Part 21

He emphasized that French soldiers had never been afraid to stand artillery fire, so why should they run from the less dangerous dive bombers? He said he instructed all soldiers not serving antiaircraft guns to go under cover for the few seconds while the dive bombers dived, but to emerge immediately upon hearing the detonation of the bombs, and meet the advancing tanks. If they were small thinly armored tanks, and the French possessed adequate antitank guns, they should attempt to destroy the tanks. If the tanks were too large and heavily armored, the French should permit the tanks to go through and emerge in time to stop the German infantry following the tanks.

General Huntziger admitted that it had been extremely difficult at first to persuade his troops of the comparative harmlessness of the dive bombers and mentioned the fact that in the first thirteen days of the German attack his troops had been overwhelmed and he had lost fifty per cent of his effectives, more than ninety per cent of whom were captured, but he believed that now the troops were experienced and could not be frightened as they were at first. As we were soon to observe, the French troops never did get used to the dive bomber which is truly the most terrifying weapon ever invented. General Huntziger compared it to a locomotive with its whistle wide open falling upon you from the sky.

“You are certain it is coming just for you,” the General said, “and you believe it is not merely going to drop bombs upon you, but you are sure the plane itself is going to crash upon you and leave you smashed like a beetle.”

The noise of the dive bomber is its most terrifying quality. An ordinary airplane diving makes a loud rushing noise familiar to everyone nowadays, but many of the German dive bombers were equipped with sirens attached to loud-speakers, so that when they dived each plane screamed with the noise of a score of ordinary diving planes. In addition to that they were often equipped with screaming bombs. General Touchon, commander of the Sixth Army, showed me one at his headquarters. It had four whistles, each about the size of a cannon cracker, in the vanes of its tail. They made each falling bomb sound as loud as four American locomotives with the whistles open. “But,” General Huntziger said, “all you have to do is to realize that noise doesn’t hurt anyone, and I have explained that to my soldiers and from now on they will stand firm.”

Huntziger gave me a copy of his orders of the day. I cannot read it even now without feeling the terrible weight of despair that settled upon all of us as we realized that the end of France was near. It is dated May 18, 1940 and begins: “The war has commenced,”--it was to be all over in exactly thirty days--“and, in order to win, the enemy always attacks your morale. In this first shock, his tactic, his ruses of warfare and his weapons have but one object, _to demoralize you_. The enemy is reckoning only upon fighting you with fright. It is necessary therefore that you know this.

“Know also that the massive bombardments of the enemy aviation, no matter how impressive they are, make few victims, as you may have already noted. You know the total lost; they are a minimum. Take refuge when the enemy aircraft passes and immediately afterward take up again your combat post. Never forget our aviation protects you. _Even when you cannot see it._ Know that our airplanes have knocked down more than a thousand enemy machines in less than eight days and that among the enemy our bombers are giving blow for blow.

“Know that against infantry the tank is not able to accomplish big things if you hide yourself and the tanks cannot see you. Let them pass without showing yourself, then fire on the guides who accompany them. Without them the tank is almost blind; sooner or later it will have to abandon the field to refuel if our antitank guns have not already knocked it out.

“These guns are very efficient; they have given many proofs of it in the last few days.

“Do not allow yourself to be influenced by tales of parachutists but if you actually find some, remember that an armed man can always beat them. Guard yourself against imaginary dangers. As though you were in active combat, you have to defend yourself against false rumors which may be spread by a traitor or an imbecile seized with panic.

“If you listen to such tales they may be able to provoke serious defection. Listen to no one but your superior officers and those you know.

“A man can overcome his fear. It is his duty to surmount it and to combat the fears of others. If a man spreads fear he not only commits an act of cowardice. He commits treason.

“Know finally that the enemy is not so strong as some people think. Oppose to him your will. It is your will which will sweep the enemy away. Never forget what you are defending. If you let the enemy pass you will lose more than your life. You will be pitilessly separated from your families to suffer far from them a slavery worse than death.”

The intelligence and courage of Huntziger as displayed in these orders were of no avail, because he could not, as Churchill can, transmit his spirit to others. His soldiers listened to his talk and read his orders of the day but still they yielded to their fear. It must be seldom in military history that a commanding general has to devote his principal orders to adjuring his troops not to be afraid. The French Army was already panic-stricken.

Q. _You say there was treachery among senior officers of the French Army and among the government. Why do you say that and what proof of it have you?_

A. There were both treachery and treason. High French officers and officials conspired to overthrow the Republic. Pétain himself was their leader. They were so fanatical in their desire to destroy the Republic that they fell into the German trap and acquiesced in what the Germans told them would be a fake defeat, after which they would set up the Fascist government which they did set up at Vichy. After that Hitler would withdraw his troops and restore France to all her old power and glory, an equal partner and friend of Nazi Germany. They were of course deceived and now most of them must realize they were deceived, and that Hitler has no intention of ever allowing France to be a great power again. But this awakening is too late and the guilty men, many of them now in Pétain’s government, have a life-and-death interest in preserving their secret, since in the present temper of the French people if the truth were known many another assassination would follow the attempts on Laval and Deat.

This is a rough outline of what I believe to have happened in France. I will be glad to give you all the evidence I have, admitting that it probably is not sufficient to win a verdict of guilty in a court of law, but maintaining that it is convincing to one who witnessed the debacle and was bewildered by the lack of adequate explanation. You see, after we had added up all the other reasons for the fall of France, there was still something lacking; something to explain the fact that the French Army of nearly five million men, with its centuries of glorious tradition, and its reputation among experts as the best in the world, never once held firm after the Germans broke through the Low Countries, never once stopped the enemy for as much as a day, but steadily, day by day retreated, crumbled, broke up, and at the end of five weeks ceased to exist.

Review our list of causes now and see if all of them put together explain this phenomenon. Complacency and trust in the Maginot line and the softening effect of eight months of inactivity, comparative lack of leadership, man power and planes and tanks; lack of faith, anger, and the spirit to fight to kill; conflict between communists and conservatives. No, all these reasons together do not explain the conduct of the French Army between May 11 and June 17, 1940.

Q. _But the thesis you present is too astounding. That French Army officers should have conspired with the enemy is almost beyond belief. Do you mean the French General Staff?_

A. Yes, the French General Staff. Not all of it; only a few members were necessary. If you find it difficult to believe, remember that the French officers and officials concerned did not believe they were betraying France; they believed that Hitler would keep his word and restore France as soon as the Republic was overthrown. To make this aspect of the matter clear: suppose you were a young Frenchman today, would you think of it as treason if you worked to overthrow the Vichy government? Would you think of yourself as a traitor if you conspired with the British to throw out Pétain and reorganize a democratic government? No.

Well, in so far as one can credit such Fascists with sincerity, we have to admit that these men also thought they were serving the best interests of France when they conspired to overthrow the Republic. Remember that French officers as a class have generally been anti-Republican. Napoleon’s officers soon forgot Republican principles in their devotion to the Emperor. The hierarchy of the Army did not favor the equalitarianism of the French Republic. Aristocratic officers generally set the tone for the majority of the higher ranks. Time and again I was astonished to note that upper-class Frenchmen seemed to remember as though it had been yesterday the bloody events of the French Revolution, and were more afraid of their own working class than of any foreign enemy.

I visited once the famous deep cellar vaults of the Bank of France where they kept the gold, and while walking through the doorway, piercing its twenty-foot thick steel and concrete walls, I asked why they needed such formidable and expensive protection. Was it against the Germans? It could not be, because if ever the Germans occupied Paris, as they do today, no underground fortification such as these vaults could prevent them from getting the gold, especially since the Germans would be holding as hostages the men with the keys. No, it was not against a foreign enemy; the vaults were built against the Paris mob, against revolutionaries, against another 1789.

This spirit was shared by many French senior officers, and it is ironic that their conspiracy to bring about a feigned defeat in order to overthrow the Republic was greatly helped by the defection of the Parisian Communist troops in Corap’s Ninth Army at the Meuse. The very workingmen who had most to lose by the fall of the Republic and the establishment of a Fascist France, helped bring about their own downfall under the mistaken guidance of Moscow. The treachery to France came from the two opposite poles of French society.

Q. _How did this treason manifest itself in the operations of the army?_

A. I will give you one example, from personal experience and the testimony of French friends. You remember the Germans, when they broke through the Low Countries and across the Meuse, dashed with their Panzer divisions for the coast, pell-mell, at top speed, not bothering or wasting time at first to widen their column of penetration, which was still only a few miles wide for much of its length when the first German detachments reached the sea at Abbeville. North of this thin German column was the strong French Army under General Prioux, while south of it were the main French forces. It was the constant fervid hope of the French that their armies would cut across the German column, roll it up in two directions, and win not merely the battle of France but perhaps the war.

Military experts, foremost our own, thought it possible; some held it probable. This hope reached its climax after Weygand made an inspection flight to the Low Countries and returned to Paris. That day at the Ministry of Information as I was waiting in the office for Colonel Schieffer, in charge of American correspondents, the gaunt, one-eyed, black-monocled, fiercely patriotic Colonel came in with a bang, dropped his customary stillness and exclaimed: “Weygand says he won’t leave a German alive, not one. He’s going to cut the column and bottle them up and he says there won’t be left one living.” Like wildfire the word of Weygand spread through the building, through Paris, through France. It was the only bright moment in the whole Battle of France.

