To Lose a Battle (113 page)

16
. Though in terms of weight of explosive delivered, it was still probably eclipsed by the German artillery bombardment on the opening day of the Battle of Verdun in February 1916.

17
. It was perhaps the noise that constantly seemed the most unnerving feature of the Stuka attack. In Florence Conrad’s field ambulance, the French wounded kept repeating: ‘The noise, the horrible noise!… You feel the bomb coming, even if it falls 50 or 100 yards away. You throw yourself to the ground, certain of being blown into thirty pieces. And when you realize it was only a miss, the noise of this shrieking
vous casse les pattes
…’

18
. It was also the antecedent in design of most present-day tank guns.

19
. At the Riom Trial, French Army witnesses claimed, surprisingly, that the use of these boats ‘came to us as a great surprise’.

20
. Belonging to Grandsard’s 71st Division.

21
. The motorized infantry belonging to the 1st Panzer Division.

22
. Presumably Rubarth and company.

23
. The ‘Panzers at Bulson’ were in fact almost certainly their own tanks, belonging to Grandsard’s reserve tank battalions. One more ingenious variation of the story, recounted to Madame Conrad at her Field Service Unit by fugitives several days later, was that the wicked Boche had confused the defenders by utilizing Renault tanks captured in Poland!

24
. In the wake of Sedan, the quest for ‘an argument for their own pride’ seems to have been carried out at all levels. General Lafontaine himself, in a report to Gamelin dated 18 May, attempts to utilize the old, untenable bogey (about which more will be said) of the German Fifth Column: ‘one must note the almost certain presence,’ he declares,‘of doubtful characters, certainly of parachutists charged with a definite mission to fulfil, who transmitted the orders for withdrawal…’ As with so many major French débâcles throughout history, there has to be somewhere a ‘traitor’ or an enemy agent –
‘Nous sommes trahis!’
Needless to say, no hard evidence has ever been produced for this ‘Fifth Column’ activity at Sedan.

25
. ‘If the ill-starred French had not been still dogged by misfortune,’ commented Captain von Kielmansegg, giving a German view of this missed opportunity, ‘they would have made a spirited counter-attack to remove while it was still small the bulge which had developed in their lines and destroyed all the German units on their side of the Meuse before they could be reinforced.’

26
. The Germans claim to have knocked out 30 Somuas and 70 Hotchkiss H-35s.

27
. The last thing for which the ‘continuous front’ philosophy was in fact designed!

1
.
Eingetroffen
instead of
eingeschlossen.

2
. From the newly arrived 4th North African Division.

3
. Not much faster than the rate of advance of the Panzers through France.

4
. As will be seen on subsequent occasions, it was frequently the French North African and colonial units which put up the best resistance in 1940. On the other side, German troops inoculated with Nazi racial doctrines are repeatedly to be found protesting at the ‘shame’ of the
Herrenvolk
having to fight against inferior ‘nigger-people’ in France.

5
. Its immediate forebear, III Brandenburg Corps of 1914–18, had pulled off the remarkable
coup
of capturing Verdun’s Fort Douaumont.

6
. These reserves would have been principally the 3rd Armoured and 3rd Motorized Divisions.

7
. Literally, ‘Wallop them, don’t tap them’, i.e. strike as a whole and don’t disperse the effort.

8
. Against fighter attack from the rear the Battles (designed in 1933) had only one flexibly mounted Lewis gun, roughly the same armament as that carried by the aircraft of 1914–18.

9
. Total French and British losses from the Sedan action on 14 May were probably nearer ninety.

10
. His unit, the 2nd D.L.C., having regrouped after its withdrawal from the Ardennes, was due to attack on the right of Flavigny’s group, comprising the 3rd Armoured and the 3rd D.L.M.

11
. Comprising the 3rd Armoured, 3rd Motorized and 5th Cavalry Divisions and the 1st Cavalry Brigade.

12
. This was duly passed on to Gamelin, with the addition of a little extra saccharine at Les Bondons.

13
. Another factor was the serious shortage of fuel threatening the Panzers at this stage in the campaign. To an important extent the planning of
Sichelschnitt
had been predicated on the German ability to supplement its own reserves from captured enemy supplies.

1
. This decision exemplified the unawareness on the part of the French commanders of the speed with which the Panzers were about to move. That same morning General Sancelme of the 4th North African Division, the other component in Corap’s counter-attack against Rommel, had also sent his guns to the rear.

2
. So called from the insignia of the 31st Panzer Regiment.

3
. The total may have been somewhat exaggerated.

4
. But the fact that the 1st Armoured had virtually ceased to exist was not learned by Ninth Army H.Q., No. 1 Army Group, or G.Q.G. until much later.

5
. Very probably the artillery and supply echelons that Bruneau had sent to the rear.

6
. This was optimism!

7
. As one French military historian, Colonel le Goyet, remarks, by now Brocard ‘no longer commanded anything. He had simply become a provider of tanks.’

8
. One of the crack German divisions that was later lost at Stalingrad.

9
. Though they were light compared with any equivalent action at Verdun in 1916.

10
. Huntziger retained his command throughout, though in retrospect it is difficult to see that he handled the battle any more brilliantly than Corap, who had faced the far greater test.

