, British local commanders were instructed not to tell the Norwegians they were leaving. Gen. Bernard Paget ignored this order, provoking an emotional scene with Norwegian C-in-C Otto Ruge, who said: ‘So Norway is to share the fate of Czechoslovakia and Poland. But why? Why? Your troops haven’t been defeated!’ After this brief explosion, however, Ruge’s natural dignity and calm reasserted themselves. Some historians have criticised his defence of central Norway, but it is hard to imagine any deployment of his small forces that would have altered the outcome. When King Haakon and his government opted for exile in Britain, the army C-in-C refused to leave his men and insisted upon sharing their captivity.

At Namsos, Maj. Gen. Carton de Wiart obeyed the evacuation order without informing the neighbouring Norwegian commander, who suddenly found his flank in the air. After conducting a difficult retreat to the port, Ruge’s officer found only a heap of British stores, some wrecked vehicles, and a jaunty farewell note from Carton de Wiart. Gen. Claude Auchinleck, who assumed the Allied command at Narvik, later wrote to Ironside, the CIGS, in London: ‘The worst of it all is the need for lying to all and sundry in order to preserve secrecy. Situation vis a vis the Norwegians is particularly difficult, and one feels a most despicable creature in pretending that we are going on fighting when we are going to quit at once.’ In the far north, the British and French concentrated some 26,000 men to confront the 4,000 Germans who now held Narvik. Amazingly, even after the campaign in France began, the Allies sustained operations until the end of May, seizing the port on the 27th after days of dogged and skilful German resistance.

The confusion of loyalties and nationalities that would become a notable feature of the war was illustrated by the presence among Narvik’s attackers of some Spanish republicans, enlisted in the French Foreign Legion after being evicted from their own country. ‘Those officers who had misgivings about welcoming [them] into the Legion (they dubbed them all communists) were gratified by their fighting prowess,’ wrote Captain Pierre Lapie. ‘[One of] the young Spaniards who attacked a German machine-gun post behind Elvegard…was mown down by fire at only a few yards’ distance. Another sprang forward and smashed the head of the gunner with his rifle butt.’ The regimental war diary described the Legionnaires’ ascent of the steep hill before Narvik, where they met a fierce counter-attack: ‘Captaine de Guittaut was killed and Lieutenant Garoux severely wounded. Led by Lieutenant Vadot, the company managed to halt the counter-attack and the Germans fell back, abandoning their dead and wounded…Sergeant Szabo being the first man to set foot in the town.’

It was all for nothing: immediately after capturing the town and burying their dead, the Allies began to re-embark, recognising that their position was strategically untenable. The Norwegians were left to contemplate hundreds of wrecked homes and dead civilians. Their monarch and government sailed for Britain on 7 June aboard a Royal Navy cruiser. Some Norwegians undertook epic journeys to escape from German occupation and join the Allied struggle, several being assisted by the Soviet ambassador in Stockholm, the remarkable woman intellectual Aleksandra Kollontai, to travel eastwards around the world and eventually reach Britain.

The evacuation of central Norway, under heavy air attack, shocked and dismayed the British public at home. Student Christopher Tomlin wrote on 3 May: ‘I am stunned, very disillusioned and afraid of our retreat…Mr. Chamberlain…made me believe we would drive the Germans out of Scandinavia. Now the wind is out of my sails; I feel subdued and expect to hear more bad news…Haven’t we, can’t we find, more men of Churchill’s breed?’ In truth, the First Sea Lord bore substantial responsibility for the rash and muddled deployments in Norway. Britain’s armed forces lacked resources to intervene effectively; their bungled gestures mocked the tragedy of the Norwegian people. But Churchill’s rhetoric and bellicosity, in contrast to the prime minister’s manifest feebleness of purpose, prompted a surge of public enthusiasm for a change of government, which infected the chamber of the House of Commons. On 10 May, the prime minister resigned. Next day King George VI invited Churchill to form a government.

