Read All Hell Let Loose Online
Authors: Max Hastings
Dunkirk was indeed a deliverance, from which the prime minister extracted a perverse propaganda triumph. Lancashire woman Nella Last wrote on 5 June: ‘I forgot I was a middle-aged housewife who sometimes got up tired and who had backache. The story made me feel part of something that was undying and never old – like a flame to light or warm, but strong enough to burn and destroy rubbish … Somehow I felt everything to be worthwhile, and I felt glad I was of the same race as the rescuers and rescued.’ The British Army salvaged a professional cadre around which new formations might be built, but all its arms and equipment had been lost. The BEF left behind in France 64,000 vehicles, 76,000 tons of ammunition, 2,500 guns and more than 400,000 tons of stores. Britain’s land forces were effectively disarmed: many soldiers would wait years before receiving weapons and equipment that rendered them once more fit for a battlefield.
It is sometimes supposed that, when the BEF quit the Continent, the campaign ended, which is a travesty. In each day’s fighting between 10 May and 3 June, the Germans had suffered an average of 2,500 casualties. During the ensuing fortnight, their daily loss rate doubled to 5,000. A soldier of the French 28th Division wrote defiantly on 28 May: ‘It seems that the Germans have taken Arras and Lille. If this is true, the Nation must rediscover its old spirit of 1914 and 1789.’ Some units remained committed to fight, some Frenchmen shrugged off the despair of their commanders. One of Brigadier Charles de Gaulle’s men wrote: ‘In fifteen days we have carried out four attacks and we have always been successful, so we are going to pull together and we will get that pig Hitler.’ A soldier wrote on 2 June: ‘We are really tired, but we have to be here, they shall not pass and we shall get them … I shall be proud to have participated in the Victory of which I have no doubts.’ Even some foreign governments were not yet convinced of France’s final defeat. On 2 June Mussolini’s foreign minister flaunted the Italian regime’s boundless cynicism when he told the French ambassador in Rome: ‘Have some victories and you will have us with you.’
In the last phase of the campaign, forty French infantry divisions and the remains of three armoured formations faced fifty German infantry and ten panzer divisions. Thirty-five of Weygand’s generals were sacked and replaced. The French army fought better in June 1940 than it had done in May, but it was too late to redeem the initial disasters. Constantin Joffe of the Foreign Legion expressed surprise at the manner in which the Jews of his regiment distinguished themselves:
Many of them were small tailors or peddlers from Belleville, the workman’s quarter of Paris, or from the ghetto of the Rue du Temple. No one would have anything to do with them at [the training camp of] Barcares … They spoke only Yiddish. They looked as if they were afraid of a machine-gun, they seemed to be in perpetual fear. Yet under fire, if volunteers were needed to fetch back munitions under a heavy shelling or if lines of barbed wire entanglements had to be up at night fairly in front of the enemy guns, these little men were the first to offer their service. They did it quietly without swagger, perhaps without enthusiasm; but they did it. It was always they who, up to the very last moment, brought back our arms from an abandoned post.
Wehrmacht commanders expressed admiration for the manner in which some French units fought in early June to defend their new line on the Somme. A German diarist wrote: ‘In these ruined villages the French resisted to the last man. Some “hedgehogs” carried on when our infantry was twenty miles behind them.’ But on 6 June the front was decisively breached, and by the 9th von Rundstedt’s tanks were driving into Rouen. Next day, they broke the Aisne line as the French government left Paris; diplomat Jean Chauvel set fire to the chimney of his office in the Quai d’Orsay as he burned a mass of papers in its fireplace, one of many such symbolic bonfires of his nation’s hopes. There were fears that, with the administration gone, socialist workers from the suburbs would march into the capital and proclaim a new Commune. Instead, when so many inhabitants had fled, there was only a macabre tranquillity: on 12 June in a smart Paris street, a Swiss journalist was bemused to meet a herd of abandoned cattle, lowing plaintively. The fall of the capital two days later caused the Austrian writer Stefan Zweig, a Jew now in remote exile, to write: ‘Few of my own misfortunes have dismayed me and filled me with despair as much as the humiliation of Paris, a city that was blessed like no other with the ability to make anyone who came there happy.’
