To Lose a Battle (41 page)

They grope their way out of the woods, and in one single rush are fifty yards beyond the trees. Panting, they lie down in the shell-holes… Onwards! They don’t shoot, they don’t want to bring the enemy fire down on themselves… Star rockets are fired above. Their light seems to last forever, like the rays of a huge searchlight, covering the countryside far and wide with a deadly brightness… At last, after what seems an eternity, their groping fingers reach the leaves and branches on the bank. In front of them runs the river. The first phase has been achieved.

The Germans reach the

thin spine with many gaps in it which comprises the old unprotected and weather-worn stone weir… Right and left machine-guns take up position. They give covering fire… The first assault troops do gymnastics, one behind the other, with a distance in between them, on the fragile framework of the weir. Like tightrope walkers they balance their way forwards.

The enemy did not react, and the long thin island turned out to be untenanted. Rommel’s motor-cyclists made their way stealthily through its scrub and bushes, until they discovered on its far side a lock gate, equally intact. They crossed this, and taking advantage of the hubbub and confusion of the night firing, they swiftly dug themselves in. Pinned under a cross-fire from German and French machine-guns, with friendly bullets ricocheting disagreeably off the railway line that ran along the west side of the river, the motor-cyclists clung to a precarious foothold. Packet by packet they were reinforced until several companies were across, and still, strangely enough, no serious attempt was made to dislodge them. Shortly after midnight on 12 May, less than three days after the campaign had begun,
German soldiers were actually established on the west side of the Meuse. And it had cost Rommel that day the lives of no more than three officers, six N.C.O.s and fifteen men.

Rommel’s easy initial crossing resulted from an unusual combination of circumstances. By sheer luck, at Houx he had struck a particularly sensitive point in the Meuse defences. The lock and the weir had expressly not been destroyed because it was feared (not unreasonably) that, with the exceptionally dry season, their destruction would so lower the level of the Meuse that it might actually be fordable in certain places. Yet the banks of the island were fringed with high trees so that the Germans could cross concealed from the defenders on the west bank, while on that side the road and railway, both running along the river, further impeded the defenders’ field of fire. Westwards from Houx, the terrain climbs gently towards Anthée and Philippeville on the open plateau beyond, offering a very enticing axis of penetration for armour. Houx was therefore, from all points of view, a danger area not lightly to be ignored, and it might have been assumed that its defence would have assumed particular priority. This was not so, however.

The French at Houx

To compound the misfortunes of the sector, the German crossing point happened to fall right on the boundary between General Bouffet’s II Corps and General Martin’s XI Corps. Bouffet’s solitary division, the 5th Motorized, which formed the left flank of Corap’s army, on account of its mobility had already arrived and was more or less in position by the 12th; but its neighbour to the right in Martin’s sector, the 18th Infantry Division (an ‘A’ class unit), had only managed to get six of its battalions and a portion of its artillery into line. In fact, according to Corap’s original plans, the 18th was not scheduled to be entirely in position until D+5, or 14 May. As a result, its companies were so thinly spread out along the Meuse that they could not hope to keep their whole front covered, and after the more than fifty miles they had had to cover by forced marches from the French frontier, the ‘A’
class reservists were thoroughly exhausted. Already on the 11th, General Martin had expressed disquiet about the Houx area and had obtained permission to plug the gaps in his defence with the retreating remnants of the 1st D.L.C. But by now the value of the chastened cavalry was not great, and what little it possessed was thrown away by dispersing it among the infantry. There was added confusion caused by a conflict in seniority between the colonels commanding the cavalry regiments and the lieutenant-colonels of the infantry.

To give further teeth to the defences opposite Houx, Martin had also asked the 5th Motorized Division to transfer one of its battalions to the 18th, until such time as all that division’s effectives could be in line. Although the unit concerned, the 2nd Battalion of the 39th Infantry Regiment, received its orders on the 11th, it did not reach its new position until 1600 hours on the following day; thus, at the time of Rommel’s arrival on the other side of the Meuse, it was just in the process of taking over from the 66th Regiment. Observing that the river bank was already exposed to fire from Rommel’s advance guard on the east side, the newly arrived battalion had shown no predilection to send outposts down there. Instead, the 39th had sat on the high ground west of the river, whence it was impossible to cover the Isle of Houx, or its approaches, and it remained there even after darkness had removed the excuse of enemy fire. This error was a radical contravention of Corap’s orders (No. 12 of 22 April), which stated explicitly that the main defence must be carried forward down to the water’s edge. Here was perhaps one first practical consequence of the poor discipline of the French Ninth Army on which General Brooke had commented the previous autumn.

