To Lose a Battle (51 page)

About the only comfort that Corap, the portly old colonial soldier, could find on his front that day was the continued resistance that the colonial machine-gunners of the 102nd Fortress Division were putting up at Monthermé. Here General Kempf’s 6th Panzer was not having an easy time. During the early hours of the morning, accurate French artillery fire had destroyed the footbridge made up of rubber dinghies. The riflemen clinging to the west bank of the Monthermé isthmus had been repeatedly counter-attacked, and were much hampered by the non-arrival of the divisional heavy artillery, still held up in the Ardennes traffic blocks. With heavy losses, Colonel von Ravenstein’s riflemen managed to push up on to Height 325 during the morning, but by midday Kempf was forced to tell his corps commander, Reinhardt, that he saw little prospect of any further progress that day. There was certainly no question of building a heavy pontoon bridge to get the tanks across. All through the day and the following night the French gunfire kept up. But the few heavy weapons available to the defenders were slow-firing, First War models of the ‘long’ 155, which with their flat trajectory had difficulty in hitting the Germans on the steep reverse slopes of the Monthermé isthmus. To help them, Corap sent up a group of sixty year old 220-mm. howitzers. At midnight these were found by the commander of the 42nd Half-Brigade abandoned on the road by their personnel, presumably after being attacked by the Luftwaffe. That same evening a solitary 47-mm. anti-tank gun was also sent up to
Monthermé; according to General Menu, it too was discovered by the enemy the following day, abandoned by its crew without having fired a single shot.

German Infantry Reach the Meuse

Despite the continued agglomeration of traffic in the Ardennes, the first of Rundstedt’s infantry divisions, which were to play a vital role in ‘lining’ the corridor of the Panzer breakthrough, had now reached the Meuse. On the 14th, three of them established crossings on either side of Rommel’s bridgehead, while two divisions of General Haase’s III Corps,
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the 3rd and 23rd, fought their way down to the Meuse at Nouzonville, roughly midway between Monthermé and Charle-ville-Mézières. One of the subalterns of the 23rd Division was Axel von dem Bussche, a twenty-one-year-old regular who was later to become distinguished for his participation in various bomb plots against Hitler. So far, the march through the Ardennes had seemed like a jolly picnic, and, until the commanding officer had berated them for unmartial practices, his footsore men had taken to wheeling their weapons along in commandeered prams. Then, fighting his way down to the Meuse, von dem Bussche, his arm raised in the act of lobbing a grenade into a French position, saw a frightened Annamite face taking aim at close range. The bullet removed his right thumb, and for him the campaign was over.

Lieutenant Karl-Heinz Mende of the Engineers had shared similar experiences of the campaign so far. Still not having seen a shot fired, he recalled how when passing a customs house on the French frontier that morning his men had acquired a rubber stamp marked ‘Douane Française, 9 Mai 1940’, which they adjusted to the right date, and frivolously stamped their letters home with it. One even tattooed his breast with it. There was an occasional sound of gunfire in the distance, but that was all. Then suddenly Mende’s unit was plunged into the inferno. In spite of repeated Stuka attacks on
Nouzonville, the French 102nd Fortress Division fought back tenaciously from well-hidden positions, and it was only on the third attempt that his division got across the river. Later Mende wrote home describing this first confrontation with war in more pensive terms, which perhaps typified the emotions of many a young German during those days:

We have it behind us… after everything that I have experienced I do not know whether I have become richer or poorer and whether the experience of such things is the true new value of this campaign. I only know one thing – and I have also found this conviction among brave comrades: the worst thing in battle is not the danger, which stands burning before one’s eyes; the worst feeling is nervousness about success.

After the crossing had succeeded,

I cannot say that we were worried or uncertain, we simply had no feeling left in us. That was the mood of the battle. And only, when in front of us an infantryman who was hit collapsed and a dead comrade lay nearby, did there awake a piece of the old feeling and we thought for one second how dangerous it all was and that we were after all human beings of flesh and blood.

By the end of the 14th, however, it was not the crossings at Monthermé and Nouzonville that were most endangering Corap’s right flank, but the change in direction of Guderian’s thrust. To study this, one now has to return to the scene at Sedan.

