Introductionintroduction 1 Introduction

IntroductionIntroduction 1 Introduction

At 4 a.m. on May 28, 1940, the Belgian army ceased its hopeless resistance against the German Wehrmacht. King Leopold III, the commander-in-chief of the Belgian forces which had been caught up in the disaster that befell the Allied First Army Group, had been forced to seek a cease-fire the previous day with the Belgian forces exhausted and out of reserves and the Allied army group cut off from the rest of the French forces and apparently destined for destruction.1 The Belgians, and their king, Leopold III, are often made the scapegoats for the failure of the Allies in May-June 1940. This began immediately with an offi- cial statement by French Premier Paul Reynaud, which was followed by an about-face by Winston Churchill, who had first praised Belgian resistance. The Belgian government-in-exile, which had opposed Leopold’s decision to seek an armistice, publically condemned him. For many then, as now, Belgium’s main fault was to refuse permission to the Allies to enter before a German invasion.2 These ‘legends’ have filtered down into the historiography, in, for example, Martin Alexander’s otherwise estimable biography of French generalissimo Maurice Gamelin while Brian Bond’s defense of the Belgians and Alistair Horne’s agreement with him are relegated to a footnote.3 In two of the major popular works in English on the 1940 campaign and the Second World War more generally, important writers repeat these calumnies. Alistair Horne condemns Belgian ‘independence,’ savaging the Belgian decla- ration of neutrality, condemning King Leopold III, “who did not inherit the full measure of [Albert’s] wisdom and moral courage” and comparing his hope that such a policy could keep Belgium out of war with “the optimism of the imprudent little pigs.” He repeats the false allegation that the French failed to continue the Maginot Line to the English Channel to spare Belgian feelings while in fact, as we will see later, the Belgians were anxious that the work should be completed. This French decision deprived both the Belgians and the

1 Major-General F.F.O. Michiels, “Summary of the Operations of the Belgian Army in May 1940” in The Belgian Campaign and the Surrender of the Belgian Army, May 10-28, 1940 (NY: Belgian American Educational Foundation, Inc., 1940), pp. 56-57. 2 Compare, for example, Ernest R. May, Strange Victory: Hitler’s Conquest of France (NY: Hill and Wang, 2000) or Martin S. Alexander, The Republic in Danger: General Maurice Gamelin and the Politics of French Defence, 1933-1940 (Cambridge UK: Cambridge UP, 2002); Paul Reynaud quoted in Alistair Horne, To Lose a Battle: France 1940 (London: Penguin, 1990), p. 621; Winston Churchill quoted op. cit., p. 621, n7. 3 Horne, p. 621, n. 7.

French of the benefits of ‘independence’ by keeping the incentive for Germany to go through Belgium and by depriving the Allies of strong fortifications on the Franco-Belgian border. More recently, in his latest popular work on World War II, Max Hastings spends much of his first chapter, revealingly called “Poland Betrayed,” condemning the Anglo-French (especially French) cynical use of Poland but makes nary a comment on how the French planned to use Belgium. Indeed, he too condemns the Belgians, noting “Allied deployments were critically hampered by Belgian neutrality … ” although he does sympa- thize with their king, who “declined to offer Germany a pretext for invasion by admitting Anglo-French troops meanwhile.” 4 The criticism of the Belgians begins with the controversial decision in 1936 of Leopold III and his government to repudiate military ties with France. This policy of ‘independence’, similar to neutrality, has been accused of equating France and Germany. This was true only on the surface. In fact, it was a policy aimed at defending Belgium from Germany by giving the government the sup- port it needed to build up the Belgian military and by keeping the fractious Belgian population, mainly divided between the Francophobe Flemish and the Francophile Walloons, united in the face of any new trials. Nobody in the Belgian government or in the higher ranks of the Belgian army really believed the French were the main threat to the country. What they were only too pain- fully aware of was that they lacked the Parliamentary votes for a military improvement bill if the country was seen as following in the French wake because the Flemish and Socialists refused to vote ‘yea’ if there was a chance of the army being drawn into a French adventure. The aim of the 1936 military bill was to create an army strong enough to deter the enemy (presumably the Ger- mans) from attacking because of the enemy’s fear of adding the Belgian forces to its foes. The bill would have failed if the Belgian government was perceived as being too pro-French. The failure of the military bill would not have helped the Belgian forces at all and it would not have done the Allies any good either because they would have had to rely on a much weaker Belgian military. The irony is that Belgium was never truly ‘independent’; it was always caught between the Flemish and the Walloons, the Germans and the French, and ‘defense in depth’ versus ‘defense at the frontier’ (or ‘integral defense of the territory’). By looking at these binaries, and at how the Belgian military and political establishment tried to navigate them, one can achieve a greater understanding of the formation of Belgian defense policy specifically and

4 Horne, To Lose a Battle, pp. 75, 84; Max Hastings, Inferno: The World at War, 1939-1945 (NY: Knopf, 2011), p. 26.