To Lose a Battle

by Alistair Horne

  By nightfall this division consisted of nothing but fragments, straggling back over the frontier. Thus General Martin’s XI Corps had all but vanished. Nevertheless, he was ordered by Corap to ‘do everything possible to halt the enemy on the frontier line’. It was an impossible demand. As General Martin notes, ‘the first task was to get the engineers to open the doors of the bunkers!’ But the keys to the bunkers, locked up when the Ninth Army moved forward on the 10th, had disappeared – either with units that had been dispatched elsewhere, or on the persons of local mayors who had themselves taken off among the growing stream of refugees.

  To the north the 5th Motorized Division covering Yvoir, though not heavily engaged that day, was also forced to withdraw in mounting disorder after its flank had been exposed by the breaking-up of XI Corps. In Corap’s northern sector there thus remained only General Sancelme’s 4th North African Division, and the fate of this fine unit on the 15th was particularly poignant. After its admirable defence against Rommel at Anthée on the 14th, the division had been pulled back to hold the Hemptinne–Philippeville line. But deprived of artillery support – since Sancelme, like Bruneau, had sent his guns to the rear – it had been unable to assume a proper defensive position before being sliced up by Rommel in his drive around the flank of the 1st Armoured. The experience of Lieutenant Édouard Leng, a reservist officer of the 13th Zouaves, pushed off the roads by the retreat of General Martin’s H.Q. the previous day, was perhaps typical:

  From the early hours of the morning, I fought on the Vodeceée crossroads and at Villers-le-Gambon, enduring fire from German tanks and Stukas, and finding myself almost without contact with the other elements of the division. Towards 1830 hours, we received the order to withdraw in the direction of Philippeville… Closely pursued by the enemy in the course of this movement, sustaining losses in both men and weapons (which were almost out of ammunition), with two other officers and a group of our men I ran into a score of German tanks at Vachefontaine, about one kilometre south-east of Philippeville… We were encircled, and any resistance became useless.

  Other tanks of the 7th Panzer overran the H.Q. of the 25th Algerian Tirailleurs at Philippeville itself, and an hour later reached the divisional command post at Neuville, from which General Sancelme only narrowly escaped behind a barricade of anti-tank guns. Cut off from his regiments, that afternoon he dispatched three separate liaison teams to Martin’s H.Q. But none returned. By the end of the 15th, the 4th North African, like the 1st Armoured, was no longer an effective fighting force.

  Havoc at Monthermé

  Further south on XLI Corps front, the break-up of Corap’s army proceeded with even more dramatic switfness. Here the repercussions of Corap’s order to withdraw behind the line Rocroi–Signy-l’Abbaye proved particularly disastrous, for the 102nd Division, whose colonial machine-gunners from Indo-China and Madagascar had so valiantly been holding Reinhardt at bay in the Monthermé peninsula during the past two days, was a fortress unit devoid of transport, while the 61st Division to the north had insufficient vehicles, and these were not close enough at hand for a quick get-away. During the small hours of the 15th at Monthermé, German engineers equipped with flame-throwers and riflemen of the 6th Panzer crept up to within a few yards of the bunkers held by a gallant colonial rearguard. At 0330 hours they attacked under a powerful artillery barrage. While it was still dark the Germans were through the first defences, and by 0830 they had captured the French reserve positions. Immediately the hitherto stymied tanks of the 6th Panzer began to swarm across the Meuse at Monthermé. At this moment a French truck loaded with a thousand desperately needed anti-tank mines arrived at the front, tragically late. With considerable courage the driver persisted in trying to push through to his destination, but was caught by tanks ‘which opened fire and the truck blew up with a formidable explosion’. Upstream from Monthermé, the German 3rd and 23rd Infantry Divisions completed their river crossings and began erecting bridges to get Reinhardt’s other Panzer division, the 8th, across the Meuse.

  Now Reinhardt more than made up for the time he had lost on the previous four days of crawling through the Ardennes and battling his way into the Monthermé peninsula. The transport-less 102nd Fortress Division, forced to abandon all its guns and even its machine-guns, was overtaken and rounded up with incredible speed. Rushing out from the Monthermé bridgehead, the motor-cyclists of the 6th Panzer roared past

  a French munitions dump, and past numerous guns which stand abandoned on the road. The enemy has had no time in which to take them with him in his flight. Also in the wood to the right a battery all ready to fire has been abandoned. It must have been completely surprised… Near the leading group, a few carbine shots ring out. Then the enemy soon comes out with raised hands from the bushes. Some thirty men were there, and four Negroes. They are muddy and unshaven, and their eyes are full of fear.

  On reaching Arreux, some six miles from Monthermé,

  Frenchmen come out from cellars and surrender of their own accord… In Renwez it is the same story. The French give themselves up without having fired a single shot.

  On the left of the 6th Panzer, motorized infantry occupied the sprawling twin cities of Charleville–Mézières. Karl von Stackelberg, a war diarist travelling with them, noted that ‘the shops were closed and barred, the houses locked up. All the inhabitants had flown, and we moved through lonely and dead quiet streets.’ Later he was astonished to meet a French column marching in the opposite direction, in perfect order, headed by a captain:

  They had, however, no weapons and did not keep their heads up… They were marching willingly without any guard into imprisonment. Behind this first company which I saw followed new groups, ever new groups… There were finally 20,000 men, who here in the sector of our corps, in this one sector and on this one day, were heading backwards as prisoners. Unwillingly one had to think of Poland, and the scenes there. It was inexplicable. How was it possible, that after this first major battle on French territory, after this victory on the Meuse, this gigantic consequence should follow? How was it possible, these French soldiers with their officers, so completely downcast, so completely demoralized, would allow themselves to go more or less voluntarily into imprisonment?

  Everywhere on the far side of the Meuse where Reinhardt’s Panzers had passed, Stackelberg encountered the same indescribable havoc:

  All along the side of the road lay dead horses, abandoned baggage waggons, from which the cases had tumbled down, their contents strewn about the ground, rifles thrown away, steel helmets, saddles and all kinds of other equipment. I saw dead Frenchmen lying in the ditches. I saw abandoned guns, riderless horses roaming about, and often this scene escalated to regular barricades compounded of vehicles, guns and dead horses that had all been shot up together.

  Reaching the small village of Brunehamel, close to where the command post of the French corps commander, General Libaud, had been that morning, Stackelberg found more barricades manned by dead Frenchmen and a deathly silence broken only by the crackling of flames. In the middle of a street a horse with crazy eyes stood unmoving; as Stackelberg approached it, it suddenly collapsed and died. In another village he came upon two German soldiers playing that old hit of the Phoney War, ‘We’ll Hang Out Our Washing on the Siegfried Line’, on a ‘liberated’ gramophone. As the tinny music blared out, a tearful French colonel watched the forlorn columns of prisoners file past. Interrogated by Stackelberg, they expressed hopeless amazement at the speed with which the Panzers had overrun them.

  By 1100 hours, the commander of the 42nd Half-Brigade which had defended Monthermé was captured; of its right-hand neighbour, the 52nd Half-Brigade, only ten officers and 500 men remained from its established strength of seventy and 2,600 respectively. The following day, the divisional commander, General Portzer himself, was rounded up, and the total strength of the division then numbered no more than 1,200. This marked the end of the 102nd as a fighting force.

  The fate of the 61st Division, which
had not been subjected to any serious frontal assault, was still less distinguished. Outflanked, its ‘soft’ transport was overhauled by Reinhardt’s racing Panzers in the kind of action tankmen dream about. On one road near Brunehamel alone, four tanks ran up and down a column of forty French vehicles, shooting them up. A hundred men surrendered. Just as the Germans were beginning to run short of ammunition, another column of seventy-five vehicles was sighted and duly destroyed. When joined by the main force the following day, the four tanks and their crews numbering thirteen had, between them, accounted for five hundred prisoners and several hundred vehicles. Under this kind of treatment, the 61st, another ‘B’ division, broke up like its sisters at Sedan. Its commander, General Vauthier, reported sadly to Ninth Army H.Q. the following day that there was only himself left, though in fact during the course of the 16th some seven to eight hundred men straggled back, with three light machine-guns between them, while other survivors of the 61st were picked up as far away as Compiègne over the succeeding days. By the end of the 15th, it could be said that Corap’s XLI Corps had also ceased to exist.

  In the heady spring sunshine, the extraordinary scenes on every side of a disintegrating enemy began to induce an entirely new mood in the German troops. Rapidly vanishing was the nervous apprehension of the legendary furia francese, of the insuperable victors of 1918; its place was taken by a kind of intoxication, the light-heartedness of the excursion, that swept the Panzers on at an increasingly reckless speed. ‘A perfect road stretches before us,’ wrote a member of the 6th Panzer, ‘and no enemy fliers over us. The air is completely dominated by our own fliers. A wonderful feeling of unconditional superiority. We rush on at 50 m.p.h. to Montcornet on the Serre. In front of the town there is a short collision with a French company, who give themselves up almost without fighting.’ Against somewhat stronger opposition, Montcornet itself was captured by nightfall. Since the morning, Reinhardt’s Panzers had covered thirty-seven miles from the Meuse, bringing them to within a bare half-hour’s drive of the H.Q. of Ninth Army itself, at Vervins to the north-west. It was by far the most outstanding advance made by the Germans so far, and even Reinhardt seems to have been taken by surprise. At midnight he ordered the 6th to halt at Liart – seventeen miles east of the point they had already reached that evening. Corap’s ‘intermediate line’ had been smashed wide open, from top to bottom.

  Back to Sedan: the Battle for Stonne

  But Reinhardt would not have had his lucky break had it not been for the earlier successes, on either side, of Rommel and particularly Guderian. One now returns to Sedan, still the key sector. On the morning of the 15th, two separate battles confronted Guderian: an offensive, break-out battle to be fought by the 1st and 2nd Panzers westwards from Singly–Bouvellemont and a dynamic defensive battle by the Grossdeutschland Regiment (principally) facing southwards at Stonne.

  All through the night of the 14th–15th, General Georges had chafed at the way Huntziger was employing the 3rd Armoured Division which had been rushed up to help him. At 0600 he telephoned Second Army to confirm his order of the previous night, calling for a vigorous counter-attack, and added: ‘Its execution is rendered even more indispensable by the situation of the Army on your left’ (i.e. Corap). Passing these instructions on to General Flavigny, Huntziger (though by now he would have been much happier to remain on the defensive) called for a ‘tank-supported’ attack on the Bulson–Sedan axis. At 1130 hours (note the further loss of time), Flavigny ordered the 3rd Armoured and 3rd Motorized Divisions to attack at 1500 hours. They would move in three systematic bounds: the first taking them to the line Chémery–Maisoncelle–Raucourt, the second to the heights south of Bulson, and the third back on to the La Marfée–Pont Maugis position commanding the Meuse. It was to be carried out along the methodical, classical lines of an ‘infantry backed by tanks’ operation such as had been taught at the Ecole Militaire ever since 1918. No initiative was allowed to the executants, and typically the whole operation was placed under the command of an infantryman – Bertin-Boussu of the 3rd Motorized rather than Brocard of 3rd Armoured.7 Meanwhile, the 3rd Armoured, deployed to form ‘corks’ the previous evening, had become dispersed over a wide area on both sides of the Ardennes Canal. It was additionally suffering from an unusual number of technical breakdowns, which perhaps reflected both the newness of its equipment and the inexperience of its crews. By 1430 hours Brocard was telling Flavigny that he could not get his ‘B’ tanks into position in time. The attack was consequently postponed until 1730 hours. It was the same old story that had bedevilled all the French counter-strokes to date.

  True to its training, the Grossdeutschland did not just sit still and wait to be attacked by the French. Early in the morning it was pushing forward up on to the high ground on both sides of Stonne, with orders to establish its defence line around this key village. This unexpected movement further helped throw Flavigny off balance, and he was forced to commit piecemeal in the defence of Stonne some of the tanks and infantry that were being husbanded for the afternoon’s set-piece attack.

  Stonne sits on a steep hill, surrounded by undulating country on which thick woods and scrub alternate with small patches of open moorland. Seen from a distance, in May 1940 its clustered houses gave the impression of an impregnably fortified hill-town from the Middle Ages. Possession of it would provide an attacker with an indispensable point of departure, while for a defender it constituted a secure position from which he would be hard to dislodge. All through the 15th the battle swayed back and forth at Stonne in some of the most violent fighting yet seen on the Sedan front, with the village itself changing hands several times in the burning May heat.

  Moving up with the 10th Panzer, one company commander related to his tank crews how his grandfather had died at Sedan with Moltke in 1871, while his father had been killed fighting in the same area in the First War. He added: ‘And if I die that is the end of a military clan.’ Near Raucourt his tank ran into French anti-tank guns. Commanding from an open turret, he brought his gun to bear, but was evidently beaten to it by a French weapon. His tank halted, and one of his men found him being supported by his crew, his head smashed by the French shell. The tragic saga had been completed. But with the 10th Panzer’s tanks still only partly deployed across the Meuse, for the Germans it was essentially an infantryman’s day at Stonne, and the Grossdeutschland was by no means having an easy time of it. Towards midday, General Schaal of the 10th Panzer received from it ‘alarming reports’ of French tank attacks.

  It was very largely thanks to the impressive celerity with which the Grossdeutschland was able to deploy its anti-tank guns (once more an attribute of the excellence of Wehrmacht training, at its best, in 1940) that the regiment was not overrun at Stonne on the 15th. Lieutenant Beck-Broichsitter, commanding the 14th Anti-Tank Company, gives a vivid description of the fighting that day. Moving into the village after a Stuka attack,

  we find abandoned houses, overgrown gardens, romantic old springs… a high water-tower standing apart from the rows of houses dominates every place in the village. We go along the village streets. Grenadiers of all companies are running about independently. They have no orders. A shot-up German tank lies in a ditch. An officer and a sergeant are standing with pistols nearby. One of the tank crew lies in a dusty black uniform nearby on the grass, dead. His face is yellow. From the water-tower there comes rifle fire! A cloud of dust rises from the road. A French tank comes towards us. We spring behind a house; it thunders past very close… The edge of the village comes under machine-gun fire from the water-tower. Hidden guns are firing often unsuspected from the wooded hill behind us – it’s a completely confused situation!

  After the company had brought up three of its light 37-mm. anti-tank guns, six French tanks appeared and a bitter duel ensued. Several of the tanks were knocked out, but one of their shells lodged in a wall close to where Beck-Broichsitter was standing:

  the shots come gradually closer; single French tanks are bringing fresh infan
try. In the gardens their strength is difficult to estimate. The situation is becoming critical, the fighting will of the soldiers is slackening in the heavy fire. All are at the end of their strength, because of the fighting since 10 May.

  The German fire begins to slacken off. After a fresh French attack from the water-tower, more tanks appear from a different direction.

  The situation is very serious [continues Beck-Broichsitter]. The other anti-tank section have their hands fully occupied with the enemy on their front. How are we going to stop these new attacking tanks? The fire gets even heavier, everything seems to be burning! On the street lie our dead, and more and more wounded disappear to the rear!…

  About ten French tanks roll in on a wide front. At some 25 m.p.h., the drivers swing their vehicles about, and then fire. They are firing from the water-tower, the three guns are hit in the middle of the road; immediately there are wounded, but the section holds! The duel begins! In an hour-long running battle, Hindelang’s section stops with their fire the attacking infantry as well as the flank fire from the water-tower and also from the wooded hill. The fight for the village slackens. Against the tough French attacks some of our rifle companies gradually crumple away. Self-propelled guns help again and again… four heavy infantry guns are brought into open positions, and fire with 15-cm. shells on the water-tower. But it does not budge. The losses are getting greater. Some of the anti-tank guns are shot full of holes. They carry on shooting.

  Beck-Broichsitter’s guns now come under fire from three of the 3rd Armoured Division’s 32-ton ‘B’ tanks:

  at 100 metres, one of them shoots up the gun; then it machine-guns the wreckage. The commander is wounded – it is Sergeant Kramer, his gun layer is badly wounded, the other dead. Kramer, himself wounded, crawls under machine-gun fire to the gun layer and drags him with unspeakable difficulty into a house.