To Lose a Battle (50 page)

14 May

In the area south of the line Liège–Namur our troops have left the Ardennes behind them and reached the Meuse between Namur and Givet with their advance guard… Under the protection of German fighter, Stuka and ‘destroyer’ units, which attacked nonstop, and with a shattering effect, it was also possible to cross the Meuse on French territory.

Wehrmacht communiqué, 14 May

In general it may be said that the Germans have not yet made contact with the bulk of the French and British forces, except possibly in the Longwy area, where they are said to be challenging the underground hill fortresses of the Maginot Line.

The Times,
15 May

Onhaye: Rommel Attacks

For the Germans, 14 May was a day devoted to consolidating their bridgeheads over the Meuse, in preparation for the great armoured breakthrough across northern France; for the French, a day of building up major counter-strokes against the two German bulges.

At Dinant, it did not seem to begin under the most brilliant of auspices for Rommel. The dawn attack (postponed from the previous night) by a battalion of Motorized Dragoons (the 14th) from General Boucher’s 5th Division succeeded in capturing the village of Haut-le-Wastia and some forty of Rommel’s motor-cyclists. Not pressing their advantage, however, the French had then withdrawn to a ‘line of containment’ fixed by Corap. On the other side of the bridgehead, Colonel von Bismarck signalled that under cover of darkness his 7th Rifle Regiment had pushed up to Onhaye, three miles down the main road west of Dinant. It had overrun enemy positions there, but was being engaged by powerful forces. Rommel rushed back and forth, positioning his anti-tank guns, and
urging on the tanks which were just beginning to cross the barely completed pontoons, but with what seemed like agonizing slowness. Suddenly Rommel received a wireless message from Bismarck stating that his regiment was ‘encircled’. Thereupon Rommel decided ‘to go to his assistance immediately with every available tank’. By 0800 hours, his 25th Panzer Regiment, under the command of Colonel Rothenburg, had succeeded in assembling just thirty tanks on the west bank. All of these now moved up behind Bismarck, but encountered no opposition. Says Rommel: ‘It transpired that von Bismarck had actually radioed “arrived” instead of “encircled”’!
¹

With five tanks providing mobile support fire, Bismarck’s riflemen now carried out a flanking attack to seize Onhaye from the rear. From Dinant the main road climbs steeply through woods to Onhaye, but once Onhaye is passed you stand on the height of land, with flat open country ideal for armoured deployment, leading westwards to Philippeville, and beyond it the featureless plains of northern France. Thus the securing of Onhaye (which had been the object of a special exercise conducted by Rommel at Bad Godesberg) was of paramount importance to the break-out phase of the 7th Panzer’s advance. To keep a tight control over the action, Rommel mounted himself in a Mark III tank and followed closely behind Colonel Rothenburg. This typical audacity nearly brought an end to his career. Approaching the corner of Onhaye wood,

suddenly we came under heavy artillery and anti-tank gunfire from the west. Shells landed all round us and my tank received two hits one after the other, the first on the upper edge of the turret and the second in the periscope.

The driver promptly opened the throttle wide and drove straight into the nearest bushes. He had only gone a few yards, however, when the tank slid down a steep slope on the western edge of the wood and finally stopped, canted over on its side, in such a position that the enemy, whose guns were in position about 500 yards away on the edge of the next wood, could not fail to see it. I had been wounded in the right cheek by a small splinter from the shell which had landed in the periscope. It was not serious, though it bled a great deal.

I tried to swing the turret round so as to bring our 37 mm. gun to bear on the enemy in the opposite wood, but with the heavy slant of the tank it was immovable.

The French battery now opened rapid fire on our wood and at any moment we could expect their fire to be aimed at our tank, which was in full view. I therefore decided to abandon it as fast as I could, taking the crew with me. At that moment the subaltern in command of the tanks escorting the infantry reported himself seriously wounded, with the words: ‘Herr General, my left arm has been shot off.’ We clambered up through the sandy pit, shells crashing and splintering all round.

Just ahead of him, Rommel was shocked to see Rothenburg’s tank ‘with flames pouring out of the rear’.