The Germans suffered the heaviest casualties in the Norwegian campaign – 5,296 compared with the British 4,500, most of the latter incurred when the carrier Glorious and its escorts were sunk by the battlecruiser Scharnhorst on 8 June. The French and a Polish exile contingent lost 530 dead, the Norwegians about 1,800. The Luftwaffe lost 242 planes, the RAF 112. Three British cruisers, seven destroyers, an aircraft carrier and four submarines were sunk, against three German cruisers, ten destroyers, and six submarines. Four further German cruisers and six destroyers were badly damaged.

The conquest of Norway provided Hitler with naval and air bases which became important when he later invaded Russia, and exploited them to impede the shipment of Allied supplies to Murmansk. He was content to leave Sweden unmolested and neutral: his strategic dominance ensured that the Swedes maintained shipments of iron ore to Germany, and dared not risk offering comfort to the Allies. Yet Hitler paid a price for Norway. Obsessed with holding the country against a prospective British assault, until almost the war’s end he deployed 350,000 men there, a major drain on his manpower resources. And German naval losses in the Norwegian campaign proved a critical factor in making a subsequent invasion of Britain unrealistic.

The British were chiefly responsible for conducting Allied operations in Norway, and must thus bear overwhelming blame for their failure. Lack of resources explained much, but the performance of the Royal Navy’s senior officers was unimpressive – the shocking incompetence of Glorious’s captain was chiefly responsible for the carrier’s loss; the weakness of British warship anti-aircraft defences was painfully exposed. The 10 and 13 April attacks on German destroyers at Narvik, and later evacuations of Anglo-French ground forces, were the only naval operations to be creditably handled. British conduct towards Norway was characterised by bad faith, or at least a lack of frankness which amounted to the same thing. It is remarkable that the Norwegians proved so quickly forgiving, becoming staunch allies both in exile and in their occupied homeland. No action within British powers could have averted the German conquest, once the Royal Navy missed its best chance on 9 April. But the moral ignobility and military incompetence of the campaign reflected poorly upon Britain’s politicians and commanders. If the scale of operations was small compared with those that now followed, it reflected failures of will, leadership, equipment, tactics and training which would be repeated on a much wider stage.

The campaign’s most important consequence was that it precipitated the fall of Chamberlain. Had there been no Norway, it is overwhelmingly likely that he would have retained office as prime minister through the campaign in France that followed. The consequences of such an outcome for Britain, and for the world, could have been catastrophic, because his government might well have chosen a negotiated peace with Hitler. But only posterity can thus discern a consolation for the Norwegian débâcle which was denied to all the contemporary participants save the victorious Germans.

2 THE FALL OF FRANCE

On the evening of 9 May 1940, French troops on the Western Front heard ‘a vast murmuring’ in the German lines; word was passed back that the enemy was moving. Commanders chose to believe that this, like earlier such alarms, was false. Though the German assault upon Holland, Belgium and France began at 0435 on 10 May, it was 0630 before Allied C-in-C General Maurice Gamelin was awakened in his bed, five hours after the first warning from the outposts. Following the long-anticipated pleas for assistance that now arrived from governments in Brussels and The Hague, neutrals in the path of the German storm, Gamelin ordered an advance to the river Dyle in Belgium, fulfilling his longstanding contingency plan. The British Expeditionary Force’s nine divisions and the best of France’s forces – twenty-nine divisions of First, Seventh and Ninth Armies – began rolling north-eastwards. The Luftwaffe made no serious attempt to interfere, for this was exactly where Hitler wanted the Allies to go. Their departure removed a critical threat to the flank of the main German armies, which were thrusting forward further south.

