With the main visible effort of the Luftwaffe concentrated over Holland, there was nothing here that might betray to Allied Intelligence the true direction of Sichelschnitt. Meanwhile, over the Panzers creeping slowly along the densely-packed roads of the Eifel and into the Ardennes, an immense fighter umbrella flew cover against any Allied ‘spy’ planes that might attempt to intrude. But few did.
To the vigilant Luftwaffe patrolling above, the roads leading towards Sedan and the Meuse presented the spectacle of a lifetime. Nose to bumper was the greatest concentration of tanks – between 1,200 and 1,500 of them – yet seen in war. Kleist’s massive Armoured Group was moving forward in three blocks, one densely closed up behind the other. ‘Like a giant phalanx,’ remarked General von Blumentritt, Rundstedt’s Chief of Operations, ‘they stretched back for a hundred miles, the rear rank lying fifty miles to the east of the Rhine. Had this mass formation of Panzers been placed in single file, the tail-end would have been in Königsberg, in East Prussia, and the head of the column in Trier.’ First came the tanks and the motorized infantry shock-troops; then the heavy supply echelons; and finally, far beyond the Rhine, singing lustily and marching against each other as if in competition, the infantry regiments whose job would be to hold and consolidate the ground conquered by the Panzers. It would be another two days before they would even reach the frontier. Occasionally the columns would be halted by a single vehicle breaking down. But such halts were rare; the moment a tank or a car showed signs of stalling, it was ruthlessly pushed off the road. Uneasily, the Panzer commanders, aware of what a superb target the dense, crawling columns presented, gazed up to the skies; but there they saw only the reassuring black crosses of the Luftwaffe.
Guderian
The passage of Guderian’s column through Luxembourg took place smoothly and peacefully. Feldwebel Schwappacher of the Grossdeutschland Regiment, which was leading the Panzers across the Ardennes, recorded how the outlines of the last houses in the frontier town of Echternach
appear and fade in the early morning mists… An old grandmother greets us happily and gives us her blessings for the forthcoming battle… The Luxembourgers try to blow up the bridge over the Sauer; it only half succeeded, so that our engineers were immediately able to put it back in order by using a few boards…
Other German soldiers were astonished to see farmers in the fields continuing to plough and barely raising their heads as the Panzers rumbled past. The ‘tourists’ of Admiral Canaris had performed their tasks well; there were few hold-ups caused by demolitions, while on the main Trier-Luxembourg road the advancing columns found several stretches that had been mined, but not detonated. The German engineers carried wooden ramps with them, specially designed to fit over the paltry Luxembourg tank obstacles, so that the Panzers could roll across them with the minimum delay. Backing up the Abwehr ‘tourists’ was the first of Hitler’s ‘special operations’ brain-children. A detachment of 125 volunteers, commanded by Lieutenant Hedderich, had been landed before dawn by twenty-five Fieseler Storchs near Esch-sur-Alzette on the Franco-Luxembourg border with the task of holding this vital communication centre until Guderian’s main force arrived. After halting and turning about a number of Luxembourg workers cycling to collect their Friday pay-packets, Hedderich’s group were accosted by a bewildered but amicable gendarme who informed them that they were ‘on neutral territory’, and ordered them to leave it. He was quietly arrested. Narrowly missing the present Grand-Duke, Jean, who happened to be passing in a car, the Germans then settled down to wait for Guderian. By 0900 that morning the forward elements of the 1st Panzer had already reached the Belgian frontier after traversing the whole of Luxembourg. Hardly a shot had been fired; total Luxembourg casualties amounted to six gendarmes and one soldier wounded, seventy-five captured, none killed.
Rommel
Out beyond the right flank of Kleist’s Armoured Group, the 5th Panzer reported that its first tank to cross the Belgian frontier had bravely managed to shoot up a group of unprepared Belgian infantrymen, lolling about on a frontier bridge. Later that morning the 5th was attacked by two enemy bombers, which dropped their bombs aimlessly in the woods. One was shot down by the German light flak, and a parachute opened. Just south of the 5th Panzer, Rommel was encountering elaborate obstructions prepared by the Belgians:
All roads and forest tracks had been permanently barricaded and deep craters blown in the main roads. But most of the road blocks were undefended by the Belgians, and it was thus in only a few places that my division was held up for any length of time. Many of the blocks could be by-passed by moving across country or over side roads. Elsewhere, all troops quickly set to work to deal with the obstructions and soon had the road clear.
