Carroll Quigley - Tragedy and Hope - A History of the World in Our Time

The Allied forces retreating southward from Belgium were greatly hampered by masses of refugees clogging the roads, were constantly harassed by Stukas, and had lost communication between units. There was almost no contact or cooperation between the French, British, and Belgians in the north, or between these and the French forces south of Kleist’s breakthrough. Panic swept Paris. On May 16th sixteen French generals, including Gamelin, were dismissed, and the command given to Weygand, who did not arrive from Syria until May 20th. During this period, evacuation of the government to Tours was ordered, and the secret archives of the Foreign Ministry were burned in bonfires on the lawns of the Quai d’Orsay.

On May 17th Reynaud replaced Daladier as minister of national defense and generally shook up the government, replacing many weak men by defeatists, appeasers, and Fascist sympathizers. The chief new face was that of Marshal Pétain, eighty-three years old, the man chiefly responsible for the inadequacy of French military planning in the interwar period. Pétain was recalled from the ambassadorship in Madrid to be vice-premier in the new Cabinet. Certain French politicians, including Pierre Laval, hoped that Pétain might play a role in French domestic politics such as Hindenburg had played in Germany: to protect the organized vested interests of industry and business from changes by the Left in a period of defeat.

Weygand spent five days (May 20th-25th) in an unsuccessful effort to get a coordinated attack on Kleist’s salient. On May 25th-26th, Kleist, moving up the coast from the Somme, on the rear of the northern Allied forces, captured Boulogne and Calais, leaving Dunkerque as the only major port on the Allied rear. Withdrawal to this port was threatened by a German break through the Belgian Army toward Ypres. On May 27th, King Leopold of Belgium made an unconditional surrender of his armies to the Germans, over the objections of the Belgian civil government and without making certain that the Allied Command had been informed. The British Expeditionary Force at once began to evacuate the Continent through Dunkerque.

In seven days, using 887 water craft of all types and sizes, 337,131 men were taken off the beaches at Dunkerque under relentless air bombardment (May 28th-June 4th). By Hitler’s direct order, no intensive ground attack was made on the Allied forces within the Dunkerque perimeter, as Hitler was convinced that Britain would make peace as soon as France was defeated, and wished to save his dwindling armored forces and munitions for the attack on the rest of France. In the interval before this new attack, Weygand tried to form a new line along the Somme and Aisne rivers from the sea to the Maginot Line and to eliminate three bridgeheads the Germans already held south of the Somme.

The Battle of France began on June 5th with German attacks on the western and eastern ends of the “Weygand Line.” By June 8th the western end had been broken, and German forces began to move to the rear of the Somme defenses. As the line collapsed and the military forces fell back, they disintegrated among packed masses of civilian refugees, hurried onward by German dive-bombers. Paris and later all cities of France were declared open cities, not to be defended. Just as in Kleist’s original breakthrough, no effort was made to hold up the Germans by road obstacles, civilian resistance, house-to-house fighting, destruction of supplies, or ( above all ) destruction of abandoned gasoline. The German armored units roamed at will on captured fuel.

On June 12th Weygand requested the French government to seek an armistice; Reynaud refused to permit any civilian surrender, since this was forbidden by an Anglo-French agreement of March 12, 1940. Instead, he gave permission for a military capitulation, if the civil government continued the war from French North Africa or from overseas bases, as Norway, the Netherlands, and Belgium were doing. Pétain, Weygand, and their supporters refused to leave France. They also flatly rejected any military capitulation, for they wanted to end the fighting with an armistice which would allow France to maintain a French Army as a guarantee against any economic or social changes in France.

There was also considerable pressure behind the scenes from antidemocratic French industrialists in monopolistic lines such as chemicals, light metals, synthetic fibers, and electrical utilities. These industrialists, together with politicians like Laval and private or commercial banks, like the Banque Worms, or the Banque de l’lndochine, had been negotiating cartel and other agreements with Germany for ten years, and felt an armistice would offer a splendid opportunity to complete and enforce these agreements.

As the military collapse continued, piteous appeals for help were sent to London and to Washington. Reynaud sent eighteen messages to Churchill asking for more air support, but could obtain none, as the British War Cabinet wished to save all the planes it still had for the defense of Britain after the French collapse. Appeals to Roosevelt were no more successful; 150 planes and 2,000 75-mm. cannons were sent, but they sailed from Halifax only on June 17th and were at sea when the fighting ceased.

The chief concern in London and Washington was over the fate of the French fleet and of French North and West Africa, especially Dakar. If Hitler obtained the French fleet or any considerable portion of it, British and American security would be in acute jeopardy. The French fleet was of high quality and included two new battleships ( Richelieu and Jean Bart ) which had just been built but were not yet in service. Such a navy, in combination with the German and Italian navies, might destroy Britain’s sea defenses and force a British surrender. This would place America in great danger, as American security in the Atlantic had been preserved by the British fleet since 1818 and, by 1940, the whole American battle fleet had to be kept in the Pacific to face Japan.

Only less immediate than these dangers was the threat to both British and American security from a German occupation of French North and West Africa. This would close the British route through the Mediterranean immediately and allow the Italian forces in Libya to invade Egypt with relative impunity. The possession of Dakar by German forces would provide a base from which submarines could attack the British route to the East by way of South Africa and might permit an attack on Brazil, only 1,700 miles west of Dakar.

With these considerations in mind, Washington and London did all they could to dissuade Mussolini from attacking France and to persuade the French to avoid any armistice which might yield either French Africa or the French fleet to Hitler. Eventually Britain gave permission to France to seek an armistice if the fleet sailed to British ports. This was rejected by the French military and naval authorities. As a final effort, Churchill, on June 16th, offered France a political union with Britain, involving joint Anglo-French citizenship and a joint Cabinet. This was never considered by the French.

As the military debacle continued to grow and Reynaud would not make a separate peace and could not get a Cabinet agreement to withdraw overseas, he resigned (June 16th) and was replaced by a new government headed by Marshal Pétain. The old man, surrounded by defeatists and appeasers who had been intriguing for deals with the Nazis for years, at once asked for an armistice, and issued an ambiguous public statement which led some French units to cease fighting immediately. On June 10th Italy had declared war, but was unable to make any important military advances against French resistance. On June 14th the Germans entered Paris, the French government having moved to Tours on June nth and continuing to Bordeaux on June 15th.