ANOTHER STORY

Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 3, Issue 267, 5 February 1941, Page 6

ANOTHER STORY

FRENCH GENERAL STAFF HAD PLANNED TO MEET BLITZKRIEG Two j'oars before the Avar* broke out the French General Staff, in its lectures on strategy at the famous •■"School of Marshals'' in Paris,, the. Centre des Halites Ktudes Mi I Haired liad actually foreseen tlie exact circumstances in "which the German blitzkrieg of May, 19-10, took plaec, writes George Slocombe. in tlie Sunday Express. More than thai, it had Avorked out a plan of operations which included the, advance of the Allied Armies into Belgium, the pivoting of the Whole Allied front on a point near Sedan, and the occupation of a new defence line from Antwerp through Nanuir to the river Disle. - These facts, hitherto unpublished. Were revealed to me this week by Genera] Legentilhomme, late com-mander-in-chief of the Allied forces in British and French Somali land', Avho has just arrived in London to join General de Gaulle, after, incidentally, escaping drowning in the Empress of Britain. "What is even more remarkable." added the general, "the French strategists in 1937 assumed that Germany would attack with 05 divisions of which six would be armoured. Actually, the blitzkrieg was fought With 03 divisions, five of which were armoured." The element of surprise, on which j Hitler has so often counted with success, was lacking in the case of France. Why, then, were the French defeated? General de Gaulle, in his brilliant book. "The Army of the Future," just published in English by Hutchinson, suggests some of the reasons. Here is the explanation advanced by his latest lieu-

tenant. "The original strategy was wrong" continued General Legentilehomme. "Wc ought never to have advanced into Belgium. We ought never to have left our strpng positions along the Belgian frontier to advance into a country "with which we were unfamiliar, in which we had' no prepared positions, and attempt to defend a line -which, once pierced by the enemy, would have to be abandoned . This alert and confident commander replied forcibly to Marshal Petain's broadcast complaint that the French Army was overwhelmed bv the enemy's superiority in men and machines. "•When Avar broke out in September, 15)39," he said, "the French Army was the most magnificent, the best armed and equipped, that France had ever possessed. Marshal Petain states that we suffered from an enemy superiority in machines of four to one. But in 191-1 wc fought a German mechanical superiority not of four to one, but of 10 to one. . "The history ol" the French defeat makes it clearer than ever how great a soldier JofTre was.

"When he was beaten to Belgium he did not retire on the Somme like Waygand, He retreated all the way back to the Seine and the Marne, and prepared his resistance oi\_ these rivers. If necessary he would have defended Paris, house by house and street by street, as AVavgand should have done last June, and as the French nation expected of hull. J off re Nibbled' "In December, 1914, when JofYrc M r as told that the guns and shells he had been clamouring for coultT. not be delivered before December, 1915, what did he do? He did not remain idle in his trenches like the army of 1939 in thei Maginot Line.i He kept the fighting spirit of his army active by constant nibbling at the enemy, with the result that •when the full force of the German' machine was exerted against vis at Verdun in the following year we had an army already hardened in "warfare and ready to take the sternest blows without flinching. "In September. 1939. the morale of the French Army was good; It remained good f/itil JanuP.ry, 19 !0, and after that it diminished steadily. It had been mined from within by idleness, lack of miHtainactivity, boredom and the propaganda of the Fifth Columnists among the soldiers' iamilios. "The destruction of the morale o! the French Army was one of the causes of its defeat. The other was the deficiency in leadership, the reliance on old generals out of contact with mi;dem ideas. The last act of folly was to send for an man like Waygand, who had been five years in retirement and who could not possibly realise the needs of the situation. The obvious manJter' •succeed Gamelin was Georges, but I amt^i^^^Bfcßaladi'er