To Lose a Battle (42 page)

In terms of artillery, Grandsard’s position by the night of 12 May was somewhat rosier – on paper. Early on the morning of the 12th, Huntziger had ordered up two additional regiments to support Grandsard, while the 55th Division, though short on machine-guns and anti-tank weapons, had twice the normal establishment of artillery, with some 140 guns supporting its front. Without apparently informing Grandsard, however, the commander of the long-range 155-mm. regiment had pulled back the battery at Torcy, which had been shelling the Bouillon crossing points so effectively, after it had run out of ammunition. To his annoyance, Grandsard discovered that evening that he could no longer maintain interdiction on the German approach routes.

Thus as 12 May drew to a close, the overall picture on Grandsard’s X Corps front was not an encouraging one. Some of the artillery was still digging itself in, while other reinforcement batteries would not arrive before dawn. Of the infantry, the elderly reservists of the 71st were thoroughly fatigued from their two nights of forced marching, and had little time to acclimatize themselves to their new positions; the 55th was also still moving house, while this already weak unit had virtually
lost one of the battalions of its 295th Regiment. Chewed up on the River Semois, the remnants straggling back across the Meuse hardly aspired to
encourager les autres
with their dismal narratives. Altogether, Grandsard’s X Corps was hardly an imposing force to put up against the élite of the German Panzers. The big question to be answered on 13 May was, would the reinforcements ordered by General Georges reach the field in time? Or would Guderian be able to beat them to it by bringing up enough of his corps to effect a river crossing in strength? Behind this, still more was at issue – the training and philosophy of a whole generation – and beyond that a whole trend of history dating back to the first Sedan in 1870.

German High Command

Would Guderian be able to cross the Meuse on the 13th? During the 12th, Hitler had sent his chief adjutant, Colonel Schmundt, to the battle H.Q. of Kleist’s Armoured Group to ask Kleist whether he intended to attempt an immediate crossing, or to wait until the main body of the infantry arrived. The question reflected the German High Command’s nervousness, still lurking just below the surface, about the audacity of the Manstein-
Sichelschnitt
Plan. Kleist, encouraged by the results of the previous three days and by Intelligence reports indicating that the French had not yet begun shifting any major reserves behind the Sedan sector, replied that he preferred to ‘attack at once, without wasting time’, so as to hit the French before they could regain their breath. A Fieseler Storch was dispatched to fly Guderian from Bouillon to Kleist’s H.Q. There he received orders for his corps to attack across the river at 1500 hours the next day. For the first time, the ever-eager Guderian demurred; the 1st and 10th Panzers would be in position on time, but not the 2nd which was still hung up along the Semois; the
Sturmpionieren
, upon whom the vital task of throwing bridges across the river would depend, were weary from their labours in the Ardennes; and Guderian himself, though he does not mention it in his memoirs, may well have been somewhat shaken from his own two close escapes that
day from Allied bombers. He questioned the wisdom of moving with only two-thirds of his corps available. But Kleist was adamant, and Guderian says: ‘I felt obliged to admit that there were probably advantages in thrusting forward immediately.’ He was, however, much more discountenanced by Kleist’s alteration in the air plan for the 13th. Guderian had previously agreed with General Loerzer of the Luftwaffe that the crossing at Sedan should be given ‘continuous support’ throughout the operation, in order to keep the heads of the enemy gunners permanently down. Now Kleist ordered ‘a mass bombing attack, to be co-ordinated with the beginning of the artillery preparation’. Guderian claimed that his ‘whole attack plan was thus placed in jeopardy’, but again Kleist insisted. In evident ill-humour, Guderian flew back to his H.Q.

On the way there was very nearly a repeat of the Mechelen Incident, which might have had much graver consequences for the Germans. The inexperienced young pilot of the Fieseler Storch could not find XIX Corps landing strip ‘in the fading light, and the next thing I knew’, says Guderian, ‘we were on the other side of the Meuse, flying in a slow and unarmed plane over the French positions. An unpleasant moment. I gave my pilot emphatic orders to turn north… we just made it.’