The defences of Holland and Belgium were smashed open. In the first hours of 10 May, glider-landed Luftwaffe paratroops secured the vital Eben Emael fort, covering the Albert Canal – built by a German construction company which obligingly provided its blueprints to Hitler’s planners – and two bridges across the Maas at Maastricht. Even as Churchill took office as Britain’s prime minister, German spearheads were rolling up the Dutch army. Meanwhile south-westwards, some 134,000 men and 1,600 vehicles, of which 1,222 were tanks, began threading their way through the Ardennes forest to deliver the decisive blow of the campaign against the weak centre of the French line. Germans joked afterwards that they created ‘the greatest traffic jam in history’ in the woods of Luxembourg and southern Belgium, forcing thousands of tanks, trucks and guns along narrow roads the Allies had deemed unsuitable for moving an army. The advancing columns were vulnerable to air attack, had the French recognised their presence and importance. But they did not. From beginning to end of the struggle, Gamelin and his army commanders directed operations in a miasma of uncertainty, seldom either knowing where the Germans had reached, or guessing whither they were going.

Disproportionate historical attention has focused upon the operations of the small British contingent, and its escape from Dunkirk. The overriding German objective was to defeat the French army, by far the most formidable obstacle to the Wehrmacht. The British role was marginal; especially in the first days, the BEF commanded the attention of only modest German air and ground forces. It is untrue that France’s defence rested chiefly on the frontier fortifications of the Maginot Line: the chief purpose of its bunkers and guns was to liberate men for active operations further north. Scarred by memories of the 1914–18 devastation and slaughter in their own country, the French were bent upon waging war somewhere other than on their own soil. Gamelin planned a decisive battle in Belgium, heedless of the fact that the Germans had other ideas. The French C-in-C’s gravest mistake in the early spring of 1940 had been to move the French Seventh Army to the left of the Allied line in anticipation of the Belgian incursion.

French vanguards crossed into Holland to find that the Dutch army had already retreated too far north-eastward to create a common front, while the Belgian army was falling back in disarray. Gamelin’s formations fought hard in the significant battles that followed in Belgium: although short of anti-aircraft and anti-tank guns, they had some good tanks, notably the Somua S35. In a long slogging match at Hannut between 12 and 14 May, 165 panzers were knocked out, for the loss of 105 French tanks. The French front on the Dyle remained unbroken. But its defenders were soon obliged to fall back, because they found their right flank turned. The Germans, gaining possession of the Hannut battlefield, were able to recover and repair most of their damaged armour.

For the first two days of the campaign, the French high command was oblivious of its peril: a witness described Gamelin’s demeanour as positively jaunty, ‘striding up and down the corridor in his fort, with a pleased and martial air’. Another observer spoke of the C-in-C as ‘in excellent form with a big smile’. Now sixty-seven years old, as Joffre’s chief of staff in 1914 he had been widely perceived as the architect of France’s triumph in the Battle of the Marne. A self-consciously cultured figure, he enjoyed discussing art and philosophy; also intensely political, he was much more popular than his future successor, the splenetic Maxime Weygand. Gamelin’s crippling weakness was an instinct for compromise: he strove to avoid making hard choices. Anticipating ‘une guerre de longue durée’, a protracted confrontation on the frontier of France, he and his subordinates were confounded in May 1940 by events unfolding at a speed beyond their imaginations.

The Germans had committed seventeen divisions to demonstrate against the Maginot Line in the south, twenty-nine to seize Holland and northern Belgium, and forty-five including seven panzer to attack in the centre, then swing north-west towards the Channel coast after crossing the Meuse, cutting off the French and British in Belgium. Only half of the German attacking troops were fully trained, and more than a quarter were reservists aged over forty. The principal burden of defeating the French army rested upon 140,000 men of the panzer and mechanised divisions making the vital thrust across the Meuse. The first German troops reached the river at 1400 on 12 May, having seen scarcely a French soldier since they broke clear of the Ardennes; they had thus far conducted a march rather than an attack. The Meuse line was defended by reservists of Charles Huntziger’s Second Army. On the morning of 13 May, these French troops suffered a devastating bombardment by more than a thousand Luftwaffe aircraft, attacking in waves. This, the first such attack of their war, did little material damage but impacted severely on morale. A soldier wrote: ‘The noise of their engines is already enormous and then there is this extraordinary shrieking which shreds your nerves…And then suddenly there is a rain of bombs…And it goes on and on! Not a French or British plane to be seen. Where the hell are they? My neighbour, a young bloke, is crying.’

