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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780300189872 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Yale University Press |
| Publication date: | 04/28/2015 |
| Pages: | 208 |
| Sales rank: | 297,452 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.60(w) x 8.60(h) x 1.00(d) |
About the Author
Sean Runnette, a multiple AudioFile Earphones Award winner, has also produced several Audie Award-winning audiobooks. His film and television appearances include Two If by Sea, Copland, Sex and the City, Law & Order, Third Watch, and lots and lots of commercials.
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France 1940
Defending The Republic
By Philip Nord
Yale UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2015 Philip NordAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-300-19068-7
CHAPTER 1
DIPLOMACY
"Too few babies, too few arms, too few allies": such was Pétain's first stab at accounting for France's defeat in 1940. That was in a radio address of 20 June, four days after he had become premier. Pétain made a second go of it five days later, once again in a radio speech, although this time he laid greater weight on the nation's moral failings: "Our defeat was due to our laxness. The spirit of pleasure-seeking brings to ruin what the spirit of sacrifice has built." And the Marshal's voice carried weight. Not only was he France's prime minister: he was the nation's greatest living war hero, the victor of Verdun, for France the costliest battle of the Great War. Demographics do not get the same play today as they did in Pétain's time, but otherwise, the explanation for France's collapse has not changed much since. France just wasn't ready to go to war.
In certain respects, France was indeed in "an unfavorable strategic situation" when the war began in September 1939.1 In contrast to the Great War, there was not much of an Eastern Front to speak of. French diplomacy in the 1930s had flirted with a Soviet alliance but never followed through, hobbled by anti-communist apprehensions. The Soviets in the end gave up on the anti-fascist cause, signing a non-aggression pact with the Germans in August. France had made an effort to cultivate substitute eastern allies in Czechoslovakia and Poland, but that effort fell short. France sold out her Czechoslovak ally at Munich in September 1938, and the following March, Hitler swallowed up what remained of an independent Czechoslovakia. Britain answered back, promising to guarantee Polish territorial integrity against Nazi depredations, and the French took steps to reaffirm an already long-standing commitment to Poland. The two Allied powers made good their pledges when Hitler moved on Poland in September, but in the event France did little to supply the Poles with much substantive military assistance, in effect leaving them to fend for themselves. But even had the French wanted to do more, they faced a major logistical problem. Italy stood in the way between France and Poland, literally, and Italy was bound by alliance to the Germans. Rapprochement between the two dictatorships had begun in the fall of 1936, culminating in a full-fledged military alliance, the Pact of Steel, concluded in May 1939. The Rome–Berlin axis, as it came to be called, had not been an inevitability. In 1934 a Hitler still new to power had menaced Austria. Italy stood up to Hitler and forced him to back down, a show of resolve that led to a warming of relations between Italy, France, and Great Britain too. But the three-power entente that resulted, the Stresa Front, had been allowed to unravel, such that Mussolini (as Stalin would do later) deemed it wiser to make a deal with Hitler rather than to oppose him.
France, however, did have one friend among Europe's great powers, and that was Great Britain, but how difficult it had been to bring the British around. In March 1936, Hitler had remilitarized the Rhineland in contravention of the Versailles Treaty. The French contemplated action but took none, deterred in part by Britain's refusal to help out. Later that year, General Francisco Franco mounted a military coup against the Spanish Republic. France's Popular Front, led by the Socialist Léon Blum, wanted to come to the aid of its sister Republic but once again did little. Britain had made clear it would not stand by France in case of a war over Spain, and so Blum backed off, seeking instead to coax the interested powers—Germany, Italy, and the Soviet Union—to agree to non-intervention. Yet for a third time, during the Munich crisis, the French bent to Britain's will. British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain wanted to pursue a policy of appeasement, and the French, ever the junior partners, went along. Unkind critics have characterized Britain today as a "poodle," taking its lead from a bossy United States, but things were different in the 1930s. Then Britain was the imperious "governess" and France her sometime restive but on the whole compliant charge.
So, yes, there is a strong case to be made that France's strategic position in 1939 was unfavorable. Just think about it in comparison to 1914. At that time, the Germans had faced a formidable Eastern Front opponent in Imperial Russia. In 1939 the Soviet Union was more co-conspirator than enemy. All that stood in the Germans' way was Poland, which had the pluck to put up a gallant fight but not the means to do more than that. In the Great War, Italy wound up on the side of the Entente. In the Second World War, it took Germany's part. Then there is Great Britain. It got into the Great War at the very last minute, but once in, it did not hold back, dispatching an initial expeditionary force of six divisions that ballooned to twenty within a year. In the run-up to the Second World War, Britain committed itself sooner (a commitment to send troops was firmed up in the wake of Munich, almost a year before the actual outbreak of hostilities) but in the event never mustered more than a smallish army for continental service—ten divisions in all as late as May 1940. How was it that France found itself in such a predicament? For many historians, the answer is a simple one: bad policy, a diplomacy that was hesitant, shortsighted, and spineless.
