Flames over France (16 page)

He and his two fellow pilots were going to be first into the battle. They continued their dive, building up their speed, and headed towards the middle of the beehive of enemy dive-bombers. Picking a section of three Junkers 87s that were still flying in formation, preparing to dive on whatever target lay on the ground, they closed in rapidly and opened fire.

The
Stuka
in Armstrong’s sights suddenly went into a steep turn, its pilot alerted to the threat by his gunner. It flew straight into the path of Armstrong’s bullets. The RAF pilot kept his finger on the trigger and raked the dive-bomber from the yellow spinner at its nose right through to its tail. The long glasshouse cockpit shattered into fragments and then he was streaking over the rapidly disintegrating bomber like a flash of lightning.

He pulled up hard and stall-turned, arrowing down to make a second attack. It was not necessary. The
Stuka
, its pilot probably dead at the controls, was fluttering earthwards like a falling leaf. Two other Ju 87s were going down, the victims of his wingmen, one a ball of blazing fragments, destroyed by the explosion of its own bomb.

Armstrong selected another target, a Stuka that was weaving uncertainly ahead of him. He closed in to point-blank range, ignoring the tracer that sprayed at him from the German’s rear gun. For the first time in air combat, he felt a burning, murderous anger against the men he was going to kill. Up to this point his feelings had been dispassionate; he had even felt sorry for the crew member of the Dornier whose remains had been spattered over his fighter weeks earlier. This was something different. He wanted to kill these men, to strew their charred remains over the French countryside. Now it was France; tomorrow it would be England that lay at the mercy of their bombs.

Not if he could help it. Bastards, he thought, and pressed the trigger again, literally chopping the
Stuka
to pieces from a range of fifty yards. The rear gunner was dead, a bloodstained bundle sprawled over his gun. The
Stuka
was in shreds, flames licking back from its engine. The front section of its cockpit canopy flew off and whirled away in the slipstream. The dive-bomber lost speed. Armstrong saw the pilot trying to struggle clear.

Armstrong throttled back. He raised the Hawk’s nose a little, put his sights squarely on the luckless German, and squeezed the trigger, intent on blowing the man apart.

Nothing happened. He was out of ammunition. A red veil of rage crossed his vision and he inched towards the
Stuka
. Madness possessed him as it filled the sky ahead. He was going to ram it.

Then the enemy pilot dropped away from the doomed aircraft and reason returned. He hauled on the stick and pulled the Hawk away, averting a collision by a hair’s breadth. Sweating and shaking, aching in every limb, he looked down, seeing the German’s dark shape tumbling towards the ground. He saw no sign of a parachute.

Suddenly, the sky was full of aircraft as more Hawks and some Caudrons joined the combat. He called up his wingmen and headed for Paris, his presence useless now that he had no bullets left. Behind him, dark columns of smoke, like tombstones, marked the last fiery plunge of a dozen
Stukas
. The remainder dropped their bombs haphazardly and fled, harried by the French fighters, who only gave up the chase when they were forced to do so through shortage of fuel and ammunition.

The destruction of the dive-bombers was the single biggest success of 5 June, a day in which the French fighter groups flew 438 sorties and claimed 40 enemy aircraft for the loss of 15 of their own. In the afternoon, as Colonel Villeneuve had predicted, the cannon-armed Morane units were ordered to carry out ground-attack missions, and at 1400 six aircraft made a low-level cannon attack on a column of about seventy enemy tanks; one tank was knocked out but all the Moranes were hit and two of their pilots wounded.

At 1700 eight more Moranes set out to attack the same column. This time ten Me 109s were waiting for them and a fierce dogfight flared up over Royes, in the course of which two Moranes and two 109s were destroyed. The last lighter ground-attack sortie of the day was carried out between 2000 and 2030 by nine Moranes escorted by nine D. 520s of GC I/3 and II/7. The pilots of I/3 shot down four Me 109s and a Henschel 126 observation aircraft; one French pilot was shot down and killed and a second wounded.

It was not the first hectic air battle involving I/3 that day. Earlier, at 1705, six aircraft had been sent out on an air cover mission in the Braye-sur-Somme sector. They were accompanied by eight more D.520s of GC II/7, flying at a higher altitude. At 25,000 feet over Compiegne the latter were suddenly ambushed by fifteen Me 109s; twenty-five more enemy fighters circled watchfully at a distance, ready to pick off any stragglers. The 109s swept through the French formation in a dive, shooting down two D.520s and badly damaging a third on their first pass.

The three pilots of II/7’s lower flight turned to meet the attackers head-on and one of them,
Sous
-
Lieutenant
Pomier-Layragues, set a 109 on fire with a short burst. The pilot bailed out; he was
Hauptmann
Werner Moelders, commander of a squadron of the elite German fighter unit, JG 53. At that time his score stood at twenty-five French and British aircraft destroyed. Taken prisoner by French artillerymen, Moelders at once asked if he might be permitted to meet the man who had shot him down.

