France in June: The Collapse
I
THE fall of France must have resounded through the world like that of Rome in the fifth century or that of Constantinople in the fifteenth. To civilized men in five continents, from Lima to Chungking, Paris has been a supranational capital of arts and letters, of culture and civilization. The last cries of Prague and Warsaw sounded faintly in American ears. But when Paris fell, and the whole of France soon afterwards, even those with least knowledge and experience of the countries across the Atlantic must have realized that a relatively soft and civilized world could end, that a new age of iron had set in not only for Czechoslovakia, not only for Poland, not only for France, but for the whole world.
France’s disaster occurred so swiftly that the mind can scarcely grasp its magnitude. Until the middle of May, life, except for the soldiers at the front, was amazingly normal for a country that was engaged in a life-and-death struggle. Shops were full of goods and crowded. Fashion shows attracted throngs of spectators. Operas, concerts, theatres, went on much as usual. I am amazed, in retrospect, to recall how well Paris was eating up to the very eve of the German occupation. There was talk of ration cards, but they had not been actually introduced except in the case of sugar. Such nominal restrictions as existed on the consumption of meat and pastries and alcohol were of a very mild character and were easily evaded. Even the blackout, such an emphatic tangible reminder of war in England, was little more than a mild darkening in Paris.
Then, in one incredibly swift blinding month, France suffered a shipwreck such as few other countries have experienced. . . . Ten million refugees, a quarter of the population, fleeing blindly, madly, choking up roads, consuming the food resources of the unoccupied provinces like a horde of locusts. . . . German soldiers on guard at the Arc de Triomphe and Napoleon’s Tomb. . . . Paris a virtual desert, its whole gay busy life blotted out as if by the action of some malevolent spell. . . . German armored divisions parading through the country with almost as little resistance as French troops might have encountered in Indo-China or in some other colonial land. . . . The armistice that marked France’s elimination, perhaps a permanent elimination from the number of the great powers. . . . And then the ungrateful and complicated tasks of a reconstruction that will be infinitely more difficult than that which took place after 1871.
Now I have lived through with the French people the whole tragedy of this ill-conceived and badly prepared war. I saw at first hand the four months of prelude to war, the eight months of deceptively quiet war without real fighting, the six weeks of devastating Blitzkrieg. I was part of the huge teeming mass of refugees that flooded from northern into southwestern France.
I was a refugee myself, as my wife and I were obliged to leave Paris with nothing but what we could carry in our hands. I have known all the vicissitudes of life in a time of national debacle; the extreme difficulty of obtaining food and drink and shelter; the virtual impossibility, in many cases, of obtaining means of transportation; the occasional sick feeling of being trapped in a town that would soon become a scene of fighting. I have gone to sleep night after night without knowing whether a bomb would leave anything of my place of refuge by morning.
Now that I am out of this kaleidoscopic nightmare, when every day was apt to be one of hurried evacuation to some new place farther removed from the Panzerdivisionen, I propose to answer for myself and for the Americans who may read this article the question, at once painful and fascinating: How did France fall? When Poland collapsed after three weeks of German onslaught last year there was a sense of shock. But almost everyone felt that this could not happen in an advanced, militarily prepared Western country. Yet after six weeks France was knocked out just as completely as was Poland. What is the explanation?
Not the least cause of the French debacle was the world of make-believe, of illusion, of profound misconception of the real balance of forces in the present war in which most people in France, in Great Britain, in America, have been living. A pessimist myself since the beginning of the war, I have been both amazed and appalled by the unreasoned ‘Germany cannot win’ attitude which has prevailed not only in France and Great Britain, where public opinion has naturally been doped and doctored by war propaganda and censorship, but also in the United States, where a more detached, realistic point, of view might have been expected.
America, I think, was definitely a victim of what is perhaps a national weakness for wishful thinking. Shortly before the German offensive that shattered so many illusions began, I had an interesting conversation with one of the soundest, best-informed American observers of European affairs.
