To Lose a Battle (39 page)

After General Prioux’s alarming account of the state of the Dyle Line on the 11th, Billotte had ordered Blanchard’s First Army to speed up its advance so that it would be established in position twenty-four hours earlier than previously stipulated, on the 14th instead of the 15th. Moving by day instead of during the short May nights, the French mechanized columns now came under systematic Luftwaffe attack for the first time. In the forced marches necessitated by this acceleration of the timetable, much of the artillery was left behind. Meanwhile, during the morning of the 12th the Belgian Army was in full retreat from the Albert Line and attempting to take up position on the line Antwerp–Malines–Louvain, linking up with the B.E.F. on its right. The Belgian withdrawal in turn exposed the forward elements of General Prioux’s Cavalry Corps to attack from the armour of General Hoeppner’s XVI Panzer Corps. In the general area of Hannut, roughly midway between Liege and the Dyle, preliminary blows were now exchanged in the first major tank battle between the French and Germans. On that opening day Prioux’s tanks gave a good account of themselves. The armoured forces of both sides were over-extended, and the German infantry were moving up so slowly behind that the harassed Belgian command was given a badly needed breather in which to effect its withdrawal without precipitating a real crisis. By the evening of the 12th, Prioux’s armoured screen was still clinging to its forward positions, though
precariously. The day’s fighting had been indecisive, but it seemed to show that, on anything like equal terms, French armour could hold its own against the German Panzers. From army, army group, and back to Gamelin at G.Q.G., Prioux was showered with flattering praise for these first – alas premature – results. But by the end of the 12th no more than two-thirds of the First Army had reached the Dyle, and it looked as if the main weight of Hoeppner’s two Panzer divisions might hit Prioux on the morrow.

The B.E.F., entrenched along the Dyle from Louvain to Wavre, enjoyed another quiet day. That afternoon, Gort’s Chief of Staff, General Sir Henry Pownall, attended what the British official historian describes as ‘a momentous meeting’, at the Château de Casteau, near Mons of 1914 fame. Present were King Leopold and his chief military adviser, General van Overstraeten, Daladier (still Minister of National Defence), Georges and Billotte. Under pressure of this first crisis confronting the three embattled allies, all now agreed to General Georges’s earlier proposal that Billotte act as his ‘delegate’ to ‘co-ordinate the actions of the Allied forces in Belgian territory’. One of the first practical results of the Casteau conference was to resolve the defence of Louvain, which, since 10 May, as one further consequence of the poor liaison with the Belgians before the offensive began, had been duplicated by both a British and Belgian division; the sector was now handed to the B.E.F. In effect, however, the terms of reference within the Allied command remained vague, and with Billotte increasingly overwhelmed by the responsibilities heaped upon him by his large command, he was to have little time for ‘coordinating’ the Belgians and the B.E.F. with the French forces. Henceforth, Gort for one would have to carry on virtually without directives from above, a neglect that was to have its repercussions at a critical stage in the battle ten days later.

The skies on that brilliantly sunny Whit Sunday once again saw the main Allied air effort concentrated in the north. It was the Maastricht bridges and the stretch of road leading from them through Tongres that attracted particular attention. Here Hoeppner’s Panzers were pouring towards the Dyle Line, presenting
(apparently) far more threatening and obvious targets than the many times larger force ‘lost’ in the Ardennes. At 0600 on the 12th, Billotte called upon French Fighter Command to lend all its support that day to flying cover for the bombers attacking the Maastricht bridgehead. According to General d’Astier, the French bomber squadrons were still not yet ready for action. The crack ‘ground-level’ attack unit,
Groupe
I/54, for instance, which had been ordered to shift bases on 10 May, had been lacking some vital bomb-release accessories right up to the night of the 11th–12th, when these had actually been fetched by truck from the factory itself. Therefore, on the morning of the 12th, Astier was forced to call again on the R.A.F. to shoulder the main burden against Maastricht. Out of nine Blenheims bombing columns between Tongres and the Maastricht Bridges, seven were shot down by Messerschmitts.