He was too late. Even as the German ace parachuted to earth, Pomier-Layragues found himself in a desperate single-handed fight against four Me 109s. He shot one of them down, but in the following moments his fighter was torn apart by the shells of six more Messerschmitts. A ball of fire, it crashed in the suburbs of Marissel and exploded. The pilot had not bailed out.

At Le Bourget, Armstrong and his fellow pilots flew two more missions in the course of the day, both escorting Potez 63s which were assigned to photograph the movement of German forces across the Somme bridges. During the second mission, the French aircraft were attacked by ten Me 109s and 110s, which broke through to shoot down the Potez in flames.

A swirling air battle developed, with the French and German pilots striving to gain a height advantage. In the end, from the ground, the twisting fighters seemed no more than silvery midges against the sky’s deep blue.

German troops paused in their march to watch the combat, hearing the scream of tortured aero-engines and the distant rattle of machine-guns. In the midst of the melee they saw a sudden flare, a starburst of light, followed by a pencil-line of smoke that raced towards the earth. The doomed aircraft fell arrow-straight, its engine still howling. It fell for an eternity, the noise of its passing growing louder with every moment, until it streaked out of sight behind a clump of trees on the horizon, the point of its impact marked by a great geyser of smoke and earth.

Troops who reached the spot found only a smoking crater, with a few scraps of twisted metal lying around. Of the pilot, not a relic remained.

It was, perhaps, the way in which Colonel Pierre Villeneuve would have wished to die.

Chapter Eleven

The battle in the north continued its inexorable course. On 6 June General von Kleist renewed his advance, but once again the French stopped him. One of his armoured corps had over half its tanks disabled after two days of fighting. Once again, it was Rommel who kept the offensive going. Exploiting the gap he had created, he raced on to cover another thirty miles, advancing as far as Forges-les-Eaux on the Beauvais-Dieppe road and slicing the French Tenth Army in two as he did so. On the 7th his meteoric progress continued as he drove the centre of the Tenth Army before him in what was fast becoming a rout, and at 0200 on the eighth, after a brief halt, his tanks reached Elbeuf on the River Seine.

In the picturesque villages, many inhabitants gazed in bewilderment as the
Panzers
rolled through, unable to comprehend the speed with which disaster was overtaking them. Only a few hours before, they had cheered and thrown bouquets of flowers at the men of their own 3rd Armoured Division, now pulling back over the Seine. Such was the confusion that in Elbeuf a woman came up to Rommel’s command vehicle and asked the general if he was English.

Rommel’s dash did not succeed in securing the Seine bridges, which were blown one after the other. The town of Rouen, however, fell that same morning to General von Hartlieb’s 5th
Panzer
Division, the tanks and personnel carriers rumbling in a long column up Autoroute 28 and entering the town unmolested. Meanwhile, on Rommel’s other flank, and infantry corps under General Erich von Manstein had succeeded in forcing a passage through to the lower Seine.

The German drive to the Seine, and the splitting of the French Tenth Army, had effectively sealed off the French Ninth Corps — which included the British 51st Highland Division — in the Rouen-Dieppe pocket, with their backs to the sea, and their encirclement was completed on the 9th when the 5th and 7th
Panzer
Divisions swung north-westwards from the Seine. The next morning, Rommel and von Hartlieb launched a concerted attack on Ninth Corps, which had set up a hasty line of defence around the perimeter of St Valery-en-Caux, where the 51st Division and the remnants of the French forces expected to be evacuated by sea, as had happened at Dunkirk. This, however, was prevented by the fog and by the Germans themselves, who by noon on the 11th were in a position to shell both the Allied ships offshore and the beaches at St Valery.

The Highlanders and most of the French now had less than half a day’s rations left. On the morning of the 12th, General Ihler, the Ninth Corps commander, ordered the French forces at St Valery to surrender, and although this raised bitter protests from the Highlanders, who were prepared to fight on, they were compelled to do likewise soon afterwards. Over 8,000 British troops fell into the German net; the total bag of Allied troops that day was 40,000, including no fewer than twelve generals.

Rommel’s tanks clattered into Le Havre on the morning of 14 June. There they rested for forty-eight hours before pushing on towards Cherbourg, covering as much as 150 miles in a single day. There was no longer any opposition, and on 19 June Rommel accepted Cherbourg’s surrender. For the incredible 7th
Panzer
Division, which alone had taken close on a 100,000 prisoners in its headlong dash from the Meuse to the sea, the Battle of France was over.

Meanwhile, on 9 June, the German Army Group A had attacked on the River Aisne, the weight of its offensive falling on the newly-formed French Fourth Army Group, comprising the Second, Fourth and Sixth Armies and commanded by General Huntziger. Ever since the German breakthrough on the Meuse, the French Second Army had been under relentless pressure, striving to hold some sort of line between the Bar and the Meuse and so prevent the outflanking of the Maginot Line. Losses were heavy, and reserves were continually being drained to make good the attrition. Despite this, the Second Army had been compelled to withdraw during the last week of May, and as a consequence part of the Maginot defences had to be abandoned.

