To Lose a Battle

by Alistair Horne

  Thus, at the end of the first day, one finds a curious inversion of moods: in Gamelin’s G.Q.G., complacent optimism; in Kleist’s battle H.Q., nervous pessimism.

  Chapter 10

  Through the Ardennes

  11 May

  Soldiers of the West Front! The hour of the most decisive battle of the future of the German nation has come.

  For three hundred years it was the aim of British and French Governments to hinder every workable consolidation of Europe, and above all to keep Germany in weakness and impotence…

  Soldiers of the West Front! With this, the hour has come for you.

  The battle which is beginning today will decide the fate of the German nation for the next thousand years.

  Do your duty…

  ADOLF HITLER, Order of the Day, 10 May 1940

  Rommel

  As soon as day broke on Saturday, 11 May, the Panzers were once again on the move everywhere. Rommel, having concentrated and reorganized his forces during the night, swiftly smashed the courageous resistance of the Chasseurs Ardennais at Chabrehez. By the end of the morning, leading elements of his 7th Panzer had already reached the River Ourthe, the objective that had been denied him the previous night. On the other side of the river, parts of the French 4th D.L.C. had arrived. At Hotton, Lieutenant Georges Kosak’s sapper company had been detailed to demolish a bridge which had been inefficiently blown by the Belgians, his job greatly complicated by the masses of Belgian refugees streaming across it. At 1345 he finally succeeded in clearing the bridge, and detonated charges under it, just at the very moment when the first of Rommel’s armoured cars appeared on the opposite bank. Kosak then withdrew to Marche, some five miles behind the river. The French cavalry made no attempt to cover the destroyed bridges on the Ourthe, and within a matter of hours the German engineers had thrown pontoons across the undefended river.

  Appearing with unexpected suddenness on the other side of the Ourthe, Rommel’s Panzers struck their first blow savagely at the dispersed French cavalry. At Marche, Lieutenant Kosak and his troop were surprised by machine-gun fire from a German armoured car. He leaped into a small French car and tried to make off:

  … all of a sudden, a grey-green mass bars the road; with all my concerted strength, I brake, my hands clutching the wheel; the tyres make a noise like a large electric saw cutting wood; I swerve to the left. A quite brutal shock stops the car… the enemy armoured car manoeuvres; it is lying sideways on across the road, trying to turn about.

  Kosak then managed to reverse and swing behind some buildings, a second before the Germans opened fire. Outside Marche, he regathered his troop, and reckoning that escape seemed impossible, decided to take up a defensive position. The sappers buried a few mines and took over. A group of German armoured cars approached. The first one blew up with a devastating explosion on one of Kosak’s mines, which also knocked out a second vehicle. Benefiting from the ensuing disarray of the enemy, Kosak miraculously managed to escape to Ciney, where only the previous day he had experienced that ‘strange feeling’ on moving up through the first shuttered and frightened Belgian town. Here, less than ten miles from Dinant and the Meuse, the divisional commander, General Barbe, interviewed Kosak and declared ‘I am pleased with you.’

  Throughout the day there was confused fighting on Rommel’s axis similar to that reported by Kosak. At times the tanks of the 4th D.L.C. attacked strongly, but their Renaults and Hotchkisses were both outnumbered and outclassed. Rommel’s own account of the day’s action describes how ‘prompt opening fire on our part led to a hasty French retreat’. On this first day of battle with the French he discovered ‘again and again that in encounter actions, the day goes to the side that is the first to plaster its opponent with fire. The man who lies low and awaits developments usually comes off second best.’ His Panzers thus advanced, spraying the woods on either side of the roads promiscuously with machine-gun and cannon fire. Into these woods the French cavalry, horses and tanks mixed up with one another, scattered in disorder. By the evening of the 11th, Rommel was in fine fettle, having more than made up for the setbacks of the previous day. To his wife, he dashed off a second quick note:

  Dearest Lu,

  I’ve come up for breath for the first time today and have a moment to write. Everything wonderful so far. Am way ahead of my neighbours. I’m completely hoarse from orders and shouting. Had a bare three hours’ sleep and an occasional meal. Otherwise I’m absolutely fine. Make do with this, please, I’m too tired for more.

