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The historiography of the German defeat of France and her allies in 1940 has focused mainly on the first fortnight of what was a six-week campaign.
Most writers have concentrated on either the German Wehrmacht’s breakthrough of the thin French defences on the River Meuse, on the evacuation of over 330 000 Allied troops from Dunkirk and the nearby beaches, or on the political level of an unravelling Anglo-French partnership. The continuing fight of the French armies, with some assistance from the British and others in the last month of operations ( c .25 May to 25 June), has been almost invisible, reduced to the status of an epilogue. This article re-examines questions of French command and control, force strength, and combat performance, focusing particularly on a series of case studies of French divisions that resisted the second-stage German offensive, Fall Rot (Case Red) from 5 June 1940. The evidence deployed offers a considerably more complex – and for the French, more creditable – picture of how resistance was reorganized after the shocks of May 1940. The German victory was not some kind of stroll in rural France, but came about only after very hard fighting that has been lost from sight in most evocations of the ‘fall of France’.
T he second phase of the western European campaign in 1940 – codenamed by the Germans ‘Case Red’ ( Fall Rot ) – has been neglected.
Most studies of the defeat of France focus overwhelmingly on the first three weeks – code-named ‘Case Yellow’ ( Fall Gelb ) – that commenced on 10 May 1940 and swiftly produced the Wehrmacht’s panzer breakthrough from Sedan and Monthermé to the Channel coast. But can we satisfactorily understand the events of 1940, and why they occurred, if the combats in late May and June continue to be dismissed as ‘a brief afterword’?
1
At the time of the fiftieth anniversary Eliot Cohen and
1
K.H. Frieser (with J.T. Greenwood), The Blitzkrieg Legend: The 1940 Campaign in the West
(Annapolis, MD, 2005), p. xiii; this first appeared as Blitzkriege-Legende: der Westfeldzug 1940
(Munich, 1995) and as Le Mythe de la guerre-éclair: la campagne de l’ouest, 1940 (Paris, 2003).
The work rests on extensive research from the German side and has exemplary maps.
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220 Martin S. Alexander
John Gooch reaffirmed that France’s military performance was a ‘catastrophic failure’, without ‘even the smallest redeeming feature’.
2 This article challenges that judgement and the widespread dismissal of the significance of operations after Dunkirk and the elimination of the Allied forces north of the panzer ‘corridor’.
Although Case Red ended with German victory over France, an armistice taking effect on 25 June, the Germans did not have things all their own way. Indeed Case Red unfolded far less smoothly than Yellow. The
French army and its morale rallied impressively after the May disasters on the Meuse, in Belgium and in the Netherlands. French units fought tooth and claw in early–mid-June, as a recent book by Julian Jackson that presents events through a set of scenes and tableaux acknowledges.
3
Contrary to what Alistair Horne once affirmed, it was not simply a case of the Wehrmacht now being ‘free to mop up the French Army’ or that after Dunkirk ‘it became largely a matter of marching for the Germans’.
4
The contingency of the campaign in the west – and the innate frailties of the Wehrmacht and Luftwaffe for extended war after late May 1940
– is not firmly grasped if the first fortnight of Germany’s Westfeldzug alone is examined.
Reconsideration of the familiar often occurs by means of a fresh perspective or a modified periodization. Both feature in this article. The dominant literature has it that operations were ‘over bar the shouting’ once Dunkirk was evacuated. For the Allies, in this reading, even if full time in the match had not been reached, the ‘scoreline’ of Wehrmacht successes – entire countries (the Netherlands, Belgium) forced to retire from the field – meant the game was up by 3 June at the latest.
5 Most literature on the French armies is limited to what its authors – Horne,
Claude Gounelle, Jeffery A. Gunsburg, Robert A. Doughty, Florian K.
Rothbrust, Jean Vanwelkenhuyzen, and Karl-Heinz Frieser – argue were the critical few days (12–16 May) on and just west of the River Meuse.
6
These works place overwhelming emphasis on Sedan and its aftermath,
3
4
2
5
6
E.A. Cohen and J. Gooch, Military Misfortunes. The Anatomy of Failure in War (New York,
1990, 1991), ch. 8, pp. 197–230: ‘Catastrophic Failure: The French Army and Air Force,
May–June 1940’ (quotation p. 220).
J. Jackson, The Fall of France: The Nazi Invasion of 1940 (Oxford, 2003), pp. 178–80.
A. Horne, ‘France, Fall of’, in I.C.B. Dear, ed., The Oxford Companion to the Second World
War (Oxford, 1995), pp. 408–14 (quotation p. 414).
This assumption colours R.E. Powaski’s Lightning War: Blitzkrieg in the West, 1940
(London, 2003); it also shapes the better-documented study by J.A. Gunsburg, Divided and Conquered: The French High Command and the Defeat of the West, 1940 (Westport, CT,
1979). Frieser’s Blitzkrieg Legend gives the three weeks after 31 May just three pages
(315–17), a perfunctory section subtitled: ‘Plan Red – Only an Epilogue’.
A. Horne, To Lose a Battle: France 1940 (London, 1969); C. Gounelle, Sedan, mai 1940
(Paris, 1965, repr. 1980); Gunsburg, Divided and Conquered ; R.A. Doughty, The Breaking
Point: Sedan and the Fall of France, 1940 (Hamden, CT, 1990); F.K. Rothbrust, Guderian’s
XIXth Panzer Corps and the Battle of France: Breakthrough in the Ardennes, May 1940 (New
York, 1990); J. Vanwelkenhuyzen, 1940: pleins feux sur un désastre (Brussels, 1997);
Frieser, Blitzkrieg Legend , esp. pp. 100–239; G. Chapman, Why France Collapsed (London,
1968); J. Williams, The Ides of May: The Defeat of France, May–June 1940 (London, 1968);
J.C. Cairns, ‘Some Recent Historians and the “Strange Defeat” of 1940’, Journal of
Modern History XLVI (1974), pp. 60–85.
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After Dunkirk 221 revealing that the Germans shared French surprise at the ease and speed of their breakthrough. Case Red operations after 4 June are mentioned only cursorily or not at all.
7 Other writers, chiefly British ones operating within a national historical discourse about Britain’s supposed ‘finest hour’, have understandably dwelt on the retreat to the Channel, the fight for Calais, and the rescue of 338 000 troops from Dunkirk.
8 The fierce and far more effective resistance offered in
June 1940 on the Somme, Aisne, and Moselle, on the Seine and Loire, has been left to a few non-academic writers and to local or regimental historians.
9
Yet even writers convinced that a decision in the west had been reached by the end of May, leaving no French lifeline to survival, perhaps owe us an explanation of why fighting continued and why French resistance was now more resolute than hitherto. For the French did not lay down their arms a day or two after Belgium did so (28 May).
Nor did they do so after the last evacuations at Dunkirk. On the contrary, the French armies made a Herculean effort to prepare for a new and more effective fight for France. The German staffs had to craft fresh plans to overcome a fast-reviving spirit. And the German troops met considerably more skilled military resistance. During June this resistance caused the Germans serious losses of soldiers, tanks, vehicles, and aircraft – but at a price to the French armies of only 27% of the
7
8
9
Frieser’s core argument is summarized in his chapter ‘La Légende de la blitzkrieg’, in
M. Vaïsse, ed., Mai–Juin 1940: défaite française, victoire allemande, sous l’œil des historiens
étrangers (Paris, 2000), pp. 75–86.
See M. Smith, Britain and 1940: History, Myth and Popular Memory (London and New
York, 2000); D. Reynolds, ‘Churchill and the British “Decision” to Fight on in 1940:
Right Policy, Wrong Reason’, in R.T.B. Langhorne, ed., Diplomacy and Intelligence during the Second World War: Essays in Honour of F.H. Hinsley (Cambridge, 1985), pp. 147–67.
A good short account of the evacuation is B.I. Gudmundsson, ‘Dunkirk’, Military History
Quarterly IX (1997), pp. 61–70. The controversies surrounding the evacuation are dissected in J. Vanwelkenhuyzen, Miracle à Dunkerque: la fin d’un mythe (Brussels, 1994).
See also Frieser, Blitzkrieg Legend , pp. 291–314; W.J.R. Gardner, ed., The Evacuation from
Dunkirk: Operation Dynamo, 26 May–4 June 1940 (London, 2000); R. Atkin, Pillar of Fire:
Dunkirk, 1940 (London, 1990); B. Bond, Britain, France and Belgium, 1939–1940
(London, 1990). Cf. Gen. J.-A. Doumenc, Dunkerque et la campagne de Flandre (Paris,
1947); Gen. J. Armengaud, Le Drame de Dunkerque (mai–juin 1940) (Paris, 1948); P. Le
Goyet and J. Foussereau, Calais 1940: la corde au cou (Paris, 1975); A. Neave, The Flames of Calais: A Soldier’s Battle, 1940 (London, 1972).
P. Nivet, ‘Les Soldats français sur la Somme (mai–juin 1940)’, in P. Nivet, ed., La Bataille en Picardie: combattre de l’antiquité au XXe siècle. Actes des colloques d’Amiens (16 mai 1998 et
29 mai 1999) (Amiens, 2000), pp. 221–38; P. Vasselle, La Bataille au sud d’Amiens
(Montdidier, 1948); idem, Les Combats de 1940, 18 mai – 9 juin: Haut-Somme et Santerre.
Ligne de l’Avre et de l’Ailette; VIIe Armée Frère, 1er et 24e Corps (Montdidier, 1970); idem,
Juin 1940 sur la Basse-Somme: Xe Armée Altmayer, 9e Corps d’armée, 13e DI, 5e DIC, 40e DI
(Montdidier, c .1973); R. Dietrich, ‘Le 24e RTS [Régiment de Tirailleurs Sénégalais] à la bataille de la Somme 1940’, in 24e RIMa: portes ouvertes, 25–26 juin 1988 (Perpignan,
1988); R. Macnab, For Honour Alone: The Cadets of Saumur in the Defence of the Cavalry
School, France, June 1940 (London, 1988). I am grateful to Dr William Philpott, Dept of
War Studies, King’s College, London, for the first four of these references and to
Randal Gray, formerly of Frank Cass Ltd, for the fifth. For an overview: Col. J. Vernet,
‘La Bataille de la Somme’, in C. Levisse-Touzé, ed., La Campagne de 1940: actes du colloque, 16 au 18 novembre 2000 (Paris, 2001), pp. 198–209.
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222 Martin S. Alexander deaths sustained in May (24 000 dead from 4–25 June as against 92 000 in the fortnight of 10–25 May).
Much evidence, then, stands against reading French defeat in 1940 as somehow predetermined – or even as an inevitably easy German triumph. In early June the Dunkirk evacuation was completed and both adversaries drew breath and paused. They now faced a second, different and considerably harder, phase of operations that would be known as the battle of France (see Figure 1). In this phase the key roles would be taken far less by the German panzer spearheads and the French B-series reservist divisions, but instead by the commonly overlooked bulk of the opposing armies – the infantry divisions and the artillery.
By Dunkirk some friendly powers, to be sure, had fallen by the wayside – the Netherlands capitulated on 18 May and Belgium 10 days later.
10
However, new British formations were dispatched to aid France’s fight for survival by Winston Churchill, prime minister as well as minister of defence after 10 May, a more pugnacious and francophile individual than his predecessor, Neville Chamberlain.
11 Besides engineers there were lines-of-communication troops of General Lord Gort’s British
Expeditionary Force (BEF) in the lower Somme, Normandy, and
Brittany who had avoided the defeat in Belgium and the Nord.
12 The main surviving combat force from the original 10 BEF infantry divisions
10
11
12
See A. Ausems, ‘The Netherlands Military Intelligence Summaries, 1939–40, and the
Defeat in the Blitzkrieg of May 1940’, Military Affairs L (1986), pp. 190–199; idem, ‘Ten
Days in May 1940: The Netherlands Defense against “Fall Gelb”’, master’s thesis, San
Diego State University, 1983; D.J. Mol, ‘Feeding the Crocodile: The End of Dutch
Neutrality. Lessons in Intelligence and Small State Security from 1939–1940’,
MSc(Econ) diss., University of Wales Aberystwyth, 2002.
Cf. the view that from Churchill’s notorious 16 May visit to Gamelin and Reynaud in
Paris onwards the British leaders were accepting French defeat rather than trying to prevent it, and focusing on salvaging assets to help Britain fight on. See P.M.H. Bell,
‘Les Britanniques considéraient-ils la défaite française comme irrémédiable?’, in Vaïsse, ed., Mai–Juin 1940 , pp. 126–44; also P.M.H. Bell, France and Britain, 1900–1940: Entente and Estrangement (Harlow, 1996), pp. 232–50.
The British army was expanding to 55 divisions, as agreed in the winter of 1939–40 (an enlargement from earlier plans announced in spring 1939 for a 32-division army based on doubling the Territorial Army and reintroducing conscription). See D. French,
Raising Churchill’s Army: The British Army and the War against Germany, 1919–1945
(Oxford, 2000), pp. 157–59; M.S. Alexander, ‘“Fighting to the Last Frenchman”?
Reflections on the BEF Deployment to France and Strains in the Anglo-French
Alliance, 1939–40’, in J. Blatt, ed., The French Defeat of 1940: Reassessments (Providence and Oxford, 1998), pp. 296–326; B. Bond, British Military Policy between the Wars (Oxford,
1980), pp. 298–311; P. Dennis, Decision by Default: Peacetime Conscription and British
Defence, 1919–1939 (London, 1972), pp. 191–225; idem, The Territorial Army, 1907–1940
(Woodbridge, 1987), pp. 232–61; R.J. Minney, The Private Papers of Hore-Belisha (London,
1960), pp. 171–206; M. Glover, The Fight for the Channel Ports: Calais to Brest 1940, A Study in Confusion (London, 1985).
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After Dunkirk 223
Figure 1 The battle of France
Source : Général Maxime Weygard, Mémoires , tome 3 (Paris, 1957). Map
© Editions Flammarion, Paris, whose permission for reproduction is hereby gratefully acknowledged.
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224 Martin S. Alexander was Major-General Victor Fortune’s 51st Highland Division.
13
This was supplemented by Major-General Roger Evans’s incomplete 1st Armoured
Division, assembling in Normandy in mid-May.
14
Two more British infantry divisions and a Canadian division, arriving through Cherbourg and
St Malo, supported the French 10th Army (General Robert Altmayer) west of Rouen in mid-June.
15
British units – if now few in number – were respected by the Germans for their ‘very high quality’ and were buttressed by two Polish divisions and a Polish tank brigade under General
Wladislaw Sikorski’s government in exile, a division of Czechs, and two new French corps headquarters with their staffs, artillery, engineers, and signals troops.
16
More significantly, the French had the defender’s advantage – seeking only to hold what they held. France’s intrinsic defensive doctrine stemmed from many factors, some political, others embedded in military thinking and conclusions drawn from operations in 1914–18.
First, satisfied by Versailles’s territorial terms in 1919 if not by the fragility of constraints on German rearmament, French voters and parliamentarians would not have financed an army had it trained in the
1920s and 1930s for revanchist offensives. Second, the defensive mindedness was buttressed and given literally concrete shape by the construction of the powerful fortified zones bordering the Saarland and
Baden-Wurtemburg after 1929 that became known as the Maginot Line.
Next, French war plans and military training followed from the sharp drop in available military manpower for France, 20 years after the fall in birth rate during 1914–18, so that the period from 1935 to 1939 was dubbed ‘the hollow years’ ( les années creuses ). Finally, like any organization cutting its coat according to its cloth, the French army regarded defensive combat, under firm top-down command, as most suited to its
13
14
15
16
On 10 May 1940 the Scotsmen were in Lorraine, each BEF division rotating there to gain acquaintance with French troops and a gentle baptism of fire. They became prisoners of Rommel’s 7th Panzer Division at St-Valéry-en-Caux on 12 June 1940. See
S. David, Churchill’s Sacrifice of the Highland Division, France 1940 (London, 1994);
B. Innes, St Valéry: The Impossible Odds (Edinburgh, 2004). On the ‘quiet’ Lorraine front in the Phoney War, see J.-P. Sartre (mobilized as a 34-year-old reservist in 1939), The War
Diaries of Jean-Paul Sartre, November 1939 – March 1940 , trans. Q. Hoare (London, 1984);
R. Felsenhardt, 1939–40 avec le 18e Corps d’armée (Paris, 1973), pp. 19–104.
Service historique de I’armée de terre (French Army Archives, at Vincennes: hereafter
SHAT), SHAT 7N2817: le général Albert Lelong (attaché militaire à Londres) à l’Etat-
Major de l’Armée (2e Bureau), no. 592/S, 5 October 1939.
Major-General Roger Evans, ‘The 1st Armoured Division in France, May–June 1940’
(privately produced, author’s collection); SHAT 32N476-81 (2nd DLC);
Vanwelkenhuyzen, Pleins feux , pp. 256, 285–86, 353–60; A. Danchev and D. Todman, eds., Field Marshal Lord Alanbrooke: War Diaries, 1939–1945 (London, 2001), pp. 73–88;
General Sir D. Fraser, Alanbrooke (London, 1983), pp. 160–71; General Sir J.H. Marshall-
Cornwall, Wars and Rumours of Wars: A Memoir (London, 1984), pp. 138–65; B. Karslake,
1940, The Last Act: The Story of British Forces in France after Dunkirk (London, 1979).
K.A. Maier, H. Rohde and B. Stegemann, Germany and the Second World War , trans. D.S.
McMurray and E. Osers, vol. 2 (Oxford, 1991), p. 234; J.-L. Crémieux-Brilhac, Les
Français de l’an 40 , 2 vols (Paris, 1990), vol. 2: Ouvriers et soldats , p. 644; SHAT 32N501-3
(war diaries of the Polish and Czech units).
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After Dunkirk 225 short-service conscripts who did only 18 months with the colours from
1923 to 1928 and just 12 months from 1928 to 1936.
17
Also, a cautious recovery of faith that defensive battle could be staged with success began to flow through the French divisions rushing up and erecting strong points along the Somme, the St Quentin and Crozat canals, and the Aisne from 19 May onwards. Morale and confidence were recovering now that the disorderly retreats of mid-May were over.
The surviving armies were falling back onto shorter lines of communication, with easier access to tank repair shops, supply dumps, stores, and stockpiles. Most significantly, between 25 May and 5 June, the French army was gaining reinforcements with every passing day. One source of these was the initiative taken in November 1939 by General Maurice
Gamelin, the French commander-in-chief dismissed by Prime Minister
Paul Reynaud on 20 May, to expand the army through a ‘five month plan’. The scheme had generated three new infantry divisions, two additional ‘light’ divisions, a new colonial division, and three new North
African infantry divisions by the end of May 1940.
18
In addition there were 14 new ‘light’ infantry divisions, the divisions légères d’infanterie , in the process of establishment, 6 of them formed by
31 May, as well as the equivalent of 13 divisions of specialist fortress garrison units in the Maginot Line. Finally, around a quarter of the 112 000 or more French troops evacuated at Dunkirk fought again, once repatriated through the ports of Normandy and Brittany – notably General
Henri Vernillat’s 43rd Infantry Division, originally part of General
Henri Giraud’s 7th Army sent to the Netherlands and Belgium, around
Caen and Lisieux from 8 to 17 June.
19 Taken together, these formations were imperfect but significant substitutes for the 25 French divisions lost by the end of May.
20
Nor were all the new forces simply infantry, for the French refitted their armoured divisions quickly and made good the attrition sustained
17
18
19
20
These issues have generated an extensive literature. See, notably, R.A. Doughty, The Seeds of
Disaster: The Development of French Army Doctrine, 1919–1939 (Hamden, CT, 1985); Doughty,
Breaking Point , pp. 8–18, 27–30; E.C. Kiesling, Arming against Hitler: France and the Limits of
Military Planning (Lawrence, KS, 1996), esp. pp. 63–112, 136–39, 174–75; H. Dutailly,
Les Problèmes de l’armée de terre française, 1919–1939 (Paris, 1980), esp. pp. 39–41, 140–42,
176–87, 191–99, 202–204, 207–41; R.J. Young, ‘ La Guerre de Longue Durée : Some Reflections on French Strategy and Diplomacy in the 1930s’, in A. Preston, ed., General Staffs and
Diplomacy before the Second World War (Totowa, NJ, and London, 1978), pp. 41–64;
M.S. Alexander, ‘In Defence of the Maginot Line: Security Policy, Domestic Politics and the Economic Depression in France’, in R. Boyce, ed., French Foreign and Defence Policy,
1918–19: The Decline and Fall of a Great Power (London, 1998), pp. 164–94.
SHAT 1K224/7, dossier [hereafter, Dr.] titled ‘Le problème des effectifs’; ‘Grandes Unités nouvelles prévues au Programme des 5 Mois’, 15 February 1940; cf. SHAT 1N43, Gen.
Louis Colson (GOC interior depots and training camps): ‘Modifications prévues ou possibles progressivement dans l’organisation de l’Armée active à partir d’Octobre 1940’.
R. Looseley, ‘“Le Paradis après l’Enfer”: The French Soldiers Evacuated from Dunkirk in 1940’, MA diss., University of Reading, 2005; T. Richard, ‘La 43e Division d’Infanterie en Basse-Normandie: l’impossible renaissance, 4–26 juin 1940’, Revue Historique des
Armées CCXIX (2000), pp. 43–52; Frieser, Blitzkrieg Legend , pp. 246–51.
Cf. Vanwelkenhuyzen, Pleins feux , pp. 397–98, that these troops’ weaknesses made the remainder of the campaign merely ‘the management of inevitable defeat’.
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226 Martin S. Alexander in the first fortnight of operations. Both the 1st and 2nd DCRs ( divisions cuirassées de réserve , heavy armoured divisions) gained new and more talented commanders, General Marie-Joseph Welvert and Colonel Jean
Perré respectively, while their destroyed or abandoned tanks were swiftly replaced after 20 May.
21 Meanwhile the armoured force was strengthened by the deployment of the newly formed 4th DCR under Colonel
(later Brigadier-General) Charles de Gaulle. In a series of counterstrokes at Montcornet, Crécy-sur-Serre and Laon between 15 and 20
May, de Gaulle startled the Germans, trapping the XIX Panzer Corps commander, General Heinz Guderian, for some ‘uncomfortable hours’ in Holnon Wood.
22 But de Gaulle was less successful when he assaulted the German infantry and anti-tank bridgehead on the Somme’s south bank at Abbeville between 28 and 30 May, when many of the 4th DCR’s tanks were knocked out. Better results attended the more methodically prepared attacks of Perré’s 2nd DCR on 3 and 4 June.
23
When the Case Red offensive commenced at dawn on 5 June, 2nd
DCR had regrouped 25 km behind the River Bresle, south of the Somme.
Meanwhile 4th DCR was reassembling around Marseille-en-Beauvaisis. It had just received new tanks to make good its losses sustained at Abbeville and, with de Gaulle summoned to the side of the prime minister, Paul
Reynaud, and appointed to the government as under-secretary for war on
5 June, received a new commander, General de La Font, two days later.
24
French armour had been re-equipped with impressive speed by the first week of June 1940. Despite the damage sustained in May the spirits of the battalions in the arme blindée were high, and the tank crews fought with great heart and competence in the latter stages of the French campaign.
21
22
23
24
1st DCR lost 158 of its 174 tanks in a stern fight against 5th Panzer Division (von Hartlieb) and part of 7th Panzer Division (Rommel) at Anthée–Flavion–Florennes on 15 May, and then against 7th Panzer Division at Avesnes on 16 May (though more ran out of fuel and were abandoned than were knocked out by German fire). See SHAT 32N447: 1st DCR war diary; G. Saint-Martin, L’Arme blindée française , tome 1, Mai–Juin 1940: les blindés français dans la tourmente (Paris, 1998), pp. 101–103, 180–85; D. Lehmann, ‘The Battle of
Flavion in Belgium (15th May 1940): The French 1st DCR against the German 5.PzD and
7.PzD’, at www.militaryphotos.net/forums/archive/index.php/t-43180.html (accessed
14 July 2006); Frieser, Blitzkrieg Legend , pp. 236–39, 267–71; Crémieux-Brilhac, Français, vol. 2, pp. 596–97, 617; Vanwelkenhuyzen, Pleins feux , pp. 109–11. First-hand published accounts in M.-A. Fabre, Avec les héros de ‘40’ (Paris, 1946), p. 104; B.H. Liddell Hart, ed.,
The Rommel Papers (London, 1953), pp. 21–28.
P. Huard, Le Colonel de Gaulle et ses blindés: Laon, 15–20 mai 1940 (Paris, 1980);
J. Lacouture, De Gaulle: The Rebel (1890–1944) (London, 1990), pp. 180–83; Saint-
Martin, L’Arme blindée française , pp. 214–30; H. Guderian, Panzer Leader , trans.
C. Fitzgibbon (London, [1952] 1974), p. 111.
SHAT 32N461-9 (2nd DCR archives). H. de Wailly, De Gaulle sous la casque: Abbeville 1940
(Paris, 1990), is critical of de Gaulle’s plan, dispositions and stubbornness at Abbeville.
A commander of one of de Gaulle’s regiments equipped with Somua S35 tanks stated:
‘The equipment was very good; [but] our men’s lack of training with it prevented our obtaining satisfactory results’, adding that ‘The absence of communications sets rendered the regiment un-commandable [ incommandable ]’. Archives nationales de
France, Paris [hereafter AN], AN 496 (Daladier papers) 4DA7/Dr.3/sdr.c: ‘Témoignages sur le valeur de nos chars: 4e DCR: rapport du Colonel François, commandant le 3e
Régiment de Cuirassiers’; cf. Saint-Martin, L’Arme blindée française , pp. 178–79, 231–53.
Lacouture, De Gaulle , pp. 184–87, 189–207; Saint-Martin, L’Arme blindée française , p. 254.
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After Dunkirk 227
In the wider picture, too, not only were the formations available to
General Maxime Weygand, Gamelin’s successor as generalissimo, well armed, their morale was good. The attitude of French soldiers was markedly more combative from about 22 May onwards. Several reasons account for this upturn. One was that the divisions deploying to the
Aisne and Somme knew of German successes only by hearsay. A second was the growing confidence of French troops in their weapons, most of which were outperforming the Wehrmacht’s. The ‘resistance of the heavy French and British tanks to German shot, while at the same time they scored kills with their own guns, vindicated tanks that were both heavily armoured and well armed – particularly if they could be thrown into massed action’ (as occurred in a couple of isolated instances).
25 A third was that surviving battle-tried troops – such as the officers and men of the 1st, 2nd, and 4th DCRs, and the 23rd, 29th, 43rd, and 47th infantry divisions – had learnt crucial tactical lessons.
26 The French artillery in particular, as the Wehrmacht acknowledged, proved technically superior to its counterpart. This ‘redoubtable weapon’, as Jean-
Louis Crémieux-Brilhac has termed it, was put to telling use by gunnery officers whose ‘rapid adaptability’ to new tactics, such as deploying
75 mm field guns in an anti-tank role, was ‘remarkable’.
27
In terms of the infantry, though excellent divisions had been lost in the north, so had others of indifferent quality. About a third of the formations had been undermined by their incomplete provision with modern equipment and by their fragile morale. The weakest were the B-series reservist divisions of General André Corap’s 9th Army, formations that comprised the second echelon reserve generated by general mobilization. Each of the 20 peacetime ‘active’ infantry divisions in metropolitan
France shed half their regular officers and NCOs on the publication of the mobilization decree. These men formed the command cadres of two
‘spin-off’ formations, the A-series and B-series divisions, whose constitution tripled the size of the army. The A-series units gained most of these
‘cast-off’ professional officers and NCOs, while the B-series type received only 10%. In the latter divisions, as a result, even officers as senior as battalion commanders were often reservists.
28
25
26
27
28
K. Macksey, The Guinness Book of Tank Facts and Figures (Enfield, 1972), pp. 107–108.
Crémieux-Brilhac, Français , vol.2, pp. 640–43; earlier, Gamelin had opined to his personal staff that ‘The crux of things is that troops like ours, not yet battle-hardened, should be able to withstand an all-out German onslaught.’ SHAT 1K224/9: Cabinet
Gamelin – Journal de marche, 14 October 1939.
Crémieux-Brilhac, Français , vol. 2, p. 644; e.g. the order from the 23rd Infantry Division commander, Gen. Jeannel, on 28 May: ‘Remember that all 75 mm artillery must be placed in situations to intervene in an anti-tank defence role even if, for that, it must abandon its direct fire-support missions’, in SHAT 32N134: 23e Div. d’Infanterie (Etat-
Major: 3e Bureau), no. 1073 S/3: ‘Ordre général d’opérations’, 28 May 1940, p. 15.
AN 496 (Daladier papers), 4DA1/Dr.4/sdr.a: Etat-major de l’Armée paper M14, ‘Le Problème militaire français’, 1 June 1936: Annexe-Note no. 1; The National Archives/Public Record
Office, Kew, London [hereafter TNA/PRO], FO 371, 19870, Col. Bernard Paget, MI3a (War
Office Directorate of Intelligence): ‘General Note on French Army Strengths, Service and
Mobilization Arrangements’, 10 December 1935, pp. 2–4, 6; Dutailly, Problèmes , pp. 264–68; also F. Cochet, Les Soldats de la drôle de guerre, septembre 1939 – mai 1940 (Paris, 2004).
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228 Martin S. Alexander
The B-series reservists were older men who had served as conscripts in the 1920s. Lacking martial spirit, their esprit de corps was weak, their morale brittle. A short annual summer exercise had been the limit of their more recent encounters with army life, and many among them struggled with the wirelesses, new weapons, and even motor vehicles they received in 1939–40.
29 In General Charles Huntziger’s 2nd Army on the Meuse at Sedan on 10 May were the 55th Infantry Division of
General Henri Lafontaine (disbanded in the First World War and only recently re-formed) and 71st Infantry Division of General Joseph Baudet.
Both were B-series divisions and have unjustly become synonymous with the entire French army of 1940.
30 Smashed by XIX Panzer Corps, their fate, and the destruction of several A-series divisions too, was part of the tragedy of May 1940 that bore little comparison to the far stiffer contest that unfolded when battle resumed against France’s remaining active and reservist formations from 5 June. Making for Tours the following week, the New Yorker ’s correspondent, A.J. Liebling, ‘soon met soldiers moving north to Paris as everybody else moved south. They seemed content with what they were doing. There were infantrymen in camions and motorcyclists on their machines, and their faces were strong and untroubled.’ 31
More damaging for the intended defence on the Somme and Aisne was the loss in Belgium and the southern Netherlands of the three
‘active’ series motorized infantry divisions and one armoured cavalry
DLM (light mechanized division) in Giraud’s 7th Army. These formations had paid the price of the ill-advised ‘Breda dash’, imposed by
Gamelin in a hazardous bid to link the Dutch army into Allied dispositions.
32 To 7th Army’s right was the BEF (less 51st Highland Division) and on its right, in central Belgium, General Georges Blanchard’s 1st
Army. This contained France’s other two DLM armoured cavalry divisions, forming General Jules Prioux’s mechanized corps, and three more motorized infantry divisions, 1st Moroccan Division and two North
African infantry divisions.
33
29
30
31
32
33
Dutailly, Problèmes, pp. 140–46; J. Vidalenc, ‘Les Divisions de série “B” dans l’armée française dans la campagne de France’, Revue Historique des Armées , IV (1980), pp. 106–26; Kiesling, Arming against Hitler , pp. 63–71, 86–106; Crémieux-Brilhac,
Français , vol. 2, pp. 502–506, 522–24.
On 55th and 71st Inf. Divs. at Sedan see Jackson, Fall of France , pp. 167–73; Doughty,
Breaking Point , pp. 102–106, 108–20, 197–200; Frieser, Blitzkrieg Legend , pp. 145–53;
Vanwelkenhuyzen, Pleins feux , pp. 59–64; Gen. C. Grandsard, Le 10e Corps d’armée dans la bataille, 1939–1940 (Paris, 1949); Col. P. Guinard, J.-C. Devos and J. Nicot for Ministère de la Défense, Etat-Major de l’Armée de Terre: Service Historique, Inventaire sommaire des archives de la guerre (série N, 1872–1919): introduction. Organisation de l’armée française.
Guide des sources. Bibliographie (Troyes, 1975), pp. 101, 103.
A.J. Liebling, The Road Back to Paris (New York, 1988), p. 94.
TNA/PRO, FO 371/32082, ‘Rapport Giraud: Les causes de la défaite; 26 July 1940;
B. Chaix, En mai 1940 fallait-il entrer en Belgique? Décisions stratégiques et plans opérationnels de la campagne de France (Paris, 2000); Col. R. Villatte, ‘L’Entrée des français en Belgique et en Hollande en mai 1940’, in [no author] La Campagne de France (mai–juin 1940) (Paris,
1953), pp. 60–76; M. Lerecouvreux, L’Armée Giraud en Hollande, 1939–1940 (Paris, 1951).
Gen. J. Prioux, Souvenirs de guerre, 1939–1943 (Paris, 1947), pp. 55–136.
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After Dunkirk 229
Much has correctly been made by writers of the significance of losing these forces in the north. Under the more limited defensive advance to the Scheldt (Escaut), the Franco-British plan of September–November
1939, 7th Army had been in general reserve near Reims. Had 7th Army remained in Champagne, there would have been a much better prospect of stopping the German push westwards from the Meuse in mid-May.
34
The Breda manoeuvre remains the fateful ‘gamble gone wrong’ of 1940, forever staining Gamelin’s record as a wartime commander-in-chief.
35
But despite these losses, 60 French divisions and 4 British remained to fight for France, along the line of the Somme–Oise–Ailette–Aisne.
Many of these formations had already begun by 20 May to transfer here, on Gamelin’s orders, from Alsace-Lorraine, the Jura, and the
Alps. Weygand accelerated the switch the moment he assumed command.
36 These divisions were fresh, well armed, and well supplied, with high morale, and they arrived rapidly, the French 4e Bureau exploiting interior lines of communication. In the crisis when the German armies approached Paris in 1914 a ‘secret weapon’ had been available to General Joseph Joffre, then the French commander-in-chief. This was
France’s highly efficient railway network, able to ‘move an entire corps from his right to his left in five or six days’.
37 The advantage remained in 1940, with civilian motor vehicles supplementing trains and military convoys. ‘The buses have disappeared’, recorded Alexander Werth,
Paris correspondent of the Manchester Guardian , on 16 May. This had startled French people: ‘Reminded them of the Battle of the Marne.
Many taxis have also disappeared, perhaps for the same reason.’ 38
Advance parties from the redeployed formations arrived on the
Somme with impressive speed. Mobile elements from the reconnaissance battalion of General Joseph Jeannel’s 23rd Infantry Division reached the river at Ham on 17 May. They immediately set up defensive positions, strengthened by the arrival with refugees from the north of a
Renault R35 tank and some 75 mm field artillery. At noon the next day the first German motorcycle detachments appeared and were repelled as infantry stragglers reported the Panzers heading northwest for the
34
35
36
37
38
Chaix, Fallait-il entrer en Belgique?
, pp. 95–199 and maps at pp. 317–28; cf. D.W. Alexander,
‘Repercussions of the Breda Variant’, French Historical Studies VIII (1974), pp. 459–88.
P. Le Goyet, Le Mystère Gamelin (Paris, 1976), pp. 292–350 (terming the days 10–20 May
‘Gamelin’s “real war”’); Frieser, Blitzkrieg Legend , pp. 90–93.
B. Destremau, Weygand (Paris, 1989), pp. 403–404. Weygand was a true generalissimo, with command authority over the chiefs of the French air force and navy – a remit beyond that previously enjoyed by Gamelin, who had been only commander-in-chief of all land forces.
R.A. Doughty, Pyrrhic Victory: French Strategy and Operations in the Great War
(Cambridge, MA, 2005), p. 99 (about 110 trains were required to move a twodivision corps); see also SHAT 34N1017, Dr. 5: GQG (Grand Quartier général, supreme command) Direction des Mouvements et Transports sur Route: Memento de service des mouvements et transports de route (Paris, March 1940) – a 168-pp. handbook issued to all divisional staffs based on the war of movement of autumn 1918 and experiences since September 1939.
A. Werth, The Last Days of Paris (London, 1940), p. 45.
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230 Martin S. Alexander coast. Despite a Luftwaffe raid on the railway at Chaulnes, Weygand’s great switch of forces from the right to left flanks was easily and swiftly completed. Trains and bus fleets disgorged men, munitions, artillery, and stores at Rouen, Noyon, Soissons, and Chantilly on 19 and 20 May, including the main formations of General Fougère’s XXIV Corps (23rd
Infantry Division, 29th Alpine Division, and 3rd Light Infantry Division).
The rest of the now reconstituted 7th Army, under a forceful new commander, General Aubert Frère, along with Altmayer’s new 10th Army to its west, arrived between 23 and 28 May.