The French: a Mission of Sacrifice

As an indication of just how well according to plan
Sichelschnitt
was going, the main directive contained in Guderian’s brief orders for the 14th read: ‘The divisions will capture their objectives according to the map exercise.’ By dawn a substantial number of the 1st Panzer’s tanks had already trundled across Lieutenant Grubnau’s bridge. The concentration of vehicles queueing up on the east bank was so enormous that it was quite impossible for anything to move in
the opposite direction. Thus, noted Grubnau, the cloth factory from which the first crossings had been launched on the 13th had been transformed into a field hospital in which all the German wounded, plus two hundred French were being tended. The 1st Panzer tanks immediately headed towards Chéhéry (where Colonel Balck was sitting somewhat precariously) and Bulson. These happened to be the same axes along which General Lafontaine’s two counter-attacking groups, each consisting of an infantry group and a battalion of support tanks, were advancing. The first head-on collision between Guderian and the French armour was now imminent. But on top of all the delays of the previous night, the two groups still proved incapable of co-ordinating with one another. The right-hand group (comprised of the 4th Tank Battalion and the 205th Infantry Regiment of the 71st Division) were still not ready for action. So only the 7th Tanks and Lieutenant-Colonel Labarthe’s 213th Infantry Regiment went, piecemeal, into battle. Still complaining about the state of his regiment, Labarthe begged to be allowed to adopt a defensive position in the villages of Chémery and Maisoncelle. But he was overruled by Lafontaine (backed by Grandsard), and finally set forth at 0700 hours, muttering
‘C’est une mission de sacrifice!’
The 213th carried with it not one anti-tank weapon, artillery support was doubtful, and the 7th Tanks was equipped only with the light F.C.M. infantry model mounting an obsolete 37-mm. gun with little penetrating power. Nevertheless, the battle started well enough for the French armour. Near Chéhéry they came upon vehicles of the 1st Panzer that were refuelling and a savage encounter at short range ensued, in which the two leading German tanks were knocked out and the commander of the 1st Panzer Brigade, Colonel Keltsch, severely wounded.

Even the German accounts admit that this was an ugly moment for them, and it leads one to speculate what havoc the 4th and 7th Tanks might have inflicted on Balck’s soft-skinned infantry had they only been able to attack a few hours earlier. With that mixture of optimism and misinformation still prevalent in the French High Command, half an
hour later General Georges was reporting to Gamelin that ‘the breach at Sedan has been contained and a counter-attack with strong formations was carried out at 4.30 a.m.’. Shortly afterwards, the tide of battle was already turning against 7th Tanks. With extreme courage, a nearby German
Sturmpionier
battalion flung itself on the French tanks, hurling hollow charges between the tracks and under the motors; during this attack the commander, Lieutenant-Colonel Mahler, lost his life. The French tanks seemed hesitant to press their advantage. As in the armoured battle in northern Belgium at Merdorp, they were seen to be manoeuvred slowly and clumsily by their commanders. While the few German anti-tank guns that had reached the battle-line (plus two ‘88s’) held the 7th Tanks at bay, with customary speed the 1st Panzer prepared a smashing counter-blow. Towards 0830 hours, a mass of Panzers struck in the area of Connage (midway between Chéhéry and Chémery), accounting for eleven out of the fifteen F.C.M.s. there. A similar fate overtook the French tank companies deployed on the dominating high ground at Bulson. Now it could be said with truth that ‘The Panzers are at Bulson’. The 7th Tanks reeled back, having lost more than half of their machines on much the same ground where the French
cuirassiers
had sacrificed themselves at the 1870 Battle of Sedan. German armour hooking left from Chémery then tore into the flank of the unprotected 213th Infantry Regiment. Its commander, the reluctant Labarthe, was wounded and taken prisoner, while the broken remnants of his regiment streamed back to the 55th Division’s second line of defence at Mont-Dieu.

It was about 2130 when General Lafontaine heard of the failure of his counter-attack. Under the circumstances, he considered it pointless to throw in the right-hand combat group. Instead he ordered it to fall back behind Raucourt, the 4th Tank Battalion dispersing without ever having been engaged that day. This, says General Ruby, ‘marked the end of the 55th Division’. Some three hours later, an exhausted and saddened Lafontaine, alone with his H.Q. staff, reported to Grandsard’s Corps H.Q. Two days later he was officially
removed from command of a division that no longer existed.

The 71st, though still not attacked, was not long to survive its sister ‘B’ division. Poor General Baudet, ill and overdue for retirement, who had been told by Grandsard only the previous morning ‘the enemy cannot possibly attack today with forces of any size’, had wandered about all night in a state of bemusement, from his own command post to that of his right-hand neighbour, the 3rd North African Division, and to Grandsard’s H.Q. During the night he moved his own command post from Raucourt back to La Bagnolle, and once again in the morning to Sommauthe, seven miles further south. Thus, at a moment when the 10th Panzer was beginning to press in from Pont Maugis and Thélonne, and grim reports were percolating through about the fate of the 55th, General Baudet had lost all contact with his troops. There were cries of ‘Tanks to the rear and to the left!’, and, says General Menu,

This cry re-echoed from group to group, from section to section. Riflemen and machine-gunners got up and fled, taking with them in their flight those of the artillerymen who had not already beaten them to it, mingled with elements flooding backwards from the neighbouring sector… by 1400 hours there was no one any longer in position.

Except for the 205th Regiment, earmarked for Lafontaine’s counter-attack
manquée,
which continued to hold out bravely around Raucourt, the 71st Division, with no one visibly in command, just disintegrated. By the evening of the 14th it had, in the acid words of General Ruby, ‘literally faded away at the mere threat of the enemy’. Baudet’s head too fell into the basket, along with Lafontaine’s.

The contagion of fear seems also to have spread to Grandsard’s X Corps H.Q. during the morning of the 14th. Its chief Signals officer, who (according to Grandsard) ‘since the previous day had shown a regrettable agitation and nervousness’, had evacuated the H.Q. telephone exchange without any orders: ‘When, towards midday, I wanted to call up Army
once again, the exchange no longer replied. Going down to it, I discovered that it had been completely taken apart!’ By nightfall, Grandsard himself possessed only the empty husk of a command. All that remained of his corps artillery were one 105-mm. and one 155-mm. gun which had been in the repair shop, and his one intact division, the 3rd North African, was tranferred by Huntziger to XVIII Corps. The remaining fragments of X Corps were then placed at the disposal of General Flavigny, commander of the newly constituted XXI Corps, which, with the 3rd Armoured and 3rd Motorized Divisions, was hastening up towards the Sedan bulge. With this Grandsard’s X Corps and its hapless ‘B’ divisions disappear from the story, to be replaced by the first of a steady flow of new names and new units.

Guderian Swings West

On the morning of the 14th, Sergeant Schulze with the riflemen of the 10th Panzer, who had such a hard time crossing the Meuse the previous day, reached the heights above Thélonne once tenanted by the 55th Division. ‘We found their artillery positions left as if they had fled. Some of the guns were still loaded; the enemy had not had time to render the weapons unserviceable.’ The size of the hole which had been rent in the French defences was also immediately apparent to the German field commanders. During the morning Guderian had again driven across the Meuse to the front of the bridgehead, passing thousands of French prisoners on the way, and had been present while General Kirchner gave the 1st Panzer his orders for warding off the French tank attacks. Shortly after leaving Kirchner, the 1st Panzer concentrations at Chémery had been attacked with heavy losses by Stukas, unaware that their own troops had advanced so far. Meanwhile, since early morning there had been reports from Luftwaffe Intelligence of hectic transport movements from Verdun, Metz and Soissons towards Sedan, despite heavy bombing of road and rail networks. It deduced that ‘movement up by railroad
of the French Army reserve is apparently beginning’.
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Going back to the Meuse bridge, Guderian ordered the tank brigade of the 2nd Panzer to hasten across the river immediately behind the 1st, so as to be in a position to meet the main French counter-thrust. The principal task of the 1st Panzer and the Grossdeutschland Regiment must be to secure with all urgency the vital high ground at Stonne which commanded the whole Sedan bridgehead. Then, by early afternoon, the breaking-up of Lafontaine’s counter-attack and the lack of any other immediate French threat made the weakness of the whole enemy position apparent to Guderian. He returned once more to the 1st Panzer, which was now facing south on the line Chémery-Maisoncelle, to put a most important question to General Kirchner: