AFTER the signature of the armistice, Marc Bloch, a middle-aged professor of history, temporarily residing near Gueret in the south-west of France, set about putting down on paper his own impressions of the catastrophe that had befallen France. Bloch was an internationally celebrated medieval historian. He had served in the French army with great distinction in the First World War. Decorated four times, he ended the war as a captain. Called up again in 1939, at the age of 53, he had witnessed the débâcle at close hand, and he felt a burning need to record what he had seen while it was ‘still fresh and living’ in his memory.
Bloch had spent most of the Phoney War with the First Army. Initially, thanks to his linguistic abilities, he had been assigned to the Intelligence Branch as liaison with the British. Here he witnessed at first hand the lack of comprehension between the British and French. In the eyes of the French, the British soldiers were lecherous and rowdy, and the British officers distant and snobbish. Frustrated by this posting, Bloch was relieved to be reassigned to a new position as the officer in charge of the army’s petrol supplies. Since the First Army was the most motorized of all the French forces, this was a post carrying great responsibility. Bloch quickly mastered his new task, and, like most other soldiers, he spent much of the Phoney War bored, cold, and frustrated by inactivity. He whiled away the time by starting work on a history of the French people. This was the book that eventually became his Apology for the Historian.
On 10 May 1940, Bloch was in Paris. He rushed back to the front and rejoined the First Army as it moved into Belgium. Five days later, the armies began their retreat back towards the French frontier along roads clogged with refugees. Despite the chaos of the retreat Bloch managed to ensure that petrol was always available, and equally that none of the petrol depots under his responsibility fell into enemy hands: ‘the whole line of our retreat from Mons to Lille was lit by more fires than can ever have been kindled by Attila’. Eventually he found himself, with other remnants of the First Army, in Dunkirk. In this ‘ruined town with its shells of buildings half-visible through the drifting smoke’, he set about organizing the evacuation of his men. It took ‘superhuman doses of charity not to feel bitter’, as ‘ship after ship carried their foreign companions to safety’. Bloch wrote:
I can still hear the incredible din which, like the orchestral finale of an opera, provided an accompaniment to the last few minutes which we spent on the coast of Flanders—the crashing of bombs, the bursting of shells, the rat-tat-tat of machine guns, the noise of anti-aircraft batteries, and as a kind of figured bass, the persistent rattle of our own little naval pom-pom.
Bloch himself left Dunkirk on the evening of 31 May on a British ship, the Royal Daffodil. Immediately upon his arrival at Dover the following morning he was transported by train to Plymouth, from where he returned to Cherbourg later that evening.
Back in France, Bloch spent the first two weeks of June in northern France, first in Normandy and then at Rennes in Brittany. He was angry and frustrated that he and his men were not being effectively reorganized so that they could take part in the fighting again. On 17 June Rennes was bombed; on the next day it was rumoured that the Germans were about to arrive. In order to avoid being taken prisoner, Bloch found himself some civilian clothes, made contact with an academic colleague in the town, booked into a hotel, and pretended to be in Rennes on academic business. The Germans did not suspect that this grey-haired and respectable-looking gentleman had been in the army a few days earlier. It was clear also that the Germans had quite enough prisoners already without tracking down all those soldiers who might be evading them. At the end of the month, once the railways were running again, Bloch rejoined his family in Guéret.
These were the events that Bloch recounted in his manuscript, under the heading ‘One of the vanquished gives evidence’. In the last section, entitled ‘A Frenchman examines his conscience’, he tried to analyse the causes of the disaster. His pages seethe with anger at the folly, incompetence, and human weaknesses he had witnessed on the French side. He is particularly critical of politicians, army leaders, junior officers, journalists, and teachers. Nor does he spare academics like himself who ‘out of mental laziness’ had gone back to the ‘tranquillity’ of their studies after 1918 and allowed France to head down the path to destruction. Although himself a man of the moderate left, Bloch was as critical of the self-interested narrow-mindedness of the working class as of the egoism and class hatred of the bourgeoisie. The essential thesis of his book, however, is that the fundamental causes of the defeat were intellectual: France had become an intellectually ossified and sclerotic society.
Having completed his manuscript, Bloch put it away until France should once again be free and it could be published. He never lived to see that day. During the Occupation, Bloch joined the Resistance, becoming one of the organizers in the Lyon area. As well as fighting the Germans, the Resistance was very concerned with drawing up reforms for liberated France. Bloch himself drafted far-reaching proposals for reform of the educational system to be implemented after Liberation. These were published in one of the clandestine Resistance newspapers. Bloch was arrested by the Germans on 7 March 1944. After being imprisoned and tortured, he was shot on 16 June, a few days after the Allies had landed in Normandy.
In 1946 Bloch’s autopsy of the defeat was finally published as the book Étrange Défaite [Strange Defeat], not a title he had chosen. Bloch had written without access to documents, interpreting his experiences in the light of his insights as an historian. What makes his essay so fascinating is that Bloch was one of the leading lights of the so-called ‘Annales’ group of historians (so named after the review Annales founded by Bloch and his friend Lucien Febvre in 1929). These historians wanted to move historical writing away from its traditional concentration on political events (histoire événementielle) in order to study the ‘total’ history of a period over a long time-frame (la longue durée). ‘Annales’ historians were more interested with the long, slow history of deep structural continuities than with the superficial discontinuities of politics. Yet the ‘event’ of 1940 imposed itself too urgently for Bloch not to feel the imperative, as a citizen, to try to explain it. This has led one commentator to suggest that the impact of 1940 had in effect led Bloch to abandon Annales history: ‘when Bloch analyses the defeat, it could be any historian writing about a period of national crisis.… He talks about individuals, their intelligence, stupidity, courage, patriotism, virtue, honesty … he talks about destiny, fate, chance, fall of the cards, surprise.’1 Conversely, many other readers of Étrange Défaite take a rather different view, interpreting Bloch, in his confrontation with the historical event of 1940, as having rejected contingency in favour of a quest for deep structural causes to explain it.
However one wishes to interpret Bloch’s account, it remains the starting-point for most historians in their search to understand the causes of the defeat, even if they use his arguments only as a foil. In the first years after the Liberation, the problem for French historians who might have wished to test or develop Bloch’s intuitions was that the debate on 1940 had become highly politicized. One of the first acts of the Vichy regime of Marshal Pétain had been to set up a tribunal at the small town of Riom, not far from Vichy itself, to try those it blamed for the defeat. The defendants included Léon Blum, Daladier, Pierre Cot (in his absence), and Gamelin. Given that three of these figures had been leading members of the Popular Front, it was clear in which direction Vichy was pointing the finger. The Riom trial, which finally opened in February 1942, was suspended two months later before a judgement had been reached. It had become a public relations disaster because Daladier and Blum succeeded in turning the tables on their accusers and demonstrating the flimsiness of the charges against them.
At the Liberation, it was the turn of Pétain and other members of the Vichy regime to find themselves on trial, not only for their activities during the Occupation and their role in the events of 1940. In addition, the French Parliament set up a Committee in August 1946 to enquire into ‘the political, economic and diplomatic events that, from 1933 to 1945, preceded, accompanied and followed the Armistice, in order to establish the responsibilities incurred’. In the event, this Committee, despite its broad remit, concentrated primarily on the events of 1940. The starting date of its investigation—1933—three years before the Popular Front came to power, contradicted Vichy’s assertion that everything had started to go wrong after 1936. Over the next four years, most of the major actors in the events of 1940 came to testify before the Committee. There were more than one hundred hearings. Nine volumes of evidence were published. The first volume of the Committee’s report, published in 1951, and covering only the period up to 1936, highlighted the responsibilities of the army command. The subsequent volumes were never produced because the Committee lapsed at the end of the parliamentary session in 1951, and was never reconstituted.
23. The caption reads: ‘Riom … Let’s have a laugh.’ It refers to the trial of those whom Vichy held responsible for the defeat. The cartoon shows Gamelin (in uniform) and (clockwise): Daladier, Blum, Mandel, Reynaud. Mandel and Reynaud were not tried at Riom, but were imprisoned by Vichy. Mandel was assassinated in 1944
Although there were specific reasons why neither the Riom trial nor the post-war Committee ever finished their work, their failure also seems symbolic of the magnitude of the task they faced. The mountain of material amassed by the Riom court and then the Committee has been mined by historians ever since. Soon historians were also able to start exploiting the memoirs that began to pour out in the decade after 1945. First off the mark was Gamelin with three volumes of memoirs between 1946 and 1947, then Reynaud with two volumes in 1947, and Weygand with three volumes between 1952 and 1955. Lesser known, but hardly less important, figures also produced their testimonies. Among these were Jacques Minart (1945), who had been on Gamelin’s staff at his headquarters in Vincennes; General Prioux (1947), Commander of the First Army’s Cavalry Corps; General Ruby (1948), Deputy Chief of Staff of the Second Army; General Charles Grandsard (1949), Commander of the Second Army’s X Corps (which included the ill-fated 55DI).
24. Reynaud, standing on the right, and Weygand, standing on the left, fought out their quarrel of 1940 once again in 1945 at the trial of Pétain. The Marshal himself, slumped in a chair on the right, his kepi on the table in front of him, refused to testify
Even if the archives were closed for many years to come, historians certainly did not lack documentary material to begin studying the Fall of France, but almost no histories of the event appeared in France in the thirty years after the end of the war. Two notable exceptions, neither by professional historians, and both appearing in 1956, were Jacques Benoist Méchin’s Soixante jours qui ébranlèrent l’occident [Sixty Days Which Shook the West] and Colonel Adolphe-Goutard’s La Guerre des occasions perdues [The War of Lost Opportunities], both of which were translated into English. Benoist-Méchin’s book, three volumes long, was extremely well documented, but it certainly did not pretend to objectivity. Its author had been a hard-line supporter of collaboration with Germany during the war and an unapologetic Fascist sympathizer. He was therefore extremely hostile to the defunct Third Republic, which he saw as bearing fundamental responsibility for the defeat. Goutard’s approach could hardly have been more different. As his title implied, his view was that the defeat was due not to the decadence of the French people or the defects of the Republic, but to the mistakes of its military commanders. For Goutard, this was a war that could have been won.
The lack of any other important French studies of the Fall of France at this time was symptomatic of a more general reluctance among the French historical profession to write contemporary history. In this period, the Annales school was becoming increasingly influential and increasingly obsessed with studying long-term socio-economic trends. This was especially true of its dominant post-war figure, Fernand Braudel. Under Braudel’s influence Annales became more dogmatic in its rejection of the ‘event’. Braudel argued that the significant turning-points in history were linked to economic cycles. This meant, as he argued in a lecture in Mexico in 1953, that the real moments of discontinuity in France’s nineteenth- and twentieth-century history were 1817, 1872, and 1929. In this reading of French history, 1940 was a purely epiphenomenal politico-military occurrence.
