I visited once the famous deep cellar vaults of the Bank of France where they kept the gold, and while walking through the doorway, piercing its twenty-foot thick steel and concrete walls, I asked why they needed such formidable and expensive protection. Was it against the Germans? It could not be, because if ever the Germans occupied Paris, as they do today, no underground fortification such as these vaults could prevent them from getting the gold, especially since the Germans would be holding as hostages the men with the keys. No, it was not against a foreign enemy; the vaults were built against the Paris mob, against revolutionaries, against another 1789.
This spirit was shared by many French senior officers, and it is ironic that their conspiracy to bring about a feigned defeat in order to overthrow the Republic was greatly helped by the defection of the Parisian Communist troops in Corap’s Ninth Army at the Meuse. The very workingmen who had most to lose by the fall of the Republic and the establishment of a Fascist France, helped bring about their own downfall under the mistaken guidance of Moscow. The treachery to France came from the two opposite poles of French society.
Q. How did this treason manifest itself in the operations of the army?
A. I will give you one example, from personal experience and the testimony of French friends. You remember the Germans, when they broke through the Low Countries and across the Meuse, dashed with their Panzer divisions for the coast, pell-mell, at top speed, not bothering or wasting time at first to widen their column of penetration, which was still only a few miles wide for much of its length when the first German detachments reached the sea at Abbeville. North of this thin German column was the strong French Army under General Prioux, while south of it were the main French forces. It was the constant fervid hope of the French that their armies would cut across the German column, roll it up in two directions, and win not merely the battle of France but perhaps the war.
Military experts, foremost our own, thought it possible; some held it probable. This hope reached its climax after Weygand made an inspection flight to the Low Countries and returned to Paris. That day at the Ministry of Information as I was waiting in the office for Colonel Schieffer, in charge of American correspondents, the gaunt, one-eyed, black-monocled, fiercely patriotic Colonel came in with a bang, dropped his customary stillness and exclaimed: “Weygand says he won’t leave a German alive, not one. He’s going to cut the column and bottle them up and he says there won’t be left one living.” Like wildfire the word of Weygand spread through the building, through Paris, through France. It was the only bright moment in the whole Battle of France.
But it did not happen. Why didn’t it? A captain from General Prioux’s staff may have the answer. This is the story he told. “After the Germans reached Abbeville and cut us off from the South, General Prioux called us all together one day and said, ‘I have orders from General Headquarters that you must blow up your tanks and guns and retreat as speedily as possible to the seashore. I must tell you that personally I do not approve these orders. I am convinced we are strong enough to make an offensive southward and cut the Germans and reunite with our troops in France. However, orders are orders and one does not discuss orders. You will do as I have told you and I shall stay here where I am.’
“We did as we were told and Prioux became a prisoner of war. That was our last chance. The failure to cut the German column was the end of the Battle of France. We could have done it; we were ordered not to.”
Counterattack, always we waited for the famous French counterattack, the fulfillment of the French Army tradition of aggression, à la baionette! but it never came. Orders stopped it.
Q. Who gave the orders? Pétain was not an active officer then.
A. No, but General George was. I want to give you my evidence in the form of a firsthand quotation from a French friend, but before I do so it is important to point out that between General Gamelin, commander in chief of all the Allied land forces, and General George, commander of the French armies fighting against Germany, there existed a jealousy so strong that it amounted to hatred, and their headquarters staffs became so permeated with it that they actually withheld information from each other.