A French staff officer at Sedan wrote: ‘The gunners stopped firing and went to ground, the infantry cowered in their trenches, dazed by the crash of bombs and the shriek of the dive-bombers; they had not developed the instinctive reaction of running to their anti-aircraft guns and firing back. Their only concern was to keep their heads well down. Five hours of this nightmare was enough to shatter their nerves.’ Soldiers, like most human beings in all circumstances, react badly to the unexpected. Through the long winter of 1939–40, there had been no attempt to condition the French army to endure such an ordeal as it now experienced.

Most of the command telephone system was destroyed in the air attacks. Early that evening of the 13th, there was a ‘tank panic’ three miles south of Sedan. The local commanding general left his headquarters to investigate wild shouting outside, and found a scene of chaos: ‘A wave of terrified fugitives, gunners and infantry, in cars, on foot, many without arms but dragging kitbags, were hurtling down the road screaming “The tanks are at Bulson.” Some were firing their rifles like lunatics. General Lafontaine and his officers rushed in front of them, trying to reason with them and herd them together, and had lorries put across the road…Officers were mixed in with the men…There was mass hysteria.’ Some 20,000 men decamped in the Bulson panic – six hours before German forces crossed the Meuse. In all probability, their flight was prompted by frightened men mistaking French tanks for enemy ones.

The first German river-crossing parties suffered heavily at the hands of French machine-gunners, but handfuls of determined men reached the western shore in dinghies, then waded through swamps to attack French positions. A sergeant named Walther Rubarth led a group of eleven assault engineers to storm a succession of bunkers with satchel charges and grenades. Six of the Germans were killed, but the survivors opened a breach. Panzergrenadiers ran across an old weir linking an island to the two banks of the Meuse, to establish a foothold on the western side. By 1730, German engineers were bridge-building, while rafts ferried equipment across. Some French soldiers were already retreating, indeed fleeing. At 2300, tanks began clattering across the first completed pontoons: the German sappers’ achievement was as impressive as that of the assault troops.

The French response was painfully sluggish, absurdly complacent. It was suggested to Gen. Huntzinger that the German assault was unfolding like that on Poland. He shrugged theatrically: ‘Poland is Poland…Here we are in France.’ Told of the Meuse crossings, he said: ‘That will mean all the more prisoners.’ Earlier that day, Gamelin’s headquarters declared: ‘[It] is still not possible to determine the zone in which the enemy will make his main attack.’ But that night General Joseph Georges, commanding the north-eastern front, telephoned Gamelin to say that there had been a rather serious upset – ‘un pépin’ – at Sedan. At 0300 on the 14th, a French officer described the scene at Georges’ headquarters: ‘The room was barely half-lit. Major Navereau was repeating in a low voice the information coming in. General Roton, the chief of staff, was stretched out in an armchair. The atmosphere was that of a family in which there has been a death. Georges got up quickly…He was terribly pale. “Our front has been broken at Sedan! There has been a collapse.” He flung himself into a chair and burst into tears.’ An officer described Gen. Georges Blanchard, commander of First Army, ‘sitting in tragic immobility, saying nothing, doing nothing, but just gazing at the map spread on the table between us’.

The decisive moment of the campaign came later that morning. The German crossing of the Meuse need not have been calamitous, had it been reversed by a swift counter-attack. But French troops assembled lethargically, then advanced hesitantly and piecemeal. Attacks by 152 bombers and 250 fighters of the RAF and the French air force failed to damage the German bridges, while costing heavy losses – thirty-one of seventy-one British bombers failed to return. F/Lt. Bill Simpson’s single-engined Battle caught fire when it crashed, and he was dragged half-naked from the flaming wreckage by his crew. Sitting shocked on the grass nearby, he stared at his hands ‘with unbelieving terror…The skin hung from them like long icicles. The fingers were curled and pointed, like the claws of a great wild bird – distorted, pointed at the ends like talons, ghostly thin. What would I do now? What use would be these paralysed talons to me for the rest of my life?’

By nightfall on the 14th three French formations around Sedan had collapsed, their men fleeing the battlefield. One of these was the 71st Division. A notorious episode passed into legend, of one of its colonels who sought to check fleeing men and was swept aside by soldiers crying: ‘We want to go home and get back to work! There is nothing to do! We are lost! We are betrayed!’ Some modern historians question the reality of this incident. Pierre Lesort, another officer of the same formation, retained a different and more heroic memory of the day: ‘I saw very well, about 800–1000 metres on my left, an artillery battery…which never stopped firing at the diving Stukas which ceaselessly attacked it; I can still see the little round clouds which its guns created in the sky around the swirling planes which continuously dispersed and returned…As for the reactions of the machine-gunners in my company, we never stopped shooting desperately at the planes.’ Yet Lesort acknowledged the progressive erosion of morale: ‘It must be said that this control of the sky by the Germans for these two days made the men discontented and impatient. At the start it was just a sort of grumbling: “Christ, there are only German planes, what the hell are ours doing?” But on the following days…one felt the growth of a kind of helpless resentment.’

Through the succeeding days, French armour launched desultory attacks on the Meuse bridgehead from the south. Gamelin and his officers made another disastrous and probably irrecoverable mistake: they failed to grasp the fact that von Rundstedt’s spearheads did not intend to continue their advance west into the heart of France, but instead were racing north, for the sea, to cut off the British and French armies in Belgium. The Germans’ ‘expanding torrent’ was now advancing across a front sixty miles wide. The French Ninth Army, charged with defending the region, had almost ceased to exist. The advancing panzer columns were acutely sensitive to the risk of an Allied counter-attack on their flanks, but the French high command lacked the will or the grip to initiate such action, as well as means to carry it out. It is mistaken to suppose that the French army offered no significant resistance to the German offensive in 1940. Some of Gamelin’s units made energetic and successful local attacks, and paid a heavy price in casualties. But nowhere did the French deliver assaults of sufficient weight to halt the racing thrusts of von Rundstedt’s armour.

Pierre Lesort described ‘an immediate impression of total disorder and shameful despair. Belongings pushed on bikes, helmets and guns out of sight, and the appearance of dazed vagrants…By the side of the road a man was standing alone, immobile. Wearing a black cap and short cassock: a military chaplain…I saw that he was crying.’ Another soldier, Gustave Folcher, wrote of encounters with men of broken units from the north: ‘They told us terrible things, unbelievable things…Some had come from as far as the Albert Canal…They asked for something to eat and drink; poor lads! They streamed on endlessly; it was a piteous sight. Ah, if those enthusiasts who go and watch the magnificent military parades in Paris or elsewhere could have seen on that morning this other army, the real one…perhaps they would understand the suffering of the soldier.’

A sense of unreality at first pervaded French public consciousness as the familiar world began to disintegrate. The Russian-born Jewish writer Irène Némirovsky described in her autobiographical novel of 1940–41, Suite française, the disbelieving response in Paris to news of stunning German advances: ‘Even though the reports were terrible, no one believed them. No more so than if victory had been announced.’ But as the truth began to be understood, panic swept the nation. Among the most terrible aspects of those days was the massed flight of civilians, which impacted as disastrously on military communications as upon soldiers’ morale. The people of eastern France had suffered German occupation in 1914; they were determined to escape another such experience. Much of the population of Rheims fled, only one-tenth of Lille’s 200,000 inhabitants stayed in their homes, and just eight hundred of Chartres’ 23,000 people after the cathedral city was heavily bombed. Many places became ghost towns.

