Alone, 1932-1940

  Political relationships between the two Western allies had soured; the Warsaw junta had driven a wedge between them. To Churchill’s consternation, the rift between London and Paris was matched by chilliness on the military level. The Conseil Supérieur de la Guerre, France’s high command, was altering its military plans, but Tiny Ironside had been provided with no details. He hoped they were better than Britain’s.

  Winston’s prestige across the Channel made him an ideal choice to do what Britain’s Imperial General Staff could not: talk to the French high command, question them, reassure them. In 1936, as their guest, he had toured Verdun, Metz, and the famous line named after André Maginot, a politician who believed good fences made neighbors who are not good friends keep their distance. Winston’s letters then had been notable for their lack of opinion. To Clementine he had written: “There was nothing to see as all the troops were hidden in holes or under bushes. But to anyone with military knowledge it was most instructive.” Now he was going to take a closer look. To Ironside he wrote that he was “off tomorrow” for the Rhine sector. “Generals Georges and Gamelin are very kindly going to come with me part of the time, and I expect we shall be able to have some talks on the matters we discussed.”111

  Accompanied by General Spears, he landed at Le Bourget and was greeted personally by Gamelin’s deputy, General Joseph Georges, who had cleared his crowded calender to serve as Churchill’s guide. Winston was flattered; as he wrote Clementine that evening from the Ritz, “Georges will command the army in a war.” After they had left the airport, he wrote, the general drove him and Spears “to the restaurant in the Bois where in divine sunshine we lunched & talked ‘shop’ for a long time.” As they ate wood strawberries soaked in white wine, the French commander said the French thought “nothing will happen till the snow falls in the Alps & gives to Mussolini protection for the winter.” Churchill agreed. “This looks like early or mid-September, wh wd still leave Hitler two months to deal with Poland, before the mud season in that country. All this of course is speculation, but also reasonable. It seems to fit the German programme so far as it has been published.”112

  As the tour progressed—they traveled, Winston proudly wrote Clementine, “in a special Michelin train of extreme speed, dining en route” and spent “2 vy long days on the line”—their host’s feeling grew that hostilities were inevitable. According to Spears’s notes, Georges said he was “convinced that war was almost upon us, and that the Germans, unless given all they wanted, were prepared to launch it.” Spears wrote, “It emerged that there was no more doubt in General Georges’ mind than in ours that it was the Germans rather than we who had benefited by the time gained at Munich, always supposing that they had really intended fighting then, which he doubted. He thought Hitler had been bluffing.” A year ago, he told them, the Nazis had no elaborate defenses facing France; now they had built their Westwall, the Siegfried Line, “a formidable obstacle built according to modern ideas, in great depth, whereas the Maginot Line was linear.” A year earlier, French artillery had been “incomparably superior”; the Germans, whose Munich spoils included Czechoslovakia’s vast Skoda munitions works, were now masters of the big guns. Moreover, Georges said, the Nazis had built a long lead in the air, “and all we could do was to build and build, and place the largest possible orders in the United States.”113

  Churchill’s second tour of the Maginot Line confirmed his new views of modern tactics and strategy. After he had lunched with General Gamelin, chief of the French General Staff and commander in chief–designate (Georges would be the field commander), Gamelin left instructions that Winston and Spears were to be shown parts of the intricate defense system never revealed before to any foreign visitor—strong points along the Rhine, ingenious new antitank obstacles, underground railroads opposite the Westwall, and, should Hitler decide to attack through Switzerland, heavy artillery sited on Swiss road junctions. And so it was that on Tuesday, August 15—as Anglo-French diplomats tried in vain to get Poland to agree to let Soviet troops cross Polish territory—Churchill and Spears, led by Georges, began a grueling exploration of the line’s eighty-seven “fortified” miles, completed four years earlier.