It was 0100
⁴
on the morning of 13 May when General Boucher, commanding the 5th Motorized Division, learned that a German detachment had crossed the Meuse. But General Martin, the senior commander most concerned, did not receive the news until 0400. As a further example of the lethal sluggishness of French communications, Martin found it quite impossible to get through on the telephone to Corap. Thus, Martin
was forced to co-ordinate plans for a localized counter-attack laterally with Boucher; a wider consequence was that nobody from the army commander, Corap, upwards was aware of the extent of the threat at Houx until late on the 13th, by which time a much greater danger was already revealing itself at Sedan.

French High Command

At the top echelons of the French High Command, despite the repeated warnings of aerial reconnaissance and the fragmentary items of bad news from the cavalry, the day passed once again in a general atmosphere of optimism, and without any specific alarm at the turn of events in the Ardennes. Attention was concentrated on the tank battle in the Gembloux Gap, which (as General Georges later admitted) the French High Command continued to regard as a greater danger to the Allied front than Sedan – because this was the way the Germans had come in 1914. In Government circles the talk was all about ‘Fifth Columnists’ and parachutists; Alexander Werth, a British correspondent, recalls one of Reynaud’s chief spokesmen at the Quai d’Orsay, Duroc, telling him reassuringly that Sunday: ‘After all, if the Germans have to resort to tricks like dressing up their soldiers in foreign uniforms – well, then they can’t feel so very strong. It makes me confident they’ll still lose the war.’ On the 12th, Gamelin is to be found suggesting to General Georges that the cavalry screen withdrawing from the Ardennes now be sent to the rear in readiness to round up German parachutists; then he changed his mind and suggested it should be sent northwards to back up Blanchard’s First Army – both proposals only serving to illustrate just how badly out of touch the Generalissimo was, at his radio-less G.Q.G. Gamelin admits that he was ‘above all devoted to dealing with matters of overall organization’. These appear to have included all sorts of minor details concerning tactical defence against tanks in northern Belgium, and warnings to the Maginot Line of the technique employed by the Germans to capture Eben Emael. He complains at the poverty of the intelligence reaching him from the
Ardennes sector, but went to bed that night contented by the evening’s situation report from General Georges, which stated: ‘The defence now seems well assured on the whole front of the river [Meuse].’

At General Georges’s headquarters at La Ferté, his Chief of Staff, General Roton, records the receipt at 1500 hours on the 12th of ‘a very alarming report’ from Huntziger’s Second Army. The cavalry had suffered ‘very severe losses’ (something of an exaggeration), and Huntziger was calling for a fresh division to replace the 71st, which Grandsard (commanding X Corps) was having to insert into the line south of Sedan. Georges was away in the north, and in his absence Roton took the initiative to order the movement ‘immediately’ of three of the five divisions from the general reserve which Georges had earmarked for the Sedan sector the previous day: the 3rd Armoured,
⁵
the 3rd Motorized and the 14th Infantry Divisions. These were also among the best in the French Army. But at 1700 hours, surprisingly enough, a ‘more reassuring’ message came through from Huntziger’s Chief of Staff: ‘Calm had returned to the front’, says Roton. ‘He estimated that there was no urgency to push the 3rd Motorized as far as Stonne. But I held to my point of view; this division was to arrive punctually on 14 May at the battlefield of Sedan.’ This would be, however, at least one critical day too late. Meanwhile nothing further was done for the more immediately threatened Corap.
⁶

Huntziger’s Orders to the Second Army

With nightfall, it was abundantly clear to the French Second Army that they were going to be attacked in earnest the following day. All night long the troops opposite Sedan could hear the growl of German tanks moving up on the other side of the Meuse, and any pretence of secrecy or camouflage now
appeared to be abandoned. Night reconnaissance flights reported vast motorized columns, moving with headlamps full on in flagrant contempt of the Allied air forces, along all the roads leading to the Meuse south of Namur, and heaviest of all was the traffic heading towards Sedan. That day the 1st Panzer Division had been positively identified, and while even from the garbled reports of the French cavalry screen it was obvious that this was not the only one converging on Sedan, the fact that the 1st Panzer was known to be the pride of Hitler’s armoured formation must have clearly suggested to Huntziger the scale of the pending attack.