39
Unfortunately on 20 May the 10th Panzer Division from Guderian’s
XIX Panzer Corps reached Péronne and helped beat off French attempts to take it back. A similar situation had unfolded lower down the Somme at Amiens, Picquigny, and Abbeville. Many of the arriving
French infantry therefore became temporary navvies, lending their muscle to the army’s corps of engineers. These men, the Génie militaire , were racing against the clock as they toiled to erect new defensive positions.
40 The Somme’s hamlets and villages, along with those of Picardy and Champagne, became demolition sites, their streets and squares echoing to the clang of pickaxes and crash of controlled demolitions.
The work at Rethonvillers, 5 km northeast of Roye, was recorded in the diary of Captain Paul de Lussan, adjutant of 34th GRDI ( Groupe de reconnaissance de division d’infanterie ), the reconnaissance battalion of
29th Alpine Division, on 29 May: ‘A big village with many routes in and out […] It took the entire day to set up its defence, construct barricades etc.’ 41
As the bastions took shape throughout a zone stretching 8 km to the rear of the Somme and Aisne, the local inhabitants fled, their exodus swelling the stream of refugees from Belgium, the Nord, and the
Meuse.
42 In the now-empty houses, farms, and ubiquitous sugar-beet factories the troops knocked out windows, sandbagged doorways, and sited machine-guns, along with 25 mm and 47 mm calibre anti-tank artillery, in mutually supporting strong points. Meanwhile roadblocks were set, covered by machine-gun nests and by the 75 mm and 105 mm
39
40
41
42
Vasselle, Les Combats de 1940 , pp. 12–13, 14–19.
Destremau, Weygand , pp. 455–56; Dutailly, Problèmes , p. 199.
SHAT 34N527: 29th DI [ division d’infanterie , Infantry Division] Alpine: Capt. Paul d’Audibert de Lussan, Adjutant, 34th GRDI, Carnets de route.
G. Sadoul, Journal de guerre, 1939–40 (Paris, 1977), p. 227: 36 years old in 1940,
Sadoul was a Communist Party activist and already a distinguished film historian and critic. The novelist Arthur Koestler saw ‘The muddy cars of the refugees from the north – mattresses on top, bicycles on the running-board, bulging with exhausted people – crossing Paris like a swarm of birds on their flight from a hurricane’
( Scum of the Earth , London, 1941, pp. 155–56). See also R. Vinen, The Unfree French:
Life under the Occupation (London, 2006), pp. 28–43. In-depth scholarly treatments are J. Vidalenc, L’Exode de mai–juin 1940 (Paris, 1957); N. Dombrowski, ‘Beyond the Battlefield: The French Civilian Exodus of May–June 1940’, PhD thesis,
New York University, 1995. Cf. comparisons in J.S. Torrie, ‘For Their Own Good:
Civilian Evacuations in Germany and France, 1939–1945’, PhD thesis, Harvard
University, 2002.
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After Dunkirk 231 calibre divisional and corps artillery to the rear.
43
Weygand’s plan was to construct a new, deep, but aggressive defensive system along the
Somme and Aisne, to restore a war of position. The village redoubts acquired the nickname ‘Weygand hedgehogs’. They presented an attacker with an uninvitingly spiky 360 degree position – no easy prey – and were inspired by the elastic defence of 1917 and 1918 that had proven superior to linear positions in channelling a breakthrough and choking its momentum.
44
Behind these strong points were more newly arriving infantry divisions, as well as the 2nd, 3rd, and 5th DLCs (light cavalry divisions), which were half-mechanized, and 2nd DCR on the Bresle, west of
Hornoy and Molliens-Vidame, with Evans’s 1st (British) Armoured Division deploying behind the Andelle, northwest of Forges-les-Eaux.
45
It was all the more unfortunate, then, that the new defences and their well-motivated defenders were compromised by the German lodgements gained on the Somme’s south bank.
46
Because the lodgements presented excellent assault bridgeheads, the French launched renewed attempts to eliminate them, making attacks with composite battle groups of fresh troops. One group consisted of Lieutenant-Colonel René Landriau’s
34th GRDI (reconnaissance battalion of 29th Alpine Division, whose main body was still in transit from Lorraine), accompanied by Foreign
Legionnaires from 97th GRDI (reconnaissance battalion of General
Barre’s 7th North African Infantry Division).
47
This battle group attacked the German advance guards in Péronne’s southern suburbs on 20 May, also fighting a sharp action that day at Villers-Carbonnel to the southeast. Landriau’s force showed that the French army had rediscovered its fighting spirit. Its troops, a mix of active-duty and reservist personnel, ‘conducted themselves splendidly, their calmness under fire comparing well with their Legion comrades’. The 34th GRDI was praised in a divisional citation for ‘knowing how to organize itself, use its weapons coolly, and maintain its self-belief’.
48
43
44
45
46
47
48
SHAT 32N218: 42nd Inf. Div. Journal de marche et opérations [French unit war diary, hereafter: JMO] génie divisionnaire (on the Aisne); 30N242: XXIV Corps engineering
JMO (9 February–10 July 1940) and ‘Notes sur la main d’oeuvre, février – juillet 1940’;
30N243: XXIV Corps, ‘Notes sur les ponts de la Somme, points de passage, destructions’; 30N62: VIII Corps, 4e Bureau papers and JMOs for corps artillery and engineers; 30N75: IX Corps, JMO de l’EM [Etat-Major, Military Staff] de Génie
(September 1939–July 1940); 30N216: XVIII Corps, Génie: travaux et notes relatives à la
DCA [Défense contre avions].
B.I. Gudmundsson, ‘The Hedgehogs of Amiens’, Military History Quarterly IX (1997), p. 67; Vasselle, Combats de 1940 , pp. 30–31; Saint-Martin, L’Arme blindée française , pp. 158–61; F.O. Miksche, Blitzkrieg (London, 1941).
Commandant [Major] Pierre Lyet, La Bataille de France, mai–juin 1940 (Paris, 1947), pp. 120–21 (map).
Frieser, Blitzkrieg Legend , pp. 252–69, 274–78.
Vanwelkenhuyzen, Pleins feux , pp. 261–65, 284–89; SHAT 32N385: 7th DINA [ Division d’infanterie North-Africaine , North African Division] war diary (20 March–11 July 1940);
32N386–9 for the rest of this division’s surviving papers.
SHAT 34N527: 29th DI Alpine: Capt. de Lussan’s carnets de route, incorporating 29e
DI/EM: ‘Note de Service’ no. 40/1, 22 mai 1940.
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232 Martin S. Alexander
But on 22 May the Germans repositioned General von Wietersheim’s
XIV Motorized Corps to guard this sector as Guderian’s XIX Panzer
Corps moved north to Dunkirk. Over the succeeding days Wehrmacht infantry at last caught up and reached the Somme river and bridgeheads.
49 The lodgements withstood the French attacks and remained as breaches in the integrity of the Weygand Line. ‘Duroc [a press briefer] at the War Office’, Werth noted on 2 June, ‘tells me they’re worried about the three German bridgeheads: at Amiens, Péronne and Ham’. Large
German infantry concentrations had been detected in the Péronne region. ‘He thinks the Germans will try to push towards Rouen and towards Reims: leaving Paris isolated’.
50 This was an accurate forecast of
Case Red, as a pause now occurred in operations, the lull limiting air as well as ground operations.
51
The Luftwaffe had flown bombing sorties in close support of
Wehrmacht ground units in the fighting west of the Meuse from 12 to
16 May.
52 But taking the six-week campaign as a whole, these Luftwaffe missions occurred with diminishing frequency as German air power concentrated on fighting for aerial mastery. Air activity tailed off markedly as the Luftwaffe paused after Dunkirk to repair damaged aircraft and relocate squadrons to forward airfields now in German hands in Belgium and northern France. In June 1940 operations would be conducted deeper into France, and were characterized by extensive aerial combat, operations against French road and rail networks to hamper troop redeployments, and attacks on refugee columns. There were few instances in June of the Luftwaffe playing the ‘flying artillery’ role, for all that this has become entrenched as a major ‘explanation’ for German victory in 1940.
53
Even in Poland the Luftwaffe had suffered 29% losses (560 aircraft destroyed of a total of 1929 engaged). This was a loss-rate far higher than expected, and was followed by further attrition during the Norway campaign in April 1940.
54 From 10 May to 3 June, first over Belgium and
49
50
51
52
53
54
Vasselle, Combats de 1940 , pp. 27–29.
Werth, Last Days of Paris , p. 119.
E. R. Hooton, Phoenix Triumphant: The Rise and Rise of the Luftwaffe (London, 1999), p. 242, table 23: ‘Attacks on French Targets, 10 May–8 June 1940’.
Frieser, Blitzkrieg Legend , pp. 44–54, 342–45; Doughty, Breaking Point , pp. 132–37;
J.S. Corum, The Luftwaffe: Creating the Operational Air War, 1918–1940 (Lawrence, KS,
1997), p. 277. Cf. sights witnessed by German follow-up infantry in de Wailly, De Gaulle sous la casque , pp. 34–35.
See, for example, Corum, Luftwaffe , pp. 278–80.
Figures from tables in Maier et al., Germany , vol. 2, pp. 86–87, 101, 106, 117–18, 121,
124–25. For the 1 September 1939 Luftwaffe order of battle see Hooton, Phoenix
Triumphant , pp. 281–88; on the Luftwaffe in Poland, Corum, Luftwaffe, pp. 272–77.
Cf. K.A. Maier, ‘The Luftwaffe’, in P. Addison and J.A. Crang, eds, The Burning Blue:
A New History of the Battle of Britain (London, 2000), pp. 15–21.
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After Dunkirk 233 the Champagne-Ardennes and then above Calais and Dunkirk, the
Royal Air Force and French fighter squadrons put up a lively fight for the skies.
55 French pursuit and interceptor squadrons, particularly those operating the new Dewoitine 520, took a heavy toll of the Luftwaffe.
56
Though French army units did collapse under the combination of heavy Wehrmacht and Luftwaffe attacks on the Meuse, and in the infamous ‘panic’ at Bulson on 13 May, anti-aircraft defences in late May and into June improved.
57 French fighters more often challenged German aircraft once the Luftwaffe flew deeper into French air space.
58 General
François d’Astier de la Vigerie, commanding the ZOAN (Zone of Air
Operations: North), was right to emphasize that ‘the sky was not empty’ of French aircraft.
59 The armée de l’air and the Luftwaffe fought
‘a battle of attrition which took place increasingly behind enemy
[French] lines’.
60 In all the Luftwaffe lost 26% of its in-service strength as of 4 May, during the six-week campaign over France and Belgium.
61
The attrition included 521 bombers lost by 25 June (of 1758 in squadron service on 4 May 1940), a 30% rate of destruction – a rate also sustained by the Messerschmitt Me 110 twin-engined two-seater Zerstörer and by the
Junkers Ju 87 dive-bomber force.
62 The skies were fiercely contested. As the distinguished German air-power historian Horst Boog notes, before the Luftwaffe could commence air war against Britain it ‘had to recover from the heavy losses incurred during the French campaign’.
63
61
62
63
55
56
57
58
59
60
For this phase of air operations and losses see Hooton, Phoenix Triumphant , pp. 257–62; also Anon. [Paul Richey], Fighter Pilot: A Personal Record of the Campaign in France,
September 8th 1939 to June 13th 1940 (London, 1941), pp. 85–119.
In an extensive literature see especially: P. Facon, L’Armée de l’air dans la tourmente: la bataille de France, 1939–1940 (Paris, 1997); Gen. C. Christienne, ‘L’Armée de l’air dans la bataille de France’, in Les Armées françaises pendant la Seconde Guerre mondiale,
1939–1945: actes du colloque de Paris, mai 1985 (Paris, 1986); P. Martin, Invisibles vainqueurs: exploits et sacrifices de l’Armée de l’air en 1940 (Paris, 1990); J.A. Gunsburg,
‘L’Armée de l’Air vs. the Luftwaffe, 1940’, Defence Update International XLV (1984), pp. 44–53; P. Buffotot and J. Ogier, ‘L’Armée de l’air française dans la campagne de
France, 10 mai–25 juin 1940: essai de bilan numérique d’une bataille’, Revue Historique de l’Armée (1975), pp. 88–117; D. Griffin, ‘The Role of the French Air Force: The Battle of France, 1940’, Aerospace Historian (1974), pp. 144–53. Cf. A. Ausems, ‘The Luftwaffe’s
Airborne Losses in May 1940: An Interpretation’, Aerospace Historian (1985), pp. 84–88;
W. Murray, Luftwaffe (Baltimore, 1985), pp. 39–46; Hooton, Phoenix Triumphant , pp. 239–71; Frieser, Blitzkrieg Legend , pp. 44–54.
Crémieux-Brilhac, Français , vol. 2, pp. 563–65, 574–89.
See Frieser, Blitzkrieg Legend , pp. 157–61, 174–83; Jackson, Fall of France, pp. 163–67;
For another case of mass flight or surrender by troops shattered by concentrated airarmour attack in mid-May see J. Minart, P.C. Vincennes: secteur 4 , 2 vols (Paris, 1945), vol. 2, pp. 221–22.
Gen. F. d’Astier de la Vigerie, Le Ciel n’était pas vide (Paris, 1952); Crémieux-Brilhac,
Français , vol. 2, pp. 652–56, 665–67.
Hooton, Phoenix Triumphant , p. 247; also M. Smith, ‘The RAF’, in Addison and Crang,
Burning Blue , pp. 22–36, esp. 31–36.
Figures from tables and bar charts in Murray, Luftwaffe , pp. 44–45.
Op. cit.
H. Boog, ‘The Luftwaffe’s Assault’, in Addison and Crang Burning Blue , pp. 39–54
(quote, p. 40). Boog corroborates Murray, Luftwaffe , pp. 48–49, and Crémieux-Brilhac,
Français , vol. 2, pp. 659, 666–69; Luftwaffe availability rates in Maier et al., Germany, vol. 2, pp. 252–53, 278–79.
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234 Martin S. Alexander
Air-force influence on ground operations diminished as May closed.
On 26 May soldiers of the French 13th Infantry Division encountered a lorry driver from Corap’s 9th Army as they moved into the new ‘Weygand
Line’ southwest of Amiens. The driver had survived his parent formation’s collapse on the Meuse and had since been shuttling soldiers up to the new front. ‘At first we got bombed’, he reported, ‘but things are going better now. Our fighter aircraft have got into action at last. As soon as they meet a spot of resistance, the Germans pull back.’ 64
On 31 May the French chief of air staff, General Joseph Vuillemin, centralized command of all remaining French aviation and attempted to disrupt transfers of German land forces southwards in readiness for
Case Red.
65 To this end the Allies flew 454 bomber sorties between
28 May and 4 June (66% of them by the armée de l’air ). German troop movements, however, proceeded even in daylight ‘without a hitch’, in the words of Albert Kesselring, a Luftwaffe general.
66 On the French side, too, the ground forces suffered little more than sporadic strafing as they transformed the Somme and Aisne villages into ‘hedgehogs’.
67
The duels in the sky were intense and almost constant, however, with the result that Luftwaffe serviceability to support Case Red on 5 June remained 30% down on the aircraft available on 10 May. Flying over
300 sorties a day on 5, 6, 7, and 8 June, these days were ‘the French fighter arm’s finest hours’.
68
‘Allied inferiority in the air’, as Douglas Porch correctly notes, ‘was not the decisive element in the campaign.’ 69 But the Luftwaffe did manage two significant and under-recognized achievements. First, it prevented Allied generals gathering much-needed tactical intelligence about German dispositions during their preparatory phase to the assault on the Weygand Line. Second, it restricted the refuelling operations and manoeuvre of French armour from which counterstrokes would be required if Weygand’s improved fighting tactics were to do more than delay the Wehrmacht.
On the first of these effects, the Luftwaffe helped shroud the
Wehrmacht’s stage-by-stage redeployments southward from Dunkirk in a fog of war. Signals intercepts rarely cut through the murk in these early months of the war, ‘Enigma’ decrypts being fragmentary and of short duration owing to German code changes.
70 Aerial reconnaissance might
64
65
66
67
68
69
70
Sadoul, Journal de guerre , p. 228, 26 May 1940; cf. Hooton, Phoenix Triumphant , pp. 257–58.
Facon, L’Armée de l’air , pp. 220–27; Crémieux-Brilhac, Français , vol. 2, pp. 652–54, 657–58.
Quoted in Hooton, Phoenix Triumphant , p. 262; cf. Frieser, Blitzkrieg Legend , p. 343.
SHAT 34N527, 29e DI Alpine (34e GRDI): Capt. de Lussan, Carnets de route, p. 12,
30–31 May, 2–3 June 1940.
Crémieux-Brilhac, Français , vol. 2, pp. 665–66; cf. Hooton, Phoenix Triumphant , pp. 262,
264–66; Frieser, Blitzkrieg Legend , pp. 309–10, 343.
D. Porch, ‘Why Did France Fall?’, Military History Quarterly II (1990), pp. 30–41
(quote, p. 39).
Cohen and Gooch, Military Misfortunes , pp. 223–24; M.S. Alexander, Republic in Danger:
General Maurice Gamelin and the Politics of French Defence, 1933–1940 (Cambridge, 1992), pp. 323–26, 334–36; R.A. Doughty, ‘The French Armed Forces, 1918–1940’, in A.R. Millett and W. Murray, eds, Military Effectiveness , 3 vols (London, 1988), vol. 2, pp. 39–69, esp. 50–52.
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After Dunkirk 235 have produced more intelligence, given the blue skies and superb visibility on most days in May and June 1940. However, the French air force had dropped priority for reconnaissance and army support after winning independence in 1933. Its surviving reconnaissance aircraft – BCR
( bombardement–combat–reconnaissance ) machines from 1932–34 – were few in number and obsolete. Missions deeper than 11 km behind
German lines had been prohibited in November 1939, and would have been suicidal in the intense fighting of May–June 1940. ‘When I asked for and obtained some reconnaissance flights’, noted the 2nd DCR’s commander, Colonel Perré, ‘my requests were conscientiously and courageously met, but there was never any depth to their incursions over enemy territory.’ 71 Bereft of information, French generals were left guessing how best to deploy their units as these arrived on the Somme,
Oise, and Aisne. ‘Personally’, wrote General Baudouin, the commander of 13th Infantry Division, ‘the absence of intelligence and firm orders from the high command caused me dreadful anguish’.
