To Lose a Battle (43 page)

Rommel Crosses the Meuse

At 0300 on the 13th, Rommel with his A.D.C., Captain Schraepler, drove down to Dinant to find out what was going on. There he found shells falling from the French artillery on the other side of the Meuse, and a number of knocked-out tanks lying about in the streets leading down to the river. Enemy fire made it impossible for him to go any further in his conspicuous command vehicle, so he and Schraepler clambered on foot down to the river. Here his 6th Rifle Regiment was about to cross to the other bank in rubber assault boats, to reinforce the foothold made during the night by the motorcycle battalion. From here on, Rommel’s own account remains probably the best and clearest of the day’s events. The riflemen, says Rommel, were

being badly held up by heavy artillery fire and by the extremely troublesome small arms fire of French troops installed among the rocks on the west bank.

The situation when I arrived was none too pleasant. Our boats were being destroyed one after the other by the French flanking fire, and the crossing eventually came to a standstill. The enemy infantry were so well concealed that they were impossible to locate even after a long search through glasses. Again and again they directed their fire into the area in which I and my companions – the commanders of the Rifle Brigade and the Engineer Battalion – were lying.

The early-morning mist, which had provided such invaluable cover for the motor-cyclists in their crossing at Houx, was
meanwhile dissipating. A smoke-screen was desperately needed with which to render innocuous the searing fire of the enemy infantry:

But we had no smoke unit. So I now gave orders for a number of houses in the valley to be set alight in order to supply the smoke we lacked.

Minute by minute the enemy fire grew more unpleasant. From up river a damaged rubber boat came drifting down to us with a badly wounded man clinging to it, shouting and screaming for help – the poor fellow was near to drowning. But there was no help for him here, the enemy fire was too heavy.

At this point Rommel turned his attention northwards to Houx, where the motor-cyclists were clinging precariously to their gains of the previous night. Most of the battalion had now reached the west bank, but the French resistance was mounting. Shortly after crossing, the commander of No. 1 Company, Captain Heilbronn, was wounded; then the Battalion Adjutant, Senior Lieutenant Pflug, and another subaltern were killed. Leading two companies himself, the Battalion Commander, Major Steinkeller, pushed up inland on to high ground after a brief struggle, taking the small hamlet of La Grange. But by mid-morning all contact with the east bank of the river had been effectively severed, there were still enemy pockets of resistance behind and heavy gunfire was coming down on the crossing area; the motor-cyclists had not yet been able to bring over any anti-tank guns, and in the event of any early French counter-attack accompanied by tanks, their position would of necessity be extremely perilous.

Not particularly happy, Rommel now drove south in a Mark IV tank to the 7th Rifle Regiment which, under Colonel von Bismarck,
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was trying to cross the Meuse opposite Bouvignes, about two miles south of Houx. On the way, he came under fire again several times from the west bank, and shell splinters wounded Schraepler in the arm. Bismarck had already managed to get a company across the river; but, says Rommel,
the enemy fire had then become so heavy that their crossing equipment had been shot to pieces and the crossing had had to be halted. Large numbers of wounded were receiving treatment in a house close beside the demolished bridge. As at the northern crossing point, there was nothing to be seen of the enemy who were preventing the crossing…

Rommel decided that there was no hope of getting any more men over the Meuse without bringing right down to the river bank ‘powerful artillery and tank support to deal with the enemy nests’. To effect this, he drove back to divisional H.Q., where he found both his corps commander, Hoth, and the commander of the 4th Army, Kluge, following his progress with interest. Then he returned to the Meuse, to Leffé on the northern outskirts of Dinant, so as ‘to get the crossing moving there’. At Leffé, Rommel continues:

we found a number of rubber boats, all more or less badly damaged by enemy fire, lying in the street where our men had left them. Eventually, after being bombed on the way by our own aircraft, we arrived at the river… The crossing had now come to a complete standstill, with the officers badly shaken by the casualties which their men had suffered. On the opposite bank we could see several men of the company which was already across, among them many wounded… The officers reported that nobody dared show himself outside cover, as the enemy opened fire immediately on anyone they spotted.

The Mark IV tanks
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called for by Rommel began to arrive, and Captain König of the 25th Panzer Regiment takes up the story:

Only half the tanks reach the edge of the Meuse, the rest remain with tracks that have been thrown off and other damage, somewhere on the slope. On the Meuse all hell is let loose – the enemy defends himself from a mass of bunkers and provisional battle positions – every house on the other side of the bank is equipped to assist the defence. Concentrated fire is coming down on the positions of our engineers, and the Meuse water is whipped up by constant artillery and mortar-shell explosions.

The tanks cruised slowly along the river road, with their turrets traversed at 90 degrees, firing at little more than one hundred yards’ range directly into the French bunkers and machine-gun nests on the opposite bank.

The fire of the Panzer guns [continues König], the 75-mm. shells as well as the well-scattered 20-mm. quick-firing cannon, soon show an effect… the companies shoot almost as if they were in training, and no recognized target, no suspicious movement of the enemy, remains unnoticed. The enemy fire begins to slacken noticeably, but nevertheless the crossing of the first storm boats, the engineers, remains a hard task, a task from which many don’t come back. In impotent rage, the tank crews watch boats torn to pieces by direct hits…

One particularly troublesome pill-box
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was engaged by Lieutenant Hanke,
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who, after firing several rounds, knocked it out.

Under cover of the tanks’ gunfire, the crossings slowly got under way again, and a cable ferry using several large pontoons was started up. During these operations, according to Captain König, ‘General Rommel is everywhere. He is with the engineers, he leaps on to a Mark IV tank in order to give it the target himself. He is no easy chief for his staff…’ To whip up the flagging zeal of his obviously badly shaken riflemen, Rommel seems to have returned to a previous incarnation that morning, and to have acted more like the junior officer leading his raiding parties behind the Italian lines at Caporetto than a divisional commander. He states:

I now took over personal command of the 2nd Battalion of the 7th Rifle Regiment and for some time directed operations myself.