Safely back at corps H.Q., Guderian got to work on drawing up his orders for the next day. In an interesting revelation of just how thorough German training for this momentous operation had been since the redrafting of
Fall Gelb
three months previously, Guderian states:

In view of the very short time at our disposal, we were forced to take the orders used in the war games at Koblenz from our files and, after changing the dates and times, issue these as the orders for the attack. They were perfectly fitted to the reality of the situation. The only change that had to be made was that at Koblenz we had imagined the attack going in at 0900 instead of 1500 hours.

Yet while all eyes of the German High Command were focused upon the Meuse crossing being prepared by Guderian, no one was aware that to the north Major-General Rommel,
allotted only the secondary role of providing flanking cover to the main thrust, already had a toe-hold on the far side of the river and was indeed about to develop a major offensive of his own.

Chapter 12

The Crossing

13 May

It seems that the Germans are not interested in France this time…

New York Journal American
, 13 May

‘
La description d’une bataille devrait être une leçon de Moral.
’

JOSEPH JOUBERT

Rommel Emerges

On the eve of an adventure which would launch a reputation ultimately more familiar to the world at large than that of any other German general of the Second World War, Erwin Rommel was a name completely unknown outside the Army even at home, and little enough known inside it. He came from a simple middle-class family of moderate means, with no military tradition; both his father and grandfather had been school-teachers. Rommel was a Württemberger, a race more renowned for its solidity and shrewd thriftiness than for any martial attributes. Aged forty-eight in 1940, he had been commissioned in 1912, with not particularly brilliant marks, into a not particularly brilliant line regiment. He appears to have made an early impact as a meticulous regimental officer, intolerant of anything slipshod, but – as his British biographer, Desmond Young, remarks – he was one of those soldiers who only ‘find in war the one occupation to which they are perfectly adapted’. It was on the southern fringe of those fateful Ardennes, near Longwy, that Lieutenant Rommel had his first opportunity three weeks after the war broke out in 1914. With only three men and suffering painfully from food poisoning, he ran into some fifteen to twenty French troops; instead of calling up the rest of his platoon Rommel immediately opened fire and, taken by surprise, the enemy scattered. Five months later, after recovering from a thigh wound, Rommel won the Iron Cross
by crawling with his platoon through barbed wire into the middle of the main French position, knocking out four blockhouses and then withdrawing with light losses before the defence could make an effective riposte. Although this was only a small-scale action, it was as characteristic of Rommel’s expertise in the tactics of infiltration – which, as a senior commander, he was to bring to a supreme art – as it was of his nerveless audacity. Later in 1915 Rommel’s skill at this kind of operation gained him transfer to a newly-created mountain battalion, designed to perform special tasks in ‘battle groups’, the commanders of which were granted a freedom of action far in excess of their rank. In the brief Roumanian campaign of 1916–17, Rommel carried out some almost incredible exploits, often with up to a whole battalion under his control, although he was still no more than a 1st lieutenant.

But the real summit of his First War career came during the Battle of Caporetto in October 1917, against the nation that would fight under his command in the Western Desert twenty-five years later. Penetrating the Italian lines at dawn, Rommel first surprised an enemy gun battery without a shot being fired. Then, diving still deeper behind the enemy positions, he surprised from the rear a counter-attacking Italian battalion. That too surrendered. After this success, Rommel was reinforced to a total of six companies and now took up position astride an important supply road well behind the enemy lines. Here he succeeded in capturing the best part of a brigade of crack Bersaglieri moving up towards the front. After fifty hours constantly on the move, he returned with the astonishing bag of 150 Italian officers, 9,000 men and 81 guns. For his feat, he was promoted captain and awarded the Pour le Mérite, the equivalent of the Victoria Cross when given to a junior officer.

