To Lose a Battle (46 page)

Sedan: the Fatal Moment

Abruptly, at 1500 hours, the Stuka bombardment lifted, shifting to targets further behind the Meuse. Though few of the soldiers confronting each other across this narrow strip of water can have had time to reflect upon it, the moment of crisis in the whole battle had arrived. Here was the culminating point of all the elaborate plans of
Sichelschnitt
– indeed, of Hitler’s very
aspirations to become the founder of a ‘Thousand-Year Reich’. If the crossings at Sedan were to fail, if Guderian’s spearhead were to be smashed, who could foretell what future would lie ahead for Germany? It was the crisis for France, for Western civilization, and it would come to be regarded as one of the critical moments of the twentieth century. At such a moment, suddenly the great, complex stratagems of both sides, in which armies are moved about like chess pieces, become reduced to the isolated actions of one or two men. Like the adage of the nail, the horse and the rider, the success or failure of such lone combats leads to the success or failure of a platoon, from a platoon to a company, a company to a regiment, and so on until the whole battlefield is in flux and the day is decided.

At Sedan, events move with such brutal speed that the historian is left floundering – as blinded by the all-obscuring smoke of the Stuka bombs as the French defenders. Unlike the leisurely four months of siege warfare around Paris in 1870, or the ten months of static warfare at Verdun in 1916, minutely and superbly recorded at every level, the decisive acts at Sedan pass in confused, unchronicled minutes, or even seconds. On the French side, there would be but little time to enter up the regimental diaries; whole pages of the story that day have disappeared for ever with the participants. Others are, alas, so shaming to French
amour propre
that, like the details of the mutinies of 1917, they will probably lie forever hidden from sight in the archives contained in the gloomy dungeons at Vincennes. Even on the German side, where headquarters units were not destroyed or dispersed, the pressure of events resulted in an unfortunate lack of cohesive reports on the course of the battle. Thus one is forced to build up a picture of the day upon snatches and fragments of small, scattered scenes, and to rely to a large extent upon the German accounts, with their occasional distortions imposed by National Socialist bombast.

10th Panzer

Even before the smoke from the last Stuka bombs had cleared,
the attackers were appearing everywhere on the river in their inflated rubber dinghies.
¹⁹
There were many casualties among the first wave. To the survivors, the sixty-yard crossing seemed to last interminably. On the left of Guderian’s corps, the 10th Panzer, crossing ‘according to the last war-game at Bernkastel’ (on the Moselle), made a bad start. The boats for the right-hand group, composed of the 86th Rifle Regiment, reached the water’s edge too late for it to take full advantage of the Stuka bombardment. On its left, the 69th reported (at 1600 hours) to Lieutenant-General Schaal, the divisional commander, that it could not move on account of heavy flanking shell fire from guns
²⁰
apparently left untouched by the Luftwaffe, which rained down upon it in the flat, exposed meadows bordering the Meuse near Bazeilles. Out of some fifty small rubber dinghies, all but two had been shot up. A vivid account is provided by Sergeant Schulze of the 69th. His platoon had come under heavy artillery fire at Givonne that morning, and after being ordered to ‘dig in’ for the first time during the campaign, it had been particularly gratified to see the first Stukas come shrieking down on the enemy guns. At H-Hour, Schulze’s team began to work its way through the village of Balan:

A large meadow lies in front of us. On a hill about 800 yards away, the enemy is dug in [on the far side of the Meuse]. To begin with we move forward well; the meadow is wet, finally we are wading up to our calves through the water, here and there shots fly over our heads. Barbed wire is cut through, and we move on ahead. In the next second everything breaks loose. Machine-gun bursts whistle over us, there are strikes before, near and behind us. The enemy is shooting well. Under this fire it is impossible for anybody to get forward. The least movement… brings the fire down anew. We are lying in the water, we hug the ground very close, and are delighted when a particularly high grass hummock keeps us out of sight of the enemy. To the left of us some of our own troops are going back, but for us any movement is impossible. About 300 to 400 metres further to the right is
Oberfeldwebel
S.P. with his platoon. The men have already got to within 80 yards of the river…