‘You know,’ my companion said, ‘whenever I write an article showing how strong Germany is, but pointing out one or two weak points, I am likely to receive a request for a different kind of article, emphasizing and developing only the weak points. I am afraid American public opinion is being misled. Because the majority of the American people passionately want the Nazis to lose, they are falling too easily into the idea that. “Germany cannot win.”’
One of the illusions that prepared the way for France’s disaster found pictorial expression in a war poster which was displayed all over France; I imagine it is being torn down with a bitter sense of mockery now. It showed the world expanse of the French and British empires, as contrasted with the limited space on the map occupied by Germany, and it bore the comforting caption: ‘We shall win, because we are the stronger.’
Now the idea which inspired this poster, that Great Britain and France must win because they possessed greater natural resources than Germany, might have been borne out if Hitler had fought the war as the Allies wished him to fight it, as a long-term contest of endurance. But, as one of the most penetrating French political commentators remarked to me when the situation was becoming obviously critical: ‘There is a dangerous fallacy in this idea that we are fatalistically predestined to win merely because we have more natural resources. Hitler’s resources are mobilized and on the battlefield. Ours, and those of the British, are mostly scattered all over the world. They haven’t been turned into the tanks and airplanes that alone could check the German advance. What we might be able to get from our empires, or from the United States in a year or two, or even within six months, is of little use in determining the issue of a campaign that will certainly be decided within a very few weeks.’
How many neat, logical, documented articles I have read in French and British and American newspapers and periodicals, casting up figures of the world’s stocks of gold and iron and oil and copper and other strategic materials and pointing to the comforting conclusion that ‘Germany cannot win’! The facts and figures were correct enough; but the conclusions would have been valid only on the assumption of a long war of endurance. In a short war it is only the man power and material available for immediate use that count.
France was the victim of the illusion that superiority in natural resources is a sure gauge of victory. It was also a victim of exaggerated faith in two other weapons: its own Maginot Line and the British blockade.
The Maginot Line, which I have visited several times, is a magnificent piece of military engineering. Its forts, built into hillsides and surrounded by enormous masses of barbed wire, swept every bit of intervening countryside with the flanking fire of cannon and machine guns. The Maginot Line proper, which extended from the beginning of the Belgian frontier to the Rhine, could certainly not have been stormed by frontal attack without tremendous, perhaps prohibitive, losses. What most people in France and elsewhere forgot was that the Maginot Line covered only a small section of the frontier. Once the much weaker defenses along the Belgian frontier had been pierced, it was only a question of time until the Maginot Line could be taken in the rear and turned — its elaborate forts, with their vast communicating underground passages, as useless as the Great Wall of China.
The blockade is a weapon of great, perhaps of decisive, importance in a long war between fairly evenly matched sides. It was of no use whatever to France in those bitter days of mid-June when the Germans were in the heart of the country. In the same way it would be small comfort to America to know that its own or an allied fleet might starve out an invading enemy after a term of years if the forces of that enemy had advanced from the Atlantic to the Mississippi and obviously required only a short time to complete the military occupation of the country as far as the Pacific Coast.
II
Over and above these illusions, France suffered cruelly from the fact that the two men primarily responsible for its war preparedness in the years before the war and in the first eight or nine months of the war, Generalissimo Gamelin and Minister of Defense Daladier, were unimaginative mediocrities at a time when chiefs of the stature of Napoleon or of Carnot, the revolutionary ‘organizer of victory,’ were needed. Again and again I have heard from tired, beaten, soured French soldiers the bitter words: ‘We were betrayed. The politicians sold us out.’
Of outright treason in high places there is as yet no proof. But there is abundant evidence that Daladier, Gamelin, and their associates were guilty of something almost as harmful as treason — of sheer inability to grasp the nature of modern war and to make adequate preparation for it.
Daladier was simply the average, common or garden, left-of-centre politician, the familiar type of the Third Republic. An amateur in military affairs, he was inordinately vain of his fancied capacity as a specialist in this field.
Gamelin, head of the French defense system for many years and an intimate associate of Daladier, was the worst possible type of commander-in-chief for the modern war in which the scientific discoveries and technical advances of the last two decades have created such a revolution. Cautious and conservative, Gamelin overrated the fortified line in the same degree as he underrated the striking power of the airplane and the tank. The projects for the creation of special mechanized units, adequately equipped with tanks and with men qualified to operate them, put forward by young officers like Colonel (now General) Charles de Gaulle were coldly received, pigeonholed, and not acted on.
While France, like England and America, was nursing itself in illusions of victory to be won without supreme effort, there were certain hard facts of the situation which impressed every observer not obsessed with wishful thinking, but which propaganda and censorship combined to obscure. A very intelligent French publicist and politician, M. Marcel Déat, who stood almost alone, after March 1939, in publicly opposing the policy of fighting Germany on the Polish issue, warned his countrymen on the eve of the war that ‘France today is not that of Louis XIV or of Richelieu.’ M. Déat may now take what satisfaction he can in having been an accurate Cassandra.
The recent debacle has simply proved what was made abundantly clear in 1870-1871, what was obscured in 19141918 because a vast coalition was then built up against Germany: that France alone is no match for Greater Germany. The odds against France in trained man power were two to one, or three to one if Italy is taken into account. In industrial power Germany’s advantage over France was even greater, perhaps four or five to one. So it is not surprising that France entered its last desperate battle on the Somme and the Aisne with only sixty divisions, as against Germany’s one hundred and fifty, supplemented by eleven armored divisions.
One of the basic facts about the present war, which attracted far too little attention, was that Germany faced a much weaker array of strength in 1939 than was the case in 1914-1918. Only two great powers, England and France, were obliged to bear the full burden of the struggle. In the World War, on the other hand, Russia, Japan, Italy, and the United States, to say nothing of several smaller powers, were in the antiGerman bloc. Not all these powers, of course, pulled the same weight, or at the same time. But they all made some contribution to Germany’s downfall. If it had not been for the Russian pressure against Germany in the East, the victory of the Marne would probably never have been won and France might, well have been crushed almost as quickly in 1914 as in 1940.
It would be a mistake to recognize only military causes of France’s catastrophe. The present war was half or perhaps three quarters lost diplomatically before it even began in a military sense. FrancoBritish diplomacy in relation to the Third Reich was ghastly in its wavering, fumbling ineptness. It is difficult to say, in retrospect, which was the more tragic blunder: not to have made war on Hitler in 1936, or to have declared war in 1939.
There can be little doubt that France single-handed could have crushed Germany at the time of the reoccupation of the Rhineland in 1936. Germany’s massive rearmament was only in its first stages. The French forces could have quickly moved deep into Germany’s industrial centres in the Ruhr and the Rhineland across the unfortified frontier.
Once France had missed this opportunity, acquiescence in German expansion eastward, motivated by the hope of an ultimate clash between the Third Reich and the Soviet Union, was the sole reasonable policy. The Munich Agreement seemed to signify that such a policy had been adopted. But there was not sufficient clearsighted realism in Paris or in London to adhere to it.
The crowning blunder was the British guaranty to Poland at the end of March, 1939. Such a guaranty would only have been justified if the Soviet Union, like the Russia of 1914, had been a reliable ally of France and Great Britain.
But Stalin’s entire record spoke loudly against the likelihood that the Soviet Union would join Great Britain and France as an ally. This Asiatic despot hates everything individualistic and humanistic in Western civilization and would gladly see it destroyed. He is, moreover, keenly conscious of the hopeless inferiority of his much ‘purged’ Red Army to the Reichswehr. It was almost incredibly naïve for the French and British statesmen to believe that Stalin would bear any part of the shock of Hitler’s attack, especially after Great Britain and France had taken it on themselves to face the onslaught of Hitler’s airplanes and tanks by barring the way to further German expansion in Eastern Europe.