By midday on the 12th,
Groupe
I/54 was at last ready for its first action. Flying with its leading flight of six Bréguets, Sergeant-Gunner Conill gives a graphic account of a low-level attack on an enemy column at Tongres that typified the experience of many Allied bomber crews during these May days. On approaching Liège, Conill’s formation was ordered to dive to zero altitude:

In front of us the Major flew his Bréguet with incredible daring, skimming the roof-tops, brushing the trees, jumping obstacles. A grand game!… The roofs of Tongres rose up in front of us… A main road was there, the one we were looking for, flanked by trees and ditches. And what a sight! Hundreds and hundreds of vehicles rolling towards France, following each other at short intervals, mobile, and travelling fast. A lovely target!… at 350 [kilometres] an hour, right down the axis of the road, flying at tree top level, the Major attacked… Suddenly white and blue flashes sprang up underneath us and there was a hell-like outburst of fire and steel and flames, which grew bigger. I saw clearly the bursts of small-calibre shells climbing towards us by the thousand. Each one of us felt they were aimed at him personally…

Ahead, Sergeant Conill could see the German flak ripping into the Major’s plane; suddenly it ‘tipped on one wing’, tore
through some poplar branches, ‘and crashed in the midst of the German troops, right on the road’. Conill then turned to see his wing-man plunging earthwards in flames. Undismayed, however, the pilot of Conill’s plane, Lieutenant Blondy, managed to drop his bombs squarely among a group of lorry-borne infantry, before his Bréguet too was riddled with flak. On one engine the Bréguet limped back to make a belly-landing in a French field. The plane was a write-off, but none of the other five planes of the flight returned.

The effectiveness of the 20-mm. and 37-mm. flak, and the speed with which the Germans had managed both to bring up and mass these weapons around important passages, provided a singularly disagreeable shock to the French Air Force that day. The severe losses (eight out of eighteen planes in all) suffered by
Groupe
I/54 was also to bring a virtual end to the ground-level attack technique. That evening a dozen Léo bombers from
Groupement
6 again attacked the Tongres road network, but this time prudently from an altitude of 2,500 feet, while the flak still forced them to take such evasive action that accuracy suffered badly. All the Léos returned, though none was undamaged. Meanwhile, during the afternoon, Air Marshal Barratt, under constant pressure from Billotte and fully realizing how suicidal future attacks on the well-guarded Maastricht bridgehead would be, took the exceptional step of calling for a volunteer effort from No. 12 ‘Battle’ Squadron. The whole squadron, well nicknamed the ‘Dirty Dozen’, volunteered. Under a strong cover of Hurricanes, five ‘Battles’ went out. Only one crippled plane was brought back, after the pilot had ordered his crew to bale out; the other four were never seen again. Flying-Officer Garland and Sergeant Gray in the leading aircraft were posthumously awarded the V.C., the first to be awarded in the campaign. One truss of the Veldwezelt bridge was knocked down. Pulled out of the burning wreck of his plane, one of the survivors was told by his German captors:

You British are mad. We capture the bridge early Friday morning. You give us all Friday and Saturday to get our flak guns up in circles all round the bridge, and then on Sunday, when all is ready, you come along with three aircraft and try to blow the thing up.

It was not an unreasonable judgement.

According to General d’Astier, altogether that day R.A.F. bombers made 140 sorties and lost twenty-four planes, while French bombers flew only thirty sorties, losing nine planes. French fighters flew about 200 sorties, losing six planes and claiming twenty-six of the enemy, while with its 124 Me-109s that had pounced upon the Maastricht Blenheims, the German Fighter Group 27 alone chalked up as many as 340 sorties that day, losing four planes for a claimed twenty-eight. As regards the results achieved by the sacrificial Allied efforts against Maastricht, the war diary of Hoeppner’s XVI Panzer Corps admits that it caused ‘considerable delays’. But at what a cost! And why were the Allied air forces continuing to waste their precious substance upon this purely secondary threat?

In his reconnaissance report for the 12th, d’Astier once again emphasized the German effort in the Ardennes: ‘Considerable motorized and armoured forces are on the march towards the Meuse round Dinant, Givet, and Bouillon, coming respectively from Marche and Neufchâteau.’ Ominously he noted the substantial amount of bridging equipment being carried by the German columns, and concluded: ‘One can assume a very serious enemy effort in the direction of the Meuse.’ But, to his amazement, by midday on the 12th Billotte was still allocating priority for air operations to the Maastricht area, though he now switched second priority from the battered 7th Army and the untroubled B.E.F. to support of Huntziger. At 1600 hours, says d’Astier, General Georges intervened to grant first priority to Huntziger. Billotte, having moved into a battle H.Q. behind the French First Army, had his eyes fixed upon this sector of the front, and was astounded. Resuming his former tack he declared: ‘Two-thirds of the air effort in support of the First Army, one-third in support of Second Army.’ To some extent, Billotte can be exculpated by the surprising fact that Huntziger himself, although informed of the bomber support earmarked for his Second Army, apparently made no appeal for it to General d’Astier at all that day. It was purely on his own initiative, based on the reconnaissance reports, that d’Astier requested fifty British aircraft to bomb the Neufchâteau and
Gouillon areas on the evening of the 12th, from which another eighteen bombers failed to return.

