To Lose a Battle (87 page)

Rommel Again

On the 6th, the French once again stopped Kleist south of Amiens and Péronne. In these two days of battle, one of his Panzer corps had some 65 per cent of its tanks disabled. But disaster overtook the French on the flank. It was precipitated by
Rommel, who broke through west of Amiens after some fierce fighting and advanced twenty miles southwards from the Somme. The next day (his wife’s birthday), Rommel swept forward another thirty miles to Forges-les-Eaux on the Beauvais–Dieppe road and only twenty-five miles from Rouen. With his customary swiftness to adapt himself to new situations, Rommel had mastered Weygand’s ‘chequer-board’ system by taking his division cross-country so as to avoid the French ‘hedgehogs’, leaving them to be dealt with by the following infantry. His advance that day split in two General Robert Altmayer’s Tenth Army, of which one of the units left on the coastal flank was the British 51st (Highland) Division. Next, on the 8th, Rommel pushed on to take Elbeuf on the Seine, thereby sealing off the great city of Rouen. He wrote to his wife on the 9th in high spirits: ‘Two glorious days in pursuit, first south, then south-west. A roaring success. 45 miles yesterday,’ and on the 10th:

Our successes are tremendous and it looks to me inevitable that the other side will soon collapse.

We never imagined war in the west would be like this.

The 5th Panzer had meanwhile captured Rouen, and on Rommel’s left the Lower Seine had been reached by the XXXVIII Infantry Corps, commanded by General Erich von Manstein – allowed at this late date to participate in the triumph which owed so much to his genius. Rommel was now ordered to countermarch to the north-west, swing around Rouen, and head for the sea near Fécamp in order to cut off the retreat of Altmayer’s isolated left wing. After another sixty-mile advance, Rommel reached the coast in a day, and began to push back up it towards Dieppe. At the small port of St Valéry-en-Caux he fell upon the cut-off part of Altmayer’s army, then attempting to form a bridgehead prior to evacuation. But no ships arrived, and on 12 June the Allied garrison surrendered. That day Rommel took 40,000 prisoners, including twelve generals. They included the whole of the 51st Highland Division, with its commander, Major-General Fortune – one of Britain’s finest fighting units.

On the 14th, Rommel occupied Le Havre. Then, after two days’ rest, he was ordered to advance on Cherbourg, passing through terrain which, as a Field-Marshal and almost exactly four years later, he would be called upon to defend against American tanks enjoying almost the same numerical superiority that the Germans had had in 1940. On 17 June he established an alleged all-time record, by advancing 150 miles in a single day. Two days later he accepted the capitulation of Cherbourg. This was the end of the campaign for Rommel and the 7th Panzer, nicknamed by the French the ‘Phantom Division’. In six remarkable weeks, it had captured 97,648 prisoners, together with 277 guns, 458 armoured vehicles, and over 4,000 trucks. Its own casualties had totalled 682 killed (including the relatively large number of 52 officers), 1,646 wounded and 296 missing, while its loss in tanks was only 42 complete write-offs.
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Guderian Again

On 9 June, Rundstedt’s attack had duly gone in. In an Order of the Day to the French armies that morning, Weygand declared: ‘We have come to the last quarter of an hour. Stand firm.’ The German assault was led by Guderian’s Armoured Group, which, after a 150-mile march largely retracing the route of his victorious advance, was concentrated on either side of Rethel. Meanwhile, the main weight of the Armoured Group belonging to his former chief and antagonist, Kleist, was also being switched eastwards to the Aisne, after being checked south of Amiens and Péronne on the direct route to Paris. In contrast to the Meuse crossings, this time the infantry were to attack first and seize bridgeheads across the Aisne before Guderian committed his Panzer divisions. But, says Guderian,

At 1200 hours [German] I received messages from the front on either side of Rethel that the Rethel attacks had failed. My observes from the other fronts reported that the infantry had only succeeded in establishing a single bridgehead, a small one a mile to a mile and a half deep, in the neighbourhood of Château-Porcien.

