To Lose a Battle (73 page)

At first de Gaulle seemed to be advancing into empty space. After overwhelming or dispersing light enemy forces, he reached the Serre within four hours. Here his tanks came up against heavy opposition. Guderian had reacted with his customary speed. ‘Crécy is a fortress of anti-tank guns, an enormous ambush,’ declared Captain Idée. ‘The R.35s came to a halt and withdrew in a shambles. Already several are burning.’ His D.2s now moved up. Just before the bridge over the Serre the first tank blew up on a mine, the second had a track blown off. In third position, Idée’s own tank, the
Rocroi
, came under violent fire:

A formidable shock. The turret shakes, struck at the base. The traversing gear is jammed. The turret won’t move any more. I struggle furiously with it, strike the gear, and just at the moment when I am despairing, unjam it. The turret moves. I fire. Bang! A heavy shell strikes obliquely at the top of my turret, which glows red.

As on the 17th, the infantry never materialized; so – having lost two tanks – Idée decided to withdraw. In the two days’ fighting, his company of fourteen tanks had lost six destroyed and two ‘missing’.

De Gaulle’s misfortunes on the 19th were compounded by a piece of bad liaison that was typical of the inefficient communications existing between the French ground and air forces. To ward off the shattering Stuka attacks that had disrupted de Gaulle’s first attack, General d’Astier had been called upon to provide the most powerful fighter cover that his reduced circumstances would allow. But the time of the attack was changed without d’Astier being informed. The Stukas once again descended on de Gaulle’s column out of an empty sky. Answering a desperate plea for help, d’Astier ordered up every fighter patrol already in the air at the time. But by the time they arrived over the Serre it was too late; de Gaulle’s force had been badly knocked about. Early that afternoon he received an order from Georges, instructing him ‘not to commit himself too deeply, as the division was needed on another front’. Under repeated Stuka bombing, de Gaulle once more pulled his forces back in good order, behind the Aisne. In most bitter frustration, he says:

I could not help imagining what the mechanized army of which I had so long dreamed could have done. If it had been there that day, to debouch suddenly in the direction of Guise, the advance of the Panzer divisions would have been halted instantly, serious confusion caused in their rear, and the northern group of armies enabled to join up once more with those of the centre and the east.

19 May: the Germans Consolidate

From Guderian’s point of view, the various local difficulties besetting him that morning, of which de Gaulle was one, imposed three choices of action: he could halt his westerly advance and establish a defensive face towards the south; counter-attack southwards with the main weight of his forces; or change nothing in his orders and continue the advance as before.
Typically he chose the third possibility, leaving it to the 10th Panzer alone to block de Gaulle’s attack. Once again events proved his decision right.
¹¹
Meanwhile, as de Gaulle’s attack was in progress, a corrective radio signal resolved Guderian’s major anxiety; the report about the Hirson fuel depot should have read ‘ready for distribution’, instead of ‘burnt out’!
¹²
The Panzers could forge on.

During the afternoon, Guderian’s 1st and 2nd Panzers crossed the Canal du Nord and reached the old Somme battlefield of the First War, an event giving rise to strong emotions among the many veterans who had sat there for months on end in 1916, under gruelling attack by the British and French. There were now warnings from both men and machines that seemed to make a brief pause imperative; when the commander of his prize 1st Panzer Brigade, Colonel Nedtwig, collapsed from sheer exhaustion,
¹³
even Guderian had to take note. That night the main weight of his corps halted on the line Cambrai-Péronne-Ham.

To Guderian’s immediate north, Reinhardt’s Panzers mopped up French resistance around Le Catelet by the middle of the day after more brisk fighting. By nightfall they too stood shoulder to shoulder with Guderian in a consolidated position west of the Canal du Nord defence line. For Rommel the fast going of the previous days came to an end with the
capture of Cambrai. He too was forced on the 19th to pause in order to regroup and give his exhausted crews some sleep. By nightfall he had pushed forward a bare six miles to Marquion, where the Canal du Nord crosses the Arras road. Visited by his corps commander, General Hoth, during the afternoon, the impatient Rommel asked to be allowed to mount another night attack so as to seize the vital high ground south-east of Arras, some twenty miles on, by daybreak on the 20th. Hoth demurred, on the grounds that the men could not take it. ‘The troops have been twenty hours in the same place,’ countered Rommel, ‘and a night attack during moonlight will result in fewer losses.’ Hoth yielded, and Rommel was allowed to prepare to move towards Arras shortly after midnight. On Rommel’s right flank, the 5th Panzer was again sharply engaged in the Forest of Mormal with elements of the 1st D.L.M. and the 1st North African Division. But pushing on towards Solesmes, its advanced units also began to draw level with Rommel. Meanwhile, still further north the 3rd and 4th Panzers of Hoeppner’s XVI Corps, now transferred to Rundstedt, were battering back the southern anchor of Blanchard’s First Army in the direction of Valenciennes. Thus by the end of the 19th, after their various itineraries, all but one of Hitler’s ten Panzer divisions
¹⁴
were now lined up as a dense phalanx of armour in what has been called the ‘rendezvous of 19 May’. Here, just fifty miles from the sea, they stood poised for the final act of
Sichelschnitt.

The Maginot Line: the Forgotten Army

Down in the Maginot Line, life during the previous eight days of the battle had continued very much as in the months of the Phoney War. The desperate struggle to the north left it untouched. Inside its steel and concrete turrets, observers peered out, waiting for an enemy who never came. There was an occasional long-range artillery duel, but that was about all. Then, on the 18th, General von Witzleben’s First Army suddenly attacked a small fort, curiously enough called La
Ferté. It lay in an awkward defensive position, and after a savage struggle La Ferté fell on the 19th. This first capture of a Maginot Line fortress was greeted with maximum acclaim by the German radio, though its strategic significance was negligible. The action, however, was not just braggadocio. It was carefully and deliberately timed, for the French High Command had at long last given the order to withdraw the hitherto immobilized ‘interval troops’ as reinforcements for the battle in the north. Here, then, was a warning not to go too far in denuding the Maginot Line – one which, as the Germans expected, the French High Command would be bound to heed; by the end of May it was actually
sending back
precious tanks to help guard the forts.

The Luftwaffe Ascendant

In the air, the 18th and 19th witnessed a further marked deterioration of Allied strength.
¹⁵
By the 19th, General d’Astier’s Z.O.A.N. could count no more than 170 serviceable fighters, and because of damage to the telephone lines, it was becoming increasingly difficult for his group commanders to bring their planes into action. There were still six
groupements
of bombers left, but two consisted of Amiots and Blochs, which could only be used by night; of the three equipped with Léos and Bréguets, two were on the move, while the third was caught (on the 19th) by the Luftwaffe just as it was about to take off on a mission and lost two-thirds of its machines; the sixth, consisting of newly arrived American Glenn Martins, was waiting to have the bomb-release mechanisms fixed. As far as the British were concerned, on the 18th Barratt’s Advanced Air Striking Force was still virtually out of action on account of its move. The following day telephone contact between Barratt and the Air Component with the B.E.F. had been severed by the German advance, and Lord Gort agreed with the Air Ministry that it should now be withdrawn to operate from
southern England. Within two days nothing but a few Lysander liaison planes remained in France. The evacuation of the Air Component was, alas, carried out in such haste that most of its ground equipment and stores had to be abandoned to the enemy. A total of 261 Hurricanes had flown with the Component; 75 had been destroyed, but only 66 of the remainder returned to England. The balance of 120 consisted of damaged machines that also had to be abandoned in France. Thus in ten days’ operations over northern France alone, Britain had lost 195 Hurricanes, roughly a quarter of her entire strength of modern fighters. Henceforth based on Kent and under control of the Air Ministry, the Component was now too far removed from the battle to provide effective collaboration with the B.E.F., and its activities were largely limited to night operations of doubtful value.

The R.A.F. continued to pound the Ruhr by night with its heavy and medium bombers, and continued to deceive both itself, the Government and the public as to the results.
L’Œuvre
spoke on 19 May of ‘catastrophic effects’ reported by eye-witnesses; the disorganization following the raids was claimed to have ‘almost crippled the movement of reinforcements to the front over the past twenty-four hours’. In his diary General Ironside quoted a pilot who ‘said that over Hamburg he could read a book at 10,000 feet. They also touched up the Ruhr again, finding very little A.A. defence guns’, a statement that perhaps reveals just how lightly the Germans were taking these raids. Passing Cologne aerodrome on the 19th, William Shirer noted:

It was packed with planes, but the hangars had not been touched. Beautifully camouflaged with netting they were. Obviously these night attacks of the British have failed not only to put the Ruhr out of commission, but even to damage the German flying fields. A phony sort of war the Allies still seem to be fighting.

Meanwhile, Churchill was grumbling to his Chief of the Air Staff at the Allied impotence to strike at the Panzers which were doing all the damage: ‘Is there no possibility of finding out where a column of enemy armoured vehicles harbours
during the dark hours, and then bombing?’ On the evening of the 19th, twenty Chance-Vought dive-bombers belonging to the French Navy and based on Boulogne and Berck were thrown in for the first time to help the forces desperately engaged in the Forest of Mormal, but ten of them were shot down, the remainder badly holed, and the effect on the Panzers apparently was minimal. With the steady extension of the ‘Panzer Corridor’ and the decreasing number of Allied planes available, it was becoming more and more difficult to pinpoint the spread-out enemy columns. Early on 19 May, reconnaissance spotted a large armoured force (presumably Rommel’s) moving in the direction of Arras, but no bombers were on hand at the time, and the Panzers were allowed to move on unmolested. The next morning two R.A.F. bomber squadrons were dispatched from England to attack Panzer columns spotted at 0830. The first reached the target area at 1130 and bombed a column moving westwards; shortly afterwards the second could find nothing at the same point. Both had in fact arrived too late to attack the initially designated target, an advanced unit of the 6th Panzer, which was by then well dispersed.

On the German side, the Luftwaffe was now well established in Belgian airfields close behind the front, so that its Stukas were able to fly as many as six or seven missions a day, thereby multiplying its already imposing numerical superiority. Apart from this never-failing tactical close support work, the medium bombers of the Luftwaffe were concentrating effectively on smashing up the French railway system by which Georges was trying to bring up reinforcements to the Aisne and the Somme. At midday on the 19th, a powerful force of German bombers struck savagely at Amiens, ‘softening up’ for the next day’s Panzer attack. The city appears to have been all but undefended, whether by fighters or anti-aircraft guns. Four-fifths of the population had already left the threatened city, but casualties were heavy; fortunately twenty ambulances manned by volunteers of the American Field Service happened to be passing through the city and were able to help with the wounded.

Retreat from Northern Belgium

In northern Belgium, the Allies completed their withdrawal behind the Escaut Line on the 19th, with the Belgian Army in position from Terneuzen on the coast down to Oudenaarde. Below them, the B.E.F. occupied a strong position on the Escaut as far as Maulde on the French frontier. The 5th Division had been pulled back to Seclin, just south of Lille, as Army reserve, and on the night of the 19th Gort ordered the 50th Division, minus one brigade group, to concentrate north of Arras on the Vimy Ridge of First War fame. Here it was ‘to prepare for offensive action’. South of the B.E.F., Blanchard’s First Army had the task of holding a ‘mole’ anchored on Condé-sur-l’Escaut, Valenciennes and Bouchain, around the end of which the irresistible flood of the Panzers swirled westwards. Bombed repeatedly during the last stage of its withdrawal, the B.E.F. was extremely tired. Lieutenant Miles Fitzalan-Howard, with Montgomery’s 3rd Division, recorded in his diary what was a typical experience for those days: ‘In five nights I have had eight hours sleep; 18th. up all night; 19th, up till 3, sleep till 7; 20th, up till 3, sleep till 7; 21st up; 22nd in bed.’ Nevertheless, the B.E.F. was in much better shape than Blanchard’s forces, which had consistently borne the brunt of the fighting in the north since the first encounter with the enemy, and had suffered higher casualties than either the British or the Belgians.