To Lose a Battle

by Alistair Horne

  I consider the next two, three, or four days decisive for Paris and probably for the French Army. Therefore the question we must face is whether we can give further aid in fighters… I personally feel that we should send squadrons of fighters demanded (i.e. six more) tomorrow, and, concentrating all available French and British aviation, dominate the air above the Bulge for the next two or three days, not for any local purpose, but to give the last chance to the French Army to rally its bravery and strength. It would not be good historically if their requests were denied and their ruin resulted.

  Prophetic words!

  At about 2330 the reply came back – in one single word of Hindustani, ‘han’, or ‘yes’, via Ismay. The British Cabinet had agreed to the call for the six extra squadrons. Churchill immediately

  took Ismay off with me in a car to M. Reynaud’s flat. We found it more or less in darkness. After an interval M. Reynaud emerged from his bedroom in his dressing gown.

  A scene now ensued with Churchill putting on his most powerful histrionic performance in a deliberate attempt to inspirit his French colleague. It reminded Ismay of parents watching their children open presents; Churchill ‘was about to give Reynaud a pearl beyond price, and he wanted to watch his face when he received it’. He insisted on reading out with great emphasis the telegram he had sent to London. Reynaud thought it was ‘admirable’. Following this, says Churchill, ‘I told him the favourable news. Ten fighter squadrons! I then persuaded him to send for M. Daladier.’ This proposal, Ismay observed, did not greatly please Reynaud. But Daladier arrived; Churchill read through his telegram once again, and repeated the Cabinet’s response. ‘Daladier,’ Churchill continues, ‘never spoke a word. He rose slowly from his chair and wrung my hand.’ Churchill now launched into what Reynaud described as ‘a forthright harangue on carrying the war to the enemy’. One of the French eye-witnesses records Daladier as being ‘crushed, bowed down with grief; Reynaud silent and with his head erect, like some small broken piece of machinery’, while Churchill paced back and forth, exhorting them: ‘You must not lose heart! Did you ever suppose we should achieve victory except after dire set-backs?’ Warming to his subject with true Churchillian vehemence, he began to exert a potent charm over his important audience. ‘Crowned like a volcano by the smoke of his cigar,’ wrote Baudouin in his diary, Churchill declared

  that even if France was invaded and vanquished England would go on fighting… Until one in the morning he conjured up an apocalyptic vision of the war. He saw himself in the heart of Canada directing, over an England razed to the ground by high explosive bombs and over a France whose ruins were already cold, the air war of the New World against the Old dominated by Germany… Mr Churchill made a great impression on Paul Reynaud, and gave him confidence. He is the hero of the war to the end.

  Meanwhile that same evening the French radio was broadcasting a confident and assertive address by Reynaud, which revealed an almost excessive swing from his mood of the early morning. ‘The absurdest rumours have been put about,’ he assured the French public.

  It has been said that the Government intends to leave Paris: that is false. The Government is, and will remain, in Paris…

  It has been said that the enemy was in Rheims. It has even been said that he was in Meaux, whereas he has merely managed to form a broad pocket, south of the Meuse, that our gallant troops are striving to fill in.

  We filled in plenty in 1918, as those of you who fought in the last war will not have forgotten!

  In this new frame of mind, before the day was over Reynaud was also warning his colleagues that the Government might have to be prepared to go, at a moment’s notice, to North Africa, to continue the war from there.

  The Ten R.A.F. Squadrons

  Next morning Churchill flew back to England, feeling that perhaps he had managed to ‘revive the spirits of our French friends, as much as our limited means allowed’. But in fact what he, Dill and Ismay had seen and heard that day in Paris gave birth to an irremediable lack of confidence in the French High Command. From now on British policy assumed an increasingly sober view of the Battle of France. ‘Encouragement’ towards the French would go hand in hand with retrenchment at home; operations at Narvik (which were beginning to look most hopeful) would be suspended, so as to enable a build-up of the home forces; the Local Defence Volunteers would be formed to deal with German parachutists; and a sharp line would be drawn on the dispatch of any more fighter squadrons to France. As it was, after the atmosphere of jubilation which Churchill had deliberately fostered by the manner of his announcement, the facts about the six extra squadrons, promised to France were to come as a grave disappointment.