In the ill-conceived British guaranty to Poland was the germ of the SovietGerman Pact, which almost predetermined the issue of the war before it began, since it gave Germany full security in the East and made it possible to let loose the full power of the German armed forces against France. Rapprochement with the Soviet Union, which Hitler had hitherto avoided, was the obvious retort to the Anglo-French alliance with Poland. And Stalin was delighted at the prospect of the ‘capitalist’ and fascist states’ weakening each other in a war from which the Soviet Union, standing aloof, might hope to reap both territorial and revolutionary advantages.
It is quite possible that Stalin now realizes that his reckoning was mistaken, that he feels lonely in a Europe where the Third Reich is the sole remaining great power. But his regret, if he feels it, is of little benefit to France, knocked out beyond hope of recovery, or to Great Britain, obliged to fight alone against fearful odds. The responsibility of those Frenchmen — the politicians, diplomats, publicists, moulders and leaders of public opinion — who shaped their country’s policy so that Hitler’s blow fell on civilized France, not on the barbarous Soviet Union, is heavy almost beyond estimate. ‘Whom the gods wish to destroy . . .’
III
France’s swift collapse is a stern condemnation of many features of French political life. The multiplicity of parties, the short-lived cabinets, the party bickerings and intrigues, the not infrequent financial scandals — all this was not a very edifying picture in normal times. It was an utterly intolerable waste of national energy and resources since 1933, when France’s secular enemy beyond the Rhine, through means which individualistic and democratic peoples doubtless find at once brutal and fantastic, succeeded in preparing for war with a thoroughness and completeness perhaps unequaled in human history.
Yet by some fatal perversity France became more deeply, ruinously divided as Germany’s newfound unity and ruthlessness bridged more and more rapidly the margin of military superiority which the Versailles settlement had left to France and finally transformed inferiority into superiority. With how much bitterness every patriotic Frenchman must look back on the strife and division of the years from 1934 to 1938, on the Paris riots, on the excesses of the Front Populaire period, when an unending series of strikes for a time reduced French airplane output almost to zero!
While Hitler’s spies were busy and active and his agents in ‘high society’ carried out a certain amount of corrupting influence in French conservative circles, Muscovite Communism played an extremely disastrous rôle in France’s tragic destiny. For Communism in France was not a negligible exotic cult, as in the United States or in Great Britain. It was a mass movement, with a substantial following among the industrial workers and a large representation in parliament.
And the rôle of the French Communists, following the shifting orders from Moscow, was first to aggravate greatly the class differences within the country, then to push France into a war for which Communist-inspired strikes had made it unprepared, and finally to execute an abrupt turn toward defeatism after the war against Hitler’s Germany had actually begun. During the last months before the outbreak of hostilities the French Communists were in the first rank of the ‘bellicists.’ Their newspaper, rather inappropriately called L’Humanité, foamed with rage against anyone who suggested that a compromise solution of the Danzig problem would be desirable or even that peace in itself was desirable. But after Stalin had struck his deal with Hitler the illegal L’Humanité, which continued to appear after the newspaper had been suppressed, carried out pure defeatist propaganda. It is difficult to know whether this Communist agitation had any demoralizing effect in the army; but there can be little doubt, I think, that it slowed up work in the munitions factories, where camouflaged Communists were numerous.
France commenced the war, as has been shown, under great disadvantages, military, diplomatic, and political. Yet the situation was not entirely hopeless. The country could have made a better showing if the tremendous seriousness of the danger had been realized and if an iron directing will, such as France found, for instance, during the Revolution, had half led, half driven the people to accept immense sacrifices, to turn the country into an armed camp, where everyone would have lived on a Spartan ration of bare necessities — in short, to match the effort which Germany made not only during the years before the war, but during the first eight months of the conflict, so deceptively mild in outward appearance.