72
Nor was it easy to obtain enemy soldiers to interrogate. Jeannel’s 23rd
Infantry Division took 13 prisoners when its leading echelons clashed with German reconnaissance forces, reaching the 23rd’s newly allotted defensive sector along the St Quentin canal from Ham through Jussy to
Tergnier on 19 May. But the Germans swiftly took steps to minimize their risk from raids. Patrols from 23rd Division probed the north bank of the canal during the night of 21–22 May but returned emptyhanded, finding ‘that the enemy left only very weak elements in contact during the hours of darkness’.
73 Jeannel’s men had slightly more success a week later, several patrols crossing the canal on 29 May during the day and after dark to reconnoitre the enemy’s positions, one of the night raids pulling off a coup de main that yielded four prisoners.
74
Most of the French infantry, however, were required for working parties to construct Weygand’s ‘hedgehogs’ the moment they arrived on the Somme and Aisne. Few could be spared for raiding and, in consequence, most officers taking charge of the forward defensive sectors were reliant on what their outposts saw or heard. The rumble of heavy traffic behind the German front line was reported on 31 May and
1 June, on the routes départementales from Péronne southeast to Tertry, and from Péronne to Athies. Identifying the enemy’s type and strength became almost impossible, however, when the German artillery that had been peppering the forward positions of 29th Alpine Division demolished the Pargny and Voyennes church towers on 1 June – vantage points in which 29th Division had set up observers.
75
73
74
75
71
72
AN 496 (Daladier papers) 4/DA7/Dr.3: compte-rendu de la 2e Div. Cuirassée, p. 15;
Crémieux-Brilhac, Français , vol. 2, p. 652.
SHAT 32N77, Dr. 2: ‘Extrait du Carnet de notes du général de division Baudouin, commandant la 13e DI’, p. 13.
SHAT 32N134, Dr. 1: 23e DI – JMO (24 août 1939 au 11 juillet 1940), 19 and 22 May 1940.
Op. cit., 29 May.
SHAT 32N182: 29e DI Alpine – Général Gérodias, ‘Souvenirs de guerre, 1939–40’, p. 22.
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236 Martin S. Alexander
To disrupt intelligence-gathering further, Wehrmacht raids kept
French outposts busy in self-defence. On 2 June, just as a stream of
German vehicles, including lorries pulling tarpaulin-covered trailers, became visible on the Brie to Prusle road, German infantry suddenly emerged from the cemetery at the northern edge of the village of
Brisot and tried to rush the French strong point at Hill 82.
76
Though the attack was beaten off, the Germans tried a night-time infiltration at 02.00 on 3 June between Hill 82 and St Christ. Later on 3 June, 40
Minenwerfer rounds bombarded Epénancourt to keep French heads down.
77
The 29th Alpine Division’s outposts were strafed for 30 minutes that afternoon: ‘numerous aircraft sweeping in at very low altitude that machine-gunned Languevoisin in particular, and circled over the whole sector’.
78
The ‘aggressive behaviour’ of the German ground troops coincided with preparations visible through field glasses north of the Somme canal, while 23rd Infantry Division got ‘various indicators of important movements in the enemy rear areas’ on 2 June and
‘incessant noise signifying continuing movements in the enemy rear areas’ during the night of 3–4 June.
79
Lacking specific intelligence, however, the French could aim only general ‘harassing fire’ at the enemy, the 94th Mountain Artillery Regiment discharging 200 shells in five hours during the night of 3–4 June.
80
Positioning the precious French counter-attack reserves in particular – the DCR tank formations and half-mechanized DLCs – was little better than a lottery.
81
Army and corps staffs were as much in the dark as frontline officers whose men would receive the enemy blows. Baudouin, commanding 13th Infantry Division, recorded that: ‘we divisional generals, spread out along the Somme, had such poor intelligence that we thought ours was a covering and sacrificial role, to allow time to be won and a defence organized to the rear on the Oise, the Seine, the Loire perhaps’.
82
Such misapprehensions were the cause of much later bitterness.
The 29th Alpine’s chief of staff, Major Petetin, became so desperate for solid information about enemy preparations and order of battle that he ordered every infantry battalion in the division to prioritize tactical intelligence-gathering. Regimental intelligence officers were instructed to telephone reports at 05.00, 08.30 and 18.00 hours and provide a written intelligence briefing covering the previous 24 hours by 06.00 on 5 June.
83
80
81
82
83
76
77
78
79
SHAT 32N184, Dr. 4: 29e DI, Etat-Major: 2e Bureau, no. 215/3, 2 June 1940 – compterendu de situation no. 4.
Op. cit., Dr. 10: no. 532/2, 3 June 1940, compte-rendu de renseignements no. 5, du 2 juin, 8h, au 3 juin, 8h.
Op. cit., no. 534/2: compte-rendu de renseignements du 3 juin 1940 de 8h à 18h.
Op. cit., no. 236/3, 4 June 1940, 10h48: compte-rendu de situation no. 6, du 3 juin, 8h, au 3 juin, 20h; and 32N134, Dr. 1: 23e DI, JMO, 2 June 1940.
SHAT 32N184, no. 236/3.
SHAT 32N77, Dr. 2: ‘[…] notes du général de division Baudouin’, pp. 11, 12, 14, 16.
Op. cit., p. 12.
SHAT 32N184, Dr. 12: 29e DI (Etat-Major: 2e Bureau, no. 522/2), ‘Ordre particulier pour la recherche du renseignement pour les sous-secteurs’, 3 June 1940.
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After Dunkirk 237
Answers were not long in coming. They were delivered, however, not by
French voices down the telephone but by a torrent of German shells, bombs, and bullets.
On the Somme, Case Red commenced at 03.00 on 5 June. Along the length of 7th Army’s front the dawn sky ‘was lit by the flash and flare of a thunderous air and artillery bombardment’.
84 Masking the precise dispositions of the Wehrmacht over the previous 10 days was a significant and overlooked Luftwaffe contribution to the preparation of the offensive, one assisted by the German ground troops’ aggressive protection of their starting positions. Nor did events clarify themselves once fighting resumed. As Cohen and Gooch discerned: ‘The troops suffered […] while their leaders were unable to contact superior headquarters for orders and lacked all but the vaguest notion of the situation.’ 85 The archives confirm the problem. ‘Intelligence reaching me was piecemeal, fragmentary’, recorded General Baudouin; ‘it was difficult to arrive at an accurate picture of the situation. From higher command, from neighbouring units, I had no news.’ 86
The second way the Luftwaffe handicapped French military effectiveness was by interfering with their armoured and motorized infantry counter-attacks. Sometimes this was achieved by strafing and bombing the French units, at other times by forcing refuelling to take place in woods or after dark, leaving the French tanks and tracked-carriers immobilized or too far distant to relieve critically hard-pressed infantry bastions.
An example of the direct intervention occurred on the afternoon of
6 June south of Péronne. Here German infantry and tanks had battered 29th Alpine Division’s positions for a day and a half without success. To the left, however, a salient had been driven by late afternoon on 5 June between the 29th and the neighbouring formation, General
Fernand Lenclud’s 19th Infantry Division. Wehrmacht mechanized elements had ‘attained, attacked or outflanked’ the fortified hamlets of Fonchette, Fonche, Hattencourt, Etalon, Curchy, and Dreslincourt.
But a combined arms counter-attack at 18.00 that evening by a Renault
R35 tank company and a company of Major de Jankowitz’s 65th
Chasseurs alpins battalion recaptured Dreslincourt.
87
The success encouraged the sector’s senior commander, General
Théodore Sciard of I Corps, to attempt a larger-scale counterstroke at noon the next day, 6 June, and scatter the German attackers. As spearhead, Sciard selected Major Dufour’s 25th Battle-tank Battalion from
Welvert’s rebuilt 1st DCR.
88 Dufour had 30 B1bis and R35 tanks available
84
85
86
87
88
Williams, Ides of May , p. 274.
Cohen and Gooch, Military Misfortunes , p. 205.
SHAT 32N77, Dr. 2: 13e DI – ‘[…] notes du général de division Baudouin’, p. 15.
SHAT 34N527: 34th GRDI, Capt. de Lussan: Carnets de route, p. 13, 5 June 1940.
See SHAT 32N447: 1st DCR war diary; also SHAT 32N448 (1st DCR Etat-Major: bulletins de renseignements, studies of 1st DCR in Belgium, maps and aerial photographs of its zone of operations); Frieser, Blitzkrieg Legend , pp. 236–37, 270;
Crémieux-Brilhac, Français , vol. 2, pp. 596–97.
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238 Martin S. Alexander in three companies. His orders were to roll back the Germans completely and relieve the undaunted alpins . Realizing that the French tanks were setting at risk the entire Case Red assault on the middle Somme, the
German ground commander summoned a ‘massive’ series of Ju 87 Stuka attacks from 12.30 that ‘continued all afternoon’. Dufour had no antiaircraft battery to drive away the air raids, and his two leading companies were forced to abandon their advance and scatter, or be destroyed.
89 The
25th Battalion’s third tank company, however, had manoeuvred meanwhile around Champien, site of 29th Alpine Division’s headquarters, and its nine tanks fought off the panzers till 17.30. Their action enabled the
29th’s staff to slip the German noose, keep the division under command and control, and direct their infantry battalions to begin a fighting retreat to the Oise at Pont-Ste-Maxence and thence eventually to the south of the Loire.
90
French tactics rested on aggressive defence and slowing down the
German operational tempo. Every encircled strong point, enjoined
Weygand’s operational order of 24 May, ‘must hold out at all cost while it awaits relief’ by tactical counter-attacks to sweep away the attackers.
General Frère’s 7th Army order of 29 May elaborated the techniques now felt to work best against Wehrmacht methods, and the evidence in the 7th Army case studies examined here – 13th Infantry Division and
29th Alpine Division – resembles a modernized variant of the flexible defence developed in 1918.
91 The Germans had no option but to make difficult and dangerous assaults. Time and again they had to pick their way through barbed-wire entanglements, anti-tank spikes and minefields, while under intense and pre-ranged fire from sandbagged and fortified buildings. These positions offered a more effective counter to the infiltration and breakthrough tactics than the linear defences that the Wehrmacht had easily unhinged in May. Adapting with impressive speed, French units relearnt war in under three weeks.
92
On the 29th Alpine Division’s eastern sector the French infantry were solidly dug in. For three days they resisted assaults by strong infantry forces backed by plentiful artillery, tanks, and aircraft. Despite their strength, the Germans made only limited inroads, their advance being measured in metres and dead bodies because of the uncompromising and sacrificial resistance of Colonel Mermet’s 6th Chasseurs alpins demi-brigade around Liancourt. Even when a salient was punched into the French lines between Voyennes and Offoy the breach was eliminated
89
90
91
92
AN 496 (Daladier papers) 4/DA7/Dr. 3/sdr.a: Rapport du Cdt. Dufour, 25e BCC
[Bataillon de Chars de Combat]; Saint-Martin notes how French armoured divisions were weakened by having no integral accompanying anti-aircraft batteries: L’Arme blindée française , p. 126.
SHAT 34N52: 34th GRDI – Capt. de Lussan, Carnets de route, pp. 12–16, 5–6 June
1940; Fabre, Avec les héros , pp. 90–92 (seven of the nine French tanks were destroyed);
Saint-Martin, L’Arme blindeé française, pp. 187–88.
SHAT 32N77, Dr. 2: 13e DI - ‘[…] notes du général de division Baudouin’, p. 11;
Crémieux-Brilhac, Français , vol. 2, pp. 635–43.
Crémieux-Brilhac, Français , vol. 2, p. 644.
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After Dunkirk 239 when elements of 3rd Alpine Regiment and 24th Chasseurs alpins counterattacked and re-established liaison with the formation to 29th Alpine
Division’s east, General Duchemin’s 3rd Light Infantry Division.
93
Weygand visited the headquarters of General Besson, commanding
Army Group no. 3 (to which 29th Alpine Division and its parent formation, 7th Army, belonged) on the afternoon of 5 June. ‘The order I had given to the different key positions to hold their ground, even if encircled and by-passed by enemy tanks’, noted the generalissimo, ‘was hard and almost cruel’. He left Besson, however, having ‘reason to hope it was being respected’.
94
In June 1940 neither German air power nor mechanization was a magic wand to obviate the need for costly battles at close quarters by the ground troops.
95 General Hermann Hoth’s XV Panzer Corps
(Rommel’s 7th Panzer Division and von Hartlieb’s 5th) did, to be sure, wreak havoc below the lower Somme and Bresle that recalled the week from 12 to 19 May. But mostly it was hard and bloody work to dislodge
French resistance. ‘Further east’, in the evidence of a panzer force officer, ‘the German offensive did not go so smoothly. Panzergruppe
Kleist tried in vain to break out of the bridgeheads at Amiens and
Péronne; the French troops in this sector fought with extreme stubbornness and inflicted considerable losses.’ 96
The bulk of its strength being engaged in the aerial battles of 5–15
June, the Luftwaffe’s aid to the Wehrmacht in this stage of the campaign was mainly indirect. In several instances it dispersed French armour that had been ordered to relieve embattled infantry redoubts and delayed the armour’s return to combat. But it did not blast the French infantry, artillery, and combat engineers from their defences as it had often done three or four weeks earlier.
97 On 14 June the Germans entered Paris and their air force was, in a revealing directive, instructed ‘to help […] maintain momentum, hinder the retreat of enemy forces and disrupt the enemy rail network’.
98 Even in the final 10 days of operations in France, the battles on the ground had to be won by troops on the ground.
The most serious effect of German air power was how it cramped manoeuvre by French reserves that feared air attack. This particularly
94
95
96
93
97
98
SHAT 32N182, Dr. 4: 29e Div. Alpine, no. 253/3: compte-rendu succinct des opérations, p. 3.
Gen. M. Weygand, Recalled to Service (London, 1952), p. 122.
Facon, L’Armée de l’air , pp. 228–36, on the aerial struggle of 5–15 June.
Maj.-Gen. F.W. von Mellenthin, Panzer Battles: A Study of the Employment of Armor in the
Second World War ([Norman, OK, 1956] New York, 1990), pp. 24–25.
AN 496 (Daladier papers) 4/DA7, Dr.3/sdr.a: Rapport du Commandant Dufour,
25e BCC.
Hooton, Phoenix Triumphant , p. 266.
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240 Martin S. Alexander affected tank forces. Weygand and his subordinate commanders needed their armour for fast and mobile counterstrokes. German spearheads overextended themselves at many points in the battle of France. This offered opportunities for French tanks and mechanized cavalry to hurt them and then pull back, without a battle of attrition. French armour was a defensive force-multiplier with significant combat advantages.
Most German tanks were puny, three-quarters being obsolete Panzer
Mk Is and Mk IIs.
99
On the French side, however, the Char B1bis was formidable. It packed a hard punch with a hull-mounted 75 mm gun and a turretmounted 47 mm gun. So did the Somua S35 with its 47 mm turret gun, while the Renault R35 and its uprated successor, the R40, were also tough opponents. In tank-on-tank encounters the French were better protected and usually more powerfully armed than their opponents
(the few Panzerkampfwagen Mk IVs with their 75 mm gun excepted).
100
Technical comparisons, however, hide part of the story. French ‘jab– move–jab’ counterstrokes were hampered by three other – interrelated – factors: insufficient concentrated tank forces, insufficient combat range for their key tank types, and insufficient radios to facilitate tactical control and fast, co-ordinated manoeuvre.
The insufficient concentration of French tanks in large formations
(brigades or divisions) reflected pre-war disputes whether tanks were primarily for infantry support, in defence or attack, or for employment en masse – with attached mechanized infantry and mobile artillery to secure the ground the tanks won and provide fire support. There were, in May–June 1940, three DLMs and three DCRs (with de Gaulle’s
4th DCR forming as battle commenced in May). This amounted to about 1200 tanks. Many more tanks remained dispersed: about 1800 tanks in 40 independent battle-tank battalions (BCCs: bataillons de chars de combat ).
101
In December 1939 General Gaston Billotte (general officer commanding Army Group no. 1 in May 1940) had recommended ‘increasing our number of large mechanized formations’ in case the battle ‘begins in
Belgium with a “rush” of German armoured divisions’. Billotte had stressed the need for time together to ‘give them the necessary cohesion and train commanders able to manoeuvre them’. The severe winter of
1940 left training time in very short supply, however, and the operations of May 1940 particularly exposed the ignorance of senior officers – corps and army commanders – about how to combine the mechanized
99
100
101
Their fast road speed came at the price of poor rough-terrain ability, thin armour-plate, and machine-gun armament; in French nomenclature they would not have been classed as tanks but only ‘auto-mitrailleuses’ – mechanized machine-gun carriers.
Frieser, Blitzkrieg Legend , pp. 35–44, concurs that ‘it was not the thickness of the armor and calibre of the gun […] but entirely different factors that determined the success of the German Panzer force’ (p. 44); cf. Saint-Martin, L’Arme blindée française , pp. 113–14, pp. 119–20. Macksey, Guinness Book of Tank Facts , pp. 71–72, 85–86, 96, 107–14.
Saint-Martin, L’Arme blindée française , pp. 81–83.
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After Dunkirk 241 and armoured divisions effectively with infantry formations and supporting corps artillery.
102
The second factor was the fear of the Luftwaffe. This stirred anxieties that tugged in the opposite direction to Billotte’s recommendation of more divisions combining tank battalions with mechanized infantry and integrated artillery, engineers, and anti-tank guns. With the risks of attack from the air weighing heavily on the minds of
French commanders, the distribution of the bulk of their tanks in
‘penny packets’ – individual tank battalions – was attractive. Dispersal presented Hermann Goering’s aircrews with fewer large and easy-tolocate targets.
The air threat, furthermore, intersected with the organization of
French armour via the so-called ‘radius of action’ dilemma. For range was crucial to tank manoeuvre and it was refuelling that gave the
French army 4e Bureau , the logisticians, its greatest headaches. These were most painful in respect of the Char B1bis and the Hotchkiss H39.
The former, the behemoth of the battlefield in 1940, was a sophisticated machine that weighed 31.5 tons and carried 60 mm of protective armour plating. It was steered by a Naeder advanced regenerative controlled differential system (also used to lay the 75 mm gun), had an auxiliary electric motor for the revolving 47 mm gun turret and radio set (when fitted), and a 320 hp engine. But so generous a specification came with a costly trade-off: high fuel consumption.
103 Perré, the 2nd
DCR’s commander from 20 May to 25 June, recounted how this came about:
The specifications of all our modern tanks demanded that the fuel supply carried on the vehicle provided a radius of action of at least eight hours on the move. However the Chars B1bis of the latest type with the 320 hp engine possessed only a five-hour operating range.
This reduction stemmed from the increase in engine power achieved by the addition of a second carburettor.
The manufacturer, Renault, had not stressed – or perhaps had not understood – the operational consequences of uprating the engine without increasing fuel-tank capacity. Perré discovered the reduction of the
Char B1bis radius of action only when he was given command of a demibrigade equipped with the tanks in November 1939. Remembering the eight-hour range of the less heavily armoured and smaller-engined Char
B1, Perré and his officers were ‘astonished to see, during deployments in
102
103
AN 496 (Daladier papers) 4/DA7, Dr.1/sdr. a, Billotte to Gamelin and Gen. Alphonse
Georges (commander, northeast France theatre of operations), no. 3748 (S/3), ‘Etude sur l’emploi des chars’, 6 December 1939; Saint-Martin, L’Arme blindée française , pp. 99–101; J.J. Clarke, Military Technology in Republican France: The Evolution of the French
Armored Force, 1917–1940 (Ann Arbor, MI, 1970), pp. 205–208; Gen. M. Gamelin, Servir ,
3 vols (Paris, 1946–47), vol. 1: Les armées françaises de 1940 , pp. 262–67.
B.T. White, Tanks and Other AFVs of the Blitzkrieg Era, 1939–1941 (London, 1972), pp. 90–91; also Saint-Martin, L’Arme blindée française , p. 117.
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242 Martin S. Alexander
September and October 1939, newly delivered tanks running out of fuel after five hours on the move’.
104 The same problem afflicted the H39 tank as well, where additional speed had been gained on the H35 from which it had been developed, but again at a cost in range.
In consequence, argued Perré, the high command – generals directing corps and armies – should have calculated their dispositions and allocated missions to the DCRs in full knowledge of their having only a five-hour range. This was a new and weighty constraint, adding to many others; it was not a latent failing. Recognizing the constraint would have been enough, for what was required was that the radius of action absolutely determine which missions were entrusted to the DCRs. The ‘drama’ was not the reduction of the radius of action but the fact that certain authorities who had the divisions or their units at their disposition refused to take it into account. During the missions given them under these conditions, the tank crews were constantly haunted by breakdowns resulting from running out of petrol.
105
In the end, many tank battalion commanders in the open countryside of Picardy and Champagne erred on the side of caution, refuelling only at night. The French army in 1940 rarely lost tanks to air attack (in part, also, because the Luftwaffe lacked ‘tank busting’ aircraft).
106 But it also rarely found it had massed tanks where and when the higher command – or hard-pressed French infantry – required them.
Further exacerbating the French armoured force’s shortcomings of unsettled organization and inadequate range was the third factor noted earlier – the deficient communications equipment of the army in general and the tank units in particular.
107 This made armoured companies and battalions cumbersome to handle in action. Shortages of two-way radios limited their installation to squadron and battalion command tanks. Each troop leader’s tank had a ‘receive-only’ set; the remaining tanks, though often led by experienced sergeants, had to use visual observation to conform to their leader’s manoeuvre.
Such limitations amplified the effects of top-down command that already characterized French military doctrine. They also restricted the sharing of urgent battlefield intelligence. Junior officers, discouraged by regulations from taking initiatives anyway, found it pragmatically difficult to do so once the enemy came within range and their unit ‘closed for action’. At that point their awareness of how the wider battle was
104
105
106
107
AN 496 (Daladier papers) 4/DA7/Dr.3: compte-rendu de la 2e Div. Cuirassée (Col.
Perré), p. 11.
Op. cit., p. 12; also account and analysis of Perré’s period in command of 2nd DCR in
Saint-Martin, L’Arme blindée française, pp. 190–97.
Luftwaffe machine-guns and 20 mm cannon were as ineffective against French tanks, as were these weapons when they armed panzers; ‘tank plinking’ by aircraft, in the
21st-century colloquialism, was not commonplace at any stage in the Second World War.
See I. Gooderson, Air Power at the Battlefront: Allied Close Air Support in Europe, 1943–45
(Ilford, 1998), esp. pp. 103–23.
Dutailly, Problèmes , pp. 193–96, 200–202; Saint-Martin, L’Arme blindée française , pp. 117–18, 127–28.
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After Dunkirk 243 unfolding shrank to what was visible through their own periscope or armoured glass slit-sight. Finally, and potentially the greatest handicap, was that the ‘conducted’ engagement – which French doctrine sought to assure – would disintegrate into solitary tanks acting blindfold if the command vehicles were identified by their aerials and destroyed early in the action.
108
The French tactical command arrangements were, however, an organizational solution to a technical problem. For although their two best tanks, the Somua S35 and the Char B1bis, had three-man and four-man crews respectively, the tanks shared a cast turret whose design accommodated just one crew member. This soldier had to act as tank commander and 47 mm gunner, and operate any radio. In action, therefore, the squadron and troop leaders’ triple task posed extreme difficulties in conducting a gunnery duel with enemy targets while still exercising wireless command over the rest of their unit’s tanks.
109
It was not just on the middle Somme that the French fought well. On the
Aisne, where the German offensive opened on 9 June, the stout fight for
Château-Porcien and Rethel by 14th Infantry Division under General
Jean de Lattre de Tassigny is the most often cited success by French infantry in 1940.
110 Elsewhere on the Aisne, however, the French offered stalwart resistance – such as the defence of the bridge at Oeuilly by
Major Emile-Jean Ory’s 3rd Battalion (6th Infantry Regiment) of General
Boissau’s 44th Infantry Division, and the fight by Lieutenant Robert
Felsenhardt and his comrades in General Marcel Aublet’s 36th Infantry
Division.
111 ‘There was’, conceded one German general, ‘fierce fighting
[…]; the country was difficult with numerous villages and woods which were strongly held by the French’. A newly formed DCR armoured
108
109
110
111
B.T. White, Tanks and Other Armoured Fighting Vehicles of World War II (London: 1975), pp. 90–92, 154–55; on communications, Frieser, Blitzkrieg Legend , pp. 237–38; Kiesling,
Arming against Hitler , pp. 142–43.
Numerous after-action reports by tank and mechanized dragoons officers in AN 496
(Daladier papers) 4/DA7/Dr.3/sdr.a (1st DCR); sdr.b (2nd DCR); sdr.c (4th DCR);
Dr.4/sdr.a (1st DLM); also Saint-Martin, L’Arme blindée française , pp. 114–15, and
Commandant [Major] A. Wauquier (with Col. de Virieu), ‘Les Forces cuirassées dans la bataille: l’emploi des chars français’, in Campagne de France , pp. 150–64.
J. Dinfreville, Le Roi Jean: vie et mort du maréchal de Lattre de Tassigny (Paris, 1964), pp. 105–27; B. Simiot, De Lattre (Paris, 1953), pp. 135–47; Maj.-Gen. Sir G. Salisbury-Jones,
So Full A Glory: A Biography of Marshal de Lattre de Tassigny (London, 1954), pp. 64–92;
A. Clayton, Three Marshals of France: Leadership after Trauma (Oxford, 1992), pp. 93–95;
Crémieux-Brilhac, Français , vol. 2, pp. 647–48.
L. Carron, Fantassins sur l’Aisne, mai–juin 1940 (Grenoble and Paris, 1943), pp. 97–173;
SHAT 32N223 and 32N227 (war diaries, 44th DI headquarters, infantry and artillery);
Felsenhardt, 1939–40 , pp. 137–50 ; Gen. A. de Boissieu, ‘L’Engagement de la 10e
Division sur l’Aisne’, in Levisse-Touzé, Campagne de 1940 , pp. 189–97.
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244 Martin S. Alexander division counter-attacked the flank of XXXIX Panzer Corps (General
Rudolf Schmidt) from Juniville on the afternoon of 10 June, and the following day Reinhardt’s XLI Panzer Corps had to ‘beat off several counterattacks by French armored and mechanized brigades’.
112
The Germans also met unflinching resistance on the lower Somme.
There Rommel’s 7th Panzer Division, making an assault on 5 June from
Hangest-sur-Somme, found itself in ‘heavy fighting against strong enemy forces’, chiefly on its right, as it pushed towards Montagne-Fayel. A regiment of French colonial infantry put up a particularly fierce fight with
‘large numbers of field and anti-tank guns’, from positions on the wooded hill slopes. They ‘defended themselves desperately’, especially a Senegalese battalion skilfully ensconced in the walled grounds of Château du
Quesnoy.
113 To Rommel’s left, Baudouin’s 13th Infantry Division had barricaded itself strongly in the hamlets of Guignémicourt, Pissy, Seux,
Saisseval, and Fluy. The diary of Georges Sadoul, cook to a signals detachment of the divisional artillery, gives a vivid personal slant to set alongside the official record of the 13th’s skilful fighting withdrawal from the Somme.
114 Similar combative spirit was strongly in evidence further east along the river, where even all-out attacks only slowly pushed back the 19th and 47th Infantry Divisions and 29th Alpine Division.
115
The 29th Alpine had begun the war in the Alps, watching the Italians, before being moved to Lorraine, where it spent the winter.
116 As the implications of the breakthrough on the Meuse became apparent, it was redeployed by rail and road to Noyon on the Oise, northeast of
Compiègne. Its reconnaissance battalion, 34th GRDI, arrived first, followed by the leading infantry elements on 19 May ‘ferried in Paris buses’, and moved north rapidly, as noted earlier, making its unsuccessful attempt to eliminate the German pocket at Péronne.
117
Between 28 May and 4 June the rest of the 29th Alpine completed its deployment into the villages southwest of the Somme canal, with fire support from well-camouflaged anti-tank and machine-gun posts in the fortified hamlets north of Roye and Champien (location of the divisional headquarters) – Oisancourt, Rethonvillers, Dreslincourt, Epénancourt,
112
113
114
115
116
117
Von Mellenthin, Panzer Battles , p. 25; Saint-Martin, L’Arme blindée française , pp. 208,
296–304.
Liddell Hart, Rommel Papers , pp. 46–51.
SHAT 32N77-78 for 13th Inf. Div. archives; cf. Sadoul, Journal de guerre , pp. 271–86.
SHAT 32N232 contains 47th Div. war diary and a report by Mendras on operations,
1–25 June 1940; 32N237-8 hold the 47th’s infantry and artillery war diaries.
On France’s southeastern frontier: Col. F. Guelton, ‘La Bataille des Alpes (2 septembre
1939–25 juin 1940)’, in Levisse-Touzé, Campagne de 1940 , pp. 221–39; Crémieux-Brilhac,
Français , vol. 2, pp. 699–702; Capitaine Truttmann, ‘Les Fortifications alpines de 1880 à
1940’, Revue Historique des Armées CLXX (1988), pp. 39–45; W. Allcorn, ‘The Maginot
Line in the Alps’, Fort: The International Journal of Fortification and Military Architecture XV
(1987), pp. 135–52.
SHAT 34N527: 29e DI Alpine: Capt. de Lussan, Carnets de route, 16 May–19 June 1940; he added that ‘Reading the buses’ route boards: “Madeleine-Bastille”, “Porte d’Italie” etc. one could not help thinking of the taxis of the Marne […] hoping that, as in 1914, we’ll soon stop the German onrush and switch to the offensive.’
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After Dunkirk 245
Pargny, Voyennes, St Christ, Miséry, Carrépuis. The division’s preparations afforded a textbook example of the interlocking chequerboard defence by ‘Weygand hedgehogs’. Here the German assaults on 5 June were led by eight battalions from 3rd and 4th Panzer Divisions of General
Erich Hoepner’s XVI Panzer Corps, supported by 13th Motorized
Division. In all the French faced about 1000 armoured vehicles, including around 250 PzKw III 18 ton medium tanks.
118 French resistance was, however, so well organized and valiant that it had knocked out 80 of the first wave of 500 armoured vehicles by the day’s end.
The German assaults along the Somme and Aisne were direct, crude, and costly, the easy victories of mid-May having bred overconfidence.
Infantry sections ‘screamed like banshees’ as they charged the French strong points, making no attempt to employ fire-and-movement tactics.
They suffered terrible losses. The watchword of the ‘Saviour of Verdun’,
Marshal Henri-Philippe Pétain, ‘Le feu tue’ (‘fire-power kills’), had lost none of its force since 1916. But ominously, as one chasseur recorded,
‘when we mowed down twenty, another forty sprang up in their place’.
119
At the fortified hamlets of St Christ and Miséry, Lieutenant Albert
Besson, a company commander in the 3rd Battalion of Lieutenant-
Colonel Nauche’s 112th Alpine Regiment, recorded six German ‘wave assaults’ on 5 June alone. During attacks on positions held by Captain
Ménard’s 6th Company (2nd Battalion, 112th Alpine), a group of French soldiers captured earlier were prodded ahead of the attacking Germans to form a ‘human shield’.
120 Meanwhile the French artillery and antitank batteries shelled the German mechanized units with a ‘violence’ that a panzer battalion commander and 1914–18 veteran, Captain von
Jungenfeld, said ‘was not surpassed by any firing of the World War’.
121
The attack stalled around noon as German ammunition and fuel ran low.
Jungenfeld recorded that little headway was made until late afternoon,
‘when a battery of anti-aircraft guns arrived in the nick of time and helped the tank battalion to deal with the French anti-tank guns’.
122
For over three days the 29th Division resisted with courage and skill, not a metre being ceded by its ‘Blue Devils’ (nickname of the vaunted alpins , from the colour of their dress uniform berets).
123 The weight of attack fell most heavily on the left flank, defended by Nauche’s 112th
118
119
120
121
122
123
T. Draper, The Six Weeks’ War: France, May 10–June 25, 1940 (New York, 1944), p. 240;
Panzer order of battle in Chapman, Why France Collapsed , pp. 346–47.
SHAT 32N186, Dr. 5: ‘La 29e DI sur le front de la Somme: journées du 5 et 6 juin 1940’
(testimony of Adjutant Tasso).
SHAT 34N118, Drs. 4–6: Lt. Besson (Albert) à M. le général d’armée commandant-enchef les forces terrestres, ministre secrétaire d’état à la guerre. Objet: réponse à demande de renseignements no. 18684 du 19 mai 1941.
Quoted in Draper, Six Weeks’ War , p. 240.
Op. cit.
See Lt.-Col. F. Puel de Lobel, ‘La Vocation alpine des chasseurs à pied’, Revue Historique de l’Armée CLXX (1988), pp. 10–18; Gen. P. Laurens, ‘Historique des troupes alpines’,
Revue Historique de l’Armée CLXX (1988), pp. 19–32.
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246 Martin S. Alexander
Alpine. The colonel’s strong points and eventually his own command post at Licourt were overrun. Just a hundred survivors, many wounded, finally gave themselves up when the last of their ammunition was expended. In 29th Division’s 6th demi-brigade the divisional reserves –
Major Roucaud’s 25th and Major de Jankowitz’s 65th chasseurs alpins battalions – were also reduced to remnants before their survivors disengaged, thanks in part to the intervention of Dufour’s tanks.
124
Alongside 112th Alpine Regiment, to its west, was the 22nd RMVE
( Regiment de marche de volontaires étrangers ) or Foreign Volunteer Regiment, the right flank unit of 19th Infantry Division.
125 The regiment had been raised in late October 1939 at Le Barcarès, a Pyrenean camp housing refugee Spanish Republicans – scores of thousands of whom had fled north after the Nationalist victory in the Spanish civil war.
126
Despite their superficially similar name, the RMVE units were not French
Foreign Legion ( Légion étrangère ). They were ardent anti-Fascists, exiles who had been given shelter by France, including Italian opponents of
Mussolini, Jewish refugees from Germany and Austria, Czechs and
Poles, 10 000 welcome additional troops in total. Formed into three regiments to supplement the formations raised under Gamelin’s fivemonth plan, the RMVE units all saw action in 1940.
127
The 19th Division, to which 22nd RMVE was posted, was in flux on the eve of Case Red, having been under the temporary command since 28 December 1939 of General Toussaint. The 22nd RMVE was an even newer arrival, having joined 19th Division on only 10 May.
Toussaint had grumbled on 31 May to Sciard, his corps commander, that the regiment was ‘absolutely incapable in its present state of fulfilling its mission in battle’.
128 But Toussaint seems to have been prejudiced against the predominantly Spanish troops of the unit and made insufficient allowance for the low priority for modern weapons and equipment given by the army supply branch to the RMVEs. The 22nd, moreover, managed only three weeks of company-level training in
124
125
126
127
128
SHAT 34N118, Drs 4–6: 29e DI Alpine: ‘Rapport du Chef de Bataillon Robert Simonin, commandant le 2e Bataillon du 112e RIA [Régiment d’Infanterie Alpin], comme
Capitaine, pendant les opérations de 1939–40’, 25 September 1945; ‘La Défense de
Licourt (Somme) par l’EM du 3/112e RIA les 5 et 6 juin 1940’; Lt. Le Casne, ‘112e RIA:
Souvenirs des journées des 4–5–6 juin 1940. Front tenu par le Régiment de Pargny à
St. Christ’; Sgt. Ritzmann, 3rd Cie., 112e RIA, letter to Lt. Andreis.
19th Infantry Division order of battle: 41st Infantry Regiment, 117th Infantry
Regiment, 22nd RMVE, 10th Artillery Regiment., 210th Heavy Artillery Regiment.
See M.S. Alexander, ‘France, the Collapse of Republican Spain and the Approach of
General War: National Security, War Economics and the Spanish Refugees, 1939–1940’, in C. Leitz and D.J. Dunthorn, eds, Spain in an International Context, 1939–1959
(New York, 1999), pp. 105–28.
These were the 21st, 22nd, and 23rd RMVE, assigned to 8th, 19th, and 35th Infantry
Divisions respectively. V. Giraudier, ‘Sécurité et camps d’internement, 1939–1940’, in
Levisse-Touzé, Campagne de 1940 , pp. 389–402; V. Caron, ‘The Missed Opportunity:
French Refugee Policy in Wartime, 1939–1940’, in Blatt, French Defeat of 1940 , pp. 126–70, esp. pp. 133–35, 150–58, 164–66.
SHAT 34N319: EM (no. 1200/1): le Général Toussaint, Commandant p.i. la 19e DI à M.
le Général Commandant [Gen. Sciard] le 1er CA [corps d’armée], EM: 1er Bureau,
31 May 1940.
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After Dunkirk 247
Larzac Camp from 18 April, bad weather preventing battalion- and regimental-level exercises before it moved to Alsace on 6 May. From positions near Altkirch the regiment was redeployed on 19 and 20 May via Dijon, Melun, Versailles, St Germain, and Mantes to Epluches.