Once again, the French defenders were fighting back heroically; de Lattre de Tassigny’s tough 14th Division alone claimed some 800 German prisoners. If only Grandsard’s men could have put up the same kind of resistance at Sedan, when the odds had been so much less in favour of the Germans! Guderian now decided to move tanks of the 1st Panzer into the solitary bridgehead under cover of darkness. The next day the armour pushed out of the bridgehead, but made only slow progress; in the afternoon a hard tank-versus-tank battle was fought around Juniville against the remnants of Guderian’s old adversary, the French 3rd Armoured Division. Colonel Balck personally captured the colours of a French regiment, but Guderian admitted to having suffered heavy casualties. On the 11th, Guderian records that the 1st Panzer progressed ‘as though this were a manoeuvre’. French resistance on the Aisne sector of the ‘Weygand Line’ was clearly coming to an end. Soon Reinhardt’s two Panzer divisions, then Kleist’s four, were across the Aisne, thrusting southward in an irresistible mass of armour. By nightfall, Rheims was reached; the following morning (12 June) Guderian captured Châlons-sur-Marne.

Paris Abandoned

The capture of Rouen in the west and the crossing of the Marne in the east now meant that Paris, the sacred capital, was irretrievably compromised. On 3 June, Paris was bombed for the first time and over 250 people were reported killed. By the 8th, the sound of distant cannon had become almost continuous. For the third time in seventy years, Paris began to resemble a city under siege. ‘The restaurants emptied,’ said Fabre-Luce. ‘The Ritz, abandoned by its last clients, looked like a palace in a spa on the day the baths closed down.’ The following day, G.Q.G. North-East packed up at Les Bondons and departed for less commodious lodgings at Briare, on the
upper reaches of the Loire. The next night (10 June), the French radio announced: ‘The Government is compelled to leave the capital for imperative military reasons. The Prime Minister is on his way to the armies.’ At midnight, the car containing Reynaud and his new Under-Secretary of State for National Defence, General Charles de Gaulle, left for the future seat of Government at Tours. Behind them an endless stream of refugees poured out along the Boulevard Raspail. Ilya Ehrenburg, who, as a correspondent representing Hitler’s Russian ally, remained, was moved to compassion while, as he watched, ‘An old man laboriously pushed a handcart loaded with pillows on which huddled a small girl and a little dog that howled piteously.’ In contrast, de Gaulle relates how in the course of his arduous journey through the night, past a long stationary line of refugees,

suddenly a convoy of luxurious, white-tyred American cars came sweeping along the road, with militiamen on the running-boards and motor-cyclists surrounding the procession; it was the Corps Diplomatique on its way to the châteaux of Touraine.

It was dawn by the time Reynaud and de Gaulle reached Orléans.

Until this moment, the French Government had kept on repeating in Gambettaesque terms that it would fight in front of Paris and behind Paris, and only that weekend it had announced that the city had been placed ‘in a state of defence’. Every fifty yards or so down the Champs-Elysées buses had been placed diagonally, with the object of preventing German airborne troops from landing. Then, on the night of the 11th, Weygand decided to declare Paris an ‘open city’. That Paris should have capitulated without a struggle while Warsaw, London, Leningrad and Stalingrad opted to accept battle and be devastated has ever since remained a source of contention; at the time there were many loyal Frenchmen who, like André Pertinax, considered its capitulation ‘quite unprecedented’ and pointed out that ‘in 1870–1 the war had continued in the provinces only as a result of the capital’s heroic resistance’. By 11 June, the situation was such that there would, however, have
been little military advantage gained in fighting for Paris, stone by beautiful stone. But psychologically, its abandonment struck a grievous blow to what remained of French morale. André Maurois recalls being warned, on 10 June, that Paris would not be defended: ‘At that moment I knew everything was over. France deprived of Paris, would become a body without a head. The war had been lost.’