The adjutant of the Panzer Regiment had also left his tank. I thought at first that the command tank had been set alight by a hit in the petrol tank and was extremely worried for Colonel Rothenburg’s safety. However, it turned out to be only the smoke candles that had caught alight, the smoke from which now served us very well… It was only the involuntary smoke-screen laid by this tank that prevented the enemy from shooting up any more of our vehicles.

Meanwhile, Rommel’s own armoured signals vehicle pushed into the wood where it too was immobilized with a shot in the engine. Rommel got away from the fracas, though his biographer, Desmond Young, claims that he narrowly escaped being captured by French native troops.
²
He then ordered Stuka strikes to liquidate the troublesome French gun positions. Later his riflemen winkled out a courageous French gunner captain from the cellar of a half-destroyed house, where, ‘smoking cigarettes and drinking red wine, on a sofa’, he had remained to telephone observations to his battery as the German columns marched past his refuge. His capture did not immediately silence the French guns, but thenceforth their fire fell wildly all over the place. However, on account
of the morning’s setback, it was not until evening that Rommel could lay hands on his vital assembly area at Onhaye.

Onhaye: French Counter-attacks

On the French side, there was more fatal procrastination in the dispatch of reserves to counter-attack Rommel’s bridgehead. The most powerful piece that General Georges could bring into play – in fact one of the most powerful pieces on the whole French chessboard – was the 1st Armoured Division. Originally earmarked by Gamelin to back up the Dyle Manoeuvre, on 11 May the 1st Armoured had been sent to Charleroi to be at the disposal of Blanchard’s First Army, with the specific object of covering the Gembloux Gap. Commanded by General Bruneau, the 1st Armoured contained only 150 tanks, compared with Rommel’s 228, but half of these were the excellent heavy ‘B’ model. On the other hand, it possessed no armoured liaison cars, it lacked signals units, and among the tanks which were equipped with radios it was found that the accumulators were inadequate to maintain transmission over any length of time. Fear of the Luftwaffe forced the division to make its approach march to Charleroi by night, which, in the short May nights, would have required four stages to cover 130 kilometres.
³
Then, following the rapidity of the German progress, it was decided to reduce the stages to two, the second being carried out by daylight; finally, a third decision prescribed that Bruneau reach Charleroi in one hop. Much confusion resulted. In fact, German bombing of the railways delayed the division’s arrival by eighteen hours, and as soon as Bruneau had established his command post at Lambusart (near Charleroi) on the night of 12 May he received a request from the local corps commander to help him round up parachutists reported in his region. Wisely, Bruneau refused.

All through the 13th the 1st Armoured remained inactive there, less than twenty-five miles from where Rommel’s bridgehead was developing. That day General Georges had
promised it to Corap, but Billotte, alarmed by the course of the fierce tank battle in which Prioux’s Cavalry Corps had become engaged in front of the sensitive Gembloux Gap, and still disinclined to accept that the main German thrust was materializing in the south, continued to hesitate. Only at midnight on the 13th did Bruneau receive preliminary instructions preparing the 1st Armoured to strike south in order to aid General Martin’s XI Corps. Then another twelve hours were frittered away by muddled staff work, until, at 1300 hours on the 14th, it was ordered to move to the Florennes area just over twenty miles to the south. But ‘It took them a long time to reach their positions,’ wrote Colonel Bardies, ‘for the roads were cluttered with fleeing troops and civilians… It took the armoured division seven hours to cover those twenty miles. It was short of petrol. It would be unable to fight that day.’ One battalion lost its way, and it was not until after midnight that Bruneau had three battalions of tanks in the Florennes assembly area; meanwhile, mistakenly, he had relegated his petrol trucks to the rear of the divisional column, and thus it semed doubtful whether the 1st Armoured would even be in a fit state to attack early on the morning of the 15th.

By this time, the whole picture would have altered radically. How different things might have been if it could have hit Rommel on the 13th, when only his infantry were across the Meuse, or even on the morning of the 14th when Rommel was still being vigorously resisted around Onhaye.

