by John Keegan
Perhaps only a Prometheus could have done that – and there was nothing Promethean about Gamelin. Even the British army, a brotherhood of professional warriors and eager amateurs, approached the war with a sense of déjà vu; ‘as we have beaten the Germans once, why do we have to do it again?’ might have encapsulated their attitude. The French army, drawn from the whole of the nation, scarred by its terrible sufferings of 1914-18 and divided by the extremism of its politics, was touched by a similar sense of pointless repetition, but still more acutely. Albert Lebrun, the French President, noted after his visit to the front a ‘slackened resolve, relaxed discipline. There one no longer breathed the pure and enlivening air of the trenches.’ Winston Churchill, First Lord of the Admiralty, was ‘struck by the prevailing atmosphere of calm aloofness, by the seemingly poor quality of the work in hand, by the lack of visible activity of any kind’ on the French front. General Edouard Ruby, of the Second Army, found that ‘every exercise was considered as a vexation, all work as a fatigue. After several months of stagnation, nobody believed in the war any more.’
In part the French did not believe because the war was foreseen, not only by common soldiers but also by the generals, as a repetition of the trenches, long-drawn-out and indecisive. The common soldiers and generals of the German army had been given in Poland a vision of a different outcome; if they as yet lacked the faith to believe it could be repeated in the west, Hitler had no doubts. ‘Gentlemen,’ he told his staff on the eve of ‘Case Yellow’, ‘you are about to witness the most famous victory in history!’ On 27 April, persuaded by his reading of captured Allied documents relating to their intervention in Norway that he could not be condemned for his imminent violation of Dutch and Belgian neutrality, he announced to Halder that the attack in the west would begin in the first week of May. Weather forecasts enforced postponement of the date from 5 to 6 May, then 8 May. Finally on 7 May he postponed it again to 10 May ‘but not one day after that’. He held to his resolve.
‘Late in the evening of Friday 9 May from the Dutch frontier to Luxembourg,’ wrote Professor Guy Chapman, ‘outposts facing Germany became aware of a vast murmuring on the German side as of the gathering of a host.’ A warning of impending attack from the Belgian military attaché in Berlin, delayed in deciphering, was received in Brussels just before midnight. The Belgian high command at once put its army on alert; but by then the German vanguards were already moving to the attack. At 4.30 on the morning of 10 May, airborne units began landing near The Hague and Leyden in Holland and on the crossings of the Meuse in Belgium. The most daring of the airborne attacks was against the Belgian fort of Eben Emael, guarding the junction of the Meuse with the Albert Canal, both key obstacles in the Belgian defence plan. German glider-borne infantry crash-landed on the roof of the fort, penned the defenders inside and, using concrete-piercing charges, overwhelmed them by the sheer surprise of their descent.
Surprise afflicted no one worse than the Dutch, who were genuine neutrals. They had taken no part in the First World War, wanted no part of the Second and commended themselves as an enemy only because parts of their territory, notably the strip known as the ‘Maastricht appendix’, offered an easy way round the Belgian water obstacles. The ability of the Dutch to defend their territory was minimal. Their army, only ten divisions strong, had not fought a war since 1830. Their air force had only 125 aircraft, half of which were immediately destroyed on the ground by surprise attack. Their best hope of delaying defeat, as they had learnt in the Eighty Years War against the Spanish three centuries earlier, was to retreat inside their waterlogged zone around Amsterdam and Rotterdam and trust to the network of its canals and rivers to delay the invader. The strategy which had cost Spain decades of campaigning was unhinged by German airpower in a few hours. By overflying the water defences of ‘Fortress Holland’ with streams of Junkers 52 transport aircraft on the morning of 10 May the Luftwaffe landed the whole of the 22nd Airborne Division in its heart, there to await the arrival of Army Group B’s tanks. Despite the brave resistance of the Dutch army, the blowing of several vital bridges through the miscarriage of German surprise attacks, and the intervention of the French Seventh Army, the German airborne troops did not have long to wait. On the morning of 13 May, as the German armoured spearheads reached out to join hands with them as they were on the point of capturing Rotterdam, the Luftwaffe misunderstood a signal from the ground announcing their success and bombed the city centre flat. It was the first ‘area’ operation of the Second World War and a raid which killed 814 civilians. But it effectively ended Dutch resistance, prompting the Queen of the Netherlands to embark on a ship of the Royal Navy for a British port – she had asked to be taken to another part of her kingdom – and causing the Dutch high command to capitulate the following day. As Queen Wilhelmina left, she forecast that ‘in due course, with God’s help, the Netherlands will regain their European territory’. The Dutch people, who were to pass through the cruellest of German occupations in western Europe, were not to foresee that the Dutch empire in the East Indies would also be lost to them before liberation eventually came.
