To Lose a Battle

by Alistair Horne

  Just ahead of him, Rommel was shocked to see Rothenburg’s tank ‘with flames pouring out of the rear’.

  The adjutant of the Panzer Regiment had also left his tank. I thought at first that the command tank had been set alight by a hit in the petrol tank and was extremely worried for Colonel Rothenburg’s safety. However, it turned out to be only the smoke candles that had caught alight, the smoke from which now served us very well… It was only the involuntary smoke-screen laid by this tank that prevented the enemy from shooting up any more of our vehicles.

  Meanwhile, Rommel’s own armoured signals vehicle pushed into the wood where it too was immobilized with a shot in the engine. Rommel got away from the fracas, though his biographer, Desmond Young, claims that he narrowly escaped being captured by French native troops.2 He then ordered Stuka strikes to liquidate the troublesome French gun positions. Later his riflemen winkled out a courageous French gunner captain from the cellar of a half-destroyed house, where, ‘smoking cigarettes and drinking red wine, on a sofa’, he had remained to telephone observations to his battery as the German columns marched past his refuge. His capture did not immediately silence the French guns, but thenceforth their fire fell wildly all over the place. However, on account of the morning’s setback, it was not until evening that Rommel could lay hands on his vital assembly area at Onhaye.

  Onhaye: French Counter-attacks

  On the French side, there was more fatal procrastination in the dispatch of reserves to counter-attack Rommel’s bridgehead. The most powerful piece that General Georges could bring into play – in fact one of the most powerful pieces on the whole French chessboard – was the 1st Armoured Division. Originally earmarked by Gamelin to back up the Dyle Manoeuvre, on 11 May the 1st Armoured had been sent to Charleroi to be at the disposal of Blanchard’s First Army, with the specific object of covering the Gembloux Gap. Commanded by General Bruneau, the 1st Armoured contained only 150 tanks, compared with Rommel’s 228, but half of these were the excellent heavy ‘B’ model. On the other hand, it possessed no armoured liaison cars, it lacked signals units, and among the tanks which were equipped with radios it was found that the accumulators were inadequate to maintain transmission over any length of time. Fear of the Luftwaffe forced the division to make its approach march to Charleroi by night, which, in the short May nights, would have required four stages to cover 130 kilometres.3 Then, following the rapidity of the German progress, it was decided to reduce the stages to two, the second being carried out by daylight; finally, a third decision prescribed that Bruneau reach Charleroi in one hop. Much confusion resulted. In fact, German bombing of the railways delayed the division’s arrival by eighteen hours, and as soon as Bruneau had established his command post at Lambusart (near Charleroi) on the night of 12 May he received a request from the local corps commander to help him round up parachutists reported in his region. Wisely, Bruneau refused.

  All through the 13th the 1st Armoured remained inactive there, less than twenty-five miles from where Rommel’s bridgehead was developing. That day General Georges had promised it to Corap, but Billotte, alarmed by the course of the fierce tank battle in which Prioux’s Cavalry Corps had become engaged in front of the sensitive Gembloux Gap, and still disinclined to accept that the main German thrust was materializing in the south, continued to hesitate. Only at midnight on the 13th did Bruneau receive preliminary instructions preparing the 1st Armoured to strike south in order to aid General Martin’s XI Corps. Then another twelve hours were frittered away by muddled staff work, until, at 1300 hours on the 14th, it was ordered to move to the Florennes area just over twenty miles to the south. But ‘It took them a long time to reach their positions,’ wrote Colonel Bardies, ‘for the roads were cluttered with fleeing troops and civilians… It took the armoured division seven hours to cover those twenty miles. It was short of petrol. It would be unable to fight that day.’ One battalion lost its way, and it was not until after midnight that Bruneau had three battalions of tanks in the Florennes assembly area; meanwhile, mistakenly, he had relegated his petrol trucks to the rear of the divisional column, and thus it semed doubtful whether the 1st Armoured would even be in a fit state to attack early on the morning of the 15th.

  By this time, the whole picture would have altered radically. How different things might have been if it could have hit Rommel on the 13th, when only his infantry were across the Meuse, or even on the morning of the 14th when Rommel was still being vigorously resisted around Onhaye.

  The other major force at Corap’s immediate disposal for a counter-attack against Rommel was General Sancelme’s 4th North African Division, which had been standing by in reserve. A tough regular unit comprised of Zouaves and Algerian Tirailleurs – many of whose kinsmen would be fighting against France less than two decades later – and constituting the finest division4 in the Ninth Army, it should ideally have been employed in a forceful attack co-ordinated with the 1st Armoured. Corap, however, true to the 1918 doctrine of ‘containment’, immediately cast it in a defensive role, to hold the line at Onhaye. Fighting splendidly, it had been the Tirailleurs forming its advanced elements which had administered the check to Rommel here during the morning of the 14th, but the defensive tone of Corap’s order did not have an encouraging effect on the hard-pressed remnants of his 18th Division. The news from its left flank, opposite Rommel’s original crossing place at Houx, was particularly bad. Here the battalion of the 39th Regiment detailed off to attack Surinvaux Wood at dawn had stumbled into it too early during the night. At daybreak it was swiftly rounded up by the Germans, supported with tanks. Then, fighting gallantly, the remains of the 66th Regiment were submerged. After which, says General Doumenc,

  the whole line ebbed back and attempted, without much success, to anchor itself to the Anthée–Sosoye defence line. The Luftwaffe raged relentlessly around the sector; communications were cut, orders could not be passed; it became impossible to control the battle.

  Corap in Trouble

  Control was not aided by Corap’s own movements that day. Having found that his H.Q. at Vervins was too far from the battlefield to keep abreast of events, in the morning he had moved up to General Martin’s command post at Florennes and had then spent the rest of the day visiting the various divisional command posts. Liaison officers urgently requiring instructions for orienting the 1st Armoured and the 4th North African Divisions found it difficult to locate him. What Corap saw and learned that day depressed him in the extreme. In addition to Rommel’s bridgehead, a German infantry division was getting across the Meuse at Yvoir, to the north of Dinant. Worse still, another infantry division had partly overrun the southerly division (the 22nd) of General Martin’s corps, which was holding the line near Givet. As bad luck would have it, the divisional commander, General Hassler, had been injured in a car accident the previous month and did not return to his division until 15 May. Losing his head, Hassler’s Chief of Staff ordered the 22nd Division to abandon the strongpoint guarding Givet and fall back some six miles behind the river. Furious, Corap threatened him with a court martial and formally ordered him to counter-attack. But it was too late; as Colonel Goutard acidly comments, ‘Here was another division which disintegrated at the first blow.’

  Everywhere Corap found indications that morale was flagging, and especially among the ‘A’ reservists of the 18th Division which had so far absorbed the hardest blows from Rommel. Officers seemed to be giving up all too readily. To the Ninth Army at large he addressed an exhortatory signal with the following words:

  Some défaillances have occurred at certain points… At this moment, when the destiny of France is in the balance, no weakness will be tolerated. At all levels, leaders have the duty to set the example, and if necessary force obedience! Pitiless sanctions will fall upon any leaders who fail.

  By evening Rommel had succeeded in wresting Onhaye from the North Africans. Although they were still fighting back hard, at 1900 hours General Martin, concerned at the shaky position of both his 18th and 2
2nd Divisions and their poor state of morale, gave order for the whole corps to fall back behind a ‘barrier’ line running through Florennes. Moving up to the front that evening, the 13th Zouaves, the reserve regiment of the 4th North African Division, was astonished to pass Martin and his H.Q. heading in the opposite direction. The Zouaves had begun to move up from their positions on the Belgian frontier on 10 May, repeatedly attacked by German bombers and Stukas, and during the night of the 13th they had circuited the burning town of Philippeville. Now, still not having seen the enemy, they were ‘thrown into the ditches alongside the road, and remained there immobilized for more than three hours, watching without comprehension’, as the H.Q. of XI Corps, accompanied by a flotsam of fighting troops, withdrew through them. Hard upon its heels came Colonel Rothenburg’s Panzers, who by nightfall on the 14th had pushed down the Philippeville road as far as Anthée. Rommel’s bridgehead was now over seven miles deep – at a total cost of three officers, seven N.C.O.s and forty-one men killed that day. The tanks of both Rommel’s division and those of Colonel Werner’s from the 5th Panzer, which were still at his disposal, were flowing into the bridgehead with ever-increasing speed, despite Allied air attacks on the pontoons, and all was now set for the break-out phase. In this, Rommel was still one jump ahead of Guderian at Sedan.

  About the only comfort that Corap, the portly old colonial soldier, could find on his front that day was the continued resistance that the colonial machine-gunners of the 102nd Fortress Division were putting up at Monthermé. Here General Kempf’s 6th Panzer was not having an easy time. During the early hours of the morning, accurate French artillery fire had destroyed the footbridge made up of rubber dinghies. The riflemen clinging to the west bank of the Monthermé isthmus had been repeatedly counter-attacked, and were much hampered by the non-arrival of the divisional heavy artillery, still held up in the Ardennes traffic blocks. With heavy losses, Colonel von Ravenstein’s riflemen managed to push up on to Height 325 during the morning, but by midday Kempf was forced to tell his corps commander, Reinhardt, that he saw little prospect of any further progress that day. There was certainly no question of building a heavy pontoon bridge to get the tanks across. All through the day and the following night the French gunfire kept up. But the few heavy weapons available to the defenders were slow-firing, First War models of the ‘long’ 155, which with their flat trajectory had difficulty in hitting the Germans on the steep reverse slopes of the Monthermé isthmus. To help them, Corap sent up a group of sixty year old 220-mm. howitzers. At midnight these were found by the commander of the 42nd Half-Brigade abandoned on the road by their personnel, presumably after being attacked by the Luftwaffe. That same evening a solitary 47-mm. anti-tank gun was also sent up to Monthermé; according to General Menu, it too was discovered by the enemy the following day, abandoned by its crew without having fired a single shot.

  German Infantry Reach the Meuse

  Despite the continued agglomeration of traffic in the Ardennes, the first of Rundstedt’s infantry divisions, which were to play a vital role in ‘lining’ the corridor of the Panzer breakthrough, had now reached the Meuse. On the 14th, three of them established crossings on either side of Rommel’s bridgehead, while two divisions of General Haase’s III Corps,5 the 3rd and 23rd, fought their way down to the Meuse at Nouzonville, roughly midway between Monthermé and Charle-ville-Mézières. One of the subalterns of the 23rd Division was Axel von dem Bussche, a twenty-one-year-old regular who was later to become distinguished for his participation in various bomb plots against Hitler. So far, the march through the Ardennes had seemed like a jolly picnic, and, until the commanding officer had berated them for unmartial practices, his footsore men had taken to wheeling their weapons along in commandeered prams. Then, fighting his way down to the Meuse, von dem Bussche, his arm raised in the act of lobbing a grenade into a French position, saw a frightened Annamite face taking aim at close range. The bullet removed his right thumb, and for him the campaign was over.

  Lieutenant Karl-Heinz Mende of the Engineers had shared similar experiences of the campaign so far. Still not having seen a shot fired, he recalled how when passing a customs house on the French frontier that morning his men had acquired a rubber stamp marked ‘Douane Française, 9 Mai 1940’, which they adjusted to the right date, and frivolously stamped their letters home with it. One even tattooed his breast with it. There was an occasional sound of gunfire in the distance, but that was all. Then suddenly Mende’s unit was plunged into the inferno. In spite of repeated Stuka attacks on Nouzonville, the French 102nd Fortress Division fought back tenaciously from well-hidden positions, and it was only on the third attempt that his division got across the river. Later Mende wrote home describing this first confrontation with war in more pensive terms, which perhaps typified the emotions of many a young German during those days:

  We have it behind us… after everything that I have experienced I do not know whether I have become richer or poorer and whether the experience of such things is the true new value of this campaign. I only know one thing – and I have also found this conviction among brave comrades: the worst thing in battle is not the danger, which stands burning before one’s eyes; the worst feeling is nervousness about success.

  After the crossing had succeeded,

  I cannot say that we were worried or uncertain, we simply had no feeling left in us. That was the mood of the battle. And only, when in front of us an infantryman who was hit collapsed and a dead comrade lay nearby, did there awake a piece of the old feeling and we thought for one second how dangerous it all was and that we were after all human beings of flesh and blood.

