All Hell Let Loose_ The World at War 1939-1945 - Max Hastings [40]
In the week that followed the German crossing of the Meuse, the invading armies maintained an almost ceaseless advance, while the Allies conducted in slow motion every activity save flight. The British held the French overwhelmingly responsible for their predicament, but some of Gort’s officers adopted a more enlightened view, understanding that their own BEF had little to be proud of. ‘After a few days’ fighting,’ wrote Irish Fusiliers officer John Horsfall, ‘part of our army was no longer capable of coordinated measures, either offensive or defensive … We could not lay these … to the charge of our politicians, [they were] failings that were strictly our own … Within our army the fault lay in the mind, and really one must wonder what the Staff College was about in those pre-war years.’
The disparity between the battlefield performance of the German and Western Allied armies would prove one of the great enigmas not merely of the 1940 campaign, but of the entire conflict. Thomas Mann once described Nazism as ‘mechanised mysticism’. Michael Howard has written: ‘Armed as they were with all the military technology and bureaucratic rationality of the Enlightenment, but fuelled by the warrior-values of a largely invented past, it is not surprising that the Germans held the world at bay through two terrible wars.’ Though these remarks reflect important truths, they seem an incomplete answer to the question: why was the Wehrmacht so good? Its senior officers had fought in World War I, but for more than a decade thereafter the German army was almost moribund. It gained no inter-war combat experience. Meanwhile, many British rankers as well as officers participated in low-intensity operations on the North-West Frontier of India, in Irish or colonial skirmishes.
The inescapable conclusion is that the British Army’s role as an imperial gendarmerie impeded its education and adaptation for large-scale war. Brushfire conflicts emphasised the handling of small forces, the regiment as the focus of operations. They demanded limited effort, sacrifice and tactical thinking. Some officers were, in Michael Howard’s words, ‘highly professional within a tiny environment’. But throughout the conflict Churchill’s generals suffered from the lack of any coherent system of instruction for higher command, such as the British Army belatedly acquired only thirty years later. The Wehrmacht, recreated in the 1930s from a mere cadre, embraced new ideas, prepared and conditioned itself solely for continental war. Its officers displayed greater energy, professionalism and imagination than most of their British counterparts; its men proved highly motivated. An institutional discipline pervaded the German army’s battlefield conduct at every level, and persisted throughout the war. Its commitment to counter-attack, even in adverse circumstances, amounted to genius. The concept of conducting war à l’outrance, pursuing to the last gasp the destruction of the enemy, seemed to come naturally to Germans, as it did not to their British or French opponents. On the battlefield Allied soldiers, reflecting the societies from which they were drawn, prided themselves on behaving like reasonable men. The Wehrmacht showed what unreasonable men could do.
In the May 1940 BEF, John Horsfall deplored a lack of good maps; failure to cover the retreat by local counter-attacks and inflict substantial damage on the German spearheads; to deploy artillery effectively; or adequately to brief those at the sharp end: ‘Our soldiers just need to know in simple terms what they have to contend with.’ Horsfall and his comrades became bewildered and disgusted by their long trek back from Belgium and through north-eastern France, during which they watched a substantial