Braudel had come to prominence in 1949 with the publication of his massive study of the Mediterranean in the age of Philip II. Having researched the book for fifteen years, Braudel began to write it entirely from memory while a prisoner of war in Germany between 1940 and 1944. He had thrown himself into the task almost immediately upon arriving at the camp. In July he wrote to Lucien Febvre: ‘I am working flat-out on the 16th century; rather absurd at such a time but so consoling’ [‘chose absurde mais si douce’]. At the very moment that Bloch was confronting the ‘event’, Braudel was fleeing it—perhaps because, unlike Bloch, his confinement in a camp offered no immediate prospect of acting upon ‘events’. Looking back thirty years later on his development as an historian, Braudel was quite explicit about this relationship between contemporary history and his own choices as an historian:
My vision of history took on its definitive form without my being entirely aware of it … partly as a direct existential response to the tragic times I was passing through. All those events which poured in upon us from the radio and the newspapers of our enemies, or even the news from London which our clandestine receivers gave us—I had to outdistance, reject, deny, them. Down with events, especially vexing ones! I had to believe that history, destiny, was written at a much more profound level.2
Many historians in France at this time were, of course, not part of the Annales group. Political and diplomatic history was being written at the Sorbonne; contemporary history was being written by the group of historians working in the Committee for the History of the Second World War, which had been set up immediately after the Liberation. This Committee produced an important journal that was the first scholarly review anywhere entirely devoted to the history of the war. But although not entirely neglecting the defeat of 1940, most of the Committee’s research in the 1950s and 1960s was devoted to the study of the Resistance. In the 1960s, when General de Gaulle was in power, the attitude of official archivists was certainly not encouraging towards historians who might want to study the causes of the defeat. The Gaullist regime did not want to dwell on this dark episode in France’s history.
In the 1970s, after de Gaulle’s death, these official attitudes relaxed somewhat. French archival laws became more liberal after 1975, and historians were less prone to see their task as glorifying the Resistance. This, however, led them to focus not on 1940 but more and more on Vichy and collaboration. As one historian comments: ‘[B]y the mid-1970s there was scarcely a scholar in France with any interest in 1940.’3 The defeat still remained a touchy subject. Pierre le Goyet, a senior historian in the French Army Historical Service, had his career cut short because in 1975 he published his book on Gamelin without official authorization.
In the absence of major French studies on 1940, the field was left open to British and American writers. Three influential books appeared in English at almost exactly the same time: Guy Chapman’s Why France Collapsed, published in 1968, and Alistair Horne’s To Lose a Battle: France 1940 and William Shirer’s The Collapse of the Third Republic: An Inquiry into the Fall of France in 1940, both published in 1969. Of the three writers, Chapman, the author of several excellent books on French history, was the most knowledgeable about the political background of the Third Republic, but for various reasons he chose in his book to concentrate almost exclusively on the detailed military narrative of 1940. The result is a book that is both spare in style and dense in content, but one that never really ends up satisfactorily answering the question in his title: ‘why?’
Shirer, who had been an American foreign correspondent in both Berlin and Paris during the inter-war years, took a very different approach. His enormous book devotes hundreds of pages to the domestic political background in France. Written with the same light touch that made his history of the Third Reich a worldwide success, the book is extremely readable, but it is marred by a certain exasperated condescension at the ineptitude of the French and their creaky political institutions. Shirer has both the qualities and the limitations of a first-rate newspaper reporter. At times he almost seems to be suggesting that everything might have been all right if only France had been a bit more like America. The result is an unremittingly bleak account of the last years of the Third Republic, which is depicted as having been in a state of terminal decline: ‘its strength gradually sapped by dissension and division, by an incomprehensible blindness in foreign, domestic and military policy, by the ineptness of its leaders, the corruption of its press and by a feeling of growing confusion, hopelessness and cynicism in its people’. The French defeat was ‘a collapse of the army, the government, the morale of the people’.
Horne’s book is not entirely free of the same underlying assumptions. Previously the author of excellent books on the siege of Paris in 1870–1 and the Battle of Verdun in 1916, Horne spent much less time on the politics than Shirer. As a military narrative of the events of 1940, his book is one of the best ever written, but when he does discuss the social and political background of the 1930s, he is prone to a somewhat moralistic reading, in which the Third Republic appears as irremediably decadent. For example, his description of the French army leaders: ‘[L]ike the lotus-eating mandarins of Cathay behind the Great Wall, the French Army allowed itself to atrophy, to lapse into desuetude.’ Or his comments on the effects of the Popular Front: ‘a newly acquired instinct for disobedience, a disdain for authority of all forms … which was certainly to bear moral fruit in 1940’.4
The books of Shirer and Horne, both translated into French, had considerable influence in forming popular views of the Fall of France. Less widely known, because published only in the form of articles, were the writings of the Canadian historian John Cairns. Offering a critique of the inadequacies of the existing literature, as well as providing detailed studies of Franco-British relations in the war, Cairns pointed the way towards a more sophisticated understanding of the causes of the Fall of France. He argued that analysis of the event had to be separated from the polemics that had immediately followed it; that the Third Republic needed to be treated historically and not merely as the prelude to the débâcle; that the defeat must be put in the context of the Franco-British alliance and not seen as a purely French event; that even General Gamelin deserved to be considered by history ‘as fairly as it considers every commander on whom finally the sun did not shine’.5 In short, Cairns argued that it was necessary to rescue the history of the defeat from the view that France was terminally decadent in 1940.
In the end Cairns has never written the book on 1940 that his articles seemed to promise, but his work provided the agenda for a number of ‘revisionist’ works, which started to appear from the 1970s. These works can be called revisionist in the sense that they tried to escape from the paradigm of ‘decadence’ in their view of the Third Republic. For example, the Canadian historian Robert Young argued in 1978 that French policy in the 1930s was a rational attempt to match objectives with resources. In his view the French prepared intelligently for a long war that would exploit Allied economic superiority. The Israeli-American historian Jeffrey Gunsburg in 1979 offered a remarkably favourable assessment of French military planning in the 1930s. The British historian Martin Alexander in 1992 even assumed the seemingly hopeless task of trying to rehabilitate General Gamelin. Alexander argued that Gamelin had struggled to modernize the French army in the face of overwhelming difficulties. Even if he had to conclude that Gamelin was not entirely successful, Alexander’s purpose was to move beyond over-simplifying accounts of the period constructed around contrast between, on the one hand, a few visionaries like de Gaulle, and, on the other, a French High Command that was hidebound, conservative, and impervious to what was going on in the rest of Europe. Analysing the complex constraints—diplomatic, economic, and financial—under which the governments of the later Third Republic operated, all these historians concluded that France’s leaders did not perform badly.
These revisionists could not of course ultimately gainsay the fact that France was defeated. Some explanation needed to be offered for that fact. One approach, followed especially by Gunsburg, was to emphasize the Allied dimension of the defeat. For Gunsburg, however well the French planned their war and however competent their leadership, nothing could compensate for the fact that in 1940 their allies were able to offer them very little. Secondly, some historians argued that, despite the best efforts of French leaders in the 1930s, France did suffer from underlying political and economic weaknesses that proved insuperable. In other words, there were underlying structural causes of the French defeat, which required to be identified rather than passing inappropriate moral judgements on the state of France or of the French people as a whole. Thirdly, it was possible to argue that ultimately the defeat of 1940 was a primarily military phenomenon caused by military miscalculations which were only related tangentially, if at all, to the political and social background.
While these revisionist works began appearing outside France, most French historians remained remarkably uninterested by the events of 1940. There was, however, a growing interest in modern and contemporary history, and some of this did have important implications for the understanding of the defeat. In 1978 the august Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques published two volumes summarizing the proceedings of a conference devoted to the Daladier government of 1938–9. This was the first attempt to study Daladier’s government in detail and see it as an important moment in the recovery of French national self-confidence on the eve of the war rather than as just another episode in the game of Third Republic musical chairs. In 1982, the historian Robert Frankenstein published a very technical study of the way in which the French governments had financed rearmament in the 1930s. This book destroyed one old right-wing canard by showing that it was under the left-wing Popular Front that French rearmament had begun in earnest. More generally it showed what considerable efforts the Third Republic had made towards rearming France in the late 1930s.
Despite the revisionist implications of these works, the best-known book on the lead-up to the war to appear in France at this time took a very different approach. This was a 1979 study of French foreign policy in the 1930s by the doyen of French diplomatic historians, Jean-Baptiste Duroselle, whose title seemed to say it all: La Décadence. Where exactly Duroselle thought the ‘decadence’ lay was not entirely clear, but one theme of his study was that there had been a failure of political leadership in France. The sub-text of the book seems to be that France lacked a figure of the stature of Clemenceau (or indeed de Gaulle). For Duroselle the assassination of Louis Barthou in 1934 removed the last French politician with the necessary vision and will to stand up to Nazi Germany. In the same spirit, in 1980 Henri Michel, the leading historian of the Committee for the History of the Second World War, wrote of the defeat as ‘the outcome of a long process of disintegration affecting all the activities of the French nation’.
From the early 1980s onwards, important studies have been produced by the staff of the Historical Services of the various armed forces. These have added hugely to our understanding of the state of the armed forces on the eve of war, but, because military history continues to be looked down upon by most French university historians this work has not always had the wider impact it deserves or been integrated into a wider picture. The military history of the war has been somewhat ghettoized in France, and its practitioners are themselves not always sensitive to complexities of the political context. For example, a recent useful history of French tanks in 1930, produced under the aegis of the Army Historical Service, tells us that the Third Republic was characterized by ‘political instability (42 governments from 1920 to 1940) rendering a coherent defence policy vain’.6 In fact, despite the political instability of the 1930s, Daladier had been continuously Minister of Defence since 1936, irrespective of the government, and since he worked well with Gamelin, who had been in charge of the army since 1935, they provided a team that offered considerable continuity and coherence in defence planning for four crucial years. That they may have made many errors of judgement is another matter altogether.
One book that stood apart from any other (though interestingly it came from a historian writing from outside the academy) was the massive two-volume work by Jean-François Crémieux-Brilhac, entitled Les Français de l’an 40 [The French People in 1940] (1990). As a young man during the war, Crémieux-Brilhac had been with the Free French in London and his book was clearly driven by a personal need to understand the events of his own past. It contains pioneering research on the state of French morale in 1939/40, and superb analyses of the economics of rearmament and of the French political background. Crémieux-Brilhac’s study provides no simple answers, but it certainly offers a much more positive account of French morale than had any other author previously. For that reason alone, if one had to situate his book historiographically, it would be in the revisionist camp, but it is in reality too nuanced to be pigeon-holed in any way.
It remains a curious fact that the most extreme revisionist studies have come from outside France. The most recent example was the publication in 2001 of a book by the American historian Ernest May, robustly entitled Strange Victory. The burden of May’s argument is that militarily France was in all respects in a superior position to Germany in 1940—in computer simulations of the likely outcome France wins!—and the defeat was almost entirely attributable to the dramatic failure of the intelligence services to predict the location of the main German attack. But for this fatal error, France should and would have won. This may be a revisionist bridge too far, but the argument has some force.
