To Lose a Battle (36 page)

At Vincennes, from 0100 onwards, G.Q.G. had been kept in a state of alert by reports from Luxembourg of suspicious German troop movements. Then at 0505 hours, the sirens had begun to wail. Warned of the German attack by his
chef de cabinet
, Colonel Petitbon, Gamelin came down to his office. According to one of his staff, ‘his face revealed no apparent emotion, no interior disquiet’. Toward 0700 Gamelin gave the
order for the Dyle-Breda Plan to get under way. Captain André Beaufre, visiting Vincennes from General Doumenc’s G.H.Q. staff, saw Gamelin

pacing up and down the corridor of the barracks, humming audibly with a martial air… It has been said since that he had foreseen defeat, but I can scarcely believe that this was his state of mind at that moment.

The Secretary-General of the Department of War was later heard to remark:

If you had seen, as I have done this morning, the broad smile of General Gamelin when he told me the direction of the enemy attack, you would feel no uneasiness. The Germans have provided him with just the opportunity which he was awaiting.

To the men under his command he drafted an Order of the Day, ending symbolically with a reiteration of Pétain’s immortal words at Verdun:
‘Nous les aurons!’
But somehow the message seemed banal and lacked the C.-in-C.’s customary fluent ease. After a hasty breakfast, Gamelin drove to General Georges’s H.Q. at La Ferté. There he heard a report sent from a French colonel attached to the King of the Belgians that ‘a rather serious incident has occurred at Fort Eben Emael’. Otherwise the impression given by the news for the remainder of that day, as it reached G.Q.G., seemed ‘favourable’.

Up at the front, Lieutenant Jamet’s comment in his diary on hearing of the German attack was simply. ‘So it’s war at last?’, and it was a reaction widely shared among the soldiers of No. 1 Army Group as they prepared to move into Belgium. As the eight months of Phoney War ended, apprehension was not entirely unmixed with relief. On receiving his orders to march up to the Dyle Line, Lieutenant-General Alan Brooke of the B.E.F.’s II Corps recorded that ‘it was hard to believe on a glorious spring day, with all nature looking its best, that we were taking the first step towards… one of the greatest battles of history’. General Prioux of the French Cavalry Corps noted with pride the admirable route discipline of his
units, and their encouraging lack of mechanical breakdowns. The air-liaison colonel accompanying him also expressed admiration, but added apologetically how sad it made him to see such fine men and equipment granted such miserable air cover. That night, after a smooth advance of seventy-five to ninety-five miles, Prioux’s corps reached the Dyle Line according to schedule. But he was horrified to find there a complete absence of any defensive work, such as he had been led to believe the Belgians had promised.

Ninth Army

On General Corap’s Ninth Army front, the infantry divisions marched forward as planned to line up along the Belgian sector of the Meuse, while the cavalry screen fanned out ahead of them into the Ardennes. Lieutenant Georges Kosak of the 4th D.C.L. recalled their rapidly altering reception as they entered Belgium on the morning of the 10th:

At first we pass through several small villages where the people did not seem to be informed about events; then important centres where the population mass on the sidewalks and at the windows greeting us frenziedly. French flags and garlands were hung from all windows. Women have their arms full of flowers, and their aprons full of packets of cigarettes, sweets and chocolates… It is very moving. Our hearts beat; an immense pride overcomes us…

On crossing the Meuse, like General Alan Brooke, Kosak found it hard to believe that the battle had really begun: ‘everything is so gay and sunny’. But on reaching the small town of Ciney, just forty-five air miles from the German frontier and towards which Rommel’s Panzers were already advancing,

a strange feeling comes over us; the streets are quiet and silent, the shutters are closed, and a few curious onlookers watch us pass without showing any emotion… the atmosphere is indifferent, if not hostile; our men have become watchful and serious. After Ciney, no longer any songs, no longer any laughter…

The advance of Corap’s infantry progressed somewhat less
smoothly. Inexcusably, General Martin’s XI Corps seems to have been taken by surprise. The 22nd Division had a number of battalions absent on exercises; in order to regroup themselves, some had to march twelve miles on foot, thus losing nearly twenty-four hours. The 18th Division, which had to cover over fifty-five miles in order to reach its positions around Dinant (compared with the seventy-five miles facing Rommel), could only rush up two battalions by truck on the first day. The rest of the 18th would not be in position until 14 May; but then it was reckoned that the enemy could not possibly reach the Meuse until the morning of the 16th at the earliest. Meanwhile, on leaving its frontier positions, XI Corps was ordered to lock up all bunkers there and hand the keys to the staff of the 53rd Division. But this division, held in reserve by Corap, was subsequently moved southwards. The bunkers were to remain locked, and inaccessible.

Second Army

Although the cavalry divisions of the Ninth and Second Armies were supposed to work closely together, in fact liaison between them was extremely poor from the beginning. On Huntzigers Second Army front, the cavalry screen at once advanced far ahead of Corap’s, and it was on this sector that the first direct confrontation of the Battle of France between French and German troops took place. Covering the Arlon gap, the advance guard of the 2nd D.C.L. came up against reconnaissance troops of Guderian’s left-hand Panzer division near Habay-la-Neuve (about eight miles north-west of Arlon) at 0900 hours on the 10th. There was confused fighting in the area, during which a German regimental commander, Lieutenant-Colonel Ehermann, was killed. At Étalle, a French detachment had its 25-mm. anti-tank gun destroyed the moment it was put into action; it was encircled and crushed after a brief street fight with the Grossdeutschland Regiment. To our right, a group of French marching into position in a field of clover,’ a German rifleman of the Grossdeutschland wrote of this first encounter.

They look at us in astonishment; we ourselves don’t exactly look at them cheerfully – are we to shoot?… Major Föst gives the order to fire!… One of the French somersaults in the clover, the first dead man, who looks completely white. Dead!… something cold grips us around the heart. We will have to get used to that yet…

There was more shooting around Étalle, during which Major Föst, a veteran of 1914–18, was killed and several men wounded. Because of their immobility, the 2nd D.L.C. was unable to bring up its 105-mm. guns in time to give support, and by mid-afternoon it was forced to abandon Arlon. By nightfall, scattered over far too wide an area and badly shaken by its first engagements, the 2nd D.L.C. had fallen back on the River Semois, the last serious barrier in the southern Ardennes beyond the French frontier.

Meanwhile, at about the same time, on the right of the 2nd D.L.C, the 3rd D.L.C. (belonging to General Condé’s Third Army), passing the Luxembourg grand-ducal family on its flight westward, had fought a sharp engagement at Esch against Lieutenant Hedderich’s group, which it at first erroneously reported as ‘Fifth Columnists’. By 0900 hours, a French machine-gun carrier and a tank having been blown up by land-mines, the 3rd D.L.C. decided it could not force Hedderich’s hastily constructed barriers, and sent its H.35 tanks to try to block the roads entering Esch from the north and east. A French dragoon, Captain Gontaut-Biron, describes how the tanks were brought under fire by

very numerous anti-tank guns… while the enemy artillery pinned us down on the positions we had acquired… the enemy was there before us with very superior forces, and greatly helped by numerous formations of the Fifth Column in Esch-sur-Alzette which continued to fire on all isolated men…

In fact, Hedderich’s ninety men, plus the light forward ground elements that came to reinforce them, were heavily outnumbered throughout the day. Nevertheless that evening the French withdrew from Esch, their withdrawal acutely complicated by some 25,000 desperate civilians attempting
to escape down the only route towards the French frontier. It was the first of such experiences with uncontrollably panicking refugees that were to bedevil the French Army for the rest of the campaign.

On Huntziger’s left, the 5th D.L.C. had the task of covering the open country in the area Neufchâteau-Libramont–Bastogne. It was through here that the route of Guderian’s main force lay, but because of the hold-ups inflicted by the Belgian demolitions at Martelange, the 5th D.L.C. was able to fulfil its objective for the 10th without any serious fighting. Meanwhile that day General Huntziger himself had driven up to Bouillon, the ravishing Crusader fortress on the Semois, to inform himself of the situation in the Ardennes. He was somewhat surprised by the Belgian mayor who, when requested that one of Bouillon’s hotels be turned into a field hospital, replied in astonishment: ‘But,
mon général
, Bouillon is a summer resort, our hotels are reserved for tourists.’ Nevertheless, General Ruby tells us that Huntziger returned to his H.Q. at Senuc ‘in general satisfied with the course of the day’. That night, however, aerial reconnaissance reports reached Senuc which identified two large mechanized masses of the enemy crossing into the Ardennes, apparently menacing both Sedan and Carignan to the south-east.

By the evening of 10 May, General Kayaert’s Belgian Chasseurs Ardennais in front of Huntziger, in obedience to their instructions, had withdrawn northwards, leaving a vacuum between the French cavalry and Guderian’s Panzers. Only on Corap’s front did they stay to fight a bitter action, thereby inflicting upon Rommel his first setback of the campaign. That night he had intended to reach the River Ourthe, but just as night was falling he was held up by a spirited defence at Chabrehez, some twelve miles inside the Belgian frontier and about the same from the Ourthe. Here part of the 3rd Regiment of Chasseurs Ardennais was dug in in well-sited field-works, amid heavily contoured country ideally suited for the defence. Though they had no anti-tank weapons, the Belgians courageously kept up a disturbingly accurate fire on Rommel’s 7th Motorcycle Battalion. Frustrated, Rommel was forced to
abandon his aim of reaching the Ourthe that night, and Corap’s cavalry were granted a respite to move up behind the river without meeting the Germans that day.

Allied Air Effort

The Luftwaffe’s early-morning attacks on air bases in France on 10 May had been followed by a dismal tardiness to mount any riposte in the air on the part of the Allies, and damage done to airfields was by no means the chief cause of this. We are told, for instance, that the powerful
Groupe d’Assaut
1/54, equipped with Bréguet attack-bombers and located in a well-placed base midway between Paris and Châlons-sur-Marne, received no instructions until midday on the 10th. Then a written order arrived, earmarking it for operations over northern Belgium and shifting it to Montdidier. But no movement order arrived until the following day, with the result that
Groupe
1/54 was not in action until the 12th. Almost the whole of the fighter strength of General d’Astier’s Z.O.A.N., plus strong support from R.A.F. Hurricanes based in England, had been ordered by General Gamelin, who was still obsessed with the importance of his left-flank movement, to cover General Giraud’s Seventh Army racing up to Breda, while only two French fighter
groupes
, totalling thirty-seven planes, were dispatched for the support of the Ninth and second Armies.

In their joint air H.Q. at Chauny, General d’Astier and Air Marshal Barratt had spent the morning fretting with frustration. At 0800 they had received the following order from G.Q.G.: ‘Air limited to fighters and reconnaissance.’ This meant that, during the very hours when the massed German columns crowding the Ardennes roads would be most vulnerable to it, they were immune from air attack. It was not until 1100 that the Allied air commanders received authority to bomb enemy columns (first priority) and airfields (second priority), and even this authorization contained a rider added by General Georges: ‘At all costs avoid bombing built-up areas.’ Motivated by the deep French dread of Luftwaffe
reprisals, and predicated by Gamelin’s utterly unrealistic hopes that a ‘bombing war’ could somehow be avoided, it meant that Allied pilots were hamstrung by their inability to bomb the Panzers as they were passing through, or halted in, the innumerable hamlets on their route.

Overcome by impatience at the lethargy of the French Air Force, Air Marshal Barratt finally took matters in to his own hands and independently ordered a first flight of Fairey Battle bombers to attack Guderian’s columns advancing through Luxembourg. Barratt’s Battles were the only bombers to strike there that day. Attacking without fighter support at very low altitudes, the Battles were met by a hurricane of fire from the German light flak on the ground, and pounced upon by hovering Me-109s. Immediately the Battle revealed its extreme vulnerability to attack from below, which was to prove tragically costly later at Sedan. Of the first eight Battles to attack, three were immediately shot down. More returned to make low-altitude runs that afternoon, and of thirty-two Battles dispatched that day, thirteen were destroyed and all the remaining nineteen damaged.

That night a massive Franco-British operation, in which Bomber Command was to participate from Britain, was also torpedoed by General Georges’s veto. Eventually, attacks were limited to the R.A.F. bombing three airfields in Holland and a few French Amiots scattering bombs on German airfields and roads west of the Rhine. By the end of the 10th Air Marshal Barratt’s temper was barely under control, his view of his apparently torpid ally all but unprintable.