But it did not happen. Why didn’t it? A captain from General Prioux’s staff may have the answer. This is the story he told. “After the Germans reached Abbeville and cut us off from the South, General Prioux called us all together one day and said, ‘I have orders from General Headquarters that you must blow up your tanks and guns and retreat as speedily as possible to the seashore. I must tell you that personally I do not approve these orders. I am convinced we are strong enough to make an offensive southward and cut the Germans and reunite with our troops in France. However, orders are orders and one does not discuss orders. You will do as I have told you and I shall stay here where I am.’

“We did as we were told and Prioux became a prisoner of war. That was our last chance. The failure to cut the German column was the end of the Battle of France. We could have done it; we were ordered not to.”

Counterattack, always we waited for the famous French counterattack, the fulfillment of the French Army tradition of aggression, _à la baionette!_ but it never came. Orders stopped it.

Q. _Who gave the orders? Pétain was not an active officer then._

A. No, but General George was. I want to give you my evidence in the form of a firsthand quotation from a French friend, but before I do so it is important to point out that between General Gamelin, commander in chief of all the Allied land forces, and General George, commander of the French armies fighting against Germany, there existed a jealousy so strong that it amounted to hatred, and their headquarters staffs became so permeated with it that they actually withheld information from each other.

Here then, were the principal elements and forces involved in the great conspiracy: First, Pétain, towering above all other figures and forces; then the Deuxième Bureau, the famous Second Bureau in charge of Intelligence of the French Army; General George and General Dusseigneur and Colonel Eugene Deloncle; the Cagoulards, that secret society of so-called Hooded Men, which most people considered merely absurd but whose importance turned out to be greater than that of any French secret society since the Revolution; the group operating the Fascist weekly, _Je Suis Partout_; and on the German side Otto Abetz, now Hitler’s ambassador to France, and the unlimited money and propaganda of Himmler’s Gestapo, Goebbels’ Ministry, Ribbentrop’s Foreign Office, and the Ausland’s Buro.

* * * * *

_Now I shall let my French friend talk. This is his report: from here to page 262 he is speaking in the first person._

On June 17, 1940, I found myself standing outside a wayside tavern in France. I was one of the millions retreating southward from occupied Paris ahead of the German Army. I had stopped by the roadside because, through the open window of the inn, I heard a radio broadcasting the pathetic voice of an old man. Marshal Pétain was telling the French nation that he had decided to ask Hitler to grant France an armistice.

Standing beside me was a young artillery lieutenant. As the last words of the old Marshal died away, he turned toward me, pale as ivory, and exclaimed: “Now I begin to understand! They forced us to retreat so that we would have to accept this armistice, so that the Germans could come in to do their dirty work for them!”

I didn’t dare understand. “How do you mean?” I asked him.

“Don’t be so naive!” he exploded. “Can’t you see what’s happened? Don’t you remember that handful of enthusiastic young fools who were always shouting ‘Pétain in power!’ Well, now he is in power. He can govern with the aid of German troops. He has opened the way for them to occupy the country. The Germans will make the arrests and carry out the executions, and when their opponents have all been put out of the way, Pétain and his friends will be in possession of the kind of Nazified country they like. Mark my words--this is not the end, but only the beginning. This is not war; it’s a domestic political maneuver!”

At that moment it seemed that only a man completely out of his mind could have believed what the young officer had just said. A higher officer who had been listening broke in to correct him. Pétain, he said, was very old and possibly not very intelligent. But he certainly could not be a traitor.

“His first consideration,” this officer went on, “will be to obtain reasonable terms from the enemy. I doubt very much whether he will give any time at all to internal political questions. All Frenchmen, all the legislators, all the people, will be behind him in his struggle against the Germans. What greater power could he gain by bringing about an internal political transformation?”

I said nothing but I was deeply anxious. _Why had Pétain announced publicly that he had asked for an armistice before he was sure that honorable conditions would be granted?_ The mere fact of an announcement’s having been made would complete the shattering of army morale and all hope of further resistance, and make it impossible, in case satisfactory terms could not be achieved, to reshape a fighting army and resume the struggle. Pétain’s radio speech seemed at the very least unwise--_unless its object were to eliminate the slightest chance that the armistice might not go through_. And in that case, the young officer was probably right.