Many French historians, despite Crémieux-Brilhac’s work, still tend somewhat lazily to fall back on crude stereotypes about the Third Republic, almost as if, as a profession, they have unconsciously assimilated the Gaullist idea that the Fifth Republic has finally cured France’s constitutional ills. This makes it harder for them to view the Third Republic in an entirely positive light. Thus, a recent much-read textbook by the French historian Serge Berstein invokes the ‘drama of the 1930s which in retrospect seems to have led the country inevitably to the tragedy of 1940’.7 A recent French collection of excellent scholarly essays on 1940 opens with the words: ‘[E]veryone knows that the conduct of the war of 1939—40 by a deliquescent Republic was disastrous.’8 The conduct of the war may have been disastrous, but is it really accurate to say that, except in retrospect, the Republic in 1939 was ‘deliquescent’?
The ancient historian Pierre Vidal-Naquet has written, in a different context, that ‘history is not tragedy. To understand historical reality, it is sometimes necessary not to know the end of the story.’9 It is certainly true that, when the outcome is known, the narrative tends to write itself too smoothly. In narratives of 1914, Joffre’s massive bulk functions as a symbol of his imperturbable moral solidity; in narratives of 1940, the fact that the ‘portly’ General Corap was so fat as to have difficulty getting into his car serves as a symbol of his sluggishness in responding to the German breakthrough. If we did not know the end of the story, the inter-war Third Republic could be depicted as an extraordinary success story. The reconstruction of the north-east of France during the 1920s was certainly one of the greatest achievements of any country in inter-war Europe. Despite the turmoil of the following decade, between 1934 and 1938 the Third Republic succeeded in seeing off the threat of Fascism, carrying out significant social reforms, and launching ambitious programmes of rearmament.
Clearly France was a very divided country in the 1930s, but writing the history of these years as an inexorable road to decline, leading inevitably from the Stavisky riots in Paris in February 1934 via Munich in September 1938 to the signing of the armistice at Rethondes in June 1940, fails to take account of the remarkable recovery that occurred in the twelve months following Munich. The reassertion of national self-confidence and governmental authority between September 1938 and September 1939 is every bit as striking as the rapid deterioration in France’s situation between 1930, when it was seen as the ‘île heureuse’ because the economic crisis had not yet struck, and 1932 when it was on the way to becoming the sick man of Europe. In 1938, Daladier was one of the most popular prime ministers France had ever had; by the outbreak of the war his government was already one of the longest lasting in the history of the Third Republic, the economy was recovering so rapidly that Paul Reynaud could justifiably talk of an ‘economic miracle’, and the rearmament effort was at last taking effect.
Although it might be true that the situation in 1939 was healthier than it had been a few years earlier, one is of course starting from a low base. What if the comparison is made not between 1939 and say 1934 but between 1939 and 1914? The result of such a comparison is less telling than one might expect: if for a moment we imagine a German victory in 1914—something that came close to happening—it would not be difficult to construct a political and social narrative that explained why that event was fated to occur. To begin with ‘morale’, many years ago the historian Jean-Jacques Becker demonstrated that despite the popular image of mass enthusiasm and crowds baying ‘To Berlin’, the prevalent mood in 1914 was sombre. The words which recur most often in the contemporary accounts are ‘consternation’, ‘tears’, ‘sadness’, and ‘resignation’. In cities, the mood was more bellicose, but they also witnessed the largest demonstrations against the war. Some kind of anti-war meeting was recorded in thirty-six departments; the biggest, in Montluçon, attracted some 30,000 participants. In the end this opposition came to nothing, and the proportion of those refusing the call-up was about 1.5 per cent—more or less the same as in 1940.10 Becker notes that even once the war was underway, in the first days French morale was ‘extremely fragile … reacting a bit like a weathervane to the gusts of wind’. As we have already noted when discussing the Exodus of 1940, morale reached a low point in August 1914 as the Germans advanced on Paris and the government fled to Bordeaux. As for the fighting qualities of the troops in 1914, it was claimed in the autumn that the XV Corps, made up mainly of meridional troops, had been extremely unreliable. Many monuments to defend the reputation of the XVth were subsequently erected in Provence. The reliability of this particular allegation is questionable but it is certain that there were some cases where morale was very suspect in 1914.
What about the political situation in 1914? One must not underestimate the extent of class conflict in the decade before 1914, which witnessed extremely high levels of strike activity. In the 1900s there was a trade union movement committed, at least in theory, to the doctrine of revolutionary syndicalism and to anti-militarism. Three-year military service, which had been introduced in 1913, was one of the main issues at the 1914 elections. The left-wing parties, which won those elections, had pledged to repeal that law and were only stopped from doing so by the outbreak of war. So frightened was the government of anti-war feeling on the left that it had a list of about 2,500 trade union activists and others who were to be arrested when war broke out.
As far as comparisons of political leadership are concerned, when Duroselle comments that the team of Lebrun—Daladier in 1939 was hardly comparable in quality to that of Poincaré–Clemenceau,11 he forgets that that team was not in place until November 1917, more than three years after the start of the war. In 1914, the premier was the ineffectual René Viviani, who was constantly on the edge of a nervous breakdown; Poincaré, the President, had only limited opportunity to influence policy; and Clemenceau refused to join any government that he did not lead. Daladier and Reynaud were figures of almost Napoleonic stature if compared to Viviani, whose main preoccupation during the whole month of July, when Europe headed towards the abyss, was the trial of Madame Joseph Caillaux, the wife of one of France’s leading politicians, who had shot a newspaper editor dead some months earlier. It is true that there was greater political unity in 1914 than in 1939, but there was also a lot of backbiting and infighting.
As far as relations between the Allies are concerned, we have already seen that structures of coordination were much more rapidly set up in 1939 than in 1914, when they barely existed at all. Of course such structures did not guarantee that in human terms relations would be cordial, and we have seen that often they were not. But the relations between General French, Commander of the BEF in 1914, and General Lanrezac in command of the French Second Army in 1914, were every bit as bad as those between Gort and Blanchard or Weygand in 1940. When French and Lanrezac first met on 17 August 1914, no interpreters were present in order to preserve secrecy, although each man could barely speak more than a few words in the other’s language. French tried to ask whether the Germans were going to cross the Meuse at Huy, but had trouble with this almost unpronounceable name, which needs almost to be whistled. Eventually he spat the word out, and an exasperated Lanrezac replied: ‘tell the Marshal that in my opinion the Germans have merely gone to the Meuse to fish’. This very much set the tone for the future.12 The ubiquitous Spears, who was acting as a liaison officer between the two armies, remarks of Lanrezac that he ‘invariably tended to prefer retreat to battle’—showing that his skills at acerbic commentary were already well honed. Although the Allies did learn to work with each other, relations between Haig and Pétain in 1918 were also atrocious, and Pétain had not forgotten this in 1940.
As far as military planning is concerned, Joffre’s infamous Plan XVII of 1914, which involved an offensive into Lorraine, was quite as disastrous as Plan D in 1940. Joffre completely misread the German intentions and was slower than Gamelin in 1940 to realize a terrible mistake had been made. The French General Staff’s understanding of the nature of modern warfare was every bit as bad in 1914 as in 1940, if not indeed worse. The British military writer Fuller described Joffre as a ‘tactically demented Napoleon’. It was not only Joffre who was at fault. The 24-year-old lieutenant de Gaulle wrote in September 1914: ‘[A]ll the wounded officers are agreed on the profound reasons for our early drawbacks … inadequacy … of too many of the divisional and brigadier-generals who did not know how to use the various arms in liaison with each other.’ Joffre had to sack so many generals in the summer that he gave the new word ‘limoger’ to the French language (the disgraced generals were exiled to Limoges, where, Spears tells us, ‘they were popularly supposed to while away the time by playing melancholy games of bridge together’). Finally, it should be noted that in 1914 France suffered from a serious inferiority in armaments, especially artillery. French military spending in 1938 was in real terms 2.6 times what it had been in 1913.
In short, France was less ready for war in 1914 than in 1939. But in 1914 there was time to adapt, thanks to the victory of the Marne. That victory can be explained by a German mistake—when von Kluck wheeled his armies to the east of Paris thus exposing his flank to counterattack—and possibly by the Russian alliance: Moltke diverted six army corps to the eastern front on 25 August 1914. In 1940 there was no Russian alliance and no German mistake—except Hitler’s ‘halt order’ of 24 May. This was a terrible miscalculation, which allowed the British to salvage a large part of the BEF, but did not much help the French.
Even if it is true that France was better prepared for war in 1914 than in 1939, it could certainly be argued that, whereas many deficiencies were quickly overcome in 1914, in 1939 France’s situation deteriorated during the Phoney War. These eight months saw political infighting, popular demoralization, and problems with armaments production. If a link is to be made between France’s political and social conditions and the defeat, it can be more convincingly done by looking not so much at the last years of the Third Republic in general as at the very specific conditions of the Phoney War. This has led the Canadian historian Talbot Imlay to offer a suggestive middle way position between the ‘decadence school’ and the ‘revisionists’. While rejecting the proposition that France was doomed to defeat once the war broke out, he argues that the defeat was not just the result of a series of military blunders. It resulted from the failure of France’s political leaders to seize their opportunities during the Phoney War. In this view France’s defeat was explained not so much by long-term structural deficiencies as by the conjunctural problems of the Phoney War. In the days preceding the German attack, the Reynaud government was mired in political crisis while the rearmament effort was stymied by the liberal economic choices that had been adopted after Munich. These choices were themselves imposed by the need to rally conservative support, but did not in fact prevent many conservatives from feeling distinctly lukewarm about the war. In short, political and economic factors pulled the government in contradictory directions. In this interpretation, Reynaud’s advocacy of schemes like the Caucasus operation were signs of desperation, an attempt to escape from his domestic dilemmas before they doomed France.
To reinforce his point, Imlay contrasts French inadequacies during the Phoney War with the more successful policies pursued by the British. The problem, however, about linking the defeat to France’s difficulties during the Phoney War is that it would in fact also be easy to highlight many similar difficulties in Britain during the Phoney War, or as many people revealingly called it, the ‘bore war’. If for a moment we imagine a second counterfactual—British defeat in 1940—there would be no difficulty in demonstrating the inevitability of this event.
To begin with propaganda, British performance in the first months of the war was generally agreed to be a disaster, quite as bad as Giraudoux’s efforts in France. The first Minister of Information, Lord Macmillan, was so ineffectual that he was replaced in January 1940 by Lord Reith, formerly the head of the BBC. Reith himself was no more successful and was moved in May 1940. A particularly bad impression was created by one government poster that proclaimed: ‘Your courage, your cheerfulness, your resolution will bring us victory’. The organization Mass Observation, which attempted to monitor public opinion, found that people resented the distinction between ‘your’ and ‘us’, as if ordinary people were being asked to sacrifice themselves for their leaders.13 When it came to propaganda, however, the greatest criticism was reserved for the BBC, whose broadcasts seemed stale and boring. Many people tuned into the Radio Hamburg broadcasts of William Joyce, popularly known as ‘Lord Haw Haw’, formerly a member of Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists. The Listener Research Department of the BBC found in January 1940 that 30 per cent of the population listened to his broadcasts. The rumours spread by people listening to Lord Haw Haw began to cause great concern to the Ministry of Information. By March the novelty had worn off, and only one-sixth of the population listened regularly to Lord Haw Haw, though only one-third said they never listened at all.14 For a while the phenomenon of Lord Haw Haw was as disconcerting to the British authorities as the equivalent case of Paul Ferdonnet broadcasting to France on Radio Stuttgart. If Ferdonnet has gone down in folk memory as a somewhat sinister figure and Lord Haw Haw as a faintly ridiculous one, that is due to what happened subsequently.
During the Phoney War, British morale was no better than French. One historian suggests that between September 1939 and May 1940 British morale was probably lower than at any other time during the war.15 Mass Observation concluded its study of the subject in 1940 by reporting:
A strong feeling in the country that the wretched war is not worth going on with … looking back we can suspect that Hitler has won News-Round 1 in this war. He’s been able to give his own people a tremendous success story—Poland—but he has also made millions of people bewildered. Bewilderment is the first step to suspicion.
The Socialist intellectual Beatrice Webb wrote in her diary on 5 October 1940: ‘Everyone I speak to seems utterly bewildered and downcast, far more so than in the early days of the last war. There is no war enthusiasm—at most, a dull acquiescence.’16 All this was encouraging to those groups lobbying for an end to the war. During the inter-war years there had been a strong feeling that Germany had been badly treated at Versailles, and traces of this remained in 1939. In the mid-1930s pro-German sentiment was stimulated by Hitler’s future Foreign Minister, Ribbentrop, who visited London first as an unofficial envoy and then as Ambassador. Ribbentrop attempted the same role of seduction in London as Otto Abetz in Paris. Unlike the charming Abetz, the vulgar Ribbentrop certainly put many members of the British elite off, but he was not entirely unsuccessful. He played both on fear of war and anti-Communism. Among fervent anti-Communists was Lord Rothermere, proprietor of the Daily Mail, who had started purchasing estates in central Hungary as a refuge in case of revolution. Rothermere visited Hitler in December 1934. Like Abetz, Ribbentrop exploited the sense of comradeship and hatred of war felt by war veterans. He organized a visit to Germany in July 1935 by leaders of the British Legion. Abetz’s Comité Franco-Allemande had its equivalent in the Deutsch-Englische Gesellschaft. More important than this was the Anglo-German Fellowship founded by the merchant banker Ernest Tennant, another friend of Ribbentrop, which had quite a bit of support among businessmen.
Among the many prominent British figures who visited Hitler in the 1930s were the pacifist Lord Allen of Hurtwood (January 1935), the pacifist Liberal peer Lord Lothian (January 1935 and April 1935), the former Prime Minister, David Lloyd George (1936), the former Labour leader George Lansbury (April 1937), and the Duke and Duchess of Windsor (October 1937). Two particularly fervent admirers of Hitler were the Duke of Buccleuch and Lord Brockett, both former conservative MPs, who attended Hitler’s 50th birthday celebrations in 1939.
By 1939 most of these people had certainly lost their illusions about Hitler, apart from ultra-pacifists or hardcore Nazi sympathizers. The latter included The Anglo-German Review, edited by the mutilé de guerre, C. E. Carroll, with a circulation of about 12,000; the Link, founded in 1937 by Admiral Sir Barry Domvile, a former director of Naval Intelligence, and having about 4,300 members in 1939; the National Socialist League, founded by William Joyce and John Beckett, both former members of the BUF. Even more obscure were the British People’s Party, founded in April 1939; the Nordic League—one of whose leaders declared in 1939 that he saw his mission as ‘spreading the Gospel of Hate of the Jews’; and the Liberty Restoration League with the Duke of Wellington as its President. In May 1939 a speaker at a British People’s Party meeting asked: ‘Why should British lives be sacrificed to prevent Danzig, a German city, going back to Germany?’17 It would clearly be absurd to inflate the importance of these fanatical groups, but it is worth remembering that even in France most of the most extreme pro-Nazis had repented or fallen silent after March 1939. If Marcel Déat’s article ‘Mourir pour Danzig’ has left more traces in the history books than the speeches of the British People’s Party, it was because of Déat’s subsequent activities during the war. At the time the article fell largely on deaf ears and only served to demonstrate Déat’s isolation.
A number of British pro-peace activists continued to lobby during the Phoney War. They were particularly active amongst members of the House of Lords and included the Duke of Westminster, Lord Londonderry, the Duke of Buccleuch, Lord Tavistock (who succeeded to the title of the Duke of Bedford in 1940), Lord Redesdale (father of the notorious Mitford sisters, one of whom, Diana, was married to Oswald Mosley, and another of whom, Unity, fell in love with Hitler and tried to kill herself in 1940), Lord Brocket, Lord Mottistone, the Earl of Galloway, and the Earl of Mar. These were all figures of the right, or even the extreme right, some of whom had been in the Anglo-German Fellowship or the Link. There were also peers inspired more by a commitment to peace than attraction to Fascism. They included the former Labour MP Lord Arnold, the former Labour MP Lord Ponsonby, and the lifelong Labour pacifist Lord Noel-Buxton. On 11 September a meeting of anti-war peers took place at the house of the Duke of Westminster; a meeting a week later was also attended by some MPs. Just as Pétain’s first Vichy governments had more representatives of the military than any French administration since Marshal Soult in 1832, any equivalent administration in Britain would probably have contained more peers than any other government since the Duke of Grafton’s in 1776.
There were also a few right-wing pro-peace figures in the House of Commons. Several of them were members of the secret Right Club, formed by the MP Captain Archibald Ramsay in May 1939 to cleanse conservatism of Jewish control. This group had eleven MPs. More significant than these right-wing extremists was the Parliamentary Peace Aims Group, organized by the maverick Labour MP Richard Stokes. Consisting of about thirty MPs, mostly Labour, and ten peers, the group met weekly. It pressed the government to seek out the possibilities of a negotiated peace. There was much coming and going between these people and intermediaries who claimed to be in contact with moderates in the German government. Stokes, who was in Istanbul in January 1940, had a meeting with Germany’s Ambassador, von Papen. Tavistock had a meeting with Halifax in January and claimed to have secret contact with the German leaders via the German Embassy in Dublin. Others had contacts with Goering’s agent Prince Max von Hohenlohe in Switzerland. Another indefatigable mediator was the Swedish businessman Birger Dahlerus who also claimed privileged access to Goering. Alexander Cadogan described Dalherus as ‘like a wasp at a picnic—one can’t beat him off’.18
Wasps are rarely fatal, and Cadogan’s dismissive comment shows that the government did not take any of this too seriously. None of the pro-peace peers were first-rank, or even third-rank, political figures. They were associated with extreme right organizations, which had almost no following in the country. Cadogan argued that there was no reason to stop the ‘halfwit’ Lord Tavistock publishing a pamphlet outlining his views in February 1940 since the best way of discrediting his views was to allow him to express them. As for those in the Commons favouring negotiations, they were a small and isolated group. Nonetheless they cannot be dismissed as entirely without importance, since there was certainly some audience in the country for the idea of conciliation. Pacifism still had a considerable constituency on the outbreak of war. The biggest pacifist organization, the Peace Pledge Union, had about 136,000 members in September 1939. One of its leading members was the feminist and Socialist Vera Brittain, who remained an indefatigable propagandist for pacifist ideas throughout the war. She wrote a weekly ‘Letter to Peace Lovers’, which had 2,000 subscribers. On 7 October 1939 George Bernard Shaw wrote a letter to The New Statesman advocating peace (to the horror of Marc Bloch in France). This gave rise to considerable correspondence over the following weeks. In the next issue, 17 intellectuals, including Clive Bell, Vera Brittain, and John Middleton Murry, signed a letter of support. Members of the National Peace Council, including the very popular philosopher Cyril Joad, the socialist intellectual G. D. H. Cole, the actress Sybil Thorndike, and the actor John Gielgud, wrote to Chamberlain urging him to ‘give sympathetic consideration’ to a peace proposal sponsored by neutral powers. Pacifist opinion also had support from a number of leading clergymen including the Bishops of Chichester, Southwark, and Birmingham. Opposition to the war not only came from pacifists, however. The influential military expert Basil Liddell Hart believed in March 1940 that Britain should ‘come to the best possible terms as soon as possible’; there was ‘no chance of avoiding defeat’. To this end Liddell Hart opposed the war, fearing that a total German defeat would result in Soviet domination of the Continent and feeling that Hitler was essentially a reasonable statesman.19
The MP Harold Nicolson, an ardent supporter of the war, was disquieted by the number of defeatist colleagues whom he encountered. He detected an atmosphere of ‘disillusion and grumbling’, which he compared unfavourably with the mood in France. Visiting France at the end of October 1939, he commented, having met numerous leading French politicians: ‘[A]ll these conversations convince me that we are much too defeatist in London and that these people are absolutely confident of victory.’20 In the light of subsequent events Nicolson’s remark seems ironic, even absurd, but in fact the number of French députés actively lobbying for peace was not much larger than that of British M.P., doing likewise: there were about fifteen members of the ‘parliamentary liaison committee’ against the war and twenty-two had signed the motion on 3 September calling for a Comité Secret to discuss the issue of war credits. Of course figures like Flandin and Laval had greater weight than the members of the Peace Aims Group, and the peace faction in France had supporters within the government itself, like de Monzie and Bonnet. But even in Britain there were figures of political significance who, while not part of the peace faction, would have been ready to offer it support in the right circumstances. The most important of these was Lloyd George, who had been greatly impressed by Hitler when he met him in 1936. In October 1939 Lloyd George spoke in favour of negotiations with Germany in the House of Commons. After this he remained silent, but the Peace Aims Group kept in touch with him, and he was biding his time. In January 1940, he told the newspaper editor Hugh Cudlipp ‘we shall lose the war’.21
Another figure who seemed ready at one stage to play the peace card was the press baron Lord Beaverbrook, who on 3 March invited to dinner three leading peace campaigners from the left-wing Independent Labour Party (ILP) and told them that he was prepared to support their peace appeal. The Foreign Office, which heard about this, reported that Beaverbrook was ‘believed to be under the impression that there is a widespread feeling in the country in favour of a negotiated peace’. It was most embarrassing to Beaverbrook when this was revealed in 1941: by then he was a member of Churchill’s War Cabinet.
