To Lose a Battle (53 page)

Grossdeutschland at Stonne

On the other side of Guderian’s bridgehead, Sergeant-Major Rubarth and his exhausted Engineers had been overjoyed to see the first of the 10th Panzer’s tanks coming through the morning mist, after an anxious night. But during the day a combination of flanking French artillery fire, R.A.F. bomb damage to the pontoons and various technical difficulties had delayed crossings still more than in the 1st and 2nd Panzer sectors. Consequently, the 10th would not be able to lend its full weight to the vital, defensive role allotted it in Guderian’s right-wheel until the 15th. Meanwhile it was up to the Grossdeutschland, now detached from the 1st Panzer and returned once more to the 10th, to secure the key heights around Stonne, some twelve miles south of Sedan, against the enemy’s anticipated major counter-attack. Moving up towards Stonne, the Grossdeutschland was strafed by French Moranes. The war diarist of the 15th Company watched with detached curiosity as the Moranes released two bombs on it:

Helplessly we shoot back with our weapons! We look at each other. Where is the explosion? Somebody cries ‘It’s a dud.’ Corporal Waldemar Kiedrowski from Essen… leaps out of the ditch on to one of the duds… Kiedrowski throws it on to the street – the bomb blows up! There is nothing left of Corporal Kiedrowski! Corporal Schieg loses a leg – further behind us the Morane crashes, a victim to our machine-guns – Kiedrowski is our first dead. Nobody can find him, nobody can bury him!

And what of the counter-attack by the Second Army, to be launched with the powerful units that General Georges had dispatched to it? In the carefully measured words of General Ruby, such a thrust against the flank of Guderian’s bridgehead, at a moment when the main weight of the Panzers was performing its 90-degree turn, leaving the flank to be guarded by the infantry of the Grossdeutschland, would probably have gained on the evening of 14 May, ‘a fine local success, the repercussions of which… would have been felt beyond the boundaries of the [Second] Army’.

3rd Armoured at Stonne

General Brocard’s 3rd Armoured Division, together with its sisters, the 1st and 2nd, constituted one of the rooks of the French chessboard; they were the most powerful pieces that General Georges had to play. It had two battalions of new Hotchkiss H-39s, and although fewer in overall numbers, these should have been a match for the extended 10th Panzer, half of whose tanks were light Marks I and II which were not designed for tank versus tank engagements. Its morale was excellent; on the other hand, it was such a newly constituted division that its battalions had only started divisional training on 1 May, and some of its tank engines were not yet properly run-in. The 3rd Motorized Infantry Division (under General Bertin-Boussu) was also a first-rate unit, at the peak of its training. When the 3rd Armoured received its movement orders on the afternoon of 12 May it had been in training north of Rheims, some forty miles away, and it was then generally believed that the division was being transferred to another training area, not that it was going to be pitched into battle. Though not actually bombed on its approach march by the Luftwaffe, the 3rd Armoured encountered many delays resulting from bomb damage, and it lacked engineers or
sappers to put the roads in order. The heavy ‘B’ tanks had had difficulty crossing the Aisne, while at one place the encumberment caused by refugees and military fugitives was such that they were compelled to force a passage by crushing cars that obstructed their way.

What the reinforcements moving up to Sedan ran into on the roads is graphically described by Marcel Lerecouvreux.
¹⁰
Well behind the front, bridges and telephone exchanges were discovered to have been destroyed with precipitate haste, on ‘superior orders’ – the origins of which were never traced, but were later wildly attributed to the ‘Fifth Column’. Meanwhile, fresh bands of fugitives were arriving the whole time:

One squadron of the 5th Cuirassiers discovered a sergeant-major who had torn off his badges of rank, so as to take flight more easily, both from the enemy and from his own responsibilities; later a lieutenant of the divisional anti-tank battery reported fugitives among whom were found two lieutenants who had similarly degraded themselves; he made this troop turn about under threat of his sub-machine gun. All these cowards were causing terrifying rumours to run around, notably about the aerial bombardments to which they had been subjected, and about the avalanche of tanks which was closely pursuing them… One had to seek proper justification for the rout… The fugitives said that they had been pursued by formidable masses of tanks (some spoke of 400, others of 500, or even 5,000!).

Such panic-spreading tales, Lerecouvreux goes on to explain, ‘were probably one of the causes that had made excessively nervous commanders carry out the hasty demolitions which had taken place behind us’.

Closer to the front, the rumours had caused the wholesale disappearance of a battalion of sappers charged with organizing the defences of the village of Vaux; while, in the confusion, some French units, ‘reacting to mutual suspicions had machine-gunned and fired at each other with rifles; near Raucourt in particular two battalions had thus inflicted upon
each other some fairly serious losses’. At Sommauthe on the way towards Stonne there were scenes of chaos and pillage where ‘vehicles lay about on the side of the road, smashed during the precipitate retreat without this even being the work of the enemy, and left by their drivers who had completely lost their heads’. Here were also some abandoned horse-drawn artillery, one gun of which was still harnessed to its dejected horses, standing in the middle of a small stream. Despite the haste of their flight, the fugitives had nevertheless found time to pillage everything, even the medical stores. The spectacle of all this débris, which inscribed our defeat upon the ground,’ says Lerecouvreux, ‘was lamentable and it gripped my heart.’

For all the delays and degrading panic it had experienced on the approach march, the 3rd Armoured reached its assembly area behind Stonne at 0600 on the 14th, full of spirit and eager to have a go at the enemy. General Brocard promptly reported to Second Army H.Q. at Senuc, where he met the commander of the newly constituted XXI Corps,
¹¹
General Flavigny, who handed him his orders. XXI Corps was to

(a)
Take up positions along the second line to the east of the Bar… and contain the bottom of the pocket created by the enemy…
(b)
Having contained the enemy, counter-attack at the earliest in the direction of Maisoncelle–Bulson–Sedan…

Specifically, the 3rd Armoured was to hasten its refuelling and attack in co-ordination with the 3rd Motorized, ‘as soon as possible’, towards Bulson with the object of ‘throwing the enemy back across the Meuse’. But, as Colonel Goutard points out, the two terms of ‘containment’ (that old stand-by from 1918) and ‘counter-attack’ in Flavigny’s orders were contradictory:

Containment is defensive and demands linear dispersion along a front; counter-attack is offensive and requires concentration in depth at one point… How could one group fulfil these contradictory missions simultaneously, or even one after the other? And when containment has been effected, the opportunity for counter-attack would be over; it would be too late. It was obvious that, with our mania for an unbroken front, the containing mission would have priority.

Flavigny’s orders ended ominously: ‘The time of the counter-attack will be fixed later.’ Brocard then brought to Flavigny’s attention the state of his division after its night march of a full thirty miles. He did not think it would be ready to attack for some ten hours. (How closely this resembled the story of the 1st Armoured Division at Dinant!) Rejecting Brocard’s suggestion that H-Hour be fixed for 1600, Flavigny told him by word of mouth to attack at 1100. But Brocard seems to have been tardy in issuing his orders, while refuelling proceeded with painful slowness, so that the 3rd Armoured was not ready to set off for its start-line before 1300 hours. Even then, its progress was impeded by the results of bombing and more waves of fugitives to such an extent that the division was not in fact deployed for attack until 1600. Meanwhile, the 3rd Motorized Division had experienced still worse hold-ups on its approach march, and instead of reaching the battle area on the morning of the 14th, by 1600 it was able to support the 3rd Armoured with only three reconnaissance groups. But there yet remained four hours of daylight left for the counter-attack, and, says General Ruby, ‘the tank crews were champing at the bit in their eagerness’.

By this time, however, the speed with which the battlefront was changing had made its impression on General Flavigny. He was now alone at Senuc; Huntziger, fearing Second Army H.Q. to be threatened by the enemy, had moved it back to Verdun. Himself an old tank man, Flavigny (according to General Ruby) also seems to have begun to entertain doubts as to the technical qualities of Brocard’s division, with its limited training. Whatever the combination of his motives, at 1530 Flavigny made a fateful decision. He would abandon the attack part of his orders in favour of that 1918 principle of ‘containment first’. ‘The most important thing,’ he said, ‘was to ensure the safety of the second line’.

In consequence, the 3rd Armoured was ordered to disperse
itself defensively over a front of some twelve miles, from Omont west of the Bar to Stonne. On all tracks and potential corridors of penetration it was to form ‘corks’, each comprised one ‘B’ and two H-39 tanks. During the night this powerful, modern unit was thus broken up into a series of penny packets. ‘From then on,’ says Colonel Goutard, ‘there was a line, a few tanks but no 3rd Armoured Division. The steel lance was buried for ever, and so was the counter-attack.’ The best – and last – opportunity of administering a severe check to Guderian before he burst out of his bridgehead had been thrown away. It was a tragic error of judgement.

