Gamelin, General Maurice-Gustave

Gamelin, General Maurice-Gustave (1872–1958). General Joseph Joffre's operations officer on the Marne in 1914, Gamelin enjoyed a meteoric rise in the French Army. His ascent owed as much to his front-line command of a brigade, a division, and then a corps in the First World War as to his talent for staff work and knack of making political friends in high places. Successfully pacifying the Druze tribes in Syria during the 1920s, Gamelin vaulted over many senior officers to become chief of the French army staff in 1931, and then C-in-C designate in January 1935, on the retirement of General Weygand.

Open-minded and professionally innovative, Gamelin raised the cry to refurbish the French armed forces and face the challenge of Nazi Germany. An enthusiastic republican, he gained the confidence of the left-wing Popular Front government which won the 1936 elections. Fashioning a close partnership with Daladier, the Radical Party leader and Popular Front defence minister, Gamelin supported a 14 billion franc rearmament drive initiated by the Popular Front in September 1936. He held progressive views on mechanization and air support for ground operations, but his efforts were hindered by the officer corps' caution and the French economy's weaknesses. In 1937 and 1938 realistic exercises were curtailed because of equipment shortages and bitter disputes over doctrine with the apostles of strategic bombing who controlled French air power.

On learning of the Nazi–Soviet Pact in August 1939, Gamelin told Daladier—by this time prime minister—that France could and should wage war if Hitler invaded Poland. But he also warned that neither France nor her British ally would be ready for many months to try to win a war. Furthermore, he overestimated Polish ability to resist Germany and he expected the neutral Belgians to join the Allies when hostilities began. On both these counts his judgement was seriously awry. The swift defeat of the Poles in the Polish campaign restricted Gamelin to a strategic and operational defensive in the west and saw him oppose risky strategies to carry the war to Germany via Scandinavia or the Balkans. During the phoney war of 1939–40 he strove single-mindedly to tighten Anglo-French co-operation and build a larger British Army on the Continent.

Belgium proved the weak link in the Allied lines as well as in Gamelin's thinking. The Belgian frontier was not sealed with Maginot Line fortifications, since a military accord had linked Paris and Brussels from 1920 to 1936. With British acquiescence, Gamelin therefore planned in November 1939 to advance the Allied left flank on to shorter defensive lines inside Belgium (see Dyle Line). He added a variant to this manoeuvre in April 1940, instructing his general reserve, the motorized Seventh Army, to respond to a German attack by dashing from the Channel coast to Breda in the southern Netherlands. Gamelin sought to offset superior German numbers through incorporation of the Dutch into Allied dispositions. In practice this plan fatally removed his mobile reserve from the scene of the German mechanized breakthrough on the Meuse between 12 and 15 May 1940. His deployments thus bore much responsibility for the disaster which then overtook the Allies, leading to the Dunkirk evacuation and the Franco-German armistice of 22 June.

Gamelin has been widely stigmatized as ‘the man who lost the battle of France’. Yet he transformed the peacetime French Army from the skeletal framework he inherited in 1935 to the modernized and rapidly re-arming force of 1939–40. His successes, however, had been bought through accommodating republican politicians whom his fellow generals, such as Pétain and Weygand, despised. When the republican authorities, unnerved by the onrush of the panzers, dismissed Gamelin on 19 May 1940, they opened the gate for the anti-republican authoritarians. These preferred a cease-fire and internal order to resistance and possible insurgency. Gamelin had refitted the French forces so that they could fight, but had not fully gauged the character and tempo of the war they would fight. For all that, unlike Weygand and Pétain, Gamelin was not among the Third Republic's ‘gravediggers’. A fairer epitaph would acknowledge his key part in ensuring that France could and did choose the path of resistance and honour in September 1939.

Martin S. Alexander

Bibliography

Alexander, D. W. , ‘Repercussions of the Breda Variant’, French Historical Studies, VIII, 3 (Spring 1974), 459–88.
Alexander, M. S. , The Republic in Danger: General Maurice Gamelin and the Politics of French Defence, 1933–40 (Cambridge, 1992).
—— ‘Maurice Gamelin and the defeat of France’, in B. Bond (ed.), Fallen Stars. Eleven Studies of Twentieth-Century Military Disasters (London, 1991).
Gunsberg, J. A. , ‘Coupable ou non? Le rôle du général Gamelin dans le défaite de 1940’, Revue Historique des Armées, 4 ( 1979), 145–63.
Le Goyet, P. , Le Mystère Gamelin (Paris, 1976).