No word of criticism has ever been levelled against the Dutch by either victors or vanquished of 1940. Not so the Belgians. Although the German army found their soldiers stalwart in action – the official historian of the German 18th Division spoke of their ‘extraordinary bravery’; the German opponent of Hitler, Ulrich von Hassell, judged that ‘among our adversaries the Belgians fought the best’; while Siegfried Westphal, later to be chief of staff of the German armies defending France against invasion in 1944, noted that ‘it was astonishing to see that the Belgians fought with increasing tenacity the nearer the end of the war approached’ – the British and French, both during the crisis of 1940 and ever afterwards, insisted on laying blame for much of what befell them on the Belgian army, King and government.
King Leopold’s chief military adviser, General Robert van Overstraeten, has been characterised as the ‘evil genius’ of the 1940 campaign, resisting liaison with the French and British before the German attack and succumbing to defeatism as soon as it began. There is certainly something in both charges; but the truth was that Belgium found itself in an impossible position. Short of allowing France and Britain to garrison its territory from the onset – which would have compromised the neutrality it still believed to be its best hope of averting invasion – it had no option but to keep its military distance from the Allies, while fortifying its eastern frontier as best it could against the Wehrmacht. Even so, van Overstraeten did allow British and French officers wearing civilian clothes to reconnoitre the positions they intended to take up if Germany attacked; and, though he refused to co-ordinate defence plans with the Allies, he did transmit to them Belgian intelligence of German intentions, including details of the original ‘Case Yellow’ captured at Mechelen on 9 January, and subsequent indications of their scheme to envelop and destroy the Franco-British army on the Western Front.
Van Overstraeten’s professional objection to closer co-operation with the Allies lay in his belief that nothing would induce them to defend the whole of Belgium. His (correct) judgement was that they intended to advance no further than the centre of the kingdom; his equally correct but harsher judgement was that they would allow the Belgian army to ‘sacrifice’ itself in its forward positions on the Albert Canal while they consolidated their own behind it on the Dyle Line. In the event, they did not even win the time to consolidate. The French Seventh Army, though commanded by Henri Giraud, a genuine fighting general and future rival of de Gaulle for leadership of Free France, made poor time along the North Sea coast on its mission to bring support to the Dutch and the Belgian left flank. It had further to advance than the Germans of Army Group B coming from the opposite direction, who proved more adept than it in negotiating water obstacles even when defended. Its motorised reconnaissance elements also came under German air attack. By 12 May its advance was blunted near Breda, its objective, and on the following day it was ord
ered to fall back to guard the left flank of the Dyle Line near Antwerp. It did so pursued by the advance guard of the 9th Panzer Division.
The Allied deployment on to the Dyle was already going wrong. A ‘domino effect’ was in train. As the Dutch army fell back from its forward positions into Fortress Holland around Amsterdam and Rotterdam, it uncovered the left flank of the Belgians on the Albert Canal, where they were outflanked by the 9th Panzer Division. On the right they were outflanked by the 3rd and 4th Panzer Divisions, which were about to be let across the precipitous defile of the Meuse – the most formidable of military obstacles in north-west Europe – by the German airborne troops’ descent on Eben Emael. While the Royal Air Force tried vainly in a series of suicidal bombing missions to destroy the Meuse bridges in the face of the German advance, the Belgians began to fall back, hoping to feel behind them the support of the French First Army and the BEF advancing to the Dyle.
