Inferno - Max Hastings [43]
Yet Gort never believed the French would move, and he was right. When the two weak British formations advanced next day they did so alone, and without air support. The Germans were initially thrown into disarray as Gort’s columns struck west of Arras. There was fierce fighting, and the British advanced ten miles, taking 400 prisoners, before the attack ran out of steam. Erwin Rommel, commanding a panzer division, took personal command of the defence and rallied his surprised and confused units. Matilda tanks inflicted significant German losses, killing Rommel’s aide-de-camp (ADC) at his side. But by then the British had shot their bolt; the attack was courageously and effectively delivered, but lacked sufficient weight to be decisive.
On the morning of that same day, 21 May, even as the British were moving towards Arras, Weygand set off from Vincennes for the northern front, in hopes of organising a more ambitious counterstroke. After waiting two hours at Le Bourget for a plane, the C-in-C’s trip descended into farce. Arriving at Béthune, he found the airfield deserted save for a single scruffy soldier guarding petrol stocks. This man eventually drove the general to a post office where he was able to telephone the army group commander, Billotte, who had spent the morning searching for Weygand around Calais. The C-in-C, after pausing for an omelette at a country inn, used a plane to reach the port, then crawled by car along roads jammed with refugees to meet Belgium’s King Leopold at the Ypres town hall. He urged the monarch to hasten his army’s retreat westward, but Leopold was reluctant to abandon Belgian soil. Billotte said that only the British, thus far scarcely engaged, were fit to attack. To Weygand’s anger—for he wrongly saw a snub—Lord Gort did not join the meeting.
When the BEF’s commander belatedly reached Ypres, without much conviction he agreed to join a new counterattack, but said that all his reserves were committed. He never believed any combined Anglo-French thrust would take place. Weygand later claimed that the British were bent on betraying their ally: this reflected a profound French conviction, dating back to World War I, that the British always fought with one eye on their escape route to the Channel ports. The British, in their turn, despaired of French defeatism; Weygand was thus far right, that Gort believed his allies hopelessly inert, and was now set upon salvaging the BEF from the wreck of the campaign. Later on that bleak night of 21 May, Billotte was fatally injured in a car crash, and two days elapsed before a successor was appointed as Northern Army commander. Meanwhile, the breakdown of Allied command communications became comprehensive. After a meeting with the French army group commander the previous day, the British CIGS, Sir Edmund Ironside, wrote: “I lost my temper and shook Billotte by the button of his tunic. The man is completely beaten.” Gort told King Leopold on the evening of the twenty-first: “It’s a bad job.” At 7:00 p.m., Weygand left Dunkirk by torpedo boat in the midst of an air raid, eventually regaining his headquarters at 10:00 a.m. next morning. Throughout every hour of his futile wanderings across northern France, German tanks, guns and men continued to stream north and west through the great hole in the Allied line.
The supreme commander now succumbed to fantasy: reporting to Reynaud on the morning of 22 May, he seemed in an almost jaunty mood. “So many mistakes have been made,” he said, “that they give me confidence. I believe that in future we shall make less.” He assured France’s prime minister that both the BEF and Blanchard’s army were in fine fighting trim. He outlined his planned counterattack, and concluded equivocally: “It will either give us victory or it will save our honour.” At a meeting in Paris on 22 May with Churchill