The other major force at Corap’s immediate disposal for a counter-attack against Rommel was General Sancelme’s 4th North African Division, which had been standing by in reserve. A tough regular unit comprised of Zouaves and Algerian
Tirailleurs
– many of whose kinsmen would be fighting against France less than two decades later – and constituting the finest division
⁴
in the Ninth Army, it should
ideally have been employed in a forceful attack co-ordinated with the 1st Armoured. Corap, however, true to the 1918 doctrine of ‘containment’, immediately cast it in a defensive role, to hold the line at Onhaye. Fighting splendidly, it had been the
Tirailleurs
forming its advanced elements which had administered the check to Rommel here during the morning of the 14th, but the defensive tone of Corap’s order did not have an encouraging effect on the hard-pressed remnants of his 18th Division. The news from its left flank, opposite Rommel’s original crossing place at Houx, was particularly bad. Here the battalion of the 39th Regiment detailed off to attack Surinvaux Wood at dawn had stumbled into it too early during the night. At daybreak it was swiftly rounded up by the Germans, supported with tanks. Then, fighting gallantly, the remains of the 66th Regiment were submerged. After which, says General Doumenc,

the whole line ebbed back and attempted, without much success, to anchor itself to the Anthée–Sosoye defence line. The Luftwaffe raged relentlessly around the sector; communications were cut, orders could not be passed; it became impossible to control the battle.

Corap in Trouble

Control was not aided by Corap’s own movements that day. Having found that his H.Q. at Vervins was too far from the battlefield to keep abreast of events, in the morning he had moved up to General Martin’s command post at Florennes and had then spent the rest of the day visiting the various divisional command posts. Liaison officers urgently requiring instructions for orienting the 1st Armoured and the 4th North African Divisions found it difficult to locate him. What Corap saw and learned that day depressed him in the extreme. In addition to Rommel’s bridgehead, a German infantry division was getting across the Meuse at Yvoir, to the north of Dinant. Worse still, another infantry division had partly overrun the southerly division (the 22nd) of General Martin’s corps, which was holding the line near Givet. As bad luck would
have it, the divisional commander, General Hassler, had been injured in a car accident the previous month and did not return to his division until 15 May. Losing his head, Hassler’s Chief of Staff ordered the 22nd Division to abandon the strongpoint guarding Givet and fall back some six miles behind the river. Furious, Corap threatened him with a court martial and formally ordered him to counter-attack. But it was too late; as Colonel Goutard acidly comments, ‘Here was another division which disintegrated at the first blow.’

Everywhere Corap found indications that morale was flagging, and especially among the ‘A’ reservists of the 18th Division which had so far absorbed the hardest blows from Rommel. Officers seemed to be giving up all too readily. To the Ninth Army at large he addressed an exhortatory signal with the following words:

Some
défaillances
have occurred at certain points… At this moment, when the destiny of France is in the balance, no weakness will be tolerated. At all levels, leaders have the duty to set the example, and if necessary force obedience! Pitiless sanctions will fall upon any leaders who fail.

By evening Rommel had succeeded in wresting Onhaye from the North Africans. Although they were still fighting back hard, at 1900 hours General Martin, concerned at the shaky position of both his 18th and 22nd Divisions and their poor state of morale, gave order for the whole corps to fall back behind a ‘barrier’ line running through Florennes. Moving up to the front that evening, the 13th Zouaves, the reserve regiment of the 4th North African Division, was astonished to pass Martin and his H.Q. heading in the opposite direction. The Zouaves had begun to move up from their positions on the Belgian frontier on 10 May, repeatedly attacked by German bombers and Stukas, and during the night of the 13th they had circuited the burning town of Philippeville. Now, still not having seen the enemy, they were ‘thrown into the ditches alongside the road, and remained there immobilized for more than three hours, watching without comprehension’, as the H.Q. of XI Corps, accompanied by a flotsam of fighting
troops, withdrew through them. Hard upon its heels came Colonel Rothenburg’s Panzers, who by nightfall on the 14th had pushed down the Philippeville road as far as Anthée. Rommel’s bridgehead was now over seven miles deep – at a total cost of three officers, seven N.C.O.s and forty-one men killed that day. The tanks of both Rommel’s division and those of Colonel Werner’s from the 5th Panzer, which were still at his disposal, were flowing into the bridgehead with ever-increasing speed, despite Allied air attacks on the pontoons, and all was now set for the break-out phase. In this, Rommel was still one jump ahead of Guderian at Sedan.