There was much fighting still to come. The Germans had to battle their way south, but few had any doubt of the final outcome. Already sixty-one Allied divisions, the greater part of them made up of the best troops that could be found, had been beaten.
Forty-nine divisions, very few of which included young, fit, first-rate troops, confronted the new onslaught. The French had less than 200 tanks to throw into the battle. At some places civilians tried to prevent their soldiers fighting so that their homes would not be destroyed. At Vienne, near Lyon, the mayor mustered the women of the town to stop French Army engineers from destroying the bridge. Reluctant to hurt their own people, the French soldiers let the bridge remain intact and the Germans advanced over it. At other places the French troops were not so concerned with their fellow countrymen. Soldiers routed on the battlefield became violent, drunken gangs, pillaging houses and churches and stealing from other refugees. At Roy an the anxious townspeople welcomed the German invaders and drank their health, knowing that the presence of the Germans would restore law and order.
By 10 June the Germans had crossed the river Somme in a campaign which had little to distinguish it from the German military methods of the nineteenth century. There were no armored thrusts or breakthrough battles. Guderian might have proved his theories in the north, but now the army command was determined to show that foot soldiers and horse-drawn artillery could win wars too.
On 10 June Mussolini, anxious for a seat at the peace conference and a share in the spoils, declared war upon a prostrate France. Italian troops moved across the southern frontier.
Over the radio Premier Reynaud said to his people, “Signor Mussolini has chosen this time to declare war on us. How can this be judged? France has nothing to say. The world will judge.” But
Reynaud’s cable to President Roosevelt of the United States was less restrained: “What really distinguished, noble, admirable people the Italians are to stab us in the back at this time.”
The American State Department strongly advised the President not to condemn Italy in the speech he was about to deliver at the University of Virginia. Disregarding these warnings about the effect it might have on international relations and without regard to the influence that voters of Italian extraction might exert upon his own political career, Roosevelt told the world what he thought of Mussolini’s decision. “On this tenth day of June, 1940,” he told his audience, “the hand that held the dagger struck it into the back of his neighbor.” The American ambassadors in Paris and London had been providing Washington with inaccurate and often hysterical accounts of what was happening in Europe, but despite these reports Roosevelt clearly saw the predatory nature of the totalitarians and in this speech gave warning that America would oppose them.
As Italian troops moved across the border into southern France, Paris was declared an open city and the government moved out, first to Tours and then to Bordeaux. Reynaud even considered taking the government to North Africa and continuing the war from there.
In Bordeaux, Reynaud’s mistress, Helene de Portes, put all her amazing energies into promoting an immediate peace with the Germans. What the senile Marshal Petain described as the “moral rottenness of French political life” made him and the elderly General Weygand look with some perverse satisfaction at the triumph of the disciplined German armies. Neither man supported in any way Reynaud’s desire to fight on. Yet when French air force cadets at Merignac airfield near Bordeaux were issued automatic weapons, in what was probably the first step in a military takeover from Reynaud, they were told an entirely different story. The cadets heard that it was Petain and Weygand who wished to continue the war and the civilians who wanted to capitulate. The plot was discovered and quashed.
On 17 June Guderian reported that he was at Pontarlier, and Hitler wired back, “You probably mean Pontailler-sur-Saone.”
“No mistake,” said Guderian. “I am myself on the Swiss border.” Now he was able to move northeast and penetrate the Maginot Line fortifications from the rear, using the panzer group which since 28 May had been his new command. This great line of fortifications, which had cost France an immense amount of money and into which were shut so many thousands of her soldiers, was virtually useless against an attack from the rear. “The Maginot Line was a formidable barrier,” wrote one military commentator, “not so much against the German Army as against French understanding of modem war.”
From the French ambassador in London there came a dramatic idea for a political union between Britain and France. Churchill approved, and the British Cabinet was enthusiastic. The proposed union would provide for joint organs of defense, foreign, financial, and economic policies. British subjects would enjoy immediate citizenship of France and French citizens would become citizens of Great Britain. “M. Reynaud might by tonight be Prime Minister of France and Britain,” said de Gaulle on the telephone from London to Bordeaux.48
But Reynaud’s hopes that this would stiffen his Cabinet’s determination to continue the war were'dashed when his mistress leaked the news to the defeatists. “It would be like fusion to a corpse,” said Petain, and another member of the Cabinet said he would rather see France as a Nazi province than as a British dominion. With well over half his Cabinet against him, Reynaud resigned. President Lebrun asked Petain to form a government.
Churchill’s offer was generous and sincere, but the future of the French fleet was always in his mind (just as later in 1940, during the Battle of Britain, the idea of Britain’s fleet being captured by the Germans was a constant worry to the President of the United States). Churchill’s conversation with the newly appointed Premier Petain has never been revealed, but one who overheard it. General Leslie Hollis, Military Secretary to the British War Cabinet, described it as the most violent conversation he had heard from Churchill.
If Churchill was asking Petain to continue the war, he was too late. Petain had already summoned the Spanish ambassador, who phoned two of his attaches waiting at St-Jean-de-Luz. They walked across the Franco-Spanish frontier and from Irun passed on Petain’s plea for armistice terms to the Germans in Madrid. If only the French generals had waged war as smoothly as they sought peace.
Churchill’s fear that the French fleet would be combined with the Italian Navy, and perhaps ultimately with that of Japan, led him to what he came to call “a hateful decision, the most unnatural and painful in which I have ever been concerned.” The Royal Navy was given the unenviable task of disabling, by consent or gunfire, the major French warships. At Oran the British bombardment lasted for ten minutes and was followed by air attacks. Relations between France and Britain sank to an all-time low, but friends and foes throughout the world realized that, in Churchill’s words, “the British War Cabinet feared nothing and would stop at nothing.”t This was true.
World History