  Shielded by ten feet of cement, each casemate housed grenade throwers, machine guns firing out of underground slits with a fifty-degree arc, and rapid-firing antitank guns. Every casemate was manned by twenty-five men who moved through tunnels and down elevators to sleeping quarters deep below the earth. Skillfully camouflaged, the casemates were invisible to intruders in the forest, save only for the two observation cupolas above each. Five miles behind these outer strong points, spaced every three to five miles, were steel-and-concrete forts housing as many as twelve hundred poilus, who were transported from their subterranean barracks to gun turrets by electric trains. Ventilation was provided by compressors which could screen out poison gas. A major fort consisted of from fifteen to eighteen concrete blocks, each bristling with guns—ranging from 37 millimeters to 135 millimeters—bolted to disappearing turrets. Each block was split into two sections linked by underground galleries, some over a mile long. If half the fort were captured, the other half could fight on, bringing down heavy fire on the enemy. At Verdun in 1916 two forts, Douamont and Vaux, had been lost to Germans who infiltrated their superstructures and fought their way downward. To prevent this, the designers of the Maginot Line had provided for “interval troops,” special forces complete with their own field artillery, which could be shifted to any fort under heavy attack. “These,” Alistair Horne explains, were meant “to compensate for what, by definition, the Line lacked: mobility.”114

  On Wednesday, August 16, accompanied by a Times correspondent, Winston and his party drove right up to the front line, within shouting distance of Nazi troops on the right bank of the Rhine. The Times reported that Winston was “amazed” to see an enormous sign opposite Neufbrisach reading: “Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer,” and, on the left bank, a French billboard replying: “Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité.” Churchill was amazed—but not by this very ordinary sport of idle soldiers. He was startled by the naked intent of the German deployment, invisible to the reporter’s untrained eye but recognized immediately by him and his companion. “The trip,” Spears wrote, “tore to shreds any illusion that it was not Germany’s intention to wage war and to wage it soon. There was no mistaking the grim, relentless and barely concealed preparations she was making.”115

  That evening they joined French officers for a long discussion of the new threat posed by parachute troops, of tank traps, of assaults screened by artificial fog—Winston thought this very important—and of the need for heavier tanks, upon which all were agreed. As Spears listened, his mind drifted back to Vimy Ridge in 1915. Winston had earnestly explained his theory of “land cruisers” then to a French general and his staff. Spears had lingered after Churchill departed, and he remembered “how heartily they had laughed” at “this absurd idea.” They had told Spears: “Your politicians are even funnier than ours.”116

  Thursday, when Ribbentrop’s Luftwaffe pilot was instructed to prepare a flight plan for imminent departure to Moscow’s Khodnynka Airport, Churchill and Spears were back in Paris, registering at the Ritz. Long afterward Spears said that what had impressed him most during their tour was “Winston’s incredible vitality.” Nearly sixty-five, he would have been entitled to bypass some of the line’s lesser features, but he had insisted on stumbling over every pillbox in sight, scrutinizing antitank obstacles in front of the main line of resistance (repeatedly ensnaring himself on barbed wire), climbing in and out of antitank ditches, and striding in and out of the reinforced barracks, known as maisons fortes, for troops who must remain on the surface. He had been on the go for three days, hurrying through tunnels and sleeping bays, arguing over whether certain stretches could support the weight of tanks, and being manhandled down the slopes of the Rhine’s banks so he could stand, arms akimbo, staring at the German soldiers on the far shore.

  And h
e was not finished. In his room he prepared a report, to be dispatched by courier to the War Office. He thought it might be useful, he began, “to set down some of the points in my mind as a result of my long talks here.” The coming war, he believed, ought to be better managed than the last, and to that end he recommended “a liaison between British and French supply organizations.” In his opinion German regulation of industry “is the greatest advantage they possess.” The Allies “should match it.”117

  He thought the possibility of any “heavy German effort” in the west during the “opening phase” of the war extremely unlikely. The Wehrmacht’s strategy would be to crush Poland first. Preventing this was essential; if the Poles were overwhelmed the Germans could turn and hurl their full might against the Allies. Eventually France could put six million men in the field, but her present strength was only a fraction of Germany’s. To “take the weight off Poland” the French should be prepared “to engage actively all along the line and… force the Germans to man their lines heavily.” Since the German border on that front “extends so many miles, it ought to be possible to hold a very large number of German divisions in the West.” The thought that England and France might remain idle, leaving the Poles to their fate in the hope of a negotiated peace with Hitler, never crossed his mind.118

