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The Dutch would be induced to surrender by a dose of Nazi terror—the kind that had been applied the autumn before at beleaguered Warsaw.
This bit of treachery, this act of calculated ruthlessness, would long be remembered by the Dutch, though at Nuremberg both Goering and Kesselring of the Luftwaffe defended it on the grounds that Rotterdam was not an open city but stoutly defended by the Dutch.
Queen Wilhelmina and the government members had fled to London on two British destroyers.
Within five days it was all over. The fighting, that is. For five years a night of savage German terror would henceforth darken this raped, civilized little land.
Preceded by waves of Stuka dive bombers, which softened up the French defensive positions, swarming with combat engineers who launched rubber boats and threw up pontoon bridges to get across the rivers and canals, each panzer division possessed of its own self-propelled artillery and of one brigade of motorized infantry, and the armored corps closely followed by divisions of motorized infantry to hold the positions opened up by the tanks, this phalanx of steel and fire could not be stopped by any means in the hands of the bewildered defenders.
They, like the Dutch to the north of them, had simply not been able to cope with the revolutionary new tactics of the Wehrmacht.
In Berlin, I remember, OKW made the enterprise look very mysterious, announcing in a special communiqué on the evening of May 11 that Fort Eben Emael had been taken by a “new method of attack,” an announcement that caused rumors to spread—and Dr. Goebbels was delighted to fan them—that the Germans had a deadly new “secret weapon,” perhaps a nerve gas that temporarily paralyzed the defenders.
With their usual flair for minute preparation, the Germans during the winter of 1939–40 had erected at Hildesheim a replica of the fort and of the bridges across the Albert Canal and had trained some four hundred glider troops on how to take them.
It was unheard of that a great army, when attacked, held no troops in reserve.
Twice during this campaign in the West, which the Fuehrer himself directed, he hesitated.
The specter of a second Marne rose in Hitler’s feverish mind. “I am keeping an eye on this,” he wrote Mussolini the next day. “The miracle of the Marne of 1914 will not be repeated!”
And though the panzer divisions, chafing at the bit as they were, received orders to do no more than proceed with “a reconnaissance in force” this was all they needed to press toward the Channel. By the morning of May 19 a mighty wedge of seven armored divisions, driving relentlessly westward north of the Somme River past the storied scenes of battle of the First World War, was only some fifty miles from the Channel.
Is working on the peace treaty, which shall express the tenor: return of territory robbed over the last 400 years from the German people, and of other values…
The only hope of the Allies to extricate themselves from this disastrous encirclement was for the armies in Belgium to immediately turn southwest, disengage themselves from the German Sixth Army attacking them there, fight their way across the German armored wedge that stretched across northern France to the sea and join up with fresh French forces pushing northward from the Somme.
As a result, three days were lost before Weygand came up with precisely the same plan as his predecessor.
By the time they moved, communications between the various national commands had become chaotic and the several Allied armies, hard pressed as they were, began to act at cross-purposes.
It was the first of the German High Command’s major mistakes in World War II and became a subject of violent controversy, not only between the German generals themselves but among the military historians, as to who was responsible and why.
The headstrong young ruler, who had taken his country out of its alliance with France and Britain into a foolish neutrality, who had refused to restore the alliance even during the months when he knew the Germans were preparing a massive assault across his border, who at the last moment, after Hitler had struck, called on the French and British for military succor and received it, now deserted them in a desperate hour, opening the dyke for German divisions to pour through on the flank of the sorely pressed Anglo–French troops.
Actually he did it against the unanimous advice of his government, which he was constitutionally sworn to follow.
They also reminded him that he was head of state as well as Commander in Chief, and that if matters came to the worst he could exercise his first office in exile, as the Queen of Holland and the King of Norway had decided to do, until eventual Allied victory came.
Leopold’s capitulation was angrily denounced by Premier Reynaud of France in a violent broadcast, and Belgian Premier Pierlot, also broadcasting from Paris but in a more dignified tone, informed the Belgian people that the King had acted against the unanimous advice of the government, broken his links with the people and was no longer in a position to govern, and that the Belgian government in exile would continue the struggle.
The Belgian Army was under the over-all Allied Command and Leopold made a separate peace without consulting it.
Finally, even as Commander in Chief of the armed forces, Leopold in this constitutional, democratic monarchy was bound to accept the advice of his government. Neither in that role nor certainly as chief of state did he have the authority to surrender on his own.
When the call came, on July 20, 1950, after 57 per cent of those voting in a referendum had approved it, his return provoked such a violent reaction among the populace that civil war threatened to break out. He soon abdicated in favor of his son.
Ever since May 20, when Guderian’s tanks broke through to Abbeville on the sea, the British Admiralty, on the personal orders of Churchill, had been rounding up shipping for a possible evacuation of the B.E.F. and other Allied forces from the Channel ports.
Churchill added further fuel to the controversy in the second volume of his war memoirs by contending that the initiative for the order came from Rundstedt and not Hitler and citing as evidence the war diaries of Rundstedt’s own headquarters. In the maze of conflicting and contradictory testimony it has been difficult to ascertain the facts. In the course of preparing this chapter the author wrote General Halder himself for further elucidation and promptly received a courteous and detailed reply.
This exclamation mark of contempt indicates that Goering had intervened with Hitler, and it is now known that he did.
No more now than in all the years before did he comprehend the character of the British nation or the kind of world its leaders and its people were determined to fight for—to the end. Nor did he and his generals, ignorant of the sea as they were—and remained—dream that the sea-minded British could evacuate a third of a million men from a small battered port and from the exposed beaches right under their noses.
An armada of 850 vessels of all sizes, shapes and methods of propulsion, from cruisers and destroyers to small sailboats and Dutch skoots, many of them manned by civilian volunteers from the English coastal towns, converged on Dunkirk.
Without its heavy arms and equipment, to be sure, but with the certainty that the men would live to fight another day.
Le Débâcle,” he concluded, alluding to Zola’s famous novel of the French collapse in the Franco–Prussian War.
The rest of the time it encountered unexpected opposition from the Royal Air Force, which from bases just across the Channel successfully challenged it for the first time.* Though outnumbered, the new British Spitfires proved more than a match for the Messerschmitts and they mowed down the cumbersome German bombers.
By that day 338,226 British and French soldiers had escaped the German clutches.
But they were battle-tried; they knew that if properly armed and adequately covered from the air they could stand up to the Germans. Most of them, when the balance in armament was achieved, would prove it—and on beaches not far down the Channel coast from where they had been rescued.
But Churchill reminded them in the House on June 4 that “wars are not won by evacuations.”
Only the Navy remained, and the Norwegian campaign had shown how vulnerable the big fighting ships were to land-based aircraft.
But its best troops and armament had been lost in Belgium and in northern France, its small and obsolescent Air Force had been largely destroyed, and its two most illustrious generals, Marshal Pétain and General Weygand, who now began to dominate the shaky government, had no more stomach for battle against such a superior foe. These dismal facts were very much on the mind of Winston Churchill when he rose in the House of Commons on June 4, 1940, while the last transports from Dunkirk were being unloaded, determined, as he wrote later, to show not only his own people but the world—and
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Finally, the French High Command, now dominated by Pétain and Weygand, had become sodden with defeatism.
The swastika was immediately hoisted on the Eiffel Tower. On June 16, Premier Reynaud, whose government had fled to Bordeaux, resigned and was replaced by Pétain, who the next day asked the Germans, through the Spanish ambassador, for an armistice.
The secret German memorandum of the meeting24 makes clear that Hitler was determined above all not to allow the French fleet to fall into the hands of the British. He was also concerned lest the French government flee to North Africa or to London and continue the war. For that reason the armistice terms—the final terms of peace might be something else—would have to be moderate, designed to keep “a French government functioning on French soil” and “the French fleet neutralized.”
Late on the afternoon of June 19 I drove out there and found German Army engineers demolishing the wall of the museum where the old wagon-lit of Marshal Foch, in which the 1918 armistice was signed, had been preserved. By the time I left, the engineers, working with pneumatic drills, had torn the wall down and were pulling the car out to the tracks in the center of the clearing on the exact spot, they said, where it had stood at 5 A.M. on November 11, 1918, when at the dictation of Foch the German emissaries put their signatures to the armistice.
They alighted from their automobiles some two hundred yards away, in front of the Alsace-Lorraine statue, which was draped with German war flags so that the Fuehrer could not see (though I remembered from previous visits in happier days) the large sword, the sword of the victorious Allies of 1918, sticking through a limp eagle representing the German Empire of the Hohenzollerns.
Hitler, followed by the others, walks slowly over to it [I am quoting my diary], steps up, and reads the inscription engraved (in French) in great high letters: “HERE ON THE ELEVENTH OF NOVEMBER 1918 SUCCUMBED THE CRIMINAL PRIDE OF THE GERMAN EMPIRE—VANQUISHED BY THE FREE PEOPLES WHICH IT TRIED TO ENSLAVE.”
I have seen that face many times at the great moments of his life. But today! It is afire with scorn, anger, hate, revenge, triumph.
Huntziger told the Germans at once, as soon as he had read them, that they were “hard and merciless,” much worse than those which France had handed Germany here in 1918.
Dr. Schmidt, who served as interpreter, was directed to listen in on the tapped conversations from an Army communications van a few yards away behind a clump of trees.
One of the most odious of them obligated the French to turn over to the Reich all anti-Nazi German refugees in France and in her territories.
The French made no protest against a clause which stated that all their nationals caught fighting with another country against Germany would be treated as “francs-tireurs”—that is, immediately shot. This was aimed against De Gaulle, who was already trying to organize a Free French force in Britain, and both Weygand and Keitel knew it was a crude violation of the primitive rules of war.
Like almost all of Hitler’s promises, this one too would be broken.
It would not only divide France itself geographically and administratively; it would make difficult if not impossible the formation of a French government-in-exile and quash any plans of the politicians in Bordeaux to move the seat of government to French North Africa—a design which almost succeeded, being defeated in the end not by the Germans but by the French defeatists: Pétain, Weygand, Laval and their supporters. Moreover, Hitler knew that the men who had now seized control of the French government at Bordeaux were enemies of French democracy and might be expected to be co-operative in
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