  The outstripped ‘neighbours’ to whom Rommel refers consisted chiefly of the 5th Panzer division on his right. Not led with Rommel’s élan, the 5th had become tangled up on the Ardennes roads and lagged badly behind. From the 11th onwards, it would never quite catch up, and Rommel would seize all the limelight on the right flank of the breakthrough thrust.

  Reinhardt

  On Rommel’s left, Reinhardt’s corps, consisting of the 8th and 6th Panzers who were to advance through Bastogne to Monthermé on the Meuse, also had their problems. Reinhardt had actually set off after Guderian, so as to make room for XIX Panzer Corps on the saturated and tortuous roads of the Ardennes. But in the afternoon the 6th found its route blocked by elements of Guderian’s 2nd Panzer which had strayed too far to the north. At 1520 orders were given for it to hold fast until the muddle was sorted out. Finally, the 2nd Panzer had to cede this route to the 6th; later it was also deprived by Guderian of another on the right of its axis, a factor that was to delay the division’s appearance at Sedan on the critical day. In its approach march, the 1st Panzer too had suffered inconvenience by being ‘squeezed’ by the 10th Panzer on its left. Here Guderian appears to have been at least partly to blame; over-reacting against Kleist’s rescinded order for the 10th to swing southwards, at 0100 on the morning of the 11th he had instructed it to aim for the River Semois at Cugnon, several miles further north than Florenville where it was originally directed. Back at O.K.H. headquarters, Halder noted in his diary that Brauchitsch, the Army C.-in-C., wanted ‘to put pressure on Army Group ‘A’ (they report that route difficulties have been very great on account of numerous road destructions!)’. Had it not been for the apparently almost miraculous efforts of the mechanized engineers, who seemed to have been everywhere at the right moment, destroying Belgian anti-tank obstacles, replacing bridges, and constructing road detours, the hold-ups would undoubtedly have been far graver that day. As it was, the tank commanders cursed at the tangles and delays as their engines overheated, growled at the military police trying frantically to unsnarl the vast columns and continually threw nervous glances upwards into the dazzling clear blue sky. What fantastic targets these mile-long traffic jams offered the enemy air forces! How could they miss such an opportunity!

  Guderian

  On Guderian’s front, the principal action on the 11th was fought by the 1st Panzer. Having moved his tanks up in strength to the positions just east of Neufchâteau that had been seized the previous day by ‘Operation Niwi’, the divisional commander, General Kirchner, now swept aside the few remnants of the Chasseurs Ardennais in order to strike forcefully at the French 5th D.L.C. Near Suxy, south of Neufchâteau, some thirty tanks bearing the white oak-leaf emblem of the 1st Panzer broke through the French positions and swiftly surrounded a battery of 105-mm, field-guns. These were modern weapons, but they were completely unsuited for combating armour. The whole battery was swiftly destroyed, a first unpleasant foretaste of what was to await the defenders on the other side of the Meuse. Shaken, General Chanoine, the commander of the 5th D.L.C., ordered the groupement forming his right wing to fall back on the Semois. Meanwhile, north of Neufchâteau, his left wing was also being hard pressed, and during the course of the day Chanoine received Huntziger’s permission to withdraw his whole division across the Semois. But, insisted Huntziger, the Semois must be held at all costs, and to bolster the line there, he expedited a battalion of the 295th Infantry Regiment, borrowed from one of General Grandsard’s ‘B’ divisi
ons, the 55th – which was holding the key sector at Sedan.

  To the right of the 5th D.L.C., the 2nd, licking its wounds from the previous day, was left relatively alone. The explanation for the failure of the 10th Panzer to resume its attack seems to lie in the confusion caused over its change of axis and the resulting bottlenecks, but this apparent switching of enemy emphasis from the 2nd D.L.C. front to the 5th resulted in adding to the bafflement of Huntziger. Was Guderian’s main effort aimed at Carignan and the northern anchor of the Maginot Line, as it might have seemed on the 10th, or now at Sedan? On its right, the 2nd D.L.C. was left somewhat in the air by the withdrawal on the evening of the 10th of the Third Army’s cavalry screen (the 3rd D.L.C.), which, abandoning Esch, fell back across the Franco-Luxembourg frontier. Much more serious, however, was the threat presenting itself to the other flank of Huntziger’s cavalry detachments. To the left of the hard-hit 5th D.L.C. lay the 3rd Spahi Brigade, an élite North African unit under the command of General Corap’s Ninth Army. Its role was to ensure liaison between the cavalry screens of the two armies. Because of the lagging behind of the 6th Panzer, in whose approximate path the Spahis stood, they were attacked on neither the 10th nor the 11th. Nevertheless, on learning of the 5th D.L.C.’s withdrawal, the Spahi commander, Colonel Marc, pulled his brigade back across the Semois even more precipitately – the consequences of which were to be particularly unfortunate the following day.

