Inferno - Max Hastings [50]
In 1940 the Germans were not obliged to divert large forces to an eastern front, as they were in 1914 when France was allied with Russia. Despite the indisputable superiority of the invader’s air arm, Allied defeat was the consequence less of material than of inferior morale; with rare and isolated exceptions, at every level Allied responses to German initiatives lacked conviction. Winston Churchill was almost alone among Anglo-French directors of the war, as well as among soldiers on the battlefield, in being willing to demand a struggle to the last man. French politicians and generals, by contrast, adopted a rationalist view: they identified limits to the damage acceptable to the population and fabric of their country to avoid bowing to a foreign invader, as often before in history France had been compelled to bow. Relatively few French soldiers felt willing to sacrifice themselves for the cause, because they believed neither in their national leaders nor in their commanders; the country had endured forty-two chronically weak governments between 1920 and 1940. Gamelin wrote as early as 18 May: “The French soldier, yesterday’s citizen, did not believe in the war … Disposed to criticise ceaselessly anyone holding the slightest amount of authority … he did not receive the kind of moral and patriotic education which would have prepared him for the drama in which the nation’s destiny will be played out.”
Irène Némirovsky wrote reflectively in 1941, looking back on the collapse: “For years, everything done in France within a certain social class has had only one motive: fear … Who will harm them the least (not in the future, not in the abstract, but right now and in the form of kicks in the arse or slaps in the face)? The Germans? The English? The Russians? The Germans won, but the beating has been forgotten and the Germans can protect them. That’s why they’re ‘for the Germans.’ ” Very few Frenchmen in 1940 and afterwards followed the example set by tens of thousands of Poles—fighting on in exile, even after their country had been defeated. Only in 1943–44, when it became plain that the Allies would win the war and German occupation had proved intolerably oppressive, did French people in large numbers offer significant assistance to the Anglo-Americans. In the years of Britain’s lonely defiance, French forces offered determined resistance to Churchill’s armies and fleets wherever in the world they encountered them. Few even among those who did not fight against the British chose instead to fight with them: the French aircraft carrier Béarn, for instance, laden with precious American fighter planes, took refuge in the French Caribbean colony of Martinique from June 1940 until November 1942.
Among the shocked spectators of the collapse of France was Stalin. Molotov sent Hitler a dutiful telegram offering congratulations on his capture of Paris, but in Moscow the Nazi triumph provoked horror. All Soviet strategic calculations had been founded upon an expectation that a protracted bloodbath would take place on the Continent, which would drastically weaken Germany as well as the Western powers. A Russian diplomat in London later remarked indiscreetly that, while most of the world weighed Allied and German casualties against each other, Stalin added the two together to compile an assessment of his own balance of advantage. Nikita Khrushchev described the fury of Russia’s warlord at Pétain’s surrender: “Stalin was in a great agitation, very nervous. I had seldom seen him in such a