  However, his misgivings about the French static strategy were grave. The Paris dailies called the line “France’s shield.” But, Winston noted, the great advantage of a shield is that it may be moved to defend any part of the soldier’s body. The Maginot Line was immovable. It was incapable of protecting the French from Germany’s classic invasion route over the Belgian plains—“the pit of the French stomach,” as Clausewitz had called it. Churchill recalled an old Whitehall joke: “The War Office is always preparing for the last war.” Now, he thought, it was “certainly true of the French.” In his report to Tiny Ironside he wrote that while “the French Front cannot be surprised… the flanks of this front… rest upon two small neutral states.” He was satisfied that the French had “done everything in their power to prepare against an invasion through Switzerland,” but “the attitude of Belgium,” on the other hand, “is thought to be profoundly unsatisfactory. At present there are no military relations of any kind between the French and the Belgians.”119

  He had begun to understand the Maginot mind. It was the mind of a nation which did not want to lose a war, but didn’t much want to win either. The French soldiers of 1914 had lusted for revanche, the return of Alsace and Lorraine, lost when their grandfathers had been overwhelmed in the Franco-Prussian War. The two provinces had been made French again at Versailles, and now the country had no war aims. In denying an appropriation to enlarge the republic’s tank corps in 1935, the minister of war had asked a wildly cheering Chamber of Deputies, “How can we still believe in the offensive when we have spent milliards to establish a fortified barrier? Would we be mad enough to advance beyond this barrier upon God knows what adventure?” Yet everyone—including the Generalstab plotters meeting beneath the murmuring pines and hemlocks in Zossen—knew France’s basic war plan. Because the minister of war had discounted the threat through Switzerland, the Maginot Line was expected to hold the enemy at bay while other poilus valiantly drove into Belgium to counterattack the attacking Germans. But if the counterattacking poilus lacked élan vital, their assault would fail. Feeling safe behind the line, “like the lotus-eating mandarins of Cathay behind their great Wall,” as one writer put it, France had lapsed into languor, a spiritless lassitude which was the exact obverse of the lusty, singing, marching young Nazi soldiers across the border.120

  During his tour of the line Churchill, like most visiting VIPs, confined his remarks to senior officers. Indeed, he would have given grave offense had he done otherwise. Spears tells us that he was “pleased with the aspect of the men…. He knew how to look every man in the eyes as he passed him, thus convincing him he had been recognised by someone already known, even in France, to be a very important person.” But it is a pity Winston could not have talked to them, too, and later he said as much. The spirit of the Marne had, he realized, “exhausted its mission and itself in victory.” It was as though the Third Republic had become a different country. Bravery, he noted, was now associated in the great majority of French minds with the futile butchery of 1914–1918. In metropolitan France alone 27 percent of the country’s young men between the ages of eighteen and twenty-seven had not returned from the trenches. Simone de Beauvoir tells of a Dr. Lemair, who had operated on countless poilus under appalling conditions and who, on returning home, “took to his bed and never got up again.”121

  No one knew how many of the survivors of the war, the men who should have been guiding France in 1939, had been drained, exhausted, broken at the front. But the deterioration in the army’s leadership had been shocking. The Conseil Supérieur de la Guerre, whose members would become senior generals when war broke out, was hopelessly entangled in red tape and bureaucratic muddle—paperasse, as the French call it. Tanks were despised (as mortars, machine guns, and warplanes had been despised in 1914). In 1921 Marshal Pétain, then supreme commander, had dismissed the future of armored warfare in nineteen words: “Tanks assist the advance of the infantry by breaking static obstacles and active resistance put up by the enemy.” His successors endorsed this finding. As Charles de Gaulle had discovered in the early 1930s, no one in the Conseil Supérieur understood revolutionary air power and the implications of armored vehicles which could now “be made capable of withstanding artillery fire and could advance a hundred miles a day.” Indeed, not a single French general had wanted to know. De Gaulle’s memoranda had been returned to him unread, and when he published his controversial views in Vers l’armée de métier his name had been struck from the promotion list.122

