Strange Defeat
I wouldn’t have been surprised to have woken up dead yesterday.
When I was a kid I was occasionally plunged into a state of terror by the monthly tornado siren tests that were an inconsistent feature in my life due to frequent familial oscillations between locales prone to tornadoes and locales which were gratefully tornado-free. A part of my lizard brain was permanently keyed up by the relentless presence in the national news of the Soviet Union and their bottomless store of nuclear weapons—enough destructive power, we were frequently told, to fry every human being on earth several times over.
That fear got old and tired after Ronald Reagan had flogged us all with it for eight years, so it doesn’t hold the same electric charge it once did. Mostly I view the possibility with sadness now. Presumably smart people are working hard to prevent a holocaust, but after fifty-two years it just feels like Chekov’s gun, and it’s hard to imagine how we as a species will ever get it behind us.
I’ve struggled for a long while trying to figure out how to dip a spoon into the bubbling stew of current events. I don’t have any particular expertise in any of the things happening now, and I don’t possess a crystal ball, though I do have some nice crystal decanters in which can be seen visions of bourbon, whatever that’s worth. It has long been my objective here to avoid getting tangled in the sort of breathless analyses and hyper-confident prognostications that are the grist for the daily media mill, on the basis that a) there’s already too much of it and b) it’s almost all horseshit. There’s a third point as well: that we all need a break and why don’t I just provide one?
And so I’ve done week in and week out, for almost two years now. I feel like I’ve earned some kind of trophy, though I note none is forthcoming. I can only assume the academy is busy with something else. There’s a lot to be busy with. So much, in fact, that I just can’t ignore it anymore. If we haven’t yet reached an inflection point, it’s hard to imagine how we can go on much longer without a whole flock of the goddamn things flying past like a murmuration of starlings.
There’s a book that keeps shoving to the front of the crowd milling around in my head: Strange Victory, by Ernest May. I read this book many years ago, for reasons I don’t remember—I probably just liked the cover. The book is to World War II what Barbara Tuchman’s The Guns of August was to World War I—an exhaustive political and military history of the events leading up to the German invasion of France in May of 1940. It sits quietly on my bookshelf between other more rollicking volumes but there’s a cautionary tale to be had in May’s work for anyone who cares to wade through its dense pages.
The glib take on the Battle of France is encapsulated in jokes like this one:
Q: Why do French tanks have rear view mirrors?
A: To see the battle.
Cute, no? It’s not especially fair, especially coming from Americans—we’ve never spent seventy-five years living next to a powerful foe bent on our complete annihilation. We haven’t been invaded by a foreign power, in fact, for over two hundred years. France, on the other hand, was invaded thrice since Germany congealed out of a group of rival statelets in 1870.
Moreover, in May and June of 1940 French suffered more casualties than the U.S. would for the entire war, with over 90,000 killed outright, and unlike the British there was no island for them to retreat to once their position had become hopelessly outflanked. Many French continued the war even after the surrender, which was a much bigger gamble than serving as a British or American or Canadian soldier. The French partisan captured by German forces could be sure of a bullet in the brain. And yet a huge number of French citizens took the risk—a minimum of a hundred thousand; maybe more than double that. I can’t say anything kind about the Vichy government, but the French people were not cowardly.
The great irony of the Battle of France was that on paper the French were also superior in most of the ways that counted. The army they fielded, alongside the British Expeditionary Force (BEF), was slightly smaller than the German army sent to defeat them, but their equipment was arguably better, they were perceived to be better trained, their fortifications were daunting, and they were fighting a defensive war. The rule of thumb for armies on the offense is to field soldiers at a three to one ratio to the defenders, and the Germans had nothing like those numbers. So why, and this is the central question the book attempts to answer, were the French so rapidly defeated?
It’s a disservice to May to try to summarize his almost five hundred pages in two of three of my own, but there are a few points worth highlighting.
Above all the French failure was a product of overconfidence. May writes:
As an American writing in the decade of the Gulf War and the Kosovo affair, I cannot resist noting that French leaders and the French public believed before May 1940 that France, as a result of having learned the lessons of the Great War, had mastered the keys to victory in any future war. Advanced technology, manifest in the Maginot Line and the Somua and Char B tank, would ensure military success with minimum loss of life.
The French saw two major avenues for invasion between Germany and France—across the French/German border, which was in 1940 probably the most heavily fortified border on earth; and through central Belgium, which would give the French an opportunity to take the fight to the Germans outside their own territory. Between these two potential fronts lay the Ardennes, a hilly, heavily wooded region widely considered impenetrable by tanks. At least, France believed it was impenetrable. The Germans not so much.
So certain were the French of the impermeability of the Ardennes that they ignored the German buildup on the far side of the forest, as well as the actual German war plans when they fell into Allied hands just a few months before the invasion.1 For several days after the offensive began, neither the French nor the British took seriously the reports streaming in from the weak guard units posted in the Ardennes, assuming the attacks there some sort of feint.
As it turned out, it was the major axis of the invasion and the Allied assumption that the attack would come further north meant that within a few short weeks the cream of both the French army as well as the BEF were trapped in a pocket around the French city of Dunkirk, just west of Belgium on the North Atlantic coast. Both armies were utterly defeated and the British survived only by way of a miraculous evacuation involving every ship and boat the country could muster, right down to pleasure yachts and fishing vessels. France, unable to take their country with them across the Channel, was doomed.
All of this is fairly well-known to armchair generals the world over. The lesser-known story May tells is of the political turmoil that unfolded in the weeks and days before the invasion.Between March of 1938 and the fall of France in June of 1940 France went through three Prime Ministers. The last of these, Paul Reynaud, had only held the office for less than six weeks when the invasion began. Even more shocking, feuding between Reynaud and France’s Minister of Defense, Édouard Daladier, as well as between Renaud and the chief of the French armies, Maurice Gamelin, meant that the French government was in a complete uproar on the day the Germans crossed the border:
The file Renaud read aloud offered a point-by-point indictment of General Gamelin, particularly on a charge of not anticipating Germany’s move into Scandinavia and not showing sufficient diligence in managing the Allied campaign there. Daladier seemed to Deputy Prime Minister Chautemps to be listening “disdainfully,” and when Renaud finished, Daladier asked for the floor. He said that Gamelin might have faults but, in the particular case of the Scandinavian expedition, deserved “nothing but praise.” He continued, “If he is guilty, then I am.” He tendered his own resignation. A long silence followed. Reynaud, “white-faced… slowly closed his file and said emphatically: “As I cannot make my point of view prevail, I am no longer Head of the Government.” Afterward he called upon President Lebrun at the Élysée Palace and announced that he intended to go to the Chamber of Deputies and try to form another cabinet without Daladier.
Hence, on the following morning, when Germany’s attack commenced, France was technically without a government.
Across the Channel, England’s Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain also chose the day of the invasion, May 10, 1940, to step down from his position. The Allies were leaderless going into the great crisis of their age.
The situation France faced in the spring of 1940 is different from the one we face now. In truth there are probably more similarities with the situation in which Russia now finds itself—having launched a war with the smug confidence that the fighting would be over in a few days, the brittleness of the Russian army has been revealed by a determined and resourceful foe. Our problem isn’t that we’re unified behind an illusion—it’s that we’re disunified on practically every matter of consequence, as well as many of no consequence at all. If Joe Biden was seen to be eating dark chocolate half the country would loudly proclaim the superiority of milk chocolate.2
And now in the midst of our frenetic self-immolation we find the old culture wars reignited—abortion, contraception, gay rights. For a lot of people this represents a step toward an idealized Christian society in which every tongue will confess the lordship of Jesus.3 Putting aside Jesus’ silence on the matter of American politics in the 21st century (a silence more eloquent than the supposed silence of the U.S. Constitution on the matter of abortion), it’s quite obvious to the rest of us that the overturning of Roe vs. Wade will in fact unleash a torrent of pain, the ruination of families, a welter of hatred and recrimination, and, as concerns me in the context of this piece, the further degradation of our ability to respond to the roiling crises that beset us on all sides.
It’s a miracle that Putin’s Russia didn’t launch any new horrors, nuclear or otherwise, on yesterday’s anniversary of the defeat of Nazi Germany, but there’s always the next day (today is, as it happens, the anniversary of the invasion of France). In the same way the wobbles of a skateboard are self-reinforcing when you’re plunging down a hill, so much of what happens to us now stems from relatively small fluctuations; the actions of individuals rather than the democratic forces we supposedly cherish. The pending death of Roe vs. Wade, with immediate, dire consequences for millions of Americans, for instance, was predicated on the untimely death of a single person—Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Certainly there were other events before that—the unconscionable theft of what should have been Merrick Garland’s seat is a ringing example—but what all of those national failures add up to is a sort of brittleness that can be suddenly exposed by a single event.
What other brittle surfaces are we standing on? What happens if we do wind up in a shooting war with Russia, as seems to be the vector we are surely on? It’s easy to look at the battlefield successes of Ukraine and conclude that Russia is a paper tiger, but there stands France as a cautionary tale for us. We were similarly confident we could install democratic governments in Iraq and Afghanistan. We don’t even have to look that far backward though. The destruction of Russia’s illusions fills the rear view mirror, and their rude awakening might well turn into our problem.
The future is inherently unknowable, but the crumbling foundations of American power are manifestly visible. The piss poor response this country mounted against Covid-19 ought to have been a wake-up call: As a country, we are no longer capable of dealing with serious crises, and the crises are mounting fast. What’s worse, behind everything else looms the colossal specter of climate change, a nonpareil crisis which cannot be addressed or even glimpsed while we’re busy failing the intermediate tests.
We’re fractured and adrift, and only luck has prevented us from running aground yet. It’s often said that we lack clarity because of the slow-moving nature of the crises we face—the old frog in the pot conundrum. Our only hope, it would seem, is the chance for a moment sharp enough to shock us from our slumber without killing us. Given the horrors we’ve already slept through the aperture for such an event seems narrow indeed.
The full plans were in the possession of a German officer when his plane went down over Belgium in January of 1940. They were captured intact but deemed by the Allies to be a ruse.
Not kidding. C.f. kale and lattes.
There is a billboard near Dalton, Georgia which says exactly this, adding in fiery red letters, “EVEN THE DEMOCRATS!” as though half the people in America are de facto godless monsters.
Oh, that billboard. It alarms me every time I drive past.