The Second World War (11 page)

The German army which opposed this miscellaneous Allied host impressed above all by the homogeneity of its composition. It maintained only three types of division: armoured (Panzer), motorised and infantry. The parachute divisions formed part of the Luftwaffe. By May 1940 all ten of its Panzer and all six of its motorised divisions were deployed in the west; so too were 118 infantry divisions, which, since the Polish campaign, differed little in fighting efficiency, whether they were pre-war ‘active’ or wartime reserve. The only oddities in the German order of battle were the 1st Cavalry Division (effectively a motorised formation), the elite mountain infantry divisions and the two motorised divisions drawn from the SS, the Nazi Party militia. The SS had already demonstrated in Poland a tendency to illegal brutality that it was to amplify in France. Otherwise its units differed from those of the army only in an evident determination to excel in courage on the battlefield.

The simplicity of the German army’s organisation was reflected in its command arrangements. Authority over its formations ran from Hitler through his personal headquarters, OKW (
Oberkommando der Wehrmacht
, the Supreme Command), as yet an undeveloped instrument of control, to the army high command (OKH) and then directly to the army groups. In practice, as foreshadowed in Poland, Hitler would deal directly with the General Staff, locating his headquarters close to it, but leave direct operational control to its experts. The Luftwaffe’s liaison staff at OKH directly co-ordinated air operations with the army’s. On the Allied side, by contrast, operational authority rested with the French Supreme Commander, General Maurice Gamelin, but was exercised first through a Commander Land Forces (General Doumenc) and then by the commander for the north-east, General Alphonse Joseph Georges, under whom came not only the French Army Groups 1, 2 and 3 but also the British Expeditionary Force. The BEF’s commander, General Lord Gort, answered operationally to Georges but politically to the British cabinet; but by May 1940, because Gamelin answered politically to his own cabinet, he had developed the habit of dealing directly with Gort rather than through Georges, while Gort ultimately looked to London for orders rather than to La Ferté (Georges’s HQ), Montry (Doumenc’s) or Vincennes (Gamelin’s). It was a further structural weakness of the Allied command system that Gamelin’s headquarters were near Paris, those of Doumenc halfway to those of Georges in northern France, those of Gort separate from his, and those of both the British and French air forces separate again. The Royal Air Force in France actually answered to two headquarters: Gort directly controlled the RAF component of the BEF, but the much larger Advanced Air Striking Force came under Bomber Command in Britain. The French air force had three levels of command above its operational squadrons, three separate squadron headquarters, and liaison staffs with both elements of the RAF.

Structural deficiencies were compounded by personal failings. Gort was a famously brave officer who had won the Victoria Cross in the First World War but identified over closely with his fighting battalion commanders. Georges had never properly recovered from a wound suffered during the assassination of the King of Yugoslavia at Marseilles in 1934. Gamelin, once operations officer to Joffre, was simply old – sixty-eight – and, what was worse, tired by age. De Gaulle, who visited him in his remote ‘convent-like’ headquarters at Vincennes during the phoney war, brought away the impression of a researcher testing the chemical creations of his strategy in a laboratory. Air Marshal Arthur Barratt, commander of the British Air Forces in France, had a more caustic judgement: ‘a button-eyed, button-booted, pot-bellied little grocer’. Gamelin’s operational directives read like philosophical tracts. No word, written or spoken, that issued from Vincennes carried fire to the men at the front.

Perhaps only a Prometheus could have done that – and there was nothing Promethean about Gamelin. Even the British army, a brotherhood of professional warriors and eager amateurs, approached the war with a sense of
déjà vu;
‘as we have beaten the Germans once, why do we have to do it again?’ might have encapsulated their attitude. The French army, drawn from the whole of the nation, scarred by its terrible sufferings of 1914-18 and divided by the extremism of its politics, was touched by a similar sense of pointless repetition, but still more acutely. Albert Lebrun, the French President, noted after his visit to the front a ‘slackened resolve, relaxed discipline. There one no longer breathed the pure and enlivening air of the trenches.’ Winston Churchill, First Lord of the Admiralty, was ‘struck by the prevailing atmosphere of calm aloofness, by the seemingly poor quality of the work in hand, by the lack of visible activity of any kind’ on the French front. General Edouard Ruby, of the Second Army, found that ‘every exercise was considered as a vexation, all work as a fatigue. After several months of stagnation, nobody believed in the war any more.’

