Battle of Desperation

(See Cover)

Premier & Defense Minister Paul Reynaud last week told the French Senate and the world that an intellectual revolution had been wrought in the French High Command by Germany's super-Blitzkrieg. The leader of that revolution, tight-mouthed little Maxime Weygand, the new Allied Generalissimo, shot aloft in an airplane from Paris to inspect the churning inferno in Picardy and Flanders out of which he was supposed to bring order, safety, victory.

General Weygand, at 73, had taken on another job for France, a desperate job, a supreme job. The desperation of the job was that at the hour when Weygand assumed command, the scene for the greatest debacle in military history was already set. In Poland the Germans annihilated a huge but half-mobilized and poorly equipped Army. In Flanders last week they had cut off and all but surrounded 1,100,000 men thoroughly equipped and thoroughly prepared to fight, the flower of the Allied Armies.

Worse still for Weygand, it appeared that the success of the German Blitzkrieg was the result of a major military invention. There have been such inventions before (e.g., the Macedonian phalanx, the Roman Legion with its checkerboard maniple), and usually they have given their inventors military mastery for generations. Not merely tanks, not merely bombers, not merely greater concentrations of troops and materiel but a new military technique of using all these things together was the secret of German success.

Weygand's job was to improvise a successful countermeasure against this new type of war--to improvise it without adequate tanks or aircraft, with one-quarter of his combined forces already cut off--to beat the new German invention in a few days before the isolated Allied Armies disintegrated in the greatest military disaster of all time. When he took the job Weygand must have known that it was in all probability a bigger job than any man could handle.

The Spectacle confronting General Weygand in his air reconnaissance over Flanders was one of utmost confusion. The French VII Army, the French I Army, the British Expeditionary Force, the French IX Army (all of whom swept into Belgium on the night of Germany's invasion of the Low Countries) were pocketed together with the remainder of the Belgian Army--500,000 French, 200,000 British, 400,000 Belgians and a few thousand Dutch. The German Army of Kuechler had driven them back from the Albert Canal. The German Army of Reichenau had pounded through the Ardennes Forest and across the Meuse (see map). At Neufchateau and Sedan the French IX Army (under incapable General Andre Corap) had been cracked, crushed, scattered.

The morning when Weygand flew over he could see the Germans with motorized divisions on their flanks sweeping westward in a corridor between the isolated Allied Armies and Paris. German tank units were already raising havoc with Allied communications along the seacoast. Behind them German infantry and artillery divisions dropped off to strengthen the sides of the corridor. Already Reichenau (who was at the centre in Poland and performed the final closing of the bloody envelopment of Kutno) was driving on Lille. Kuechler (who commanded the German left in the Polish massacre) was pressing through Ghent.

Curled back on themselves, and soon on each other, were the flanks, trains and lines of communications of the isolated Allied force. When a battalion front is thus turned and snarled--as was famed Major Whittlesey's Lost Battalion of the A. E. F.--disaster is reckoned in a matter of hours unless, as in Major Whittlesey's case, someone comes up to help it. For with its front flanked on two sides and reversed in the rear, there is little a unit can do to help itself. Military metabolism is just as much in danger of ceasing when larger units find themselves in the same plight.

As last week progressed, the German thrust which had reached the sea near Abbeville curled northward. The Channel ports began to fall and with them the bases of the isolated Allied Armies. Only Dunkirk, Ostend, Zeebrugge--all shatteringly air-bombed--were left when, after gripping Boulogne and Calais, the Germans on Saturday, May 25, struck down Vimy Ridge to the coast at Gravelines.

The inevitable end was in sight unless little Generalissimo Weygand could stage a successful counterattack from the south across the Somme east of Amiens. If Weygand could cut through the corridor, the Germans who had pushed to the sea would themselves be isolated. But every day, every hour made stronger the coil of power through which this counterattack must pierce, from Amiens to Cambrai and Valenciennes. Before mounting and launching his attack, Generalissimo Weygand had to reconstruct his battle line on a 175-mile front from Montmedy to the Channel, for the troops whose job it had been to defend that front were now coiled up like an anchovy on the wrong side of the German lines.

The French people expected Weygand to move. A million men were lost if he did not. Worse still if he could not recover the Channel ports, he would be left, after his army in Flanders was annihilated, to fight the rest of the war from a front on the lower Somme--a far worse position than that of France in World War I. Could he in some way push the Germans back to the Belgian border's Little Maginot Line, he might, even if he could not save the isolated Army, raise the odds on an ultimate Allied victory from last week's appalling low.

Furious French shelling of Germany's "land Gibraltar" at Istein, south anchor of the Westwall, and French flooding of the river valley south from Strasbourg with water from the Rhine-Rhone Canal last week, suggested one place whence Weygand was drawing man power for his effort--from the Burgundy Gap at the corner of Switzerland. Meantime, only some 85 of perhaps 250 German divisions were so engaged in Belgium. At any hour Mussolini might march. Regardless of dangers on other fronts, Weygand had to strip them of troops for the desperate battle in the north.

New Spirit. To instill new spirit in his armies Weygand dismissed 15 generals and promoted seven younger colonels to be major generals--a move likely to produce more energy and brainpower. But if he could stretch his men and artillery far enough, he still was short of other things. The bulk of the French mechanized forces (maximum: three divisions), and all the British and Belgian, were in the fatal pocket. Worse still, the Allied Air Forces, as daily losses added up, were whittled lower & lower. Besides attrition, further weakening of the R. A. F.--to which Premier Reynaud paid glowing tribute--by the withdrawal of planes for the defense of Great Britain (see p. 27) was all too possible. Any way it was looked at, the task before Weygand was grim. All week he must have labored desperately, but the atmosphere at his headquarters was as calm, brisk, full of encouragement as it should be around a commander. Said he: "I am full of confidence if everyone does his duty with driving energy."