After the First War, Rommel became a natural candidate for the élite cadres of Seeckt’s tiny Reichswehr. Promoted major in 1933, he chose to remain with his mountain troops as a regimental officer until two years later, when he was appointed instructor at the Potsdam War Academy, with the rank of lieutenant-colonel. During that time he was also assigned on special attachment to the Hitler Youth, but this ended after
a short while when Rommel fell foul of their leader, the arrogant Baldur von Schirach. After three years at Potsdam, he was then sent to command the War Academy at Wiener Neustadt. He was by this time a full colonel, which, considering the huge expansion of the Wehrmacht, did not in any way denote a meteoric career. But he had neither connections with any of the great military clans, nor affiliations with the Party. His relationship with the Nazi machine in pre-war days was, in fact, not dissimilar to Guderian’s; never remotely a Party man, he admired Hitler as a technician, and was responsive both to his kindred dynamism and receptiveness to unorthodox ideas. It was in 1938 that Rommel first caught Hitler’s eye after publication of a simple but admirably clear textbook on infantry tactics, based on his own personal experiences from the First War and called
Infanterie Greift An
(‘The Infantry Attacks’). At the time of the occupation of the Sudetenland, he was selected to command the battalion entrusted with Hitler’s personal safety. On the outbreak of war the following year, Rommel was promoted major-general and, as Headquarters Commandant, again made responsible for guarding Hitler during the Polish campaign. He chafed at having no operational command, found himself antipathetic to the Party potentates like Martin Bormann, but was fascinated by the front-row view his job gave him of the campaign and its techniques. When it was over he asked Hitler for command of a Panzer division, by way of reward for past services. This was granted. On 15 February, Rommel arrived at Bad Godesberg to take over the 7th, one of the four ‘light’ divisions
¹
to be converted into Panzers that winter. Weaker than the original Panzer division, the 7th had three instead of four tank battalions, 218 instead of 276 tanks, and over half of these were Czech-made light-medium T-38s.

It was quite one of Rommel’s most astonishing achievements that, in middle age, after a lifetime spent with the infantry and without any experience whatever of armour or mechanized
forces, he should within three short months not only have been able to master the technique, but also to so mould a new unit that it would become perhaps the most consistently successful of all the Panzer divisions employed in France – and this despite the relative lightness of its armoured contingent. There were indeed those among his critics who considered that he never really understood the principles of armoured warfare. Again and again, he handled his large bodies of tanks very much as he had led those few raiding companies on their deep penetrations behind the Italian lines, with a bold unorthodoxy that sometimes shocked the purists. Often he had miraculous luck. Even more than Guderian, he was a commander whose constant closeness to the front provided him with an instant grasp of events.

Rommel’s Opponent

The unhappy French commander against whose army Rommel would strike the first hard blow on 13 May, General Corap, was perhaps as representative of the median of the old-style French officer as Rommel was of the élite of the new, revolutionary Wehrmacht. Sixty-two in 1940, Corap was a Norman who had passed out top of his class in St Cyr in 1898. Joining the Algerian
Tirailleurs
, he spent most of his career on colonial operations in North Africa. A captain in 1914, he was appointed to Foch’s staff the following year and in 1918 switched to Pétain’s, ending the war as a lieutenant-colonel. Afterwards he returned to Morocco, where in 1926 he achieved the summit of his career by capturing the famous rebel, Abd-el-Krim. He was what in the French Army was called a typical
baroudeur
, an old sweat from North Africa, and this largely conditioned his thinking. André Maurois remarks of him: ‘His conversation was very interesting, but one felt his attention was directed entirely toward the past. He told me how, at the time of Fashoda, he had been mobilized against England as a young second lieutenant…’ Corap is described by Maurois as being ‘a timid man, held in high esteem by his superiors, unmilitary in appearance, and running to fat around the middle. He had
trouble getting into a car…’ In contrast to the elegant, slim and aloof Huntziger, Corap had a certain vulgar, fat man’s geniality that made him well liked by the troops, although politically he was known to have a particularly violent antipathy towards the Popular Front. But even more than Huntziger, his military education had ceased with 1918, and he was totally ignorant of mechanized warfare; above all, he had not the faintest idea of just how quickly an opponent like Rommel could move in 1940.