Inferno - Max Hastings [42]
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, re-created in the 1930s from a mere cadre, embraced new ideas and 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 counterattack, 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 and the failure to cover the retreat by local counterattacks 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 northeastern France, during which they watched a substantial part of their army, and most of its commanders, fall apart. “It was a rotten march,” he wrote, “and the [Fusiliers] were progressively broken up by lost and sometimes disordered fragments of other units surging in on us from the side roads … There was over-much to brood upon … One could not fail to be aware of the loss of grip somewhere in our army. Our men knew it soon enough, and it became the task of the officers to stifle the subject—or laugh at it … Something pretty bad was happening. But it was no more the fault of our regiments than the shambles of the Crimea had been … I saw no reason … why that critical retreat was not effectively controlled.”
Meanwhile, French commanders appeared to inhabit a fantasy world. Gamelin’s staff officers marvelled to see him at lunch in his headquarters on 19 May, joking and making light conversation while his subordinates despaired. At 9:00 that night, about the time the first panzers reached the Channel at the mouth of the Somme, on Reynaud’s orders Gamelin was replaced as France’s military leader by seventy-three-year-old Gen. Maxime Weygand. The new supreme commander realised that the Allies’ only chance was to launch counterattacks from the south and north against the German flanks in the vicinity of Arras, to break the encirclement of Belgium and northeast France. Sir Edmund Ironside, the British CIGS visiting from London, reached the same conclusion. Meeting two French generals, Gaston Billotte and Georges Blanchard, at Lens, Ironside was disgusted by their inertia. Both men were “in a state of complete depression. No plan, no thought of a plan. Ready to be slaughtered. Defeated at the head without casualties.”