The War of the World: History's Age of Hatred (63 page)

Blitzkrieg
is, of course, a German word meaning ‘lightning war’. The ironic thing is that it was in many ways a British invention, derived from the lessons of the Western Front in the First World War. Captain Basil Liddell Hart had drawn his own conclusions from the excessively high casualties suffered by both sides. As an infantry subaltern, he himself had been gassed, the long-term effects of which forced him to retire from the army in 1927, after which he turned to journalism, working as defence correspondent for the
Daily Telegraph
and then
The Times
and publishing numerous works of military history. In Liddell Hart’s view, the fatal mistake of most offensives on the Western Front had been their ponderous and predictable directness. A more ‘indirect approach’, he argued, would aim at surprising the enemy, throwing his commanders off balance, and then exploiting the ensuing confusion. The essence was to concentrate armour and air power in a lethal lightning strike. Liddell Hart defined the secret as lying

partly in the tactical combination of tanks and aircraft, partly in the unexpectedness of the stroke in direction and time,
but above all
in the ‘follow-through’ – the way that a break-through is exploited by a deep strategic penetration; carried out by armoured forces racing on ahead of the main army, and operating
independently
.

The good news for Liddell Hart was that his work was hugely influential. The bad news was that it was hugely influential not in Britain but in Germany. With the notable exception of Major-General J. F. C. Fuller,
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senior British commanders like Field Marshal Earl Haig simply refused to accept that ‘the aeroplane, the tank [and] the motor car [would] supersede the horse in future wars’, dismissing motorized weapons as mere ‘accessories to the man and horse’. Haig’s brother concurred: the cavalry would ‘never be scrapped to make room for the tanks’. By contrast, younger German officers immediately
grasped the significance of Liddell Hart’s work. Among his most avid fans was Heinz Guderian, commander of the 19th German Army Corps in the invasion of Poland. As Guderian recalled, it was from Liddell Hart and other British pioneers of ‘a new type of warfare on the largest scale’ that he learned the importance of ‘the concentration of armour’. Moreover,

it was Liddell Hart who emphasized the use of armoured forces for long-range strokes, operations against the opposing army’s communications, and [who] also proposed a type of armoured division combining panzer and panzer-infantry units. Deeply impressed by these ideas, I tried to develop them in a sense practicable for our own army… I owe many suggestions of our further development to Captain Liddell Hart.

Guderian – who was happy to describe himself as Liddell Hart’s disciple and pupil and even translated his works into German – had learned his lessons well. In September 1939 his panzers were unstoppable. The Poles did not, as legend has it, attempt cavalry charges against them, though mounted troops were deployed against German infantry, but they lacked adequate motor transport and their tanks were fewer and technically inferior to the Germans’. Moreover, like the Czechs before them, the Poles found Anglo-French guarantees to be militarily worthless. At the Battle of Bzura they mounted a desperate counteroffensive to hold up the German assault on Warsaw, but by September 16 their resistance was crumbling. By the 17th the Germans had reached the fortress at Bresc (Brest) on the River Bug. On September 28 Warsaw itself fell. Eight days later the last Polish troops laid down their arms. The entire campaign had lasted barely five weeks.

