To Lose a Battle

by Alistair Horne

  In his reconnaissance report for the 12th, d’Astier once again emphasized the German effort in the Ardennes: ‘Considerable motorized and armoured forces are on the march towards the Meuse round Dinant, Givet, and Bouillon, coming respectively from Marche and Neufchâteau.’ Ominously he noted the substantial amount of bridging equipment being carried by the German columns, and concluded: ‘One can assume a very serious enemy effort in the direction of the Meuse.’ But, to his amazement, by midday on the 12th Billotte was still allocating priority for air operations to the Maastricht area, though he now switched second priority from the battered 7th Army and the untroubled B.E.F. to support of Huntziger. At 1600 hours, says d’Astier, General Georges intervened to grant first priority to Huntziger. Billotte, having moved into a battle H.Q. behind the French First Army, had his eyes fixed upon this sector of the front, and was astounded. Resuming his former tack he declared: ‘Two-thirds of the air effort in support of the First Army, one-third in support of Second Army.’ To some extent, Billotte can be exculpated by the surprising fact that Huntziger himself, although informed of the bomber support earmarked for his Second Army, apparently made no appeal for it to General d’Astier at all that day. It was purely on his own initiative, based on the reconnaissance reports, that d’Astier requested fifty British aircraft to bomb the Neufchâteau and Gouillon areas on the evening of the 12th, from which another eighteen bombers failed to return.

  Guderian: Across the Semois

  During the night of the 11th–12th, Guderian had swiftly exploited the precipitate withdrawal made by Corap’s 3rd Spahi Brigade across the Semois the previous day. The motor-cycle battalion of the 1st Panzer, deployed on the right of the division, got over the river at Mouzaive under cover of darkness, establishing itself in force on the other side before the defenders could react. Less than five air miles from Bouillon, the mainstay of the French defence along the Semois, the Mouzaive bridgehead gave the attackers an immediate and powerful advantage as dawn broke on the 12th. By 0600 Guderian had tanks across at Mouzaive, and the left flank of Huntziger’s 5th D.L.C., not forewarned of the Spahis’ withdrawal, was now already threatened. At Bouillon itself, men of Lieutenant-Colonel Balck’s 1st Rifle Regiment, who were later to cover themselves with glory on the far side of the Meuse, infiltrated down through steep and densely wooded banks until they reached a ford across the Semois which the reconnaissance unit had located the previous night. Within a short space of time they had carried their objectives, and the first tanks were rolling across the ford, their passage aided by the fact that the dry spring had considerably reduced the level of the Semois.

  As usual, Guderian was up in the cockpit that morning, watching Balck’s river crossing. After he had satisfied himself with the immediate building of a new bridge by the divisional engineers, he followed the tanks across the Semois, up the steep gorge towards Sedan. ‘But mined roads compelled me to return to Bouillon. Here, in the southern part of the town,’ Guderian admitted, ‘I experienced an enemy air attack for the first time; they were after 1st Panzer Division’s bridge. Luckily the bridge remained undamaged, but a few houses were set on fire.’ In his command vehicle, Guderian then drove to the Cugnon–Herbeumont sector, where his 10th Panzer Division was engaged in crossing the Semois. This he found ‘an impressive sight’, and he returned ‘without anxiety’ to Bouillon, where his staff had set up corps H.Q. in the Hôtel Panorama, well named on account of its splendid view over the Semois. In an alcove heavily decorated with trophies of la chasse, Guderian went to work, planning the next stage of the advance.

  Suddenly there was a series of explosions in rapid succession; another air attack. As though that were not enough, an engineer supply column, carrying fuses, explosives, mines and hand-grenades, caught fire and there was one detonation after another. A boar’s head, attached to the wall immediately above my desk, broke loose and missed me by a hair’s breadth; the other trophies came tumbling down and the fine window in front of which I was seated was smashed to smithereens and splinters of glass whistled about my ears…

  After this narrow escape, which might so easily have altered the course of the coming battle, Guderian moved his H.Q. back out of Bouillon. Once again he was bombed, and once again forced to move, this time to the delightful small village of Noirefontaine, on the Ardennes plateau three miles north of Bouillon.

  Throughout the day Allied bombardment of the Bouillon bridgehead continued. From Torcy, ten miles away on the Meuse near Sedan, French ‘long 155s’ lobbed in shells with sufficient accuracy to make the German engineers’ bridge-building a highly dangerous occupation. Rather less accurately, R.A.F. Battle bombers, such as those that had nearly hit Guderian in the Hôtel Panorama, made repeated runs on the bridges down the narrow, twisting valley. As noted earlier, eighteen out of fifty did not return. But things did not go all the Luftwaffe’s way; five American-made Curtiss fighters belonging to Groupe I/5 – the Cigognes squadron to whom had passed the mantle of the legendary Guynemer of 1914–18 fame – pounced upon twelve Stukas returning from a bombing mission between Bouillon and Sedan. All were shot down, at no cost to the Cigognes, who then attacked a second wave of Stukas coming in to bomb. Several more were shot down, and the rest put to flight. The two encounters demonstrated clearly the vulnerability of the dreaded Stuka; but alas, it was a lesson from which little benefit would be drawn.

  Despite this Allied effort, by mid-morning the 1st Panzer had established a sizeable bridgehead over the Semois and was thrusting down the road to Sedan, by the signposts now just eighteen kilometres distant. While Britons were reading their morning newspapers, the first of Guderian’s tanks was leaving Belgium behind it and crossing into France. As they burst out of the ‘inhospitable’ Ardennes which had concealed and sheltered them for the past two and a half days, the Panzers could make out in the distant haze the Frénois heights beyond the Meuse, where, seventy summers ago, the King of Prussia and Bismarck had stood as German soldiers closed in to win that first Battle of Sedan.

  Second Army

  When Huntziger had realized, early that morning, that the threat to the rear of the 5th D.L.C. by the Panzer crossing at Mouzaive rendered any defence at Bouillon impossible, he ordered the cavalry to fall back on the line of the maisons fortes, which had been constructed that winter between Sedan and the frontier. But the withdrawal of the infantry battalion of the 295th Regiment, sent up from the 55th Division to bolster the Bouillon defences only the previous day, did not go smoothly. Its motor transport appears to have vanished and, according to General Ruby, this battalion of ‘B class’ reservists

  scattered in the woods, and cut off from its route, lost its C.O., Major Clausener, as well as the major part of its effectives; only three hundred demoralized men were seen again, crying ‘treachery’ against the cavalry, and devoid of any value for the actions of the following days.

  It was an ominous indication of what might happen when a ‘B’ division was really hit hard by the German Panzers or Stukas.

  Meanwhile, further to the right on the sector of the 2nd D.L.C., Marcel Lerecouvreux paints a similarly depressing picture. With the 10th Panzer now thrusting across its front on the general axis Herbeumont–Sedan, the 2nd D.L.C. had enjoyed a relatively calm morning, but that afternoon Lerecouvreux, back at divisional H.Q. well behind the Semois, was astonished to hear the sound of small-arms fire close at hand. He learned that the neighbouring divisions were already pulling back across the River Chiers in retreat. Hastily, divisional H.Q. was packed up, with the French artillery firing over its head. Lerecouvreux noted that some of the division ‘wept at having to leave entrenchments which they had built with their own hands, where they had hoped to halt the enemy and which now served no purpose’; nevertheless the cavalry, though fatigued after three days’ combat, withdrew in good order. But it was not so with all units; at Margut, a crossing point on the Chiers, ‘during the two days that had passed since the departure of the civil population, there had been many depredations and
pillages committed by the non-combatant troops, and the wine ran down into the gutter from barrels which had been smashed open’. There was much drunkenness, leading to a particularly disgraceful incident that night:

  … a soldier, manifestly drunk, approached a platoon of the 18th Chasseurs who were halting at Margut after the battle, before regaining their regrouping area, and without any motive killed an unfortunate Chasseur with a bullet square in the chest. Taking advantage of the general surprise, the murderer disappeared before he could be arrested.

  Lerecouvreux also mentions the rout of a battalion of colonial infantry that day.

