The Collapse of the Third Republic

An Inquiry into the Fall of France in 1940

William L. Shirer

• Éditeur: RosettaBooks
• Année: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780795342479
• Sujet: History
• Sous-sujet: World War II

The National Book Award–winning historian's "vivid and moving" eyewitness account of the fall of France to Hitler's Third Reich at the outset of WWII ( The New York Times ). As an international war correspondent and radio commentator during World War II, William L.Shirer didn't just research the fall of France. He was there. In just six weeks, he watched the Third Reich topple one of the world's oldest military powers—and institute a rule of terror and paranoia. Based on in-person conversations with the leaders, diplomats, generals, and ordinary citizens who both shaped the events and lived through them, Shirer constructs a compelling account of historical events without losing sight of the human experience. From the heroic efforts of the Freedom Fighters to the tactical military misjudgments that caused the fall and the daily realities of life for French citizens under Nazi rule, this fascinating and exhaustively documented account brings this significant episode of history to life. "This is a companion effort to Shirer's The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, also voluminous but very readable, reflecting once again both Shirer's own experience and an enormous mass of historical material well digested and assimilated." — Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

BOOK FOUR

The War and the Defeat
1939–1940

27

LA DRÔLE DE GUERRE
SEPTEMBER 3, 1939–APRIL 9,1940

Poland was quickly crushed by the overwhelming might of the German Army, and France, with 85 divisions facing an enemy with little more than a covering force, did little in the West to keep its commitment to help her gallant ally. Great Britain did no more. Its small contingent of two divisions did not reach the “front” until September 26. By then it was too late for the Allied armies in the West to be of any help whatsoever to the Poles.

They were vanquished in eight days. By the afternoon of September 8, the 35 divisions of the Polish army—all that there had been time to mobilize—had been either shattered or caught in a vast pincer movement that closed in around Warsaw. That afternoon the German 4th Panzer division reached the outskirts of the Polish capital. Directly south of the city, racing up from Silesia and Slovakia, General Walter von Reichenau’s Tenth Army captured Kielce and General Wilhelm List’s Fourteenth Army arrived at Sandomierz at the junction of the Vistula and San rivers. There remained little for the Germans to do except to mop up, and this phase was completed by the 17th, except in the Warsaw triangle and further west near Posen where pockets of Polish troops held out valiantly for a few days more.

On the night of September 6, after the fall of Cracow, the country’s second largest city, the Polish government, its members dazed by the debacle, had fled from Warsaw to Lublin. On the 15th, after being unceasingly bombed and strafed by the Luftwaffe, it reached the Romanian frontier and crossed over. It was now time for the Russians, in agreement with the Germans, to move in on the stricken country to grab a share of the spoils.

The Soviet Red Army invaded eastern Poland on September 17 and the next day made contact with the German troops at Brest-Litovsk, where exactly twenty-one years before a newly formed Bolshevik government, severing its country’s ties with the Western Allies, had accepted from the German Army separate peace terms of great severity. For the proud but blinded Polish nation it was all over. On September 29 Germany and Russia, for the fourth time in history, partitioned Poland. They swallowed it up completely.^ccxxxviii

With Poland obliterated, Hitler now turned his attention to the West.

ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT

What had happened there, or rather, what had not happened, had puzzled the Germans but not actually surprised them. As early as August 14 General Halder, Chief of the Army General Staff, had drawn up in considerable detail an estimate of what would happen in the West if Germany attacked Poland with the great bulk of her army. He thought a French offensive “not very likely.” He was sure the French army would not move through Belgium “against Belgium’s wishes.” He concluded that the French would remain on the defensive.^ccxxxix On September 7, with the Polish armies already beaten, the Staff Chief noted in his diary plans for transferring the troops in Poland to the West. That evening he added a few lines on Hitler’s view of the situation in the West which the Fuehrer had just conveyed to General Walther von Brauchitsch, Commander of the German Army.

Operations in the West not yet clear. Some indications that there is no real intention of waging war….

That very night of September 7–8 General Gamelin launched his “offensive” in the West supposedly designed to relieve the German pressure on Poland. Light French forces crossed the frontier on a 15-mile front along the “Cadenbronn Salient” southeast of Saarbrücken, where the border bulged southward. On the morning of September 9 they were followed by stronger units from the Fourth and Fifth Armies advancing, according to a later German report, in battalion strength. The French met little opposition as the German covering forces withdrew toward the Siegfried Line eight miles north of the frontier. The French, moving cautiously, were slowed mainly by mines and booby traps. To the West units of the Third Army were thrust forward to occupy a smaller salient, the Wendt Forest, southwest of Saarbrücken. There was no serious fighting; only light skirmishing.

