To Lose a Battle (27 page)

But still Halder held out against the persistent Manstein. On 12 January, the day after the news of Mechelen reached Hitler, Rundstedt signed Manstein’s sixth and last memorandum, summing up all that had gone before, and forwarded it to Zossen with the express request that it be submitted to Hitler. Once again, Army Group ‘A’ was told – rather tartly – to mind its own business, and Rundstedt’s request was turned down. On the 25th, Brauchitsch visited Koblenz, and in what must have been by now a chilly atmosphere, Manstein accused the Army C.-in-C. point blank of not aiming for a ‘full decision’ in the West, and referring to the ‘well-known negative attitude of the O.K.H.’ to the offensive in general. He sharply criticized the O.K.H.’s opportunist intention of leaving the
Schwerpunkt
question open until it had been seen which way the Allied cat would jump, citing Moltke’s maxim that ‘mistakes in the initial deployment cannot be repaired’. Two days later, Manstein was shattered to receive his posting to Stettin. It seemed as if he had lost the battle.

Hitler Backs Manstein

Then, on 7 February, just two days before Manstein was due to depart for his new command, Army Group ‘A’ held its first ‘war game’. Halder was clearly impressed by what he saw, and for the first time showed himself veering towards Manstein’s thinking. On leaving Koblenz, he at last agreed to one of the points demanded by Manstein, namely, that the Meuse crossing at Sedan by Guderian’s XIX Panzer Corps be simultaneously supported by the XIV Motorized Corps. Here was yet a further step in the escalation of Army Group ‘A’. Manstein left for Stettin with at least some satisfaction. Bock uttered another growl of displeasure. On the 14th, ‘war games’ were continued,
this time in Manstein’s absence, at Mayen near Koblenz. Now an important and lively disagreement took place between Guderian and Halder. Guderian wanted to push his Panzers across the Meuse on the fifth day of the attack. True to the doctrines of
Achtung – Panzer!
, he conceived the armoured blow as being ‘concentrated and applied with surprise on the decisive point, to form the arrow-head so deep that we need have no worry about the flank’. With some asperity, Halder condemned this as ‘senseless’; it would be impossible to mount a ‘stage by stage’ attack across the Meuse until the infantry divisions arrived, and this could not be before the ninth day.
²⁰
Rundstedt, no longer supported by Manstein, now took Halder’s side. The games ended with this point unsettled. But, if nothing else, they had proved one other point – the extreme sensitivity of the area around Sedan for the ‘Red’, or defending side.

There now occurred the last of the elements of chance which were to shape the course of
Gelb.
Shortly before Manstein’s departure, Hitler’s chief adjutant, Colonel Schmundt, happened to be on a tour of the front and called in at Rundstedt’s H.Q. Here he had a prolonged conversation with Manstein, who revealed his plan at length. This was the first Schmundt had heard of it, and he was amazed how closely it paralleled Hitler’s own thoughts, though in a ‘significantly more precise form’. Back in Berlin on 2 February, he immediately told Hitler of the conversation. Though not hiding his own personal aversion to Manstein,
²¹
Hitler expressed the keenest interest; Manstein must be brought before him, but how could this be done without arousing the suspicions of the O.K.H.? Talking to Schmundt later, a Lieutenant-Colonel Heusinger
²²
of the O.K.H. operations branch, who was a warm supporter of the
Manstein Plan, suggested that he should be summoned along with the four other newly-appointed corps commanders to ‘kiss hands’ with the Supreme Commander. So, on 17 February, a fateful working breakfast took place at the Chancellery. Manstein remained until 2 p.m. pouring forth every detail of the plan he had so long been ruminating. Hitler listened raptly. The next day Brauchitsch and Halder were ordered to the Chancellery. Hitler put the Manstein Plan to them, producing it as his own homework, with no attribution to its author. The O.K.H. leaders showed that they had in the meantime swung round towards it still further (perhaps, seeing which way the wind was now blowing, they were also anxious to avoid a repetition of the painful tirades of November). With a new spring in their step, they returned to Zossen to draft an entirely revised directive. A buoyant mood of fresh confidence replaced earlier doubts. Hitler having been navigated safely past the shoals of a winter campaign, and the Army reorganized from the war in Poland, the new design now caused a prospect of great military success to glimmer within the keenly professional mind of Halder. Thoughts of deposing Hitler receded to remoter regions. Henceforth, until the plan actually went into action, the O.K.H., Hitler, Rundstedt and the other front commanders are to be found all pulling together with that superbly smooth efficiency of the German military machine at its best.

