Inferno - Max Hastings [49]
Even as the battles around Saumur were being fought, disgruntled soldiers and civilians looked on, mocking and upbraiding the defenders for their folly, and for causing needless slaughter. But following France’s surrender, as unhappy old Colonel Michon abandoned his positions and led a column westwards in the hope of continuing the struggle elsewhere, patriots embraced the story of his little stand. At Saumur at least, they said, some soldiers had behaved with honour; monuments were erected to such men as Lt. Jacques Desplats, who died with his beloved Airedale terrier Nelson defending the island of Gennes under Michon’s command. Militarily, the actions of 19–20 June meant nothing. Morally, to the people of France they eventually came to mean much.
Most of the army meanwhile awaited captivity. Lt. George Friedmann, a philosopher in civilian life, wrote: “Today among many French people, I do not detect any sense of pain at the misfortunes of their country … I have observed only a sort of complacent relief (sometimes even exalted relief), a kind of base atavistic satisfaction at the knowledge that ‘For us, it’s over,’ without caring about anything else.” The French political right applauded the accession of the Pétain regime to power, one of its adherents writing to a friend: “At last we have victory.” As the marshal himself travelled the country in the months following the armistice, he was greeted by huge, hysterically applauding crowds. They believed that nothing the Nazis might do could be as terrible as the cost of continuing a futile struggle. The fact that Churchill persuaded the British people to an alternative judgement, to defiance of perceived reality, prompted enduring French envy, resentment and bitterness.
THE CONQUEST of France and the Low Countries cost Germany almost 43,000 killed, 117,000 wounded; France lost around 50,000 dead, Britain 11,000; the Germans took 1.5 million prisoners. The British were granted one further miraculous deliverance, a second Dunkirk. After the BEF’s escape, Churchill made the fine moral but reckless military decision to send more troops to France, to stiffen the resolve of its government. In June, two ill-equipped divisions were shipped to join the residual British forces on the Continent. After the armistice, because the Germans were overwhelmingly preoccupied elsewhere, it proved possible to evacuate almost 200,000 men from the northwestern French ports to England, with the loss of only a few thousand. Churchill was fortunate thus to be spared the consequences of a folly.
Britain’s ambassador to France, Sir Ronald Campbell, wrote in valediction after the collapse: “I should … describe France as a man who, stunned by an unexpected blow, was unable to rise to his feet before his opponent delivered the ‘coup de grace.’ ” In the decades that followed French defeat, there was intense debate about alleged national decadence, which had caused such an outcome. That summer of 1940, the bishop of Toulouse thundered: “Have we suffered enough? Have we prayed enough? Have we repented for sixty years of national apostasy, sixty years during which the French spirit has suffered all the perversions of modern ideas … during which French morality has declined, during which anarchy has strangely developed.”
Modern staff-college war games of the 1940 campaign sometimes conclude with German defeat. This causes a few historians to argue that Hitler’s triumph on the battlefield, far from being inevitable, might have been averted. It is hard to accept this view. In the years that followed the 1940 débâcle, the German army repeatedly demonstrated its institutional superiority over the Western Allies, who prevailed on battlefields only when