  Guderian at Sedan

  For the retreating French, the halt on the line of the maisons fortes was far shorter than anticipated. By 1400 hours, tanks of the 1st Panzer, curling round behind the back of the 5th D.L.C. via Fleigneux and St Menges, forced it to abandon hope of standing there, and to fall back on the Sedan bridgehead. Relentlessly the Panzers pursued them. Although Gamelin’s orders were to hold the city of Sedan (the greater part of which lies on the Ardennes side of the Meuse) ‘at all costs’, within another four hours the cavalry had yielded it and retreated across the Meuse, leaving the Germans to occupy Sedan virtually unopposed. Well before dusk the forward tanks of the 1st Panzer were in the city. Sedan! The name that the visionary mind of Hitler had first spewed out, quite casually, the previous October; a small provincial French centre of some 13,000 inhabitants, a little less than that of Verdun in 1916, but what magical connotations it held for German minds! The birthplace of Turenne, a castigator of Teutons in a past era, in 1870 it had witnessed France’s great humiliation and the ascendant Prussia’s greatest triumph: the unconditional surrender of Emperor Napoleon III and 100,000 men to Moltke the Elder, a surrender that had forever altered the course of European history.

  Now Guderian’s advance guard entered a dead city. The streets were unnaturally empty and deserted. A few French stragglers, detached from the retreating cavalry, opened up desultory fire from rifle and machine-gun nests, but were rapidly silenced. As the German infantry and engineers groped their way towards the Meuse, heavy artillery fire descended on them from the other side of the river, and suddenly there was a tremendous roar as a bridge blew up. One after another the Sedan bridges erupted until not one was standing – although, in the heat of the moment, Paul Reynaud was later to claim that some had been left intact, by ‘treachery’.

  As night fell, the 1st Panzer had reached the glittering Meuse in force. General Kirchner, the divisional commander, set up his H.Q. just a mile or two north of Illy, the scene of the French General Gallifet’s last desperate cavalry charge in 1870, which had so excited the admiration and compassion of the watching King of Prussia. On the left, the 10th Panzer had also reached the Meuse in the area of Bazeilles, where another savage battle had been fought during the war of 1870. Only the 2nd, whose delays on the previous day had been compounded with a difficult crossing of the Semois, bad roads and more interference with its itinerary from other units, was still hanging badly behind – much to Guderian’s annoyance and concern.

  Reinhardt

  On Reinhardt’s XLI Corps sector, where the principal objective was Monthermé on the confluence of the Meuse and the Semois, the 6th and 8th Panzers were still making only slow progress. The reason for this was the continued confusion on their routes of advance; it was not only with Guderian’s 2nd Panzer that the traffic tangles had occurred, but also with elements of some of Rundstedt’s leading infantry divisions that were now beginning to press in from behind on to the already cluttered Ardennes road network. By the late afternoon of the 12th, the War Diary of the 6th Panzer admits that even radio communication could no longer provide any clear picture as to just where its various units had got to. Fortunately for Reinhardt, his straggling columns were again not attacked from the air, nor did they encounter any ground resistance that day. It was as if they were advancing into open air. The corp’s aerial reconnaissance that afternoon could find no enemy formations east of the Meuse, and the War Diary of the 6th tersely records the capture of ‘only one drunken French soldier’. By nightfall the advance formations of the 6th Panzer, accompanied by its commander, General Kempf, had crossed the French frontier north-east of Monthermé and stood almost on the edge of the Ardennes escarpment where it falls with dramatic suddenness down to the Meuse. But the continued, mystifying absence of the enemy was distinctly unnerving: ‘Either the French have taken leave of their senses,’ observed a Sergeant Sievert with a storm detachment of the 6th Panzer, ‘and really don’t know that we are just about to reach the Meuse – or they are preparing something particularly devilish for us.’

  Ninth Army: Cavalry Withdraws

  On the French side, however, the reason for this apparent vacuum was depressingly simple. Surprised to discover that, by the night of the 11th, the 3rd Spahi Brigade constituting the right wing of his cavalry screen had pulled back as far as Mézières on the wrong side of the Meuse, Corap had promptly ordered it to turn about and reoccupy its positions along the Semois. But, as already seen, events had moved far too quickly. Guderian’s Panzers had got across the Semois before the main body of the Spahis had even left Mézières on their return trip. Corap now realized that this flank of his cavalry was completely exposed; at the same time he had received an aerial reconnaissance report that morning which described a fifteen-mile-long enemy motorized column moving towards Marche, on the way to Dinant. A column this length could denote only one thing – a Panzer division.1 Concerned at the poor state of the defences covering Dinant, owing to the tardy approach march of his infantry, Corap had decided to order his entire cavalry screen to fall back and take up positions along the west side of the Meuse. By 1600 hours on the 12th the order had been carried out, and all Meuse bridges on the Ninth Army front, from Dinant to the River Bar, were destroyed.

