One of Rommel’s Panzer commanders recalled simply shouting, loudly and impudently, at the French troop columns to throw away their weapons: ‘Many willingly follow this command, others are surprised, but nowhere is there any sign of resistance.’ Several times his tank men were questioned, hopefully, ‘Anglais?’ There was evidently one rare, recalcitrant exception, who brought out the ruthless streak in Rommel – a French lieutenant-colonel overtaken by Rommel as his staff car was trapped in the road jam. On being asked by him for his rank and appointment, ‘His eyes glowed hate and impotent fury and he gave the impression of being a thoroughly fanatical type.’ Rothenburg signalled to him to get in his tank. ‘But he curtly refused to come with us, so, after summoning him three times to get in, there was nothing for it but to shoot him.’
Through Landrecies and across the Sambre via an undamaged bridge, the Panzer spearhead drove into a barrack full of troops. After a tank there had been swiftly destroyed, Lieutenant Hanke ordered the officers to have all their troops paraded and marched off eastwards. Almost out of ammunition and petrol, Rommel finally halted his column on a hill just east of Le Cateau, and nineteen miles on from Avesnes. It was now 0515 on the 17th. Though his tank crews were utterly exhausted, Rommel himself immediately hastened back to bring up the rest of the division.
End of the Ninth Army
Since the previous morning, Rommel had advanced nearly fifty miles. By all the existing canons of warfare, the way he had driven this thin finger, perhaps less than a mile wide, deep into the French lines by night seemed almost an act of recklessness. But its effect on an already demoralized enemy was quite devastating. Over the two days of the 16th and 17th, Rommel’s own casualties amounted to one officer and less than forty men and N.C.O.s, while some 10,000 enemy prisoners were counted and a hundred tanks knocked out or captured. The wider consequences of the ‘Avesnes Raid’ were even more significant; by seizing their starting-off points, it shattered what little prospects there were for the counter-strokes on the northern flank of the ‘Bulge’ scheduled to take place on the 17th, and, by capturing the bridge at Landrecies, it breached the Sambre–Oise line which Georges in his Order No. 14 had been determined to hold come what may. Finally, it virtually administered the coup de grâce to the Ninth Army. The fate of II Corps and its solitary division, the 5th Motorized, was a case in point. On the left wing of the Ninth Army, this formation had played only a marginal part in the battle so far. During the afternoon of the 16th, General Bouffet (the corps commander) ordered Boucher (commanding the 5th) to withdraw on Avesnes that night. Almost immediately afterwards a violent air attack wiped out II Corps H.Q., killing Bouffet and nearly all his staff. Shaken, the 5th Motorized began to withdraw in some confusion. Then, on reaching Avesnes, it was stopped dead by Rommel. Panic sown by fear-ridden fugitives spread like fire in the dark. In the vivid words of General Doumenc, out of the ensuing chaos the division emerged ‘volatilized’. Gone was the last of the divisions originally under Corap’s command.
As Victor Hugo wrote of Waterloo, ‘There faded away this noise which was a great army.’
Chapter 16
The Panzers Halt
17 May
We can always recover ground, but never lost time.
FIELD-MARSHAL GRAF VON GNEISENAU
… the spokesman of the French Ministry of Information, referring to reports of a penetration of the French lines by German armoured columns, said that ‘a marked improvement’ had taken place in the situation.
He described the penetration of the German armoured columns as being ‘in a long straight line,’ and said that some short lapse of time had been necessary before measures were taken to deal with this armoured column, owing to the necessity of collating reports of its progress to enable the Allies to make the counter-blow as hard as possible.
The Times, 17 May
There is no ground for a suggestion that the French Army showed itself ‘overwhelmed’ by the striking force of the German armoured divisions and bombers [at Sedan]. It is true that they lost ground in several places and had their line of advance ruptured; but that is only the inevitable outcome of the advantage the attacker has in choosing his point of attack. The French General Staff were prepared for such a temporary reverse; and more are bound to occur before the Allies succeed in stabilising the front.
Manchester Guardian, 17 May
All Quiet on the Kurfürstendamm
Inside Germany, the tremendous developments of the first week of the campaign had aroused astonishingly little excitement. True, as part of the German deception campaign, the full scope and direction of the breakthrough had been extensively played down. Not until 15 May did the Wehrmacht communiqué even mention that the Meuse had been crossed at Sedan, and then it was subordinated to news about the capitulation of Holland. That same evening German radio commentators also dwelt at length on the glories of the Dutch surrender, adding almost en passant that ‘the crossing of the Meuse south of Namur… offers the best prospects of threatening the fortress of Namur from the flank and of taking the northern sector of the Dyle Line from the rear’. Nevertheless, announcements of such triumphs as the conquest of Holland, the capture of Liège and the seizure of Fort Eben Emael were given tremendous emphasis – interpolated with loud fanfares and occasional bursts from the Deutschlandlied, or ‘We Sail Against England’ – and it was quite clear from the occasional hints dropped by Berlin officialdom that other startling successes were being scored at the front.
Yet by comparison with the electric days of August 1914, the lack of enthusiasm among the German public amounted almost to apathy. On 10 May, housewives gave the appearance of being principally concerned with laying in provisions for the Whitsun holiday. William Shirer, sensitive as always to the prevailing temper of the Berliners, noted how few even ‘bothered to buy the noon papers which carried the news’ that day. Two days later he recorded: ‘A typical Sunday in Berlin to-day, with no evidence that the Berliners, at least, are greatly exercised at the battle for their thousand-year existence’. As a modest air-raid precaution, cafés were closed at 11 p.m. instead of 1 a.m., and dancing was verboten for the time being. The next day, Shirer’s diary begins to reveal a sense of astonishment at the speed of events:
May 13. Astounding news… No wonder a German officer told me to-day that even the Oberkommando was a little taken aback by the pace…
May 14. We’re all a little dazed to-night by the news. The Dutch Army has capitulated – after only five days of fighting. What happened to its great water lines…?
May 15. Very long, stunned faces among the foreign correspondents and diplomats to-day. The High Command claims to have broken through the Maginot Line near Sedan… it seems almost incredible…
May 17. What a day! What news!… I would not have believed it except that the German land army has seldom misled us… At the Rundfunk to-night I noticed the military people for the first time spoke of a ‘French rout’…
But still the window-shoppers on the Kurfürstendamm, the strollers peacefully enjoying spring in the Tiergarten, continued to betray no visible excitement.
Hitler Nervous: Halder Confident
It was quite otherwise within the various headquarters of the German High Command. The hard-pressed Allied leaders would have been amazed, and encouraged, could they but have seen the nervousness, apprehension and confusion which by 17 May prevailed at the summit of the enemy camp – in sharp contrast to its very tangible successes. When one recalls the positions taken during the drafting of Sichelschnitt, a marked change in attitudes now becomes apparent among the German principals. Hitler for one – the gambler whose audacity had previously terrified his professional advisers – was showing signs of losing his nerve, whereas the cautious, professional Halder was now bursting with confidence.
On 10 May the Führer had taken up his battle H.Q. in an austere nest of concrete works belonging to the Siegfried Line amid the bleak uplands of Münstereifel. Even the mess was located in a bunker, whi
le the focal point was a small wooden hut, no more than twelve feet square, serving as a map- and briefing-room where all the most important O.K.W. conferences took place. According to Jodl’s testimony at Nuremberg, life at the Felsennest resembled
a cross between a cloister and a concentration camp… a martyrdom for us soldiers; for it was not a military headquarters at all, it was a civilian one and we soldiers were guests there…
Although Brauchitsch and Halder had their O.K.H. H.Q. close at hand, so deep-rooted had Hitler’s contempt for his Army General Staff become that contact between the two headquarters was minimal, and strained. The Luftwaffe continued to roar overhead, and Army units heading for the front poured down the roads past the Felsennest, but Hitler remained curiously remote from the battle, informed largely through the eyes of the sycophantic Keitel, who tells us that he ‘was on the road literally every other day, mostly in the area of Rundstedt’s Army Group’, of which the new Chief of Staff, General von Sodenstern,1 was an old friend of Keitel’s.