  Thus as 11 May ended, the situation of Huntziger’s cavalry was as follows: the 2nd D.L.C. was still capable of resistance, but the 5th was battered and was left holding a twenty-mile front on which two of the most powerful German Panzer divisions (the 1st and 2nd) were advancing. Both flanks of Huntziger’s cavalry screen were in the air, and the whole of it had withdrawn across the Semois. Here was the last natural barrier between the French frontier – and Sedan. It was not much of a barrier! On staff officers’ maps, the Semois may look imposing; along its upper reaches it is in fact little more than a very pretty trout stream, not unlike Hampshire’s River Itchen, meandering in countless loops through water meadows and wooded banks. In many places it is shallow enough to wade across; in others, narrow enough for a not particularly expert thrower to land a hand-grenade on the far side. Its numerous convolutions would make it hard for an extended defence force to prevent a determined and numerous enemy infiltrating across it. The principal route over the Semois, and the one heading directly for Sedan, lay through Bouillon. Here the physical features for a resolute defence – dominating heights and clearly observable approach roads from which Panzers could not easily deploy – were more promising. But it was clear that Bouillon would be the scene of Guderian’s major effort for the 12th. Nevertheless, an extraordinary atmosphere of business-as-usual still prevailed there.

  Like Rommel’s 7th Panzer, Kirchner’s 1st was now leading both its neighbours. Heading west from Neufchâteau until it had reached the important road junction of Fays-les-Veneurs, it had then swung southwards to face for the first time towards Bouillon and, beyond it, Sedan. By nightfall on the 11th, the leading tanks of the 1st Panzer Regiment had actually reached the Semois at Bouillon. Immediately they came under heavy anti-tank fire from the far bank, which knocked out a tank. An undestroyed stone bridge was then discovered, but just as the Panzers were about to cross it the French blew it up. Captain von Kress managed to cross by a ford discovered by regimental reconnaissance, but shortly afterwards he was bombed in error by twenty-five Stukas. The 1st Panzer Regiment was withdrawn, and it was decided to resume the attack the next morning, using the division’s motorized infantry.

  During the 11th, the vast majority of the men marching with and behind Kleist’s armoured phalanx had still not caught a glimpse of the enemy, a factor which lent to the campaign in the Ardennes a certain phantom quality. From time to time, Guderian himself had spotted French reconnaissance vehicles flitting silently through the trees of the Ardennes Forest, in retreat, without apparently either side opening fire. A young sapper lieutenant, Karl-Heinz Mende, wrote home in amazement at advancing through country ‘as fruitful and beautiful as the German landscape’, but empty and abandoned – ‘We are not fighting for this land, we are simply swamping it’ – and the whole campaign so far had reminded him of a well-conducted sand-table exercise. Indeed, as General von Blumentritt told Liddell Hart after the war, it ‘was not really an operation, in the tactical sense, but an approach march. In making the plan we had reckoned it unlikely that we should meet any serious resistance before reaching the Meuse.’ In the first two days of the Ardennes campaign, the German appreciation so far had certainly held good; resistance met had been only ‘weak opposition, and easily brushed aside… The main problem was not tactical but administrative.’ That night Guderian with his highly mobile corps H.Q. took up quarters at Neufchâteau in a much happier frame of mind. The approach march still presented its ‘administrative problems’, but with the exception of the 2nd Panzer, which continued to lag behind, the whole Panzer Corps had more than recovered the time lost on the 10th. Back at O.K.H., Halder recorded a visit from the Führer, lasting from 1640 until 1900 hours, and during which there had been ‘rejoicing over the success’; on the French side of the lines, there was still ‘no sign of any major railway movements anywhere. Enemy air force astonishingly restrained.’ But in a qualifying and significantly cautious note he added that there was ‘expectation of [enemy] attack from the south’.