Now, effective from 6 June, Huntziger’s new Army Group — into which the last of the reserves had been poured — was given the task of holding the Aisne from Montmedy to Attichy. Three days later, it received the full weight of the German attack, which was carried out by the armoured groups of Generals Heinz Guderian and Ewald von Kleist, the latter having been switched eastwards.

This time, the infantry were to go in first and secure bridgeheads across the Aisne before the armour was committed. The first assault fell between Neufchatel and Attigny. The French resisted furiously, and by the end of the day the Germans had succeeded in establishing only one small bridgehead. The Germans made determined attacks on the French 14th Division — commanded by a fine officer. General de Lattre de Tassigny — through the murk that was a mixture of mist and the effects of smoke shells, lying like a veil across the valley, but the French broke them all and took 800 prisoners into the bargain.

French losses, however, had been severe, and it was plain that Army Group Four would not be able to stem the German breakthrough for much longer. That night, Guderian pushed armour into the solitary bridgehead, and the next morning elements of 1st
Panzer
Division probed through the French advance positions supported by heavy air strikes. Village after village went up in flames, and although the tanks made slow progress, the defenders were gradually compelled to withdraw. Then, in the early afternoon, the
Panzers
encountered units of the French 3rd Armoured Division, comprising ten large ‘B’ tanks and two battalions of Hotchkiss. German reconnaissance aircraft had warned of the approach of the French armour, and when the tanks reached Juneville, the German anti-tank gunners were ready for them. Six Hotchkiss were knocked out in as many minutes, and although the heavier armoured vehicles made some progress, the French counter-attack — which lacked both artillery and air support — soon petered out.

The situation continued to deteriorate, and in the early hours of 11 June the French Second and Fourth Armies began to disengage, moving back through the forest of Belval towards the river Marne. The manoeuvre was carried out with extreme difficulty, for by this time two
Panzer
corps had crossed the Aisne and were pushing southwards at speed, trapping some French units and destroying them. It was clear now that French resistance on the Aisne was practically at an end; by nightfall on the 11th the German armour had reached Reims, and a few hours later Guderian’s tanks took Chalons-sur-Marne, establishing a bridgehead on the river.

With Rouen captured in the west and the Marne crossed in the east, Paris was now threatened from west and north, with the leading German forces only fifty miles from the capital. Immediately north of Paris, bitter fighting raged in the forest of Compiegne, where the 11th ‘Iron’ Division sacrificed itself to buy time while the Seventh Army fell back to the Oise. In Paris itself the thunder of distant gunfire could be clearly heard, and the roads leading south were crowded with the inevitable tide of refugees — among it the French Government, which was departing for a safer location at Tours. On the 11th, aware that there was no hope of defending the capital, General Weygand declared Paris an open city.

Meanwhile, the French fought to hold their last line of defence on the lower Seine. Weygand had committed all his available reserves to the battle, including two fresh divisions from North Africa. At the same time, the first contingent of a new British Expeditionary Force — the 52nd Lowland Division and part of the 1st Canadian — was landed at Cherbourg under the command of General Alan Brooke. A brigade of the Lowland Division was immediately sent up to bolster the French line at Evreux, but when Brook arrived at the French GHQ on 12 June, with no clear idea of the true situation, he was horrified to find that the French position was quite untenable. He at once contacted the War Office and gave his views, and on the 13th — after Churchill had intervened — he was ordered to prepare the withdrawal and evacuation of all British forces from France.

By nightfall on the 13th, the French forces in the west — the Seventh and Tenth Armies and the Army of Paris, the latter formed originally to defend the capital to the last — were all in retreat towards the Loire. That same evening, units of the German Eighteenth Army came within sight of the Eiffel Tower.

At 0340 the next morning, a lone German motorcyclist roared across the deserted Place Voltaire, circled and went back the way he had come. As the hours went by, detachments of German troops began to appear all over the capital. Loudspeaker cars toured the streets, warning what was left of the population to stay indoors and await further instructions. Nevertheless, as the morning wore on, a few inhabitants began to trickle into the streets, braving a thin drizzle to watch the seemingly endless column of German troops, armour and transport that rumbled southwards across Paris.

At 0930, the German flag broke over the Arc de Triomphe. Fifteen minutes later, the hard-bitten, veteran troops of the German 8th Infantry Division marched down the Champs Elysées in a triumphal victory parade. As the field-grey columns passed the Tomb of the Unknown Warrior, with its Eternal Flame, they saluted. It was as much a gesture of total, overwhelming victory as one of homage.

At six-thirty that evening, German soldiers clustered around the Arc dc Triomphe like peacetime tourists were astonished to see two elderly Frenchmen marching towards them in full-dress uniform, complete with swords. They were Edmond Ferrand and Charles Gaudin, both veterans of the 1914-18 war and both holding the honoured position of Guardians of the Flame. Instinctively, for they were soldiers with their own pride, who recognised the pride of others, the Germans snapped to attention as the two men solemnly extinguished the Flame that had burned without interruption for almost twenty years. Then Ferrand and Gaudin marched away, the tears glistening on their cheeks in the evening sunlight.