Short History of World War II - James L. Stokesbury [42]
The Norwegian Army command finally surrendered on June 9. By then the unhappy story of the campaign was back-page news.
8. The Fall of France
THE CAMPAIGN THAT OPENED on May 10, 1940, was one of the world’s great military masterpieces. As spring ripened into a beautiful early summer, the likelihood of war in earnest became apparent. The invasion of Denmark and Norway jolted the Allies out of their lethargy, and while it went on to its rapid and unhappy conclusion the Allied high commands tried to wrestle with the irreconcilabilities of their situation.
Hitler had made a peace offer back in October of 1939; this was probably not a serious one, and whether it was or not, the Allies refused to take it as such. Not too much had happened on the Western Front after that. The British had gradually increased their strength in France, and the British Expeditionary Force, under the command of Lord Gort, was up to a strength of nearly 400,000 men by spring of 1940. Against this, however, had to be set a noticeable decline in French morale. The army that had been fully confident of itself in September was less so by spring. There was disaffection, the troops had been quick to pick up the “phoney war” phrase, and inactivity in billets had led them to question the point of the whole exercise.
Neither of the Allies saw any real need for a reassessment of their view of the war. Though the British had increased their army commitment, they still believed that the economic pressure of the Royal Navy’s blockade would finally win the war. They coupled with this the possibility of bombing by the Royal Air Force, but when they thought of that, they had no idea of the difficulties involved, nor did they really give too much thought to the fact that strategic bombing had not only to deal with the enemy, but also with friends. The French, worried about the power of the Luftwaffe, were adamantly opposed to the initiation of a bombing campaign. With the war eight months old, the R. A. F. had so far done precious little bombing at all.
The French were busy with internal problems. There was for one thing a government reshuffle. Premier Daladier resigned, and was replaced by Paul Reynaud. A smallish, slightly oriental-looking man, Reynaud was thought to be more of a fighter than Daladier; unhappily, his political position was weaker, and he achieved the premiership only by taking into his cabinet men who were not fighters at all. In balance the Reynaud government was hardly in a position to prosecute the war any more vigorously than its predecessor had been.
There were equivalent difficulties in the army command. General Maurice Gamelin was the Commander-in-Chief of the French Army, with his headquarters just outside Paris. As leader of all French troops everywhere, he was responsible not only for metropolitan France, including troops facing Italy and Spain as well as Germany, but also for the troops throughout the empire. To deal with the main battle front from Switzerland to the sea, therefore, the French appointed General Alphonse Georges as Commander-in-Chief Northeast. Under him were the various army groups and armies of the front. This command structure was practically designed to create confusion, and did. Gamelin did not want to interfere in Georges’ direction of his battle but constantly did so; Georges wanted to run his own battle, but was never permitted to do it. Messages were shuttled back and forth and got lost, and in the end, neither Georges nor Gamelin was up to the task allotted to them.
Gamelin and his associates had refused to learn anything from the Polish campaign; they had decided before it started that the Poles were militarily negligible, and therefore the rapid defeat of Poland was no more than they expected. Since the campaign went as they supposed it would, there was obviously no lesson to be drawn from it. Through the 1939-40 winter Gamelin saw no need to restructure his defense system.