The great flight of civilians west and south continued by day and night. ‘Silently, with no lights on, cars kept coming, one after the other,’ wrote Irène Némirovsky, ‘full to bursting with baggage and furniture, prams and birdcages, packing cases and baskets of clothes, each with a mattress tied firmly to the roof. They looked like mountains of fragile scaffolding and they seemed to move without the aid of a motor, propelled by their own weight.’ Némirovsky described three hapless civilian victims of air attack: ‘Their bodies had been torn to shreds, but by chance their three faces were untouched. Such gloomy, ordinary faces, with a dim, fixed, stunned expression as if they were trying in vain to understand what was happening to them; they weren’t made, my God, to die in a battle, they weren’t made for death.’
RAF fighter pilot Paul Richey saw a Luftwaffe bomb fall upon four farmworkers as they tilled a field: ‘We found them among the craters. The old man lay face down, his body twisted grotesquely, one leg shattered and a savage gash across the back of his neck, oozing steadily into the earth. His son lay close by … Against the hedge I found what must have been the remains of the third boy – recognizable only by a few tattered rags, a broken boot and some splinters of bone. The five stricken horses lay bleeding beside the smashed harrow, we shot them later. The air was foul with the reek of high explosive.’
In those days when Europeans were still losing their innocence, British pilots were stunned by the spectacle of Messerschmitts machine-gunning refugees. Richey met a fellow airman in the mess: ‘A disillusioned Johnny almost reluctantly said, “They
are
shits after all.” From this moment our concept of a chivalrous foe was dead.’ Private Ernie Farrow of the British Army’s 2nd Norfolks likewise recoiled from the carnage wrought by Goering’s knights of the air: ‘All along the road were people who had been killed with no arms, no heads, there was cattle lying about dead, there was little tiny children, there was old people. Not one or two, but hundreds of them lying about … We couldn’t stop to clear the road … so we had to drive our lorries over the top of them, which was heart-breaking – really heart-breaking.’
At Reynaud’s new refuge of government, the Château de Chissay on the Loire, his mistress Hélène de Portes was seen directing visitors’ cars, clad in a red dressing gown over pyjamas. Her impassioned influence was exercised to persuade the prime minister to agree an armistice. Reynaud wrote sadly later, after Portes’ death in a car crash, that she ‘was led astray by her desire to be in with the young … and to distance herself from Jews and old politicians. But she thought she was helping me.’ Portes’ mood reflected that of much of her nation. At Sully-sur-Loire a woman, red with anger and excitement, shouted at a French officer standing in front of a church: ‘What are you waiting for, you soldiers, to stop this war? Do you want them to massacre us all with our children? … Why are you still fighting? That Reynaud! If I could get hold of him, the scoundrel!’
At the headquarters of the Wehrmacht, euphoria prevailed. Gen. Eduard Wagner wrote on 15 June: ‘It should really be recorded for the history of our times and of the world how [Wehrmacht chief of staff Franz] Halder sits at the million-scale map and measures off the distances with a metre-rule and already deploys across the Loire. I doubt whether [Gen. Hans von] Seeckt’s synthesis of “cool judgement and warm enthusiasm” has ever found such brilliant reality as in the General Staff in this campaign … However, in spite of everything the Führer has earned the glory, for without his determination things would never have reached such an outcome.’
On the evening of 12 June, Weygand proposed seeking an armistice. Reynaud suggested that he and his ministers might retain office in exile, but Marshal Philippe Pétain dismissed the notion. On the 16th, Reynaud accepted that most of his ministers favoured capitulation, and resigned in favour of Pétain. The marshal broadcast to the French people next morning: ‘It is with a heavy heart I say to you today that it is necessary to stop fighting.’ Thereafter, few French soldiers saw much purpose in sacrificing their lives on the battlefield.
Yet there were occasional gallant, futile stands. An infantry battalion near Châteauneuf stubbornly held its positions. Another episode became enshrined in the legend of France: as columns of refugees and deserters from the army fled across the Loire, the commandant of the French cavalry school at Saumur, a hoary old warhorse named Col. Daniel Michon, was ordered to deploy his 780 cadets and instructors to defend the area’s bridges. He assembled them all in Saumur’s great amphitheatre and announced: ‘Gentlemen, for the school it is a mission of sacrifice. France is depending on you.’ One pupil, Jean-Louis Dunand, who had abandoned architectural studies in Paris to become a cadet, wrote exultantly to his parents: ‘I am so impatient to be in the fight, as are all my comrades here. Times a hundred times more painful await me, but I am prepared to meet them with a smile.’