In part the French did not believe because the war was foreseen, not only by common soldiers but also by the generals, as a repetition of the trenches, long-drawn-out and indecisive. The common soldiers and generals of the German army had been given in Poland a vision of a different outcome; if they as yet lacked the faith to believe it could be repeated in the west, Hitler had no doubts. ‘Gentlemen,’ he told his staff on the eve of ‘Case Yellow’, ‘you are about to witness the most famous victory in history!’ On 27 April, persuaded by his reading of captured Allied documents relating to their intervention in Norway that he could not be condemned for his imminent violation of Dutch and Belgian neutrality, he announced to Halder that the attack in the west would begin in the first week of May. Weather forecasts enforced postponement of the date from 5 to 6 May, then 8 May. Finally on 7 May he postponed it again to 10 May ‘but not one day after that’. He held to his resolve.

‘Late in the evening of Friday 9 May from the Dutch frontier to Luxembourg,’ wrote Professor Guy Chapman, ‘outposts facing Germany became aware of a vast murmuring on the German side as of the gathering of a host.’ A warning of impending attack from the Belgian military attaché in Berlin, delayed in deciphering, was received in Brussels just before midnight. The Belgian high command at once put its army on alert; but by then the German vanguards were already moving to the attack. At 4.30 on the morning of 10 May, airborne units began landing near The Hague and Leyden in Holland and on the crossings of the Meuse in Belgium. The most daring of the airborne attacks was against the Belgian fort of Eben Emael, guarding the junction of the Meuse with the Albert Canal, both key obstacles in the Belgian defence plan. German glider-borne infantry crash-landed on the roof of the fort, penned the defenders inside and, using concrete-piercing charges, overwhelmed them by the sheer surprise of their descent.

Surprise afflicted no one worse than the Dutch, who were genuine neutrals. They had taken no part in the First World War, wanted no part of the Second and commended themselves as an enemy only because parts of their territory, notably the strip known as the ‘Maastricht appendix’, offered an easy way round the Belgian water obstacles. The ability of the Dutch to defend their territory was minimal. Their army, only ten divisions strong, had not fought a war since 1830. Their air force had only 125 aircraft, half of which were immediately destroyed on the ground by surprise attack. Their best hope of delaying defeat, as they had learnt in the Eighty Years War against the Spanish three centuries earlier, was to retreat inside their waterlogged zone around Amsterdam and Rotterdam and trust to the network of its canals and rivers to delay the invader. The strategy which had cost Spain decades of campaigning was unhinged by German airpower in a few hours. By overflying the water defences of ‘Fortress Holland’ with streams of Junkers 52 transport aircraft on the morning of 10 May the Luftwaffe landed the whole of the 22nd Airborne Division in its heart, there to await the arrival of Army Group B’s tanks. Despite the brave resistance of the Dutch army, the blowing of several vital bridges through the miscarriage of German surprise attacks, and the intervention of the French Seventh Army, the German airborne troops did not have long to wait. On the morning of 13 May, as the German armoured spearheads reached out to join hands with them as they were on the point of capturing Rotterdam, the Luftwaffe misunderstood a signal from the ground announcing their success and bombed the city centre flat. It was the first ‘area’ operation of the Second World War and a raid which killed 814 civilians. But it effectively ended Dutch resistance, prompting the Queen of the Netherlands to embark on a ship of the Royal Navy for a British port – she had asked to be taken to another part of her kingdom – and causing the Dutch high command to capitulate the following day. As Queen Wilhelmina left, she forecast that ‘in due course, with God’s help, the Netherlands will regain their European territory’. The Dutch people, who were to pass through the cruellest of German occupations in western Europe, were not to foresee that the Dutch empire in the East Indies would also be lost to them before liberation eventually came.

No word of criticism has ever been levelled against the Dutch by either victors or vanquished of 1940. Not so the Belgians. Although the German army found their soldiers stalwart in action – the official historian of the German 18th Division spoke of their ‘extraordinary bravery’; the German opponent of Hitler, Ulrich von Hassell, judged that ‘among our adversaries the Belgians fought the best’; while Siegfried Westphal, later to be chief of staff of the German armies defending France against invasion in 1944, noted that ‘it was astonishing to see that the Belgians fought with increasing tenacity the nearer the end of the war approached’ – the British and French, both during the crisis of 1940 and ever afterwards, insisted on laying blame for much of what befell them on the Belgian army, King and government.

