To Lose a Battle (47 page)

At midday on the 13th, the shock troops of the Grossdeutschland had been issued with their iron rations, their field-flasks filled with coffee, and weapons inspected. Then Colonel von Schwerin had arrived, jauntily carrying a stick, and the regiment had set off through Floing less than a mile from the appointed crossing area. Senior Lieutenant von Courbiere, commanding No. 6 Company, which was to be second over the river, was struck by the unnatural stillness at Floing: ‘Not a shot falls, the inhabitants have fled, dogs and cats roam through the streets whose destroyed houses bear witness to the fearful force of this war.’ Apprehensively, he wondered whether the silence of the French guns meant that they ‘had already been hit so hard, or are they just waiting for the moment we get moving to cross the river?’ Then, as his company reached the cloth factory, with its blue-tinted black-out windows overlooking the river, where it was to embark,

at last the French recognize the danger threatening them, and begin to fight back, without worrying about the bombs exploding around them. The engineers bring up their assault boats, but they cannot reach the river. Despite our covering fire the enemy can watch all movements out of his bunkers and hits back at us. Assault guns roll up, but even their shells can do nothing against the concrete and iron. Valuable time is lost, until finally a heavy 88-mm. flak silences the enemy. Once again the assault boats are brought up, but this attempt also brings down enemy fire. The young lieutenant of the 7th Company, Lieutenant Graf Medem, and two engineers are killed. The wounded are brought back – once again a heavy flak is brought into action. Under its protection the first sections of the leading (No. 7) company cross the Meuse. The crossing has succeeded! Swiftly, as we had already practised in the winter, 6th Company follows.

A little over two miles ahead, Courbiere could clearly make out the forward slopes of La Marfée. The Stukas were still hurling their bombs into the fortifications on top of it, often apparently only a ‘hair’s breadth’ from the leading attackers. Approaching the main Sedan–Donchery highway, Courbiere saw the first French appear, with their hands up. At the same time, No. 7 Company on his right was coming under heavy fire from several bunkers along the road:

A quick reconnaissance shows that a large bunker with six weapon slits some 200 yards south of the road, on the edge of a vegetable garden, offers good prospects of approach… after a short fight the bunker is reached by a sergeant and two men. The enemy are smoked out by hand-grenades; they are completely vanquished; they come out. Their faces reveal the psychological strain of this fighting. Close to each other they stand with their backs to their bunker and raise their hands;
‘Tirez!’
they cry…

Courbiere’s company then cleaned out a second bunker, and an anti-tank position concealed in a barn. Here to their delight they discovered a cache of soda-water bottles with which they slaked their thirst in the sultry heat of the late afternoon; after a short rest, they were even more delighted to make contact with elements of Lieutenant-Colonel Balck’s 1st Rifle Regiment, which had also successfully crossed the Meuse. It was now about 5 p.m. After some savage hand-to-hand fighting, just as daylight was fading Courbiere’s company reached their objective atop Height 247, not far from where Moltke had directed the first battle of Sedan seventy years previously.

Together with the Grossdeutschland, it was the 1st Rifle Regiment
²¹
that was to play so important a role in the early phases of the breakthrough at Sedan. Its commander, Lieutenant-Colonel Balck, came of a long military line; as an officer of the ‘King’s German Legion’, his great-grandfather had served on Wellington’s staff during the Peninsular War; his grandfather had served in the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, while his father had been a personal friend of General Sir Ian Hamilton of Gallipoli fame. Himself a tough front-line soldier who had gone through Verdun and been wounded five times during the First war, Balck was a most forceful personality (Chester Wilmot rates him, perhaps too harshly, as ‘a notorious optimist with a reputation for ruthless aggression’, while the American official history,
The Lorraine Campaign
, portrays him as a swashbuckling martinet), and there were certainly not many Second World War commanders who could exact more from their troops. After Sedan, Balck’s hitherto slow rise was vastly accelerated, and there were few campaigns from which he was absent: a divisional, then a corps commander in Russia; an army commander in Poland and Hungary; finally, as a full general, an army group commander in the later stages of the retreat from France. On the 13th and the next two days his qualities as a leader undoubtedly contributed most significantly to Guderian’s success.

Balck’s orders for 13 May were to cross in the Glaire–Gaulier area, in the tracks of the Grossdeutschland, push up on to the northern slopes of La Marfée, then swing round it to thrust along the main road running southwards from Sedan to Vouziers. The Grossdeutschland having borne the brunt of the fighting, Balck’s riflemen had perhaps the easiest time of any of the German assault units that day. According to Guderian, watching at Floing and chafing with impatience to get over the Meuse himself, their crossing developed

as though it were being carried out on manoeuvres. The French artillery was almost paralysed by the unceasing threat of attack by Stukas and bombers. The concrete works along the Meuse had been put out of action by our anti-tank and anti-aircraft artillery, and the enemy machine-gunners were forced to keep down by the fire of our heavy weapons and artillery. Despite the completely open nature of ground, our casualties remained light.

Balck himself, who had the impression that the French gunners had already begun to desert their batteries, noted that the cessation in French artillery fire had a remarkable effect on the morale of his riflemen: ‘A few minutes before, everyone was seeking refuge in slit trenches, but now nobody thought of taking cover. It was impossible to hold the men…’ An hour and a half after H-Hour, Balck with the leading elements of his regiment had reached the railway line running from Sedan to Donchery; another hour (1730 hours), and he had beaten his way through to the main road lying parallel to it, thus breaking into the main French line of defences. Meanwhile, the division’s motor-cycle battalion which had crossed over the Meuse loop at Iges had cleaned up the whole Iges peninsula, rejoining Balck on the banks of the canal that traverses its root. By 1930 hours, the 1st Panzer had elements of six battalions established in a substantial bridgehead. A large part of the all-important La Marfée heights, crowned by pine woods, First War cemeteries, and a monument to a French infantry regiment which, in August 1914, threw back the Germans on the Meuse by a
contre-attaque à la bayonnette
, had already fallen into their hands.

On the west bank of the Meuse, however, Guderian still had no tanks, anti-tank guns or artillery. Like Rommel to the north, he faced an anxious night during which the French might prepare an armoured riposte to crush his unprotected infantry before the first Panzers could be pushed across the river. Every priority was now devoted to rushing the construction of ferries and bridges. While the east bank was still under machine-gun fire from the bunkers opposite, Lieutenant Grubnau, commanding a special bridging company of the engineers, had already reconnoitred ‘a completely level field with firm dry ground and good approaches to the river bank… But there is no cover.’ It was close to the cloth factory at Gaulier, under cover of which the engineers assembled their heavy equipment. The Meuse is here approximately seventy yards wide. Although
some of Grubnau’s transport had been held up in the Ardennes, by 1630 hours, while Balck’s riflemen were still struggling across in their assault boats, work was already beginning on the first pontoon bridge. ‘The engineers leap from their vehicles and unload the pontoon trucks,’ recorded Grubnau, adding in surprise at the lack of anti-tank obstacles:

It is astonishing how easily heavy bridge-building could be carried out today. An enemy bombing attack causes everyone to take refuge in the little cover that is at hand. Our nine light machine-guns fire… the bombs fall far from us. With undiminished strength the construction continues. Now enemy artillery fire begins. The enemy artillery plane is, however, driven off by our fighter cover… It seems that the French are expecting our bridge to be built at another place… shells fall fifty yards from us… fortunately, the village of Glaire hinders any observed fire.

Throughout the afternoon, the young sappers, half-naked and their steel helmets cast aside in the torrid heat, worked away at the bridge in almost casual detachment despite the intermittent rain of shot and shell. In the record time of thirty-eight minutes, Grubnau’s men had the first light ferry operating; shortly before midnight a sixteen-ton bridge was ready, with a tremendous concentration of armour queuing up behind it on the east bank.

2nd Panzer

On its right hand, the performance of the 2nd Panzer stood out in even sharper contrast to the successes registered by the 1st than did the limited progress of the 10th on the left flank. Guderian’s old division, the 2nd Panzer, had taken part in the march into Austria in 1938 and, remaining as part of the garrison troops of Vienna, had become known in the Wehrmacht as the ‘Vienna Division’. Its formations contained a large number of Austrians and Bavarians. Led by Lieutenant-General Rudolf Veiel, its commander since the
Anschluss
, the ‘Vienna Division’ had spearheaded the occupation of the Sudetenland, and during the Polish campaign had thrust into Poland on the
southern flank, via Czechoslovakia. Its limited contribution to the crossings on the 13th was expected; the night before, Guderian had warned Kleist that the 2nd, still bogged down on the Semois, would not be in position on the Meuse at H-Hour, and in any case it had forfeited its heavy artillery support to the 1st. When it did get over the Meuse (at Donchery), its orders from Guderian were fairly ambitious; after seizing the high ground behind Donchery it ‘will then swing immediately westward, will cross the Ardennes Canal to the Bar bed inclusive, and will roll up the enemy defences along the Meuse’. On the higher strategic plane, the role of the 2nd Panzer would assume great significance, for it would be the formation to force the hinge between the two French armies of Huntziger and Corap.

Against expectations, on the morning of the 13th the 2nd made surprisingly rapid progress and by mid-afternoon some of its elements were already reaching Donchery, a gloomy small Meuse village straddling the river roughly two miles downstream from Sedan, where at a humble weaver’s house in 1870 Bismarck had first met Louis-Napoleon to discuss the terms of the French capitulation. As soon as the first German tanks deployed down into the river valley, they were met by a storm of artillery fire. The French observation from the overlooking hills was excellent, while with the sinking sun now glistening brilliantly behind the Meuse the Panzers found it extremely difficult to pin-point the well-camouflaged French positions. The tanks fanned out, slowly groping their way into the abandoned portions of Donchery lying on the east bank. Pinned down under the heavy fire, the
Sturmpionieren
persuaded the tank crews to carry them and their rubber dinghies down to the river on the backs of the tanks. Corporal Frömmel, with a squadron of tanks, describes how, under fire from a French anti-tank gun sited in a superbly covered position,

The engineers leap off and attempt under this hail of fire to get their boat to the Meuse. There are only a few metres separating them from the bank, and yet each step means hell. The tank shoots with all its guns, it attempts to give fire cover to the determinedly working engineers. The boat is already in the water, its paddles cutting deep into it. Like a shower, a machine-gun bursts from the bunker and falls on this single boat. All around it the water springs up high, and several brave engineers are killed. It is impossible! Back! They come back to the bank, and attempt to find cover in the deep grass. The same fate occurs several minutes later to men whose inflatable dinghy has been brought down by three further tanks to this death-dealing river.

A company commander of the engineers, Lieutenant Zimmermann, is seriously wounded in midstream and barely manages to struggle back to the bank. Here several more German wounded lie in agony in the grass, still under French machine-gun fire. Tanks carry them back to safety behind a railway embankment. In the growing twilight a murderous duel goes on between the tanks and the French bunkers across the Meuse. Tracer shells whizz back and forth like fireworks. Says Sergeant-Major Keddig:

We fired off shell after shell, always at the recognized bunkers, to try and silence them. It became unbearably hot inside the tank’s turret, which was filled with powder smoke. A beautiful summer evening lay across the countryside. But the firing of the French artillery continued with undiminished violence. We couldn’t dream of opening any of the tank’s hatches.

Despite the French artillery and anti-tank fire, few of the Panzers appear to have been knocked out. Finally, one of the bunkers is silenced and a white flag is spotted. The first
Sturmpionieren
dinghy makes a safe crossing, and shortly afterwards triumphant white Very lights arc up from the enemy bank.

Their ammunition exhausted, the tanks withdraw after nightfall. Greatly aided by the hole driven in the centre of the French lines by Balck and the Grossdeutschland, the 2nd Panzer too had gained a foothold over the Meuse. Hurrying back and forth across the river that night with reinforcements, one of its infantry officers noted in the moonlight, among the destroyed enemy bunkers and the huge Stuka craters, the extraordinary number of incomplete fortifications: