WESTERN THEATRE: Battle of France

France’s shoulders went back against the wall last week. No sooner had his Armies taken Dunkirk, consolidating his hold on the western coast of Europe “from the Arctic Circle to the north of the Somme,” than Adolf Hitler hurled them southward against the remaining Armies of Allied Generalissimo Maxime Weygand along a 160-mile front stretching from Abbeville to Rethel (see map).

Into the first assault went 40 German divisions, each 15,000 strong. In addition there were seven armored divisions, each with 450 tanks and a brigade of mechanized infantry, plus artillery and motorcycle fleets. After four days of furious fighting, 40 fresh divisions of German infantry and hundreds more tanks had joined in. East of Rethel, which was pounded only by artillery at first, a massive infantry assault plunged this week into the Argonne Forest, while an armored prong on the west pushed forward at the battle’s outset, reached and crossed the lower Seine south of Rouen. Clouds of parachute troops swarmed down on the plain of Champagne, south of Reims. As German operations developed, the Battle of France took its place as easily history’s hugest and, for France, most terrible.

Her chance of surviving it appeared to be a.fcout one in five. In spite of the mag-nit’ j and complexity of action. Generalissimo Weygand trained his guns calmly, recoiled only foot by foot, called upon his men to resist in the great French tradition.

Said he: “The future of France depends upon your tenacity. Hold tight to the soil of France. . . . Look only forward.” People who saw him in action described him as going about his work methodically at a kitchen table in a whitewashed room of a cottage near the front. As the battle reached crescendo, he declared to his men: “The enemy has suffered considerable losses. Soon he will reach the end of his effort.

This is the last quarter-hour. Hold fast.” Against 1,500,000 Germans who were engaged by week’s end, Weygand had not more than 60 French divisions, plus perhaps two British, two or three Polish, perhaps one Belgian (last week being reorganized, re-uniformed)-about 1,000,000 men in all, to face an enemy whose reserves alone were that many. He dared not weaken further the garrisons of the Maginot Line or his ten divisions facing the new Italian enemy. The Germans, he prophesied, would extend their attack until it stretched all the way to Switzerland in order to keep him from concentrating his strength on any main front. Such was the grim situation, as the field grey forces and their blue-grey machines moved on, kilometre after kilometre, toward the Seine, the Marne and Paris.

To meet the Germans’ mechanized attacks, which they launched first across the flat, marshy but (with Hitler’s usual weather luck) now fairly dry lower Somme Valley at Abbeville, Amiens and Peronne.

Weygand had his men disposed flexibly in depth-the approved “accordion” pattern of defense against mechanized power. Behind the front line were carefully camouflaged batteries of anti-tank and heavy machine guns, spaced fairly widely down the valley and highway pathways of assault. Successive, deeper rows of similar weapons were spaced more & more closely until they were backed finally by batteries of 75-mm. field guns, weapons able to knock out heaviest tanks when fired pointblank. The defense plan was to let heavy tanks push back into this final network, to have the advance units destroy motorcycles, armored cars, troop lorries following the heavy equipment.

Below Amiens and Peronne, these tactics caused the destruction of hundreds of German tanks in the first four days and the French gave up only a few miles of low ground as they withdrew forward units under terrible battering. But at the line’s western end, below Abbeville, where thin British regiments sweated under a torrid summer sun, a double armored column punched swiftly across the Somme delta to the Bresle River, then down to Forges-les-Eaux, a little spa east of Rouen. The Allied line closed behind these raiders, whose objective was to cut Paris’ communications to the sea and to force Wey-gand’s main retreat southeastward. Allied planes, bombing and machine-gunning, attacked the clanking intruders in swarms.

But the two steel prongs, composed of some 200 swift tanks each, followed by armored demolition units, pressed on to the outskirts of Rouen and to Gisors, only 35 miles from Paris. The evacuation of Paris began. The British announced they were rushing “important contingents” to France and sending more airplanes.

Meantime the main waves of Germany’s attack rose higher between Noyon on the Oise River and Soissons on the Aisne. The Oise valley was Hitler’s broadest, easiest approach to Paris. To command it fully his forces had to storm the high bridge called Chemin des Dames-just north of the Oise-Aisne Canal, and then win a foothold on the Aisne’s south bank, to converge on Compiegne and the scene of the 1918 Armistice’s signing. This they accomplished by the battle’s fifth evening, with appalling loss of life.

French officers reported that in some tight spots, going up steep ground under blinding barrage smoke, young German soldiers advanced clutching each other’s belts. They were mowed down in solid platoons. But the shouted war song of wave after wave of those still to come drowned out the dying screams of those ahead. Over this human pandemonium roared the steady thunder of German artillery blasting the infantry’s way, French artillery replying with sheets of screaming metal to stop the endless horde, and roaring swarms of airplanes from both sides diving and darting over the battle.

Throwing “everything” into his effort, by Sunday night Fuhrer Hitler had spent, according to French estimate, 400,000 lives since Tuesday, but still the young German masses surged forward, still their progress was aided by fresh mechanized fleets to supplement human flesh. Then the Germans began their double envelopment of Paris with a break-through from the Amiens region and up the Seine, west of the capital. That was when the Government left.

No conqueror had passed under the old grey Arc de Triomphe for 70 years. But Army machine-gun crews took up positions in the windows along the boulevards.

-“The Ladies’ Road,” so-called because along it ran a road built to the country home of Louis XV’s daughters.

f We’re Marching Into France-(TIME, June 10).