To Lose a Battle (38 page)

During the 11th, the vast majority of the men marching with and behind Kleist’s armoured phalanx had still not caught a glimpse of the enemy, a factor which lent to the campaign in the Ardennes a certain phantom quality. From time to time, Guderian himself had spotted French reconnaissance vehicles flitting silently through the trees of the Ardennes Forest, in retreat, without apparently either side opening fire. A young sapper lieutenant, Karl-Heinz Mende, wrote home in amazement at advancing through country ‘as fruitful and beautiful as the German landscape’, but empty and abandoned – ‘We are not fighting for this land, we are simply swamping it’ – and the whole campaign so far had reminded him of a well-conducted sand-table exercise. Indeed, as General von Blumentritt told Liddell Hart after the war, it ‘was not really an operation, in the tactical sense, but an approach march. In making the plan we had reckoned it unlikely that we should meet any serious resistance before reaching the Meuse.’ In the first two days of the Ardennes campaign, the German appreciation so far had certainly held good; resistance met had been only ‘weak opposition, and easily brushed aside… The main problem was not tactical but administrative.’ That night Guderian with his highly mobile corps H.Q. took up quarters at Neufchâteau in a much happier frame of mind. The approach march still presented its ‘administrative problems’, but with the exception of the 2nd Panzer, which continued to lag behind, the whole Panzer Corps had more than recovered the time lost on the 10th. Back at O.K.H., Halder recorded a visit from the Führer, lasting from 1640 until 1900 hours, and during which there had been ‘rejoicing over the success’; on the French side of the lines, there was still ‘no sign of any major railway movements anywhere. Enemy air force astonishingly restrained.’ But in a qualifying and significantly cautious note he added that there was ‘expectation of [enemy] attack from the south’.

Air War

In the air, the Luftwaffe continued its strategic bombing of Allied airfields and communication centres, though with no greater intensity than on the previous day. According to General d’Astier, only three French planes were destroyed and one landing-strip put out of action. Tactically, the main German air effort was concentrated upon the annihilation of the Dutch forces in the north. Over the Ardennes, the protective fighter cover remained dense, and the Panzers appear to have had as much air support as they required. Lieutenant-Colonel Soldan, a Wehrmacht chronicler, states that Luftwaffe co-operation was ‘most admirable’ during critical moments of that day:

Planes, watching the situation from above, promptly recognized any position where help was needed. Dive-bombers flung themselves on the enemy and opened the way for the countless vehicles whose motors were making a terrible noise as they laboured through this forest region of hills and mountains.

But otherwise the Luftwaffe still adroitly avoided any intensification of activity over the Dinant–Sedan area that might have given away the
Sichelschnitt
objectives. Meanwhile, on the 11th the Allied air forces undertook one single operation against those miles of irresistible targets worming through the Ardennes. The R.A.F. official history relates:

Eight Battles of Nos. 88 and 218 Squadrons were ordered to deliver a low-level attack on a column in German territory moving up towards the Luxembourg border. Whether they managed to reach their target area is doubtful. The only pilot to return saw three of his companions succumb to ground fire in the Ardennes.

Again, the French Air Force took no part.

At the other end of the battlefront, with similar ineffectiveness and high losses, a squadron of Belgian Battle bombers attacked the captured Maastricht and Albert Canal bridges, carrying 50-kg. bombs which were ludicrously small for the task. Ten out of fifteen planes were shot down. The attacks
were followed up by R.A.F. Blenheims; on one mission, five out of six were destroyed by flak. It was not until the end of the morning of the 11th that General Georges’s restrictions on the bombing of built-up areas by the French Air Force was lifted. At 1630 Gamelin himself telephoned d’Astier, ordering him to ‘put everything to work to slow up the German columns in the direction of Maastricht, Tongres, Gembloux, and not to hesitate to bomb towns and villages in order to obtain the required result’. But much irreplaceable time had been lost, and in any case Gamelin was concentrating his limited air resources in the wrong place – as indeed the
Sichelschnitt
planners had intended that he should.

