Dreams from the Dark Years: Strange Defeat
- cepmurphywrites
- Sep 19
- 15 min read
By Paul Hynes.
In the early hours of Wednesday the 15th of May, 1940, Winston Churchill was awoken to a nightmare. It came in the form of a phone call from his French counterpart, Prime Minister Paul Reynaud, who was clearly under great strain. “We have been defeated,” Reynaud said in English. When Churchill did not reply Reynaud continued, “We are beaten, we have lost the battle.”
It was the fifth day of the Battle of France, coincidentally the fifth day of Churchill’s premiership, and the beginning of the greatest crisis in the history of both France and the United Kingdom.
Churchill would continue to deny the situation was so grave for some time. His disbelief was not unfounded. He had witnessed France emerge victorious after four years of German invasion in the First World War, it was difficult to imagine they would accept defeat after only four days. In a speech the previous October Churchill had called the French army the most powerful and best trained in Europe. How could things have gone so wrong?
The Fall of France
Still, they had. When Churchill had praised the French army in October, they had not long made their own incursion into Germany. Their troops had briefly occupied a few kilometres of forest and some abandoned villages in the Saar region before withdrawing largely without incident. Since then the Western Front had been quiet with the German invasion of Denmark and Norway being the major Allied focus. That debacle had finally brought down the government of Neville Chamberlain whom Churchill had now replaced as the head of a new wartime coalition. On the same day the Germans had struck.
After an initial German advance into the Low Countries had drawn in the best British and French armies, three German Panzer divisions had emerged out the Ardennes forest and run amok. After dispatching the second-rate French forces tasked with defending the region they advanced into the French interior towards the Channel. Despite a hastily assembled French armoured force launching a somewhat successful counterattack at the Battle of Montcornet they were swept away by the Luftwaffe and the Germans reached the sea at Abbeville on the 20th of May. The best of the French forces and almost the entire British Expeditionary Force were now trapped.
A fortnight of chaos would follow. Conditions within the pocket rapidly deteriorated. British and French attempts to break through would inflict damage on the Germans but would ultimately falter. A hastily arranged evacuation from the Channel ports, particularly Dunkirk, would allow hundreds of thousands of British and French troops to escape but they would be forced to leave their equipment behind, rendering them strategically useless in the short term.
For those in the French regime already looking for a way to justify exiting the war, this British escape could easily be painted as their ally abandoning them. The fact British troops had been given priority over French ones by the Royal Navy during the evacuations helped make their point. Belgium would surrender on the 28th of May, effectively leaving France alone on the continent.
At the same time an even larger evacuation was ongoing. The sudden and rapid nature of the German advance had spread panic amongst Belgian and French civilians and they fled in their millions. In France thus is known as ‘L’Exode’ or The Exodus. By the middle of June, it is estimated that perhaps as much as a quarter of the French population, some ten million people, were displaced.
At the time it was the largest refugee crisis in recorded history. Towns and entire cities were emptied of their inhabitants. Some who could not flee took their own lives. Conditions for these refugees who were often forced to carry their possessions on foot with no regular access to food, water or shelter were dreadful. The scale of this humanitarian disaster motivated many to argue it was time for France to seek terms.
On the 5th of June the Germans resumed their offensive. If the battle wasn’t lost on the 15th of May it was by now. After several days of heavy fighting the Germans broke through once more. Paris was declared an open city on the 10th of June; this time there would be no siege. On the same day Italy joined the war and Mussolini’s troops ran headlong into the French Alps.
The French held off the Italian invasion but the German advance was now unstoppable. Paris fell on the 14th of June. A final attempt to mount a defence on the Loire river was scrapped after news arrived that the Germans had already crossed it. On the 17th of June Reynaud’s replacement, Marechal Philippe Pétain, declared the need for France to seek peace terms. In the following days what remained of the French armies would disintegrate.
The armistice would finally be signed on the 22nd of June in Compiègne. It would take place in the same railway carriage where the German delegation had surrendered to the Entente powers in November 1918. Having been a museum exhibit since the twenties, the carriage was now literally dragged back into history. A separate armistice with the Italians would be signed on the 25th of June. The debacle had barely lasted six weeks.
It would not be an exaggeration to say that the world changed forever in the Summer of 1940. We live in a reality which has been shaped by the Second World War more than any other event, whether that be in the emergence of the United States as a global superpower, the collapse of the European colonial empires, or the birth of the People’s Republic of China. Undeniably the Fall of France changed the very nature of the war and changed what many expected to be a reassertion of the old world order into the need to rebuild a new one from scratch.
