The Second World War (17 page)

In the north, astride the Rhine, the German Eighteenth Army was ready to strike into Holland towards Amsterdam and Rotterdam. A third force would head north of Tilburg and Breda towards the sea. Just to their south was Generaloberst Walther von Reichenau’s Sixth Army. Its objectives were Antwerp and Brussels. Generaloberst von Rundstedt’s Army Group A, with forty-four divisions in all, contained the main panzer forces. Generaloberst Günther von Kluge’s Fourth Army would strike into Belgium towards Charleroi and Dinant. The thrust by all these armies into the Low Countries from the east would bring the British and French forces racing northwards to join up with the Belgians and Dutch. At this point, Manstein’s
Sichelschnitt
, or sickle-cut, plan would come into play. Generaloberst Wilhelm List’s Twelfth Army would advance across northern Luxembourg and the Belgian Ardennes to cross the River Meuse south of Givet and near Sedan, the scene of France’s great disaster in 1870.

Once over the Meuse, the panzer group commanded by General der Kavallerie Ewald von Kleist would head towards Amiens, Abbeville and the Somme estuary on the Channel. This would cut off the BEF, the British Expeditionary Force, and the French Seventh, First and Ninth Armies. The German Sixteenth Army would meanwhile advance through southern Luxembourg to protect Kleist’s exposed left flank. Generaloberst Ritter von Leeb’s Army Group C, with two more armies, would maintain pressure on the Maginot Line to the south so that the French would feel unable to send forces north to rescue their forces trapped in Flanders.

Manstein’s left-hook
Sichelschnitt
was thus a reversal of the version of the right-hook Schlieffen plan attempted in 1914, which the French now expected them to try a second time. Admiral Wilhelm Canaris of the
Abwehr mounted a very effective disinformation campaign, spreading rumours in Belgium and elsewhere that this was precisely what the Germans were planning. Manstein was confident that Gamelin would send the bulk of his mobile forces into Belgium, because they had promptly moved towards the border following the capture of the documents after the plane crash. (Many senior Allied officers subsequently believed that the plane crash had been a clever plant by the Germans, when it had really been a genuine accident, as Hitler’s fury at the time confirmed.) In any case, Manstein’s plan to draw the Allies into Belgium played to another French preoccupation. General Gamelin, like most of his countrymen, preferred to fight on Belgian territory rather than in French Flanders, which had suffered such destruction in the First World War.

Hitler was also keen that airborne troops and special forces should play a part. He had summoned Generalleutnant Kurt Student to the Reichschancellery the previous October and ordered him to prepare groups to seize the fortress of Eben-Emael and key bridges on the Albert Canal, using assault groups in gliders. Brandenburger commandos in Dutch uniforms were to secure bridges while others disguised as tourists would infiltrate Luxembourg just before the offensive began. But the main airborne coup de main would consist of an assault on three airfields round The Hague, with units from the 7th Fallschirmjäger Division and the 22nd Luftlande Division under Generalmajor Hans Graf von Sponeck. Their objective was to seize the Dutch capital and take prisoner the government and members of the royal family.

The Germans had produced a lot of diversionary ‘noise’: circulating rumours of a concentration on Holland and Belgium, attacks on the Maginot Line and even the suggestion that they might circumvent its southern end by violating Swiss neutrality. Gamelin was certain that the Germans’ onslaught on Holland and Belgium would be their main attack. He paid little attention to the sector facing the Ardennes, convinced that its thickly wooded hills were ‘impenetrable’. The roads and forest tracks were large enough for the German tanks while the canopy of beech, fir and oak provided perfect concealment for Kleist’s panzer group.