Two dominant theories to explain the fall of France emerge: (1) France’s rapid debacle was due to complete unpreparedness, both physical and spiritual; (2) France was sold out, and what happened is to be explained primarily by the operations of treason. Both explanations are a part of the truth; neither of them is the whole truth.

There was a lack of matériel of all sorts--infantry weapons and artillery, ammunition, tanks, planes, etc. It was true also that production in the munitions factories was increasing slowly, and that the pace would have been insufficient if the intense warfare of the last five weeks had had to be continued over a long period. But the fact was that the period of intense warfare was very short; and it is hardly logical to say that France was beaten because she would have lacked ammunition if the war had lasted longer.

Some observers have imagined that France lacked munitions even for so short a war, for it has been established that there were shortages at many vital points. I talked with literally hundreds of soldiers and officers during the retreat of June. Infantrymen complained that they were given only three or four bullets per rifle; artillerymen said that whole batteries were left without shells; tanks ran out of gasoline at the very beginning of action and had no chance to refuel, and worst of all (everyone stressed this as having been the most discouraging factor), German planes had complete and undisputed freedom in the air. Again and again soldiers told me that during engagements, with hundreds of German planes above, on not one occasion did French aviation come to the aid of the infantry. It was not surprising, under such conditions, that morale gave way, and that the army was psychologically prepared for the final collapse.

But was this lack of matériel at points essential to the defense the result of a general shortage or simply of failure to get existing munitions to the necessary centers? It seems indisputable that it was the distributing system which was at fault. And was this breakdown of the supply lines simply due to lack of organization, or to a much more serious cause--treason? Whatever the case, it is a fact that the retreating soldiers and officers, drawing their conclusions from such facts as they had been able to witness, were unanimous in exclaiming: “We have been sold out!”

Now listen to the story of a reserve officer, a captain of a machine-gun detachment, one of the many with whom I talked.

“Don’t tell me,” he said, “that our General Headquarters lacked experience in supply problems, or that they forgot to send us cartridges for our machine guns. In 1914-1918 they had no trouble of this kind. There were situations quite as complicated as this one again and again during that war, but the ammunition always arrived. This short action hasn’t exhausted our reserve of matériel. The depots are still full. Yet we at the front lines had to destroy our machine guns to save them from the enemy when we ran out of ammunition for them and had to fall back. The same thing happened all along the front, for machine guns, artillery of all calibers, and antitank guns. You can call it disorganization, if you want. I call it intentional disorganization--sabotage, directed, probably, from the same central point. But I don’t dare yet to try to form any conclusions, to understand why such sabotage took place. Perhaps one day we shall all understand.”

On the roads choked with retreating columns and fleeing refugees, where military trucks and civilian cars were inextricably mingled, soldiers talked of their misgivings during the waits, often hours long, for jammed highways to be cleared so that traffic could resume its interminable southward crawl. Scores of times, caught in such blocks, I heard soldiers or officers say: “Why are we constantly ordered to retreat? We haven’t been in any real engagement since the Somme. We’re not afraid to fight, but the retreat orders keep us moving to the rear as fast as we can get over these encumbered roads. What is the cause of this continual flight? Aren’t they ever going to establish a line of resistance and order us to hold it?”

They never did. One June 16, two days after Paris had been occupied by the Germans, I found myself on the right bank of the Loire, at the Nevers bridge. My car, heavily loaded with the members of my family and all our luggage, had developed motor trouble. Our most urgent need was to get across that river; for we supposed of course, that the retreating troops would stop on the other side of the natural line of defense constituted by the Loire, which it should have been possible to hold for weeks, and possibly forever. Across that bridge, we thought, lay safety.

We tried to persuade passing cars to tow us across. All of them, civilian and military vehicles alike, passed us by. Their occupants intent on the pursuing Germans, had no thought for anything except to get across that bridge themselves. So we all got out except a young girl who took the steering wheel, and pushed the car over what seemed to be the longest bridge in the world.

We felt better when we got to the other side, with the wide river between us and the enemy. I found a colonel supervising the retreat of his troops, and asked him if he could direct me to the officer in charge of the sector, thinking that he could probably let me have a mechanic to repair the car.

“There is no officer in charge here,” the colonel said. “We are all passing through without stopping, so there is no organization at this point. I’m sorry I can’t do anything for you. You had better get out of here as quickly as you can. The Germans will probably be here in an hour.” From these words I realized with a shock that the defense of the left bank of the Loire was not even being considered, and that the army was retreating indefinitely. I looked up and down the long banks of the river. There were no fortified positions whatsoever. I saw only one lonely soldier standing by the side of a machine gun. He seemed to be wondering whether he had been forgotten there.