Exit France

Last week, 38 days after it started, the most prodigious military performance of modern history came to an end south of Paris with the Armies of the French Republic, once supposed second to none, completely shattered, disintegrated, praying for peace.

Nazi Germany's Blitzkrieg conquest of the Lowlands and France began before dawn May 10. Within 24 hours it pierced the strongly fortified Belgian defense line at Eben Emael, north of Liege. Crashing through the Belgian Ardennes, it encountered and crushed treacherous or woefully incompetent French Ninth Army under General Corap at Sedan on the Meuse.

Its quick crossing of the Meuse on May 14 altered the whole course of the Lowlands' campaign because it threatened the entire communication and supply systems of two other French armies and one British which had sped north to back up the Belgian Army. On May 14 also, the Dutch, seeing that the Allies could not come further to their aid, surrendered their defenses.

By May 21, with the Allies in full retreat across Flanders, German armored columns had circled around to Abbeville, were approaching Boulogne, Calais, cutting the northern Allied Armies off from all support. On May 19, Maxime Weygand had supplanted Maurice Gustave Gamelin as Allied Generalissimo. It was too late.

Weygand tried vainly to cut through to the beleaguered armies of the North. Privately, he said "Militarily the situation cannot be repaired." On May 28, finding his Army swamped by refugees, overpowered by Germans, apparently destined only to fight a rear guard action for the British, King Leopold of the Belgians surrendered. On June 3, the evacuation of Dunkirk by the Allies was completed, leaving the materiel of four armies and scores of thousands of prisoners in German hands.

On June 5 the Battle of France began, the Germans taking off southward from the Somme-Aisne line. Against all the materiel and manpower Weygand could mass, General Walther von Brauchitsch hurled 40, then 60, then 120, finally 150 divisions. By June 10 they were within 35 miles of Paris, with pincers curving down from east and west. Last week on June 14, the pincers met at Paris and it was surrendered (see p. 21). The French Armies broke southward, through and around the city. Now the German drives swerved toward the sea and toward the rear of the Maginot Line.

End of an Army. For the French Army, living in a shrieking, thundering, blood shot nightmare, last week was a period of progressive disintegration. Swarm after swarm of planes strafed them. Herd after herd of tanks charged them. Columns of armored motorcycles machine-gunned them, storms of artillery shells and grenades burst among them. Wave on fresh wave of constantly replenished German infantry pressed after them. They retreated fighting, day and night, through a time-space that had no measure because it brought no rest, and no features because the whole world was filled with smoke, noise and death.

Paris was deliberately left undefended, open to German occupation so that it would not be destroyed (see p. 21).

The day Paris fell, so did Le Havre. So did Montmedy, northern anchor of the fabulous Maginot Line, and Verdun, long thought impregnable, was encircled from the west, cracked. Meanwhile additional German forces thrust past Reims to Chalons, headed for Dijon, Chaumont, Belfort, Mulhouse, to take the whole Maginot Line from the rear.

Generalissimo Weygand had some 500,000 fresh men (27 divisions) in the Maginot Line. When his northern front started crumbling, the time came when he had to abandon the Maginot Line to save at least some of these fortress troops ("shellfish"), at least some of their mountainous supplies of food and ammunition, before they were completely enveloped. If he could get them back to the neighborhood of Dijon they might help to hold a new defense line from the valley of the Loire through the north bastions of France's Massif Central.

Weygand did not believe it likely that he would succeed in establishing another line, but a soldier's job is to fight, not to surrender. To continue fighting he had to attempt the maneuver.

When the Germans discovered that only sacrifice squads were left in the $500,000,000 Maginot fastnesses, in they poured through a gap gouged out at the Saar. They also crossed the Rhine at Neuf-Brisach, where floods from a dynamited French canal dam failed to deter them. Their bombers concentrated on rail traffic behind the fortresses and reported destroying 30 French railway cars, sending several loaded with munitions high in the air. Southward German motorized and nonmotorized columns "competed with each other in tremendous marches," said the exultant German communique.