  During his glimpse of the Maginot Line in 1936, Churchill had thought the Conseil’s doctrine sound. He later wrote that, lacking “access to official information for so many years,” he had not comprehended “the violence effected since the last war by the incursion of a mass of fast-moving enemy armour. I knew about it, but it had not altered my convictions as it should have done.”123

  Indeed it should. He had fathered the tank in 1915, when it had been ridiculed as “Winston’s Folly.” And he was the last man in Parliament to plead backbencher lack of “access to official information.” It is doubtful that any man at the cabinet table, including the prime minister, was as well-informed about the War Office, Admiralty, and RAF, all of which he had headed at one time or another, and whose staffs included officers who saw to it that he was kept abreast of the latest military developments. Moreover, as chancellor of the Exchequer he had witnessed the spectacular maneuvers of Britain’s Experimental Armoured Force on Salisbury Plain in 1927, which vindicated advocates of high-speed tank forces. Nevertheless, as late as 1938 Churchill had written that “the tank has, no doubt, a great part to play; but I personally doubt very much whether it will ever again see the palmy days of 1918…. Nowadays the anti-tank rifle and the anti-tank gun have made such strides that the poor tank cannot carry thick enough skin to stand up to them.”124

  Other views had been suggested to him. The most imaginative came from Captain Basil Liddell Hart. After the Armistice, Liddell Hart had served on the team which drafted the new infantry training manual. Then, and later as military correspondent of The Times, he had set forth the first practical alternative to the entrenched, deadlocked siege warfare he had survived. In its place he proposed an “expanding torrent” offensive, spearheaded by swift, mobile masses of heavy tanks and backed by equally versatile self-propelled guns and infantry, bound for the enemy’s rear aboard armored carriers. Liddell Hart urged abandonment of methodical siege techniques, which involved hitting the enemy where he was strongest. Instead, attackers would search for a weak spot in the foe’s defenses and pour through it with mobile firepower, creating new fronts deep in the enemy’s rear.

  Churchill’s French was weak, and he had not bee
n exposed to de Gaulle. But he and Lloyd George had met Liddell Hart in Morpeth Mansions and heard him out. At least, Lloyd George had. In his memoirs Liddell Hart wrote: “It was… very noticeable that Churchill’s mind was apt to focus on a phrase, while Ll. G. seized the point and followed on to the next point…. Moreover, Churchill liked to do most of the talking in any discussion.” Winston was usually hospitable to military innovations. If he had been slow to grasp the new role of air power, he understood the fragility of England’s air defenses. On the ground, however, he still clung to the continuous front school of military thought, remembering when it broke Ludendorff’s line and forgetting the four years of heartbreaking, bloody failures before. Perhaps the answer to his inconsistency lay in his youth and his romantic idealization of it (“Twenty to twenty-five!” he often said. “Those are the years!”). Tanks were replacing horses, and at heart he remained a young officer of hussars. In a nostalgic chamber of his mind, Victorian colonial wars, with their negligible casualties—negligible, that is, for the British—would always glitter. He rejoiced in the memory of magnificence and turned away from the squalid, forgetting that the only moral judgments in war are made by the victors, and victorious armies are led by those who have mastered the latest, most efficient tools of their trade.125

  Nevertheless, he possessed a rare gift for strategy, and he had been more attentive in Morpeth Mansions than Liddell Hart had thought. Spears’s most vivid recollection of their eve-of-the-war examination of the Maginot Line, with long sessions of men bowed over map tables, was of Churchill spotting the great weakness in the French defense system. His mouth pursed, his gaze was fixed “as if,” Spears wrote in his account, “he were crystal-gazing.” He had been smiling; now the smile vanished and he shook his head ominously as he put his finger on the shoulder of the Maginot, where it ended near Montmedy and was extended by field works opposite the Ardennes forest. “He observed,” recalled Spears, “that he hoped these field works were strong.” He understood that Marshal Pétain had once remarked that the Ardennes was “impassable to strong forces.” That view, said Winston, was now “very unwise.” He asked Georges to “remember that we are faced with a new weapon, armour in great strength, on which the Germans are no doubt concentrating, and that forests will be particularly tempting to such forces since they will offer concealment from the air.”126