As the Germans approached Paris, a drizzle of rain fell on the capital, after the long weeks of peerless weather. Early on the morning of 14 June an officer on the staff of Küchler’s Eighteenth Army, Lieutenant-Colonel Dr Hans Speidel,
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received two French officers who came under flag of truce with instructions to deliver up the capital. Later that morning troops of the German 87th Infantry Division, led by an anti-tank gun detachment which occupied the Hôtel de Ville and the Invalides, made a bloodless and orderly entry into Paris. Following in its wake just three days later, William Shirer felt an ache in the pit of his stomach at the sight of the familiar but lonely streets: ‘I wished I had not come. My German companions were in high spirits.’ Going round the Place de l’Opéra, he noted

for the first time in my life, no traffic tie-up here, no French cops shouting meaninglessly at cars hopelessly blocked. The façade of the Opera House was hidden behind stacked sandbags. The Café de la Paix seemed to be just reopening. A lone
garçon
was bringing out some tables and chairs. German soldiers stood on the terrace grabbing them.

The following day, he observed that there was already ‘open fraternizing’ between German troops and Parisians:

It seems funny, but every German soldier carries a camera. I saw them by the thousands to-day, photographing Notre-Dame, the Arc de Triomphe, the Invalides… Two newspapers appeared yesterday in Paris,
La Victoire
(as life’s irony would have it) and
Le Matin
… It [
Le Matin
] has already begun to attack England, to blame England for France’s predicament!

The day after Paris fell, Halder entered in his diary: ‘Another important day in military history!’ Verdun, the mighty fortress and spiritual symbol for which hundreds of thousands of German lives had been spent in vain in 1916, had fallen after twenty-four hours’ fighting and at a cost of less than 200 dead. For the Germans the campaign was rapidly becoming a pursuit down the highways of France. Rommel was rushing from Le Havre to Cherbourg. On the 14th Guderian entered St Dizier, to find Colonel Balck relaxing peacefully on a chair in the market-place; by the 15th the 1st Panzer had captured the old fortified town of Langres and pushed on to Gray-sur-Saône in the foothills of the Jura. The next day Guderian’s columns took Besançon, and on the 17th (his birthday) Guderian learned that his 29th Motorized Division had reached the Swiss frontier at Pontarlier. At the same time Kleist’s armour, pushing along the upper Seine, had taken Dijon. The Maginot Line – that exorbitant Great Wall – and the powerful forces
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guarding it were now turned and completely isolated from the rest of France which the Line had been built to protect. Like the triangle-player in a school orchestra waiting for his solitary bar of music, the moment had at last arrived for the Maginot Line. Attacked on all sides, little aware in their deep, sunless caverns of what was happening in the rest of France, the defenders of this white elephant of French interwar policy fought on until the very end. Not one of the major fortresses of the Line actually succumbed.

Mussolini Declares War

As if France’s cup were not full enough, the scavengers, scenting that her wounds were mortal, had moved in. Mussolini had long been champing at the bit to grab a piece of French territory, as well as a crumb of the glory. He told Marshal Badoglio:
‘I need only a few thousand dead to ensure that I have the right to sit at the peace table in the capacity of a belligerent.’ Several times President Roosevelt had interceded with the Duce, sending firmly worded pleas for Italy to remain neutral. But Hitler’s reluctance to have Mussolini as a co-belligerent (with good reason, as it later turned out) carried more weight. Finally, Mussolini could bear the postponements no longer. ‘I can’t just sit back and watch the fight,’ he exploded at the beginning of June. ‘When the war is over and victory comes I shall be left empty-handed!’ On 10 June, the day the French Government left Paris, Italy declared war on France, bringing forth from Roosevelt the angry condemnation that ‘the hand that held the dagger has stuck it in the back of his neighbour’. Italy’s act had little military consequence. After five days of fighting before the Armistice was signed, an Italian army of thirty-two divisions had barely dented France’s Alpine Front, held by General Olry and three divisions; on the Côte d’Azur the Italian invasion was held up by a French N.C.O. and seven men.
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The Soldiers: Last Resistance

For the French soldiers, the retreat seemed to go on without end:

You could catch the smell of the earth, the smell of a good June rain [wrote Hans Habe], the smell of sweating horses, the smell of the starched white blouses of the peasant girls. And then your eyes turned back to the flood of limping soldiers, trying in vain to look like men in the presence of the fleeing women. You saw children screaming desperately or still as death; officers’ cars blowing their strident horns and trying to open a path; bright cavalry uniforms on nervous, weary horses; wagons with their sleeping drivers; cannon without ammunition; the whole disordered funeral procession of a disintegrated army.