Given its impact it is perhaps strange that so many view the collapse of France in six weeks (of which the first fortnight was really decisive) as something of a fluke. Academics continue to debate whether the causes were primarily political or military whilst strategists and wargamers have struggled to replicate the outcome.
Let’s go over what can be identified as the root causes of the collapse and address some popular myths.
What Went Wrong: Myths
First we can dismiss claims that the defeat was down to a lack of French courage. We shouldn’t dismiss this notion as purely a product of Little Englander mentality however, as at the time many of the French left and right pointed to moral failings as the reason for the defeat. Those on the right such as Pétain pointed to a lack of patriotic education whilst those on the left, such as French historian Marc Bloch, blamed consumerism and selfishness for eroding belief in the nation.
However, there is little material evidence for this alleged morale collapse. Professor Julian Jackson notes how, despite a lull over the Winter of 1939/40, French morale in the Spring was as strong as it had been in the Summer of 1914. French troops fought bravely despite often overwhelming odds. Despite the rapid collapse, more than a quarter million French soldiers were killed or wounded. Following one such engagement at the Siege of Lille, the German commander granted the defeated French defenders the honours of war. An elaborate surrender ceremony was held including a parade by the French garrison at which the victorious Germans stood at attention and saluted while their captives marched past.
Others have laid the blame on the Maginot Line, the elaborate wall of defensive fortifications which lined the Franco-German border. It has become the famous example for something which gives the illusion of strength but masks weakness in the Anglosphere whilst others have joked about creating a defensive line which didn’t cover the entire French border, allowing the Germans to go bypass it. More sober criticism points to the line eating up the French defence budget or requiring too many people to man it.
In reality the Maginot Line was designed to redirect any potential German offensive, ideally forcing them to go through Belgium where the French could stop them before they advanced deep into the French interior like they had in 1914. In this sense it worked although not quite in the way the French had hoped.
In terms of weakness the Maginot Line held out throughout the Battle of France with only a few of its forts falling to the Germans before the armistice. Whilst construction of the fortifications was time consuming and expensive it would be wrong to say it stole from other areas of French rearmament, the most important period of which was 1936-39 when the line was already largely completed.
The Maginot Line did indeed require a large number of troops to man but due to the fortifications and terrain it was intended to ultimately save manpower. Many of the units stationed in the area were also second-rate in the hopes that the line and the terrain surrounding it were unlikely to be attacked.
French military doctrine and technology have been more widely criticised. The accusation is often that the French military leadership was stuck in a First World War mindset, either due to hubris or mere stagnation. In reality the French leadership had learned the lessons from the First World War, mainly that France couldn’t afford for another generation of young men to be massacred. Emphasis was put on achieving an overwhelming superiority in airpower and artillery before overwhelming the enemy on a broad front. This was the same basic plan the Allies would adopt four years later. American and British commanders from 1944 and 1945 haven’t escaped criticism but few have accused them of First World War thinking.
French tanks have also come under a great deal of criticism, particularly for their one-man turret which forced their commander to perform three or four roles at once. Although this was certainly a design flaw, at the Battle of Hannut around 350 French tanks faced off against around 600 German ones and the two sides inflicted roughly equal casualties on each other. It is still debated who won this engagement but the French designs had proven their advantages, namely their superior armour and armament in comparison to most German designs of the time.
The problem was, unfortunately, it was rare for French tanks to be in the right place.
What Went Wrong: Realities
One serious flaw with French tanks was their lack of radios. Very few had them with most having to rely on flags or hand signals to communicate with each other when in combat. Amidst gunfire and smoke this was far from ideal. It was a symptom of a far larger problem which the French army faced in May 1940, a chronic lack of communications.
Radios had seen limited use in the First World War but the technology had developed massively in the interwar period which would transform battlefields in the Second. Two-way radio transmission between aircraft, tanks and headquarters offered an extra dimension to warfare allowing strategic decisions to be made in real time. Germany, with its larger radio industry and a regime which had made it a central tool to its propaganda, had embraced these possibilities. Almost every German tank had a radio whilst their French counterparts were relying on semaphore.
German radio production was state backed and focused on military production whilst the smaller French radio industry was smaller and focused primarily on commercial sales. By 1940 there were only a few hundred available for military use whilst the Germans had thousands. Radios were simply not a priority for the French military who viewed them with suspicion. Radio signals could be intercepted; telephone lines could be bugged. For a military which had been paranoid over information security for decades since the Dreyfus Affair this led to both types of communication being kept at arm’s length.
Fears about a pro-Nazi Fifth Column within French society helped fuel this paranoia. Broadcasting from Stuggart, a French Fascist named Paul Ferdonnet acted as a sort of Francophone Lord Haw Haw, claiming to have spies embedded within the French military. His broadcasts were mostly bluster with few listeners but rumours spread of his allegedly accurate reports.
Hence, written orders delivered by courier were the preferred method of the French commanders. When Reynaud phoned Churchill to tell him the war was lost he wouldn’t have been able to do so with the head of his own army, General Maurice Gamelin, whose headquarters had neither a telephone nor a radio.
These issues were exacerbated by changes at the top. Gamelin had been sacked by Reynaud on the 9th of May only for this to be reversed during the German invasion. Gamelin would be sacked for the second time on the 19th of May when the German breakthrough had reached a critical point. His replacement, General Maxime Weygand, arrived from Syria with little understanding of the situation. This leadership transition, during which Weygand stated his first priority was to take a nap after the long journey, cost two days in which time the Germans had reached the coast.
While fears of a pro-Nazi spy network within France were unfounded, France did suffer serious problems with acting on military intelligence. French military planners had concluded the most likely route of a German attack was through Belgium, a repeat of the First World War. At the beginning of the war this assumption was correct with German plans for the invasion of France, Fall Gelb (Case Yellow), roughly resembling what the French expected. This changed when a plane carrying said plans crash landed in neutral Belgium in January 1940. The Belgians handed over the plans to the British and French whilst the Germans scrambled to amend their plans which ultimately led to something far more ambitious.
The new version of Fall Gelb would involve two stages. An initial force (Army Group B) would invade through the Low Countries as expected, luring in British and French armies to engage them. Then a far more mobile and powerful force (Army Group A) would launch a surprise attack through the Ardennes and sweep towards the coast, trapping the best Allied armies. The sweeping motion involved in the plan has led to it being popularised as Operation Sickle Cut.
The notion the Germans might change their plans following the leak was considered by the French but ultimately dismissed in favour of plans already agreed upon in November to drive deep into Belgium to meet the Germans. Reports of large numbers of German divisions moving towards the Ardennes region were available to the French high command but the notion of reinforcing the area was never considered; the established conclusion that the Ardennes were impassable remained fixed.
When three Panzer divisions burst through the forests, followed by four more, it was a terrible but avoidable shock. The German willingness to concentrate their tanks into armoured corps gave them an overwhelming firepower and mobility advantage in the desired area of the front.
Commonly known as ‘Blitzkrieg’ in contemporary western accounts and popularised as such ever since, German strategy was really a development from theories which dated back to the Napoleonic wars. The largest, most powerful forces should be concentrated on the ‘Schwerpunkt’ (centre of gravity) where a breakthrough was to be achieved.
French strategy envisaged a broad front of advance where armour would support the advance of infantry rather than being the key component. The French had three armoured divisions but they were not grouped together, and most French tanks were spread out amongst infantry divisions. The British Expeditionary Force meanwhile had a single armoured division which was still crossing the Channel when the Germans struck. The Germans had ten panzer divisions and seven would be used against their Schwerpunkt whilst the French armoured divisions were engaging the other three.
It is worth noting that the updated German plan was not some flawless work of military genius. In the seventies, mathematicians P.G. Bennett and M.R. Dando came to the conclusion it was just as likely to end in disaster for the Germans as it was success. It was considered impractical by many contemporaries as well. The notion of armoured corps was controversial amongst senior German officers.
The Soviet Red Army had pioneered the concept in the early thirties and helped impact German thinking, only for Soviet doctrine and tanks to provide lacklustre results when employed during the Spanish Civil War. The Soviets had dissolved their own armoured corps at the end of 1939 based on this performance. After the Summer of 1940 the Red Army would hurriedly reestablish them alongside the Americans and the British following the German success.
The problems of concentrated armoured divisions with their vast number of vehicles and the rough terrain of the Ardennes with its narrow-wooded roads were something the Germans had to contend with. For the first two days of their Ardennes offensive a giant traffic jam emerged in the forest. It was a perfect target for aerial attack but only a handful of attempts were made before the Germans got moving with minimal damage.
The shortcomings of the French air force, the Armee de l’Air (AdA), and the RAF’s Advanced Air Striking Force perhaps doomed France more than any other single factor in the six-week campaign. On the eve of battle the British and French had outnumbered the Germans when it came to numbers of planes on paper, but once obsolete aircraft were removed, the Germans had a 2:1 advantage when it came to planes on the ground. In the sky it was even worse, German fighters flew more than four times as much as their French counterparts.
The reasons for this are myriad. The AdA was in the midst of a major refitting at the beginning of May with the intention being to replace obsolete aircraft with modern ones, many of which were awaiting delivery following purchase from the United States. This left French pilots with planes which lacked spare parts, planes which were obsolete, or no planes at all. Command was another issue, like French armour the AdA was expected to be subordinate to French infantry divisions. This left a fragmented picture where certain squadrons were attached to certain units rather than being able to be harnessed collectively. The RAF would feed fighters in piecemeal throughout the May and early June but never fully committed their strength.
What was there was often destroyed on the ground. Whilst the Germans had invested heavily in anti-aircraft defences, French airfields only had light artillery from the First World War. The result was that attempts to strike the traffic jam in the Ardennes inflicted heavy casualties on the attackers whilst the Luftwaffe suffered nowhere near the same risk in bombing French airfields.
The overall effect of this was decisive. Having achieved complete control of the skies over France in the first few days of the conflict, the Luftwaffe was able to bolster the firepower of the German armies and subdue any British or French counterattack on the ground before it was able to gather steam. Both British and French troops felt their pilots had abandoned them. German Stuka dive bombers, with their signature screech, were able to terrorise soldiers and refugees alike with little threat from Allied fighters.
All these factors had collided to form a catastrophe for the French people. Having ignored the warnings of a new German strategy, having been unable to stop or even coordinate a major plan to stop their advance to the coast, and with their best armies and those of their allies now trapped all there was left to do was attempt to salvage the situation using the same doctrines which had caused it in the first place. The following weeks would involve many desperate counterattacks swatted away by the Luftwaffe and create defensive lives at headquarters which the Germans had already crossed. French troops would fight bravely against increasingly dire odds but the above factors had already doomed them. Or had they?
“But has the last word been said?”
On the night of the 20th of May the panzer crews which had punched through the Ardennes were granted a well-earned rest. In just ten days they had achieved what their fathers couldn’t in four years, they had reached the English Channel and ensured French defeat. Their use of airpower, communications, and concentrated armour had allowed them to decisively defeat a numerically superior enemy which had for so long been pronounced to be the greatest in the world.
In the following days as more Channel ports fell and the White Cliffs of Dover came into view, many in the German army began to fancy they could cross that short stretch of water. If they had conquered France, why not Britain? The Luftwaffe would take heavy casualties trying to clear a path for several months but to no avail. The RAF, defeated over France, would maintain control over the skies of Southern England making any invasion attempt impossible.
When the time came for the massed Panzers to turn against another great power they would go east, into the Soviet Union. Most would not come back. Many of those who did would take years to do so, returning home battered and broken having ended up much further east than their panzers had ever managed.
Unlike the Americans, the British, and the Soviets, France did not get the opportunity to recover from their own limitations and take advantage of German ones. The country would suffer four years of Axis occupation and liberation would only come from Allied forces who were able to realise the ‘Steel over flesh’ approach the French command had envisioned.
Within a few days of the Allied landings in Normandy, Free French officials had arrived to restore Republican governance. In August their armies would land in Southern France and advance all the way into Germany. Their efforts had stemmed from the few who believed the French defeat in 1940 was not decisive, that their nation had lost only a battle rather than the war. Now they were redeemed and those who had attempted to cast the 1940 defeat as an inherent moral or political failing of the Third Republic would soon face charges of treason.
The Free French leader Charles de Gaulle had concluded in June 1940 that, despite all French woes, Nazi Germany could and would ultimately be defeated. Whether this was deduction or delusion at the time can be argued but ultimately, he was proven correct.
With this in mind, next time we will think in terms of the French defeat having not been set in stone and have a look at ways the Third Republic could have survived that terrible Spring of 1940.
Paul Hynes is the author of the Decisive Darkness series and the Red Fuhrer series.
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