The enemy artillery, whose shots hitherto have fallen far behind Balan, have adjusted their fire forwards, and now it is very close behind the attackers. Enemy infantry in front of us, behind a separating river, artillery bombardment behind us, here it is impossible to move either forwards or backwards. Unexpectedly, over to the right appear engineers, men hard as iron, who bring up assault boats. There
Oberfeldwebel
S.P. decides to risk it with the engineers. He had three of his men spring forward and leap into one of the boats. In a second the boats are in the water… they are on their way to the safe shore. The second boat follows with reinforcements and the Battalion Adjutant, Lieutenant M. By the time a third boat is about to enter the water, the artillery has adjusted its fire so far towards the Meuse that the assault boat is destroyed. The engineers fall. But a small group of ten to twelve men has made it. The first on the other side of the Meuse. They lie close up against an enemy bunker. What are they to do? If there is any French counter-thrust they are lost.

From the Balan side of the river, Schulze then observed that the enemy bunker appeared to be knocked out, having received a direct hit from a German gun a short time previously. A German officer was seen to disappear behind the bunker:

soon he comes back with five prisoners, the bunker was still occupied – then they lay out white sheets, because from the other side, our own troops are often still firing; they have no idea that our own people are already over there. Meanwhile hours pass by; while
Oberfeldwebel
S.P. has crossed the Meuse, the company is stuck in the water, pinned down by the enemy fire.

Schulze’s platoon falls back on Balan that evening, and is told to stand by as reinforcements:

The enemy artillery shoots on Balan. We are sitting in our wet uniforms in safe cellars. There was no thought of sleep, for the evenings are bitterly cold. Teeth chatter and limbs tremble.

As far as Schulze’s immediate front was concerned, by nightfall on the 13th the prospects did not look brilliant. That the 10th Panzer obtained a foothold on the opposite bank at all that
day seems to have depended largely on the initiative of individual detachment leaders of the assault engineers such as
Feldwebel
Rubarth. Specially equipped with explosive charges for knocking out bunkers which had survived the Stukas and flak, Rubarth and his section of eleven men assembled their gear in the private park of a mansion near Balan. Across the wide stretch of open meadow where Schulze had been pinned down, Rubarth could clearly recognize the enemy strongpoints on the river at Wadelincourt; but he noted ‘the terrain is extremely unfavourable for an attack’. Moving down to the Meuse over this dangerously exposed ground as H-Hour arrived, Rubarth records:

Immediately we were met by strong machine-gun fire. There are casualties. With my detachment I reach the bank of the Meuse under cover of a row of trees and a sports-ground.

He appears to have had available only two small rubber dinghies designed to carry no more than three men. Cramming four into each, however, Rubarth paddled out under a hail of fire, into the sixty-yard wide river. Because of the extra weight, plus their heavy equipment of wire-cutters, grenades and hollow charges, the water came perilously close to the gunwales of Rubarth’s dinghy. He ordered his men to throw out all unnecessary ballast, entrenching tools included, remarking grimly: ‘No digging in for us – either we get through, or that’s the end.’ To upset the defenders’ aim during their crossing, the
Feldwebel
ordered his driver, Corporal Podszus, to blaze away with a machine-gun into the weapon slits of a particularly menacing-looking bunker immediately to their front, using another man’s shoulder to steady his aim in the wildly unstable dinghy. On landing (near Wadelincourt), Rubarth speedily finished off this bunker. His own story continues:

The enemy artillery is now laying down heavy artillery fire on our crossing. Crawling past the next bunker in dead ground out of reach of its guns, the section attacked it from the rear. I made use of an explosive charge. In the next second part of the rear bunker wall is ripped out by the power of the explosion. We utilize the opportunity to reduce the occupants of the bunker with handgrenades. After a brief fight they appear with white flags, and a few seconds later our Swastika flag flies over the bunker. From the other bank the sound of loud cheers from our comrades comes over to us. Thus encouraged we fling ourselves at two further field-works we had spotted some 100 metres half left of us. To get to them we have to go through a patch of swamp where part of the time we stand up to our thighs in water. With reckless audacity Corporal Bräutigam alone attacks the left bunker and through a clever action captures the occupants. Together with Sergeant Theophel and Corporals Podszus and Monk, I take the second bunker. Thus the first line of bunkers immediately behind the Meuse is broken through over a stretch of some 300 metres.