The French had an overwhelming superiority in men, guns, and tanks. Against their fully armed 85 divisions on the whole front the Germans had 34 divisions, all but 11 of which were reserve units with little training and lacking adequate arms, munition, and transport. All the panzer divisions, all the motorized divisions, had been reserved for Poland. On September 10 some nine more reserve divisions were added but they would have been of little value against a serious attack.

Fortunately for the Germans a serious attack was never mounted nor did the highly cautious French generalissimo ever contemplate one. By September 12 the French forces had moved forward some five miles on a 15-mile front and occupied twenty deserted villages. General Gamelin thereupon commanded them to halt and on that very day, September 12, to prepare to beat a retreat to the safety of the Maginot Line should the Germans attack through Belgium.

The battered Poles protested such monumental inaction and General Gamelin replied with the sort of equivocation for which he had so often chastised Georges Bonnet. On September 9 he received radio messages from Marshal Smigly-Rydz and from the Polish General Staff telling him of the plight of their forces in face of the devastating German attacks, asking him what he was doing to draw off enemy strength and imploring him to “accelerate” whatever he was doing. The next day the Polish military attaché put the two key questions bluntly to the generalissimo.

Has the French air force already begun action against the German air force and German territory?

Will you be able to accelerate your combined action? I must report these matters to Marshal Smigly-Rydz.³

General Gamelin responded the same day in writing:

More than half of our active divisions on the northeast front are engaged in combat. Beyond our frontier the Germans are opposing us with a vigorous resistance…. Prisoners indicate the Germans are reinforcing their battlefront with large new formations.

Air action from the beginning has been under way in liaison with ground operations. We know we are holding down before us a considerable part of the German air force.

I have thus gone beyond my promise to take the offensive with the bulk of my forces by the fifteenth day after mobilization. It has been impossible for me to do more.⁴

This incredible reply reveals more than we have yet learned of the generalissimo of the French armies. For the truth was quite different from what he reported. By his own account only 15 French divisions were engaged in the entire operation of the “Saar offensive,” and most French military writers put the figure at 9—out of 85 divisions on the northeast front.^ccxl There was no action in the air except for a few reconnaissance missions. French and British pilots were forbidden to bomb German territory for fear, as General Gamelin put it in a report to Daladier on September 9, “of the heaviest consequences.”⁵ There was no “vigorous resistance” on the part of the Germans. After almost bloodless skirmishes they drew back toward the Siegfried Line. And the reinforcements of “large new formations” were, as we have seen, 9 reserve divisions incapable at that moment of giving serious battle. Not a single German division or tank or plane was diverted from Poland to reinforce the West.

To the then Colonel de Gaulle, commanding the tanks of the Fifth Army, the Saar “offensive” consisted merely of “a few demonstrations.” To the then Captain Beaufre, just back from Moscow, “it was nothing. General Gamelin, true to character, decided to make no more than a gesture…. That was our aid to Poland!”⁶

“It’s a little test, you see. A little test,” Gamelin had said to General Sir Edmund Ironside, the Chief of the British Imperial General staff, when at their meeting on September 5 he had jabbed away at a map and explained what he called the sortie in the Saar.⁷ That was at least truthful. And Gamelin had been frank too when on September 1, the day Poland was attacked, he had written Daladier that the only way to bring “effective and rapid help to Poland” was for the French army to move against Germany through Belgium. If it was the “only way,” then was it not clear that he had no intention of attacking seriously in the Saar?

The quick defeat of the Poles, to be sure, relieved the pressure on Gamelin to continue the Saar “offensive.” And it raised new problems. For soon the Germans would be able to bring back their main forces, including all their armored divisions and their superior air force, and in due time hurl them against the French—possibly by way of Belgium, as they had in 1914. By September 12, when his “offensive” was coming to a halt, these considerations were much on Gamelin’s mind. On that day he issued secret Personal Instruction No. 4 to his forces to discontinue their advance. Because of “military events in Poland,” he said, “there is no more need of establishing a base for an eventual attack against the Siegfried Line.” Indeed, he added, the front of the Fourth and Fifth Armies must be established far enough away from the German fortress line so that the enemy would not be able to use it as a base for counterattacks. So not only would there be no assault on the Siegfried Line, but the French would keep out of its artillery range! In view of a possible German move through Belgium, Gamelin further advised, the army commanders must consider the “eventuality” of withdrawing from German territory—small as the slice they held was.⁸

That afternoon, at a hastily summoned meeting of the Allied Supreme War Council at Abbeville, the generalissimo informed the British that he was calling off his “offensive” in view of the developments in Poland. “I received the impression,” Gamelin says, “that my report brought a sense of relief to everyone.”⁹ Relieved at the prospect of doing nothing! The British and French were of one mind.