Nevertheless, the Belgian frontier works, undefended as they were, proved sufficient to slow Rommel’s advance down to six kilometres in three hours, a first setback which made the impatient Rommel distinctly nervous. Much of the Belgian demolition work had certainly been effected with consummate skill: bridges so well dynamited that their remains provided little of use for emergency bridges; roads blown up with charges dug so deep into their foundations as to make them completely impassable. At Martelange, just inside the Belgian frontier from Luxembourg, minefields and a destroyed river bridge presented the 1st Panzer with its first minor check, forcing it to postpone its attack on the Belgian main line of resistance until the following day. But, obeying their orders to the letter, the Belgian Chasseurs Ardennais, having completed their demolitions, withdrew from the scene. How much more the delicately balanced German timetable might have been thrown out of gear, even on the first day, if those frontier obstructions could have been supported by resolute covering fire! Here was perhaps the first of the painful consequences of Belgium’s return to neutrality of 1936
Operation ‘Niwi’
So far the most demonstrative sequences in the land fighting on 10 May had followed from Hitler’s airborne ‘special operations’, the first time that these had ever been employed in warfare on so large a scale. Lieutenant Hedderich’s airborne commando dropped outside Esch in Luxembourg has already been mentioned, but further north in the Belgian Ardennes a more ambitious endeavour, Operation ‘Niwi’, was also under way. ‘Niwi’, so named because of the two villages concerned, involved a landing of some 400 men of the Grossdeutschland at Nives and Witry in the Belgian Ardennes, roughly midway between Neufchâteau, and the frontier towns of Bastogne and Martelange. Neufchâteau, sitting on a very commanding height with roads radiating out of it in all directions, was potentially a most important defensive position, and its rapid capture was also essential to Guderian’s advance upon Sedan. Dispatched in two groups aboard ninety-eight of the light Fieseler Storchs, ‘Niwi’s’ instructions were to keep open the roads running eastwards from Neufchâteau, impede the passage of enemy reinforcements through Neufchâteau, and aid the progress of Guderian’s XIX Corps by attacking the Belgian frontier position from the rear. The Witry group, under the ‘Niwi’ commander, Lieutenant-Colonel Garski, landed according to schedule, but Captain Krüger’s group heading for Nives was beset with the errors that so often plague airborne operations.
A sergeant with Krüger describes how ‘soon after take-off we lost sight of the other Storchs flying with us… on the roads there is the endless worm of the Army stretching out. People wave to us… we land in Belgium on a meadow. It’s the wrong place, and with loud curses from us the three machines take off again.’ The pilots then spotted a Storch burning on the ground, and landed near it: ‘there is a terrible muddle. The ammunition is taken into a near-by wood, the road barricaded.’ Stunned Belgian passers-by told the lost detachment that they had landed near the village of Léglise, about nine miles from Nives and on the wrong side of Garski’s group. ‘Our defence measures are strengthened, machine-guns put in position… we requisition civilian cars… then suddenly our runner, Preusch, arrives with a bicycle; he has landed with the captain some two kilometres away.’ They joined up with Krüger�
�s group, but not with Garski and the rest of the battalion until the afternoon. There was some sharp fighting against the Chasseurs Ardennais for possession of Witry, which finally fell at 1300 hours, at a cost of nineteen German casualties. A short time later contact was made with the advanced elements of the 1st Panzer. The approaches to Neufchâteau were open.
‘Brandenburgers’
Although Operations ‘Hedderich’ and ‘Niwi’ were more fundamental, tactically, to the success of Sichelschnitt, events up in the north were certainly more colourful and eye-catching. Holland, with her small, weak Army,4 based her defence upon the flooding of large areas and the destruction of bridges over the numerous canals. It was to forestall this that Hitler decided to strike swiftly, from behind. By the end of 10 May, General Student’s airborne troops had succeeded in capturing the three key airfields of Ockenburg, Ypenburg, and Valkenburg which ring The Hague, though they had suffered setbacks and severe losses. They had also seized the important bridges over the Maas estuary (the Dutch extension of the Meuse) at Dordrecht and Moerdijk, and destroyed 62 of the Dutch Air Force’s 125 planes. Meanwhile, to open up Holland to Bock’s Panzers and infantry moving in from the east, some ruses had been resorted to that were particularly dear to Hitler’s heart. As early as November 1939 he had first mooted the idea of seizing the vital Maas bridges by commandos dressed in Dutch uniforms. Canaris, although allegedly disapproving of the operation as being unethical, had provided the necessary uniforms. Their theft did not go unnoticed in Holland, where a newspaper even caricatured the uniform-loving Goering disguised as a Dutch tram-conductor, but otherwise the phlegmatic Dutch were not disposed to let their suspicions be aroused. The troops for this cloak-and-dagger role originated from a body with the cover name of Bau- und Lehrkompanie Brandenburg,5 or ‘Brandenburgers’ as they were more commonly christened, which was to grow from a company to a battalion and later to a division during the course of the war. The ‘Brandenburgers’ had first been thought up at the time of the Czech crisis by Captain Theodor von Hippel, who had fought in Lettow-Vorbeck’s brilliant guerilla campaign behind the British lines in East Africa in the First War. They were to infiltrate behind the Czech lines to link up with Sudeten ‘patriots’. Thanks to Chamberlain, their services were never required. In October 1939, however, Canaris had instructed Hippel to set up the Bau- und Lehrkompanie, and their first service had been the capture intact of Danish bridges over the Belts.
The attempt on the Dutch bridges at Maastricht ended in dismal failure. There was a confused shoot-up, in which the leader of the bogus Dutchmen, Lieutenant Hocke, was killed; it was impossible to remove the explosive charges, and all three bridges blew up in the face of the waiting Panzers. When Canaris’s Abwehr delegate arrived outside Maastricht, he found a depressing sight of mile upon mile of Panzers and vehicles jamming the roads, and it was not until mid-morning that an assault bridge could be thrown across the Maas. A similar fiasco took place at Arnhem where the ‘Brandenburgers’, to make up for their shortage of Dutch uniforms, utilized outlandish cardboard helmets and were immediately spotted. But at Gennep they were triumphant; under Lieutenant Walther three Dutch ‘Fifth Columnists’ dressed as policemen marched up to the bridge with a posse of ‘captured’ German P.O.W.s, fully equipped with machine-pistols and grenades under their Army overcoats, and succeeded in securing the bridge from the surprised defenders. Walther’s seizure of the bridge at Gennep had important enough consequences; across it the 9th Panzer Division rushed to interpose itself between the Dutch Army and General Giraud’s Seventh Army, to forestall Gamelin’s ‘Breda Variant’; while at the same time General von Reichenau was able to divert northwards to Gennep some of the units of his Sixth Army bogged down before Maastricht. The Blitzkrieg rolled into Holland.
Meanwhile, it was also the ‘Brandenburgers’ who were charged with securing some twenty-four objectives in Belgium, including bridges and viaducts and the tracing-out of minefields which had previously been reported by German agents. At St Vith, on Rommel’s route to Dinant, Captain Rudloff, who had been studying the habits of the Belgian frontier guards minutely over the previous weeks, was particularly successful. There had been some wild shooting in the railway station, during which a locomotive managed to take off to give the warning; but otherwise three out of four of St Vith’s bridges fell intact into German hands. For their achievements, 3 Company of the ‘Brandenburgers’ received no fewer than ninety-two Iron Crosses.
Eben Emael
But the single most striking episode of 10 May was undoubtedly the capture of the Belgian Fort Eben Emael. The nearest equivalent in 1940 to Verdun’s Fort Douaumont of 1916, Eben Emael was the northernmost fortification guarding Liége and the linchpin of the Albert Canal position, along which Gamelin anticipated the Belgians could hold the Germans at bay for five days, until the French and B.E.F. could be established, a calculation that formed the whole basis of the Allied Dyle-Breda Plan. It was also a vital factor of Hitler’s Sichelschnitt that such a delay in the north should not occur, for until the powerful mechanized forces belonging to the French First Army were inextricably engaged by frontal attack there, there would always exist the grave danger that they could be diverted to strike the vulnerable northern flank of the main German breakthrough at Sedan. Therefore, for both sides, a very great deal depended on Eben Emael. Completed as recently as 1935, the fort measured some 900 yards by 700, and was protected by an enormous cutting which fell 120 feet, sheer and unassailable, into the Albert Canal. In various single and double turrets, it mounted nearly a dozen pieces of artillery from 75-mms. to 120-mms., as well as numerous light cannon and machine-guns, and safely underground it contained a full battalion of troops. No single fort of the Maginot Line was as powerful. But like all fixed, unmanoeuvrable and supposedly invincible strongholds, it had its Achilles’ heel: it possessed virtually no anti-aircraft defences, and the actual surface of the fort itself was unmined.