Generaloberst von Rundstedt had been reassured by the photo-reconnaissance expert attached to his headquarters that the French defensive positions covering the Meuse were far from finished. Unlike the Luftwaffe, which mounted constant photo-reconnaissance flights over the Allied lines, the French air force refused to send aircraft over German territory. Yet Gamelin’s own military intelligence–the Deuxième Bureau–possessed a remarkably accurate picture of the German order of battle. They had located the bulk of the panzer divisions in the Eifel just beyond the Ardennes and had also discovered that the Germans were interested in
the routes from Sedan towards Abbeville. The French military attaché in Berne, tipped off by the very effective Swiss intelligence service, warned Gamelin’s headquarters on 30 April that the Germans would attack between 8 and 10 May, with Sedan lying on the ‘
principal axis
’ of advance.

Gamelin and other senior French commanders nevertheless remained in a state of denial about the threat. ‘France is not Poland’ was their attitude. General Charles
Huntziger
, whose Second Army was responsible for the Sedan sector, had only three third-rate divisions on that part of the front. He knew how unprepared and unenthusiastic his reservists were for the fight. Huntziger begged Gamelin for four more divisions because his defences were not ready, but Gamelin refused. Some accounts, however, accuse Huntziger of complacency and say that General André Corap, commanding the neighbouring Ninth Army, was more aware of the threat. In any case, the concrete positions overlooking the River Meuse built by civilian contractors did not even have embrasures facing in the right direction. Minefields and barbed-wire entanglements were totally inadequate, and suggestions that trees should be felled across the forest tracks on the east bank of the river were rejected because the French cavalry might want to advance.

In the early hours of Friday, 10 May, word of the impending attack reached Brussels. Telephones began ringing all over the city. Police rushed from hotel to hotel to tell night porters to wake any military personnel they had staying there. Officers, still struggling into their uniforms, ran to find taxis to rejoin their regiments or headquarters. As dawn broke, the Luftwaffe appeared. Belgian biplane fighters took off to intercept, but their antiquated machines stood no chance. Civilians in Brussels awoke to the sound of anti-aircraft fire.

Reports of enemy movement had also reached Gamelin’s headquarters in the very early hours, but they were dismissed as an overreaction after so many false alarms. The commander-in-chief was not woken until 06.30 hours. His Grand Quartier Général in the medieval fortress of Vincennes on the eastern edge of Paris was far from the battlefield but close to the centre of power. Gamelin was a politician’s soldier, adept at maintaining his position in the byzantine world of the Third Republic. Unlike the ferociously right-wing General Maxime Weygand, whom he had replaced in 1935, the Delphic Gamelin had avoided an anti-republican reputation.

Gamelin, credited with planning the Battle of the Marne in 1914 as a brilliant young staff officer, was now a small, fastidious man of sixty-eight in immaculately cut breeches. Many remarked on his surprisingly limp handshake. He enjoyed a rarefied atmosphere with his favourite staff officers who, sharing his intellectual interests, discussed art, philosophy
and literature as if they were acting in a high-brow French play cut off from the real world. Since Gamelin did not believe in radio communications and possessed none, the orders to prepare to advance into Belgium were passed by telephone. The French commander-in-chief that morning exuded confidence that the Germans were playing into his hands. One staff officer watched him humming a martial tune as he strode up and down the corridors.

Word of the attack had also reached London. A Cabinet minister went to see Winston Churchill in the Admiralty at 06.00 hours only to find him smoking a cigar while eating eggs and bacon. Churchill was waiting to hear the outcome of Chamberlain’s deliberations. Chamberlain, like the King and many Conservative grandees, wanted Lord Halifax to succeed him if he had to go. But Halifax, who had a profound sense of public service, guessed that Churchill would make a better war leader and refused the premiership. Churchill had also emphasized the point that Halifax, as a member of the House of Lords, could not effectively run the government from outside the Commons. In Britain that day, the drama of political change overshadowed the far more serious events across the Channel.

Gamelin’s plan was for General Henri Giraud’s Seventh Army on the extreme left to advance rapidly up the coast past Antwerp and join up with the Dutch army round Breda. This addition to his advance into the Low Countries would prove a major element in the disaster to follow, because the Seventh Army was his only reserve in north-eastern France. The Dutch had hoped for more assistance, but this was wildly over-optimistic after their refusal to coordinate plans and given the distance to be covered from the French frontier.