As its men disembarked from their trains at Boran-sur-Oise on 21 May they narrowly escaped a Luftwaffe raid on the railway station.
On the Weygand Line the 22nd RMVE and its commanding officer,
Lieutenant-Colonel Pierre Villiers-Moriame, left Toussaint, the 19th
Division’s commander, unimpressed. A former regular, Villiers-Moriame had resigned from the army as a captain in 1926. In the next 13 years he had taken only two periods of refresher training and a reservist officers’ course.
129 Toussaint felt the colonel lacked the ‘experience and professional know-how needed to exercise command’, and the regiment did not impress the general in its baptism of fire on 25 May when it was ordered to drive the Germans out of Villers-Carbonnel. This was regarded by Toussaint as ‘a simple operation’, and the fact that it failed set in train changes in command that reached higher than Colonel
Villiers-Moriame.
130
Toussaint requested the relief of 22nd RMVE by a French regiment, or that every one of its senior officers be replaced except the chief of staff, Major Emile Verdier.
131 But Sciard, commander of I Corps, had nothing to put in 22nd RMVE’s place. Instead he made a clean sweep of the senior officers, starting with the replacement on 2 June of Toussaint himself by General Fernand Lenclud, formerly commander of the divisional infantry of 11th Division, the ‘Iron Division’. To take over 22nd
RMVE the corps commander introduced Major Paul Hermann, a regular officer from 41st Infantry Regiment, and he also promoted Captain
Guy Pascier de Franclieu, of 22nd RMVE’s 10th Company, to replace
Major Ausset in command of the regiment’s 3rd Battalion.
The switches worked well, gainsaying conventional wisdom that changes of leadership on the eve of battle only spread confusion.
132 The
22nd RMVE fought with skill and courage at Fresnes-Mazancourt, Miséry, and Marchélepot on 5 and 6 June, de Franclieu closely co-ordinating the defence by 3rd Battalion, with Captain Robert Simonin’s 2nd Battalion of Nauche’s 112th Alpine Regiment (29th Division) on its right.
133
General Lenclud, Colonel Paillas, the 19th’s divisional infantry commander, and Captain de Franclieu all attested to the ‘very fine conduct and steadiness under fire’ of the 22nd RMVE’s personnel, ‘regardless
129
130
131
132
133
On shortcomings in reservist officer training, pre-war: Kiesling, Arming against Hitler , pp. 106–11, 114–15.
SHAT 34N319: Capitaine de Franclieu, commandant la 10e Cie. puis le 1e
Bataillon du 22e Régiment de Volontaires Etrangers (19e DI) (actuellement 23e DI), fiche no. 37.
SHAT 34N319: Toussaint to Sciard, no. 1200/1, 31 May 1940.
SHAT 34N319: ‘Historique du 22e RMVE’.
Crémieux-Brilhac, Français , vol. 2, pp. 646–47.
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248 Martin S. Alexander of provenance’. Lieutenant Rigal’s 6th Company (2nd Battalion) held
Fresnes till mid-afternoon on 6 June through 25 hours of continuous combat, surrendering only after a ‘last volley from the last magazine for the fusil mitrailleur light machine-guns had cut down a German flamethrower and three accompanying soldiers’.
134 Though wounded, de
Franclieu directed the battle for another four hours and capitulated only when his survivors ran out of ammunition and rations and learnt from a liaison officer that Hermann, the new regimental commander, had been captured three hours earlier.
135
To the east of 19th and 29th Divisions the 47th Infantry Division
(General Mendras) extended the positions of the Foreign Volunteers and the Chasseurs alpins . Initially held back to the east of Montdidier on 4 June as the reserve of the 7th Army, the 47th Division, along with
General Noiret’s 7th Colonial Division, was ordered forward into the principal defences during the opening day of Case Red. Both divisions fought tenaciously without giving ground, till dawn on 8 June. Just after breakfast that day Mendras dispatched orders to Major de Clerville, commander of his reconnaissance battalion, the 35th GRDI, along with a morale-lifting intelligence report about German prisoners taken in the previous day’s action. From their interrogation ‘a key point emerges: the enemy is now hitting us with his maximum effort and he’s starting to show undeniable signs of fatigue’. The previous evening, 7 June, a captured German motorcyclist had admitted that
‘This is the first time we’ve encountered such lively resistance.’ 136 The report continued: a German infantryman brought in this morning to divisional HQ was sobbing with fatigue and dead on his feet. He declared: We haven’t slept more than 3 hours a night for three weeks and we’ve marched on foot over 260 kilometres in a week; once we covered
75 kilometres in the day, marching from 3 a.m. till 11 p.m. My comrades are keeling over, they’re so tired, our regiment could only defend itself now, not attack any more […] and the regiment has had three commanding officers in the past 12 hours. Your artillery has caused us some losses, but what’s really stopped us is your dugin entrenched infantry.
This was, moreover, a prisoner from a regiment the Germans had initially kept in reserve. Yet they had been forced to bring it into action
134
135
136
SHAT 34N319: ‘Rapport du Lt. Rigal, Cdt. la 6e Cie, 2e Bataillon, sur les opérations de
1939–1940 auxquelles a pris part le 22e RMVE’, 12 pp. MS report with two sketch-maps of the fight at Fresnes-Mazancourt.
SHAT 34N319: de Franclieu fiche no. 37 (cited above, n. 130); op. cit., le général
Lenclud, Commandant Militaire du Département de la Haute-Savoie à M. le Général
Gouverneur Militaire de Lyon, Commandant la 14e Division Militaire (Cabinet),
Annécy, 15 janvier 1941.
SHAT 34N527: 47e DI (Etat-Major: 2e Bureau), no. 5962/2.S: ‘Bulletin de renseignements, 8 juin 1940 (9h15)’.
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After Dunkirk 249 from the end of the previous afternoon, 7 June, and it was already badly battered by next morning. With the French infantry supported by tanks of Welvert’s 1st DCR, the battle raged ‘without bringing the enemy any decisive success’.
137 The ‘hedgehogs’ had formed killing zones that stopped the Germans in their tracks.
In a general order Weygand praised the ‘fine conduct’ of the French soldiers and exhorted them to still firmer resistance: ‘After the manoeuvre in progress which will place our forces once more solidly facing the enemy, they will at once prepare the same deep chequerboard system, the same artillery organizations, and the same obstinate struggle against the tanks, in order to be ready for fresh successes.’ 138 And it was not just Weygand who was impressed by the much improved tactics and spirit of French soldiers – so was the Wehrmacht. The attack on 5 and 6 June by the 63rd German Infantry Regiment on the French 60th
Infantry Regiment in Baudouin’s 13th Division, adjoining the Amiens bridgehead, exemplified the new French tenacity and skill.
139 ‘Powerful heavy artillery’ drove back a battalion of the German regiment from
Saissemont, despite a Luftwaffe strike that briefly silenced the guns. The
German infantry could get only to within 400 metres of the village, so intense was enfilade fire from a wood where ‘skilfully arranged machinegun nests put up a stout defence and had to be reduced one at a time’.
Nor was this ‘extremely stubborn’ action the key to this sector; the defence of Saissemont was the work of a rearguard from the 17th GRDI
(13th Division’s reconnaissance battalion), the task of breaking the main
French defences in the fortified villages of Revelles and Fluy still lying ahead.
Immediately northwest the 1st Battalion of the German 63rd
Regiment had become literally bogged down. To make their attack the infantry had to wade through the reed-choked marshes bordering the
Somme through stagnant water so deep they had to carry their rifles head-high. The saturated ground would not support heavy machineguns and Minenwerfer , leaving the assault here without covering fire till some gunners hacked down the thickest reeds and lashed the stems together into makeshift weapons platforms.
140 In this sector the German assault battalions were driven back onto the defensive by 6 June. The regiment next to the left made even less headway. It fell 2 km behind and exposed the flank of 63rd Regiment’s 3rd Battalion, which the
French counter-attacked after dark. The German attacks during 6 June enjoyed no success either.
137
138
139
140
Lyet, Bataille de France , p. 124.
Weygand, Recalled to Service , p. 128 (excerpt from Special Order no. 1383/3 FT, 6 June
1940); Destremau, Weygand , pp. 455–57, 460–61.
13th Infantry Division order of battle: 21st and 60th Infantry. Regiments, 8th Moroccan
Regiment, 17th GRDI, 228th Heavy Artillery Regiment (two 155 mm groups), 28th
Artillery Regiment (four groups of 75 mm field guns).
SHAT 32N82: 13e DI engineering war diary and reports on the divisional artillery’s employment; 32N80: 13e DI, 3e Bureau: ‘Opérations et ordres reçus (26 mai–8 juin
1940)’; 32N81: 13e DI, ‘Ordres d’opérations (2e partie)’.
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250 Martin S. Alexander
Progress was achieved only late on the third full day of the offensive,
7 June, when seizure of Fourdrinoy and Saissemont menaced the
French flanks. But it was the German pioneers who literally engineered success, by constructing an 8 ton capacity half-pontoon bridge at Breilly-sur-Somme, 3 km behind their assault troops.
141 This umbilical cord allowed a vital stream of German reinforcements and ammunition resupply to flow at last. Appreciating the significance of the bridge, the armée de l’air unavailingly bombed it and other crossings between Amiens and Picquigny ‘several times’. The battle against the
French 13th Division, German sources acknowledge, was ‘hard and costly in lives, the enemy putting up a stout resistance, particularly in the woods and tree lines, continuing the fight when our attacking troops had pushed on past their points of resistance’.
142
Unfortunately for the French, the tide further west was turning the way of the Wehrmacht. For on the lower Somme, south of Abbeville,
Hangest, and Picquigny, holes had been punched deep into Altmayer’s
10th Army by daybreak on 8 June. These German victories led, over the succeeding four days, to the encirclement of part of General Marcel
Ihler’s IX Corps and the 51st Highland Division, and forced the rest of
10th Army back to Rouen, Vernon, and the Basse-Seine.
During the first week of Case Red, then, the Germans were withstood in many places and pushed back in some. But they retained enough striking power, and the self-confidence bred by their victories in May, to maintain forward momentum especially west of Paris. They thereby stymied the French goal of stabilizing the battle, slowing it right down and wresting back the strategic initiative. Weygand realized that groups of two or three French divisions halting the Germans were insufficient; to turn the tide strategically required that use ‘be made of those defensive areas that held out as fulcra for the reconstitution of the defence front […]’. For this, unfortunately, French reserves, as
Weygand admitted, ‘proved to be too weak’.
143
Five command echelons below Weygand (GQG/army group/army/ corps/division), the generals whose formations had stopped the
Germans also realized that, if they were not to be reinforced, they must retreat or be surrounded. This was the case with 29th Alpine Division.
144 On 7 June four of its nine battalions remained at full strength
141
142
143
144
See H. Beiersdorf, Bridgebuilding Equipment of the Wehrmacht, 1939–1945 (Atglen, PA,
1998): original edition: Waffen-Arsenal-Kriegsbrückengeräte der Wehrmacht (n.p., n.d.);
Saint-Martin lays stress on the preparation and technical competence of the German army’s engineer corps in 1940: L’Arme blindée française , p. 125.
Kampferlebnisse aus dem Kriege an der Westfront , pp. 66–79 (trans. in SHAT 32N77, Dr. 0:
‘La percée de la Ligne Weygand, 1940’); SHAT 34N306, Dr. 1a: ‘Rapport en date du 25 mai 1945 du Chef de Bataillon Poublon, commandant en juin 1940 la 7e Cie. du 8e
Régiment de Tirailleurs Marocains sur le combat de Fluy (Somme), le 6 juin 1940’;
Sadoul, Journal de guerre , pp. 271–83.
Weygand, Recalled to Service , pp. 126–27.
SHAT 32N186, Dr. 5: ‘La 29e DI: journées du 5 et 6 juin 1940’; about a company’s worth of each of Major Roucaud’s 25th and Major de Jankowitz’s 65th Chasseurs alpins battalions also remained.
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After Dunkirk 251
(3rd Alpine Regiment’s three, and one of 6th Chasseurs demi-brigade,
Major Valo’s 24th Chasseurs alpins ), besides its artillery, engineers, antitank guns, transport and staff.
145 The challenge for General Gérodias, the divisional commander, was to extricate them in order that they could fight on.
146
For the task of disengagement, the key unit in 1940 turned out to be one whose primary role was the very different one of scouting during an advance – the unheralded divisional reconnaissance battalions.
147
Almost all performed in exemplary fashion. None performed more gallantly than Landriau’s 34th GRDI (29th Alpine Division) and de
Clerville’s 35th (47th Infantry Division), screening the withdrawal of the infantry and artillery from the Weygand Line between 8 and 10
June, and in the retreat from the Seine to the Loire (12 to 15 June).
148
The reconnaissance battalions’ tactics of ‘halt, hit, and retire’ demanded agility, cool nerves, and genuine courage. Their light scout tank and motorcycle machine-gun teams repeatedly ambushed and mauled the overconfident German spearheads.
149 A brilliant feat of arms was that accomplished on 17 June by Major Robert Roux’s 32nd GRDI (43rd
Infantry Division’s reconnaissance battalion), which defended a 16 km stretch of the River Orne in Normandy. Roux stopped an entire German motorized brigade ‘for fourteen hours, causing it heavy losses’, and won an army citation for his ‘example of coolness and courage’ and
‘brilliant qualities of leadership’.
150
Such defiant resistance recalled the desperate ‘French fury’, the furia francese , to safeguard the revolution from Prussian invasion back in 1792.
The belligerence and bravery of the GRDIs were crucial in preventing the retreat of mid-June becoming a collapse, and in avoiding the wholesale mass surrenders that had tarnished the French army’s reputation in mid-May.
151 The German jaws in June closed around deserted
145
146
147
148
149
150
151
SHAT 34N216, Dr. 3a: 24e BCA JMO de la campagne contre l’Allemagne (3 septembre
1939–25 juin 1940); 32N182, Gérodias MS, ‘Souvenirs de Guerre, 1939–1940’, pp. 29–30.
SHAT 34N216, drs 11–15: Lt.-Col. Roucaud, Major de la garnison de la Place de Nice à
M. le général d’Armée Frère, Président de la Commission d’Enquête sur les Evènements de la Guerre, no. 1899/G, 19 September 1942, encl. ‘Extrait du rapport du Chef de
Bataillon Roucaud, Cdt. le 25e BCA au cours de la campagne, concernant l’action de la
1e Cie. de son Bataillon les 5 et 6 juin 1940’; op. cit., anon. typescript report on 25th
Chasseurs alpins at Fonche, Curchy, Liancourt, and Hattencourt, 5–6 June 1940.
Though briefly acknowledging their bravery in action against panzers, Saint-Martin deliberately excludes these units’ role and conduct from his discussion of French armour in 1940 because they were not trained or organized as part of the army’s mechanized manoeuvre arm: L’Arme blindée française , pp. 85–86.
The French GQG was impressed by 7th Army’s fighting retreat and demolition of the
Oise bridges: see Gen. M. Weygand, Le Général Frère: un chef, un héros, un martyre (Paris,
1949), p. 181.
SHAT 32N182, Gérodias, ‘Souvenirs de guerre’, p. 34.
SHAT 34N527: Ordre de l’Armée no. 1415/C, 2 June 1943, cited in Richard, ‘La 43e
Division d’Infanterie en Basse-Normandie’, Revue Historique des Armées CCXIX (2000), p. 52.
SHAT 34N527: 29e DI Alpine, 34e GRDI JMO; op. cit., Capt. de Lussan: Carnets de route, 16 May–19 June 1940.
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252 Martin S. Alexander villages and empty woods – not, as they had done in mid-May, around hordes of glazed-eyed prisoners in waiting.
152
In the June 1940 fighting the French infantry, their supporting artillery, anti-tank batteries, and mobile reconnaissance groups exacted a terrible toll on their attackers.
153
Captured French officers from 13th Division were passed back through the German start lines of the multiple assaults of 5–8 June on the position de résistance of Fourdrinoy–Saissemont–
Saisseval–Seux–Fluy past field dressing stations overflowing with wounded, and through ‘a cemetery of German tanks’.
154
On the Meuse and in Belgium three weeks before, such carnage had been witnessed only on the Allied side. At first the ‘shock’ of it had produced ‘a stupefying rather than a galvanic effect’, lamented the interior minister, Georges Mandel, to Major-General Louis Spears, Churchill’s personal envoy to the French prime minister, Reynaud, on 25 May. ‘It would be very important’, Spears had written from Paris two days later,
‘to create the furious reaction of the French Army and people against invasion that existed in 1914. This is absent’.
155
This was not so: as we have seen in the previous section, France’s renowned Jacobin furia francese – the ‘spirit of Valmy’ first witnessed in the 1790s – was reviving even as Spears bemoaned its absence. The
French army was like a boxer dazed by an unexpectedly heavy punch at the start of a bout – a boxer who sways, but then clears his head, raises his guard and fights on. Historians of the 1939–40 war have, notes Jean-
Louis Crémieux-Brilhac, ‘often overlooked the national awakening that was produced when French soil was invaded and a front seemed to be re-established: the morale of the divisions that defended the Somme and Aisne was extraordinarily high; they resisted tooth and nail’.
156
152
153
154
155
156
Gérodias was furious when most of 29th and 47th Divisions’ remaining combat power, notably the unscathed 24th Chasseurs alpins , was tricked into surrender when German emissaries under a white flag told them on 19 June that an armistice had been signed.
In fact it was only being explored. Gérodias, with some artillery and Landriau’s 34th
GRDI, retreated into the interior, capitulating only on 25 June. SHAT 34N216, Dr. 3a:
JMO du 24e BCA; SHAT 34N527: JMO du 34e GRDI, entries for 18–25 June; SHAT
32N182, Dr. 0: ‘La 29e Division d’Infanterie (du 22 août 1939 au 25 juin 1940)’, by
Lt.-Col. de Chasteigner, Service historique de l’armée, July 1965; op. cit., Dr. 1: 29th Div.
Alpine JMO, pp. 108–36 (18–25 June 1940); op. cit., Gérodias, ‘Souvenirs de guerre,
1939–1940’, pp. 41–43.
P. Rocolle, La Guerre de 1940 , tome 2: La défaite, 10 mai–25 juin (Paris, 1990), pp. 226–58.
Quoted in Lyet, Bataille de France , p. 125; also SHAT 32N77 and 32N78 for 13th Infantry
Division war diary and Gen. Baudouin’s ‘diary-notes’.