Throughout eastern and central France, army units found themselves struggling to deploy for action amid huge columns of desperate humanity. Gustave Folcher wrote:

The people are half-mad, they don’t even reply to what we ask them. There is only one word in their mouths: evacuation, evacuation…What is most pitiful is to see entire families on the road, with their livestock they force to follow them, but that they finally have to leave in some cattle-pen. We see wagons drawn by two, three or four beautiful mares, some with a young foal which follows at the risk of being crushed every few metres. The wagon is driven by a woman, often in tears, but most of the time it’s a kid of eight, ten or perhaps twelve years old who leads the horses. On the wagon, on which furniture, trunks, linen, the most precious things, or rather the most indispensable things, have been hastily packed up, the grandparents have also taken their place, holding in their place a very young child, even a newborn baby…The children look at us one by one as we overtake them, holding in their hands the little dog, the little cat or the cage of canaries they didn’t want to be separated from.

Eight million French people abandoned their homes in the month following the onset of the German assault, the greatest mass migration in west European history. Those families who stayed in Paris found themselves repeatedly driven into shelters by alarms: ‘They had to dress their children by torchlight,’ wrote one of those who experienced them. ‘Mothers lifted small, warm, heavy bodies into their arms: “Come on, don’t be afraid, don’t cry.” An air raid. All the lights were out, but beneath the clear, golden June sky, every house, every street was visible. As for the Seine, the river seemed to absorb even the faintest glimmers of light and reflect them back a hundred times brighter, like some multi-faceted mirror. Badly blacked-out windows, glistening rooftops, the metal hinges of doors all shone in the water. There were a few red lights that stayed on longer than the others, no one knew why, and the Seine drew them in, capturing them and bouncing them playfully on its waves.’

In the week that followed the German crossing of the Meuse, the invading armies maintained an almost ceaseless advance, while the Allies conducted in slow motion every activity save flight. The British held the French overwhelmingly responsible for their predicament, but some of Gort’s officers adopted a more enlightened view, understanding that their own BEF had little to be proud of. ‘After a few days’ fighting,’ wrote Irish Fusiliers officer John Horsfall, ‘part of our army was no longer capable of coordinated measures, either offensive or defensive…We could not lay these…to the charge of our politicians, [they were] failings that were strictly our own…Within our army the fault lay in the mind, and really one must wonder what the Staff College was about in those pre-war years.’

The disparity between the battlefield performance of the German and Western Allied armies would prove one of the great enigmas not merely of the 1940 campaign, but of the entire conflict. Thomas Mann once described Nazism as ‘mechanised mysticism’. Michael Howard has written: ‘Armed as they were with all the military technology and bureaucratic rationality of the Enlightenment, but fuelled by the warrior-values of a largely invented past, it is not surprising that the Germans held the world at bay through two terrible wars.’ Though these remarks reflect important truths, they seem an incomplete answer to the question: why was the Wehrmacht so good? Its senior officers had fought in World War I, but for more than a decade thereafter the German army was almost moribund. It gained no inter-war combat experience. Meanwhile, many British rankers as well as officers participated in low-intensity operations on the North-West Frontier of India, in Irish or colonial skirmishes.

The inescapable conclusion is that the British Army’s role as an imperial gendarmerie impeded its education and adaptation for large-scale war. Brushfire conflicts emphasised the handling of small forces, the regiment as the focus of operations. They demanded limited effort, sacrifice and tactical thinking. Some officers were, in Michael Howard’s words, ‘highly professional within a tiny environment’. But throughout the conflict Churchill’s generals suffered from the lack of any coherent system of instruction for higher command, such as the British Army belatedly acquired only thirty years later. The Wehrmacht, recreated in the 1930s from a mere cadre, embraced new ideas, prepared and conditioned itself solely for continental war. Its officers displayed greater energy, professionalism and imagination than most of their British counterparts; its men proved highly motivated. An institutional discipline pervaded the German army’s battlefield conduct at every level, and persisted throughout the war. Its commitment to counter-attack, even in adverse circumstances, amounted to genius. The concept of conducting war à l’outrance, pursuing to the last gasp the destruction of the enemy, seemed to come naturally to Germans, as it did not to their British or French opponents. On the battlefield Allied soldiers, reflecting the societies from which they were drawn, prided themselves on behaving like reasonable men. The Wehrmacht showed what unreasonable men could do.

