To Lose a Battle (55 page)

At this moment the co-driver of the Captain informs me that the Captain, wounded in the stomach and in the legs, is handing over the command to me. The new Mark IVs burst into flames under our fire, but my radiators are themselves smashed in; my 75 is hit on the side of the muzzle, and remains in a position of maximum recoil; I continue with the 47. Feeling myself harassed, I try to change position and to move myself in a thicket further to the south. The wood is being hammered by a 105-mm., and shell-holes open up not far from us. From a distance, I can make out the
Gard,
the door of whose turret is open… On my right a knocked-out tank of the 28th; the line of German tanks form a semi-circle of vehicles which I estimate in number at between fifty to sixty.

I give the order to the tanks of my company to retire…
Ourcq
and
Yser
withdraw slowly, while I observe
Hérault
burning…

By the late afternoon the 37th Battalion was reduced to four ‘B’ tanks; its sister, the 28th, had only two left in fit state to comply with Bruneau’s order to withdraw; while the 26th could muster less than a score of its light tanks. Only the 25th (light) Tank Battalion remained more or less intact, having lost its way the previous night and arrived too late to take part in the action. Thus was the first of General Georges’s ‘rooks’ destroyed as an effective force. The tank crews of the French 1st Armoured had fought bravely and well, and claimed to have knocked out some hundred German tanks.
³
But they had been squandered, not in a bold armoured counter-stroke, but piecemeal in a battle of encounter. The division had been engaged, remarks Colonel Bardies, ‘as in times gone past squadrons of
cuirassiers
were engaged, to cover a rout, in giving them the order to die’. Under cover of night the 1st Armoured crept back to Beamount, and then to Solre-le-Château behind the French frontier positions. When Bruneau saw it the next day, it had only seventeen tanks left, the remainder having lost their way or run out of fuel during the night’s withdrawal.
⁴

Rommel Breaches French Front

Meanwhile, sweeping around the 1st Armoured, Rommel’s Panzers were now out in the open, inflicting fearful havoc upon the Ninth Army’s ‘soft’ rear areas. On the way to Philippeville, Rommel himself noted passing:

numerous guns and vehicles
⁵
belonging to a French unit, whose men had tumbled headlong into the woods at the approach of our tanks, having probably already suffered heavily under our dive-bombers. Enormous craters compelled us to make several détours through the wood. About 3 miles north-west of Philippeville there was a brief exchange of fire with French troops occupying the hills and woods south of Philippeville. Our tanks fought the action on the move, with turrets traversed left, and the enemy was soon silenced. From time to time enemy anti-tank guns, tanks and armoured cars were shot up. Fire was also scattered into the woods on our flanks as we drove past.

Already by midday Rommel had occupied Philippeville, and was pushing on to Cerfontaine six miles beyond, thereby breaching in one swift bound Billotte’s and Corap’s ‘intermediate line’ even before it could be occupied. Men and machines were exhausted. One of his Panzer commanders records:

A number of vehicles broke down, even my command vehicle could no longer keep up and I had to have it towed by a truck… I’m dead tired… two days and three nights, not a moment of rest, food consists of two slices of bread, a hellish thirst. Next day we are to have a rest.
⁶
The vehicle badly needs a service, wire has wound itself around the drive wheel, and the batteries are run down… We look like pigs, muddy, sticky and without a shave for several days. I am tottering with fatigue, and have to help myself with Pervitin tablets. The radio operators can only be kept awake with difficulty.

But Rommel was a hard taskmaster. Furious to discover that Bismarck’s weary riflemen were lagging nearly ten miles behind the tanks, creating a gap into which enemy elements were infiltrating, he turned about and headed eastward to chase them up. Along the route Rommel had covered that morning, he found two tanks which had broken down:

Their crews were in process of collecting prisoners, and a few who had already come in were standing around. Now hundreds of French motor-cyclists came out of the bushes and, together with their officers, slowly laid down their arms. Others tried to make a quick get-away down the road to the south.

I now occupied myself for a short time with the prisoners. Among them were several officers, from whom I received a number of requests, including, among other things, permission to keep their batmen and to have their kit picked up from Philippeville, where it had been left.

His mission accomplished, Rommel headed westwards once again at high speed, and just short of Cerfontaine he met

a body of fully armed French motor-cyclists coming in the opposite direction, and picked them up as they passed. Most of them were so shaken at suddenly finding themselves in a German column that they drove their machines into the ditch and were in no position to put up a fight.

From his Panzer lager at Cerfontaine, ‘looking back east from the summit of the hill, as night fell, endless pillars of dust could be seen rising as far as the eye could reach – comforting signs that the 7th Panzer Division’s move into the conquered territory had begun’. Rommel’s losses for that day had totalled just fifteen killed; he had advanced over seventeen miles, taken 450 prisoners, knocked out or captured seventy-five tanks, and struck a decisive blow against the Ninth Army, and its hopes for a counter-attack.

The Ninth Army Breaks

At 0400 on the 15th Billotte had informed Georges on the telephone that ‘the Ninth Army is in a critical position’. By nightfall on the same day its condition was one of rout, all along its fifty-mile front. Describing the effect of the German bombing, a staff officer of the 18th Division recounts:

we passed through clouds of smoke from a petrol convoy which had just been bombarded by a plane and was burning along the road close to the route. Elsewhere an artillery group had been attacked while on the march. On the road and elsewhere there was a series of enormous bomb craters and very numerous corpses of horses, which indicated that the attack had been devastating… On the road to Fraire, there arrives upon us at full gallop a group of disbanded artillerymen. Halted, they declared that the enemy was behind them.

Hammered since the day Rommel had first set foot across the Meuse, the 18th Division now dissolved. Having lost most of his staff, its commander, General Duffet, spent the day roving the battlefield, in an attempt to regroup his scattered units. With
a handful of men he ended the day trying to set up a defence at Beaumont, just inside the Belgian frontier, through which the remnants of the 1st Armoured were retreating. On his right, General Hassler’s 22nd Division, which had given no particularly commendable account of itself the previous day against the German infantry forcing the Meuse at Givet, shared a similar fate. ‘Aircraft do not cease to follow us, to bombard us and machine-gun us,’ recorded one of its battalion commanders.

We passed through Couvin, where all kinds of columns were mixed up together… the disorder worsened, and our men, in whom fatigue had exceeded anything that one could imagine, mounted on any vehicles they encountered, despite their officers who attempted to stop them. But understanding that this was the only way of pulling out a force completely exhausted, I gave them the order to allow them to do this…

But at the exit to Couvin, we were once again attacked by enemy machine-guns. There were scenes of horror which occurred with women, children, lying alongside the road, dead or wounded, stretched out in the ditches. Grown men also fell… the planes came in quantity, machine-gunning and bombarding in turn, increasing the confusion.

By nightfall this division consisted of nothing but fragments, straggling back over the frontier. Thus General Martin’s XI Corps had all but vanished. Nevertheless, he was ordered by Corap to ‘do everything possible to halt the enemy on the frontier line’. It was an impossible demand. As General Martin notes, ‘the first task was to get the engineers to open the doors of the bunkers!’ But the keys to the bunkers, locked up when the Ninth Army moved forward on the 10th, had disappeared – either with units that had been dispatched elsewhere, or on the persons of local mayors who had themselves taken off among the growing stream of refugees.

To the north the 5th Motorized Division covering Yvoir, though not heavily engaged that day, was also forced to withdraw in mounting disorder after its flank had been exposed by the breaking-up of XI Corps. In Corap’s northern sector there thus remained only General Sancelme’s 4th North African Division, and the fate of this fine unit on the 15th was
particularly poignant. After its admirable defence against Rommel at Anthée on the 14th, the division had been pulled back to hold the Hemptinne–Philippeville line. But deprived of artillery support – since Sancelme, like Bruneau, had sent his guns to the rear – it had been unable to assume a proper defensive position before being sliced up by Rommel in his drive around the flank of the 1st Armoured. The experience of Lieutenant Édouard Leng, a reservist officer of the 13th Zouaves, pushed off the roads by the retreat of General Martin’s H.Q. the previous day, was perhaps typical:

From the early hours of the morning, I fought on the Vodeceée crossroads and at Villers-le-Gambon, enduring fire from German tanks and Stukas, and finding myself almost without contact with the other elements of the division. Towards 1830 hours, we received the order to withdraw in the direction of Philippeville… Closely pursued by the enemy in the course of this movement, sustaining losses in both men and weapons (which were almost out of ammunition), with two other officers and a group of our men I ran into a score of German tanks at Vachefontaine, about one kilometre south-east of Philippeville… We were encircled, and any resistance became useless.

Other tanks of the 7th Panzer overran the H.Q. of the 25th Algerian
Tirailleurs
at Philippeville itself, and an hour later reached the divisional command post at Neuville, from which General Sancelme only narrowly escaped behind a barricade of anti-tank guns. Cut off from his regiments, that afternoon he dispatched three separate liaison teams to Martin’s H.Q. But none returned. By the end of the 15th, the 4th North African, like the 1st Armoured, was no longer an effective fighting force.

Havoc at Monthermé

Further south on XLI Corps front, the break-up of Corap’s army proceeded with even more dramatic switfness. Here the repercussions of Corap’s order to withdraw behind the line Rocroi–Signy-l’Abbaye proved particularly disastrous, for the 102nd Division, whose colonial machine-gunners from Indo-China and Madagascar had so valiantly been holding Reinhardt
at bay in the Monthermé peninsula during the past two days, was a fortress unit devoid of transport, while the 61st Division to the north had insufficient vehicles, and these were not close enough at hand for a quick get-away. During the small hours of the 15th at Monthermé, German engineers equipped with flame-throwers and riflemen of the 6th Panzer crept up to within a few yards of the bunkers held by a gallant colonial rearguard. At 0330 hours they attacked under a powerful artillery barrage. While it was still dark the Germans were through the first defences, and by 0830 they had captured the French reserve positions. Immediately the hitherto stymied tanks of the 6th Panzer began to swarm across the Meuse at Monthermé. At this moment a French truck loaded with a thousand desperately needed anti-tank mines arrived at the front, tragically late. With considerable courage the driver persisted in trying to push through to his destination, but was caught by tanks ‘which opened fire and the truck blew up with a formidable explosion’. Upstream from Monthermé, the German 3rd and 23rd Infantry Divisions completed their river crossings and began erecting bridges to get Reinhardt’s other Panzer division, the 8th, across the Meuse.

Now Reinhardt more than made up for the time he had lost on the previous four days of crawling through the Ardennes and battling his way into the Monthermé peninsula. The transport-less 102nd Fortress Division, forced to abandon all its guns and even its machine-guns, was overtaken and rounded up with incredible speed. Rushing out from the Monthermé bridgehead, the motor-cyclists of the 6th Panzer roared past

a French munitions dump, and past numerous guns which stand abandoned on the road. The enemy has had no time in which to take them with him in his flight. Also in the wood to the right a battery all ready to fire has been abandoned. It must have been completely surprised… Near the leading group, a few carbine shots ring out. Then the enemy soon comes out with raised hands from the bushes. Some thirty men were there, and four Negroes. They are muddy and unshaven, and their eyes are full of fear.

On reaching Arreux, some six miles from Monthermé,

Frenchmen come out from cellars and surrender of their own accord… In Renwez it is the same story. The French give themselves up without having fired a single shot.

On the left of the 6th Panzer, motorized infantry occupied the sprawling twin cities of Charleville–Mézières. Karl von Stackelberg, a war diarist travelling with them, noted that ‘the shops were closed and barred, the houses locked up. All the inhabitants had flown, and we moved through lonely and dead quiet streets.’ Later he was astonished to meet a French column marching in the opposite direction, in perfect order, headed by a captain: