Strange Defeat

Marc Bloch

• Editorial: Rare Treasure Editions
• Año: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781774643907
• Categoría: Historia
• Categoría: Segunda Guerra Mundial

A renowned historian and Resistance fighter - later executed by the Nazis - analyzes at first hand why France fell in 1940. Marc Bloch wrote Strange Defeat during the three months following the fall of France, after he returned home from military service. In the midst of his anguish, he nevertheless "brought to his study of the crisis all the critical faculty and all the penetrating analysis of a first-rate historian" (Christian Science Monitor). Bloch takes a close look at the military failures he witnessed, examining why France was unable to respond to attack quickly and effectively. He gives a personal account of the battle of France, followed by a biting analysis of the generation between the wars. His harsh conclusion is that the immediate cause of the disaster was the utter incompetence of the High Command, but his analysis ranges broadly, appraising all the factors, social as well as military, which since 1870 had undermined French national solidarity. "Much has been, and will be, written in explanation of the defeat of France in 1940, but it seems unlikely that the truth of the matter will ever be more accurately and more vividly presented than in this statement of evidence." - New York Times Book Review. "The most wisdom-packed commentary on the problem set [before] all intelligent and patriotic Frenchmen by the events of 1940." - Spectator.

It can be seen from what I have said that the war was a constant succession of surprises. The effect of this on morale seems to have been very serious. And here I must touch on a delicate subject. I have no right to do more than record impressions which are those only of a looker-on. But there are some things that must be said) even at the risk of hurting a good many feelings. Men are so made that they will face expected dangers in expected places a great deal more easily than the sudden appearance of deadly peril from behind a turn in the road which they have been led to suppose is perfectly safe. Years ago, shortly after the Battle of the Marne, I saw men who the day before had gone into the line under murderous fire without turning a hair, run like rabbits just because three shells fell quite harmlessly on a road where they had piled arms in order to furnish a water-fatigue. 'We cleared out because the Germans came.' Again and again I heard that said in the course of last May and June. Analysed, the words mean no more than this: 'Because the Germans turned up where we didn't expect them and where we had never been told we ought to expect them.' Consequently, certain breakdowns, which cannot, I fear, be denied, occurred mainly because men had been trained to use their brains too slowly. Our soldiers were defeated and, to some extent, let themselves be too easily defeated, principally because their minds functioned far too sluggishly.

Not only did we meet the enemy too often in unexpected places, but for the most part, especially, and with increasing frequency, in a way which neither the High Command nor, as a result, the rank and file had anticipated. We should have been perfectly prepared to spend whole days potting at one another from entrenched positions, even if the lines had been only a few yards apart as they were in the Argonne during the last war. It would have seemed to us the most natural thing in the world to carry out raids on occupied saps. It would have been well within our capacity to stand firm in face of an assault through a curtain of wire more or less cut by 'Minenwerfer', or to have gone over the top courageously in an 'attempt to rush a position that had already been flattened--though, as a rule, not very completely--by artillery fire. In short, we could have played our part without difficulty in operations beautifully planned by our own staff and the enemy's, if only they had been in accordance with the well-digested lessons learned at peace-time maneuvres. It was much more terrifying to find ourselves suddenly at grips with a section of tanks in open country. The Germans took no account of roads. They were everywhere. They felt their way forward, stopping whenever they ran up against serious resistance. Where, however, the resistance was not serious and they could find a 'soft spot' they drove ahead, exploiting their gains, and using them as a basis from which to develop the appropriate tactical movement or, rather, as it seemed, to take their choice of a number of alternative possibilities already envisaged in accordance with that methodical opportunism which was so characteristic of Hitler's methods. They relied on action and on improvisation. We, on the other hand, believed in doing nothing and in behaving as we always had behaved.

Nothing could better illustrate all this than the final episodes of the campaign in which I took a personal part. That was the time at which it really did seem as though we were beginning to profit by the lessons of experience. A decision was taken to group the forces which were in retreat from Normandy and were already cut off by the enemy advance west of Paris from the armies which had fallen back on the Loire, and with the to hold Brittany. Well, what happened? A thoroughly reliable general of engineers was hurriedly sent to reconnoitre a 'position' with both flanks resting on the sea. It was unthinkable to a staff that we should put up any kind of resistance without first plotting on the map and then pegging out on the ground a fine continuous 'line' complete with switches, forward positions, battle zones, and all the rest of it. True, we had neither the time available to organize such a system, guns with which to equip the various strong-points, or ammunition for those guns even supposing that we had found them. The result of all this was that after a few bursts of machine-gun fire, exchanged, I believe, at Fougères, the Germans entered Rennes (which our great defence system had been designed to cover) without fighting, swarmed over the peninsula, and took hordes of prisoners.

Is it true to say that by then--the precise moment at which Pétain announced that he had asked for an armistice--all hope of resistance had become impossible? Several officers thought not, especially the younger officers, for, with the quickened pace of events, a wider gulf began to show between the generations. Unfortunately, our leaders were not drawn from among those who suffered least from a hardening of the arteries. I am still strongly of the opinion to-day that what we called, in 1918, our 'last-ditchers' were right. They dreamed of a modern type of warfare waged by guerrillas against tanks and motorized detachments. Some of them, if I am not wrong, had drawn up plans for such a war, plans which will never now see the light of day. The motor- cyclists, of whom the enemy made such extensive and such excellent use, could move rapidly, and without too many accidents, only on metalled roads. Even vehicles equipped with caterpillar treads proceed less slowly on macadamized highways than across open country, and mobile guns and tractors of the normal type must have a good hard surface on which to manœuvre. That is why the Germans, true to their doctrine of speed, tended more and more to move their shock elements along the main arteries. It was, therefore, absolutely unnecessary to cover our front with a line extending for hundreds of kilometres, almost impossible to man, and terribly easy to pierce. On the other hand, the invader might have been badly mauled by a few islands of resistance well sited along the main roads, adequately camouflaged, sufficiently mobile, and armed with a few machine-guns and anti-tank artillery, or even with the humble 75! In Rennes I saw a German column, composed for the most part of motor- cyclists, moving unopposed down the Boulevard Sévigné, and all the old instincts of the foot-slogger stirred in me. But I could do nothing, because the only men available were a few orderly- room clerks and storekeepers, who, from the earliest days of the war, had been, quite ridiculously, kept unarmed. I was badly tempted, all the same, to lie in wait for that damned column at the corner of some spinney of the Breton country-side, which is so admirably suited by nature for the mounting of ambushes, even if we had nothing to fight with but the sparse equipment of an engineer detachment. Once we had produced confusion in the enemy ranks, it would have been easy enough for us to melt into the 'wild', and then repeat the same performance farther on. I am quite certain that three-quarters of the men would have jumped 'at the chance of playing a game like that. But, alas, the regulations had never envisaged such a possibility.

Naturally enough, this high-speed type of warfare demands a certain specialized equipment. The Germans saw to it that such equipment was available: we, on the other hand, did not, or only in insufficient quantities. It has been said, not once but again and again, that we were short of tanks, aeroplanes, guns, motor vehicles, and tractors, and that, consequently, we were never, from the very beginning of hostilities, in a position to fight as we ought to have fought. All this is, unfortunately, true enough, and it is equally true that the causes of this lamentable and fatal policy were not, all of them, wholly military. About that I shall have something to say later. The faults of some do not, however, excuse those of others, and it would be highly unbecoming in the High Command to put in a plea of 'Innocent'.

Let us, if we like, condemn the strategic blunders which compelled our troops in the Nord Department either to abandon to the enemy, or to jettison on the Flanders beaches, the equipment of three motorized divisions, several regiments of mobile artillery, and all the tanks belonging to one of our armies. This material would have come in mighty handy on the battlefields of the Somme or the Aisne, for never had the nation in arms been better 'found'. But I am not for the moment concerned with that. I want, rather, to consider the preparations that were made before war broke out. If we were short of tanks, aeroplanes, and tractors, it was mainly because we had put our not inexhaustible supplies of money and labour into concrete. But even so, we had not been wise enough to erect enough of it on our northern frontier, which is just as much open to attack as our eastern. And why? Because we had been taught to put our whole trust in the Maginot Line--constructed at vast expense and with much blowing of trumpets--only to see it turned, and even pierced, on the Rhine for the simple reason that it had been allowed to stop short on our left flank (but about that astonishing incident of the crossing of the Rhine I know only what the newspapers told us, which was precisely nothing at all) because, at the last moment, a hurried decision was taken to construct a number of concrete block-houses in the Department of the Nord, which, since they were designed with only a frontal field of fire, were taken from behind, with the result that our men had to expend all their efforts on digging a magnificent anti-tank ditch covering Cambrai and Saint-Quentin--which the Germans overran one fine day by the simple expedient of advancing against it from those two places; because the doctrine then current among our military theorists laid it down that we had reached one of those moments in the history of strategy when the power of defensive armour to resist is greater than the power of gun-fire to pierce-- in other words, when the fortified position is practically impregnable--though, unfortunately, the High Command lacked the courage, when the decisive moment came, to remain loyal to a theory which would, at least, have condemned the Belgian adventure even before it had started; because many of our military pundits we're profoundly suspicious of armoured units, judging them too heavy to be moved easily (and their rate of progress as shown in official statistics was, it is true, very slow, but only because it was assumed that they must move by night-- for security reasons--whereas, as things turned out, the war of speed was conducted almost uniformly by day); because those attending the Cavalry courses at the Staff College had had it drilled into them that, though tanks might be tolerably useful in defence, their value for attack was nil; because our technical experts--or those who passed for such--were of the opinion that bombardment by artillery was far superior to bombing from the air, oblivious of the fact that ammunition for guns has to be brought up over great distances, while the rate at which aeroplanes can be replenished is limited only by the speed of their flight; because, to sum up, our leaders, blind to the many contradictions inherent in their attitude, were mainly concerned to renew in 1940 the conditions of the war they had waged in 1914-18.

The story goes that Hitler, before drawing up his final plans for the campaign, summoned a number of psychologists to his headquarters and asked their advice. I cannot vouch for the truth of this, but it does not seem to be altogether beyond the bounds of probability. However that may be, the air offensive, conducted with such dash by the Germans, does seem to prove that they had gone very deeply into the whole question of nerves and the best way of breaking them. Nobody who has ever heard the whistling scream made by dive-bombers before releasing their load is ever likely to forget the experience. It is not only that the strident din made by the machines terrifies the victim by awakening in his mind associated images of death and destruction. In itself, and by reason of what I may call its strictly acoustic qualities, it can so work upon the nerves that they become wrought to a pitch of intolerable tension whence it is a very short step to panic. There is good evidence that these noises were deliberately intensified by various mechanical means. Aerial bombardment as developed by the Germans is never primarily designed as a method of spreading massacre and material desolation. No matter how thickly bombs may be sown, they never, in fact, register hits on more than a relatively small number of men. But the effect of bombing on the nerves is far-reaching, and can break the potential of resistance over a large area. It was doubtless with that end in view that the enemy High Command sent wave after wave of bombers to attack us. The result came up only too well to their expectations.

Once again I find myself constrained to deal with a subject on which even to touch--so far, at least, as this war is concerned-- gives me an acute feeling of discomfort. Only those who have shared with their comrades the existence of the front line have any right to speak about danger, courage, and the hesitancies that afflict even the brave. I realize that. All the same, I am going to relate one small experience of my own, and without mincing words. I underwent my baptism of fire in 1940 (my earlier baptism of 1914 took place at the Marne) on 22 May on a road in Flanders--for I do not count the bombing of Douai and of the environs of Lens, in neither of which was I closely concerned. On the morning of the day in question, the convoy of which my car formed part was first machine-gunned from the air and then bombed. The machine-gunning, though it killed a man quite close to me, left me more or less unmoved. Of course, it is never very pleasant to be within touching-distance of death, and I do not mind admitting that I was a good deal relieved when the storm of bullets passed. But all through that particular episode my uneasiness had been much more a matter of intellect than of instinct. It was a sort of cold fear, with nothing in it of the quality of genuine terror. The bombing attack, so far as I am aware, killed no one, or no one who was anywhere near me. Neverthleless, it left me profoundly shaken, and when I crept out of the ditch where I had been crouching I was trembling pretty badly. During the latter part of the campaign I came under a number of artillery bombardments. I have known worse, and should be the last to exaggerate their violence. Still, they were quite nasty enough. But I stood up to them without much difficulty, and I think I can say that they never made me lose my presence of mind. But under air bombing I was never able to retain anything like the same calmness except by making a very considerable effort of will.

It is true, of course, that my reflexes had, to some extent, been conditioned. Ever since my Argonne experiences of 1914 the whine of bullets had become stamped on the grey matter of my brain as on the wax of a gramophone record, so that the mere turning of the handle would start that particular tune playing: nor were my ears so faultily constructed as to have lost, in rather less than a quarter of a century, the art they had learned of guessing the trajectory of a shell and judging its probable point of impact. My experiences of air bombardment had been far less frequent. Faced by that particular danger I was about as green as the youngest recruit among us. Still, the difference in emotional 'temperature' of the three kinds of experience I have been describing was so general to all of us that I am forced to the conclusion that its cause lay deeper than can be accounted for by the nature of my own private reactions. Admittedly, the almost complete absence of our own fighters from the sky above our heads, and the deplorable immunity thus enjoyed by the enemy bombers, played no small part in lowering the morale of the troops. But these things do not wholly explain what happened.

Air bombing is probably, in itself, no more actually dangerous than many other kinds of peril to which the soldier is exposed-- or not, at any rate, in open country. When men are caught inside houses, the collapse of walls and the atmospheric concussion consequent upon any explosion in a confined space always result in a high death-roll. In the open, on the other hand, artillery fire, even when fairly widely distributed, accounts for at least as many victims, while machine-gunning is without parallel as a method of slaughter, since it literally spares no one. From the moment the campaign opened, we had been struck by the relatively small number of losses attributable to enemy aeroplanes, though the reports of their activity reaching us from the front were very highly coloured.

No, the fact is that this dropping of bombs from the sky has a unique power of spreading terror. They are dropped from a great height, and seem, though quite erroneously, to be falling straight on top of one's head. The combination of weight and altitude gives them an appearance of almost visible violence which no shelter, however thick, seems capable of resisting. There is something inhuman about the nature of the trajectory and the sense of power. Exposed to this unleashing of destruction, the soldier cowers as under some cataclysm of nature, and is tempted to feel that he is utterly defenceless--though, in reality, if one dives into a ditch or even throws oneself flat on the ground, one is pretty safe from the bursts, which are generally a good deal less effective than those of shells, always ruling out, of course, the effects of a direct hit. One has, whether und...