In the May 1940 BEF, John Horsfall deplored a lack of good maps; failure to cover the retreat by local counter-attacks and inflict substantial damage on the German spearheads; to deploy artillery effectively; or adequately to brief those at the sharp end: ‘Our soldiers just need to know in simple terms what they have to contend with.’ Horsfall and his comrades became bewildered and disgusted by their long trek back from Belgium and through north-eastern France, during which they watched a substantial part of the army, and most of its commanders, fall apart. ‘It was a rotten march,’ he wrote, ‘and the [Fusiliers] were progressively broken up by lost and sometimes disordered fragments of other units surging in on us from the side roads…There was over-much to brood upon…One could not fail to be aware of the loss of grip somewhere in our army. Our men knew it soon enough, and it became the task of the officers to stifle the subject – or laugh at it…Something pretty bad was happening. But it was no more the fault of our regiments than the shambles of the Crimea had been…I saw no reason…why that critical retreat was not effectively controlled.’

Meanwhile, French commanders appeared to inhabit a fantasy world. Gamelin’s staff officers marvelled to see him at lunch in his headquarters on 19 May, joking and making light conversation while his subordinates despaired. At 2100 that night, about the time the first panzers reached the Channel at the mouth of the Somme, on Reynaud’s orders Gamelin was replaced as France’s military leader by seventy-three-year-old General Maxime Weygand. The new supreme commander realised that the Allies’ only chance was to launch counter-attacks from the south and north against the German flanks in the vicinity of Arras, to break the encirclement of Belgium and north-east France. Sir Edmund Ironside, the British CIGS visiting from London, reached the same conclusion. Meeting two French generals, Gaston Billotte and Georges Blanchard, at Lens, Ironside was disgusted by their inertia. Both men were ‘in a state of complete depression. No plan, no thought of a plan. Ready to be slaughtered. Defeated at the head without casualties.’ Ironside urged an immediate attack south towards Amiens, with which Billotte promised to cooperate. Ironside then telephoned Weygand. They agreed that two French and two British divisions would attack next morning, the 21st.

Yet Gort never believed the French would move, and he was right. When the two weak British formations advanced next day they did so alone, and without air support. The Germans were initially thrown into disarray as Gort’s columns struck west of Arras. There was fierce fighting, and the British advanced ten miles, taking four hundred prisoners, before the attack ran out of steam. Erwin Rommel, commanding a panzer division, took personal command of the defence and rallied his surprised and confused units. Matilda tanks inflicted significant German losses, killing Rommel’s ADC at his side. But by then the British had shot their bolt; the attack was courageously and effectively delivered, but lacked sufficient weight to be decisive.

On the morning of that same day, the 21st, even as the British were moving towards Arras, Weygand set off from Vincennes for the northern front, in hopes of organising a more ambitious counterstroke. After waiting two hours at Le Bourget for a plane, the C-in-C’s trip descended into farce. Arriving at Béthune, he found the airfield deserted save for a single scruffy soldier guarding petrol stocks. This man eventually drove the general to a post office where he was able to telephone the army group commander, Billotte, who had spent the morning searching for Weygand around Calais. The C-in-C, after pausing for an omelette at a country inn, used a plane to reach the port, then crawled by car along roads jammed with refugees to meet Belgium’s King Leopold at Ypres town hall. He urged the monarch to hasten his army’s retreat westward, but Leopold was reluctant to abandon Belgian soil. Billotte said that only the British, thus far scarcely engaged, were fit to attack. To Weygand’s anger – for he wrongly saw a snub – Lord Gort did not join the meeting.