According to Gamelin’s so-called Plan D, a Belgian force of twenty-two divisions would defend the River Dyle from Antwerp to Louvain. Gort’s BEF with nine infantry divisions and one armoured division would join their right and defend the Dyle east of Brussels from Louvain to Wavre. On the BEF’s southern flank, General Georges Blanchard’s First French Army would hold the gap between Wavre and Namur, while General Corap’s Ninth Army would line the River Meuse south from Namur to west of Sedan. The Germans were aware of every detail, having broken the
French codes
with great ease.

Gamelin had assumed that the Belgian troops defending the Albert Canal from Antwerp to Maastricht would be able to hold off the Germans long enough for the Allies to advance to what they imagined would be previously prepared positions. On paper, the Dyle plan appeared to be a satisfactory compromise, but it utterly failed to predict the speed, ruthlessness and deception of the Wehrmacht’s combined operations. The lessons
of the Polish campaign had simply not been absorbed.

Once again, the Luftwaffe sent in pre-emptive dawn attacks against airfields in Holland, Belgium and France. Messerschmitts managed to shoot up French aircraft lined up at dispersal. Polish pilots were horrified by ‘
the French insouciance
’ and lack of enthusiasm to engage the enemy. RAF squadrons scrambled when ordered up, but once in the air they had little idea where to go. With no effective radar, ground control was of little help. Even so, on that first day the RAF Hurricanes still managed to bring down over thirty German bombers, but they had not had to contend with German fighter escorts, and the Luftwaffe did not make that mistake again.

The bravest pilots were those flying the obsolete Fairey Battle light bombers sent to attack a German column advancing through Luxembourg. Slow and inadequately armed, they were dangerously vulnerable to both enemy fighters and ground fire. Thirteen out of thirty-two were shot down and all the others damaged. The French lost fifty-six
aircraft destroyed
on that day out of 879 and the RAF forty-nine out of 384. The Dutch air force lost half its strength in a morning. But the battle was far from one-sided. The Luftwaffe lost 126 machines destroyed, of which most were Junkers 52 transports.

The bulk of the Luftwaffe effort was concentrated against Holland in the hope of knocking the country out of the fight rapidly, but also to re inforce the impression that the main attack was coming in the north. This was all part of what the military analyst Basil Liddell Hart later called the ‘matador’s cloak’ tactic to draw Gamelin’s mobile forces into the trap.

In a new development in warfare, Junkers 52 transport planes, escorted by Messerschmitts, began dropping the airborne assault troops. The main objective, to seize The Hague with units of the 7th Fallschirmjäger and the 22nd Luftlande Divisions, was however a costly failure. Many of the slow transport planes were shot down en route to the target and less than half the force reached the three airfields around the Dutch capital. Dutch units fought back, inflicting many casualties on the paratroopers, while both the royal family and the government made their escape. Other detachments from the same two divisions managed to seize the Waalhaven airfield near Rotterdam as well as key bridges. But to the east Dutch troops had reacted very quickly and blown the bridges round Maastricht before German commandos, dressed in Dutch uniforms, could seize them.

Hitler at the Felsennest is said to have wept with joy when he heard that the Allies were starting to march into the Belgian trap. He was also thrilled that the assault group of paratroopers in gliders had managed to drop exactly on to the glacis of the Eban-Emael fortress at the confluence of the Meuse and the Albert Canal. They trapped the large Belgian garrison beneath them until the Sixth Army arrived the following evening.
Other paratroop detachments seized bridges over the Albert Canal, and the Germans rapidly breached the first main lines of defence. Even if the principal airborne operation against The Hague had failed, the landing of paratroopers deep inside Holland created fearful panic and confusion. It started the wild rumours of paratroops coming down dressed as nuns, of poisoned sweets dropped for children and of fifth columnists signalling from attic windows: a phenomenon which infected Belgium, France and later Britain.