As in France, there were also members of the government whose commitment to the war was somewhat half-hearted. Among these one could probably put the Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, himself whose initial reaction to Hitler’s occupation of Prague had been to continue appeasement. It was the intervention of his Foreign Secretary, Lord Halifax, which convinced him of the necessity of abandoning the policy. But in the months leading up to the declaration of war he and his close adviser Sir Horace Wilson had clearly not entirely given up hope that a final concession might be enough to stop Hitler. Another member of the government distinctly unhappy about going to war was the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State at the F.O., R. A. Butler. In July he was arguing that the British should use their influence to make the Poles more amenable to German demands. In March 1940, when Roosevelt’s envoy Sumner Welles was in Europe to explore the possibility of peace, Butler told the Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax that he would not ‘exclude a truce if Mussolini, the Pope and Roosevelt would come in’. Halifax replied: ‘You are very bold … but I agree with you.’22
On 10 May, Neville Chamberlain was replaced as Prime Minister by Winston Churchill. Surely this is the point at which the comparisons with France must cease? Churchill was, history tells us, that great war leader France so sorely lacked. He, not Paul Reynaud, turned out to be the Clemenceau of 1940. As Daladier’s biographer Elizabeth de Réau comments: ‘Paul Reynaud did not succeed in creating a real War Cabinet, comparable to that which Churchill was to construct a little later.’23 But there is a danger, yet again, of allowing one’s perceptions to be clouded by retrospective knowledge.
In 1940 Churchill’s position was far from secure. Like Reynaud, he was a maverick, distrusted for his impulsiveness and ambition; like Reynaud, he was in effect a man without a party. Nowhere was the suspicion of Churchill greater than within the Conservative Party. ‘The Tories don’t trust Winston,’ as Lord Davidson wrote to Stanley Baldwin. He was distrusted for his ‘disorderly mind’ (Halifax), his ‘inability to concentrate on business’ (Chamberlain), his tendency to be ‘rambling and romantic and sentimental and temperamental’ (Cadogan). The view of Chamberlain’s Private Secretary, John Colville, was that ‘Winston will be a complete failure’. There was particular distrust of his entourage, ‘gangsters’ as they were commonly described. Chamberlain’s Parliamentary Private Secretary Alec Dunglass—the future Prime Minister Alec Douglas Home—felt that the ‘kind of people surrounding Winston are the scum’. The conservative MP ‘Chips’ Channon, a Chamberlain loyalist, wrote in his diary that the replacement of Chamberlain by Churchill made 10 May 1940 ‘perhaps the darkest day in English history’. At the end of that day he joined Butler, Dunglass, and Colville in drinking a champagne toast to the ‘king over the water’ [i.e. Chamberlain]. On the day Churchill arrived in the House of Commons for the first time as Prime Minister, the Conservative cheers for Chamberlain were much louder than for him. Throughout May Churchill continued to get a stony reception from the Conservative benches. This started to create such a bad impression, especially among American journalists, that party officials set about organizing a more enthusiastic reception for him.24
For these reasons, when he came to power Churchill was in far too weak a political position to be able to dispense with the services of the former ‘appeasers’. His government was not dissimilar in composition to its predecessor, apart from the addition of Labour members. Chamberlain and Halifax were among the five members of his War Cabinet. The only prominent figure to be sacked was the Chamberlain loyalist Sir Samuel Hoare—famous as the signatory of the Hoare—Laval pact in 1935—who was sent to be Ambassador in Madrid. This pleased Cadogan, who saw Hoare as the ‘Quisling of England’. He took comfort from the fact that there were lots of ‘Germans and Italians in Madrid and therefore a good chance of [Hoare] being murdered!’25
Churchill’s position was not strong enough to prevent a major debate raging in the Cabinet between 26 and 28 May over the possibility of approaching Italy to sound out German peace terms. The dramatic background to these discussions was the failure of Weygand’s plan for an Allied counterattack. There were five meetings of the British Cabinet to discuss this issue between 26 and 28 May. Halifax argued in favour of discovering what terms the Germans might be willing to offer: ‘if … we could obtain terms which did not postulate the destruction of our independence, we should be foolish if we did not accept them’. The discussions became acrimonious enough for Halifax to consider resigning. He thought that ‘Winston talked the most frightful rot’.
In the end Halifax’s proposal was rejected: the French were told that there would be no approach to Italy. Churchill succeeded in persuading the Cabinet that Halifax’s proposal was a ‘slippery slope’. It would be wrong, however, to portray the debates within the British government as pitting a ‘defeatist’ Halifax, eager to make peace, against a ‘resolute’ Churchill, prepared to fight on to the bitter end. In the context of the events taking place in France it would have been irresponsible for the government not at least to consider its future position towards the war. In opposing Halifax, Churchill himself did not reject the prospect of one day approaching Germany about peace terms: ‘[A] time might come when we felt that we had to put an end to the struggle, but the terms would not then be more mortal than those offered to us now.’ Churchill argued that, once Britain had shown that it was ready to fight on, and had done so, it would be in a better position to sue for terms than in its present condition of weakness. For Halifax, on the other hand, it might be possible to obtain more favourable terms before the total collapse of France than after it. No more than Churchill was he prepared to accept any terms that would compromise Britain’s ‘independence’. But he defined ‘independence’ in possibly less rigorous terms.
Even Churchill, however, was prepared to allow ‘a restoration of German colonies and the overlordship of Central Europe’, but ‘never’ a ‘German domination of Europe’. According to Chamberlain, Churchill went as far as to say that ‘if we could get out of this jam by giving up Malta and Gibraltar and some African colonies he would jump at it’. But he did not believe that this was the case. Nonetheless, although Churchill would not accept the idea of asking for terms, if he were told what they were, he ‘would be prepared to consider them’. The difference between Halifax and Churchill was therefore not as stark as might be imagined in the light of Churchill’s adoption in January 1943 of the policy of ‘unconditional surrender’. That was a long way ahead in 1940.26
Of course it may be that Churchill in 1940 was adopting a more moderate position as a tactic to keep Halifax’s support. It may equally be that Halifax was underplaying his own commitment to peace in order to win the Cabinet over to the idea of negotiations in the hope that once the government had embarked down this road it would find it hard to turn back: this was precisely the insidious strategy employed by Chautemps when he proposed that Reynaud agree to seek the terms of an armistice. Another view is that Halifax only supported the idea of peace feelers in order to avoid giving the French any grounds for recrimination.
Whatever the tactical undercurrents in the debate, one thing is certain: the idea of exploring the possibility of peace was seriously on the agenda within the British government at the end of May 1940, although it was never again discussed at such a high level or so intensively. For most of 1940 Churchill was still viewed with suspicion by his own party. On the day he delivered his famous ‘finest hour’ speech to the Commons, the Labour MP and minister Hugh Dalton noted: ‘[I]t is noticeable how much more loudly he is cheered by the Labour Party than by the general body of Tory supporters. The relative silence of the latter is regarded by some as sinister.’27 After Dunkirk there was a press campaign against the so-called ‘guilty men’, the former appeasers, many of whom were still in the government. Churchill was worried about this. Summoning various press lords, he told them to stop the campaign because ‘if he trampled on these men as he could trample on them, they would set themselves against him, and in such internecine strife lay the Germans’ best chance of victory’.28 Even admirers of Churchill had their doubts about him. Among these was the press proprietor Cecil King, who noted his disappointment on hearing a radio speech by Churchill on 18 June: ‘a few stumbling sentences … the poorest possible effort on an occasion when he should have produced the finest speech of his life’.29
Churchill felt vulnerable enough to try to tempt Lloyd George into his government in order to stop his becoming a focus for discontent. There were rumours at the end of June that Lloyd George was hoping to become the British Pétain. But Lloyd George, who remarked to one visitor in June that Hitler was the ‘greatest figure in Europe since Napoleon, and probably greater than him’, rebuffed all offers. He told his secretary in October: ‘I shall wait until Winston is bust.’ Even within the government there were still those who had not entirely given up hope of possibly extricating the country from the war. On 17 June Butler had a conversation with Björn Prytz, the Swedish Minister, in London. Prytz reported him as saying that ‘no opportunity for reaching a compromise peace would be neglected’, and that ‘no “diehards” would be allowed to stand in the way in this connection’. He also passed on a message, supposedly from Halifax, that ‘common sense and not bravado’ would govern British policy. Butler’s off-the-cuff comments were taken more seriously than he had intended, and the Foreign Office was quickly forced to assure the Swedish government that there was no change of policy by the British government. Churchill warned Halifax that Butler’s ‘odd language’ had given the Swedes a ‘strong impression of defeatism’. Butler himself offered his resignation, agreeing that he ‘should have been more cautious’.30
Butler’s protestations of good faith were accepted, and it is likely that his remarks had been to some extent distorted. Butler was only a junior member of the government, but at the start of July, when the Pope was making suggestions about peace, Cadogan noted that ‘silly old H[alifax] was evidently hankering after them’. In Madrid Hoare was reported to be ‘forcefully arguing for a compromise’ at the start of July. After a speech by Hitler on 19 July, Lord Lothian, the Ambassador in Washington, a long-standing advocate of appeasement, took it upon himself to find out, through the intermediary of an American Quaker, what the German peace terms might be. On 22 July he was reported as claiming that the German terms were ‘most satisfactory’.31
Churchill, however, rejected any talk of this kind, and towards the end of the year his political position became stronger. In the autumn Neville Chamberlain was diagnosed with cancer, and Churchill replaced him as leader of the Conservative Party. The sudden death of Lord Lothian in December gave Churchill the opportunity to remove Halifax from the government by sending him to Washington (having first offered the post to Lloyd George). Halifax was replaced as Foreign Secretary by the longstanding ‘anti-appeaser’ Anthony Eden. Victories against the Italians in North Africa at the end of 1940 further bolstered Churchill’s confidence. When Lloyd George made a somewhat defeatist speech in Parliament in May 1941, Churchill felt no need to conciliate him. He compared Lloyd George’s words to the ‘sort of speech with which I imagine the illustrious Marshal Pétain might well have enlivened the closing days of M. Paul Reynaud’s cabinet’.
If 1940 was Churchill’s finest hour, then, it had also been his most difficult. It was only in retrospect that it took on such a glorious hue thanks to the victorious Battle of Britain. The myth of Churchill was a result of victory, not its cause. Its main cause was geographical: the English Channel was a major obstacle to any successful invasion. Nor had Hitler made any serious plans to surmount that obstacle by preparing an invasion plan. After the defeat of France, which came faster than he expected, Hitler had believed that the British would sue for peace. It was only on 16 July that he issued a directive for the invasion, code-named Operation Sealion. Since the army had no landing-craft, the main role in preparing the ground for the invasion rested with the Luftwaffe. But the Luftwaffe had not been designed with a view to launching a separate air offensive. The odds were therefore stacked against the Germans in a battle to which Hitler was only half-committed. Already his thoughts were turning to an invasion of Russia. On 17 September, Hitler decided to postpone the invasion of Britain indefinitely.
That is not to say that Churchill’s leadership played no part in the victory. As soon as he became Prime Minister, he succeeded in invigorating the government and inspiring the population in a way Reynaud signally failed to do in France. In August 1940 a poll showed that 88 per cent of the population approved of his leadership. Even so, one must be wary of investing Churchill’s rhetoric with an aura that it did not necessarily have at the time. Of that gravelly voice, which seems in retrospect to embody the British fighting spirit of 1940, Halifax commented that it ‘oozes with port, brandy and the chewed cigar’.32 As for the effect of those speeches on the population at large, only five of the speeches Churchill made as Prime Minister in 1940 were broadcast and therefore heard directly by the people. Most of them were only heard in the House of Commons. It is true that Churchill’s rhetoric, which only a few months earlier had seemed old-fashioned and ridiculous, even to his admirers, suddenly suited the national mood in a way it had never done before, but in the unlikely event that the Germans had succeeded in their invasion, Churchill’s stirring words about fighting on the beaches would have taken on the same retrospective absurdity as Reynaud’s often mocked rhetoric of 1940: ‘[W]e will win because we are the strongest.’ It is in the light of defeat that Reynaud’s rhetoric seems so hollow.
The effect of Churchill’s speeches on morale is hard to calculate, as indeed is the impact of morale on victory. Public opinion can change very fast. British propaganda turned the Dunkirk evacuation into a kind of victory, and succeeded in hiding the fact that the mood of the returning soldiers was initially so poor that many of the men threw their equipment out of the windows of the trains that met them on their return to Britain. In monitoring morale throughout the war, the Ministry of Information concluded that it rose and fell according to the level of military success. Indeed morale continued to cause problems in the British army throughout the war. General Adam, visiting Italy in January 1945, found senior commanders ‘obsessed with the problem of desertion’. Two British army training centres found in 1942 that most of the recruits ‘lack enthusiasm and interest in the war and betray ignorance of the issues involved in it’. British soldiers who underwent Stuka bombardment for the first time in 1940 were no less alarmed than the French had been. One infantryman wrote: ‘an attack by Stukas … cannot be described, it is entirely beyond the comprehension of anyone who has not experienced it. The noise alone strikes such terror that the body becomes paralysed, the still active mind is convinced that each and every aircraft is coming for you personally.’ In short, morale, in the British army as in the French, was volatile, and varied from unit to unit according to circumstances. One must resist the temptation to draw unwarranted general conclusions about the state of French—or British—society from so fluctuating a phenomenon.33
Neither of these counterfactual speculations—France losing in 1914 or Britain losing in 1940—must be pushed too far. The political divisions of France in 1939 were certainly much deeper than in 1914 or than Britain in 1940. The loyalty with which Chamberlain acted towards his successor Churchill stands in striking contrast to Daladier’s petty behaviour towards Reynaud. The conflict between Reynaud and Daladier was nothing compared to the hatred which existed towards Blum in conservative circles. This made it impossible for Reynaud to consider taking Blum into his government, although the relations between the two men were very good. In mid-April 1940 the British Ambassador, Campbell, was embarrassed by the fact that on a visit to Paris Churchill had dined tête-à-tête with Blum: ‘certain circles in Paris bitterly resent the fuss we make of Blum’. Campbell himself would have liked to see more of Blum but had ‘to abstain since it is said in the salons which need to be kept sweet that the Embassy is very “red”’. A few weeks later Campbell reported that there was talk of creating a government of national unity made up of all former premiers but it came up against the ‘Blum problem’: ‘it is extraordinary how one bumps up against this problem at every turn!’.34 This made it very difficult for any leader to create the kind of political and social consensus that Churchill was able to achieve after May 1940.
The entry of leading Labour ministers into Churchill’s government was to underpin this consensus and contributed importantly to the later successes of the British war economy. But even here contrasts between the two countries must not be drawn too starkly. Even if the French working class was as sullen and alienated as seems to have been the case, it is difficult to prove that this had any effect on production. In some respects the French war economy worked less well than the British one, but Reynaud’s anti-inflation policies when Finance Minister were courageous and sensible. Many of the French production problems in the Phoney War were caused by the mistakes made at mobilization, and the effects of these were gradually being overcome. There is no single ‘right’ way to run a war economy. Both countries were feeling their way towards the most effective policies.
25. Blum was the subject of violent attacks in the right-wing press. This one appeared in the right-wing paper Gringoire on 18 January 1938. Under the title ‘Invasion’, it depicts Blum as a piper attracting an invasion of Communist and Socialist rats into France
But even if one concedes that the French war effort did run into problems during the Phoney War, it is difficult to link these directly to the kind of defeat that France suffered in 1940. If they had not been overcome, these problems might well have proved fatal, but we cannot know this since before it could dig in for the long war, France lost the short one. Even those who believe there was something fundamentally wrong with France in 1940 are hard put to show how this related to the short six weeks of fighting. They can argue only that France was like the victim of a violent murder who is subsequently found to have been suffering from an incurable disease, but they cannot show that the disease was the cause of the death in the form it took place. The defeat of France was first and foremost a military defeat—so rapid and so total that these other factors did not have time to come into play.
One way of answering the question why France lost is to examine German strengths rather than concentrate on French weaknesses. Taking a long-term perspective it is clear that France was a country in relative decline since the mid-nineteenth century, being rapidly outstripped by Germany both economically and demographically. Perhaps then we should be asking not why France lost in 1940—or 1870–1—but why it won in 1914–18. As the French diplomat Jules Cambon confided to a colleague in 1921: ‘[Y]oung man, remember this: in the immediate future the difficulty will be to slide France reasonably smoothly into the ranks of the second-rank powers to which she belongs.’35
France won in 1918 only thanks to its allies. Its leaders knew that this victory was a provisional and artificial one. Marshal Foch presciently described the Armistice of 1918 as a twenty-year truce. The Treaty of Versailles represented an attempt to embed France’s temporary post-war dominance into something permanent despite the deeper structural trends of demography and economic power. If the situation unravelled even faster than the French had feared, it was because the British (and Americans) refused to underwrite the French position, and because France’s finances were so badly undermined by the war. The value of the franc was falling rapidly in the first half of the 1920s. These two factors came together in 1923–4, when the French were unable to exploit their ‘victory’ over Germany in the Ruhr because they found themselves dependent on British and American loans to shore up their currency. The occupation of the Ruhr had merely succeeded in revealing France’s weakness. French predominance in Europe was already over by 1924.
In the second half of the 1920s French governments made a virtue of necessity and embraced reconciliation with Germany. However idealistic the language in which Briand couched his policy, he was driven by realism: ‘I make the foreign policy of our birth-rate’, he once observed. Many of those in the 1930s who advocated appeasement of Germany and disengagement from Eastern Europe believed themselves to be the authentic heirs of Briand. But there was a point at which reconciliation became abdication, and that was a choice that French leaders and the French people, in their majority, were not prepared to accept. What is remarkable about France in 1939 is not the alleged defeatism and pessimism, which many observers claim to have detected in retrospect, but on the contrary the extraordinary confidence of the French political and military elites that it could win a war, and that to survive as a great power it had to do so. As Gamelin wrote to Daladier in December 1938: ‘[T]he question is whether France wishes to renounce its status as a European Great Power and abandon to Germany hegemony over not only central but all of eastern Europe.’36
France’s confidence was buttressed by the fact that the country had at last secured a British alliance. It was believed that in the long term the superior combined resources of the Allies would prevail as they had in 1918. In fact in the long run it could be said that this strategy was vindicated. The Allies had planned for a defeat for Germany in, probably, 1943; it came in 1945. When de Gaulle went to London in 1940 and declared that the defeat of France was only the first round in what was in reality a world war, he was remaining faithful to the entire Allied strategy. In this perspective, the Battle of France can be seen not as an episode disconnected from the war that followed, but as part of that larger conflict. In the Battle of France the Germans lost 1,428 planes—28 per cent of the total—and this significantly weakened the Luftwaffe before the Battle of Britain. What the Allies had not expected was that while they were preparing to win the long war, France would lose a short one. To some extent that defeat can be blamed on the deficiencies of Allied coordination—between Britain and France, between France, Britain, and Belgium. For example, the French believed that the Belgians were better prepared to defend the Gembloux gap than was in fact the case. Coordination between the BEF and the French was execrable once the retreat had begun. The key issue, however, was not lack of coordination, but the simple fact that the British could only offer very limited help in the early stages. Ironside commented on 17 May: ‘I found that Greenwood was inclined to say “these bloody gallant Allies”. I told him that we had depended upon the French army. That we had made no Army and that therefore it was not right to say “these bloody Allies”. It was for them to say that of us.’37
That does not mean that the French reproaches against the British were all well founded. The British made a considerable contribution in the air, and did as much as was possible while retaining what was necessary for the security of the British Isles. The British lost a total of almost 1,000 aircraft in the Battle of France. And even if they had been willing to sacrifice even more, at the risk of jeopardizing their security for the sake of the alliance, there is no chance that this would have significantly changed the outcome of the battle. Despite German air superiority, the Battle of France was not won or lost in the air. As Air Chief Marshal Barratt, commander of the AASF, put it: ‘the RAF could not win the war if the French infantry had lost it.’
Why did the French infantry lose it? Was German military strength so overwhelming, German military prowess so superior, that there was nothing France could have done about it? There are, it must be said, many myths about Germany in 1940, beginning with the elusive notion of ‘Blitzkrieg’. The myth runs as follows: Blitzkrieg (lightning war) was a strategy conceived to allow Germany to overcome its industrial inferiority in relation to the combined economic strength of the Allies by winning a series of successive lightning knockout military victories. Another advantage of this method was to make it unnecessary for Hitler to shift the German economy onto a total war footing, something he was reluctant to do for political and social reasons. But in the view of the German historian Karl-Heinz Frieser, who has most recently and exhaustively studied the notion of Blitzkrieg, there is no validity in this account.38 Blitzkrieg in fact emerged in a rather haphazard way from the experience of the French campaign, whose success surprised the Germans as much as the French. Why otherwise did the High Command try on various occasions, with Hitler’s backing, to slow the panzers down, finally doing so on 24 May with the Haltbefehl? The victory in France came about partly because the German High Command temporarily lost control of the battle. The decisive moment in this process was Guderian’s decision to move immediately westward on 14 May, the day after the Meuse crossing, wrenching the whole of the rest of the army along behind him.
Germany’s success in France did lead to the adoption of Blitzkrieg at a politico-strategic level in 1941 with the invasion of Russia. Thus, to quote Frieser: ‘[T]he [French] campaign was an improvised but successful Blitzkrieg while that against Russia was a planned but unsuccessful one.’ Blitzkrieg, at a politico-strategic level, was a backward-looking denial of the realities of modern industrial warfare. The war as a whole ended up more like the one that the Allies had expected to fight in 1940 than the one the Germans hoped to fight in 1941.
Where the idea of ‘Blitzkrieg’ did inform the campaign of 1940 was at the tactical and operational level. It derived from the ‘infiltration tactics’ pioneered by the Germans in 1918 as a way of breaking out of the stalemate of the Western Front. After a short and intensive artillery bombardment, groups of specially trained assault units or ‘storm-troopers’ had been sent, under cover of smoke and shells, to infiltrate the enemy lines, bypassing pockets of resistance if necessary. This tactic proved extremely successful, but insufficient mobility made it impossible to exploit the advantage gained sufficiently rapidly. In the 1920s, Guderian and others worked on how to overcome this problem by using modern military technology such as tanks, planes, and radio communications. One key element in their thinking was the need to develop close cooperation between different arms, especially between air and land forces.
Another source of Blitzkrieg was the writings of British military theorists like Fuller and Liddell Hart, who argued that modern technology could be used for the ‘strategy of indirect approach’. The idea was to use armoured force to penetrate deep into the enemy rear in order to destroy its command and control systems. Instead of a clash of front-line troops aiming for a battle of annihilation, the objective would be to hit at the enemy’s ‘brain’. The campaign of 1940 certainly seems in many respects to have been a textbook example of Blitzkrieg in this sense, although it is unclear to what extent Guderian had been influenced, if at all, by the ‘strategy of indirect approach’. Or was he more like Molière’s M. Jourdain who wrote prose without knowing it? But one must not exaggerate the novelty of all the German methods in 1940. Apart from the crossing of the Meuse at Sedan, there were few, if any, examples where close air support—the combination of Stukas and Panzers—was decisive (it played no part in Rommel’s crossing at Dinant where the Luftwaffe did not play an important role). And even at Sedan the initial success was, of course, due not to the tanks—which did not start to cross until the early hours of 14 May—but to the professionalism of a small number of infantry units, and to the inspirational leadership of a few infantry commanders like Balck and Rubarth.
Nonetheless one must not underestimate the vulnerability of the Germans in 1940. The German plan could so easily have gone wrong. During the crossing of the Ardennes, there were major traffic problems and infantry units got tangled up with one another. The Germans were very lucky that the French were so blissfully unaware of this and did not take the opportunity to bomb them, increasing the chaos. The German newsreels of the period depict young, bronzed, disciplined troops marching through the cornfields of France like conquering demigods. These images are so powerful that it is all too easy to characterize Germany as a ruthlessly efficient and militarized society in which every sinew was strained for war, with an imaginative and forward-thinking military command, and highly modernized armed forces. And yet almost all of these judgements are highly questionable.
It is a commonplace among historians of Nazi Germany that the regime’s administration was chaotic and inefficient, not least in the organization of rearmament. Although the Germans had a considerable head start over the Allies in this respect, by 1940 the French armaments industry was in many areas out-producing the German. As far as the modernized army is concerned, the truth is that the German army in 1940 was more dependent on horse-drawn transport than the French one. Only sixteen of the German army’s 103 divisions were fully motorized; and each infantry division required between 4,000 and 6,000 horses to transport its supplies from the railhead to the troops. Most of the German tanks at the start of the war were still light Panzer Is and IIs, and many of these had broken down during the Polish campaign. As for the cooperation between air and ground forces, in fact only one flying unit of the Luftwaffe was dedicated to this purpose, although the Stukas, which were intended for a wider range of operations, could be called upon to play this role. As far as the forward-thinking High Command is concerned, there were many high-level German commanders who were extremely worried by the audacity of commanders like Guderian.
What about German morale? William Shirer, at that time a correspondent in Berlin, noted in the days leading up to the declaration of war that people in the city looked ‘dejected … grim and silent’. He detected ‘almost a defeatism discernible in the people’. On 31 August he wrote: ‘[E]verybody against the war. People talking openly.’ And two days later: ‘I walked in the streets. On the faces of the people astonishment, depression.… No excitement, no hurrahs, no cheering, no throwing of flowers, no war fever.… There is not even any hate for the French and British.’ Another observer on the same day saw small groups of Germans standing silently ‘with faraway expressions’. These impressionistic observations are supported by the reports of the German security police between 1933 and 1939, which suggested that the Germans were ‘not in an aggressive warlike mood but full of resignation, fear of war and longing for peace’. At a government press conference on 1 September 1939 journalists were instructed that there were to be no headlines containing the word ‘war’ in order to avoid panic in the population.39 None of this is surprising: German soldiers too had fought at Verdun. The German High Command was worried after the Polish campaign about the lack of fighting spirit demonstrated by certain units in Poland; Hitler lost his temper with Brauchitsch who told him that the German soldier in 1939 had not revealed the same qualities as that of 1914. It was for all these reasons that the German military leaders, even Guderian, saw the victory of 1940 as a ‘miracle’.
26. Contrary to the myth propagated by the newsreels, which portrayed the German army as a sort of mechanized juggernaut, it was highly dependent on horses for transport. When Hitler moved against the Russians in 1941 his army had 3,350 tanks and 650,000 horses
The greatest German weapon in 1940 was not overwhelming military superiority but surprise. The failure of the French to predict the locus of the German invasion must rank as a failure of intelligence as dramatic as the American failure to predict Pearl Harbor or the Israeli failure to predict the Egyptian attack in 1973. There had in fact been ambiguous intelligence signals, but so often the history of intelligence in warfare supports the axiom that intelligence information tends to be sifted to reinforce received ideas rather than to overturn them. In June 1944 it took weeks before the German High Command accepted that Normandy was the real site of the invasion and not a diversionary tactic to cover the real attack that would come in the Calais area. The French intelligence services in 1940 did pick up quite a lot of information on the possibility of an Ardennes offensive—for example, on 13 March 1940 it was reported that a lot of bridging equipment was being assembled in Germany opposite the Luxembourg border, two days later that an increasing number of tanks were being deployed opposite south Belgium and Luxembourg—but even more about the possibility of a German move through Switzerland. The problem was how to distinguish genuine information from ‘noise’. The cumbersome French command structure meant that there were no very clear mechanisms for the collation and centralization of intelligence information, especially after Gamelin split the headquarters up in January 1940. According to one historian ‘no senior officer had the task of assimilating intelligence and relating it to operational planning’.40
The consequences of this intelligence failure in 1940 were exacerbated by the decision to gamble almost everything on the Dyle–Breda Plan. Why did Gamelin do this? One key motive was to bring in the Dutch and Belgians and weld them into the alliance; another possibly less openly avowed reason was to have an army between the British and the sea. Even if the Germans had attacked where Gamelin expected them to, his plan was risky because it exposed the French to fighting an encounter battle, something that went against French military doctrine. But the real problem was that the Germans did not attack in the right place. This meant not only that the sector on which the Germans concentrated their greatest forces was the least well defended but that part of what had been the central reserve—including two DLMs and some of the most mobile infantry divisions in the French army—was uselessly stranded deep in Belgium when the French most needed reserves to counter the Germans on the Meuse. For this decision, about which Billotte, Georges, and Giraud had all expressed reservations, Gamelin above all must be held responsible. He will have understood as well as anyone the force of Joffre’s famous riposte to those who tried to argue that General Gallieni rather than he should be given credit for the victory of the Marne: ‘I do not know who was responsible for winning the Battle of the Marne, but I do know who would have been responsible for losing it.’
It is the supreme irony of Gamelin’s career that a man so cautious and rational should have taken—and lost—such a massively risky gamble. Perhaps it was Gamelin’s very rationality and caution that let him down: he could simply not imagine that the Germans would take the extraordinary gamble of sending the bulk of their armoured forces through the Ardennes. But Gamelin sometimes seems to have been temperamentally unwilling to confront unpleasant realities, as if any problem could be finessed by charm, luck, and personal contact. Very characteristic in this respect were his expectations, based only on his secret and informal contacts with van den Bergen, that Belgium would suddenly abandon neutrality in 1939 because this was what would best have suited France.
On the other hand, Gamelin cannot be made a scapegoat for everything that went wrong in France in 1940. In the historical literature on 1940 poor Gamelin cannot win. Because, unlike Georges, he did not break down in tears, he is accused of passivity and detachment. He is accused by some historians of locking himself away at Vincennes, but during the first five days of the battle he visited Georges frequently—twice on 14 May necessitating about four hours of travel—which leads to his being accused by another historian of wasting too much time in this way.41 In many respects Gamelin was the prototype of the general as administrator, with many of the qualities of those military managers such as Generals George Marshall, Alan Brooke, or Alexei Antonov who were the real architects of the Allied victory in 1945. It was Gamelin’s tragedy that he did not have the chance to employ his undoubted qualities where they would have been most useful.
But the problems of the French army in 1940 went far beyond Gamelin. In 1914 Joffre’s strategic mistake had been equally disastrous but there was time to remedy it. In 1940 there was too little time. The absence of Giraud’s troops was not the only reason for this. One problem was that even once the High Command had realized that the main German thrust was through the Ardennes, it still failed to read German intentions correctly. Georges operated initially on the assumption that the Germans would pivot south-east towards the rear of the Maginot Line, or possibly through the centre of the Second Army, but not that they would swing west into the right flank of the Ninth Army. Even when on the night of 13–14 May Georges did form a special detachment under General Touchon to close the gap between the French Second and Ninth Armies, he did not pay significant attention to the right flank of the Ninth Army. He may also have been lulled here into a false sense of security by the successful resistance of the French forces at Monthermé for two days. Thus, Georges’s countermeasures played into the hand of the Germans and possibly aggravated the French situation once the Germans had broken through: there were almost no troops ready to place in their path. Georges had also been reluctant to move troops from behind the Maginot Line—possibly because of his fear that they might be needed to deal with an attack through Switzerland: this misplaced fear was another major intelligence failure.
More serious even than the French military’s slowness to read the direction of the German attack was their incapacity to grasp the nature and speed of warfare as practised by the Germans in 1940. Even after the German break-through, the French were sure that it would eventually run out of steam, and allow them to plug (colmater) the gap. In the First World War, break-throughs of this kind had always slowed down owing to the exhaustion of the troops, and supply and logistical difficulties. From the beginning to the end of the battle, what is most striking about the French response in 1940 is its slowness—whether General Lafontaine’s delayed counterattack at Sedan on the morning of 14 May, or General Flavigny’s even more delayed attack on the next day, or the delay in sending the First DCR against Rommel, and so on. The first crossing of Rommel’s men at Houx occurred before midnight on 12 May, but General Martin, in command of the XIth Corps (18DI and 22DI), was not told anything until 7 a.m. on 13 May, and Corap, who could not be contacted at first, did not know how serious the situation was until the evening.
The truth is that the French were faced with a kind of fighting for which they were completely unprepared—the opposite of the methodical warfare (bataille conduite) for which their doctrine prepared them. One striking difference between the two sides was the conduct of the senior commanding officers. The German commanders were closely involved in the battle, while their French counterparts usually remained in the rear. General Lafontaine of the 55DI, operating from his command post about 8 km behind Sedan, or General Huntziger, from his command post at Sennuc, about 45 km behind the line, were quite different from commanders like Rommel, throwing themselves personally into the fray. Of the four French regiments involved in fighting at Sedan, none lost its commander, whereas the Germans lost a number of key commanders. This was nothing to do with cowardice; it was a reflection of different doctrinal approaches: the ‘methodical’ battle required the senior commanders to stay in their command posts and keep their hand on ‘the handle of the fan’ rather than get too closely mixed up in the action; the German doctrine of ‘mission oriented’ tactics encouraged initiative on the part of lower-level commanders.
