To Lose a Battle (31 page)

The French total was thus approximately 1,200, and the British deployed something over 600 in France, if one also took into account the aircraft of Bomber Command which could intervene in the battle. But according to General d’Astier de la Vigerie, who commanded the
Zone d’Opérations Aériennes Nord
(Z.O.A.N.), because of the French system of dispersal, his vital
Zone
, supporting Billotte’s No. 1 Army Group, could only count on a total of 746 aircraft. Against this, Goering would be able to deploy 3,000–3,500 planes out of a grand total of 5,000, the remainder (including the Ju-52 transports) being kept in Norway or in reserve in Germany. What the Wehrmacht lacked in guns on the ground was more than made up for by its ‘flying artillery’. In mobility and training, the Luftwaffe, with its experience in Spain and Poland, also had an incalculable advantage.

The French on the Meuse

The French forces which specifically would bear the weight of the German offensive, of Rundstedt’s forty-five divisions spearheaded by those seven Panzers, were the Ninth Army of General Corap and the Second Army of General Huntziger.

As already noted, the function of the Ninth Army under Gamelin’s ‘Dyle-Breda Plan’ was to wheel forward upon its pivot north of Sedan to hold the Belgian section of the Meuse running from Namur southwards, which would involve an advance of up to forty-five miles. The front Corap was expected to hold spanned approximately fifty air miles; but in fact, taking into account the sinuous twists and turns of the Meuse, it amounted to considerably more than this. For this task, he had only nine and a half divisions. There were two Light Cavalry Divisions (the 1st and 4th), plus the 3rd Spahi Brigade, a mixture of horses and light armour that could in no way stand up to a German Panzer division; these, acting as a reconnaissance screen, were to push into the Ardennes across the Meuse and absorb the first shock of a German attack while the infantry were taking up position along the Meuse.

Of Corap’s seven infantry divisions holding this key sector of the front, only two, the 5th Motorized and 4th North African, were regulars; two (the 18th and 22nd) were ‘A’ series, which meant that only 23 per cent of their officers, 17 per cent of the N.C.O.s and 2 per cent of the men were regulars, the remainder reservists; two others (the 61st and 53rd) were ‘B’ series, which were composed almost exclusively of reservists (and the oldest reservists at that – men of forty unkindly nicknamed ‘crocodiles’ by the rest of the Army) commanded by generals called back from retirement; finally, one (the 102nd) was a fortress division of the kind to be found embedded in the Maginot Line, severely limited in its mobility.

Corap’s mixed bag of an army comprised largely Normans and Bretons (good fighters, but very conscious of the past tendency of French commanders to commit them where other softer, more
meridional
troops might fail), men from the Loire and colonials from North Africa, Indo-China and Madagascar. Altogether, they had certainly not made a good impression on Lieutenant-General Alan Brooke, when he had attended an Armistice Day parade with Corap in November 1939. Beneath a monument on which was inscribed ‘
Ici triompha par sa ténacité le Poilu!
’, Brooke watched Corap’s guard of honour march past:

I can still see those troops now. Seldom have I seen anything more slovenly and badly turned out. Men unshaven, horses ungroomed, clothes and saddlery that did not fit, vehicles dirty, and complete lack of pride in themselves or their units. What shook me most, however, was the look in the men’s faces, disgruntled and insubordinate looks, and, although ordered to give ‘Eyes Left,’ hardly a man bothered to do so. After the ceremony was over Corap invited me to visit some of his defences in the Forêt de St Michel. There we found a half-constructed and very poor anti-tank ditch with no defences to cover it. By way of conversation I said that I supposed he would cover this ditch with the fire from anti-tank pill-boxes. This question received the reply: ‘
Ah bah! on va les faire plus tard – allons, on va déjeuner!
’

The bitter, idle winter had certainly brought little improvement, while of the whole French front there was probably no other sector less densely held than Corap’s. On a visit to the Ninth Army, André Maurois was ‘struck by their lack of numbers. Returning to Vervins, I had the feeling of traversing an abandoned country.’

At Dom-le-Mesnil, on the confluence of the Meuse and the Ardennes Canal about five miles downstream from Sedan, lay the boundary of the Ninth and Second Armies. General Huntziger’s Second Army, whose role under the ‘Dyle Plan’ did not entail any advance into Belgium, consisted of only two army corps (plus a cavalry screen similar to Corap’s).

It is, however, X Corps (General Grandsard) which principally concerns this story, as his was the one to be attacked by Guderian’s Panzer spearhead at Sedan. To guard against an outflanking attack on the Maginot Line, Huntziger (disastrously) had deployed his best divisions on the right and his poorest on the left immediately behind Sedan, where they linked hands with Corap’s indifferent forces. Grandsard’s right wing was held by the regular 3rd North African Division, which would be almost left out of the crucial phase of the battle, while his left was held by the 55th Infantry Division, another ‘B’ series unit, and a poor one at that. Behind, in reserve, stood the 71st – also a ‘B’ division belonging to X Corps.

Quite early in the war, Huntziger, talking in confidence to an American volunteer ambulance driver, Florence Conrad, admitted
that the poor morale of his troops was worrying him. Of the 55th and 71st Divisions, General Grandsard himself says:

… cases of ill-will were rare, but the ardour for work, for training and the desire to fight, were even rarer. Nonchalance was general; it was accompanied by the feeling that France could not be beaten, that Germany would be beaten without battle… the men are flabby and heavy… In the artillery the men are older, the training is mediocre…

The 55th (General Lafontaine), recruited in the region of Bourges, has been described as a ‘poor relation’ in terms of equipment;
¹⁵
it was particularly short in modern anti-aircraft weapons. Of its 450 officers, only 20 were regulars, and this included only the colonel of each infantry regiment, and 3 out of 50 gunner officers. The 71st, recruited in Paris (including some of the more red-tainted suburbs), was probably even more mediocre than the 55th. On 10 May, owing to leave, sickness and other causes, it could muster no more than 10,000 men out of its normal establishment of 17,000, while (according to General Ruby) its commander, General Baudet, ‘brilliant once, but now physically enfeebled, did not inspire confidence either among his troops or their leaders. His replacement was a matter of days.’

Thus three third-rate ‘B’ divisions, the 55th, the 71st and Corap’s 53rd, were left guarding the fateful sector of Sedan. It was, as Gamelin mildly admits in his memoirs, a ‘dangerous’ thing to do – and a heaven-sent gift for Guderian.

Football and Roses

Of the general state of French training and defence preparations during the bitter winter of the ‘Phoney War’, Churchill comments how

visitors to the French front were often 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. The emptiness of the roads behind the line was in great contrast to the continual coming and going which extended for miles behind the British sector…
¹⁶

This was an impression also shared by many Frenchmen, soldiers and civilians. Instead of ardently studying and exercising upon the sober lessons of Poland, too many French troops were employed in blancoing the kerbs and steps of their barracks, playing organized football, growing roses to embellish the glacis of the Maginot forts, and, as spring came, tilling the fields, by way of dispelling boredom. Writing to Simone de Beauvoir from the front, Jean-Paul Sartre described his daily contribution to the war effort in terms that represented the futility shared by countless other French soldiers:

My work here consists of sending up balloons and then watching them through a pair of field glasses; this is called ‘making a meteorological observation’. Afterwards I phone the battery artillery officers and tell them the wind direction; what they do with this information is their affair. The young ones make some use of the intelligence reports; the old school just shove them straight in the wastepaper basket… Since there isn’t any shooting, either course is equally effective…

At Arras, André Maurois, on observing Territorials engaged in planting kitchen gardens and raising rabbits and pigs, inquired why they could not have been set to work fortifying the River Scarpe.
¹⁷
He was told ‘The enemy will never advance that far. You are a defeatist!’ Hans Habe, an Austrian refugee who had joined up in a regiment that would later be thrown into the Battle of Sedan, recalled the futility of training with hopelessly rusted rifles on a beach near Perpignan: ‘… hardly an ideal
drill ground. At every step you sank up to your ankles in sand; it was impossible to set up a single machine-gun or dig a single trench.’ The rare tank exercises had a habit of grinding to a halt, because the
Intendance
had not provided sufficient petrol in advance. Gamelin’s G.Q.G. would issue instructions nineteen pages long on the conduct of patrol actions, while officers at the front wondered why on earth it was not holding exercises to simulate dive-bomber attacks, so that the troops could be made to realize that safety lay, not in running about in a panic, but in staying put in fox-holes and weapon-slits. And during all these months of Phoney War wasted by the French, on the German side second-, third- and fourth-line divisions were being transformed from what was described as ‘an armed rabble’ into fully operational units.