The facility with which Rubarth and his few men succeeded in knocking out this row of bunkers, one after the other, suggests the state to which the French defenders had already been reduced. What were the ‘interval troops’ entrusted with guarding the vulnerable flanks of these important bastions doing? There is virtually no mention of them in Rubarth’s accounts; where were they? All was clearly not well with the river defences at Wadelincourt.

Rubarth’s own account continues with his detachment pushing forward to the railway embankment a hundred yards or so from the river bank. Here, for the first time, he came under such strong fire ‘that temporarily we have to seek cover’. Taking stock of the situation, Rubarth ascertained that the other dinghy bringing his section across the river had been hit in midstream, its occupants presumably killed. Thus

with one sergeant, four men and the group of infantry which were covering our right flank, I am alone on the far side of the river. Moreover, our ammunition is exhausted, so that we cannot continue our attack. In order to bring up reinforcements and ammunition, I go back to the crossing place and discover that the crossing operation has been interrupted by very heavy enemy fire. The dinghies are partly deflated or shot to pieces. Four men of my detachment have been killed there. My company commander, who is still on the other side of the river and has watched the course of the battle, immediately orders the bringing-up of new dinghies and appoints new crews.

While waiting for these reinforcements under the blazing sun, Rubarth’s Corporal Bräutigam, who spoke French, ordered one of the prisoners to go back into his bunker and get something to drink. He returned with a bottle of wine. During the interval the Wadelincourt defenders suddenly rallied and launched a surprise attack on Rubarth. They were beaten off, but Bräutigam was killed, and Corporals Monk and Podszus wounded. Shortly after this critical moment, an infantry group arrives, and Rubarth joins up with it. With fresh reinforcements of assault engineers reaching him at last from the east bank, he then goes on to blast a gap in the second line of bunkers. By nightfall, exhausted and having lost six dead and three wounded out of his original eleven men, Rubarth, together with riflemen of the 86th Regiment, had reached his objective on the heights above Wadelincourt. For his achievements Rubarth was immediately awarded the Ritterkreuz, and a lieutenant’s commission.

Thus, by dusk, the 10th Panzer had a firm but small toehold on the west bank, between Wadelincourt and Pont Maugis.

1st Panzer

With the tremendous concentration of firepower supporting it, the 1st Panzer was having a somewhat easier time. On its left flank, the job of clearing the western suburbs of Sedan and then rushing the La Marfée heights fell to the Grossdeutschland Regiment. One of the élite fighting units of Nazi Germany, the Grossdeutschland could trace its origins in the 1870s as the Berlin ‘Guard Regiment’. In the turbulent 1920s it was employed to put down any attempted
putsches
in the capital, while in more peaceful times its principal function was to march three times a week, with bands thundering out
Deutschland über Alles
, to change the guard at the Brandenburger Tor, and to provide guards of honour for such visiting dignitaries as Ciano of Italy and Horthy of Hungary. Just three months before war began, Hitler had issued a proclamation changing the regiment’s name to Grossdeutschland as a martial symbol of the unity of all Germans within the new Reich. Officers of the Regiment Grossdeutschland (which later in the war was expanded
to a division, and eventually to an army corps) were specially selected from the rest of the Army. As with the British Brigade of Guards, the men had to be over a certain height, and the regiment always fought as a separate unit, its name proudly emblazoned on the sleeves of its members. Regarded as an élite force set aside for especially tough operations, the Grossdeutschland had been earmarked by Guderian ever since February for the role of smashing a hole in the French lines through which the Panzers could then pour. At that time Guderian had evidently made some disparaging remarks about infantry who ‘slept instead of advancing at night’, to which the regimental commander, Lieutenant-Colonel Graf von Schwerin, rose testily, betting Guderian a case of champagne that this would not happen with the Grossdeutschland. All through April it had undergone rugged toughening-up exercises: marching on short rations, river crossings on the Moselle, and night attacks.