The fluidity of the battle between 15 May and 4 June was exactly the kind of warfare the French were least prepared to deal with. As General Prioux put it, the enemy was ‘imposing his will on us and … we had lost the operational initiative’. The only solution would have been to organize a powerful thrust at the Germans by a concentrated force including the DCRs, but this force would have had to be ready by 16–17 May. The French lacked the logistical apparatus to coordinate their responses fast enough. The movement of troops was also severely disrupted by the German bombing and by the refugees who clogged the roads. There were too few radios; most communication was by messenger or telephone, both of which were easily interrupted. French deficiencies in communications were visible at every level, starting at the top. Gamelin’s command post lacked a radio or even carrier pigeons. He either communicated by messengers (who were often the victim of accidents) or by time-consuming personal visits to command centres. Marc Bloch noted that the First Army headquarters often had no idea where its own corps were situated. In the resulting chaos, French command structures disintegrated; regiments were cut off from their divisional headquarters. As one soldier wrote: ‘[W]e had the impression of a total lack of coordination in the orders we received. We felt we were moving in a kind of fog.’42
British control and communications were no better: the whereabouts of Gort were often a mystery. As one British officer commented after the defeat: ‘[D]ecisions had to be made so very quickly and so often could not be confirmed on the basis of the information coming in.… The general moves the Germans made were so quick and where you may have a stable situation in the morning, by 7 o’clock or 8 o’clock in the evening, if you did not act and do something, the situation might be irretrievably lost.’43
The misadventures of General Prioux perfectly illustrate the confusion and communications breakdown on the French side immediately after the German breakthrough. Prioux was one of the few French generals whose resolution did not falter throughout the disaster. Having fallen back from the Dyle with his Cavalry Corps, along with the rest of the First Army, he was eager to launch a counterattack on the German corridor from the north. One problem, however, was that his own forces had become very dispersed. While trying to reunite them, he also sought orders. From Valenciennes on 17 May, he phoned Georges and was told that he might be of use to the Ninth Army at Mormal, but that ‘this was not an order and I was to do nothing without referring to the Army Group, which would perhaps have a different use for me’. This was indeed the case. Finding Billotte at Douai he was told that the First Army ‘needs you’ (Billotte also told him that France was heading for a catastrophe worse than 1870). At dawn on 19 May, Prioux was instructed to attack south towards Cambrai, which contradicted orders he had received the previous day. The order was anyway impossible to execute, since his tank brigades had not yet arrived despite having been ordered to do so. On the next day, trying to implement the instructions he had received, he dictated an order to attack towards the south-west of Arras. Then a few minutes later he was told to stay put instead. Prioux reflected ruefully that he had been at five different command posts in four days.44
There is no point in seeking out individual culprits. About thirty-five generals were sacked after the initial disaster, and Corap was selected as the most high profile sacrificial victim. But this was an entirely arbitrary choice. The performance of Huntziger’s Second Army had been no better than that of Corap’s Ninth. Corap had at least tried to draw attention to the problems of his sector before the German attack, unlike Huntziger, who had been extremely complacent. In October 1939, when hearing about the defeat of Poland from the French attaché in Warsaw, Huntziger had remarked: ‘Poland is Poland … Here we are in France.’ He is reported to have said, on hearing that the first Germans had crossed the river at Wadelincourt, ‘that will mean all the more prisoners’. When the aerial bombardment started at Sedan his initial response was that the soldiers needed their baptism of fire. Although Huntziger had been sent important reinforcements in the form of the 3DCR and 3DIM on 13 May, he had failed to use them for a powerful counterattack. He may have owed his survival to the fact that on 15 May the Second Army at Stonne seemed to be performing somewhat better than on the previous two days, but that was only because the thrust of the German attack had shifted westwards. If Huntziger survived and Corap did not, it was because Corap had fewer protectors in high places. Huntziger went on to be a minister at Vichy.
Whatever the deficiencies of individual commanders, the real lesson of 1940 was the way in which almost the entire French High Command had been caught unawares by the new kind of warfare. If there were so many cases of French generals collapsing into tears it was because collectively—with very few exceptions—they had been utterly overwhelmed intellectually and psychologically. No one seems to have been more crushed by events than Blanchard who, according to Bloch, was urged by a corps commander: ‘Do anything you like, sir, but for Heaven’s sake do something.’ Bloch himself observed Blanchard ‘sitting in tragic immobility, saying nothing, doing nothing, but just gazing at the map spread on the table between us, as though hoping to find on it the decision which he was incapable of taking’. General Alan Brooke has an almost identical description:
He [Blanchard] was studying the map as I looked at him carefully and I soon gathered the impression that he might as well have been staring at a blank wall for all the benefit he gained out of it. He gave me the impression of a man whose brain had ceased to function, he was merely existing and hardly aware of what was going on around him. The blows that had fallen on us in quick succession had left him ‘punch drunk’ and unable to register events.45
It is possible, then, to offer primarily military explanations for the Fall of France. And it must be remembered that in a battle the difference between success and failure can turn on very little. In 1914 France had survived very narrowly indeed; in 1940 the story was different. But can we stop there? As Michael Howard remarks in his history of the Franco-Prussian War: ‘the military system of a nation is not an independent section of the social system but an aspect of it in its totality’.46 In no society does the military operate entirely in a vacuum. In Marc Bloch’s view, the French military had been intellectually outclassed, and he saw this as symptomatic of a more general intellectual sclerosis affecting France in this period. Such sweeping statements are difficult to verify, and Bloch’s own original and pioneering work as an historian and creator of the Annales school is proof that certainly not all of French intellectual life was ossified in the inter-war years. Indeed there is a case for saying that this was one of the most culturally vibrant periods in modern French history.
Was the army somehow apart from this? It is easy to depict the French High Command as a complacent gerontocracy immured in its certainties and unwilling to rethink the future. Pétain told the post-war investigating commission that after 1918 ‘my military brain was closed’. But Pétain had no influence on French military planning in the 1930s, and there were, as one would expect, military conservatives and ‘modernizers’—to the extent that these terms have any validity—in both Germany and France. Explaining why certain views and not others prevailed in each country requires us to consider the social and political context.
In France the ‘modernizers’ were certainly stymied by the delays in rearmament and the production bottlenecks. In 1936 the army still only possessed twenty-seven B tanks. Once these tanks did start coming on stream there was precious little time for training before they were thrown into battle. The French failure to exploit the full potential of the DCRs stemmed also from the commitment to the idea of the methodical battle. This commitment, however, was not just blind resistance to change. It was a response to the context in which the army had to operate. As one army manual put it: ‘[I]t is important to deliver methodical battles and avoid encounter battles. These, because of the uncertainties they bring with them, are not suitable for the employment of young troops who need, on the contrary, to be engaged methodically on the field of battle with all the necessary support of firepower.’47 In other words, the ‘methodical battle’ was what the military considered necessary for an army composed primarily of short-service conscripts, badly prepared reservists, and overworked professionals—all posing problems which were exacerbated by the progressive reduction in army service between 1923 and 1930. The French military were undoubtedly suspicious of the fighting quality of their soldiers. Already in 1914 Joffre had hesitated to use reservists in the belief that they were not battle-ready. His mistake in estimating the size of the forces on the other side came from his belief that the Germans would act likewise.
The idea of a professional army on the lines proposed by de Gaulle was inconceivable in a political culture which since the nineteenth century had deeply distrusted the possible political ambitions of the army. A conscript army was considered the corollary of a democratic society. It should be remembered also that the military were operating within the context of a thoroughly pacifist—or at least peace-loving—society. Weygand recorded in his diary in 1933: ‘France is profoundly pacific.… The army … is one of the means, the most important, that a country uses to support its policy. The old formula that it is necessary to have the army of one’s policy has lost none of its validity.’48
In this context, putting the case for armoured divisions was something that had to be done with skill and tact. Daladier, for one, had never been entirely convinced about the desirability of B1 tanks: were they the kind of armaments that a democratic and pacific society required? The situation in Germany was very different. In the 1920s, the reconstruction of the Reichswehr, which had to proceed clandestinely, was carried out by the army without civilian interference; in the 1930s, it was the politicians who provided the impulse to war. The Nazi regime existed to make war. This is not to say that France was ‘decadent’, and that Germany was not, unless the kind of pacific and liberal values in which France’s leaders believed are to be equated with decadence. In the circumstances one might indeed consider that the efforts achieved in France to prepare the country for war were remarkable—a testimony to the adaptability of French political institutions and to the quality of France’s governing class.
It is true, however, that the memories left by the previous war, and the scars inflicted by the divisions of the 1930s were still so fresh that there were many people who were only half convinced that this was ‘their’ war. This was the case of many pacifists on the left, and many anti-Communists on the right. Had the early stages of the war gone better, however, it is quite possible that it would have become ‘their’ war, as seemed to be happening in the early days of June, and as happened in Britain during the Blitz, which transmuted a conflict that had been accepted without enthusiasm into a genuinely popular crusade. In both countries conditions were much more fluid and open-ended than they seem to us in retrospect. The way that the different social and political ingredients crystallized was to a considerable degree a result of the military situation. Many French politicians and intellectuals were haunted in the 1930s by a sense of the weakness of their country and the decadence of its political institutions. The recovery that had taken place in the year before the war was too recent for that mood of pessimism to have dissipated entirely. The sense of French decadence was shared by figures as far apart as the Fascist novelist Drieu La Rochelle and the liberal philosopher Raymond Aron. In his memoirs Aron wrote: ‘[D]uring the years of decadence, we felt France’s ills personally.… What struck us all … was the contrast between the paralysis of the democratic regimes and the spectacular recovery of Hitler’s Germany.’49 The sense of decadence was therefore not purely a retrospective shadow cast by 1940, but on the other hand it did not predetermine the responses to 1940, even if it explains why some people were able to resign themselves so easily to defeat: Drieu became an ardent collaborator, but Aron went to London. In Britain also there were many politicians and intellectuals who felt deeply alienated by what they saw as the drift and lack of imagination of the National Government, and the conservatism of British society. They were lucky enough to be able to find a home supporting the Churchill coalition in 1940. In other circumstances their alienation might have found other outlets.
It is certainly true that once the French army had been defeated, some French conservatives, and many others who felt alienated from the Republic for different reasons, readily found explanations for the defeat and were ready to embrace it almost with a kind of self-sacrificial fervour, seeing it as a chance to remake the nation in their image. This was the force of Charles Maurras’s comment that the defeat was a ‘divine surprise’. By this he did not mean that he had welcomed it, but that at least it had the beneficial result of bringing to power France’s saviour in the form of Marshal Pétain. The politics of the 1930s do, then, matter in our discussion of the Fall of France—but they help explain the consequences of the defeat more than its causes.