  Air War

  In the air, the Luftwaffe continued its strategic bombing of Allied airfields and communication centres, though with no greater intensity than on the previous day. According to General d’Astier, only three French planes were destroyed and one landing-strip put out of action. Tactically, the main German air effort was concentrated upon the annihilation of the Dutch forces in the north. Over the Ardennes, the protective fighter cover remained dense, and the Panzers appear to have had as much air support as they required. Lieutenant-Colonel Soldan, a Wehrmacht chronicler, states that Luftwaffe co-operation was ‘most admirable’ during critical moments of that day:

  Planes, watching the situation from above, promptly recognized any position where help was needed. Dive-bombers flung themselves on the enemy and opened the way for the countless vehicles whose motors were making a terrible noise as they laboured through this forest region of hills and mountains.

  But otherwise the Luftwaffe still adroitly avoided any intensification of activity over the Dinant–Sedan area that might have given away the Sichelschnitt objectives. Meanwhile, on the 11th the Allied air forces undertook one single operation against those miles of irresistible targets worming through the Ardennes. The R.A.F. official history relates:

  Eight Battles of Nos. 88 and 218 Squadrons were ordered to deliver a low-level attack on a column in German territory moving up towards the Luxembourg border. Whether they managed to reach their target area is doubtful. The only pilot to return saw three of his companions succumb to ground fire in the Ardennes.

  Again, the French Air Force took no part.

  At the other end of the battlefront, with similar ineffectiveness and high losses, a squadron of Belgian Battle bombers attacked the captured Maastricht and Albert Canal bridges, carrying 50-kg. bombs which were ludicrously small for the task. Ten out of fifteen planes were shot down. The attacks were followed up by R.A.F. Blenheims; on one mission, five out of six were destroyed by flak. It was not until the end of the morning of the 11th that General Georges’s restrictions on the bombing of built-up areas by the French Air Force was lifted. At 1630 Gamelin himself telephoned d’Astier, ordering him to ‘put everything to work to slow up the German columns in the direction of Maastricht, Tongres, Gembloux, and not to hesitate to bomb towns and villages in order to obtain the required result’. But much irreplaceable time had been lost, and in any case Gamelin was concentrating his limited air resources in the wrong place – as indeed the Sichelschnitt planners had intended that he should.

  The Allies in Belgium

 
On 11th May, General d’Astier noted that Giraud’s Seventh Army in its dash towards Breda ‘is not being troubled’ by the Luftwaffe. In view of the merciless pounding that was being inflicted upon the poor Dutch, was there not something curious in the apparently blind eye the Luftwaffe was turning upon Giraud? The B.E.F. had experienced a similarly quiet time in its advance to the Dyle Line position. With it went a certain ‘Kim’ Philby, representing The Times, who, showing an astuteness which would later bring untold advantage to another employer, remarked apprehensively to an American colleague, Drew Middleton: ‘It went too damn well. With all that air power why didn’t he bother us? What is he up to?’1

  The B.E.F. advance – apart from the one incident on the 10th when an officious Belgian frontier guard had tried to halt the passage of Major-General Bernard Montgomery’s 3rd Division because it did not possess the necessary permits – had indeed proceeded with exemplary smoothness. To many of its older members who had fought in Belgium once before, there was an uncanny quality about that advance: ‘It was almost,’ wrote 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.’ But the Tommies were in excellent spirits; passing them on the road back to Paris from Brussels, Clare Boothe ‘remembered how everybody had remarked that it was funny the soldiers didn’t sing in this war. Well, these soldiers were singing… they stuck up their thumbs in the new gesture they had, which meant “O.K., everything’s fine,” and winked and blew cheerful kisses…’ By the evening of 11 May, the B.E.F. was well dug in on its appointed sector along the Dyle, from Louvain to Wavre, and although the river here was in fact little more than a wide stream, the British position was a relatively strong one.