Short History of World War II - James L. Stokesbury [48]
The French Army was now on its own. The nine Dutch divisions were gone, as were the twenty-two Belgian and nine of the ten British. The French had lost twenty-four of their sixty-seven infantry divisions, six of their twelve motorized or armored divisions. They had lost extensive amounts of equipment, and even the mechanized formations that remained were seriously depleted in strength and material. Perhaps half their army, the weaker half, remained to face the Germans along the Maginot Line, the Aisne and the Somme rivers. The Germans already had bridgeheads across the Somme at Abbeville and Amiens, and French attempts to squeeze them out failed. Defeat hung like a miasma over the Third Republic, and the higher one went, the worse it got. Weygand made futile attempts to pull his armies together and he issued orders of the day designed to inspire the troops to their utmost. But even in the most stirring government and military pronouncements of those weeks, despair lurked just below the surface. When generals begin talking of “satisfying the dictates of honor,” the implied conclusion to the sentence is always “before surrendering.”
While the French high command tried to sort out and organize the “Weygand Line” along the Somme and Aisne, the Germans were carrying out an impressive redeployment of their troops to face southward. They were ready to go by June 5, within a day or so after the completion of the Dunkirk withdrawal. With 120 divisions, they would attack all along the line. Von Rundstedt’s Army Group A would break over the Aisne between Paris and the end of the Maginot Line, von Bock’s Army Group B would storm across the Somme west of Paris as far as the Seine, then decide where to go from there. Meanwhile, General Ritter von Leeb’s Army Group C would attack the southern end of the Maginot Line, break through, and link up with the Germans advancing south behind the line.
The attack opened on the 5th, and though the French fought desperately, things went pretty well as planned. The Stukas and tanks still proved a winning combination, the German bombers continually harassed the French rear areas, disrupting communications, and the French were simply too thin to inflict more than local checks on the Germans. Von Bock reached the Seine within three days. One of his tank commanders, Erwin Rommel, drove as far as Rouen on the lower Seine, then angled back up to the seacoast to gather up remnants of the French and British who had been holding along the coast. These were the last British fighting in France. To the east of Paris the French did a little better, but were slowly forced back to the Marne, and then, on the 12th, Guderian’s tanks broke through their line at Chalons and took off south. It was the Ardennes all over again and, for practical purposes, with Guderian’s breakthrough the campaign was won. When the news came in to headquarters, Weygand went to Reynaud and asked the government to seek an armistice.
There followed several days of grasping at straws. Reynaud refused immediately to consider giving up. Political and diplomatic questions of incredible complexity had to be answered. In a bid for time, Reynaud recalled France’s hero, Marshal Pétain, who was then ambassador to Spain. Surely, he thought, the magic of Pétain’s name would put fresh heart into the army and the people of France.
Tragically, Pétain proved to be a broken reed. He was a very old man, and his ideas had changed over the years. He now was obsessed with the idea that France had sinned and must be purged of guilt; he added his voice to those counseling surrender. Reynaud’s position was further weakened.
The problem of relations with Britain was a major one. Back in March, France and Britain had rather offhandedly signed an agreement that neither would seek a peace or armistice without the full consent of the other. Little thought had been given to it at the