TNA/PRO, CAB 21/1282: Spears letter to Gen. Hastings Ismay (secretary, Committee of Imperial Defence), 27 May 1940; cf. Maj.-Gen. Sir E.L. Spears, Assignment to
Catastrophe (London, 1956), pp. 201–208, 257–59; and M. Egremont, Under Two Flags:
The Life of Major-General Sir Edward Spears (London, 1997), pp. 164–67.
Colloquium ‘La Campagne de 1940’, Paris, 16–18 November 2000, ‘Annexes: Biographies des intervenants. Résumés’, pp. 16–17 (J.-L. Crémieux-Brilhac, ‘1940: le moral des armées françaises’); and in slightly different wording in Crémieux-Brilhac, ‘L’Évolution du moral des troupes’, in Levisse-Touzé, Campagne de 1940 , pp. 289–99, esp. p. 296.
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After Dunkirk 253
By June 1940 the resolve of French combat units had stiffened and they were employing much more effective tactics. The battle for France after Dunkirk was a more even contest than admitted in the conventional historiography. The Wehrmacht found it could not, in June, shatter or scatter the French using their elite units, almost unaided. The much broader frontage of the June operations required the commitment of almost all the German forces. This stretched the French and provided opportunities for German breakthroughs, as when 7th Panzer
Division punched southwestward from Hangest-sur-Somme, via Forgesles-Eaux to St-Valéry-en-Caux. These breakthroughs eventually unhinged successful defensive action by many French infantry divisions, sometimes blocks of two or three adjoining divisions, on the Somme and
Aisne.
However, to draw in the French reserves and undo the Weygand
Line required the Wehrmacht to attack with all of its standard rifle and reservist divisions. German casualties rose markedly, and in many places, as noted, their assault faltered or failed. Case Red was very broad-fronted, entailing the deployment of non-motorized and reservist Wehrmacht infantry of indifferent quality. They encountered resolute French troops who had rapidly assimilated better methods of defensive combat. Some of the Wehrmacht armour also endured multiple maulings in June – especially Panzer Corps Wietersheim and Panzer Corps
Hoepner battling to break out of the Amiens and Péronne bridgeheads. These attacks, German sources acknowledge, ‘demonstrate[d] that it is quite useless to throw armour against well prepared defensive positions, manned by an enemy who expects an attack and is determined to repulse it’.
157 Allied troops by June were, notes Kenneth
Macksey, ‘coming to terms with the bomber, realising that its bark was often much worse than its bite. Allied infantry, which had surrendered on call to German tanks, was soon to discover that these machines were highly vulnerable, their thin armour easily penetrable by the existing anti-tank guns.’ 158
In mid-October 1939, following reports from Poland, Gamelin had instructed French army group and army commanders to tighten up procedures against air attacks among deployed units and road-bound motor columns. These instructions were communicated down to regimental level.
159 They did not prevent instances of carnage and demoralization when Luftwaffe strikes, combined with Minenwerfer bombardments and Panzer assaults, caught poorly armed and outclassed units on the Meuse, or in open country in Belgium, as fighting
157
158
159
Von Mellenthin, Panzer Battles , p. 25.
Macksey, Guinness Book of Tank Facts , pp. 107–108.
SHAT 32N204, Dr. 14 (36e DI 1939–40): GQG (Etat-Major Général: 3e Bureau), no.
0283/FT-IM: Bordereau d’envoi. Le Général Cdt. en chef Gamelin à MM. les Généraux
Commandant les Groupes d’Armées; les Généraux Commandant les Armées, 17 Oct.
1939, encl. ‘Note sur la défense contre avions de l’Infanterie’ no. 4490-BT/IMS, 9
October 1939; Kiesling, Arming against Hitler , pp. 170, 180–81.
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254 Martin S. Alexander commenced in May. But as General Aublet stressed when distributing a note on anti-aircraft measures from 3rd Army staff to his 36th Infantry
Division:
Infantry is not really all that vulnerable to air attack as long as it has dug in well in deep trenches. Do not hesitate to shoot at any aircraft flying low: our FM light machine-gun fired from the shoulder can give excellent results […] In all events, remain calm and maintain a good lookout, and don’t leave your foxhole to put yourself at the mercy of aircraft and tanks.
160
Shock and awe would not give the Germans easy victory in June. The strategic historians Cohen and Gooch, harsh critics of the French in
1940, note that: ‘Significantly, the French units performed much better in the battles on the Somme and the Aisne in early June’ – though they add the qualifier that this was when the French ‘were fighting a holding battle of the kind with which they were familiar from training and exercises’.
161
We can now take this line of analysis further. First, it is apparent that the Wehrmacht took heavy losses after Dunkirk. Second, the French, even when dislodged from the Somme, Aisne, and Oise, made their withdrawals to the Seine, Loire, and Moselle in good order. Their army did not collapse in 1940, because its divisional, regimental, and battalion commanders refused to let it. These officers, themselves often in the thick of the fight, demonstrated genuine qualities of leadership.
They rallied their troops to construct the ‘Weygand hedgehogs’ during the respite from 25 May to 4 June, and then shared the danger at the
‘sharp end’ when battle recommenced.
162 A German officer who took part in the assault across the Aisne in mid-June paid a handsome tribute: this was where the Wehrmacht ‘rediscovered “ le soldat de Verdun ”’.
163
No staff exercises in the 1930s had prepared French officers for the location of the battles of June 1940. In even the most pessimistic forecasts, any German armies again reaching French soil would be
160
161
162
163
SHAT 32N204, Dr. 14: 36e DI (EM: 3e Bureau), no. 698/3 S (14 Oct. 1939); op. cit.,
GQG (Etat-Major Général: 3e Bureau), no. 0233/FT, Le Major-Général Henri Bineau pour le Général Commandant-en-Chef les forces terrestres [Gamelin]: ‘Note relative à la défense anti-aérienne contre les avions volant bas’, 23 September 1939; cf. Kiesling,
Arming against Hitler , p. 177.
Cohen and Gooch, Military Misfortunes , p. 226.
See J. Ellis, The Sharp End of War: The Fighting Man in World War II (London, 1980), pp. 192, 225–29, on front-line officers in the 1939–45 British and US armies. Battalion, regiment, and brigade commanders are an army’s ‘middle managers’, much neglected by historians. D. Miller, Commanding Officers (London, 2001), tackles the topic but does not examine 1940. Cf. chapters, by J. Lee, P. Simkins, and C. McCarthy on World War I divisional, brigade, and battalion command respectively, in G. Sheffield and D. Todman, eds, Command and Control on the Western Front: The British Army’s Experience, 1914–18
(Staplehurst, 2004), pp. 119–39, 141–71, 173–93.
In Destremau, Weygand , pp. 473–74; for June 1940 at any rate, the evidence contradicts the poor view of junior and reservist officers conveyed – and so often cited – in
M. Bloch, L’Etrange défaite: témoignage écrit en 1940 (Paris, 1946), pp. 108–10, 125; cf.
Kiesling, Arming against Hitler , pp. 101–14.
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After Dunkirk 255 stopped in the department of the Nord if they had not been already in
Belgium.
164 Resistance had been configured as semi-mobile and defensive–counteroffensive. It was supposed to stop an attack by manoeuvres anchored on field obstacles erected by the army engineers to augment pre-war ‘obstacle-bastions’ ( môles de résistance ) just inside France:
Cassel, the Monts de Cats, Condé, and Maulde-sur-Escaut, south-east to Maubeuge, Avesnes, and Charleville-Mézières.
165 A fighting defence had never been war-gamed so deep inside France as the Somme, Aisne,
Oise, or lower Seine. Weygand and the Army Council ( Conseil supérieur de la guerre ) had, in 1932, deliberated whether to declare Lille an open city. Its location in the departments adjoining Belgium put a future
German incursion there in the realm of the possible. Deeper breakthrough, however, was unthinkable – and so the question of a fighting defence of Reims, Beauvais, Rouen, or Paris was not considered.
166
Notes Judith M. Hughes, perceptively: suggesting that French military leaders should have prepared to mount massive counterattacks, critics have too often overlooked the locale of their hypothetical maneuvers … [which] would have designated northern France as the major battlefield. For such attacks would have been launched only after a defeat in Belgium or a breach of France’s own defensive system had already occurred. Yet no French commander could in advance have consigned those heavily populated and industrially crucial departments to that fate.
[…] the problem of how the north could have been safeguarded from devastation remains unsolved.
167
Doubtless aghast at having to demolish the properties of their compatriots to form new defences, the French troops nonetheless accomplished the distasteful task. They did not lay down their arms just because it was now their homes and hearths being smashed by German bombs or shells – or, more often, by the demolition work of the French
164
165
166
167
Belgium was French leaders’ clearly preferred locus of battle. See SHAT 1N21:
CSG mtg. of 28 May 1932, minutes, p. 196, remarks by Gen. Ragueneau; Archives de l’Assemblée nationale, Commission de l’Armée de la Chambre des Députés:
‘Séance du 21 mars 1935. Procès-verbal de l’audience de M. le général Maurin, ministre de la guerre, et du général Colson, chef de l’Etat-Major de l’Armée, relative aux effectifs français et allemands’, pp. 19–20; cf. criticism of this French strategy and of Gamelin in particular in N. Jordan, ‘The Cut Price War on the Peripheries: the French General Staff, the Rhineland and Czechoslovakia’, in R. Boyce and
E.M. Robertson, eds, Paths to War: New Essays on the Origins of the Second World War
(London, 1989), pp. 128–66; also in N. Jordan, ‘Strategy and Scapegoatism:
Reflections on the French National Catastrophe, 1940’, in Blatt, The French Defeat , pp. 13–38, esp. 17–18, 20–23, 29.
Gamelin, Servir , vol. 2: Le prologue du drame, 1930 – août 1939 , pp. 66–71; SHAT
1K224/7: ‘La question du système fortifié à créer sur notre frontière de Belgique’;
Dutailly, Problèmes , pp. 166–73; P. Le Goyet, Le Mystère Gamelin (Paris, 1976), pp. 54,
73–77.
SHAT 1N21: CSG minutes (28 May, 4 June 1932 meetings); Marshal Joseph J.C. Joffre,
Mémoires du Maréchal Joffre, 1910–1917 , 2 vols (Paris, 1932), vol. 1, pp. 288–91, 306.
J.M. Hughes, To the Maginot Line: The Politics of French Military Preparation in the 1920s
(Cambridge, MA, 1971), pp. 227–28.
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256 Martin S. Alexander army’s corps of engineers. They had not planned or trained for war here. All the same, in the ‘hedgehogs’ of northern and north-central
France, they fought it. ‘There were pockets of resistance’, noted one
German, ‘where they held out when our infantry were already thirty kilometres in their rear […] the French regiments fought as if they felt they were defending the last street in France in a battle that would decide the very existence of their country’.
168
Besides this qualitative evidence, the campaign’s quantitative ledgerbook ‘attests to the bitterness of these battles’.
169 By 25 June, in just six weeks, 123 000 fighting troops were morts pour la Patrie . Regimental, battalion, and company commanders suffered especially heavily, the many hundreds of courageous lieutenant-colonels, majors, and captains who constituted the army’s middle management.
170 Infantry officers paid, proportionately, the highest price of all.
171 The 29th Alpine
Division’s ‘shooting war’ did not begin till 5 June. Yet by 25 June it had lost 70% of its field officers and 65% of its subalterns. Of the division’s constituent units, the 6th Chasseurs alpins demi-brigade lost 72% of its officers defending the strong points south of Péronne between dawn on 5 June and nightfall on 6 June. And within that formation, Major
Roucaud’s 25th Chasseurs alpins battalion lost 77% of its officers.
Further losses occurred during the demi-brigade’s withdrawal at Pont-
Ste-Maxence on the Oise, at Jargeau on the Loire, and in the southeastern suburbs of Orléans. By the armistice its officer casualties totalled 93% (95% in 25th Chasseurs and 75% in 65th).
172
To reconsider other units whose combat experience during Case
Red this article examined, the 22nd RMVE Foreign Volunteers sustained 5 officers killed and another 21 wounded, with almost 70% other-rank casualties, in the two days fighting at Fresnes–Miséry–
Marchélepot on 5–6 June.
173 The 13th Infantry Division’s 60th Infantry
Regiment, which resisted ferociously south of Breilly-sur-Somme, lost
1000 men and officers wounded, and 350 killed (15 of them officers, including all three battalion commanders, two captains, and ten subalterns).
174 In June 1940 the French troops showed individual and
168
169
170
171
172
173
174
German officer in Destremau, Weygand , pp. 473–74; cf. Crémieux-Brilhac, ‘L’Évolution du moral’, pp. 289–99.
Crémieux-Brilhac, ‘1940: le moral des armées françaises’, ‘Annexes: Biographies des intervenants. Résumés’, pp. 16–17.
Crémieux-Brilhac, Français , vol. 2, pp. 631–34, 644; among the formations examined in this article, 29th Alpine Division had two of its regimental commanders killed, as did
23rd Infantry Division.
Op. cit., pp. 676–80. Cf. figures for British Commonwealth and US Army officer losses in 1939–45 in Ellis, Sharp End , pp. 162–64; only front-line infantry suffered a proportionately higher death-rate.
SHAT 32N184, Dr. 8: Etat-major de la 29e DI Alpine: ‘Statistique des pertes en officiers
(tués, blessés ou disparus) au cours de la période du 5 au 25 juin 1940’.
SHAT 34N319, Dr. 4: ‘Rapport sur les opérations de 1939–40 auxquelles a pris part le
22e RMVE’; Crémieux-Brilhac, Français , vol. 2, pp. 646–47.
SHAT 32N77, Dr. 3: ‘Les Opérations de la 13e DI pendant la campagne de France
(mai–juin 1940). Exposé fait par le Lt. Goetz du 60e RI, au cours de la réunion de
Bourg-en-Bresse de la 13 DI, le 8 juin 1941’, p. 9 n. 1.
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After Dunkirk 257 collective valour that was the equal of the poilus of 1914–18. The Daily
Mail ’s correspondent, Harry Greenwall, rescuing his belongings from his cottage in the Compiègne forest, admitted, ‘The French did put up a fight when they had their backs to Paris’.
175
The fighting in 1940 cost the French armies 123 000 dead and another 250 000 wounded (the Germans losing, in round figures, 49 000 killed and missing, and 111 000 more wounded).
176 Disaggregating these statistics reveals that most French combat deaths, about 92 000
(and about 100 000 of the wounded), occurred in the first 15 days (10 to
24 May). The fighting on the Meuse and immediately west at Stonne, in the Mormal forest, in central and western Belgium, was fiercer than many accounts allow. And the French death toll in this opening phase of operations was also disproportionately high because French defensive techniques were poor. Further lives were then lost in the last-ditch defence at Dunkirk, to enable the evacuation of 338 226 Allied troops
(of whom between 102 560 and 123 090 were French).
177
In contrast during June, while opposing Case Red, the French army’s death toll was only 24 000 in round figures. The far lighter losses occurred despite a more determined fight, despite no wholesale surrenders, no positions quickly overrun, no entire units put to flight. Terrain, tactics, fire-power, artillery support, and divisional, regimental, and battalion leadership – all were markedly better than in May. The French fought their battles in June more skilfully and more economically.
France had no army of capitulards .
178 About 1.6 million troops became prisoners of war (one source putting the number as high as 1.8 million).
179 But the bulk was bagged from 22 June onwards. The armistice
175
176
177
178
179
H.J. Greenwall, When France Fell (London, 1958), p. 101.
J.-J. Arzalier, ‘La Campagne de mai–juin 1940. Les pertes?’, in Levisse-Touzé,
Campagne de 1940 , pp. 427–47; Saint-Martin, L’Arme blindée française , pp. 169–71;
R.E. Powaski, Lightning War: Blitzkrieg in the West, 1940 (London, 2003), pp. 349, 355.
The German army sustained 156 492 casualties in the six weeks of the 1940 campaign in western Europe comprising: 27 074 men killed, 18 384 missing,
111 034 wounded, according to J. Benoist-Méchin, La Moisson de quarante: journal d’un prisonnier de guerre (Paris, 1941), p. 67; similar statistics (49 000 rounded total of German dead and missing) in Frieser, Blitzkrieg Legend , p. 318. Cf. 117 000 killed and wounded in the Prusso-German armies that defeated France in 1870–71, a
22-week war, cited in G. Wawro, The Franco-Prussian War: The German Conquest of
France in 1870–71 (Cambridge, 2003), p. 307.
Maier et al., Germany , vol. 2, p. 293 (table VI.v.3: Evacuation of Allied Troops from the
Dunkirk Area). How many French escaped is uncertain. Admiralty records show
123 095. But it was only 112 107 according to the War Office Directorate of Quartering report: ‘Account of the Evacuation from France and the Quartering of the BEF after
Dunkirk; TNA/PRO, WO 197/134, August 1941. French troop transit by rail and road from Kent to Portsmouth, Southampton, Plymouth, and Falmouth, and re-embarkation for Cherbourg, St Malo, and Brest to return to the fight has been examined in Looseley,
‘Le Paradis’.
Some early postwar works made these points: Gen. A. Laffargue, Justice pour ceux de 40
(Paris, 1952); C.-L. Menu, Lumière sur les ruines: les combattants de 1940 réhabilités (Paris,
1953). Their impact was minimal, most French people believing long afterwards that their army’s performance was unrelievedly inept in 1940.
Bell, France and Britain , p. 250.
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258 Martin S. Alexander put them into German captivity; it was emphatically not that their capture caused the armistice.
180
Comparisons across wars, even across different branches of service in the same war, can be invidious. Yet the French army’s dead in the six-week 1940 campaign – leaving aside the wounded – was over twice the death toll of RAF Bomber Command in the six years of the Second
World War (55 000), and twice the number that the US armed forces would suffer in the Vietnam War (58 000). Figures can, of course, be variously (re)presented. Nevertheless, a way to put the French losses in context is by comparison with the first six weeks of combat on the
Western Front from mid-August 1914 to 30 September 1914, when
329 000 French soldiers were killed or captured.
181 The human price the French army paid for what was a very serious defence of the nation in 1940 has for too long gone unacknowledged. And – a sinister development – the ferocity of French resistance shocked and enraged some
German units, prompting atrocities against remnants that surrendered.
An infamous but not unique case was the massacre of 138 West African infantrymen of the 25th Regiment of Senegalese Tirailleurs , along with
19 white officers, four gunners, and a civilian at Chasseley, northwest of Lyons, on 19–20 June 1940.
182
Extending analysis of the fighting in 1940 beyond the usual preoccupations – the combats along the Meuse and around the Dunkirk perimeter – provides a more complex, richly textured canvas of France’s military performance. French and German sources coincide in showing, after about
25 May, the adaptability and resolve of troops and officers in the field. The contrasting feature to which the observer’s gaze is now led – one etched in unrelievedly sombre colours – is the French senior commanders’ inability to regain control of the campaign. And it was, coincidentally, on 25 May, at a meeting of the French war cabinet, that Weygand first expressed defeatism concerning what must occur if the Somme–Aisne defences did not hold, starting political pressure to obtain an armistice.
183 From this
180
181
182
183
Y. Durand, La France dans la 2e Guerre mondiale (Paris, 1989), p. 168; idem, Les Prisonniers de guerre dans les stalags, les oflags et les kommandos, 1939–1945 (Paris, 1994); R. Ikor, O soldats de quarante!
(Paris, 1986); S. Fishman, We Will Wait: Wives of French Prisoners of War (New
Haven, 1992); diary of his captivity from 25 June–15 Aug. 1940 by the contemporary
German army historian and Pétainist, J. Benoist-Méchin: La Moisson de quarante , pp. 8–94.
Guinard et al., Inventaire sommaire , p. 213, annex VII (monthly tables of French army deaths, August 1914–December 1918); cf. H. Strachan, The First World War, vol. 1: To
Arms (Oxford, 2001), pp. 212–31, 242–61; M.S. Neiberg, Fighting the Great War: A Global
History (Cambridge, MA, 2005), pp. 22–32; Doughty, Pyrrhic Victory , pp. 86–97.
J. Fargettas, ‘Les Massacres de mai–juin 1940’, in Levisse-Touzé, La Campagne de 1940 , pp. 448–64.
Jackson, Fall of France , pp. 101–106, 129–42; E. Gates, End of the Affair: The collapse of the
Anglo-French Alliance, 1939–40 (London, 1981), pp. 132–42, 145–59.
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After Dunkirk 259 point it is tempting to draw a direct line of causation to the cessation of fighting on 25 June.
It is a temptation one must avoid. The politics that were played out as the French armies fought to halt Case Red lie beyond this article’s scope. But more significantly, Weygand’s defeatism was irrelevant to the operational performance of the army after 25 May. Known to ministers in Paris, and then at Tours and the numerous châteaux on the Loire and Cher where the government relocated after 10 June, Weygand’s bleak analyses were not known among the fighting troops and their leaders.
184 Consequently Marshal Philippe Pétain’s wireless declaration on 17 June, a day after he replaced Reynaud as prime minister, that securing a ceasefire had become essential, stunned most French fighting officers and their staffs, from corps commanders downward.
185
What the documentary record leaves beyond a doubt is the disintegration of command, control, and communications above the divisional level. Too often divisional commanders were left to their own devices.
They went hours, sometimes several days, without instructions, unaware of developments unfolding 20 or 30 km to left or right, blind to the bigger picture. Yet the raison d’être of corps was to co-ordinate manoeuvre and battle by groups of divisions – to ensure connected and synchronized operations. French communications problems, not just in the disjointed encounter battles of May 1940 but when fighting much better in June, suggest it was at intermediate command levels – the army/corps and corps/division interfaces – where technology, systems, and mindsets were most deficient.
Two examples illustrate the muddled attempts to revise the chain of command that the operational tempo rendered stillborn. The first case was an instruction to Baudouin of 13th Infantry Division, fighting west of Amiens late on 5 June, transferring him with immediate effect to
Ihler’s IX Corps. For this corps was in the process of being decapitated as the rampant 7th Panzer Division’s advance swept past its headquarters in Sarcus, forcing Ihler and his staff to pack and hastily retreat (the village being already 14 km to the rear of the German spearhead by nightfall on 7 June).
186 Unable to contact Ihler by wireless, and ignorant
184
185
186
For the analyses and the politicking, see the record of Reynaud’s under-secretary of state,
P. Baudouin: The Private Diaries of Paul Baudouin , trans. C. Petrie (London, 1948), pp. 43–64, 78–82; Col. P. de Villelume, Journal d’une défaite (23 août 1939–16 juin 1940
(Paris, 1976), pp. 350–422; also P.C.F. Bankwitz, Maxime Weygand and Civil-Military Relations in Modern France (Cambridge, MA, 1967), pp. 293–317; Destremau, Weygand , pp. 428–45.
D. Barlone, A French Officer’s Diary (23 August 1939–1 October 1940) (Cambridge, 1942), pp. 77–78, 88, 96; this diarist, a captain in 2nd DINA (North African Infantry Division), noted on 21 June: ‘we all regard Pétain and Weygand as two old men’, fulminating two days later at ‘those politicians and politician-generals who have brought us to our present plight’ (pp. 84, 90). Cf. Jackson, Fall of France , pp. 143–44; N. Atkin, Pétain
(London and New York, 1998), pp. 84–87.
SHAT 30N65: IX Corps EOCA [Eléments organiques de corps d’armée] JMO; Liddell
Hart, Rommel Papers , pp. 52–53, 65–66; Ihler and his chief of staff became Rommel’s prisoners at St-Valéry-en-Caux on 12 June.
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260 Martin S. Alexander of his new superior’s whereabouts, Baudouin elected to join Grandsard’s
X Corps to the east, with which communications remained intact.
187
The second case affected Jeannel’s 23rd Infantry Division in General
Fougère’s XXIV Corps on 12 June – the divisional war diary recording how ‘an order was received during the morning to put ourselves at the disposition of I Corps [General Sciard]. Just a few hours later the order was rescinded’.
188 Disorganization and disorientation on this scale in the French higher–intermediate command and control echelons meant – to paraphrase Edith Cavell, a British nurse shot for helping Allied troops escape from behind German lines in 1915 – that the patriotism and even death of French soldiers were not enough.
Failure in 1940 was not, then, down to the divisional and regimental commanders and field officers. And rarely was it down to the men,
Captain Barlone of 2nd North African Infantry Division recording that his troops fought with ‘morale and courage [that] were equal to that of the last war’s army’.
189 The fatal flaws lay with the senior military hierarchy and with insufficiently supple command, control, and communications procedures – together with an overly rigid conception of how to mount a successful defence. ‘Everything was being extemporized’, as
Cohen and Gooch have noted, ‘for the pace of war no longer allowed for the preparation, writing, and transmission of orders. This disoriented
French commanders (at all levels), who had expected to receive – and to offer – continual written guidance during the conduct of battle.’ 190 It was not the French soldier’s readiness to fight that the Germans were sure they could expose. Rather, it was the inflexibility of the French senior leaders and their fragile, unwieldy command, control, and communications arrangements if forced ‘to react to changing situations by rapid decisions’.
191
In war ‘knowing your enemy’ is always crucial. In 1940 the Germans had evaluated theirs more accurately than vice-versa.
192 In the French higher and intermediate headquarters and staffs, military radicalism – thinking the unthinkable and working out responses to it – was kept out by locked mental doors. Gamelin, the army commander-in-chief down to 19 May 1940, had preached the ultimately fatal orthodoxy well before
187
188
189
190
191
192
SHAT 32N77, Dr. 1: 13e DI (Etat-Major 3e Bureau), no. 1487/3, 30 June 1940, Capt.
Buffé: ‘Opérations auxquelles a participé la 13 DI du 27 mai au 13 juin, date à laquelle elle a été rattachée au XXVe CA (Armée de Paris)’.
SHAT 32N134, Dr. 1: 23e DI JMO,12 June 1940.
Barlone, French Officer’s Diary , pp. 90, 82; cf. disparagement of rank-and-file troops, and civilian morale, in Baudouin, Private Diaries , pp. 46–47, and Gamelin, Servir , vol. 3: La
Guerre, septembre 1939–19 mai 1940, pp. 421–26: ‘Le général commandant en chef
Gamelin, chef d’Etat-Major général de la Défense nationale, commandant en chef les forces terrestres, à Monsieur le ministre de la Défense nationale et de la guerre
(Cabinet militaire. Section de Défense nationale)’, no. 1011 Cab/F.T, 18 mai 1940.
Cohen and Gooch, Military Misfortunes , p. 205.
Maier et al., Germany , vol. 2, p. 234; Frieser, Blitzkrieg Legend , pp. 325–26, 336–41.
E. May, Knowing One’s Enemies: Intelligence Assessment before the Two World Wars (Princeton,
NJ, 1985), esp. ch. 10, pp. 271–309 (R.J. Young, ‘French Military Intelligence and Nazi
Germany, 1938–1939’).
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After Dunkirk 261 fighting began. ‘Manoeuvre always ends up resulting in fronts’, he said, lecturing to the Centre for Higher Military Studies, France’s senior officer school in 1937. ‘And more than ever, in the face of the progress of motorization and mechanization, any deployment must allow rapid establishment of a front’. This displayed complacency and disastrously limited imagination.
193 The French high command was ‘so accustomed to the idea of a continuous front line, like that of the last war’, noted one infantry captain on 15 June, as the Germans breached the Loire, ‘that it seems difficult to conceive how to organize resistance without it’.
194
By contrast the German spearhead generals were improvising new rules of war (albeit giving the Wehrmacht high command many qualms as they did so). Their methods, boldness, and dash instituted a disruptive change that the inflexibility of the French command and control could not accommodate. Hence the rapid and unpredictable movements of German spearheads subverted and progressively destroyed the French operational management systems that relied on a campaign unfolding conventionally, and at their preferred pace. The French higher and higher–intermediate command’s reaction times and communications technologies (telephones, motorcycle dispatch riders, liaison officers travelling by car on congested roads) were consequently overwhelmed.
195 But underlying this was a more profound impact – the
German innovation in warfare overwhelmed the French higher and higher–intermediate command’s mindset. The fast-paced and alien
German style of warfare forced disjointed and isolated decision-taking at divisional and subordinate levels by individual commander-managers, unprepared and untrained for the eventuality. As a result the French army was denied a capacity for effective army- and corps-level command and control as battles ranged in depth, on some days in May and
June, not across 3 or 4 km of terrain but across 30 or 40.
196
As this article has illustrated, the French had subordinate generals and colonels with energy – men who displayed decisiveness, fortitude, and physical courage.
197 These commanders had the strength of mind to ditch pre-war mantras that did not work. And since they themselves
193
194
195
196
197
SHAT 1K224/7: ‘L’Art de la guerre. Doctrine et procédés. Exposé fait par le général
Gamelin au Centre des Hautes Etudes Militaires en Avril 1937 à l’occasion d’une conférence sur la campagne de 1806 par le Général Audet, suivie de considérations présentées par le Général Bineau sur les problèmes stratégiques étudiés au Centre des
Hautes Etudes Militaires en 1937’, p. 17 n.1; see criticism of Gamelin in Jordan,
‘Strategy and Scapegoatism’, pp. 15–18, 28–29, and of Weygand in Crémieux-Brilhac,
Français , vol. 2, pp. 609–11.
Barlone, French Officer’s Diary , p. 77.
Kiesling, Arming against Hitler , pp. 142–43.
Crémieux-Brilhac, Français , vol. 2, pp. 501, 589–90, 615–17, 634; M.D. Feld,
‘Information and Authority: The Structure of Military Organization’, American
Sociological Review XXIV (1959), pp. 15–22. For discussing ideas with me from strategic innovation management, as reflected in this paragraph, I am indebted to Prof. John
Hinks of Glasgow Caledonian University.
Ten French generals died during the 1940 campaign.
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262 Martin S. Alexander were willing to apply disruptive tactics in warfare, they were able sooner than hidebound commanders to recognize and fulfil the need to adapt.
The evidence shows that they did adapt, with Captain Barlone of 2nd
North African Infantry Division spotting glimmers of success and hope.
‘It seems’, he noted, ‘that during the Somme battle certain generals showed a better understanding […] which, for reasons I still ignore, did not develop, perhaps […] because the right tactics were employed only by certain units’.
198
However, Barlone also noticed a loss of respect for army officers among French civilians, in the campaign’s final week. This was understandable. With Paris gone and the Loire breached too, the perplexed populations of central France felt the army had let them down, had not done its job. Inevitably growing numbers of people, bitter and bemused, just wanted the fighting to end immediately, like the angry and tearful woman who harangued Georges Sadoul of Baudouin’s
13th Infantry Division at Sully-sur-Loire on 16 June.
199 Others, recorded
Barlone, ‘do not distinguish between those officers who, on the whole, have fought admirably, sustaining grievous losses, and the High
Command, which as I see it, has not been able to fulfil its task’.
200
True, the army was beaten, ‘but it had been an honourable defeat and not a rout’.
201 The best commanders were not just highly patriotic and competent, but willing to adapt and innovate, for example ‘experimenting with patchy success in the tactics of defence by means of strong points in depth, recommended by Weygand’.
202 They included de Lattre, Mast and Juin, Gérodias, Baudouin and Jeannel, Arlabosse,
Mendras, Perré and de Gaulle. Some of them passed the test of war in
1940 but unfortunately spent the next five years in captivity. Others inspired the French army’s resurrection from 1943 onwards.
Yet the central problem during the battle of France was that these officers were insufficiently senior to override the slow-witted ideas about defensive modes of war retained and disseminated by too many of their superiors.
203 German spearhead generals possessed and acted on ideas for deep penetration and exploitation inconceivable to
Gamelin, Weygand, and most of their army group, army, and corps commanders. The campaign in France–Belgium in 1940, just like the Polish
198
199
200
201
202
203
Barlone, French Officer’s Diary , p. 83.
Sadoul, Journal de guerre , p. 352.
Barlone, French Officer’s Diary, p. 80. A Third Republic cabinet minister, rejecting the shift of blame, sarcastically criticized the theory that ‘the soldiers having fought the war, it was agreed that the civilians lost it’: A. de Monzie, La Saison des juges (Paris, 1943), p. 185.
C. Williams, Pétain (London and Boston, 2005), p. 333.
Crémieux-Brilhac, Français , vol. 2, p. 644.
Op. cit., pp. 617–18, 643–44; cf. Bankwitz, Maxime Weygand , pp. 317–18, who trenchantly argued ‘that military defeat, far from being a “divine punishment” […] has a central and glaringly obvious military cause: the soldiers’ intellectual and characterological defects which were responsible for shockingly inadequate military doctrine’.
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After Dunkirk 263 campaign of 1939, was not a ‘war of fronts’ (though Russia from winter
1941 onwards would be, with catastrophic results for the Wehrmacht).
Cohen and Gooch note correctly, though in excessively general terms, that ‘the [French] troops failed to adapt to the demands of […] 1940 because their senior officers failed them’.
204 It is now possible to be more specific, and pinpoint the precise conceptual nature and human locus of the failure. Most French commanders at corps level and higher proved unable to ‘think on their feet’ quickly enough when their plans and expectations of the war’s tempo collapsed on first contact with the enemy. They had no ‘plan B’ when they grasped that the
Wehrmacht was playing by different rules, seizing and keeping control of the pace and places of battle. Employing imagery from the French national sport of cycle racing, another 2nd North African Infantry
Division veteran reflected aptly that the feet of the high command
‘slipped out of the pedals’ as they struggled to match the speed at which the Germans were moving.
205 Too many corps, army, and army group commanders metaphorically fell out of the saddle as the campaign careered out of control and ran away from them.
Ironically, the less doctrinaire and more pragmatic British were less vulnerable. They were more accustomed to muddling through, to some extent making this a national virtue. They were less likely, therefore, to be paralysed than were the over-methodical French. On this point, of all the many contemporaries trying to forecast how a war might unfold, it was the US military attaché in London who identified the danger.
The British, he mused in 1939, hardly had plans worth the name from which to be derailed, and ‘from the French viewpoint’, he noted, ‘it is maddeningly muddled […] Just meander along, doing one thing after another. It certainly isn’t the most efficient way of doing business. Or isn’t it? Certainly the British will not likely be confronted with that greatest of demoralisers, the plan-gone-wrong’ .
206
As a comment on 1940, this offers a piercing insight. For it is in this precise sense that we can see how Marc Bloch, the great Sorbonne medievalist and reservist captain in 1940, correctly diagnosed the
French army’s defeat as a defeat of military conception, military imagination, and military intellect.
207 ‘I think’, reflected another field officer, Captain Daniel Barlone, ‘that perhaps we may have had arms in sufficient quantity and quality to resist and beat the enemy and that our disaster could have been avoided, if our High Command had been equal to its task.’ 208 The approach of the French senior military leadership led
204
205
206
207
208
Cohen and Gooch, Military Misfortunes , p. 221.
P. Porthault, L’Arrière-garde meurt mais ne se rend pas: la tragédie 1940 des Flandres (Paris,
1970), p. 179.
US Military History Institute, Carlisle, Pennsylvania: Brig.-Gen. Bradford G. Chynoweth papers: box 6 (miscell. papers, 1917–1941 – attaché reports, 1939): ‘Great Britain:
Comments on Current Events, 28 April 1939. Report no. 40090’, p. 2 (emphasis added).
Frieser, Blitzkrieg Legend , pp. 345–46, 347–51; Bloch, L’Etrange défaite , pp. 112–22.
Barlone, French Officer’s Diary , p. 83.
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264 Martin S. Alexander to their loss of the battle of France, although not before the French army’s impressive recovery of resolve and rediscovery of a spirit of adaptation in mid-campaign, and infliction of considerable losses on the Germans.
209 As the shooting stopped on 25 June, the Wehrmacht and Luftwaffe were convinced they could now rely on operational and tactical flair, improvisation, and the ad hoc. France’s swift and stunning defeat hid from most of the victors, as well as from many of the vanquished, that this would not suffice to win a global war.
I thank Dr Stephen Badsey, Philip M.H. Bell, Prof. John C. Cairns,
Col. Frédéric Guelton, Prof. Andrew Linklater, Prof. Colin McInnes,
Prof. Michael S. Neiberg, Dr William J. Philpott, Prof. Gary Sheffield,
Prof. Dennis Showalter, and the journal's anonymous referees for helpful comments on this article in draft. I am grateful to Col. Guelton, head of the Army Branch of France’s Service historique de la défense, for facilitating access to archives, and to the British Academy and the
University of Wales Aberystwyth for financial support of the project on
French military performance from which this work draws.
209
It is a pity, and perplexing, that the otherwise instructive analysis of 1940 by Cohen and
Gooch makes the bizarre and unsupportable claim that ‘Where the French were more or less a numerical match for the Germans – in men and tanks – they performed abysmally’: Military Misfortunes , p. 220.
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