To Lose a Battle

by Alistair Horne

  Rommel Consolidates

  One of the legion of prisoners to be taken by Rommel during his ‘Avesnes Raid’ was Lieutenant Georges Kosak of the 4th Light Cavalry, who had already had one lucky escape from Rommel’s advance guard east of the Meuse on the 11th. Captured at Maroilles, some six miles west of Avesnes, Kosak managed to escape a second time by wading down a stream in water up to his neck. Reaching Wassigny, he was rushed to General Giraud’s H.Q. where he was cross-examined. Giraud and his staff appeared astonished to learn from him that the Panzers were already in force at Maroilles. So, for that matter, was Rommel’s own corps commander, General Hoth, who that morning, to Rommel’s amusement, ordered him to ‘continue’ his attack towards Avesnes. For Rommel, the 17th was spent in consolidating his gains of the previous night and early morning and rounding up prisoners, but it was not devoid of excitement. There was an anxious moment in the early morning when, after halting outside Le Cateau, Rommel discovered that in fact ‘only a small part of the Panzer Regiment and part of the Motor-Cycle Battalion’ had been following his lead. Displeased, he sent an officer back to the rear at once:

  Then I tried myself to drive back to establish contact, but soon came under anti-tank fire from Le Cateau and had to return. Meanwhile, Rothenburg with part of Panzer Battalion Sickenius had been in action with French tanks and anti-tank guns on the hill east of Le Cateau, but had soon disposed of them. I returned to the Panzer Battalion, which had meanwhile formed a hedgehog.

  After further elements of the Motor-Cycle Battalion had arrived, Rommel felt that the situation at Le Cateau was secure, and still believing that the rest of the division was somewhere close behind, he hastened off in his signals vehicle, escorted by a single Mark III tank, to bring it forward:

  On the way we came across several stranded vehicles belonging to the Motor-cycle Battalion and Panzer Regiment, whose crews told us that it was wise to go carefully in Landrecies as a number of our vehicles had been fired on there by enemy tanks. I then drove on [eastwards] at high speed to Landrecies, where the Panzer III, which was in the lead, lost its way in the town. When at last we reached the road to Avesnes, we saw a German vehicle standing in the road, a hundred yards ahead, where it had been shot up by enemy guns. There must have been a French tank or anti-tank gun somewhere around, but we had no time for a long palaver and so – through! As we drove past, wounded motor-cyclists shouted frantically to us to take them along. I could not help them, unfortunately – there was too much at stake.

  Then, near Maroilles where Lieutenant Kosak had fallen into German hands, the escorting Mark III broke down. It could hardly have been a more awkward moment, for

  Alongside the road there were French officers and men bivouacked close beside their weapons. But they had apparently not yet recovered from the fright which the German tanks had spread and so we put them on the march so far as we could by shouts and signs from the moving vehicle. There were no German troops to be seen. On we went, at top speed, through Maroilles. East of the village we suddenly discovered a Panzer IV, which had been stranded by mechanical trouble and had its 75 mm. gun in working order. We sighed with relief. A Panzer IV was a strong protection at such a moment.

  A short time later Rommel spotted a motorized rifle company on the horizon, travelling fast down the road from Marbaix, midway between Maroilles and Avesnes. Thinking that this meant further detachments would be following in its wake, Rommel pushed on further towards Avesnes, ‘but found nothing’. At this moment,

  a French car came out of a side-turning from the left and crossed the road close in front of my armoured car. At our shouts it halted and a French officer got out and surrendered. Behind the car there was a whole convoy of lorries approaching in a great cloud of dust. Acting quickly, I had the convoy turned off towards Avesnes. Hanke swung himself up on the first lorry, while I stayed on the crossroad for a while, shouting and signalling to the French troops that they should lay down their arms – the war was over for them. Several of the lorries had machine-guns mounted and manned against air attack. It was impossible to see through the dust how long the convoy was, and so after 10 or 15 vehicles had passed, I put myself at the head of the column and drove on to Avesnes.

  Here Rommel at last encountered the lagging elements of the 7th Panzer. One can imagine that they were administered a rigorous dressing-down. It was not until approximately 1500 hours that Rommel’s own H.Q. reached Avesnes and unit after unit began to occupy the territory overrun the previous night. In the course of this move, Rommel tells us that his gunners

  successfully prevented 48 French tanks11 from going into action just north of Avesnes. The tanks stood formed up alongside the road, some of them with engines running. Several drivers were taken prisoner still in their tanks. This action saved the 25th Panzer Regiment an attack in the rear by these tanks.

  Having arranged the deployment of the 7th Panzer to his satisfaction, Rommel says he then ‘took an hour and a half’s rest’. But he was soon restored, and (according to one of his tank officers) at Le Cateau that evening, Rommel

  gathered together the Panzer commanders and gave orders in his classic manner: ‘Our further line of march – Le Cateau–Arras–Amiens–Rouen–Le Havre!’ We were somewhat shocked by this unreasonable demand, because we were completely exhausted by the battles of the last days and lack of sleep. It was thus almost welcome to us that the execution of this order initially failed, because our tanks had almost no more petrol.

  Between the long narrow tongue formed by Rommel’s foray and the hernia formed by Reinhardt’s and Guderian’s Panzers in the Oise bend, on the 17th German infantry divisions smashed through the Anor and Trélon gaps, thereby breaking the last of the ‘Maginot’ extension along the Belgian frontier. Guarding the first, the remnants of General Hassler’s 22nd Division were scattered into the Forêt de St Michel; at Trélon, it was the 1st North African Division, sent down as reinforcements from the First Army on 15 May, which suffered, and by the following day two of its battalions had been reduced to some 260 men each.

  On Reinhardt’s front, crossing tracks with the 6th Panzer, the 8th had at last entered the battle and was pushing along the upper Oise south of La Capelle before the halt order came into effect. To the south, tanks of the 6th under Colonel von Ravenstein seized an undestroyed bridge at Origny against weak resistance. That evening its bridgeheads at Hauteville and Neuvillette were sharply attacked by ‘B’ tanks of the 2nd Armoured. Once again, the official German accounts relate how ineffective the German anti-tank weapons were against the thick French armour; one ‘B’ tank was apparently hit twenty-five times before it was immobilized by a shot in the tracks. The 6th Panzer War Diary adds scornfully that ‘if German crews had been sitting in those superior French tanks’, the bridgeheads would have been hard to hold. Finally, by nightfall, they were secured by bringing up those deadly 88-mm. flak guns.

  Before the halt order came into effect, Guderian’s 1st Panzer had taken Ribemont on the Oise and Crécy-sur-Serre.12 By nightfall on the 17th, the Germans were in occupation of most of the promontory of land contained within the rivers Serre, Sambre and Oise. From Landrecies southwards to Moy on the Oise, some six miles north of its confluence with the Serre, the various Panzer commanders, under guise of the ‘reconnaissance in force’ permitted by Kleist, had established a number of important bridgeheads across Georges’s river barrier. Guderian for one was poised ready to resume his march towards the Channel the moment Kleist gave the signal.

  German Infantry Man the Flanks

  Meanwhile the German infantry divisions, whose role in ‘picketing’ the walls of the ‘Bulge’ formed so vital a part of the German design, were at last beginning to reach their positions during the day’s halt. At Stonne, far back at the root of the breakthrough where the French were still attacking, General Forster’s VI Army Corps had arrived, which meant that the motorized divisions of General von Wietersheim’s XIV Army Corps could now move forward to hold the flank at Rethel, where de Lat
tre was fighting resolutely, but defensively. Also at last released from its defensive role at Stonne was Guderian’s 10th Panzer, which now hastened forward to rejoin the main armoured phalanx. In the course of the 17th it was already passing Rethel to its south. Two days later Wietersheim would once again be ‘bumped’ westwards by the arrival of the Brandenburgers of III Corps, marching south-westwards from Charleville-Mézières. And so it continued, with the German flank protection divisions always coming up just before the French reinforcements, bombed and strafed on their approach routes and generally disorganized, could possibly insert themselves in the vacuum between the Panzers and the following echelons, as Hitler and Rundstedt had feared they might.

