REPORTING IN FRANCE

Greymouth Evening Star, 18 September 1940, Page 11

REPORTING IN FRANCE

LONDON JOURNALIST’S STORY

The French Army liked to gather its war reporters in batches and send them somewhere where nothing was happening. When the great German push on Holland, Belgium and Luxemburg began, the British, American and French reporters in Paris raised such a howl that the army had to send us somewhere, wrote the correspondent of a London newspaper. So they packed us off in bunches of three. Two others and I were the fortunate ones. We arrived on Monday, May 13, at General Huntziger’s army headquarters near Vouzies, a small town 24 miles south of Sedan. " A staff major gave us the news. “To-morrow morning the general will see you,” he said. “You will have grandstand seats for the greatest battle in history. We have left the Boche come so far. To-night or to-morrow morning he will come to our resistance line. He will be thrown back.” In came the general’s order of the day: “For three days our cavalry has had hard fighting in Belgium, fulfilling its mission ... I order now that there will be no withdrawal of any kind. . . ” The major continued: “The Germans are ingenious devils. They have been sending troops in old-type civilian aeroplanes to take our bridgeheads and outposts. When they land they burn the aeroplanes. They are using parachutists and bombers low flying in waves. They appear to have a larger number than we suspected of very heavy tanks. Some of these tanks carry big guns, 105 mm. (4.1 in. • “They also appear to have huge lorries carrying telescopic steel bridges. Yes, they are a modern army. But soon they will reach the resistance line. We will have them.” No staff officers turned up next morning, but as we sat and waited in the small, dirty and depressing square, it became obvious that a great battle had begun, and it was not going well for the French. Mud-stained poilus came walking into the square. First one, then three, then a steady trickle. Soon there were a few motor-cyclists among them. ATTACKED WITH NOISE. I learned there how General Corap’s Ninth Army had broken. How one of his divisions was strung out over a 25-mile front and was called on to face the most concentrated horror attack in history. The Senegalese, those huge, black soldiers, fierce, brave men, who love children and their white officers, were feared and hated by the Germans in the last war. But this time the Germans attacked the Senegalese with noise.

They sent over dive-bombers with whistles attached to the bombs that made.the noise of screeching devils. They sent over big tanks with noise amplifiers attached to the exhausts. The French troops are brave men. Their generals are now defeated, but the French soldier is not defeated. The men cannot be blamed. The organisation can. One Vouxiers straggler said: “Where are our aeroplanes, where are our tanks, where are our anti-aircraft guns? They told us we had as many as the Boche. ...” They had been consistently misinformed. They were badly equipped and mentally unprepared to meet the German steel battering ram. The main reason for France’s defeat was, in my opinion, the Maginot Line. It coloured the thinking processes of the French General Staff. We must never think of the seas that surround us an an unbreakable wall or barrier to the enemy. No wall is unbreakable, and the lesson of France shows that the man fighting behind walls is no match for the man who fights in the open. The French considered this war in terms of fixed fronts. They planned a war like the last war. Worst of all, because there was a Maginot Line, the French Army had a tendency not to plan at all. We must not, for our own sakes, believe that France was weak, or that she did not try. . France was both strong and brave, but an astute enemy found the weak points in her strength. We must learn our lesson quickly and thoroughly in order to keep our Empire and to repay, by giving Franee back to the French, the French soldiers who have died in our cause.