The Poles had fought courageously, but they were outnumbered and outgunned. The most striking thing about the war in the West the following year was that the opposite wastrue. It was perhaps predictable that the Dutch and Belgians would succumb to superior German forces, but the fall of France within a matter of just six weeks was, as the historian Marc Bloch said, a ‘strange defeat’. Even without the support of the British Expeditionary Force, the French forces were superior on paper, an advantage that ought to have been magnified by their fighting a defensive campaign. They had twice the number of
wheeled vehicles and 4,638 tanks to the German 4,060. Moreover, French tanks had thicker armour and bigger guns. Yet when the German offensive was launched on May 10, 1940, many units put up only token resistance. On May 15 General Erwin Rommel’s 7th Panzer Division was able to take 450 prisoners in the course of two small skirmishes; later they captured 10,000 in the space of two days. Rommel
*
himself was struck by the readiness of the French officers to give themselves up, and by their insouciant ‘requests, including, among other things, permission to keep their batmen and to have their kit picked up from Philippeville, where it had been left’. Another German officer saw ‘several hundred French officers who had marched 35 kilometres without any guard from a prisoner of war dispatch point to a prisoner of war transit station… with apparently none having made their escape’. Karl von Stackelberg, a reporter in one of the new ‘propaganda companies’, was baffled: ‘20,000 men… were heading backwards as prisoners… It was inexplicable… How was it possible, these French soldiers with their officers, so completely downcast, so completely demoralized, would allow themselves to go more or less voluntarily into imprisonment?’ British soldiers captured in 1940 could not help noticing that ‘the French had been prepared for capture and so were laden down with kit, while we were all practically empty-handed.’ In all, around 1.8 million French troops were taken prisoner in 1940, of whom nearly a million were kept in Germany as forced labourers until 1945. It is true that perhaps as many as half of those who surrendered did so in the period between June 17, when the new Prime Minister, Marshal Pétain, announced that he was seeking an armistice, and its implementation five days later. But it is still remarkable that more than a third of the French army had already been taken prisoner before Pétain’s statement. Indicative of the poor state of morale is the fact that colonial troops from French Africa fought with more determination than their supposed masters; their units certainly took heavier casualties.

What lay behind the French collapse? To Liddell Hart – who was so appalled by the outbreak of war that he suffered a nervous breakdown – it was essentially a failure of military doctrine:

The panzer forces’ thrust could have been stopped long before reaching the Channel by a concentrated counterstroke with similar forces. But the French, though having more and better tanks than the enemy, had strung them out in small packets… The one British armoured division available was not despatched to France until after the German offensive was launched, and this arrived too late for the first, and decisive, phase… This
Blitzkrieg
pace was only possible because the Allied leaders had not grasped the new technique, and so did not know how to counter it… Never was a great disaster more easily preventable.

Marc Bloch agreed that the débâcle was due at least in part to the abysmal quality of French generalship. A decisive factor was the German decision to switch the direction of their main attack from Luxembourg and the Low Countries, as Hitler had originally planned, to the line running between Liège and Namur, through the supposedly impenetrable forests of the Ardennes. The French would have fared better against the original strategy; they were wholly taken by surprise when five panzer divisions thrust their way through the Ardennes and captured the bridges over the River Meuse. Thereafter, their reactions were culpably slow or inept. Yet what happened in 1940 was more than just a military failure. At root, as Bloch argued, it was a collapse of morale.

Even during the ‘Phoney War’ of late 1939 and early 1940, Lieutenant-General Alan Brooke, who commanded the British Expeditionary Force’s 2nd Corps, had been deeply troubled by the mood of the French army, which he was inclined to attribute to the defensive character of French strategy. The heavily fortified Maginot Line’s ‘most dangerous aspect’ as it ran down the border with Germany, Brooke noted in his diary, was ‘the psychological one; a sense of false security is engendered, a feeling of sitting behind an impregnable iron fence; and should the fence perchance be broken then French fighting spirit [might well] be brought crumbling with it!’ There was more to French defeatism than this, however. To many Frenchmen, the Third Republic simply did not seem worth dying for, when so many of their
fathers, brothers and friends had died for it already between 1914 and 1918. This was the mood – the refusal to pursue another Pyrrhic victory – that had been foreshadowed in Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s
Voyage au bout de la nuit
(1932), with its stomach-churning evocation of the slaughter of the last war’s opening phase. The same mood inspired the Nobel laureate Roger Martin Du Gard’s letter to a friend in September 1936: ‘Anything rather than war! Anything… even Fascism in Spain… Even Fascism in France: Nothing, no trial, no servitude can be compared to war: Anything, Hitler rather than war!’ In the words of one German officer: ‘French spirit and morale had been… broken… before the battle even began. It was not so much the lack of machinery… that had defeated the French, but that they did not know what they were fighting for… The Nazi revolution had already won the Battle of France before our first armoured divisions went to work.’

Some Frenchmen on the Right, no doubt, saw distinct advantages to a German victory. Most, however, simply underestimated the costs of defeat. It is unlikely that the French would have surrendered in such large numbers and in such an orderly fashion if they had not expected these costs to be comparatively light. The assumptions clearly were that, with the war seemingly over, they would soon be returned to their native land; and that any German occupation would be short lived. Some senior generals seem to have been more worried about a possible left-wing revolt at home than by the prospects of German occupation. These expectations were rooted in the more distant memories of 1871 rather than 1914. They were to be bitterly confounded. The French Left melted away. The Germans stayed.

It is usually assumed that the mood in Britain was not so defeatist. Certainly, some British soldiers in France in 1940 refused to surrender even when ordered to do so. ‘Not fucking likely, you yellow bastard!’ was the furious reaction of one member of the 51st (Highland) Division when ordered to lay down his arms by an officer of the Kensington Regiment in June 1940. Yet this bellicose Scot was in a minority. Most of his comrades in the British Expeditionary Force saw little reason to fight to the death for France when the French themselves were manifestly so reluctant to do so. In British folk memory, the evacuation from the beaches at Dunkirk was a triumph. The German
newsreels more accurately depicted it as a humiliating defeat. So chaotic was the British retreat – accompanied as it was by rumours of a ‘fifth column’ supposedly sabotaging the Allied effort behind the lines – that the shattered survivors had to be quarantined on their return for the sake of civilian morale. As Corporal W. R. Littlewood of the Royal Engineers put it: ‘We were beginning to think that the Germans were almost superhuman… At every turn [they] seemed to have the answers.’ Discipline came close to breaking down. One officer was shot in the face by one of his own battle-fatigued men. In Calais an old woman was gunned down by a soldier in the Queen Victoria’s Rifles in the belief that she was one of the ubiquitous fifth columnists, since the Germans were reputedly masters of disguise as well as of warfare. Belgian civilians suspected of spying – including farm labourers accused of mowing grass ‘in the formation of an arrow’ to guide Stuka pilots to British troop formations – were summarily shot, in scenes reminiscent of the German army’s conduct in the same region twenty-six years before. In the final frantic scramble for boats at Dunkirk, some French soldiers found themselves being fired on by their own allies. The most that can be said about Dunkirk is that the British were very lucky. Hitler made his first real mistake in stopping Rommel’s marauding panzers from finishing them off. The killing or capture of around 338,226 Allied troops – the total number evacuated in Operation Dynamo, of whom 110,000 were in fact French – would have been a devastating blow from which British morale might never have recovered. In the event, only 41,340 British servicemen ended up as prisoners.

Just how vulnerable the morale of British troops was becomes clear when one considers their performance in other settings. Although Churchill was fond of phrases like ‘never surrender’, British troops as a rule did not fight to the death. In Crete in 1941 they failed to with stand a German parachute invasion, despite initially inflicting heavy casualties. The first campaigns in North Africa were also disappointing. Later, Churchill was especially troubled by the refusal of the garrison at Singapore – whom he had explicitly exhorted to fight to the last man – to hold out against what was in fact an outnumbered and very weary Japanese force (see
Chapter 14
). Even Alan Brooke, perhaps Churchill’s harshest critic, who took over as Chief of the
Imperial General Staff in December 1941, was perturbed. His constant worry was that, as in the First World War, Churchill’s appetite for ‘subsidiary theatres’ of war would lead him to spread British forces too thinly and ‘fritter away our strength’ instead of concentrating force ‘at the vital point’. For this reason he was disinclined to give priority to Asia or any other theatre, having convinced himself that Britain must concentrate on the Mediterranean and North Africa. Nevertheless, he was appalled by the collapse of resistance in the Far East. ‘It is hard to see why a better defence is not being put up,’ he confided in his diary as the Japanese closed on Singapore. ‘I have during the last 10 years had an unpleasant feeling that the British Empire was decaying and that we were on a slippery slope. I wonder if I was right? I certainly never expected that we should fall to pieces as fast as we are.’ With the Japanese threatening to overrun Burma too, he became distraught: ‘Cannot work out why troops are not fighting better. If the army cannot fight better than it is doing at present we shall deserve to lose our Empire!’