It is possible, however, to read France's diplomatic record in less negative terms. To be sure, it took precious time for French policy-makers to catch on to the nature of the Nazi threat, but they did in the end and took the lead in assembling an anti-German coalition, patching together the strongest alliance possible in conditions that were difficult, to say the least. And while the French may have been slow to grasp the true state of affairs, others were slower still, sticking to policies of appeasement and neutralism up to the last minute, if not beyond. This is not to say that the French themselves were blameless, not at all, just that there was plenty of guilt to go around and that the French don't deserve to be singled out.
It is not difficult to see why France took so long to face up to the Nazi threat. First of all, the French already had a policy in place to deal with the Germans—Briandism—that, into the early 1930s, appeared to be working just fine. At Locarno in 1925, France's Foreign Minister Aristide Briand had played a pivotal part in negotiating a series of international agreements that confirmed the basic tenets of the Versailles Treaty in the West. Germany itself was among the signatories. The Germans still harbored ambitions to revise the Versailles settlement in the East, but France built up a network of regional alliances there to deter any potential aggression. In the aftermath of Locarno, Germany was step by step rewoven into the fabric of international life. It joined the League of Nations in 1926. The Young Plan of 1929 readjusted German war reparations debts to a more manageable level. As the 1930s began, the French might well congratulate themselves that Germany, Gulliver-like, was enmeshed in a web of collective agreements of sufficient strength to hold its revisionist impulses in check.
The Nazi seizure of power in January 1933 upset the order of things. With little delay, Hitler set about shredding the bonds that pinned Germany down. He pulled Germany out of the League in October. He threatened military intervention in Austria the following year and then in 1935 repudiated the provisions of the Versailles Treaty constraining German rearmament.
France, however, was not without an answer to such challenges. The "spirit of Locarno" was dead, but there was still the possibility of containing Germany through regional alliances and international pressure. France came to an agreement with Italy and Great Britain in April 1935, the Stresa Front, with the goal of guaranteeing Austrian independence. Just weeks after that, France signed a mutual assistance pact with the Soviet Union, a reminder to the Germans that they were hemmed in on all sides. Containment and deterrence remained the order of the day in French policy, and for a moment the strategy seemed to work: Hitler backed down over Austria.
Then things began to come unstuck. Britain first of all went freelancing, working out a bilateral agreement with the Germans in June 1935 that regulated tonnage ratios between the two nations' navies. The British did not consult the French on the matter, making plain Britain's willingness to act alone in areas, like naval policy, where it felt that its vital interests were at stake. More consequential still was the Ethiopian crisis. In October, Mussolini ordered the invasion of the independent and sovereign kingdom of Ethiopia, a barefaced and brutal territorial grab. The League of Nations imposed economic sanctions on the Italians, but to no avail. Behind the scenes, Britain and France maneuvered to find a negotiated way out of the imbroglio. In the interests of maintaining anti-German solidarity, however, they were at the same time anxious not to ruffle Mussolini, and so the Franco-British "solution" tilted toward the Italians, in effect rewarding them for aggression. When the terms of the deal were leaked to the press, the British dissociated themselves from it, at one and the same time leaving the French in the lurch and irritating the Italians. Italian policy henceforth began to veer away from Stresa Front solidarity. Then in the first week of March 1936 came yet more bad news. France and Belgium had signed a mutual defense pact in 1920, which the Belgian government now repudiated. It was internal politics that determined the decision. The centrist Van Zeeland government wanted to rearm, but it faced resistance from anti-militarist socialists and from anti-French Flemings. Abrogation of the 1920 treaty, it was hoped, would mollify opponents and smooth the path to an overhaul of the nation's military.
This was the background to the Rhineland crisis. On 7 March 1936, the very day after Belgium pulled out of its partnership with the French, Hitler marched German troops into the Rhineland in violation of the Versailles Treaty. Who was in a position to come to France's material aid? Not the Italians, who were edging into the German orbit, an evolution consummated over the coming summer months by concerted German-Italian intervention in the Spanish Civil War. Not the Belgians, who had backed out of an alliance with France en route to a policy of neutralism. And not the British, who continued to view the French as troublemakers all too willing to snarl Britain in unwelcome continental entanglements. As for the international community, it had demonstrated its impotence during the Ethiopian affair (and would soon do so again in 1936 in its failure to enforce non-intervention in Spain). There was, of course, the option of taking on the Germans alone. But France, as it happened, was in the midst of a wrenching election campaign, not a propitious moment for a military venture. That venture, moreover, as France's commanding generals made clear, would not be a minor one. The nation had no plans for a partial mobilization, so it was all or nothing. Into the bargain, the Chief of the General Staff, Maurice Gamelin, counseled caution. The Germans were well prepared as he saw it (Gamelin overestimated German strength) and the French were not. The remilitarization of the Rhineland in the end went unopposed.
The events of 1935–6 left French diplomacy in a shambles. They were "the wrecking of French foreign policy," in William Shirer's vivid phrasing. Germany had always harbored revisionist ambitions in the East, but now, as Hitler's Rhineland gambit made all too clear, it had its sights set on overturning the Versailles order in the West as well. France stood in imminent danger, and it had few partners it could count on. The regional alliances in the East remained in place, but that was about it. The prospects of an entente with Italy had collapsed, killed off by fascist power-grabbing in Ethiopia and Spain. Belgium and Britain, in pursuit of unilateral advantage, had turned their backs, and international institutions had proven themselves useless. Briandism was dead. It was an estimable package of policies but ill adapted to deal with a Hitler, and that was plain enough by mid-decade.
French policy-makers, however, were not at a complete loss. They maintained appearances in the East, preserving treaty ties to Poland and Czechoslovakia and keeping the option of a Soviet alliance open, and now efforts were redoubled to persuade Britain to abandon its splendid isolation and commit itself to keeping the peace on the continent by military means if necessary. This choice for Britain was as fateful as it was puzzling: fateful because anti-communist British policy-makers would in due course put a damper on France's already tentative efforts to cultivate the Soviet Union as an ally, and puzzling because Britain made no secret of its reluctance to get involved in continental affairs, a reluctance already in evidence in its hands-off conduct at the time of the Rhineland crisis.
Yet the British option was not in fact as mysterious as all that. Memories from Great War days of the entente cordiale had not yet faded, and Britain was, like France itself, a democracy, an ideological kinship that carried all the greater weight in a Europe more and more dominated by dictatorships. Not least of all, for all its obvious hesitations to get involved on the continent, Britain was not immovable on the issue. In the aftermath of the Rhineland setback, the British agreed to send two divisions to France in case of an unprovoked German attack (provided, of course, that the British government at that time still judged the gesture worthwhile).
This was something, albeit not much, and for the moment, that was as far as the British were prepared to go. At the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in July 1936, the Blum government made known to London policy-makers its intention to help the Spanish Republic; the British made it just as clear that they would not back up the French should intervention escalate into something more serious. It was at this juncture that Blum abandoned his initial, interventionist impulse to pursue instead an international non-intervention pact. Yet, still the British continued to hold back. Neville Chamberlain became prime minister in the spring of 1937, and in the following months the new government made clear that it had no more interest in preserving Czechoslovakia's territorial integrity than the outgoing Baldwin administration. Nor were the British above meddling in French affairs to advance the careers of appeasement-minded politicians to their liking. Blum left office in the summer of 1937 and then made a brief one-month comeback the following March. He appointed to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs Joseph Paul-Boncour, an advocate of a firm policy vis-à-vis the Germans. But then Blum's majority collapsed, and Blum himself was succeeded as prime minister by Edouard Daladier. The British embassy in Paris agitated to block Paul-Boncour's reappointment. London wanted the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to go to the more temporizing Camille Chautemps. In one sense, Britain did not get its way: the job went to Georges Bonnet. In another it did, for Bonnet turned out to be a hard-core appeaser.
France needed an ally and set its sights on Britain, but the response was half-hearted at best. The British were not so much bossy, which the "governess" metaphor might suggest, as they were reticent and hard to pin down. British attitudes, however, began to unfreeze in the wake of the Munich fiasco.
How disastrous the Munich crisis was for French diplomacy is all too clear. Hitler bullied Czechoslovakia, a French ally, into handing over the Sudetenland, a chunk of borderland territory essential to Czechoslovakia's defense. The French, following Britain's lead, acquiesced to Nazi terms at the Munich conference in September 1938. This is a story of sell-out, no doubt, so why did the French go along?
It was Hitler's annexation of Austria in March 1938, the so-c alled Anschluss, that first stoked French fears about German intentions vis-à-vis Czechoslovakia. French policy-makers worried, and with good cause, that Czechoslovakia might be next on Hitler's list and invited the British to issue a joint declaration guaranteeing Czech territorial integrity. The British demurred, and the British Foreign Secretary, Lord Halifax, explained why: "Quite frankly, the moment is unfavorable, and our plans, both for offence and defense, are not sufficiently advanced." In the weeks following, much as the French had anticipated, Hitler began to beat the drums about the Czech borderlands. Daladier traveled to London in April to try to induce the British to make common cause against the German threat, laying out in the plainest terms what he thought was at stake. Hitler did not just seek territorial advantage in Czechoslovakia, but far, far more: "the domination of the Continent in comparison with which the ambitions of Napoleon were feeble." The British remained unpersuaded. Chamberlain didn't think the "picture was really so black." Hitler didn't want to destroy Czechoslovakia and, even if he did, there was no way to prevent him from doing so.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from France 1940 by Philip Nord. Copyright © 2015 Philip Nord. Excerpted by permission of Yale UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction: Strange Defeat? xi
Part I War Preparedness 1
1 Diplomacy 3
2 Armaments and Morale 31
Part II The Battle of France 59
3 Battle Plans 61
4 Lightning War 86
Part III Death Comes to the Republic 105
5 Armistice 107
6 The Road to Vichy 133
Conclusion: The 1940 Syndrome 153
Notes 167
Index 178
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