Only near the sea was the French withdrawal from the Seine not an unrelieved debacle. There, from Cherbourg, Brest and St. Nazaire, fresh units of a new British Expeditionary Force, a "broomstick Army," began pouring in, true to British promise. Some were veterans of the ill-starred expedition to Norway. Some were survivors of the retreat to Dunkirk. As fast as their meagre equipment got ashore, these latecomers sped across Normandy and Poitou to meet the German tide. Those who had seen him before, even more than those who had not, longed for a crack at "Jerry." But by the time that the new B. E. F.--little but the best that Britain had to offer --reached the front, the front itself was disintegrating. French units, broken by battle and fatigue, were disjointed and out of touch. Between them German motorcycle scouts and armored units penetrated at will. Until that time there had always been an off chance that the German command would make a misstep, that the German supply system under severe strain for five weeks might crack. But the point had come when the disorganization of the French Army, and the condition of all the roads behind its lines blocked with refugees, meant that General Weygand could no longer issue orders with effect. The French military machine no longer functioned.

The Last Appeals. Before this point was reached, grim-lipped little Premier Paul Reynaud turned to the wounded and dismayed British Empire, to the angered, sickened U. S., with final appeals for aid.

Prime Minister Churchill and Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax gave Paul Reynaud Britain's answer before the yielding of Paris was announced. Britain, they promised, would strip her home defenses of every plane, tank, cannon, machine gun, rifle, bomb, shell, cartridge, grenade and man that could be transported immediately into France. Britain would fling open her vast war chest and spend at once, in a few days, munitions money earmarked for months and years ahead.

To the President of the U. S. the spokesman of France cried out: "Our fight, each day more painful, has no further sense if in continuing we do not see even far away the hope of a common victory growing. . . .

"It is necessary that clouds of warplanes from across the Atlantic come to crush the evil force which dominates Europe.

"Despite our reverses, the power of the democracies remains immense. We have the right to hope that the day is coming when all that power shall be placed in force. . . . The world must know the sufferings of France. The world must know what they owe her. The hour has come for them to pay their debt. ...

"France, wounded, has the right to turn to the other democracies and to say: 'We have claims on you.' None of those with a sense of justice can deny this. But it is one thing to approve and another thing to act.

"We know what a high place ideals hold in the life of the great American people. Will they hesitate still to declare themselves against Nazi Germany?''

President Roosevelt's reply was that the U. S. Congress alone, not he, had power to declare war; but that every ton and ounce and horsepower of help, short of an expeditionary force, would be sent.

Neither Reynaud nor Churchill cracked. France was defeated by arms in the field, not by the despair of her leaders or her ally. Paul Reynaud told President Lebrun that he would resign before he would let France surrender. But General Weygand and Vice Premier Petain, an even older soldier (who in 1916 said, "They shall not pass" at Verdun and made it stick), knew that France's Armies were already crushed beyond repair.

Then Paul Reynaud resigned.

Petain and Peace. Old Marshal Petain accepted M. Lebrun's charge to form a Cabinet dominated by military men to effect the capitulation.

Britain had already announced that, come what might, she was "prepared to continue the war just so long as it may be necessary to secure the downfall of our opponent, even though it may take years to accomplish that task,"and added: "Germany has used up her resources on a reckless scale in the present offensive, and though even these resources may not yet be exhausted, unless she can defeat the British Empire and its Allies within the next few months, her chance of defeating them at all will have vanished." There was no more that Britain could do except to begin hastily re-embarking her second B. E. F. at Bordeaux, the third British Army that had had to be rescued in two months' time.

Meanwhile Petain formed his surrender Cabinet and, during a crashing thunderstorm at Bordeaux, broadcast to his people:

"French men and women:

"... I have been thinking of those who have been fighting true to their old military traditions, against an enemy of huge numerical superiority. I also think of those old combatants whom I commanded during the last war. I have given myself to France to better her situation at this grave hour. . . .

"It is with a heavy heart that I tell you today that we must stop the fight.

"I sent a message to the enemy yesterday to ask him if he would meet with me, as between one soldier and another after the fight, and honorably to seek a way to put an end to hostilities."

But not yet was the French Army's agony over. To Marshal Petain's plea, sent to Hitler through their mutual friend, Dictator Franco of Spain whom Petain had once taught the art of war, Adolf Hitler's reply was: drop your arms or be killed. He sent for Benito Mussolini to meet him in Munich to discuss matters on June 18 (125th anniversary of Napoleon's downfall at Waterloo). Surrender, not with honor but unconditional, was reported to be the German's ultimatum to France. Meantime, the war "for which France asked" would continue.

The heart of France gave one more convulsive spurt at this treatment. Said the new Foreign Minister Paul Baudoin, a Reynaud protege and World War I ace: "We are never ready to accept shameful conditions. . . . The French whole people will know what to do."

"What was our crime?" asked a French broadcaster of the world. "It was simply a belief in a way of life that our experience had proved to be suddenly unadapted to the times."

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