King Leopold’s chief military adviser, General Robert van Overstraeten, has been characterised as the ‘evil genius’ of the 1940 campaign, resisting liaison with the French and British before the German attack and succumbing to defeatism as soon as it began. There is certainly something in both charges; but the truth was that Belgium found itself in an impossible position. Short of allowing France and Britain to garrison its territory from the onset – which would have compromised the neutrality it still believed to be its best hope of averting invasion – it had no option but to keep its military distance from the Allies, while fortifying its eastern frontier as best it could against the Wehrmacht. Even so, van Overstraeten did allow British and French officers wearing civilian clothes to reconnoitre the positions they intended to take up if Germany attacked; and, though he refused to co-ordinate defence plans with the Allies, he did transmit to them Belgian intelligence of German intentions, including details of the original ‘Case Yellow’ captured at Mechelen on 9 January, and subsequent indications of their scheme to envelop and destroy the Franco-British army on the Western Front.

Van Overstraeten’s professional objection to closer co-operation with the Allies lay in his belief that nothing would induce them to defend the whole of Belgium. His (correct) judgement was that they intended to advance no further than the centre of the kingdom; his equally correct but harsher judgement was that they would allow the Belgian army to ‘sacrifice’ itself in its forward positions on the Albert Canal while they consolidated their own behind it on the Dyle Line. In the event, they did not even win the time to consolidate. The French Seventh Army, though commanded by Henri Giraud, a genuine fighting general and future rival of de Gaulle for leadership of Free France, made poor time along the North Sea coast on its mission to bring support to the Dutch and the Belgian left flank. It had further to advance than the Germans of Army Group B coming from the opposite direction, who proved more adept than it in negotiating water obstacles even when defended. Its motorised reconnaissance elements also came under German air attack. By 12 May its advance was blunted near Breda, its objective, and on the following day it was ordered to fall back to guard the left flank of the Dyle Line near Antwerp. It did so pursued by the advance guard of the 9th Panzer Division.

The Allied deployment on to the Dyle was already going wrong. A ‘domino effect’ was in train. As the Dutch army fell back from its forward positions into Fortress Holland around Amsterdam and Rotterdam, it uncovered the left flank of the Belgians on the Albert Canal, where they were outflanked by the 9th Panzer Division. On the right they were outflanked by the 3rd and 4th Panzer Divisions, which were about to be let across the precipitous defile of the Meuse – the most formidable of military obstacles in north-west Europe – by the German airborne troops’ descent on Eben Emael. While the Royal Air Force tried vainly in a series of suicidal bombing missions to destroy the Meuse bridges in the face of the German advance, the Belgians began to fall back, hoping to feel behind them the support of the French First Army and the BEF advancing to the Dyle.

Both these forces were in forward motion, the BEF passing by Brussels, the French First Army by Maubeuge, with the Ninth Army of General André Corap on its right. For the British their line of advance was familiar country. It ran through Marlborough’s campaigning ground, past Waterloo and across more recent battlefields of their military history, Ypres and Mons. ‘It was almost’, wrote the American war correspondent, Drew Middleton, ‘as if they were retracing steps taken in a dream. They saw again faces of friends long dead and heard the half-remembered names of towns and villages.’ Dream was shortly to become nightmare for them, and for their French allies too. The Dyle, to which they were advancing, was scarcely a natural obstacle at all; the artificial obstacles they had been led to believe the Belgians had erected along it were scattered or absent altogether (the British would encounter those that they had emplaced a few years later; collected and transported to Normandy, they would form a principal element in the German fortifications of the D-Day beaches). The French had two ‘cavalry’ and one mechanised division with them; the British had almost no armour at all. Opposite were the 3rd and 4th Divisions of Hoepner’s armoured corps, with over 600 tanks, their crews battle-hardened and trained for rapid advance by the experience of the Polish campaign. No wonder that an eerie cynicism suffused Hitler’s reminiscence of this stage of the campaign: ‘It was wonderful the way everything turned out according to plan. When the news came through that the enemy were moving forward along the whole front, I could have wept for joy; they had fallen into the trap . . . they
had
believed . . . that we were striking to the old Schlieffen Plan.’ Hitler’s own first experience of battle had occurred only fifty miles from the Dyle, in the dying stage of the ‘old Schlieffen Plan’ in October 1914. It had been a bitter and bloody baptism. Now: ‘how lovely Felsennest [Crag’s Nest, his ‘Sickle Stroke’ headquarters] was! The birds in the morning, the view of the road up which the columns were advancing, the squadrons of planes overhead. There I was sure everything would go right for me . . . I could have wept for joy.’