On 16 May, Hitler was already showing visible concern for the safety of the lengthening left flank of the Panzer breakthrough. The infantry divisions marching up to protect it seemed to be arriving much too slowly. Jodl noted that Hitler that day ‘was pressing hard for the transfer of all armoured and motorized formations from Army Group B to Army Group A’, while he was heard bellowing down a field telephone at Reichenau, commander of the Sixth Army, for procrastinating over the release of Hoeppner’s XVI Panzer Corps.2 This and other interferences in the Army’s conduct of the campaign added to the tension already existing between Hitler and the O.K.H. Meanwhile Halder, its Chief of Staff, who had long since abandoned his cautious pessimism about Sichelschnitt (once he had been persuaded as to its intrinsic military virtues), in no way shared Hitler’s alarm for the left flank. Here lay the essential difference between the rational intellect of the professional and the irrational, instinctive functioning of the unschooled genius. In his diary for 16 May, Halder wrote with manifest satisfaction that ‘the breakthrough is developing along completely classical lines’. Following with scrupulous care the Intelligence reports from ‘Foreign Armies West’, which on the whole proved to be highly accurate, Halder noted that there was still no sign that the French were throwing their main reserves into battle, while by 1900 hours that evening incoming reports stated that all attacks3 against the left flank had been warded off. By the next day, fresh intelligence from ‘Foreign Armies West’ made it quite obvious to Halder that there was also little danger now of a serious Allied counter-attack on the northern flank of the ‘Bulge’. In the opening entry for the 17th, Halder wrote in his diary that the ‘picture shows clearly that the enemy has still not taken any major measures to close the breakthrough gap’. He noted that the French had brought up ‘at least six divisions’ along the Germans’ critical southern flank, but ‘here we do not intend to attack, and his forces do not suffice for an attack’.
In his new mood of complete confidence, Halder then went on to give voice to an opinion which signified a radical departure from the original Sichelschnitt blueprint, as well as representing a remarkable swing of the pendulum from his own earlier mood of conservative caution. So well did the overall situation seem to be developing, thought Halder, that ‘one may conclude that we can now consider continuing the operation towards a south-westerly direction’.4 In his view, France could at this point be smashed in one single battle, instead of the two separate operational phases called for in Manstein’s thinking. To Bock’s Army Group ‘B’ alone would fall the task of ‘encircling and annihilating the enemy north of the Sambre’, while Rundstedt’s Army Group ‘A’ should now swing away eccentrically to roll up the French to the south-west, with a possible right hook enveloping Paris. He could see no conceivable threat to the southern flank, ‘because for the time being the enemy is too weak’. Accordingly, at 1030 hours he telephoned Rundstedt’s Chief of Staff, Sodenstern, instructing him not to halt on the Oise, and not let his forces become pinned down along the southern flank. At midday, the O.K.H. C.-in-C., Brauchitsch, was summoned to Hitler and evidently experienced another of those disagreeable sessions that so discomfited him. Says Halder laconically:
Apparently little agreement of ideas. The Führer emphasizes that he sees the main danger coming from the south. (At present I don’t see any danger at all!) Therefore infantry divisions must be brought up as quickly as possible to protect the southern flank.