Guderian: Across the Semois

During the night of the 11th–12th, Guderian had swiftly exploited the precipitate withdrawal made by Corap’s 3rd Spahi Brigade across the Semois the previous day. The motor-cycle battalion of the 1st Panzer, deployed on the right of the division, got over the river at Mouzaive under cover of darkness, establishing itself in force on the other side before the defenders could react. Less than five air miles from Bouillon, the mainstay of the French defence along the Semois, the Mouzaive bridgehead gave the attackers an immediate and powerful advantage as dawn broke on the 12th. By 0600 Guderian had tanks across at Mouzaive, and the left flank of Huntziger’s 5th D.L.C., not forewarned of the Spahis’ withdrawal, was now already threatened. At Bouillon itself, men of Lieutenant-Colonel Balck’s 1st Rifle Regiment, who were later to cover themselves with glory on the far side of the Meuse, infiltrated down through steep and densely wooded banks until they reached a ford across the Semois which the reconnaissance unit had located the previous night. Within a short space of time they had carried their objectives, and the first tanks were rolling across the ford, their passage aided by the fact that the dry spring had considerably reduced the level of the Semois.

As usual, Guderian was up in the cockpit that morning, watching Balck’s river crossing. After he had satisfied himself with the immediate building of a new bridge by the divisional engineers, he followed the tanks across the Semois, up the steep gorge towards Sedan. ‘But mined roads compelled me to return to Bouillon. Here, in the southern part of the town,’ Guderian admitted, ‘I experienced an enemy air attack for the first time; they were after 1st Panzer Division’s bridge. Luckily the bridge remained undamaged, but a few houses were set on fire.’ In his command vehicle, Guderian then drove to the Cugnon–Herbeumont sector, where his 10th Panzer Division was engaged in crossing the Semois. This he found ‘an impressive
sight’, and he returned ‘without anxiety’ to Bouillon, where his staff had set up corps H.Q. in the Hôtel Panorama, well named on account of its splendid view over the Semois. In an alcove heavily decorated with trophies of
la chasse
, Guderian went to work, planning the next stage of the advance.

Suddenly there was a series of explosions in rapid succession; another air attack. As though that were not enough, an engineer supply column, carrying fuses, explosives, mines and hand-grenades, caught fire and there was one detonation after another. A boar’s head, attached to the wall immediately above my desk, broke loose and missed me by a hair’s breadth; the other trophies came tumbling down and the fine window in front of which I was seated was smashed to smithereens and splinters of glass whistled about my ears…

After this narrow escape, which might so easily have altered the course of the coming battle, Guderian moved his H.Q. back out of Bouillon. Once again he was bombed, and once again forced to move, this time to the delightful small village of Noirefontaine, on the Ardennes plateau three miles north of Bouillon.

Throughout the day Allied bombardment of the Bouillon bridgehead continued. From Torcy, ten miles away on the Meuse near Sedan, French ‘long 155s’ lobbed in shells with sufficient accuracy to make the German engineers’ bridge-building a highly dangerous occupation. Rather less accurately, R.A.F. Battle bombers, such as those that had nearly hit Guderian in the Hôtel Panorama, made repeated runs on the bridges down the narrow, twisting valley. As noted earlier, eighteen out of fifty did not return. But things did not go all the Luftwaffe’s way; five American-made Curtiss fighters belonging to
Groupe
I/5 – the
Cigognes
squadron to whom had passed the mantle of the legendary Guynemer of 1914–18 fame – pounced upon twelve Stukas returning from a bombing mission between Bouillon and Sedan. All were shot down, at no cost to the
Cigognes
, who then attacked a second wave of Stukas coming in to bomb. Several more were shot down, and the rest put to flight. The two encounters demonstrated clearly
the vulnerability of the dreaded Stuka; but alas, it was a lesson from which little benefit would be drawn.