The Second World War (12 page)

There were soon to be tears of anguish in his adversaries’ headquarters – but not from the hard-boiled Major-General Bernard Montgomery commanding the British 3rd Division whose troops on 11 May were digging in cheerfully on the Dyle Line; nor from Sir Edmund Ironside, the British chief of staff, whose diary tells that he judged ‘on the whole the advantage is with us’ and looked forward to ‘a really hard fight all this summer’; nor from Gamelin, who remained ‘above all preoccupied with Holland’ and had the previous day delegated his powers of command in Belgium to Georges; not even from General Gaston Billotte, to whom Georges had in turn delegated authority on the northern front and who, with thirty divisions to cover fifty-five miles of line, had more than adequate force to fulfil his mission. On the ‘line of engagement’ along the Dyle, the Allies, despite the disturbing developments on their flanks and the softening of Belgian resistance in front of them, had reason to believe that they outnumbered the approaching Germans – as they did – and would be able to check their advance.

The Allied appreciation of the situation in Belgium, however, rested on the misapprehension (in which Hitler was then exulting) that there they faced the main axis of the German offensive and confronted their main concentration of force. As in 1914, their intelligence resources had failed to establish where the German
Schwerpunkt
lay. In 1914 it was the French cavalry, beating the thickets of the Ardennes when it should have been roaming Flanders, which missed the German spearheads; in 1940 it was the Allied air forces, flailing vainly at the German spearheads in Belgian Flanders when they should have been overflying the Ardennes, which had lost touch with essentials. From 10 to 14 May, the seven Panzer divisions of Army Group A nudged forward nose to tail along the Ardennes defiles in a traffic concentration so dense that General Günther Blumentritt calculated that if deployed on a single-tank ‘front’, the tail of the column would have been in East Prussia; they breasted up towards the weakest spot on the Allied front to form an irresistible force. These seven Panzer divisions – 1, 2, 5, 6, 7, 8, 10 – deployed between them 1800 tanks. In front of them they found in first line the two Belgian divisions of Chasseurs Ardennais, an old-fashioned elite of forest riflemen whose bravery counted for nothing against armour. When they had been brushed aside, the Panzers found themselves opposed by Corap’s Ninth Army and part of Huntziger’s Second. Although neither formed an elite by any estimation, with the Meuse at their front their reservists should nevertheless have been able to hold, at least in normal times; but May 1940 was not normal times. Almost as soon as the German vanguards of Army Group A made touch with the Meuse defences, they were able to find a way across. Corap’s and Huntziger’s outpost guards took fright, the banks of the river were abandoned and the breach in the Allied defensive dyke was opened.

General André Beaufre, then a junior staff officer at French general headquarters, described the impression the news made on General Georges at his command post at La Ferté early in the morning of 14 May:

The atmosphere was that of a family in which there had been a death. Georges . . . was terribly pale. ‘Our front has been broken at Sedan. There has been a collapse. . . .’ He flung himself into a chair and burst into tears. He was the first man I had seen weep in this campaign. Alas, there were to be others. It made a terrible impression on me. Doumenc [Georges’s subordinate] – taken aback – reacted immediately. ‘General, this is war and in war things like this are bound to happen!’ Then Georges, still pale, explained: following terrible bombardment from the air the two inferior divisions [55 and 71] had taken to their heels. X Corps signalled that the position was penetrated and that German tanks had arrived in Bulson [two miles west of the Meuse, and so inside the French-defended area] about midnight. Here there was another flood of tears. Everyone else remained silent, shattered by what had happened. ‘Well, General,’ said Doumenc, ‘all wars have their costs. Let’s look at the map and see what can be done.’

There is much in Beaufre’s description of this scene that yields to exegesis. First, Sedan: the name of the town where Napoleon III had surrendered to the Prussians in September 1870 was in French ears synonymous with disaster. Second, the ‘two inferior divisions’: the 55th and 71st Divisions of Huntziger’s Second Army were both composed of older reservists, and both had indeed taken to their heels at the approach of the German tanks. Third, what the map suggested might be done: the German penetration of the French line had occurred at a point so sensitive – as Manstein had intended – that any counter-measure adopted would have to be massive and almost instantaneous if it were to stop the rot. The story of Allied strategic decision in the next week would be one of seeking the telling blow.