Rundstedt Supports Hitler
Distrustful as ever of his O.K.H. advisers, Hitler then set off himself that afternoon to see Rundstedt at his H.Q. in Bastogne. Arriving in a state of extreme nervousness, Hitler found Rundstedt’s views closely approximating to his own. (Indeed, in retrospect one may well wonder to what extent Rundstedt, in his recurrent anxiety, was the principal breeding ground for Hitler’s loss of nerve, not only during the period of 17 to 19 May, but also later at the time of the historically far more consequential ‘halt order’ before Dunkirk.) The utterances of all three Army Group commanders show them to have been completely taken aback by the initial successes of Sichelschnitt; after the Meuse crossings, Bock exclaimed ‘The French seem to have taken leave of their senses’, while by 18 May, Leeb, obviously overwhelmed by the speed of the German advance, was writing in his diary ‘It’s fantastic !’ But Rundstedt seems to have been the most surprised of the three; his loyal Chief of Operations and biographer, General von Blumentritt, refers to the Meuse crossings as a ‘miracle which Rundstedt could not understand’. At various crucial moments, Rundstedt shows himself to have been almost as strongly conditioned by his personal experiences of 1914–18 as any of his French opposite numbers. His own unit having come within sight of Paris in 1914, he could not forget how Kluck’s misguided change of direction had forfeited the victory apparently within Germany’s grasp, and upon no other German senior officer had the French Army’s capacity to recuperate from shattering reverses and fling itself into a devastating riposte left so ineradicable an impression. Any talk about a deviation to the south-west5 immediately aroused in him the worst memories of Galliéni’s lethal attack on Kluck’s flank which was the prelude to the Marne. His esteem for the French General Staff remained unshakably high, and (so Blumentritt tells us) from the earliest moments of the breakthrough he and Sodenstern had lived in expectation of the wily enemy launching ‘a great, surprise counter-offensive by strong French forces from the Verdun and Châlons-sur-Marne area, northwards towards Sedan and Mézières’.
Already by 15 May the Army Group ‘A’ War Diary is expressing Rundstedt’s concern about his southern flank:
the question has arisen for the first time as to whether it may not become necessary temporarily to halt the motorized forces on the Oise… the enemy is in no circumstances to be allowed to achieve any kind of success, even if it be only a local one, on the Aisne or later in the Laon region. This would have a more detrimental effect on operations as a whole than would a temporary slowing-down of our motorized forces.
The War Diary continues:
The extended flank between La Fère and Rethel is too sensitive, especially in the Laon area… an open invitation for an enemy attack… If the spearheads of the attack are temporarily halted, it will be possible to effect a certain stiffening of the threatened flank within twenty-four hours.
In consequence, Rundstedt had issued orders to Kleist on 16 May instructing the Armoured Group to mark time and not cross the Oise before the 18th. Now Hitler in his visit to Army Group H.Q. on the following day accorded Rundstedt his complete support, declaring:
the decision at the moment depends not so much on a rapid thrust to the Channel, as on the ability to secure as quickly as possible an absolutely sound defence on the Aisne in the Laon area and, later, on the Somme… All measures taken must be based on this, even if it involves temporary delay of the advance to the west.
Fortified by his talks with Rundstedt, Hitler drove back to the Felsennest with renewed rage against his O.K.H. advis
ers. That night Halder summed up in his diary: ‘A very disagreeable day. The Führer is enormously nervous. He is anxious about our own success, doesn’t want to risk anything and would therefore be happiest to have us halt.’ His visit to Army Group ‘A’, added Halder, ‘has only caused unclearness and doubt’. From the O.K.W., Hitler’s devotee Jodl concurred. ‘A day of great tension,’ he wrote. ‘The C.-in-C. of the Army [Brauchitsch] has not carried out the decision of building up as quickly as possible a new flanking position to the south… Brauchitsch and Halder are called immediately and ordered peremptorily to adopt the necessary measures at once.’ Halder was forced to abandon the ‘south-west operation’; though, bravely, he still clung to his original viewpoint.
Kleist Orders Guderian to Halt
Meanwhile, what was the net effect of all this discord at the top on the actual executants and their conduct of operations? As previously noted, Kleist, the Armoured Group commander – activated by Rundstedt – had already made two unsuccessful attempts to put a brake on Guderian. There was little love lost between the two generals, with their totally different personalities and doctrines of warfare, and during the last argument (on the night of the 15th) tempers had risen. Then, very early on the morning of the 17th, Guderian received a message from Armoured Group H.Q.:
the advance was to be halted at once and I was personally to report to General von Kleist, who would come to see me at my airstrip at 0700 hours [German]. He was there punctually and, without even wishing me a good morning, began in very violent terms to berate me for having disobeyed orders.6 He did not see fit to waste a word of praise on the performance of the troops. When the first storm was passed, and he had stopped to draw breath, I asked that I might be relieved of my command.
The angry Kleist, says Guderian, was ‘momentarily taken aback’, but then he nodded and ordered Guderian to hand over to his most senior divisional commander, General Veiel of the 2nd Panzer.
To Lose a Battle Page 49