With Corap’s and Huntziger’s mediocre divisions protecting the Meuse – those who could most have benefited from intensive training – the picture was particularly depressing. The trouble was that the urgent need both for training of the reservists and for work on the deficient fortifications stood in direct conflict with each other. Four out of every five divisions were required in defending and working on the line all the time, so that on average only half a day per week could be devoted to firing practice and training, while after each of the numerous false alarms, training and works had been interrupted for five to six days. The Arctic weather conditions had also had their effect; Grandsard noted that it was not possible until the beginning of March to send two of his infantry regiments to the rear for three weeks’ training. Instructors tended to be in-experienced, and, commenting on the ‘general apathy’ of the Second Army’s ‘B’ divisions, General Ruby remarks that ‘every exercise was considered as a vexation, all work as a fatigue. After several months of stagnation, nobody believed any more in the war…’

In France it has always been held against Pétain that, in March 1934, he was the one to declare the Ardennes ‘impenetrable’ (though why the French General Staff should have persisted in unquestioningly accepting this thesis is another matter!); but Pétain’s rider, ‘provided special dispositions are
effected there’, tends to be forgotten. By 10 May, just what ‘special dispositions’ had the men of the Second and Ninth Armies, ‘soldiers become navvies’, achieved? Some French staff officer had indeed suggested that the forest roads leading through the Ardennes towards the French frontier be blocked by the simple expedient of felling thousands of trees. But this had been rejected. Why? Because these roads had to be kept clear for the advance of the French cavalry screen. At Sedan itself, General Grandsard tells us, the Meuse at the beginning of the war had been guarded by only some forty bunkers of ‘type Barbeyrac’. Carrying either two machine-guns, or a small anti-tank weapon and one machine-gun, these could stand up to nothing heavier than a 105-mm. shell. There were no concrete installations for command posts or for artillery positions. Not until 25 November was a first programme launched to double the number of bunkers. Work began only on 5 December, and by 10 January no more than a fifth of the 45,000 tons of material required had actually arrived. Then, too, the terrible cold rendered the pouring of concrete almost impossible, so that virtually two months of the winter programme had to be written off; and to add to its residual disgruntlement, the 71st Division was forced to remake over ten miles of slit trenches which winter had wrecked.

But why the delay in starting this urgent programme? Grandsard criticizes the idleness and softness of his men, and the lack of authority of the junior officers; but the most injurious factor seems to have lain in the protracted inability of Billotte and his army commanders to agree upon a standard type of fortification.

Meanwhile, in early March, Gamelin had received a prophetic letter from a Deputy, Pierre Taittinger, who had just completed a parliamentary inspection of the line. The defences at Sedan so shocked Taittinger and his colleagues that they foresaw it as a sector ‘of misfortune for our forces’. Gamelin responded by reinforcing Givet, fifty miles down the Meuse, with a solitary battalion,
¹⁸
and ordained the construction of a
line of
maisons fortes
, protecting Sedan midway between the Belgian frontier and the right bank of the Meuse. A
maison forte
was a small semi-disguised block of masonry with a thick layer of concrete in the ceiling; above was a superstructure providing living accommodation for its garrison of four to five men. They were supposed to resist any bombardment, but in fact one Stuka bomb or even a direct hit from a big German self-propelled gun would be sufficient to blow them apart. The garrisons of the
maisons fortes
tended to be selected from the ‘undesirables’ – grumblers and men under suspended sentence. It was a formula that hardly spoke for success; moreover, by 10 May, the right-bank line covering the Sedan ‘bridgehead’ was far from completed – as Rundstedt’s keen-eyed photographic expert, Major von Stiotta, had spotted.