The details of the story from the German side, however, boded even worse for Georges than he had grasped. For the Meuse had first been crossed not, as he believed, on the day before he had his nervous collapse, but the day before that, 12 May. As darkness fell, patrols of the motorcycle reconnaissance battalion of the 7th Panzer Division commanded by Erwin Rommel had found an unguarded weir across the Meuse at Houx, north of Sedan. Creeping across it, they reached an island in midstream from which a lock-gate led to the west bank. During the night reinforcements joined them there, so that by 13 May ‘Sickle Stroke’ had already struck at the foundations of the Gamelin plan. The next morning Rommel’s engineers began to lay pontoon bridges across the river, while his tanks, waiting to cross, destroyed French bunkers on the other side with gunfire. By evening the bridges were completed and the first of his tanks had crossed the river – only 120 yards wide at this point.

The French might have dealt successfully with this bridgehead. It was as yet precarious. They tried a counter-attack, with a force that included a tank battalion, and Gamelin was told, ‘the incident at Houx is in hand’. However, the tanks withdrew after taking a few prisoners, leaving Rommel’s bridgehead intact, if not yet a burgeoning threat. Meanwhile French attention was diverted southwards by the assault of Army Group A’s main Panzer formation at Sedan. They had been deploying in the open flood plain of the river, after three days of nose-to-tail driving through the defiles of the Ardennes, all through the morning of 13 May. General P. P. J. Gransard observed ‘the enemy emerging from the forest . . . an almost uninterrupted descent of infantrymen, of vehicles either armoured or motorised’. The French artillery brought them under fire; but it was answered by German bombing, first by high-level Dornier 17s, then by diving Stukas. The effect on the French infantry regiments was shattering. ‘The noise, the horrible noise’, repeated the wounded brought to a field ambulance; better troops were to feel the same terror under air attack throughout this and subsequent wars. ‘Five hours of this nightmare’, wrote General Edouard Ruby, deputy chief of staff of Second Army, ‘were enough to shatter [the troops’] nerves.’ By three in the afternoon the Stukas drew off. As soon as they did so, the assault pioneers of the 1st, 2nd and 10th Panzer Divisions began dragging their inflatable boats to the water’s edge. Setting off under a suddenly amplified hail of enemy fire – the French manned their weapons as they saw the danger they faced – the boat crews suffered heavy casualties and were here and there driven back, but along the whole line of assault, from Donchery to Bazeilles, established a series of footholds on the far bank. Bazeilles was a place of legend in French military history; it was there in 1870 that the elite
coloniales
had fought to the death against the Germans in ‘the house of the last cartridge’. In 1940 it was the Germans who were ready to do or die at Bazeilles. Hans Rubarth, a pioneer sergeant of the 10th Panzer Division, ordered his men to throw their entrenching tools out of their overloaded boat in midstream: ‘No digging for us – either we get through or that’s the end.’ Before the day was out, nine of his eleven men had become casualties but the group had taken its objective. Rubarth was promoted lieutenant in the field and awarded the Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross, Germany’s highest decoration for bravery.

Such exploits, many times repeated, carried the storming parties of all three Panzer divisions across the Meuse during the afternoon of 13 May. In front of them isolated outposts of French infantry held their ground with great courage; but others ran at the sight of tanks – sometimes at the sight of French tanks, often merely at the rumour of tanks. French tanks did appear towards evening; they belonged to the 3rd Armoured and 3rd Motorised Divisions, but the counter-attack they had been sent to deliver was not driven home. As they withdrew from the river’s edge, the Germans reinforced their own tank units, which by pontoon bridges had been transported to the French bank and prepared for the coming breakout.

That evening Gamelin, still at Vincennes, 120 miles from the crisis-point, issued an order of the day: ‘The onslaught of the mechanical and motorised forces of the enemy must now be faced. The hour has come to fight in depth on the positions appointed by the high command. One is no longer entitled to retire. If the enemy makes a local breach, it must not only be sealed off but counter-attacked and retaken.’

During 14 May Gamelin’s troops – who were far too widely dispersed to ‘fight in depth’ – did attempt counter-attacks against the German bridgeheads. None was successful, in part because the target was diffuse. The blade with which ‘Sickle Stroke’ would be delivered had not yet formed. Its component elements were still struggling out of their bridgeheads: the 6th and 8th Panzer Divisions north of Sedan; the 2nd, 1st and 10th to the south. The danger posed by the 5th and Rommel’s 7th at Dinant had not yet impressed itself on the French high command’s consciousness. In a strict military sense, it would have been best to wait until the Panzer divisions had coalesced and started inland, before their supporting infantry had crossed the river to join them. Then the armoured column might have been caught ‘in flank’ and decapitated. As it was, the French 3rd Armoured Division wandered about the battlefield on 14 May seeking ineffectively whom it might devour. While the Panzer bridgeheads were enlarged, the German tanks refuelled and reammunitioned and the start-lines were drawn for a plunge into the French heartland.

