To Lose a Battle (49 page)

As night fell, Lieutenant-Colonel Balck, sitting comfortably on his objective just beyond Frénois, became aware of the fading away of French gunfire. An inkling of what was going on among the enemy gunners seems to have occurred to him. His riflemen were dog-tired from the day’s exertions, but, infusing his own energy into them in a notable feat of personal leadership, he rallied them and got them on their feet again. Bullying and driving, Balck led the weary regiment in a five-mile night march towards the south, so that by dawn, without opposition, they had reached Chéhéry, thereby at one bound doubling the depth of the bridgehead. On the left flank, nightfall and the diminution of the flanking fire from the 71st Division enabled the stalled rifle battalions of the 10th Panzer to get across the Meuse. Creeping from one bomb crater to another, ‘ideal positions’ thrown up by the Stukas, Sergeant Schulze noted how many bunkers seemed to have been abandoned by their occupants. Swiftly the divisional engineers began construction on a bridge for the 10th Panzer, just south of Sedan. On the 1st Panzer front Guderian, who had already crossed the river closely on the heels of Balck’s riflemen, stood by watching anxiously as Lieutenant Grubnau’s men put the finishing touches to their bridge at Gaulier. The regimental historian of the Grossdeutschland notes that ‘the noise of
fighting had almost stopped; only occasionally there was one shot, otherwise silence – the enemy is beaten!’ Shortly before midnight, the pontoon bridge was ready, and

we roll slowly over on to the other bank, turn sharply to the right and follow the road running along the Meuse some thousand yards to the small village of Villette. A crater-like Stuka bomb hole forces us out on to the fields… around us are burning houses, shimmering with heat.

As the first Panzers rumbled into the Sedan bridgehead, it measured some three miles wide by four to six miles deep at the point where Balck had completed his night march. ‘Pleased and proud with what I had seen’, Guderian returned to his H.Q. at La Chapelle to prepare operational orders for the 14th. It was, he felt, clear that this day would ‘bring a decision’. At the same time, he could not resist sending off a telegram to General Busch, the commander of the Sixteenth Army, who, at that meeting with Hitler, had told Guderian he would never get across the Meuse.

Reinhard’s Difficulties

If on both wings of the
Sichelschnitt
thrust – at Dinant and Sedan – the results on the 13th left little to be desired (from the German point of view), the same could hardly be said of the centre. Here, at Monthermé, Reinhardt’s XLI Corps was badly stuck, and would remain so for the next two days. The story of Reinhardt’s difficulties makes an interesting comparison with the easy successes of Rommel and Guderian, though it was not really his fault. The terrain around Monthermé is some of the ruggedest in the Ardennes; the approach roads, on which Reinhardt’s supply columns had become so badly entangled with those of Guderian’s 2nd Panzer on the previous days, are few and poor. The defenders, unlike the troops of Corap’s northern wing at Dinant, who had had to take up unfamiliar positions after a sixty-mile march into Belgium, were on French territory and had been dug in there since the beginning of the war; also, in contrast to Huntziger’s troops
at Sedan, they were not ‘B’ reservists, but regulars of the 102nd Fortress Division. With its main weight concentrated on Sedan, the Luftwaffe could lend only relatively small support to Reinhardt, and against the well-prepared French positions in this heavily wooded country its bombs had but limited effect. In fact, the Germans seem to have suffered almost as much as the French, when Stukas mistakenly attacked a detachment of the 6th Panzer, knocking out several guns and vehicles and killing eleven personnel. On the other hand Corap, judging the Charleville–Mézières gap to be the most vulnerable portion of this sector, had located most of the available artillery there, leaving the defence of Monthermé largely to the 42nd half-brigade of colonial machine-gunners, a number of them Indo-Chinese.

During the morning of the 13th, the advanced elements of General Kempf’s 6th Panzer cleared the parts of Monthermé lying on the right bank of the Meuse. Kempf himself arrived at the Roche-à-Sept-Heures, a famous tourist halt overlooking the town a mile to the north, to plan his attack. Around him stretched one of the most memorable panoramas of the whole Ardennes. Below, the heights dived almost perpendicularly through great slabs of slippery rock and treacherous shale, broken with belts of thick forest, down to the Meuse several hundred feet beneath. Beyond the river, he could see the whole Monthermé isthmus protruding from its narrow base like a swollen thumb (the Germans promptly nicknamed it the ‘bread-roll’) into the folds of the Meuse and rising to heights quite as dominating as the Roche-à-Sept-Heures – a superb natural defensive position. In the Meuse at his feet, faster flowing and wider than at Sedan, lay the half-submerged trusses of the destroyed road bridge. It was by no means an ideal place for a major river crossing, though Kempf was agreeably surprised at the astonishing resemblance to the Lahn in Germany where the division had been posted to carry out its preparatory training for
Sichelschnitt.
He ordered his 4th Rifle Regiment to prepare for an immediate attempt, deploying, like Rommel at Dinant, all his available Mark III and Mark IV tanks to provide close covering fire.

Painfully the riflemen scrabbled, stumbled and slid down the steep slope with their weighty machine-guns, mortars and ammunition boxes. Small avalanches of loose stones started up from beneath their boots, and there were many painful falls. The valley, however, was filled with a welcome pall of smoke, and gratefully they noted the sparsity of the French artillery fire. On reaching the level of the river, there was an uneasy silence during which the riflemen could distinctly hear the asthmatic sounds of the foot-pumps inflating the rubber assault dinghies under the cover of dead ground. Just across the river they could read the signs of
‘Café’
or
‘Boucherie’
on the riverside buildings, but there was no sign of life from the enemy. The moment the first team reached the water with their dinghy, however, devastating machine-gun fire opened up. Several men were wounded, the remainder dropped the boat and ran for shelter. The next team was also shot up, and it was difficult in the smoke and confusion to pinpoint just where the fire was coming from. At last a bunker was located carefully camouflaged underneath a terrace café, where in happier times tourists had sat and gazed out over the Meuse. Tanks were brought to bear on the café, and under cover of smoke from a burning coal barge, more assault teams were launched. They noted that the tanks had reduced the bunker beneath the café to a gaping hole; meanwhile it was also discovered that dinghies launched upstream and carried away by the current were jamming into the spans of the demolished bridge, where they appeared to be covered from fire by the remaining French bunkers. Swiftly the engineers capitalized on this discovery and brought up planks and more dinghies, creating a rickety footbridge lashed to the remnants of the bridge. In the twilight, the remainder of one of the rifle battalions made its way across the bridge, establishing by midnight a small bridgehead on the Monthermé peninsula. But there was no question here of French resistance being broken, and Kempf’s riflemen, tired and having suffered distressing casualties, were forced to dig in defensively, under heavy fire from the French-held heights, and with little prospect of getting their tanks across the Meuse the next morning.

Holland: a Matter of Hours

For all the new, menacing fury of the fighting on the Meuse, developments in northern Belgium and Holland were not without gravity on the 13th. The Dutch had reached a point where it was clearly only a matter of hours before the end came. The 9th Panzer was hammering its way towards the outskirts of Rotterdam. Yet still the Dutch fought back, and by the evening an exasperated General von Küchler (commander of the Eighteenth Army) was issuing orders for his forces ‘to break the resistance in Rotterdam with all means’. Meanwhile, Giraud’s Seventh Army had retired more or less out of harm’s way towards the estuary of the Scheldt. Further south, the main body of the Belgian Army had made its way back behind the Dyle Line, and on the B.E.F. front Lord Gort could once again state that ‘No event of major importance occurred during the day.’

It was General Prioux’s Cavalry Corps which, still standing ahead of Blanchard’s First Army, bore the main burden of the fighting in northern Belgium. What had been armoured skirmishes on the 12th had turned into the first full-scale tank-versus-tank battle of the campaign. Adroitly supported by Stukas, powerful concentrations of tanks from both the 3rd and 4th Panzer Divisions hammered at Prioux’s two Light Mechanized Divisions. All day the battle had seethed like a cauldron around Merdorp, a village just west of Hannut and a few miles from Marlborough’s battlefield of Ramillies. Although contemporary German accounts admit to few losses on their side, it is clear that they were much disconcerted at first by the ‘unbelievable’ armour of the medium Somuas, which could stand more than one hit by all but the heaviest German tank cannon. Then the German Panzer commanders began to detect an Achilles’ heel in French gunnery, in so far as the French tanks consistently seemed to fire short and at a slower rate than their own. So the Germans closed the range whenever possible. But, according to a German Panzer officer who was there, they learned a far more basic lesson about French armoured techniques that day at Merdorp –
‘their lack of manoeuvrability and the fact that they fight single and in loose formation, not all together under one command. They cannot take advantage of strength and number.’ Never again in the campaign would French tanks fight on such closely equal terms with the enemy; at Merdorp they fought with tenacity and courage, but too often in penny packets that were repeatedly outmanoeuvred, and it was the Panzers which, at the end of the day, held the field. That night Prioux drew his tanks back behind the Belgian anti-tank obstacle at Perwez. Both sides had suffered heavy losses,
²⁶
but the French losses were to have much more far-reaching consequences on the overall strategic position.

The Allies: Tears and Ignorance

As this eventful Whit Monday came to a close, at the upper echelons of the French High Command, General Georges for one seems at last to have been awakened as to what was at stake on the Upper Meuse. Early that morning, Captain Beaufre recalls drawing in on General Doumenc’s situation map a large arrow, denoting that the main German effort was being made ‘not in Belgium, but on the axis Luxembourg–Mézières’. He claims that Georges’s
Deuxième Bureau
had arrived simultaneously at the same conclusion, but had dismissed it on the grounds of the ‘defensive value of our position’ at Sedan. During the day, dispatch-riders rushed back and forth between Doumenc’s G.H.Q. at Montry and Georges’s at La Ferté, bearing a flood of reports. Then, late that evening, Beaufre informs us that he was awoken by a telephone call from General Georges, asking him to ‘tell General Doumenc to come at once!’ Accompanied by Beaufre, Doumenc arrived at La Ferté at about 0300. Georges’s staff officers were clustered together in the
grand salon
of Les Bondons, which had been transformed into a map room. The lights were low; in the rest of the villa they were extinguished.

At the telephone, Major Navereau repeats in a soft voice the information he is receiving. The others are silent. General Roton, the Chief of Staff, is slumped in an armchair. The atmosphere is that of a family keeping vigil over a dead member. Georges rises briskly and comes up to Doumenc. He is terribly pale. ‘Our front has been pushed in at Sedan! There have been some failures (
défaillances
)…’ He falls into an armchair and a sob silences him.

It was the first man that I had seen weep in this battle. I was to see many others, alas. It made a dreadful impression on me.

Doumenc, says Beaufre, did his best to comfort the C.-in-C. There were collapses like this in all wars, he said reassuringly. ‘Come, let’s look at the map. We’ll see what can be done.’

Gamelin, meanwhile, and beyond him the French and British Governments, remained blissfully unaware of Georges’s state of mind, cushioned from the full gravity of the situation by sheer lack of Intelligence. After General Georges’s first lustrous communication, warning of the ‘rather serious pinprick’ at Sedan, Gamelin’s last news that night from Sedan, via Georges, announced that the Second Army was ‘holding’ and concluded, superbly: ‘Here we are calm…’ Baudouin, the Secretary to Reynaud’s new War Cabinet, declares that after three vain attempts on 12 May to gain accurate information from G.Q.G., Colonel Villelume, the Cabinet’s Military Liaison Officer, succeeded in bringing in the news at about 1800 on the 13th that ‘Our advance guards had been violently thrown back in the Ardennes.’ Finally, from the depths of his isolated
Thébaïde
, Gamelin issued the following somewhat meaningless Order of the Day to the French forces at large:

The onslaught of the mechanical and motorized forces of the enemy must now be faced. The hour has come to fight in depth
²⁷
on the positions appointed by the High Command. One is no longer entitled to retire. If the enemy makes a local breach, it must not only be sealed off but counter-attacked and retaken.

In London, the British G.I.G.S., Ironside, summed up his day in his diary:

There is yet no sight of the Germans having done anything except move forward their mechanized columns under cover of intense air activity.

Chapter 13

Consolidating the Bridgeheads