When the BEF’s commander belatedly reached Ypres, without much conviction he agreed to join a new counter-attack, but said that all his reserves were committed. He never believed any combined Anglo-French thrust would take place. Weygand later claimed that the British were bent on betraying their ally: this reflected a profound French conviction, dating back to World War I, that the British always fought with one eye on their escape route to the Channel ports. The British, in their turn, despaired at French defeatism; Weygand was thus far right, that Gort believed his allies hopelessly inert, and was now set upon salvaging the BEF from the wreck of the campaign. Later on that bleak night of 21 May, Billotte was fatally injured in a car crash, and two days elapsed before a successor was appointed as Northern Army commander. Meanwhile, the breakdown of Allied command communications became comprehensive. After a meeting with the French army group commander the previous day, British CIGS Sir Edmund Ironside wrote: ‘I lost my temper and shook Billotte by the button of his tunic. The man is completely beaten.’ Gort told King Leopold on the evening of the 21st: ‘It’s a bad job.’ At 1900, Weygand left Dunkirk by torpedo boat in the midst of an air raid, eventually regaining his headquarters at 1000 next morning. Throughout every hour of his futile wanderings across northern France, German tanks, guns and men continued to stream north and west through the great hole in the Allied line.

The supreme commander now succumbed to fantasy: reporting to Reynaud on the morning of 22 May, he seemed in almost jaunty mood. ‘So many mistakes have been made,’ he said, ‘that they give me confidence. I believe that in future we shall make less.’ He assured France’s prime minister that both the BEF and Blanchard’s army were in fine fighting trim. He outlined his planned counter-attack, and concluded equivocally: ‘It will either give us victory or it will save our honour.’ At a meeting in Paris on 22 May with Churchill and Reynaud, Weygand exuded optimism, claiming that a new army of almost twenty divisions would conduct the French counter-attack from the south to restore the link with the BEF. Both the army and the attack, however, were figments of his imagination.

On the night of the 23rd, Gort withdrew his forces from the salient they held at Arras. This caused the French to assert that the British were repeating their selfish and pusillanimous behaviour of 1914. Gort’s decision represented only a recognition of reality, but Reynaud failed to tell Weygand that the British were preparing to evacuate the BEF. Gort told Admiral Jean-Marie Abrial, commanding the Dunkirk perimeter, that three British divisions would help to screen the French withdrawal. After Gort’s departure for England, however, his successor in command, Maj. Gen. Harold Alexander, declined to make good on this commitment. Abrial said: ‘Your decision dishonours Britain.’ Defeat prompted a welter of such inter-Allied recriminations: Weygand, told of the Belgian surrender on 28 May, expostulated furiously: ‘That king! What a pig! What an abominable pig!’

The Last Phase of the 1940 French Campaign (#ulink_831e7ceb-f064-52b7-8b1f-6539ccca3f87)

The British, meanwhile, had begun to evacuate the BEF from the port and beaches of Dunkirk. ‘It was evident to one and all that a monumental military disaster was in progress,’ Irish Fusiliers officer John Horsfall wrote with weary resignation. ‘Therefore we could take refuge in history, knowing that this was not only to be expected but actually the commonplace experience of our army when tossed recklessly by our politicians into European war.’ Sergeant L.D. Pexton was one of more than 40,000 British soldiers taken prisoner, after a rearguard action near Cambrai in which his unit was overrun: ‘I remember the order “Cease Fire” and that the time was 12 o’clock,’ he wrote afterwards. ‘Stood up and put my hands up. My God how few of us stood up. I expected my last moments had come and lit a fag.’

The Dunkirk evacuation was announced to the British public on 29 May, when civilian volunteers from the Small Boat Pool joined warships rescuing men from the beaches and harbour. The Royal Navy’s achievement during the week that followed became the stuff of legend. Vice-Admiral Bertram Ramsay, operating from an underground headquarters at Dover, directed the movements of almost nine hundred ships and small craft with extraordinary calm and skill. The removal of troops from the beaches in civilian launches and pleasure boats forged the romantic image of Dunkirk, but by far the larger proportion – some two-thirds – were taken off by destroyers and other large vessels, loading at the harbour mole. The navy was fortunate that, throughout Operation Dynamo, the Channel remained almost preternaturally calm.