  The French cavalry action was now over, having lasted just two and a half days, instead of the five upon which the French High Command had counted when it had calculated that the Germans could not possibly mount any crossing of the Meuse before the ninth day of the campaign. Despite the disarray into which the French cavalry units had been thrown, losses on both sides had been light.

  In the sector facing Reinhardt, Corap’s cavalry had disengaged themselves without hindrance. It was a different story, however, opposite Rommel’s fast-thrusting 7th Panzer, and it was here that the most significant and decisive event of 12 May occurred. Lieutenant Georges Kosak describes the withdrawal across the Meuse north of Dinant of his badly battered division, the 4th D.L.C.:

  Towards midday, groups of unsaddled horses returned, followed on foot by several wounded cavalrymen who had been bandaged as well as possible; others held themselves in the saddle by a miracle for the honour of being cavalrymen. The saddles and the harnesses were all covered with blood. Most of the animals limped; others, badly wounded, just got as far as us in order to die, at the end of their strength; others had to be shot to bring an end to their sufferings…

  Pursuing hotly behind them came Rommel. By 1130 hours his 25th Panzer Regiment under Colonel Rothenburg2 had captured Ciney and Leignon, just ten miles from Dinant. Although the narrow gorges from Ciney down to Dinant should have been easy to block and difficult to clear, by early afternoon the first German reconnaissance armoured cars were rolling down to the banks of the Meuse itself. Sitting in a pill-box that guarded the western end of the railway bridge at Houx3 (destroyed earlier that afternoon), Private Darche of the Chasseurs Ardennais heard the noise of their motors. It was about half past four. A few minutes later an enemy armoured car reached the other end of the bridge, little more than a hundred yards from Darche. He fired his anti-tank rifle at it, missing with his first shot, but stopping it dead with the second. Machine-gun fire from the pill-box also scattered some lorry-borne infantry imprudently debussing on the Meuse. Then Darche was killed by another armoured car firing shells straight into the gun embrasure. The survivors were forced to evacuate the pill
-box, but for the time being they had imposed greater wariness upon the approaching Germans.

  Rommel

  Rommel’s 7th Panzer, converted from a ‘light’ division, contained only one tank regiment instead of the two allotted to the standard Panzer divisions. Then, at midday on the 12th, he received a valuable reinforcement. This was Colonel Werner’s 31st Panzer Regiment, which belonged to the lagging 5th Panzer Division but which Hoth, the corps commander, now temporarily transferred to Rommel to back up the latter’s already encouraging success. Werner’s regiment was already well ahead of the rest of the division, and under Rommel’s guidance, after some sharp encounters with the rearguard of the French 4th D.L.C. near Ciney, it now surged down to the Meuse at Yvoir late that afternoon. The last French vehicles were just crossing the bridge, and Werner’s armoured cars immediately tried to rush the bridge before it was destroyed. In a bunker on the other side of the river a gallant Belgian sapper, Lieutenant de Wispelaere, pressed the demolition plunger. Nothing happened. One of the German armoured cars was already moving up the incline towards the bridge. Under heavy fire, an anti-tank gun under de Wispelaere’s command brought it to a halt, belching smoke, actually on the bridge itself. But its commander, clad in a black leather jacket, climbed out of the stricken vehicle and started running towards where the explosive charges were located, a large pair of pliers in his hand. He was felled by de Wispelaere’s group, while another shot from the anti-tank gun knocked out a second armoured car attempting to follow its precursor on to the bridge. With extreme courage, de Wispelaere now darted out into the open to ignite the demolition charges by hand, under heavy enemy fire. Miraculously he managed to light the fuse; but as he stood up to run for the shelter of the bunker, he was struck by a shell, and killed outright. Almost simultaneously the bridge erupted; according to a German account ‘a huge plume of flame leaped into the air. There was a crash like thunder. Bits of steel, stone blocks fly high into the air, and with them the two armoured cars…’ Now the last of the Meuse bridges was down. But was it the last?