11
. According to Churchill, by the night of the 14th there were only 206, out of 474, serviceable R.A.F. aircraft left in France.

12
. Over the passage of intervening years, the record seems to indicate that Churchill comes out better from this oft-recounted episode; it now appears that Dowding presented his famous graph of Hurricane losses not, as previously suggested, on 15 May, but
three weeks later
– which would have considerably reduced its impact.

1
. The words ‘surprised’, ‘shocked’, ‘astonished’, appear with revealing frequency in these sections of the Gamelin memoirs,
Servir.

2
. A retort originally attributed to one of Napoleon’s generals upon whom he had wanted to impose his own plan of campaign.

3
. Although they were sent with the primary purpose of protecting the northern end of the Maginot Line, the dispatch of these two units to Sedan was perhaps Georges’s happiest stroke; as already seen, it was the fault of the local commanders, not Georges, that they were so misused. A less happy stroke was Georges’s change of mind about the 2nd Armoured, also earmarked on 11 May for Sedan, which, two days later, was ordered northwards to First Army.

4
. It was revealing that the first measure taken to defend Paris should have concerned the preservation of order, presumably against a popular revolt by the Left, such as had been a perpetual bugaboo since the Commune of 1871.

5
. This incredible episode appears at least to have steeled Reynaud to one resolve, though rather late in the day. ‘It is time to put an end to this comedy,’ he told Baudouin. ‘I must be Minister of National Defence. Daladier will have to go to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs or resign.’

6
. The next day, when the panic had temporarily abated, Hering wrote anew to Reynaud:

‘It was my duty, yesterday, to suggest to you the departure of the Government and the Chambers from Paris. You have decided to remain. My heartiest congratulations,

Yours respectfully, 

Hering.’

7
. ‘What a man!’ one of Mandel’s colleagues remarked to Élie Bois that day. ‘What a pity he’s not Prime Minister!’

8
. The 71st was specifically mentioned. This was the thesis to which even Reynaud, in his memoirs written after the war, continued to subscribe.

9
. French accounts of this exchange broadly agree with Churchill’s, with the exception that Gamelin claims that, when speaking of the strategic reserves, he did not say ‘There are none’, but ‘There are no longer any’.

10
. According to Alexander Cadogan (
The Diaries of Sir Alexander Cadogan,
p. 284), before leaving for France, Churchill ‘sprang up’ in Cabinet, and declared that ‘it was ridiculous to think that France could be conquered by 120 tanks…’. It revealed just how out of touch even he was with the true state of affairs in France.

11
. Ismay observed that ‘boolge’ was the nearest Churchill could approach in French.

12
. This had been sanctioned by the Cabinet just before Churchill’s departure from London that day, despite the views of Dowding.

13
. It should be expressly noted that, by the night of 16th, there was no considered thought by either Churchill or the French leaders that the German thrust might be aiming at the Channel and not at Paris.

14
. Gamelin’s
chef de cabinet.

15
. On the fortified line behind the French frontier, in Ninth Army’s sector.

16
. The Grossdeutschland’s next battle would be against the British at St Omer on 23 May.

17
. De Gaulle’s attack was not due to begin until the following day. Guderian would err again later in attributing an action to de Gaulle.

18
. Caused, apparently, by posters instructing engine drivers to take off to their homes.

19
. Who, after Vervins had been overrun by the enemy, was in the process of moving Army H.Q. back to Wassigny behind the Sambre-Oise Canal.

1
. Successor to Manstein.

2
. Which had been striking at Prioux’s Cavalry Corps and the French First Army.

3
. Referring presumably to Flavigny’s action.

4
. Author’s italics.

5
. Although events proved Halder to have judged the threat to the southern flank more accurately than either Rundstedt or Hitler, his proposed ‘two in one’ operation might well have dangerously dispersed the Panzers and their indispensable air support. This opportunism of Halder’s was typical of what traditionally provided German staff planning with both its greatest tactical strength and its strategic weakness, and, at its worst, had led to the disaster on the Marne and Ludendorff’s final catastrophe in 1918.

6
. Presumably those initiated by Rundstedt on the 16th, instructing the Panzers to mark time while allowing the infantry flank protection to catch up.

7
. See also later notes (pp. 634–7) on Ultra.

8
. The first pillar, roughly speaking, is constituted by de Gaulle’s reputation as an
avant-garde
military thinker of the inter-war period; the second, by his performance as an armoured commander during the Battle of France; the third, by his career as leader of the Free French from 1940 onwards; and the fourth, by his achievements in the post-war world as President of France.

9
. It should be noted in passing that de Gaulle’s account of the action has to be drawn entirely from his own memoirs, in so far as he alone of the French Armoured Division commanders of 1940 steadfastly refused to testify at any of the sessions of the official Serre Commission investigating (in 1947) the failure of French armour in 1940.

10
. The fact that de Gaulle’s counter-attack, feeble as it was, should have gone down in the records as the one bright armoured effort by the French perhaps serves to emphasize how pathetic were those which the other three French armoured divisions had carried out previously.

11
. Probably belonging to the 1st D.L.M.

12
. Not to be confused with the Black Prince’s Crécy-en-Ponthieu, near Abbeville.

13
. ‘If I should ever lie dead on a blood-soaked field.’