But this iron will was conspicuously absent. A banal and stupid censorship prevented the hard facts of the situation from being dinned into the consciousness of the French people, of their British allies, and of America, where a quicker realization of the peril might have stimulated quicker and more effective aid with airplanes and material. The attitude of the government was that there was all the time in the world with which to win the war.
France refused to turn its butter into cannon. In the last disastrous weeks it had more pastries than Germany, but fewer tanks; more good new clothes, but fewer airplanes. One fears that the country will pay dearly, and for many years, for having maintained a relatively soft, comfortable standard of living in a life-and-death struggle for national existence. For it is scarcely conceivable that victorious Germany will tolerate in conquered France a standard of living higher than its own.
It is too soon to fix personal or even national responsibilities. But the slowness with which the French and British orders for airplanes and other munitions were placed in America is, in retrospect, almost incredible. Again, there was the fatal obsession with the Maginot Line and the efficacy of the blockade, the belief that it was just as well to husband gold, since it would be a long war and there was plenty of time in which to win it.
Lenin, greater as a man of action than as a social and economic theorist, uttered a profound truth when he told his followers never to ‘ play with revolution’ — to fight with the last ounce of strength when once the order for decisive action had been given. The same principle, of course, should hold good for war. And I am afraid that France committed the fatal error of waging war half-heartedly, or at least without mobilizing the national resources of labor and material to the uttermost limit.
Military historians will doubtless some day cast up a reasonably accurate balance sheet of German and French strength as regards trained divisions and artillery and tanks and airplanes. But this will not, I think, tell the whole story of the war or explain why catastrophe overtook France so quickly. There are certain psychological and moral factors which must be taken into consideration.
From the beginning of the war I was impressed by the absence of any sign of popular enthusiasm. To the average Frenchman the war was a misfortune — an inevitable misfortune, perhaps, but a misfortune just the same. Considerable sections of public opinion were definitely opposed to the war — the Communists because Moscow had ordered them to take this attitude, certain propertied and conservative groups because they foresaw the crumbling of the property system and the destruction of social order as the probable consequence of a long war, even apart from the military issue of the war.
The opposition to the war was not sufficiently strong and organized to cause any overt resistance to the order for mobilization. But pessimism, not to say defeatism, hung over the country in a thick pall. I made several trips to the front in the course of my work, and at officers’ messes in peasant homes in Alsace and Lorraine and in the long automobile trip to and from the frontline positions I talked with perhaps a score of officers, ranging in rank from general to lieutenant.
Not one of these officers anticipated the disaster that was to come. But I cannot recall one who was an optimist about the prospect, after the war was ended. All foresaw general impoverishment, social upheaval, new problems and difficulties. I am sure that every one of these men did his full duty when the final terrible test came. Some no doubt gave their lives in the unequal struggle.
But the mental attitude of these officers (and soldiers are seldom more enthusiastic than the men who lead them) was that of commanders of Roman legions when the barbarians were breaking through the frontiers of the empire. It was that of Byzantine officers leading what they perhaps felt in their hearts was a lost cause against fanatical Saracens or Turks. It was not the mental attitude of French soldiers in the expansionist wars of the Revolution. It was not the mental attitude that can reverse hopeless odds, that can turn defeat into victory.
France, in this short and terrible war, suffered from the psychological disadvantage of being interested only in conserving, in defending. It was morally as well as physically an unequal match for the Third Reich, where old-fashioned efficient German militarism was lit up and inflamed by Nazi revolutionism.
Are there any lessons that America can draw from the catastrophe of France? The time during which lessons will be of practical value may be short, terribly short. But two things do, I think, stand out from France’s experience. The fateful decision for war should never be taken, so far as it depends on a nation’s free will, without the fullest possible material and psychological preparation. And war, once started, must be fought through with every ounce of national strength and energy. There must be no ‘playing with war,’ no effort to make pinpricks and emotional gestures serve as a substitute for the grim effort that the modern total war requires.