Sichelschnitt

By 24 February the new directive was ready. As it emerged from the cautious pen of Halder, it represented an even more drastic revision of
Gelb
than anything proposed by Manstein. The disputed question of the
Schwerpunkt
had been resolved; it would lie, from the very start, on the front of Army Group ‘A’. The role of Bock’s Army Group ‘B’ was now relegated, in the admirable simile of Liddell Hart, to that of ‘a matador’s cloak’, which would draw Gamelin into Holland and northern Belgium, while Rundstedt was striking the lethal sword-blow elsewhere. The operation of the original Schlieffen Plan in 1914 has been compared (again by Liddell Hart) to that of a revolving
door; the harder the French armies pressed in Lorraine, the more forcefully the door was intended to rotate against their back with the German push swinging round through Belgium in the north.
Sichelschnitt
(‘the cut of the sickle’), as the O.K.H.’s new plan was admirably christened, also functioned like a revolving door, but this time the rotation was clockwise, with the French ‘pushing’ in the north, the Germans in the south. Bock’s forces had been whittled down from his original 43 divisions to 29⅓; from controlling all the Panzers, he was left with only three, and two of these would be earmarked for eventual transfer to Rundstedt. None the less, Bock’s role remained of the utmost importance. Though substantially weaker than the numerical sum of the forces likely to be met in Holland and northern Belgium, Bock had to engage the Allied ‘bull’ so vigorously that he would be unable to break away in order to gore the flank of Rundstedt’s thrust.

Reading from north to south, the German line-up would be as follows: Army Group ‘B’, consisting of Küchler’s Eighteenth Army (opposite Holland), and Reichenau’s Sixth Army; Army Group ‘A’, with its northern boundary running south of Liège, consisting of Kluge’s Fourth Army (which, transferred from Bock to Rundstedt, now brought Army Group ‘A’s strength up to 45⅓ divisions), List’s Twelfth Army and Busch’s Sixteenth Army; Army Group ‘C’ (Leeb), running from Luxembourg to the Swiss frontier and consisting of the First and Seventh Armies. The seven Panzer divisions handed to Rundstedt were all to be concentrated from the start (as in
Achtung – Panzer!
) to break through the rugged Ardennes country of Luxembourg and southern Belgium – which the French High Command had so long considered ‘impenetrable’. In a solid steel phalanx, forty five miles wide, they would breach the Meuse between Dinant and Sedan.

The main effort – no longer just a subsidiary thrust – would be made at Sedan, by Guderian’s XIX Panzer Corps consisting of the 1st, 2nd
²³
and the 10th Panzer Divisions, aided by Hitler’s élite Grossdeutschland Regiment of motorized infantry and backed up by von Wietersheim’s XIV Motorized Corps.
Further north, the 6th and 8th Panzers of Reinhardt’s corps were to head for Monthermé, while the 5th and 7th Panzers of Hoth’s corps were to provide flank cover by crossing the Meuse at Dinant. The five Panzer divisions of Guderian and Reinhardt, comprising the main effort, were welded together under command of an integrated Armoured Group. There was some argument as to who should command this; both Guderian and Manstein were passed over (fortunately for Britain, because if either had received the key command there would most probably have been no evacuation from Dunkirk), the final choice falling upon General Ewald von Kleist. A rather conservativeminded cavalry general, Kleist had been retired at the time of the Fritsch-Blomberg ‘purge’, but brought back to command a corps in the Polish campaign. Though his corps had included one Panzer and one ‘light’ division, according to Guderian (who certainly did not welcome the thought of Kleist sitting on top of him), Kleist had never ‘shown himself particularly well disposed to the armoured force’. His appointment, however, was an important success for Halder, who, always suffering some nervousness about the audacity of the new plan, reckoned that in the conservative Kleist he had a man whom he could keep on a tight rein.

At Hitler’s particular instance, a major reshuffle (which would make an essential contribution to the success of
Sichelschnitt
) was ordained within the Panzers themselves. Most of the heavier, cannon-bearing Mark III and IV tanks were to be withdrawn from Küchler’s Eighteenth Army facing Holland, where they would hardly be needed, and given to Kleist and Rundstedt, who would find their guns indispensable for silencing bunkers that defended the Meuse crossing areas. Also incorporated in the new plan were various ‘special operations’ that had been hobby-horses of Hitler from the earliest days of
Gelb;
²⁴
these included parachute and glider operations to capture
key bridges and forts on the Dutch and Belgian canal defence systems, as well as communications centres lying on the route of Kleist’s approach-march through the Ardennes. Hitler occupied himself down to the last detail with the planning of these ‘special operations’; as will be seen, the use of ‘Brandenburger’ commandos wearing Dutch uniforms especially appealed to him.

Meanwhile,
Sichelschnitt
was to be accompanied by elaborate ‘deception’ schemes designed to keep the French constantly in fear that the
real
– or, at least, a serious secondary – attack would come from Leeb’s Army Group ‘C’ facing the Maginot Line. In fact, Army Group ‘C’, containing only nineteen infantry divisions of moderate value, was to play virtually no aggressive role in the coming battle. The mighty Maginot Line upon which France had spent so much of her substance would simply not be accorded any opportunity to cover itself with battle-honours. On the other hand, if it fell for Hitler’s deception plan, the French High Command, it was hoped, would be hesitant to risk withdrawing from the Maginot Line the ‘interval troops’, which constituted such a large portion of disposable reserves, for use against the Sedan breakthrough. Thus were both Leeb and Bock to act as foils for Rundstedt.

There remained some doubts and misgivings about the new plan. As late as April, Bock, possibly still smarting from the dilution of his command, was grumbling to Halder that

you will be creeping by ten miles from the Maginot Line with the flank of your breakthrough and hope that the French will watch inertly! You are cramming the mass of the tank units together into the sparse roads of the Ardennes mountain country, as if there were no such thing as air power! And [added Bock] you then hope to be able to lead an operation as far as the coast with an open southern flank 200 miles long, where stands the mass of the French Army!

It was, he declared, ‘transcending the frontiers of reason’. Rundstedt too, deprived of the reassuring presence of Manstein, continued to worry about that ‘open southern flank’, deducing that it must be along the axis Paris–Châlons-sur-Marne-Verdun
that Gamelin would logically mass his strongest reserves. His new Chief of Staff, Sodenstern, had his doubts about the hideous traffic tangle that might ensue from the vehicles of seven Panzer divisions all converging on the Ardennes. Even Guderian was seen to be having some second thoughts about whether his corps alone could force the Meuse at Sedan. Halder, right to the end, harboured doubts as to whether the troops would be capable of executing this plan, which called for the utmost skill and endurance. The deficiencies shown in the Polish campaign still worried him, and even by the spring of 1940 only a portion of the Army seemed to him to be up to standard, either in spirit, training or equipment, and all these élite units would be committed into the first wave of the attack.

But gradually new sand-table exercises and war games ironed out the remaining defects in the plan. Day after day the Panzer men brought themselves and their weapons to a higher pitch of efficiency; up in the Eifel Mountains, schools, dance-halls, and timber sheds were turned into workshops, keeping the vehicles in top running order, ready for action at twenty-four hours’ notice as decreed by Hitler. Meanwhile, Intelligence reports brought encouraging news. By mid-March, ‘Foreign Armies West’ had a complete enough picture of the French order of battle to assure the O.K.H. that the most reserves Gamelin could bring to bear upon that vulnerable southern flank of the breakthrough would be 41 to 48 divisions, of which 12 to 17 could be rated as ‘third wave’ units only. And to muster this force, the French High Command would have to act with great speed and decision; this, ‘Foreign Armies West’ assessed, was not of the highest probability. A second cause for satisfaction stemmed from the results of aerial reconnaissance over the Meuse crossing zones. Throughout the winter, Luftwaffe planes flying at extremely high altitude had been busily photographing the area. From a microscopic examination of the prints, Major von Stiotta, an Austrian engineer of great ability, reported to Rundstedt shortly before the attack was due to be unleashed that the French fortifications belonging to the Maginot Line ‘extension’ were very far from completed.