‘Steps in a dream’
Both these forces were in forward motion, the BEF passing by Brussels, the French First Army by Maubeuge, with the Ninth Army of General André Corap on its right. For the British their line of advance was familiar country. It ran through Marlborough’s campaigning ground, past Waterloo and across more recent battlefields of their military history, Ypres and Mons. ‘It was almost’, wrote the American war correspondent, Drew Middleton, ‘as if they were retracing steps taken in a dream. They saw again faces of friends long dead and heard the half-remembered names of towns and villages.’ Dream was shortly to become nightmare for them, and for their French allies too. The Dyle, to which they were advancing, was scarcely a natural obstacle at all; the artificial obstacles they had been led to believe the Belgians had erected along it were scattered or absent altogether (the British would encounter those that they had emplaced a few years later; collected and transported to Normandy, they would form a principal element in the German fortifications of the D-Day beaches). The French had two ‘cavalry’ and one mechanised division with them; the British had almost no armour at all. Opposite were the 3rd and 4th Divisions of Hoepner’s armoured corps, with over 600 tanks, their crews battle-hardened and trained for rapid advance by the experience of the Polish campaign. No wonder that an eerie cynicism suffused Hitler’s reminiscence of this stage of the campaign: ‘It was wonderful the way everything turned out according to plan. When the news came through that the enemy were moving forward along the whole front, I could have wept for joy; they had fallen into the trap . . . they had believed . . . that we were striking to the old Schlieffen Plan.’ Hitler’s own first experience of battle had occurred only fifty miles from the Dyle, in the dying stage of the ‘old Schlieffen Plan’ in October 1914. It had been a bitter and bloody baptism. Now: ‘how lovely Felsennest [Crag’s Nest, his ‘Sickle Stroke’ headquarters] was! The birds in the morning, the view of the road up which the columns were advancing, the squadrons of planes overhead. There I was sure everything would go right for me . . . I could have wept for joy.’
There were soon to be tears of anguish in his adversaries’ headquarters – but not from the hard-boiled Major-General Bernard Montgomery commanding the British 3rd Division whose troops on 11 May were digging in cheerfully on the Dyle Line; nor from Sir Edmund Ironside, the British chief of staff, whose diary tells that he judged ‘on the whole the advantage is with us’ and looked forward to ‘a really hard fight all this summer’; nor from Gamelin, who remained ‘above all preoccupied with Holland’ and had the previous day delegated his powers of command in Belgium to Georges; not even from General Gaston Billotte, to whom Georges had in turn delegated authority on the northern front and who, with thirty divisions to cover fifty-five miles of line, had more than adequate force to fulfil his mission. On the ‘line of engagement’ along the Dyle, the Allies, despite the disturbing developments on their flanks and the softening of Belgian resistance in front of them, had reason to believe that they outnumbered the approaching Germans – as they did – and would be able to check their advance.
The Allied appreciation of the situation in Belgium, however, rested on the misapprehension (in which Hitler was then exulting) that there they faced the main axis of the German offensive and confronted their main concentration of force. As in 1914, their intelligence resources had failed to establish where the German Schwerpunkt lay. In 1914 it was the French cavalry, beating the thickets of the Ardennes when it should have been roaming Flanders, which missed the German spearheads; in 1940 it was the Allied air forces, flailing vainly at the German spearheads in Belgian Flanders when they should have been overflying the Ardennes, which had lost touch with essentials. From 10 to 14 May, the seven Panzer divisions of Army Group A nudged forward nose to tail along the Ardennes defiles in a traffic concentration so dense that General Günther Blumentritt calculated that if deployed on a single-tank ‘front’, the tail of the column would have been in East Prussia; they breasted up towards the weakest spot on the Allied front to form an irresistible force. These seven Panzer divisions – 1, 2, 5, 6, 7, 8, 10 – deployed between them 1800 tanks. In front of them they found in first line the two Belgian divisions of Chasseurs Ardennais, an old-fashioned elite of forest riflemen whose bravery counted for nothing against armour. When they had been brushed aside, the Panzers found themselves opposed by Corap’s Ninth Army and part of Huntziger’s Second. Although neither formed an elite by any estimation, with the Meuse at their front their reservists should nevertheless have been able to hold, at least in normal times; but May 1940 was not normal times. Almost as soon as the German vanguards of Army Group A made touch with the Meuse defences, they were able to find a way across. Corap’s and Huntziger’s outpost guards took fright, the banks of the river were abandoned and the breach in the Allied defensive dyke was opened.