The Allies in Belgium

On 11th May, General d’Astier noted that Giraud’s Seventh Army in its dash towards Breda ‘is not being troubled’ by the Luftwaffe. In view of the merciless pounding that was being inflicted upon the poor Dutch, was there not something curious in the apparently blind eye the Luftwaffe was turning upon Giraud? The B.E.F. had experienced a similarly quiet time in its advance to the Dyle Line position. With it went a certain ‘Kim’ Philby, representing
The Times
, who, showing an astuteness which would later bring untold advantage to another employer, remarked apprehensively to an American colleague, Drew Middleton: ‘It went too damn well. With all that air power why didn’t he bother us? What is he up to?’
¹

The B.E.F. advance – apart from the one incident on the 10th when an officious Belgian frontier guard had tried to halt the passage of Major-General Bernard Montgomery’s 3rd Division because it did not possess the necessary permits – had indeed proceeded with exemplary smoothness. To many of its older members who had fought in Belgium once before, there was an uncanny quality about that advance: ‘It was almost,’ wrote Drew Middleton, ‘as if they were retracing steps taken in a dream. They saw again faces of friends long dead and
heard the half-remembered names of towns and villages.’ But the Tommies were in excellent spirits; passing them on the road back to Paris from Brussels, Clare Boothe ‘remembered how everybody had remarked that it was funny the soldiers didn’t sing in this war. Well, these soldiers were singing… they stuck up their thumbs in the new gesture they had, which meant “O.K., everything’s fine,” and winked and blew cheerful kisses…’ By the evening of 11 May, the B.E.F. was well dug in on its appointed sector along the Dyle, from Louvain to Wavre, and although the river here was in fact little more than a wide stream, the British position was a relatively strong one.

The French First Army of General Blanchard, earmarked to fill the ‘Gembloux Gap’ between the B.E.F. and Corap’s Ninth Army, was not so well off. Moving up from Valenciennes, Major Barlone sombrely noted meeting Belgian refugees racing towards France from the Liège area: ‘The news these people bring is pessimistic… Treachery and the Fifth Column are the sole topics of conversation.’ On reaching Gembloux, General Prioux of the crack Cavalry Corps was ‘dumbfounded’ to discover how little the Belgians had done to fortify this vital area; it seemed a completely open plain offering itself to the German Panzers. Meanwhile, a staff captain had brought him grave news from Liège; mighty Eben Emael had fallen, and the Germans were already flooding across the Albert Canal line. By the afternoon the Germans were in Tongres and reaching out to Waremme some six miles west of Liège, thus threatening it from the river. At this rate, Prioux reckoned that his corps would never have time to establish itself before the enemy was on top of it. Early that afternoon he reported to Blanchard that ‘in view of the feeble Belgian resistance and superiority of the enemy aviation, the Dyle Manoeuvre appears to be difficult to execute and it would seem to be preferable to resort to the Escaut Manoeuvre’. Blanchard passed this on to Billotte, attaching his own recommendation. Billotte, always the staunchest supporter of the Dyle–Breda Plan among the French hierarchy, was shocked. Visiting Prioux that night in person, Billotte told
him that the Dyle Plan could not possibly be put into reverse; he would speed up the advance of the bulk of the first Army, but meanwhile Prioux would have to hold fast until D+5, 14 May.

Holland

In Holland, the defences were crumbling at a terrifying speed. Rumours of Fifth Column treachery were multiplying: hand-grenades were reported to have been filled with sand instead of explosive, bunkers crumbled because the concrete had been ‘cut’, children were ‘poisoned’ by chocolates dropped from the air. Panic was everywhere. The Dutch Army was still valiantly attacking the pockets held by General Student’s airborne troops, but the Dutch Air Force had been all but wiped out, and the 9th Panzer Division had now got its tanks across the Maas (via the bridge at Gennep captured by the ‘Brandenburgers’) and was rapidly striking westwards, towards Rotterdam. The advance guard of Giraud’s mechanized divisions reached its destination at Breda, only to find that the Dutch Army to whom it had come to ‘extend an arm’ had been forced to withdraw northwards covering Rotterdam. By lunchtime on the 11th Giraud had run into the 9th Panzer, in the vicinity of Tilburg. Shaken by this unexpected encounter, his armour turned about, falling back in the direction of Antwerp, now savagely strafed and bombed by low-flying German planes. Thus within thirty-six hours of the opening of battle, Gamelin’s ‘Breda Variant’, upon which was wagered his irreplaceable mobile reserve, had already been rendered null and void.

French High Command

Back at Vincennes, Gamelin’s eyes were still kept riveted upon the north by the crescendo of events there. In London, General Spears was told by the French Military Attaché (on the 11th and again on the 12th) that G.Q.G. was convinced that the Germans were making their main effort between
Maastricht and Liège, while, on the 11th, the
Times
Military Correspondent (obviously also fed by a similar
tuyau
from Vincennes) declaimed confidently that ‘This time at least there has been no strategic surprise.’ General Ironside recorded sanguinely in his diary: ‘… we shall have saved the Belgian Army. On the whole the advantage is with us. A really hard fight all this summer…’ To outer commands such as General Weygand’s in Syria, French G.Q.G. concluded its summary that day: ‘The Allied manoeuvre is developing favourably.’ If there was any diminution of Gamelin’s optimism that day, it lay in disappointment at the rapid disintegration of Dutch resistance and at the unexpectedly poor quality of the Belgian defence preparations. As Gamelin admits in his memoirs, during the first three days of the battle ‘I was above all preoccupied with Holland.’

Yet the indications were mounting steadily that something serious was also afoot in the Ardennes. Already by the morning of the 11th, both French and R.A.F. reconnaissance reports had contained such items as ‘numerous columns on the road from Euskirchen to Prüm and on the Belgian road network to the west of Luxembourg,’ the unloading of tanks north of Neufchâteau, and considerable motorized forces deploying towards Arlon, while in his midday bulletin General d’Astier stated: ‘The enemy seems to be preparing an energetic action in the general direction of Givet.’
²
It was the actual numbers of the Panzer divisions operating in the Ardennes that continued to elude G.Q.G.’s
Deuxième Bureau
in composing its enemy order of battle. The effectiveness of the German fighter umbrella against reconnaissance intruders, and the leafy natural camouflage of those ‘impenetrable’ forests into which whole divisions could melt without trace from one hour to another, all conspired to this end, while the forcefulness with which Bock was brandishing the ‘matador’s cloak’ north of Liège certainly suggested that more than just a quarter of the German Panzer strength might be deployed there.

Nevertheless, it would not be true to say that, even as early
as 11 May, the French High Command had received no warnings of the danger in the Ardennes, or that they were not reacting to these warnings. On that afternoon, General Georges issued an Instruction No. 12 in which he ‘foresaw’ the need to ‘push up on to the second position behind Sedan the 2nd and 3rd Armoured Divisions, the 3rd Motorized and the 14th, 36th and 87th Infantry Divisions’, all belonging to the general reserve. The orders for the transportation of these units would be passed on between the 11th and 13th; but as events were soon to prove, they would come too late.

During the afternoon of the 11th, Gamelin visited General Georges at his headquarters of Les Bondons. The previous day he had, on his own initiative, delegated to Georges powers to deal directly with King Leopold as Commander-in-Chief of the Belgian Army. Now he was astonished to discover that Georges in his turn had sub-delegated these powers to Billotte, to whom he also wanted to pass his ‘powers of co-ordination’ over Lord Gort’s B.E.F. It was, said Gamelin crossly, ‘an abdication’, yet he did nothing to attempt to alter his subordinate’s decision. When he returned to Vincennes that evening the tangle of the Allied command network had in no way been simplified, nor were relations between Gamelin and Georges any friendlier.

Chapter 11

On the Meuse

12 May

The Germans announce that one of the forts of Liège is in their hands. Even if this claim is true, its significance is diminished by the announcement that a captain and a lieutenant have been decorated for it. That would indicate that… the fort was only a bunker or a small pill-box.

New York Herald Tribune
, 12 May

DESPAIR IN BERLIN

Sunday Chronicle
, 12 May

The attack of the German Wehrmacht in the west made good progress on 12 May.

Wehrmacht communiqué 13 May

The Low Countries

Allied newspapers on the morning of Whit Sunday, 12 May, generally gave the impression that the German offensive had been stemmed by the Dutch and Belgians – as indeed, according to Gamelin’s plans, it should have been. But in fact by that morning the situation in Holland was already desperate, and in the course of the next twenty-four hours it became hopeless. In the extreme north, the German ground troops reached the eastern shore of the Zuyder Zee; in the centre, advancing beyond Arnhem, which the airborne troops had captured on the first day, they broke through the Grebbe Line at Rhenen after some hard fighting, whence the very heart of the country could be threatened; in the south, the 9th Panzer was pushing towards the great bridge over the Maas estuary at Moerdijk, to link up with the German paratroopers still holding it. By the evening of the 12th, Moerdijk was captured and with it vanished all hope of assistance from Giraud’s Seventh Army. Holland was cut in two and the Dutch Army, though it continued to fight on with bitter desperation, was left with no
option but to retreat into
Vesting Holland
, the area containing the main cities, The Hague, Rotterdam, Utrecht and Amsterdam, with their backs to the sea. Only one airworthy bomber, a Fokker, was left to the Dutch Air Force, and this was shot down over Moerdijk the following day. General Giraud’s fine mechanized units found themselves in a menacing predicament: heavily hit both by Stukas and German armour, their right flank was increasingly threatened by the 9th Panzer, ammunition was running short, and many of their tanks were still moving up through Belgium on flat-cars. Losses had been heavy. Giraud decided to withdraw from all but a tiny corner of Dutch soil, and try to hold a line from Bergen op Zoom to the Turnhout Canal, covering Antwerp.