  During Churchill’s absence on the 16th, Air Chief Marshal Sir Hugh Dowding had followed up his stand of the previous day with an important and strongly worded official letter to the Air Ministry, reminding them ‘that the last estimate which they made as to the force necessary to defend this country was 52 squadrons, and my strength has now been reduced to the equivalent of 36 squadrons’. At the emergency Cabinet meeting summoned by Churchill from Paris that night, although Ironside had ‘recommended that we should send all we could – up to ten squadrons’, saying that ‘it was a battle that might lay France low and we must not stand out’, the Chief of the Air Staff, Sir Cyril Newall, had strongly backed Dowding. He finally produced a rabbit out of the hat in the form of a conversation with Barratt’s H.Q. in France, which had pointed out that their bases could, in any event, accommodate only three more squadrons. In view of the fact that the A.A.S.F. was being forced by the Panzers’ advance to abandon some of its fields that day, this was an argument difficult to refute. It was thus agreed that, as a compromise, the six additional Hurricane squadrons should be concentrated in the. south of England and should fly to France daily (three in the morning, and three relieving them in the afternoon) for operations over the battlefield. The British Official War History explains: ‘Thus the equivalent of ten extra squadrons for which the French had asked was operating from French or English bases by the 17th.’ But considering the short maximum range of the fighters of 1940 (300 miles for a Hurricane), this was by no means the same as what the French thought they had been promised on the night of 16 May; based on England, the Hurricanes certainly could not, as Churchill had envisaged, ‘dominate the air above the Bulge for the next two or three days’. In any case, such was the superiority now achieved by the Luftwaffe that a hundred-odd fighters could not possibly tip the balance. Moreover, as Churchill had pointedly remarked to the French, it was only on the ground that the Panzers could be stopped.

  Vincennes: ‘A Wind of Panic’

  How, after all the comings and goings of this eventful day, did Gamelin and Georges now propose to eliminate the ‘Bulge’?

  In the course of the important political happenings on the afternoon and evening of the 16th, more fragments of bad news had kept on arriving at Vincennes. Liaison officers brought with them depressingly uniform accounts of the ‘bad appearance’ of troops. Even in the suburbs of Paris, the bars and bistros, says Colonel Minart, were ‘filled with topers in uniform of all arms. Disorder, indiscipine reigns everywhere.’ In G.Q.G. itself, Minart records something like a ‘wind of panic’ blowing by the end of the day:

  Colonel Petitbon14 had sited in the court of the fort itself, pointed in the direction of the great south portal, a 75-mm. gun arrived from no one knows where, which would have been better used elsewhere. Secretaries were rapidly initiated in the service of this cannon.

  This order Minart considered as indicative of just how completely everybody had lost their heads. One staff officer had even ‘had his kit brought down to his office so that he could carry it away with greater ease in case of flight’. Meanwhile, Gamelin himself, ‘sad and unoccupied, inspiring a profound pity, came and went between his chief staff officers and his A.D.C.s, endeavouring to grasp at some intangible fetish. Nobody dares tackle him.’

  Nor, for that matter, was Gamelin yet prepared to
tackle General Georges and take control of operations out of his hands, despite his (ex post facto) grumblings at Georges’s handling of operations and the fact that one army commander (Corap), one corps commander (Martin), and three divisional commanders had already been (or, in Martin’s case, were about to be) sacked for their responsibility in the disaster on the Meuse. Meanwhile, by the end of the 16th, both Gamelin and Georges continued deluded as to the Germans’ strategic goal. Paris was now their overriding fixation. Yet at the same time fresh alarums from Switzerland combined with renewed hard fighting at Stonne still kept alive in the backs of their minds nagging fears for the safety of the Maginot Line, with the result that they could not quite bring themselves to deploy elsewhere all those idle reserves and interval troops guarding the Line. No serious thought was given to the possibility that Rundstedt might be heading for the Channel coast with the aim of encircling and annihilating the Allied armies now in northern Belgium.

