To Lose a Battle (35 page)

A sergeant with Krüger describes how ‘soon after take-off we lost sight of the other Storchs flying with us… on the roads there is the endless worm of the Army stretching out. People wave to us… we land in Belgium on a meadow. It’s the wrong place, and with loud curses from us the three machines take off again.’ The pilots then spotted a Storch burning on the ground, and landed near it: ‘there is a terrible muddle. The ammunition is taken into a near-by wood, the road barricaded.’ Stunned Belgian passers-by told the lost detachment that they had landed near the village of Léglise, about nine miles from Nives and on the wrong side of Garski’s group. ‘Our defence measures are strengthened, machine-guns put in position… we
requisition civilian cars… then suddenly our runner, Preusch, arrives with a bicycle; he has landed with the captain some two kilometres away.’ They joined up with Krüger’s group, but not with Garski and the rest of the battalion until the afternoon. There was some sharp fighting against the Chasseurs Ardennais for possession of Witry, which finally fell at 1300 hours, at a cost of nineteen German casualties. A short time later contact was made with the advanced elements of the 1st Panzer. The approaches to Neufchâteau were open.

‘Brandenburgers’

Although Operations ‘Hedderich’ and ‘Niwi’ were more fundamental, tactically, to the success of
Sichelschnitt
, events up in the north were certainly more colourful and eye-catching. Holland, with her small, weak Army,
⁴
based her defence upon the flooding of large areas and the destruction of bridges over the numerous canals. It was to forestall this that Hitler decided to strike swiftly, from behind. By the end of 10 May, General Student’s airborne troops had succeeded in capturing the three key airfields of Ockenburg, Ypenburg, and Valkenburg which ring The Hague, though they had suffered setbacks and severe losses. They had also seized the important bridges over the Maas estuary (the Dutch extension of the Meuse) at Dordrecht and Moerdijk, and destroyed 62 of the Dutch Air Force’s 125 planes. Meanwhile, to open up Holland to Bock’s Panzers and infantry moving in from the east, some ruses had been resorted to that were particularly dear to Hitler’s heart. As early as November 1939 he had first mooted the idea of seizing the vital Maas bridges by commandos dressed in Dutch uniforms. Canaris, although allegedly disapproving of the operation as being unethical, had provided the necessary uniforms. Their theft did not go unnoticed in Holland, where a newspaper even caricatured the uniform-loving Goering disguised as a Dutch tram-conductor, but otherwise the phlegmatic Dutch were not disposed to let their suspicions be aroused. The troops for
this cloak-and-dagger role originated from a body with the cover name of
Bau- und Lehrkompanie Brandenburg
,
⁵
or ‘Brandenburgers’ as they were more commonly christened, which was to grow from a company to a battalion and later to a division during the course of the war. The ‘Brandenburgers’ had first been thought up at the time of the Czech crisis by Captain Theodor von Hippel, who had fought in Lettow-Vorbeck’s brilliant guerilla campaign behind the British lines in East Africa in the First War. They were to infiltrate behind the Czech lines to link up with Sudeten ‘patriots’. Thanks to Chamberlain, their services were never required. In October 1939, however, Canaris had instructed Hippel to set up the
Bau- und Lehrkompanie
, and their first service had been the capture intact of Danish bridges over the Belts.

The attempt on the Dutch bridges at Maastricht ended in dismal failure. There was a confused shoot-up, in which the leader of the bogus Dutchmen, Lieutenant Hocke, was killed; it was impossible to remove the explosive charges, and all three bridges blew up in the face of the waiting Panzers. When Canaris’s Abwehr delegate arrived outside Maastricht, he found a depressing sight of mile upon mile of Panzers and vehicles jamming the roads, and it was not until mid-morning that an assault bridge could be thrown across the Maas. A similar fiasco took place at Arnhem where the ‘Brandenburgers’, to make up for their shortage of Dutch uniforms, utilized outlandish cardboard helmets and were immediately spotted. But at Gennep they were triumphant; under Lieutenant Walther three Dutch ‘Fifth Columnists’ dressed as policemen marched up to the bridge with a posse of ‘captured’ German P.O.W.s, fully equipped with machine-pistols and grenades under their Army overcoats, and succeeded in securing the bridge from the surprised defenders. Walther’s seizure of the bridge at Gennep had important enough consequences;
across it the 9th Panzer Division rushed to interpose itself between the Dutch Army and General Giraud’s Seventh Army, to forestall Gamelin’s ‘Breda Variant’; while at the same time General von Reichenau was able to divert northwards to Gennep some of the units of his Sixth Army bogged down before Maastricht. The
Blitzkrieg
rolled into Holland.

Meanwhile, it was also the ‘Brandenburgers’ who were charged with securing some twenty-four objectives in Belgium, including bridges and viaducts and the tracing-out of minefields which had previously been reported by German agents. At St Vith, on Rommel’s route to Dinant, Captain Rudloff, who had been studying the habits of the Belgian frontier guards minutely over the previous weeks, was particularly successful. There had been some wild shooting in the railway station, during which a locomotive managed to take off to give the warning; but otherwise three out of four of St Vith’s bridges fell intact into German hands. For their achievements, 3 Company of the ‘Brandenburgers’ received no fewer than ninety-two Iron Crosses.

Eben Emael

But the single most striking episode of 10 May was undoubtedly the capture of the Belgian Fort Eben Emael. The nearest equivalent in 1940 to Verdun’s Fort Douaumont of 1916, Eben Emael was the northernmost fortification guarding Liége and the linchpin of the Albert Canal position, along which Gamelin anticipated the Belgians could hold the Germans at bay for five days, until the French and B.E.F. could be established, a calculation that formed the whole basis of the Allied Dyle-Breda Plan. It was also a vital factor of Hitler’s
Sichelschnitt
that such a delay in the north should not occur, for until the powerful mechanized forces belonging to the French First Army were inextricably engaged by frontal attack there, there would always exist the grave danger that they could be diverted to strike the vulnerable northern flank of the main German breakthrough at Sedan. Therefore, for both sides, a very great deal depended on Eben Emael.
Completed as recently as 1935, the fort measured some 900 yards by 700, and was protected by an enormous cutting which fell 120 feet, sheer and unassailable, into the Albert Canal. In various single and double turrets, it mounted nearly a dozen pieces of artillery from 75-mms. to 120-mms., as well as numerous light cannon and machine-guns, and safely underground it contained a full battalion of troops. No single fort of the Maginot Line was as powerful. But like all fixed, unmanoeuvrable and supposedly invincible strongholds, it had its Achilles’ heel: it possessed virtually no anti-aircraft defences, and the actual surface of the fort itself was unmined.

The mission of capturing Eben Emael was entrusted to the ‘Koch Storm Detachment’, consisting entirely of volunteer sappers, who, under Captain Koch, had been trained at Hilde-sheim in the most rigid secrecy since November 1939. Its members had been allowed no leave, were forbidden to mix with men of other units and had been sworn to secrecy under pain of death. Initially they had practised their attack on models, and later on bunkers of the Czechs’ Sudeten fortress system, so that by May they knew every detail of Eben Emael in their sleep – except its name. At 0330 on 10 May, while it was still dark, they took off from Cologne in eleven large gliders, each carrying seven to eight men and towed by a Ju-52. The gliders were piloted by some of the star German pilots of peace-time gliding competitions – a sport at which Germany, on account of the Versailles limitations, had long excelled – including the former world champion, Sergeant Bräutigam. The reason for employing gliders was simple: in the dusk, they could cover the thirteen odd miles across the frontier unheard and unseen, and could land on top of the fort itself within twenty yards of a given spot. The superbly precise timing allowed them to land on Eben Emael just five minutes before the bulk of the Wehrmacht crossed the frontier. After circling to gain height, the Ju-52s followed a line of beacons to Aachen where they cast off the gliders from a height of 8,000 feet. They flew on, dropping quantities of parachute ‘dummies’ stuffed with fire-crackers, to confuse the Belgian defenders. At Eben Emael, the Belgian sentries heard
Dutch anti-aircraft fire over the Maastricht appendix, but heard or saw nothing else, until suddenly, like great black birds that seemed to hang almost motionless in the air, the gliders were on top of them.

For all its minute planning, however, the operation nearly failed when the tow-ropes of two of the gliders snapped, including the one containing the expedition commander, Lieutenant Rudolf Witzig, himself. One landed near Düren, midway between Aachen and Cologne, and its disgruntled members were forced to join up on foot with the advancing ground forces. Witzig landed in a field not far from Cologne; with commendable energy, he prepared a field by chopping down willow hedges and called up another Ju-52 to tow him off. He arrived safely at Eben Emael to find that, no doubt as a by-product of the superb training they had undergone, his Sergeant-Major, Wenzel, already had the situation well in hand, having landed unopposed plumb on top of the fort. Swiftly the German engineers blasted the thick steel carapaces which protected the subterranean gun turrets, using (for the first time) powerful hollow charges. One by one Eben Emael’s turrets and gun casemates were knocked out in this fashion; the heavy twin 120-mm. turret, whose armour proved too thick for the hollow charges, was dispatched by the simple device of poking explosive charges down the barrels. Some time was wasted on two turrets which proved to be dummies, but by the time Lieutenant Witzig reached Eben Emael the mighty fort had been blinded and its teeth drawn. Near-by Belgian artillery opened heavy fire on the Germans on the fort glacis, but no really dangerous counter-attack had been mounted by the battalion-strong infantry garrison, nor any mines or other obstacles encountered. Witzig now entered the fort to clean up inside. Meanwhile, other detachments of Koch’s glider-borne engineers had seized two near-by bridges over the Albert Canal. All through the night of 10–11 May the garrison of Eben Emael held out, while Belgian infantry from outside the fort attempted to dislodge the Germans. The situation for Witzig’s eighty-five men was becoming precarious when, at 0600 hours on the 11th, they were relieved by the
advance troops of Reichenau’s Sixth Army. Six hours later Eben Emael surrendered, and 1,100 men were taken prisoner. In the fighting the Belgians lost 23 killed and 59 wounded; Witzig, 6 dead and 15 wounded. Hitler promptly awarded Koch and Witzig
⁶
(then only twenty-four) the Ritterkreuz, one of Germany’s highest decorations.

Of all the successes of 10 May, none pleased Hitler more than the capture of Eben Emael. His pleasure was indeed justified. It was undoubtedly one of the boldest
coups
of war, more brilliant even than the seizure of Fort Douaumont in 1916, which fell virtually by accident. Its capture meant that within thirty hours the Germans had already breached the Albert Canal line and thrown into jeopardy the whole of Gamelin’s strategy. But, as already noted, this tactical success only concerned the secondary part of the German plan. Of still greater importance was the psychological impact of the sudden collapse of Eben Emael. Cunningly, Goebbels’s propaganda machine, suppressing all mention of Witzig’s hollow charges, made mysterious capital by referring to a ‘new method of attack’. The refrain was promptly taken up in the Allied camp and dark rumours circulated about secret weapons, such as nerve gases. Even a year later an American magazine was claiming that Eben Emael had been blown up by Germans who in peace-time had grown chicory in nearby caves, which they treacherously filled with explosives! Coming so soon after Hitler’s extraordinary successes in Norway, talk about ‘secret weapons’ at Eben Emael left a nasty feeling in the pit of French stomachs; if the Germans could deal thus with the world’s strongest single fort, what would be the fate of the impregnable Maginot Line? Eyes became nervously diverted there – eyes that should have been fixed in gaze upon the danger hourly mounting in the Ardennes. Meanwhile, the employment of the handful of ‘Brandenburgers’ disguised in Dutch uniforms was itself to achieve a major success of psychological warfare for Hitler. Like wildfire, the rumours of ubiquitous Fifth Columnists – nuns in hobnailed boots, priests
with machine-pistols under their
soutanes
– spread through Holland, and then into Belgium and France, carrying paralysis and demoralization in their wake like the germs of a deadly plague.

The Allies Move

In London, at 6 a.m. on the morning of the German attack, Sir Samuel Hoare visited Churchill – still waiting to be summoned by the King to form a government – at the Admiralty. He was smoking a cigar and eating fried eggs and bacon as if nothing serious had occurred. Two hours later the War Cabinet met to discuss events on the Continent, and Churchill with supreme calmness insisted that the Cabinet listen to a report he wanted to make on a ‘homing A.A. fuse’. The Cabinet listened. (‘We are impossible!’ exclaimed General Ironside.)

On hearing the news in Paris, Paul Reynaud swiftly agreed with President Lebrun that it was no time for the Government to fall, and withdrew his letter of resignation. Equally, he agreed that it was now inopportune to switch commanders-in-chief, and to Gamelin he addressed a brief conciliatory note: ‘
Mon général
, the battle is engaged. Only one thing matters; to win it. We shall all work for this end together, with a single heart.’ Speaking to the nation over the radio, he declared bravely, The French Army has drawn its sword; France is gathering herself, and then pleaded for national unity in the coming crisis. Privately he expressed concern about the projected Allied advance into Belgium; to Baudouin he admitted: ‘I am disturbed. We shall see what Gamelin is worth.’