General André Beaufre, then a junior staff officer at French general headquarters, described the impression the news made on General Georges at his command post at La Ferté early in the morning of 14 May:
The atmosphere was that of a family in which there had been a death. Georges . . . was terribly pale. ‘Our front has been broken at Sedan. There has been a collapse. . . .’ He flung himself into a chair and burst into tears. He was the first man I had seen weep in this campaign. Alas, there were to be others. It made a terrible impression on me. Doumenc [Georges’s subordinate] – taken aback – reacted immediately. ‘General, this is war and in war things like this are bound to happen!’ Then Georges, still pale, explained: following terrible bombardment from the air the two inferior divisions [55 and 71] had taken to their heels. X Corps signalled that the position was penetrated and that German tanks had arrived in Bulson [two miles west of the Meuse, and so inside the French-defended area] about midnight. Here there was another flood of tears. Everyone else remained silent, shattered by what had happened. ‘Well, General,’ said Doumenc, ‘all wars have their costs. Let’s look at the map and see what can be done.’
There is much in Beaufre’s description of this scene that yields to exegesis. First, Sedan: the name of the town where Napoleon III had surrendered to the Prussians in September 1870 was in French ears synonymous with disaster. Second, the ‘two inferior divisions’: the 55th and 71st Divisions of Huntziger’s Second Army were both composed of older reservists, and both had indeed taken to their heels at the approach of the German tanks. Third, what the map suggested might be done: the German penetration of the French line had occurred at a point so sensitive – as Manstein had intended – that any counter-measure adopted would have to be massive and almost instantaneous if it were to stop the rot. The story of Allied strategic decision in the next week would be one of seeking the telling blow.
The details of the story from the German side, however, boded even worse for Georges than he had grasped. For the Meuse had first been crossed not, as he believed, on the day before he had his nervous collapse, but the day before that, 12 May. As darkness fell, patrols of the motorcycle reconnaissance battalion of the 7th Panzer Division commanded by Erwin Rommel had
found an unguarded weir across the Meuse at Houx, north of Sedan. Creeping across it, they reached an island in midstream from which a lock-gate led to the west bank. During the night reinforcements joined them there, so that by 13 May ‘Sickle Stroke’ had already struck at the foundations of the Gamelin plan. The next morning Rommel’s engineers began to lay pontoon bridges across the river, while his tanks, waiting to cross, destroyed French bunkers on the other side with gunfire. By evening the bridges were completed and the first of his tanks had crossed the river – only 120 yards wide at this point.
The French might have dealt successfully with this bridgehead. It was as yet precarious. They tried a counter-attack, with a force that included a tank battalion, and Gamelin was told, ‘the incident at Houx is in hand’. However, the tanks withdrew after taking a few prisoners, leaving Rommel’s bridgehead intact, if not yet a burgeoning threat. Meanwhile French attention was diverted southwards by the assault of Army Group A’s main Panzer formation at Sedan. They had been deploying in the open flood plain of the river, after three days of nose-to-tail driving through the defiles of the Ardennes, all through the morning of 13 May. General P. P. J. Gransard observed ‘the enemy emerging from the forest . . . an almost uninterrupted descent of infantrymen, of vehicles either armoured or motorised’. The French artillery brought them under fire; but it was answered by German bombing, first by high-level Dornier 17s, then by diving Stukas. The effect on the French infantry regiments was shattering. ‘The noise, the horrible noise’, repeated the wounded brought to a field ambulance; better troops were to feel the same terror under air attack throughout this and subsequent wars. ‘Five hours of this nightmare’, wrote General Edouard Ruby, deputy chief of staff of Second Army, ‘were enough to shatter [the troops’] nerves.’ By three in the afternoon the Stukas drew off. As soon as they did so, the assault pioneers of the 1st, 2nd and 10th Panzer Divisions began dragging their inflatable boats to the water’s edge. Setting off under a suddenly amplified hail of enemy fire – the French manned their weapons as they saw the danger they faced – the boat crews suffered heavy casualties and were here and there driven back, but along the whole line of assault, from Donchery to Bazeilles, established a series of footholds on the far bank. Bazeilles was a place of legend in French military history; it was there in 1870 that the elite coloniales had fought to the death against the Germans in ‘the house of the last cartridge’. In 1940 it was the Germans who were ready to do or die at Bazeilles. Hans Rubarth, a pioneer sergeant of the 10th Panzer Division, ordered his men to throw their entrenching tools out of their overloaded boat in midstream: ‘No digging for us – either we get through or that’s the end.’ Before the day was out, nine of his eleven men had become casualties but the group had taken its objective. Rubarth was promoted lieutenant in the field and awarded the Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross, Germany’s highest decoration for bravery.