On September 21, Gamelin says, he renounced “any intention of continuing the offensive.” On that date he issued orders that if the Germans counterattacked in strength the French forces should retreat to the shelter of the Maginot Line. “If the bulk of the German Army is brought back to face us,” he added, “we have no interest in fighting a defensive battle except on our fortified position on French soil.”¹⁰ A week later, on September 30, the generalissimo decided, he tells us, that “the hour had come to retreat.” Realizing that this would be a blow to the government, which had been making a great deal of propaganda about the French “invasion” of Germany, General Gamelin and General Georges went to see Daladier to explain to him the reasons for retreating in the Saar. The Premier was not pleased. “He feared,” he said, “the reaction of public opinion not only in France but throughout the world.^ccxli But out of “profound patriotism,” as Gamelin puts it, he acquiesced. To avoid any leaks to the Germans it was decided not to inform the cabinet, some of whose members, now that Poland had fallen, saw no reason for continuing the war. Only the President of the Republic was told. The French withdrawal was to be as secret as possible.¹¹ Indeed in his order of September 30 Gamelin, after advising General Georges that he “considered it urgent” to begin the retreat at once, instructed him to be sure to get away in the dead of night so that the enemy would not know of it.¹² “Operate only at night,” he admonished. A light screen of troops was to be left in the forward positions. The withdrawal of the main French forces began that night and was completed on October 4

Ten days later, though the Germans had not had time to transfer any forces worth mentioning from Poland to the West, General Gamelin convinced himself that the enemy was about to launch a great attack. He therefore issued on October 14 a ringing Order of the Day. It makes strange reading in view of what happened.

Soldiers of France! At any moment a battle may begin on which the fate of the country will once more in our history depend. The nation and the whole world have their eyes fixed on you. Steel your hearts! Make the best use of your weapons! Remember the Marne and Verdun!

On October 16 the awaited attack began. The fate of France never depended less on a battle. The Germans attacked with light forces, usually in company or battalion strength, disdaining to use even the few tanks they had. The French screening forces withdrew quickly, as planned, and by the night of the 17th German territory had been cleared of the invaders. In two days, with a handful of infantry troops, the Germans took back what the French had taken two weeks to gain. Gamelin says the Germans suffered “important losses” from the fire of French artillery, which he had directed “not to spare its ammunition.” Actually, the Germans listed 198 killed in the entire action, which was probably a fairly accurate figure. The French High Command put the best face possible on its withdrawal, stressing in its communiqués that the Germans were merely occupying territory evacuated by the French. General Prételat, Commander of Army Group II, whose forces had conducted the Saar “offensive,” praised his troops for the “happy manner” in which they had effected their retreat. They deserved, he said, “the highest praise.” But in truth, as more than one general reported, the retreat without a fight began to sap the morale of the French soldiers. It did not improve the morale of the civilians at home. After six weeks of being at war the great French Army had been unable—or unwilling—to bring the slightest relief to Poland. Its “invasion” of Germany had ended in a fiasco.

“After the prologue of the ‘phony offensive,’” wrote Colonel Goutard, “we were ripe for the ‘phony war.’”¹³

***

The phony “offensive” in the Saar revealed, at the very beginning of the war, something about the French nation, government, army, the High Command, and General Gamelin. “The nation,” Alfred Sauvy, the eminent French economist and demographist, would write of this time, “refused the war”—on the battlefield and at home. Daladier, in his postwar testimony before the Parliamentary Investigating Committee, explained why his government had not pressed Gamelin to fight on the Western Front that September.

“The collapse of Poland,” he said, “was unexpected and completely surprised the High Command. General Gamelin had said he hoped the resistance of the Polish army would last over the winter, which would permit us to act in the spring.” Daladier then posed the key question: “Should the French Army have attacked?”

The War Committee studied this problem… and decided that France at this moment should not carry all the burden of an offensive against Germany. It observed that Britain had sent but two divisions and that even these were far from complete, and that it was to our interest to first neutralize Italy, if possible, to increase war production and to stimulate war production in America so that the United States could furnish solid and effective help…. The High Command also decided to wait for spring or summer to do anything on the French front though there were possibilities of doing something at Salonika….

At the very first meeting of the Supreme Allied War Council at Abbeville on September 11 Daladier had proposed that the British and French establish an “Eastern front” at Salonika, as they had done in the first war. The Franco-British forces would be joined by the armies of the Balkan Entente, which presented, the Premier emphasized, “a force of ...

Table des matières

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• Prologue
• Book One The Rise of the Third Republic 1871–1919
• Book Two Illusions and Realities of Victory 1919–1934
• Book Three The Last Years of the Third Republic 1934–1939
• Book Four The War and The Defeat 1939–1940
• Book Five The Collapse of The third republic
• Epilogue
• Footnotes
• Notes
• Acknowledgments