Max Hastings Two-Book Collection: All Hell Let Loose and Catastrophe. Max Hastings
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the lights were out, but beneath the clear, golden June sky, every house, every street was visible. As for the Seine, the river seemed to absorb even the faintest glimmers of light and reflect them back a hundred times brighter, like some multi-faceted mirror. Badly blacked-out windows, glistening rooftops, the metal hinges of doors all shone in the water. There were a few red lights that stayed on longer than the others, no one knew why, and the Seine drew them in, capturing them and bouncing them playfully on its waves.’
In the week that followed the German crossing of the Meuse, the invading armies maintained an almost ceaseless advance, while the Allies conducted in slow motion every activity save flight. The British held the French overwhelmingly responsible for their predicament, but some of Gort’s officers adopted a more enlightened view, understanding that their own BEF had little to be proud of. ‘After a few days’ fighting,’ wrote Irish Fusiliers officer John Horsfall, ‘part of our army was no longer capable of coordinated measures, either offensive or defensive…We could not lay these…to the charge of our politicians, [they were] failings that were strictly our own…Within our army the fault lay in the mind, and really one must wonder what the Staff College was about in those pre-war years.’
The disparity between the battlefield performance of the German and Western Allied armies would prove one of the great enigmas not merely of the 1940 campaign, but of the entire conflict. Thomas Mann once described Nazism as ‘mechanised mysticism’. Michael Howard has written: ‘Armed as they were with all the military technology and bureaucratic rationality of the Enlightenment, but fuelled by the warrior-values of a largely invented past, it is not surprising that the Germans held the world at bay through two terrible wars.’ Though these remarks reflect important truths, they seem an incomplete answer to the question: why was the Wehrmacht so good? Its senior officers had fought in World War I, but for more than a decade thereafter the German army was almost moribund. It gained no inter-war combat experience. Meanwhile, many British rankers as well as officers participated in low-intensity operations on the North-West Frontier of India, in Irish or colonial skirmishes.
The inescapable conclusion is that the British Army’s role as an imperial gendarmerie impeded its education and adaptation for large-scale war. Brushfire conflicts emphasised the handling of small forces, the regiment as the focus of operations. They demanded limited effort, sacrifice and tactical thinking. Some officers were, in Michael Howard’s words, ‘highly professional within a tiny environment’. But throughout the conflict Churchill’s generals suffered from the lack of any coherent system of instruction for higher command, such as the British Army belatedly acquired only thirty years later. The Wehrmacht, recreated in the 1930s from a mere cadre, embraced new ideas, prepared and conditioned itself solely for continental war. Its officers displayed greater energy, professionalism and imagination than most of their British counterparts; its men proved highly motivated. An institutional discipline pervaded the German army’s battlefield conduct at every level, and persisted throughout the war. Its commitment to counter-attack, even in adverse circumstances, amounted to genius. The concept of conducting war à l’outrance, pursuing to the last gasp the destruction of the enemy, seemed to come naturally to Germans, as it did not to their British or French opponents. On the battlefield Allied soldiers, reflecting the societies from which they were drawn, prided themselves on behaving like reasonable men. The Wehrmacht showed what unreasonable men could do.
In the May 1940 BEF, John Horsfall deplored a lack of good maps; failure to cover the retreat by local counter-attacks and inflict substantial damage on the German spearheads; to deploy artillery effectively; or adequately to brief those at the sharp end: ‘Our soldiers just need to know in simple terms what they have to contend with.’ Horsfall and his comrades became bewildered and disgusted by their long trek back from Belgium and through north-eastern France, during which they watched a substantial part of the army, and most of its commanders, fall apart. ‘It was a rotten march,’ he wrote, ‘and the [Fusiliers] were progressively broken up by lost and sometimes disordered fragments of other units surging in on us from the side roads…There was over-much to brood upon…One could not fail to be aware of the loss of grip somewhere in our army. Our men knew it soon enough, and it became the task of the officers to stifle the subject – or laugh at it…Something pretty bad was happening. But it was no more the fault of our regiments than the shambles of the Crimea had been…I saw no reason…why that critical retreat was not effectively controlled.’