Huntziger himself was rated to be perhaps the most brilliant intellect among the senior commanders of the French Army. Half Alsatian and half Breton, on leaving St Cyr in 1901 his first choice was to join the Marines. After taking part in pre-1914 colonial wars in Madagascar and Indo-China, he commanded a battalion during the First War, ending it with the rank of lieutenant-colonel as Marshal Franchet d’Esperey’s Chief of Operations in Salonika. By 1938 he was appointed to the
Conseil Supérieur de la Guerre
(Supreme War Council), having already commanded the French forces in Syria as one of the youngest army commanders on record. On taking over the Second Army, he was still well under sixty (which, by the standards of 1940, was youthful), a trimly elegant, alert and vigorous figure. His cold blue eyes gave away a certain tendency to be remote in his dealings with subordinates, but most of them agreed upon his ‘dazzling intelligence’ as a theoretician, and he was generally regarded in the French Army as the likeliest successor to Gamelin.

Perhaps the most fundamental truth about Huntziger, like so many of his contemporaries of 1940, however, is to be found in the concluding words of his Order of the Day of the night of 12 May, warning the Second Army of the coming battle on the Sedan ‘position of resistance’:

Every portion of terrain upon which the enemy may have set foot must be retaken from him.

The honour of leaders at all levels is at stake in preserving the integrity of the position, without regard to casualties.

No
défaillance
will be tolerated.

On the Maginot Line, we shall defend the sacred soil of the nation.

I am sure of the Second Army.

Resounding, courageous and inspiring words, but they were those of a past war, redolent of the resolute but rigid linear defence at Verdun. They revealed that Huntziger’s thinking, for all his intellectual power, remained rooted in the victory of 1918. The French General Staff, basing its judgements on its own capabilities, knew that it could not execute a full-scale crossing of the Meuse before 18 May; therefore, q.e.d., the Germans could not either. And by the evening of 12 May, Huntziger equally still seems only to have half believed, despite all the signs, in the imminence of the danger confronting him.

Symptomatic of that fatal leisureliness with which his Second Army (or, for that matter, Corap’s Ninth) carried out its final preparations was the manner in which the 71st Division was being brought up into the line. Up till March, this Parisian-recruited ‘B’ division, probably the poorest of all Huntziger’s units, had been holding a sector on the Meuse at Mouzon, but since then it had been undergoing badly-needed training in the Vouziers area. On 10 May, Huntziger had ordered it to resume its position on the Meuse, between the 55th and 3rd North African Divisions, but he appears to have failed to impart to his subordinates any particular sense of urgency for this transfer. General Grandsard, to whose X Corps the 71st belonged, claims in his apologia that by the night of the 12th he still had no idea of the strength of the German force approaching Sedan, details of air and cavalry reconnaissance intelligence not having filtered down to him, and his appreciation that night was that the enemy could not attack with any likelihood of success on the 13th. (He adds that of course he knew all about the German Stukas, but had complete faith in the French Air Force to keep them at bay.) But Grandsard blames Huntziger for having stationed the 71st so far away from the line on 10 May: ‘To demand an infantry division to march on foot,’ says Grandsard, ‘some sixty kilometres in two short May nights (six hours approximately each night), plus a relief, is to demand the
impossible.’
⁷
On the afternoon of the 12th, the commander of the 71st Division, the elderly and ailing General Baudet, requested Grandsard for a time extension. Grandsard refused. On moving into line, General Baudet found that his command post had not been set up, while the divisional telephone exchange was linked with only light temporary cables, many of which were not even buried. Meanwhile, to make way for the entry into line of the 71st, General Lafontaine’s 55th Division was also in the process of extensively reorganizing itself. Altogether, Grandsard reckoned that the earliest date by which the whole of his corps could possibly be in position was the 13th; but in fact, General Ruby tells us, General Lafontaine was not planning to complete
his
dispositions before the
night
of 13–14 May.