Abstract
Few accounts have managed to cover so concisely in English the interaction of war and society in Belgium during the period 1940 to 1945 as the present volume. Jean-Michel Veranneman de Watervliet is a former ambassador to the UK and served with the Chasseurs ardennais. Particularly effective is the combination of broader military and political perspectives with some individual case histories of Belgian responses to the crisis, including that of his own father.
The book opens with a vivid description of the lightning invasion of Belgium by the Germans in the early hours of 10 May 1940 and their seizure of the supposedly impregnable fort of Eben-Emael. Hoping to hold the Germans back more effectively, and aware that Hitler would probably violate Dutch as well as Belgian neutrality, the Belgians had built the fort in the 1930s within sight of Maastricht, and covering the bridge crossings over the Meuse. The fortress had huge retractable gun cupolas and numerous machine gun positions. The Germans deployed men transported by gliders, who landed on the fort and then used explosives to disable the cupolas. The garrison quickly surrendered, for the supposed impregnability of the fort had led the Belgians to garrison it with reservists and raw recruits under an inept and bureaucratic commander. Despite the courageous resistance of the neighbouring smaller forts, the defensive advantage had been lost and the blow to morale was great.
Their neutrality violated, the Belgians called on France and Britain for military assistance. The plan, worked out secretly in advance of this contingency, assumed that the Belgians would hold the Albert Canal for a few days before falling back on the Dyle river, roughly the Antwerp-Louvain-Namur Line, there to be joined by British and French troops continuing that line down to the start of the fortified Maginot Line. The plan went disastrously wrong because the French, expecting the main thrust of the invaders in central Belgium, failed to anticipate the switch in German strategy towards an attack further south, through the Belgian Ardennes, on 15 to 16 May. Prevented by the Constitution from operating outside the country, the Belgian Army had retreated, not southwards, but further west, from the Scheldt to behind the Leie/Lys river, extending its thin line towards Courtrai, to cover the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) for an offensive southwards to link up again with the French. There was no offensive, as the British were already planning the withdrawal of the BEF to Dunkirk. The Belgian Command knew what the Sedan breakthrough meant, and by 23 May saw that the Franco-British coalition was disintegrating. Encircled, the Belgian Army surrendered on 28 May. The surrender brought out tensions between Belgium and the Allies. Faced by the prospect of defeat, the Allies made King Leopold III the scapegoat for the failure of French strategy, accusing him falsely of having surrendered without warning. King Leopold’s view was that his country had fulfilled its commitment to defend its territory. Belgium had no formal treaty obligations towards the Allies. Unlike the situation in 1914 when the Allied front had stabilized across the frontier, the Belgian Army had not been able to hold on to a small corner of national territory.
The defeat exacerbated latent tensions between Leopold III and his ministers. Under the constitution the King was the Commander of the Armed Forces, but his actions had to be countersigned by a minister. Leopold III insisted upon commanding in the field, and he had precedents both for the exercise of such royal command and the bitter disputes with ministers that it entailed. Leopold III followed his father’s example from 1914 to 1918, but into uncharted territory, that of his country’s military defeat and total occupation by the enemy. When his ministers urged him to leave the army and to withdraw with them to France, Leopold refused on the grounds that it was his duty to remain with his soldiers and share their fate. The ministers reached France, where Paul Reynaud compelled them to condemn their monarch, who never forgave them. After the defeat of France in June, they thought Britain might make peace. When, by October, it became clear that Churchill would fight on and that they could not return to their country, four leading ministers came to London and continued the fight against Germany. They invoked an article of the constitution entrusting the government with the exercise of the king’s powers, should the monarch be ‘in the impossibility of reigning’. As a prisoner-of-war, detained not with his troops in Germany but in his palace at Laeken, the king did not contest this interpretation. He did not overtly engage in political activities, although his staff were in contact with collaborators, and his pledge to share the fate of his soldiers sounded a little hollow once he contracted a second marriage and went on a honeymoon to Austria.
The Minister of the Colonies, De Vleeschauwer, who had been the driving force behind the move of his colleagues to London, ensured that Belgian forces in the Congo defended the colony. Its wealth helped to bolster the work of the government, which later signed a profitable deal with the USA for the supply of uranium. A small Belgian brigade was regrouped at Tenby and took part in the liberation of Europe. The Germans tried to worsen the relations between the Flemings and the Walloons by freeing Flemish prisoners of war in preference to Walloon ones. Collaborators and resisters could be found on both sides of the linguistic divide, and Veranneman gives an excellent account of the impact of both. With the invasion of Russia and the advent of the ‘crusade against Bolshevism’, volunteers from Flanders and Wallonia, the latter led by the charismatic Leon Degrelle, fought on the Eastern Front.
While Belgium was under complete German military control, civil servants did their job and were paid on the basis of a blanket IOU issued by the finance minister before he left the country. The Belgian government in London recognized that Belgians had to earn their living during the occupation, and factories were allowed to work for the Germans within patriotic rules set by a committee of bankers, though some industrialists did not always respect the spirit of the arrangement. Belgian workers were later requisitioned to work in Germany. Some 56% of Jews resident in occupied Belgium escaped deportation and death thanks to the action of the population at large.
With the liberation, the government returned and installed the king’s brother as regent while Leopold III was a prisoner in Germany. Leopold III, once restored, mishandled his relations with successive governments, and the Royal Question poisoned the political life of the country until his abdication in 1951. The Communist Party, once active in the resistance, seemed to threaten the established order, but the economy recovered, social welfare expanded and the country moved increasingly in a federalist direction.
Veranneman’s book reads well. The photographs and campaign maps are excellent. A host of interesting details emerge in passing, such as the information that the guns in some Belgian forts were hand-me-downs from the old German Imperial Army given to Belgium as reparations after 1918.