With Lieutenant Most
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I crossed the Meuse in one of the first
boats and at once joined the company which had been across since early morning. From the company command post we could see Companies Enkefort and Lichter were making rapid progress.

I then moved up north along a deep gully to Company Enkefort. As we arrived an alarm came in: ‘Enemy tanks in front.’ The company had no anti-tank weapons, and I therefore gave orders for small arms fire to be opened on the tanks as quickly as possible.

From this there arose the
belle légende
, long attributed to Rommel, that he told his hard-pressed infantry to fire their Very pistols at the French tanks, to simulate the tracer effect of anti-tank shells. Whether true or not, the result was indisputable and the tanks withdrew, while Rommel reported that ‘large numbers of French stragglers came through the bushes and slowly laid down their arms’.

It was now about midday, and things were beginning to look a bit better for Rommel. With Lieutenant Most, he returned once more to the east bank, driving north with a tank and a signals vehicle to where the 6th Rifle Regiment were supporting the beleaguered motor-cycle battalion. Here the crossing was ‘in full swing’, and Rommel was told that already twenty badly-needed anti-tank guns had been forded across the river.

A company of the engineer battalion was busily engaged in building 8-ton pontoons, but I stopped them and told them to build the 16-ton type. I aimed to get part of the Panzer Regiment across as quickly as possible. As soon as the first pontoon was ready I took my 8-wheeled signals vehicle across.

The waiting Panzer crews, their vehicles under cover just off the river, watched impatiently as the sweating engineers struggled away under a broiling midday sun. Several times the pontoons were hit, at least one of them actually sinking to the bottom of the river with a tank on it, and the Engineer battalion commander was killed, together with a number of his men.

At this point in the consolidation of the bridgehead, Rommel seems momentarily to have been struck with an excess of optimism. According to 7th Panzer’s official history, in the late
afternoon he summoned three subalterns commanding his light tank detachments and told them: ‘
Meine Herren!
The enemy is in full retreat. We shall follow up immediately, and even today we shall reach X-locality eighteen kilometres west of Dinant!’ But work on the ferries was further delayed by French interdiction fire, and it was not until twilight that the first of these tank detachments was able to cross, so that Rommel had to drop any intention of breaking out of the bridghead in favour of consolidation.

Meanwhile, according to Rommel, ‘the enemy had launched a heavy attack, and the fire of their tanks could be heard approaching the ridge of the Meuse bank’. Rommel crossed the Mese again, heading towards the firing. Arriving at the infantry brigade H.Q. now established there,

I found the situation looking decidely unhealthy. The Commander of the 7th Motor-cycle Battalion had been wounded,
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his adjutant killed, and a powerful French counter-attack had severely mauled our men in Grange. There was a danger that enemy tanks might penetrate into the Meuse valley itself.

Leaving my signals lorry on the west bank, I crossed the river again and gave orders for first the Panzer Company, and then the Panzer Regiment, to be ferried across during the night. However, ferrying tanks across the 120-yards-wide river by night was a slow job, and by morning there were still only fifteen tanks on the west bank, an alarmingly small number.

This ‘powerful French counter-attack’
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was in fact an exaggeration, and it remains to be seen just what in fact the French reaction amounted to on this critical day.

Corap Reacts

The sparsity and incompleteness of French accounts of the fighting exemplify the confusion enveloping this and the
succeeding days, not only opposite Rommel but everywhere else where the Germans managed to cross the Meuse. Yet it is clear from Rommel’s version alone that the Belgian Chasseurs Ardennais manning the pill-boxes and bunkers down on the Meuse, as well as the men of the French 66th Regiment plugging the intervals, fought hard and well throughout the 13th. By the end of the day, there were still pockets holding out behind the German bridgehead, but their resources in supporting arms were very inadequate; the 66th was far too thinly spread out along the river and was already much fatigued by its approach march before the attack began. A relieving force was urgently needed.

During the 13th, the situation immediately behind the threatened area seems to have been worse even than down on the river itself, a phenomenon to be repeated, with interest, later at Sedan. As every available plane was being committed to support Guderian that day, the tactical air strikes on Rommel’s front had been strictly limited, and they could at most have been only partly responsible for the chaos which was to exert so disastrous an influence in the mounting of the French counter-attacks. General Boucher, commanding the 5th Motorized Division, had, as already noted, first learned of the Houx crossing at one o’clock that morning. Five hours later, although his battle H.Q. was less than ten miles removed from the scene of the action, he discovered that all liaison with the battalion of the 39th Regiment which he had loaned to his neighbour had somehow been broken. To restore contact, he pushed forward a squadron of motor-cyclists and two troops of machine-gun carriers from divisional reconnaissance, probably the same that were repulsed by the small-arms fire and ‘Very pistols’ brought to bear by Rommel himself that morning. At 1000 hours, Boucher now decided to throw in an infantry attack on Hautle-Wastia executed by one battalion of the 129th Regiment. H-Hour was to be 1300 hours, but the battalion did not begin to move until 1400 hours and was then almost immediately dispersed by enemy aircraft. A crack regiment of Motorized Dragoons under command of II Corps was then ordered to take over the task, but when this regiment said it could not
arrive at the start-line until 2000 hours, the operation was postponed until the following morning. This was the extent of the effort mounted on the 13th from II Corps’s sector north of the Houx bridgehead – by some of the best units to be found in the whole of Corap’s Ninth Army.
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