Meanwhile, French commanders appeared to inhabit a fantasy world. Gamelin’s staff officers marvelled to see him at lunch in his headquarters on 19 May, joking and making light conversation while his subordinates despaired. At 2100 that night, about the time the first panzers reached the Channel at the mouth of the Somme, on Reynaud’s orders Gamelin was replaced as France’s military leader by seventy-three-year-old General Maxime Weygand. The new supreme commander realised that the Allies’ only chance was to launch counter-attacks from the south and north against the German flanks in the vicinity of Arras, to break the encirclement of Belgium and north-east France. Sir Edmund Ironside, the British CIGS visiting from London, reached the same conclusion. Meeting two French generals, Gaston Billotte and Georges Blanchard, at Lens, Ironside was disgusted by their inertia. Both men were ‘in a state of complete depression. No plan, no thought of a plan. Ready to be slaughtered. Defeated at the head without casualties.’ Ironside urged an immediate attack south towards Amiens, with which Billotte promised to cooperate. Ironside then telephoned Weygand. They agreed that two French and two British divisions would attack next morning, the 21st.
Yet Gort never believed the French would move, and he was right. When the two weak British formations advanced next day they did so alone, and without air support. The Germans were initially thrown into disarray as Gort’s columns struck west of Arras. There was fierce fighting, and the British advanced ten miles, taking four hundred prisoners, before the attack ran out of steam. Erwin Rommel, commanding a panzer division, took personal command of the defence and rallied his surprised and confused units. Matilda tanks inflicted significant German losses, killing Rommel’s ADC at his side. But by then the British had shot their bolt; the attack was courageously and effectively delivered, but lacked sufficient weight to be decisive.
On the morning of that same day, the 21st, even as the British were moving towards Arras, Weygand set off from Vincennes for the northern front, in hopes of organising a more ambitious counterstroke. After waiting two hours at Le Bourget for a plane, the C-in-C’s trip descended into farce. Arriving at Béthune, he found the airfield deserted save for a single scruffy soldier guarding petrol stocks. This man eventually drove the general to a post office where he was able to telephone the army group commander, Billotte, who had spent the morning searching for Weygand around Calais. The C-in-C, after pausing for an omelette at a country inn, used a plane to reach the port, then crawled by car along roads jammed with refugees to meet Belgium’s King Leopold at Ypres town hall. He urged the monarch to hasten his army’s retreat westward, but Leopold was reluctant to abandon Belgian soil. Billotte said that only the British, thus far scarcely engaged, were fit to attack. To Weygand’s anger – for he wrongly saw a snub – Lord Gort did not join the meeting.
When the BEF’s commander belatedly reached Ypres, without much conviction he agreed to join a new counter-attack, but said that all his reserves were committed. He never believed any combined Anglo-French thrust would take place. Weygand later claimed that the British were bent on betraying their ally: this reflected a profound French conviction, dating back to World War I, that the British always fought with one eye on their escape route to the Channel ports. The British, in their turn, despaired at French defeatism; Weygand was thus far right, that Gort believed his allies hopelessly inert, and was now set upon salvaging the BEF from the wreck of the campaign. Later on that bleak night of 21 May, Billotte was fatally injured in a car crash, and two days elapsed before a successor was appointed as Northern Army commander. Meanwhile, the breakdown of Allied command communications became comprehensive. After a meeting with the French army group commander the previous day, British CIGS Sir Edmund Ironside wrote: ‘I lost my temper and shook Billotte by the button of his tunic. The man is completely beaten.’ Gort told King Leopold on the evening of the 21st: ‘It’s a bad job.’ At 1900, Weygand left Dunkirk by torpedo boat in the midst of an air raid, eventually regaining his headquarters at 1000 next morning. Throughout every hour of his futile wanderings across northern France,