The Battle of Britain Five Months That Changed History, May—October 1940 by James Holland (z-lib.org).epub

was not equipped to deal with the unexpected. When the battle deviated
from the prepared plan, the French did not know what to do. They simply
hadn’t been trained to take the initiative and to think for themselves.
Rather, military thinkers had believed that any new war would be dealt
with by first sitting tight and waiting for the enemy to attack. From their
bunkers they would halt the enemy with heavy fire, while local reserves
were brought up, bringing any enemy attack to a standstill. Only once
superiority had been achieved in men and materiel at the main point of
attack would the French then go on the offensive. Thus, French armour, for
example, was only ever conceived of as being infantry support, rather than
an independent arm.
It was a cumbersome process designed for the long-haul attritional war
of twenty years before, but while the French had pretty good tanks and
guns, and a phenomenal amount of concrete, they lacked decent, properly
thought-out logistics and disgracefully neglected developments in
communications. As a rule of thumb, orders from Gamelin’s HQ to the
front usually took around forty-eight hours. There was not even a radio at
Gamelin’s HQ, for example; he believed they were too insecure, and could
be easily listened in to by the enemy. Telephones were fine so long as the
front line was not disrupted – which it inevitably was – while messengers
were obviously horribly slow. It simply had not occurred to them that large,
modern forces could or needed to be moved quickly. The speed at which the
Germans reached the Meuse stunned them completely.
The lack of radio communication had been starkly revealed at Flavion
when the 1 Division Cuirassée had been destroyed. Hardly any French
tanks had radio sets and so they could not communicate with one another.
The Germans, on the other hand, might not have had powerful guns in their
turrets but they did have wireless sets. The Panzer Is and IIs, thanks to good
communication, were able to lure the more powerful French tanks into traps
of hidden anti-tank guns. It was these, rather than the panzers themselves,
that had done most of the damage. And there were other little things: the
French had been caught napping as they refuelled because it was such a
long-drawn-out process. Fuel bowsers would laboriously go from one tank
to another filling them up in turn. The Germans, in contrast, would deliver
truckloads of jerrycans so that panzer crews could fill up simultaneously.
And that, of course, saved time.