  By the end of the 14th, however, it was not the crossings at Monthermé and Nouzonville that were most endangering Corap’s right flank, but the change in direction of Guderian’s thrust. To study this, one now has to return to the scene at Sedan.

  The French: a Mission of Sacrifice

  As an indication of just how well according to plan Sichelschnitt was going, the main directive contained in Guderian’s brief orders for the 14th read: ‘The divisions will capture their objectives according to the map exercise.’ By dawn a substantial number of the 1st Panzer’s tanks had already trundled across Lieutenant Grubnau’s bridge. The concentration of vehicles queueing up on the east bank was so enormous that it was quite impossible for anything to move in the opposite direction. Thus, noted Grubnau, the cloth factory from which the first crossings had been launched on the 13th had been transformed into a field hospital in which all the German wounded, plus two hundred French were being tended. The 1st Panzer tanks immediately headed towards Chéhéry (where Colonel Balck was sitting somewhat precariously) and Bulson. These happened to be the same axes along which General Lafontaine’s two counter-attacking groups, each consisting of an infantry group and a battalion of support tanks, were advancing. The first head-on collision between Guderian and the French armour was now imminent. But on top of all the delays of the previous night, the two groups still proved incapable of co-ordinating with one another. The right-hand group (comprised of the 4th Tank Battalion and the 205th Infantry Regiment of the 71st Division) were still not ready for action. So only the 7th Tanks and Lieutenant-Colonel Labarthe’s 213th Infantry Regiment went, piecemeal, into battle. Still complaining about the state of his regiment, Labarthe begged to be allowed to adopt a defensive position in the villages of Chémery and Maisoncelle. But he was overruled by Lafontaine (backed by Grandsard), and finally set forth at 0700 hours, muttering ‘C’est une mission de sacrifice!’ The 213th carried with it not one anti-tank weapon, artillery support was doubtful, and the 7th Tanks was equipped only with the light F.C.M. infantry model mounting an obsolete 37-mm. gun with little penetrating power. Nevertheless, the battle started well enough for the French armour. Near Chéhéry they came upon vehicles of the 1st Panzer that were refuelling and a savage encounter at short range ensued, in which the two leading German tanks were knocked out and the commander of the 1st Panzer Brigade, Colonel Ke
ltsch, severely wounded.

  Even the German accounts admit that this was an ugly moment for them, and it leads one to speculate what havoc the 4th and 7th Tanks might have inflicted on Balck’s soft-skinned infantry had they only been able to attack a few hours earlier. With that mixture of optimism and misinformation still prevalent in the French High Command, half an hour later General Georges was reporting to Gamelin that ‘the breach at Sedan has been contained and a counter-attack with strong formations was carried out at 4.30 a.m.’. Shortly afterwards, the tide of battle was already turning against 7th Tanks. With extreme courage, a nearby German Sturmpionier battalion flung itself on the French tanks, hurling hollow charges between the tracks and under the motors; during this attack the commander, Lieutenant-Colonel Mahler, lost his life. The French tanks seemed hesitant to press their advantage. As in the armoured battle in northern Belgium at Merdorp, they were seen to be manoeuvred slowly and clumsily by their commanders. While the few German anti-tank guns that had reached the battle-line (plus two ‘88s’) held the 7th Tanks at bay, with customary speed the 1st Panzer prepared a smashing counter-blow. Towards 0830 hours, a mass of Panzers struck in the area of Connage (midway between Chéhéry and Chémery), accounting for eleven out of the fifteen F.C.M.s. there. A similar fate overtook the French tank companies deployed on the dominating high ground at Bulson. Now it could be said with truth that ‘The Panzers are at Bulson’. The 7th Tanks reeled back, having lost more than half of their machines on much the same ground where the French cuirassiers had sacrificed themselves at the 1870 Battle of Sedan. German armour hooking left from Chémery then tore into the flank of the unprotected 213th Infantry Regiment. Its commander, the reluctant Labarthe, was wounded and taken prisoner, while the broken remnants of his regiment streamed back to the 55th Division’s second line of defence at Mont-Dieu.