Weygand replaces Gamelin

On 18 May 1940, eight days after the start of the German offensive in the west, the French prime minister, Paul Reynaud, reshuffled his government. He took over the portfolio of national defence and war himself, moved the previous minister, Édouard Daladier, to foreign affairs, and made the 84-year-old Marshal Philippe Pétain, the hero of Verdun, recalled from the embassy in Madrid, deputy prime minister. Georges Mandel, once the closest collaborator of Georges Clemenceau, became minister of the interior. The following evening Reynaud dismissed the Commander-in-Chief, General Maurice Gamelin, and entrusted the command to the 73-year-old General Maxime Weygand, summoned from Beirut. The two men who in 1918 had embodied victory were now to restore the French people’s faith in themselves.

These events are sometimes spread across two dates: 17 May, when Reynaud is said to have “formed a new government” including Pétain, and 18 May, when Weygand is said to have replaced Gamelin. In reality no new cabinet was formed; the one Reynaud had formed in March was reshuffled. According to French sources, on 17 May Reynaud summoned Weygand and obtained Pétain’s consent, but the government changes were formally carried out on 18 May. Weygand flew into France only on 19 May; the decree appointing him was signed that evening, and he actually took over command on 20 May.

A week of defeat

Reynaud had long wanted to be rid of Gamelin. He considered him a cautious general lacking in initiative, and said of him that he was “a prefect, a bishop, but not a leader”. On 9 May, at a cabinet meeting, he demanded his dismissal, and when Daladier came to the general’s defence he announced that the cabinet would resign. The next morning the Germans attacked the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg, President Albert Lebrun persuaded the prime minister to stay on, and the dispute was shelved. Gamelin set the Dyle Plan in motion, and the best French armies and the British Expeditionary Force moved into Belgium.

The main German blow, however, came through the Ardennes. On 13 May General Heinz Guderian’s corps forced the Meuse at Sedan, and over the next two days the French Ninth Army ceased to exist as a coherent force. On the morning of 15 May Reynaud told Winston Churchill over the telephone that France was beaten. On 16 May in Paris, during a conference with the British prime minister, Gamelin admitted that he had no strategic reserve, while archives were being burned in the garden of the Foreign Ministry. That same day the Allied armies in Belgium were ordered to withdraw from the line of the River Dyle, and on 17 May the Germans entered Brussels. The German panzer divisions were now heading not for Paris but westwards, towards the Channel. On 18 May their spearheads were at Cambrai, Saint-Quentin and Péronne.

The marshal and the general

Reynaud was looking for names that would reassure the country and parliament. Pétain was France’s most popular soldier. At Verdun in 1916 he had organised a defence that withstood the heaviest offensive of that war, and in 1917 he had put down the mutinies in the army without shedding as much blood as had been feared. Since March 1939 he had been ambassador to the government of General Francisco Franco. In September 1939 he had turned down an offer to join Daladier’s government, and at the beginning of May 1940 he had refused Reynaud too. Now he agreed, although according to accounts from his circle Franco advised him against returning to France. He declined, however, to take the war ministry. He became deputy prime minister, alongside Camille Chautemps, who kept that post, and minister without portfolio.

The reshuffle affected several ministries. Reynaud, who since March had been both prime minister and foreign minister, handed diplomacy to Daladier and took over national defence and war himself, that is, direct oversight of the armed forces. Mandel, a resolute advocate of fighting to the end, moved from the colonial ministry to the interior, and the colonies went to Louis Rollin. As early as 10 May representatives of the right-wing opposition, Louis Marin and Jean Ybarnégaray, had joined the government as ministers of state. In this way the cabinet was meant to look like a government of national unity. According to French historians, Pétain’s appointment was very well received in the country, in parliament and in the press. Reynaud, like most politicians, saw the old marshal above all as a symbol. He did not imagine that Pétain would play any independent role.

In 1918 Weygand had been chief of staff to Marshal Ferdinand Foch, and it was he who read out the armistice terms to the Germans in the railway carriage in the forest of Compiègne. In 1931–1935 he had been the designated commander-in-chief of the French army in wartime; he then retired, and in August 1939 Daladier recalled him to service and sent him to Beirut as commander of French forces in the eastern Mediterranean. On 17 May he received Reynaud’s summons and set off for France by air. He reached Paris on 19 May. According to French accounts, that day he told members of the government: “I know Foch’s secret.”

Gamelin’s last order

On the morning of 19 May, while Weygand was still on his way, Gamelin issued his last directive, Personal and Secret Instruction No. 12. He began with the reservation that he did not wish to interfere in the conduct of the battle, which was the business of the commander of the North-Eastern Front, General Alphonse Georges. Nevertheless he proposed what many regarded as the only way out: the armies cut off in Belgium and northern France were to strike south, towards the Somme, while the forces being assembled south of the breach were to attack northwards, into the flank of the German wedge. The German panzer divisions had outrun their infantry, and their flanks were poorly covered. “Everything is a matter of hours,” Gamelin wrote. It was in practice his first operational order of the battle, issued nine days after it had begun.

In the afternoon Weygand met Gamelin at his headquarters in the Château de Vincennes. Gamelin briefed him on the situation, the extent of the breach at Sedan and the lack of reserves. According to Gamelin’s memoirs, Weygand spoke disparagingly of the politicians in the course of their conversation. In the evening Reynaud signed a decree making Weygand Chief of the General Staff of National Defence and Commander-in-Chief in all theatres of operations. Gamelin left without a word of protest. The new commander, so it was later said, decided that the first thing he needed was a good night’s sleep.

Three days’ delay

On 20 May Weygand suspended Gamelin’s order. He wanted first to see the situation with his own eyes and talk to the commanders. He went to Georges’s headquarters at La Ferté-sous-Jouarre, and on 21 May flew north over territory that the Germans had already partly overrun. His aircraft landed on the abandoned airfield of Norrent-Fontes. At Ypres he conferred with King Leopold III of the Belgians and the commander of the 1st Army Group, General Gaston Billotte. The commander of the British force, Lord Gort, who had been informed late of the place and time of the meeting, arrived after Weygand had left. That evening Billotte, the only commander in the north who knew the Commander-in-Chief’s intentions, was injured in a car accident, and he died on 23 May. On that same day, 21 May, the British counter-attacked at Arras on their own initiative.

On 22 May at Vincennes Weygand presented his plan to Reynaud and Churchill. The armies in the north, together with the British, were to strike south towards Bapaume and Cambrai, and a newly formed group on the Somme was to strike north, in order to cut off the German armoured columns. In essence it was the same idea that Gamelin had put forward three days earlier. Churchill backed it. Meanwhile, on the evening of 20 May, German tanks had reached the sea near Abbeville, and the Allied armies had been cut in two. In those few days the German infantry caught up with the tanks and strengthened the flanks of the corridor. The Weygand Plan was never carried out on the intended scale.

Historians judge these days differently. Many, especially in Britain and the United States, believe that changing the Commander-in-Chief in the middle of the battle and suspending Gamelin’s order cost the Allies two or three days, at a time when hours were decisive in this campaign. Others point out that Gamelin’s order came very late and that the armies in the north, tied down in fighting and on crowded roads full of refugees, were in any case unable to regroup quickly for an offensive. They agree that from 20 May the French no longer had the strength to reverse the course of the battle in the north.

The men of the armistice

The appointments of 18 and 19 May were meant to strengthen the will to fight, but they became the start of the road to the armistice. Pétain and Weygand soon concluded that the war was lost. On 21 May, in a speech to the Senate, Reynaud declared the fatherland in danger and spoke of “unbelievable mistakes” that had left the bridges over the Meuse intact. On 25 May, at a meeting of the War Committee at the Élysée Palace, the word “armistice” was spoken for the first time. The next day, in a note for the prime minister, Pétain blamed the defeat not on the commanders but on the failings of the whole nation and its “love of an easy life”, which foreshadowed the later ideology of Vichy.

At the end of May the Allied troops trapped around Dunkirk were evacuated across the Channel, while on the Somme and the Aisne Weygand was building a new line of defence out of strongpoints in villages and woods. On 5 June the Germans attacked it and soon broke through. From 12 June Weygand openly demanded a ceasefire, and Pétain supported him. On 16 June Reynaud resigned and Pétain became prime minister, with Weygand joining his government as minister of national defence. On 22 June the armistice with Germany was signed in the forest of Compiègne. Gamelin, Daladier, Mandel and Reynaud himself were soon arrested by the authorities headed by the man whom Reynaud had brought back from Madrid in May to save the Republic.