  From General Georges’s North-East Command, two important orders went out during the 16th. The first, ‘General Order No. 14’, specifically referring to the enemy thrust ‘in the general direction Givet-Paris’, decreed that Billotte’s armies were to ‘make every effort to re-establish themselves’ along the line running from Antwerp through Charleroi, Anor,’15 Liart, Signy-l’Abbaye and Omont to the anchor position at Inor. But this meant that the armies in northern Belgium were to continue to hold the Germans frontally, regardless of any possible threat to flank – or rear – while the line from Liart to Omont had already been broken through the previous evening. The order then prescribed that, in the event of it proving impossible to re-establish the ‘continuity’ of this front, the French forces were to ‘oppose any lateral extension of the enemy by holding all the passages over the Aisne and the Oise, as far as their confluence’. Georges’s ‘Special Order 93’, however, called for ‘a counter-attack by tanks’ on the morning of the 17th aimed at ‘cleaning up’ the whole area between Hirson–Liart and Château Porcien on the Aisne. The attack was to be conducted by Giraud, using the 1st and 2nd Armoured Divisions with reinforcements from the 1st Light Mechanized and the 9th Motorized Divisions, which had belonged to his old Seventh Army. From the south, General Touchon was to attack with the ‘de Gaulle group’, about which more remains to be said later. Was this, then, to be the concentrated action against both flanks of the ‘Bulge’ which Churchill had urged? Alas, no. Georges was totally misinformed as to the true state of the units designated to take part. The 1st Armoured had lost most of its tanks, while the 2nd was split in two and dispersed, and de Gaulle’s group was literally being assembled that very night under the fanciful title of the ‘4th Armoured Division’. Furthermore, as far as the 2nd Armoured was concerned, Georges’s instructions were mutually contradictory in exactly the same sense as Flavigny’s handling of the 3rd Armoured on its arrival south of Sedan: on one hand, it was expected to launch a counter-attack; on the other hand, its scattered tanks were being called upon to ‘cork up’ the various river crossings along the River Oise. Once again, as events would swiftly prove, France’s waning armoured strength was about to be thrown away in penny packets.

  At the Front: Stonne Again

  On Guderian’s front, the fighting at Stonne continued to seesaw back and forth fiercely throughout the 16th. During the night of the 15th–16th, a fresh local attack mounted by General Flavigny succeeded in pushing two companies of ‘B’ tanks into the village, where they destroyed some dozen German tanks. But as so often before, infantry and tanks were poorly co-ordinated, so that by midday the occupying French infantry were once again pushed out of Stonne by German counter-attacks. That day the battered Grossdeutschland Regiment pulled out of the line for its well-earned rest,16 to be replaced by the first of the infantry divisions hastening up by forced marches in Guderian’s wake. On the way, they encountered scenes of destruction caused by accurate French artillery fire such as were seldom to be seen elsewhere behind the German lines during the whole campaign:

  shell-hole upon shell-hole, shot-up tanks, motor-cycles; in one vehicle… the driver is still sitting at the wheel, half his skull torn away, a terrible sight.

  Huntziger’s men swiftly noticed the difference between the second-line German relief troops and the magnificent élite that had stormed Sedan. ‘The prisoners,’ says Ruby, ‘are sorry specimens.’ One letter found on a young officer revealed: ‘Our losses are very heavy… the French artillery decimates entire companies. We are fed up with this.’ But still the French could make no perceptible headway. ‘The fighting,’ Colonel Ruby tells us, ‘took the form of a war of position.’ From the French point of view, at Stonne this was quite the wrong ‘form’; yet now, in what was still the most sensitive part of the German front, Huntziger no longer had the armoured striking power for a serious counter-stroke. At this point, Huntziger and his Second Army are left behind by the rapidly flowing tide of battle and assume but a minor role in this story; Huntziger, now ensconced with his H.Q. in one of the sinister forts at Verdun, reappears only to place his name on the document of capitulation which had had its beginnings at Sedan.

  Guderian Breaks Through

  To the north-west of the static battlefield around Stonne, the right-wheel of the 1st and 2nd Panzers moved into top gear on the 16th. Guderian, now restored his ‘freedom of movement’ by Kleist, was himself riding up with the leading tank company in a signals half-track, repeatedly intervening in the conduct of the advance. Although Luftwaffe reconnaissance could provide no clear-cut picture of the situation to the west, it was rapidly becoming clear to the men with the armoured spearhead that there was no longer any defending force worthy of the name ahead of them. ‘One had the impression,’ wrote Captain Kielmansegg, with the staff of the 1st Panzer, ‘as if he [the enemy] were staring half-paralysed, half-hypnotized at the original breakthrough area at Sedan.’ Driving up from Sedan, Kielmansegg noted that, as far as Bouvellemont, where Balck had fought so hard an engagement against de Lattre’s men the previous day,

  there was not a place that was not either shot to pieces or burnt, in which only a few houses could offer a possibility of accommodation. The smell of burning lay everywhere in the air, and in many places the flames had still not been extinguished. Then suddenly all this ceases. There is neither any sign of the enemy nor of our own troops anywhere. A wonderful spring morning… which is not characterized by fliers in the sky but by singing birds… In this peaceful landscape, human beings were absent. Everything is dead and empty, not even the old people have remained… the second thing that I remember is the bellowing cattle in the fields and in the cowsheds.

  The troops were ordered to milk the swollen udders of the cows whenever possible, but ‘by now the speed of the campaign seldom made this possible’.

  ‘We were in the open now’, wrote Guderian, and the realization acted like the most potent of stimulants on his jaded troops. Driving through to Montcornet that day,

  I passed an advancing column of the 1st Panzer Division. The men were wide awake now and aware that we had achieved a complete victory, a break through. They cheered and shouted remarks which often could only be heard by the staff officers in the second car: ‘Well done, old boy’, and ‘There’s our old man’, and ‘Did you see him? That was hurrying Heinz’, and so on. All this was indicative.

  In the market-place of Montcornet, Guderian found General Kempf of the 6th Panzer, which had captured it the previous night. With three Panzer divisions now pouring through this one centre and no boundaries laid down by Kleist, it was imperative to allot new routes to the various divisions. Guderian and Kempf settled these between themselves and then ‘ordered the advance to go on until the last drop of petrol was used up’. By the end of the day, the leading elements of Guderian’s corps had reached Marle and Dercy on the River Serre, over forty miles from that morning’s starting point and fifty-five miles from Sedan. Corps H.Q. was established at Soize, just east of Montcornet. To the north, Kempf, after capturing Vervins – the
former site of Corap’s Army H.Q. – had pushed his reconnaissance units as far forward as Guise on the Oise. (Meanwhile, back on the Meuse, the 3rd Infantry Division, after a hard fight, had just completed its bridge at Nouzonville, thereby enabling Reinhardt’s other Panzer division, the 8th, to get its tanks across the river, which it hitherto had been unable to do. Fresh, and having suffered negligible losses, it now sped forward to catch up with its sister division.) Behind Guderian’s and Reinhardt’s Panzer divisions there was, however, so the Official History of the 1st Panzer tells us,

  hardly a single German soldier to be found, except for a few supply services, up to 25 to 30 miles behind the 1st and 2nd Panzer Divisions. Munitions and petrol were brought up over a single very thin, almost unprotected supply road. They were also, however, tanked up from petrol dumps and public petrol stations captured from the French.

  By the night of the 16th, the foremost infantry divisions were only just reaching the Sedan area. Here was a situation to alarm sober minds back at Armoured Group H.Q. and beyond – though not the impetuous Guderian.

  During the 16th, offensive actions against Kleist’s advancing Armoured Group by French formations, disorganized as they now were, amounted to almost nil. After several days of rest behind the Maginot Line at Longwy, the 3rd Light Cavalry Division had returned to the front via Rheims and was under orders to join in de Gaulle’s thrust into the southern flank of the ‘Bulge’ which Georges had ordered for the 17th. On the 16th the divisional commander, General Petiet, decided to send a reconnaissance in force towards Montcornet. On reaching Dizy-le-Gros, some five miles short of Montcornet, it ran into the 2nd Panzer and was badly battered late that afternoon. The cavalry force was dispersed and did not rejoin the division until two weeks later, while only two and a half platoons of motor-cyclists and armoured cars were able to disengage themselves. Guderian, in Montcornet at the time, speaks of an entire tank company taken prisoner, which he mistakenly states belonged to General de Gaulle’s division’.17 Meanwhile, a battalion of dragoons in Hotchkiss medium tanks, dispatched by Petiet to take up a defensive position near Sissonne, encountered no Panzers, but was almost overwhelmed by an unstoppable flood of fugitives from broken French units. Another battalion of dragoons was ordered to occupy the village of Liesse and make contact with de Gaulle’s force, supposedly concentrating in the Forest of Samoussy, just east of Laon. It arrived in Liesse just as the curé, ‘a big old man with an energetic expression and a moustache cut sharply above his upper lip, locked up his church and pulled out’. At about 1900’ hours the dragoons met a solitary tank belonging to de Gaulle. Three hours later machine-gun fire was heard, indicating that the Panzers were already close.