The Generals: Georges and Huntziger

On 13 May General Georges, in order to relieve the already overburdened Billotte from responsibility for the fighting at Sedan as well, had transferred the Second Army from No. 1 Army Group to his direct control. Thus it was to Georges that Huntziger had to report back on the 14th. Although his headquarters attempted to fob British correspondents off with the bland statement that ‘we are withdrawing our advance posts, as has always been our intention’, Huntziger warned Georges that morning that some of his troops were not holding, ‘that men had been seen emerging from block-houses with uplifted arms and that he had given orders to open fire on them’.

Huntziger’s references to Flavigny’s counter-attack seem, however, to have been so discreet as to be almost evasive. At 1900, his Chief of Staff told Georges that it had been unable to begin ‘for technical reasons’. Half an hour later Huntziger was on the telephone himself, claiming with ill-founded optimism that ‘the enemy advance has been contained by Flavigny’s
groupement
between the Ardennes Canal and the Meuse’.
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Georges, obviously much vexed by Huntziger’s procrastination but at the same time still only partially aware of the full gravity of the situation at Sedan, replied sharply:

The 3rd Armoured Division was put at your disposal in order to counter-attack at Sedan. Tomorrow, therefore, you must vigorously pursue the operation so well started (
sic!
) today by pushing on as far as you can towards the Meuse, and consolidation with the infantry the terrain conquered by the tanks. This is the only way to gain a supremacy over the enemy and to paralyse his whole advance to the west and south.

By the end of the 14th, Huntziger was in fact far from feeling the optimism which he attempted to impart in his messages to Georges. To one of his officers he remarked sadly: ‘I shall always be
le vaincu de Sedan.’
In his depression at the buffeting his army had received he now made a miscalculation on an even graver scale than Flavigny’s halting of the counter-attack and dispersal of the 3rd Armoured. Reacting in a manner typical of the epoch in which the Maginot Line had come to be regarded as the be-all and end-all of French military policy, Huntziger concluded that Guderian’s thrust was aimed principally at outflanking the Maginot Line and then rolling it up from the north. Thus he decided to meet this notional threat by pivoting on his right heel which was planted where the Line ended near Longwy, and swinging back the centre of his army from its position astride the Meuse at Mouzon to one further back at Inor. In effect, this would mean the relinquishment without fighting of over 130 bunkers along the Meuse, and the expansion of the four mile wide Donchery–Wadelincourt pocket into a large breach more than fifteen miles across. It also meant that the 10th Panzer crossing-point could no longer be brought under interdiction fire by Huntziger’s flank artillery, which in turn critically reduced the prospect of any counter-attack that might be launched on the 15th. But worst of all, Huntziger’s decision meant that the Second Army would in fact be
pulling away
from the Ninth, thereby increasing the gap through which Guderian was planning to burst.

The Generals: Guderian and Kleist

At his H.Q. near La Chapelle that night Guderian was drafting
his orders for the break-out by the 1st and 2nd Panzers the next day. In one hop of over twenty miles they were to ‘reach as primary objective the line Wasigny-Rethel’, while the corps reconnaissance was to probe as far ahead as Montcornet. These orders immediately provoked another heated disagreement between Guderian and his superior, Kleist. Having studied the Intelligence reports on the movement of Flavigny’s reinforcements towards Stonne, Kleist – just that much further removed from battlefield realities than Guderian – had become extremely nervous for the safety of that southern flank. It was an anxiety that would plague the German senior commanders repeatedly from this day on, as indeed it had during the planning stages of
Sichelschnitt.
Kleist and other German officers of his generation could not help but be haunted by memories of how, in 1914, victory had been snatched from them on the Marne after Kluck had wheeled inwards prematurely, thereby exposing his flank to Galliéni’s counter-attack out of Paris.
¹³
Instead of pushing on to Rethel, Kleist now told Guderian that he would prefer to halt and consolidate on the line Donchery–Wadelincourt, just a mile or two beyond where the Panzers had come to rest that same night. Guderian was furious. According to XIX Corps’s War Diary, he ‘bitterly criticized this plan which throws away the victory’. After some forceful argument, Guderian won, and his orders for the 15th were issued as intended. But if any additional justification was required for Flavigny launching his counter-attack on the 14th, this hesitancy revealed by Kleist certainly seems to provide it.