The mission of capturing Eben Emael was entrusted to the ‘Koch Storm Detachment’, consisting entirely of volunteer sappers, who, under Captain Koch, had been trained at Hilde-sheim in the most rigid secrecy since November 1939. Its members had been allowed no leave, were forbidden to mix with men of other units and had been sworn to secrecy under pain of death. Initially they had practised their attack on models, and later on bunkers of the Czechs’ Sudeten fortress system, so that by May they knew every detail of Eben Emael in their sleep – except its name. At 0330 on 10 May, while it was still dark, they took off from Cologne in eleven large gliders, each carrying seven to eight men and towed by a Ju-52. The gliders were piloted by some of the star German pilots of peace-time gliding competitions – a sport at which Germany, on account of the Versailles limitations, had long excelled – including the former world champion, Sergeant Bräutigam. The reason for employing gliders was simple: in the dusk, they could cover the thirteen odd miles across the frontier unheard and unseen, and could land on top of the fort itself within twenty yards of a given spot. The superbly precise timing allowed them to land on Eben Emael just five minutes before the bulk of the Wehrmacht crossed the frontier. After circling to gain height, the Ju-52s followed a line of beacons to Aachen where they cast off the gliders from a height of 8,000 feet. They flew on, dropping quantities of parachute ‘dummies’ stuffed with fire-crackers, to confuse the Belgian defenders. At Eben Emael, the Belgian sentries heard Dutch anti-aircraft fire over the Maastricht appendix, but heard or saw nothing else, until suddenly, like great black birds that seemed to hang almost motionless in the air, the gliders were on top of them.
For all its minute planning, however, the operation nearly failed when the tow-ropes of two of the gliders snapped, including the one containing the expedition commander, Lieutenant Rudolf Witzig, himself. One landed near Düren, midway between Aachen and Cologne, and its disgruntled members were forced to join up on foot with the advancing ground forces. Witzig landed in a field not far from Cologne; with commendable energy, he prepared a field by
chopping down willow hedges and called up another Ju-52 to tow him off. He arrived safely at Eben Emael to find that, no doubt as a by-product of the superb training they had undergone, his Sergeant-Major, Wenzel, already had the situation well in hand, having landed unopposed plumb on top of the fort. Swiftly the German engineers blasted the thick steel carapaces which protected the subterranean gun turrets, using (for the first time) powerful hollow charges. One by one Eben Emael’s turrets and gun casemates were knocked out in this fashion; the heavy twin 120-mm. turret, whose armour proved too thick for the hollow charges, was dispatched by the simple device of poking explosive charges down the barrels. Some time was wasted on two turrets which proved to be dummies, but by the time Lieutenant Witzig reached Eben Emael the mighty fort had been blinded and its teeth drawn. Near-by Belgian artillery opened heavy fire on the Germans on the fort glacis, but no really dangerous counter-attack had been mounted by the battalion-strong infantry garrison, nor any mines or other obstacles encountered. Witzig now entered the fort to clean up inside. Meanwhile, other detachments of Koch’s glider-borne engineers had seized two near-by bridges over the Albert Canal. All through the night of 10–11 May the garrison of Eben Emael held out, while Belgian infantry from outside the fort attempted to dislodge the Germans. The situation for Witzig’s eighty-five men was becoming precarious when, at 0600 hours on the 11th, they were relieved by the advance troops of Reichenau’s Sixth Army. Six hours later Eben Emael surrendered, and 1,100 men were taken prisoner. In the fighting the Belgians lost 23 killed and 59 wounded; Witzig, 6 dead and 15 wounded. Hitler promptly awarded Koch and Witzig6 (then only twenty-four) the Ritterkreuz, one of Germany’s highest decorations.
To Lose a Battle Page 26