The local mayor had already lost his own soldier son on the battlefield. Knowing that Pétain intended surrender, he pleaded with Michon not to make ancient Saumur a battlefield. The colonel contemptuously dismissed him: ‘I have an order to defend the town. The honour of the school is at stake.’ He sent away his eight hundred horses, and deployed the cadets in ‘brigades’, each led by an instructor, on a twelve-mile front at likely Loire crossing places; they were reinforced by a few hundred Algerian infantry trainees and army stragglers, supported by a handful of tanks. Just before midnight on 18 June, when leading elements of the German cavalry division led by Gen. Kurt Feldt approached Saumur, they were greeted by a barrage of fire. A German officer advanced beside a French prisoner carrying a white flag, in an attempt to parley. But this provoked shots and explosions which killed both men. Thereafter, as German artillery began to bombard Saumur, fierce little battles erupted the length of the line.
Some of the defenders acted with a heroism no less memorable because it was self-consciously theatrical. A cadet, Jean Labuze, questioned the order to hold until the last, saying despairingly, ‘One is ready to die, but not to die for nothing.’ His officer responded, shortly before himself being killed: ‘No one dies for nothing. We shall all die for France.’ Another officer, at Milly-le-Meugon, roused the parish priest from his bed at midnight in order that his pupils might be shriven before facing death; some two hundred took communion in the darkened village church before fighting resumed. The Loire bridges around Saumur were blown by the defenders, and throughout 19 and 20 June, repeated German attempts to cross in small boats were beaten off.
But the invaders instead crossed the river up-and downstream, outflanking Saumur; the last positions held by men of the cavalry school, around a farmhouse at Aunis three miles south-west of the town, were overwhelmed. Scores of cadets and instructors were wounded or killed, including the former architectural student Jean-Louis Dunand. Another of the dead at Aunis was a young soldier named Jehan Allain, before the war a rising organist and composer: Allain had already won a Croix de Guerre in Flanders, experienced evacuation from Dunkirk and returned from England to fight again, before meeting his death. Sheets of an unfinished musical composition were found in the saddlebag of his motorcycle.
Even as the battles around Saumur were being fought, disgruntled soldiers and civilians looked on, mocking and upbraiding the defenders for their folly, and for causing needless slaughter. But following France’s surrender, as unhappy old Colonel Michon abandoned his positions and led a column westwards in the hope of continuing the struggle elsewhere, patriots embraced the story of his little stand. At Saumur at least, they said, some soldiers had behaved with honour; monuments were erected to such men as Lt. Jacques Desplats, who died with his beloved Airedale terrier Nelson defending the island of Gennes under Michon’s command. Militarily, the actions of 19–20 June meant nothing. Morally, to the people of France they eventually came to mean much.
Most of the army meanwhile awaited captivity. Lt. George Friedmann, a philosopher in civilian life, wrote: ‘Today among many French people, I do not detect any sense of pain at the misfortunes of their country … I have observed only a sort of complacent relief (sometimes even exalted relief), a kind of base atavistic satisfaction at the knowledge that “For us, it’s over,” without caring about anything else.’ The French political right applauded the accession of the Pétain regime to power, one of its adherents writing to a friend: ‘At last we have victory.’ As the marshal himself travelled the country in the months following the armistice, he was greeted by huge, hysterically applauding crowds. They believed that nothing the Nazis might do could be as terrible as the cost of continuing a futile struggle. The fact that Churchill persuaded the British people to an alternative judgement, to defiance of perceived reality, prompted enduring French envy, resentment, bitterness.
The conquest of France and the Low Countries cost Germany almost 43,000 killed, 117,000 wounded; France lost around 50,000 dead, Britain 11,000; the Germans took 1.5 million prisoners. The British were granted one further miraculous deliverance, a second Dunkirk. After the BEF’s escape, Churchill made the fine moral but reckless military decision to send more troops to France, to stiffen the resolve of its government. In June, two ill-equipped divisions were shipped to join the residual British forces on the Continent. After the armistice, because the Germans were overwhelmingly preoccupied elsewhere, it proved possible to evacuate almost 200,000 men from the north-western French ports to England, with the loss of only a few thousand. Churchill was fortunate thus to be spared the consequences of a folly.