The World at War

Forlorn monsters today,

in May 1940, these forts of the Maginot line

were France's first-line defence against the Germans.

Half a million French soldiers lurked beneath these man-made hills.

These were the most extensive,

the most elaborate forts ever constructed.

Here the guns would halt the Hun -

provided the Hun came this way.

"Thank God for the French army,"

said Winston Churchill when Hitler came to power.

But in 1933

the French army was no longer the superlative weapon it once had been.

French military manuals devoted page affer page

to the tactics of the First War,

although Hitler had said, "The next war will be very different from the last."

The French had helped introduce the tank and the aeroplane,

but now did little to extend their use.

They had pioneered motor transport in warfare,

but went back now to relying on railways and the horse -

especially the horse.

lt was a period of very deep decay,

probably caused by the excess of effort during the First World War.

We suffered from an illness which is not peculiar to the French -

the illness of having been victorious

and believing that we were right and very clever.

Victory is a very dangerous opportunity.

France between the wars was deeply divided.

Factions clashed, alliances altered, cabinets came and went in the cascade,

some lasting a few hours, some a few months.

Rarely did one last a whole year.

On the very day Hitler came to power France was without a government.

lt was again without one when he marched into Austria five years later.

The Leff in France was concerned more

with hounding rogues in high places at home,

than curbing fascism elsewhere.

The Right so hated the Leff

it was prepared to countenance dictatorship.

As early as 1934 the victor of Verdun, Marshal Pétain,

was proposed as France's saviour from communism,

although he was then nearly 80.

These deep divisions were to fetter France

when she faced the need to re-arm.

The whole of the possessing classes,

the Right if you like,

preferred the idea of the Germans

to their own communists.

You didn't have to walk round these streets

and see "pour qui et pourquoi" written on them,

or the hammer and sickle, to realise nobody was going to liff a finger.

France in the '30s built a series of great forts

along her frontier with Germany,

and because her war minister then happened to be one André Maginot,

these forts came to be known as the Maginot line.

The Maginot forts were truly 20th-century wonders.

Electric trains took the troops from barracks to gun turret,

from arsenal to canteen.

There were cinemas underground, sun-ray rooms, air conditioning,

the lot.

Theirs was a vast Jules Verne type of world

hundreds of feet below ground.

They called it The Shield of France.

The Maginot line failed to protect all of France's eastern flank.

lt was only 87 miles long

and it stopped 250 miles short of the Channel.

Should the alarm ever have to sound in grim earnest,

French strategists argued that

their troops would need to confront the Germans on Belgian, if not German, soil.

Besides, to extend the Maginot line along the Belgian frontier

would not only be expensive,

but would make the Belgians think that if war came, France would forsake them.

The folly of this thinking was shown up in 1936

when, without consulting the French,

the Belgian King Leopold opted for neutrality

and closed his borders, even to French military obserVers.

All too late France began extending the Maginot line to the sea.

But by May 1940 it was far from finished.

France had suffered a terrible loss of life in the Great War.

Now French military thinking became wholly defensive,

forgetting Napoleon's favourite maxim:

"The side that stays within its fortifications is beaten."

Since the French spurned any notion

of taking the offensive,

the Maginot line ironically protected Germany better than it protected France.

A German colonel, Heinz Guderian, the year the Maginot line was completed,

published a book with a prophetic title: Achtung Panzer.

A book never properly studied by the French or English general staff,

yet these pages expound a new kind of warfare -

the concentrated use of tanks with infantry and air force in close support:

Blitzkrieg.

We had had tanks in the First World War,

we knew all the difficulties of the game,

while the Germans, who didn't have them,

had the feeling of those who are attacked by tanks.

And while we considered that the tanks were a little awkward

and difficult to use,

the Germans jumped at the new weapons with the appetite of the new rich.

Paris, July 14, 1939.

The last Bastille Day parade of the Third Republic.

A few days earlier, Britain's war minister, visiting Paris, had said,

"France has the greatest army in the world."

Like the parade itself, such statements were meant merely to raise morale.

Parisians had hardly got back from their holidays

before they found themselves once more at war

with their traditional foe.

But whereas in 1914 the cry had been "On to Berlin",

this time it was "Let's get it over with."

lronically, French mobilisation was too efficient.

The call-up of skilled technicians

brought many vital war industries almost to a halt.

lt was only affer weeks of confusion that these men were released.

Nor was France going to war united.

The bitternesses of French politics continued.

Ministers looked to their own futures instead of their country's

and many took their cue from such leadership.

Paris didn't alter much with the coming of war, save in appearance.

The most popular song that autumn of 1939 was Paris Will Always Be Paris.

While their Polish allies were routed in the East,

the French, like the British, did little in the West.

There was the so-called Sarre offensive -

the only French offensive, in fact, of the war.

A few French divisions advanced five miles,

but they didn't even try to penetrate the Siegfried line,

at that time still unfinished.

And while Poland fought on,

there were no German tanks at all on the Western Front.

The newsreel commentators of the day, though, didn't doubt the French resolve.

We read the communiqués from the French High Command.

This is the living story behind those brief, unvarnished reports.

Our cameramen in the advanced lines on German territory

watch obserVation posts

at the bridge over the Rhine between Kehl and Strasbourg.

This was a German railway station, now in the hands of French troops.

From fortified outposts the vigilant watch is never relaxed.

The Maginot line, built as the first line of defence for France,

has become the second line behind the attack.

The gradual but steady advance of French troops

has brought their camouflaged artillery in range of the Siegfried outposts.

There is no haste, only a grim, relentless pressure

on the Nazi emplacements.

Metre by metre the poilus are moving forward.

lf the French army would have attacked at the beginning of September

with their very strong superiority

in division, in armoured cars -

we lacked all armoured cars on the Western Front at that time -

in artillery and air force,

the German forces on the so-called Western Front

could stand no more than one or two weeks.

Before Poland surrendered,

the French commander ordered his men back behind the Maginot line -

a withdrawal the Germans did nothing to prevent.

One Frenchman wrote at the time,

"Affer the prologue of the phoney offensive,

we were ripe for the phoney war."

For several minutes each day the Maginot guns boomed out,

usually to impress visitors such as the Duke of Windsor.

Little attempt was made to harass the enemy.

Even bombing the Ruhr was forbidden

in case the Luffwaffe retaliated against French factories.

Journalists were taken up to the lines to see the inactivity.

l stayed at an obserVation post on the Rhine

watching the Germans washing, playing football,

and l said to the sentry,

"Why don't you shoot them? Why don't you shoot at them?"

"No," he said, "They're behaving all right."

"They don't shoot at us, why should we shoot at them?"

Life at the front was dreary and drab.

Badly paid, leave became an obsession for the French soldier

and was used mainly to make a little on the side.

The winter of 1939 was the coldest for half a century.

Even the Channel froze at Boulogne.

The French halted work on the Maginot extension.

The Germans, however, forged ahead with their plans.

As winter wore on, French morale sank.

Discipline deteriorated and drunkenness became rife.