Which of the German spearheads would be first away? The Panzer concentration around Sedan was the stronger, but that further north at Dinant faced the poorer troops of Corap’s Ninth Army. André Corap, a fat and jovial colonial soldier with a talent for making his men like him, was opposed, moreover, by the wiry and ascetic Erwin Rommel, whose soldiers idolised him because he clearly cared only for beating the enemy. Rommel had won the
Pour le Mérite
, Germany’s highest military decoration, as a captain by a brilliant stroke of personal initiative during the First World War, and destroyed much of an Italian division in the process. On 15 May 1940, by a similar initiative, he broke through Corap’s tentative ‘stop-line’ before it could be manned and advanced seventeen miles for the loss of fifteen German dead. During the afternoon the 6th Panzer Division, crossing at Monthermé, north of Sedan, joined in the Ninth Army’s destruction. The Indo-Chinese machine-gunners who had defended the crossings with devoted bravery for three days were bypassed (their soldierly qualities portended of the bitterness with which Vietnam would be contested by Ho Chi Minh’s followers in the post-war years). Their French comrades-in-arms, whom the 6th Panzer Division met as it drove forward, showed no such tenacity – nothing, indeed, but pitiful demoralisation. Karl von Stackelberg, a war correspondent accompanying the German tanks, was astonished to encounter formed bodies of French troops marching to meet them:

There were finally 20,000 men, who here . . . in this one sector and on this one day, were heading backward as prisoners. Unwillingly one had to think of Poland and the scenes there. It was inexplicable. How was it possible that, after this first major battle on French territory, after this victory on the Meuse, this gigantic consequence should follow? How was it possible these French soldiers with their officers, so completely downcast, so completely demoralised, would allow themselves to go more or less voluntarily into imprisonment?

Not all French soldiers would give up the fight so easily. In the north the First Army was still resisting steadily, as it would do until its remnants were completely surrounded at Lille. And on 15 May Charles de Gaulle, who had been appointed to command the 4th Armoured Division four days previously, received orders from General Georges to attack at Laon, which lay in the German Panzers’ path, and ‘gain time’ for a new front to be established north of Paris. Although the 4th Armoured Division was still in the process of forming, de Gaulle, long an enthusiast for armoured warfare and a patriot whose love of country was fortified, not diminished, by its army’s current demoralisation, accepted the challenge with ardour. ‘I felt myself borne up by a limitless fury,’ he wrote later. ‘ “Ah! it’s too stupid! The war is beginning as badly as it could. Therefore it must go on. For this the world is wide. If I live, I will fight wherever I must as long as I must until the enemy is defeated and the national stain washed clean.” All I have managed to do since was resolved upon that day.’

De Gaulle managed to do little when he finally brought his division into action on 17 May. His tanks made inroads into the positions of the 1st Panzer Division, one of whose staff officers, Captain Graf von Kielsmansegg, who thirty-five years later would command the NATO forces in Germany, decided on showing them that ‘discretion was the better part of valour’. However, they were too few to do more than frighten the Germans and by evening they turned about and withdrew to refuel.

The Germans had grown collectively nervous that day – although Guderian, commanding the 2nd and 10th Panzer Divisions, champed at the bit and sought by every means to get forward. But Hitler, recorded Halder, ‘is anxious about our own success, doesn’t want to risk anything and would therefore be happiest to have us halt.’ Halder himself was concerned to line the ‘walls’ of the developing ‘Panzer corridor’ with his infantry, which was lagging behind the tanks; Brauchitsch, the commander-in-chief, was adamant that he should. The Panzers had advanced forty miles since the crossing of the Meuse four days earlier, were converging into a solid armoured mass of seven divisions and had the clear evidence of the collapse of the French Ninth and Second Armies everywhere before their eyes. The French First Army, the BEF and the Belgians were giving ground to the north, while the French to the south, immobilised in the Maginot Line and unable to manoeuvre for lack of transport, were clearly unable to intervene against the Panzers. Nevertheless the German high command, prompted by Hitler’s anxieties, on 17 May imposed a halt on the advance.