Then Prime Minister Winston Churchill flew again to Paris. No one needed to inquire what he had come to ask of Premier Reynaud, Vice Premier Petain and the Generalissimo: could Weygand rescue the B. E. F.? It was probably too late to withdraw it by sea--any major part of it at least. Battle was joined and if disaster was at hand, nothing could prevent it from being the worst defeat that Britain ever suffered. While the leaders were facing that fact, Weygand excused himself, saying he had forgotten some papers, and nipped up two flights of stairs to his office. Churchill watched the septuagenarian Generalissimo bound upstairs and then, according to the story told last week in Paris, turned to Marshal Petain (83) and demanded: "Do you think we should entrust the fate of our two countries to so young a man?"

At week's end, M. Reynaud paid Mr. Churchill a visit in London and presently a new Chief of the British Imperial Staff was announced, replacing General Sir Edmund Ironside, who was put in charge of home defense (see p. 27). In a switch strategically parallel to the Weygand-for-Gamelin move, Mr. Churchill called on General Sir John Greer Dill, who was brought home from his command of the B. E. F. First Corps in France in April to be Sir Edmund's Vice Chief and standin. Sir John, 58 and Irish, is accounted the British Army's master of strategy and maneuver, in contrast to Sir Edmund's defensive talents. As a field commander in Palestine (1936) he learned about tanks and airplanes as infantry adjuncts.

Third Great Battle. Against Weygand who in the desperate hour walked with spring in his step, Germany sneered in an official statement that it was a commentary on French democracy that for a savior it had to turn to "the illegitimate issue of a Habsburg, namely, of that Emperor of Mexico, Maximilian, who met such an adventurous end."*

Weygand's mother was a German woman from the Saar, and Weygand was born in Belgium, did not become a citizen of France until he joined the Army at the age of 21. Worse than that, the top general of all the generals of France was not a product of the sacrosanct French War College. He was the product of the late, great Marshal Foch, who made him, bowlegged little cavalry colonel that he was, his chief staff officer purely on a seniority basis, when called upon to form and take command of the famed IX Army for the First Battle of the Marne (1914).

The present battle was history's greatest and most decisive, but the Allied Commander fighting it had also fought history's last two "greatest battles," both desperate actions: at the Battle of the Marne where Weygand saw his chief resist the distraction caused by German pressure on his centre and his left flank, to concentrate on attacking; at Warsaw where in 1920 he himself took command of the Poles, threw back the victorious Reds and kept the tide of Bolshevism out of Europe.

Last week's situation was fraught with distractions to worry a commander on an unparalleled scale. In the beginning German parachute troops poured down, sometimes disguised as French peasants, even as women, to put the torch to villages in the Allies' rear areas. German motorcycle troops with armored breastplates and flame-throwing tanks with crews in suits of asbestos made incursions behind the French lines. The Germans used cardboard shapes to decoy bombing attacks to fake airfields, and dummy superstructures to make trucks and light tanks look like heavy tanks. They mixed delayed action bombs with their contact bombs, so that even duds caused terror. German bombers scoured the skies over Allied columns moving along highways, coming down in ear-shattering power dives to bomb and machine-gun, then zooming up into high loops to dive again farther down the road (see p. 21). And the Sixth Column--the milling, hysterical hordes of refugees, 2,000,000 of them in the Belgian pocket alone--clogged roads and snarled up the already disorganized Allied supply lines. The disrupting Panzer column blows were swift and, when parried, they glanced around the target to strike farther on, even deeper in the Allied rear. Meanwhile, in Belgium the German infantry pressed forward relentlessly, night and day, in efficient "sacrificial cooperation" with the air and armored forces.

Weygand had no compensating means of distraction. The Germans' fuel supply was one vulnerable point, and R. A. F. bombers were sent again & again on carefully selected missions to bomb big oil depots at Cologne, Duesseldorf, Aachen, Hamburg. Hectoring the German supply line passing west between Bapaume-Cambrai and Amiens-Peronne, even if he could not break through, was urgent, and there Weygand massed artillery.

But the German hammering against the north and east fronts of the trapped Army intensified. The desperate Allies yielded ground, fought among miles of cemeteries where lay Britain's dead of the last war.

As the battle reached its final stages, Adolf Hitler, with victory almost in his grasp, had to pay the price of his success. To make victory sure he hurled his troops recklessly against the trapped Army in Flanders. Hitler had told his men that he would rather lose 1,000,000 men in a short war than fewer in a war dragged out over many months. He had told them they would "be home by August." As usual it appeared that he meant what he said.

Even between Amiens and Bapaume, where Weygand's rescuing Army had cut a few small nicks in the German corridor, the French were thrown. Then, incredibly, at 4 a.m. Tuesday morning, Leopold King of the Belgians--without consulting his Allies, against the counsel of his ministers--tossed in the sponge, ordered his army to lay down its arms. Premier Reynaud embittered, sarcastic, told his people by radio of the action "without precedent in history." Despite their King's order, he said, the Belgian Government would continue to function, would "raise a new army" to fight alongside the allies who came to aid them.

To France and Britain, King Leopold's 'was a ghastly decision, for the gallant Belgian Army was the vital left wing of their pocketed troops. The Belgian capitulation made the plight of Maxime Weygand's northern armies nearly hopeless. For Weygand needed planes, tanks, fresh divisions, and above all time to reorganize his Army, a sixth of whose best men had been cut off. All he had now was his own resourcefulness and the courage of France.

* After trying to abdicate in 1866, when the U. S. had forced the withdrawal of the French troops which supported him, Maximilian next year took over command of the remaining troops, was court-martialed and shot by the victorious Mexican republicans.

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