  The manning of the flanks of the ‘Bulge’ (or the ‘Panzer Corridor’, as it was about to become) was undeniably an organized triumph on the part of Halder and the O.K.H., and its contribution to the overall success of Sichelschnitt has perhaps never received sufficient acclaim by historians. But it also reflected a notable triumph of endurance by the ordinary German foot-soldier. During those days, on every highway to the rear of the advancing Panzers the picture is the same: on one side of the road, the endless dejected columns of French captives limping eastwards; on the other, the companies and battalions of young Germans, bare-headed and with sleeves rolled up, as always singing on the march ‘Sollte ich einst liegen bleiben auf blutdurchtränktem Feld’13 or that old favourite from by-gone times, ‘Siegreich wollen wir Frankreich schlagen’14 – and marching, marching, marching. For them, there is little motor transport. Supplies and baggage are brought up on horse-drawn drays, but the infantry move on their feet – an illustration of how, behind the thin armoured veneer of the superb élite forces in the Wehrmacht, relatively few in number, in 1940 the great mass of its divisions were probably less well equipped with the panoply of modern war than either the French or British. Up and down the marching columns dart the Feldwebel, keeping route discipline, herding on the stragglers, while at their back are the battalion commanders, Rundstedt and ultimately Hitler, all exhorting the hard-pressed infantry to greater efforts. In the heat and dust of that relentlessly sunny May, the strain of the prolonged marches day after day is immense; wrote one German footslogger, ‘The first fifteen kilometres a day are a country walk, the next ten an exertion and the remainder – into the evening – sheer torture.’

  Slowly the German engineers were getting the captured railway networks running again; by the 17th, there were troop trains already coming up as far as Libramont in the Ardennes; three days later, they had reached Dinant. At the same time, the Luftwaffe was leapfrogging its bases forward so that its squadrons were always there to provide the advancing Panzers the close support they needed. The organization functioned with superlative smoothness; experiences in Spain and Norway paid off. Close up behind the Panzer spearheads came special Luftwaffe task-forces, with the function of putting back into service at top speed all captured enemy airfields. They were followed by signals units that had been training all winter so that they could lay cables from vehicles and motor-cycle sidecars moving at 21 m.p.h., thus providing immediate communications with the Luftwaffe’s new forward bases. But the backbone of the whole operation was the workhorse Ju-52, in which spares, fresh crews, bombs and ammunition were flown into airfields within hours of their capture from the Allies. Even fuel came up this way; by siphoning out its own tanks and carrying an additional seven big drums, each Ju-52 could fly in nearly a thousand gallons a trip (a noteworthy feat in those days), enough to keep a Messerschmitt squadron in the air for an hour.

  Allied Air Forces Withdraw

  On the other side of the lines, the withdrawal of the Allied air forces during the 16th and 17th proceeded with considerably less smoothness. By the 16th, Barratt had been forced to evacuate his A.A.S.F. bases astride the Aisne. Fortunately they had somewhere to go, as – with commendable foresight –some grass landing-fields had been prepared around Troyes during the months of the Phoney War. But they had virtually nothing to go in, despite Barratt’s urgent representations of the past winter. As the R.A.F. official history comments:

  its transport resources were still hopelessly insufficient for a simultaneous move of the kind now required. Six hundred vehicles short even of its official complement, the Force would have been crippled but for two pieces of good fortune.

  The first of these was that the Germans did not try to cross the Aisne southwards, and the second the fact that the A.A.S.F. in some mysterious way managed to ‘borrow’ three hundred new American lorries from the French, which ‘in spite of protestations’ they kept until the final evacuation. Airfield accommodation was also aided by the ‘rolling-up’ of four of the worst hit15 of Barratt’s ten bomber squadrons. Barratt himself moved his H.Q. from its dangerous position in the path of the Panzers, at Chauny west of Laon, back to Coulommiers south of the Marne. On the 17th, the Air Component backing Gort in the north was also forced to withdraw, and Barratt, south of the enemy ‘Bulge’, henceforth found himself completely out of communication with it. Two days later the Air Component would be removed to England. Needless to say, in the highly charged emotions of the moment, the withdrawal of the R.A.F. bases was widely regarded by the French as a sign that it was ‘running away’ – a rumour that hardly improved French morale.

  At the same time as Barratt, however, General d’Astier was also obliged to move his Z.O.A.N. H.Q. back from Chauny to Chantilly. On the 16th, some ten French units had to withdraw from the Rheims-Mézières–Laon triangle, and the next day they were followed by a further four Groupes of fighters and one of bombers. It was at this point that the weakness of the French Air Force supply organization began to show up. General d’Astier notes that, incredibly enough, it was the responsibility of each Groupe to send its own pilots to the rear to ferry up replacement aircraft; meanwhile, even at the peak of battle, the depots closed down on Sundays and after hours! In the chaos that accompanied the withdrawals of the Allied air forces, air activities were reduced to a minimum – at the worst possible moment. On the 16th, 250 sorties were flown by French fighters (compared with 340 on the 14th), of which only 153 were over the critical fronts;16 on the 17th, a similar effort was made, but also dispersed across an area stretching from Antwerp to the Maginot Line. Only twenty-two victories were claimed. While the Luftwaffe was launching single attacks on communications of a hundred bombers at a time, all that could be scraped up to support de Gaulle’s attack towards Montcornet was about twelve Léos escorted by about thirty fighters. The air supremacy of the enemy was becoming more and more marked. In the French Air Force, units such as Groupe I/54 had been reduced to one serviceable aircraft. In an encounter over Gembloux in northern Belgium on the 17th, eleven out of twelve Blenheims from No. 82 Squadron were shot down, the sole survivor being heavily damaged. The useless, lethal Battles had now been withdrawn from daylight operations, and used only at night; yet, in the words of the official historians,

  In fact, so many Battle crews now dropped their bombs with no more precise identifications of their target than that provided by their watches, that Barratt was compelled to forbid bombing ‘on estimated time of arrival’. After that the phrase ceased to appear in the pilots’ reports. The practice, however, continued.

  ‘Why Don’t Our Planes Protect Us?’

  So strained had the Allied air resources become that, among their many tasks, they were unable either to come to the aid of the Second Army, which was still being heavily bombed by the Germans by way of breaking up any fresh threat to the flank at Stonne, or to assist the withdrawal of the armies in northern Belgium. This absence of friendly planes above them was having its cumulative effect on the morale of the French ground troops. Their progressive despair is well summed up by an account kept by a French N.C.O., René Balbaud, moving up with reinforcements towards Maubeuge. On first being machine-gunned by enemy aircraft on the 14th, he wondered ‘How the devil did these planes escape being pursued by our squadrons? Probably an accident.’ The next day
, after his unit headquarters had been bombed, he remarked: ‘But they can’t really know where it is. It’s just luck. We don’t, in fact, see much of the French planes.’ On the 16th, following more bombing, he is questioning: ‘Why don’t our planes protect us? No one says it aloud any more, but everyone is thinking it.’ After a night spent in hastily dug trenches, and still more bombing, he admits: ‘This bombing has tired even the toughest. What can one do with light machine-guns against 150 bombers?’ Finally he concludes:

  Not to see the enemy face to face, to have no means of defence, not to see the shadow of a French or Allied plane during hours of bombing, this was one of the prime reasons for the loss of our faith in victory.

  Meanwhile, on the morning of 17 May, there had been some disagreement between Barratt and the French High Command on the employment of the additional R.A.F. fighter squadrons promised by Churchill. Should they be used to escort Allied daylight bombing missions, or to shoot down the German bombers attacking the ground troops? The two tasks were obviously irreconcilable. General Georges pleaded that the troops could not stand up to the devastating combination of tanks and aircraft. Finally it was agreed to reduce still further the modest French daylight bombing effort, so as to concentrate on providing the ground forces with more air cover.

  Retreat from Belgium

  In northern Belgium the methodical withdrawal of the Allied armies began on the 16th and continued through the 17th. The 3rd and 4th Panzers of General Hoeppner’s XVI Corps, still hammering away at the Gembloux Gap, were now transferred from Bock to Rundstedt’s Army Group ‘A’, swinging south-west for Charleroi and Maubeuge to assure the northern flank of the ‘Bulge’. Thus all but one of the ten German Panzers were now concentrated in the encircling thrust towards the Channel. But the bulk of Bock’s forces continued to push hard behind the retreating Allies, so as to grant them no possibility of disengaging. Although the Germans were nowhere able to breach the Allied positions, over the 16th and 17th the B.E.F. experienced its hardest fighting of the campaign so far. On re-reading his diary the next day, Lieutenant-General Alan Brooke found the following entry: