To Lose a Battle

by Alistair Horne

  After the fall of Poland in October 1939, a team of sixteen Polish ‘Enigma’ experts reached France, aided by the British Secret Services. Together with a total of seventy technicians, they were set up at the Château de Vignolles, near Paris, operating under the French with the code-name of ‘P.C. Bruno’. It became the first Allied operational intelligence centre; while, at Bletchley in England, small teams of expert cryptographers were assembling to help break the Enigma intercepts. It was not, however, until April 1940 that the first ‘real’ signals were deciphered; thus Ultra played no role in warning the Allies of the pending Nazi attack on Denmark and Norway – nor, indeed, was it in time to give any advance information about Sichelschnitt. One of the principal practical problems (and it was to dog Ultra throughout the war) was that of finding a completely secure way of distributing the Enigma intelligence to the relevant commanders, while still being fresh enough to affect the course of battle. Delays proved critical; for example, a key for 26 October 1939 was not broken until three months later. The dedicated Poles were not, evidently, overly impressed by the leisurely atmosphere at Vignolles, where the French continued to enjoy a long lunch-time ritual even once battle had been engaged.

  Nevertheless, between 20 May and the capitulation of Paris on 14 June, when Vignolles was forced to shut up shop and move, no less than 3,074 German signals were claimed to have been broken by P.C. Bruno. The red-letter day seems to have been 22 May, after the Allied armies in the North had already been effectively encircled, when Bletchley intercepted and broke the Luftwaffe code. From this date onwards, all Luftwaffe signals were read, including the all-revealing communications between it and Air Force liaison officers with the German ground forces. Beginning on the 24th (the day of Hitler’s crucial ‘Halt Order’), decoded signals intercepts were being passed on to General Gort at B.E.F.

  Therefore, one might well ask oneself the question, ‘If we were already breaking German Enigma ciphers, why then could we not have spotted the true objectives of Sichelschnitt, and done more effectively to counter it?’ (Indeed, why, with this magical weapon in our armoury, did it not shorten the war by several years?)

  There seem to be several explanations. In the first place, a change of ciphers just before the attack meant that few Enigma signals could be read during those vital first ten days. Secondly, the exceptional security imposed by Hitler caused most of the preliminary troops’ dispositions under Sichelschnitt to be made over land-lines not tappable by Ultra. This was, as has been seen, a technique also inconsiderately repeated by General Guderian during the breakthrough, when, Nelson-like, he had wished to prevent his own superiors listening in’, lest they should order him to halt. Thirdly, Bletchley and P.C. Bruno were so new to the game as to be simply overwhelmed by the sheer volume of intercepts, while communications between Intelligence and the front commanders were so archaic that – at the speed with which the Blitzkrieg moved – information usually arrived too late to help. Exchanges between the French and British Ultra teams were, to say the least, patchy, and matters were not improved on the British side by Gort’s rash decision to lead the B.E.F. from the front – like the good battalion commander he had once been, but divorced from the main body of his I-Branch. This was described by his sympathetic biographer, ‘Jock’ Colville, as ‘an administrative disaster’. It was compounded when (on 17 May) he sent his Director of Military Intelligence, Major-General Mason Macfarlane, to command the ad hoc MACFORCE, accompanied by another irreplaceable senior staff officer (who was later to become a famous D.M.I. in his own right, and, still later, Field Marshal), Lieutenant-Colonel Gerald Templer. It was, in the words of Bernard Law Montgomery (then commanding 3 Division), ‘an amazing decision’.

  One of the first intercepts of major import to be received by a field commander in the war was Gort’s receipt of news of the German ‘Halt Order’ of 24 May. But, so it now seems, this was in fact an intercept of a plain language transmission carelessly made by the Luftwaffe, not a decoded Enigma message; which perhaps explains why Gort should have received it in time enough to react sensibly. At the time of the first Ultra revelations, it was considered (by Winterbotham, among others) that it was this intercept which persuaded Gort to head for the sea; thereby decisively influencing the course of the war. F.H. Hinsley has now, however, pointed out, in his contribution to the official history of the Second World War, that no such information from Ultra was ever received by Gort; furthermore, Lewin25 deduces that ‘whilst the Ultra signals may have coloured his thoughts, they were evidently not the basis of his action’. Thus the consensus is that Gort may marginally have exaggerated the value of Ultra in the campaign, in retrospect.

  Probably the most severely limiting factor on this marvellous British ‘secret weapon’, however, was the sheer speed with which events moved in France in 1940. Comments Lewin:26 ‘the best of secret intelligence diminishes in value if the enemy is overwhelmingly superior’; and Hinsley:27 The B.E.F. itself was already in full retreat in circumstances in which no intelligence service, however good, could have done much to help it.’

  Certainly, as far as the hard-pressed French were concerned, the battle had long been far too heavily loaded against them for any amount of help from Ultra to have made the least difference.

  Chapter 20

  One Last Battle

  5–22 June

  … defeat is a thing of weariness, of incoherence, of boredom. And above all of futility.

  ANTOINE DE SAINT-EXUPERY, Flight to Arras

  One can only think with a shudder of our unawareness during the past eight months, in which our noblest duty seemed to consist of making the leisure hours of the soldiers at the front pleasant.

  L’Œuvre, 30 May

  Soldiers of the West Front!

  Dunkirk has fallen… with it has ended the greatest battle of world history.

  Soldiers! My confidence in you knew no bounds.

  You have not disappointed me.

  ADOLF HITLER, Order of the Day, 5 June

  While the German Army suffers unheard-of losses, the French Army remains intact.

  Radio Strasbourg, 12 June

  ‘Operation Red’: the Opposing Forces

  At midnight on the day Dunkirk fell, Hitler decreed that bells throughout the Reich should be tolled for three days in celebration of the end of this ‘greatest battle in world history’. An hour later, on 5 June, the O.K.W. communiqué announced: ‘The second great offensive is being launched today.’ To be in at the kill, Hitler had moved westwards from his headquarters at the Felsennest. Before doing so, he ordered that the entire area in the Eifel should be preserved as a ‘national monument’; every room was to be kept unchanged, every name-plate to remain upon its door. On a rare note of concord and satisfaction, Halder wrote in his diary for the 4th: ‘In the evening a glass of wine with the C.-in-C. at his country residence.1 Wonderful eventide peace, harmonious atmosphere!’

  In the six days of rest since they had been withdrawn from the northern battle, the German Panzers had been completely reorganized and redeployed with superb flexibility. For the final battle, they were now divided into five armoured corps, each consisting of two Panzer divisions and one of motorized infantry. Three of these corps were given to Bock, still standing on the right of the German line, and two to Rundstedt, who was now facing the French from east of Laon to the northern anchor of the Maginot Line at Montmédy. On the far right of the German line, along the lower Somme, were Rommel’s 7th Panzer and the 5th, once again with Hoth as the corps commander. Then, facing Amiens and Péronne, came Kleist’s Armoured Group, now comprising two armoured corps;2 further east, facing the Rethel area along the Aisne, came Guderian, now promoted to command his own Armoured Group of two corps.3 Altogether, from the sea to the Meuse, the Germans mustered some 104 fully-manned divisions.

  Against this, along a front 225 miles long, Weygand could dispose of only forty-three infantry divisions,4 plus three much reduced and only partially reconstituted armoured divisions,
and three similarly weakened D.L.C.s. Twenty-five of Weygand’s available infantry divisions had been pulled out (belatedly) from the Maginot Line area, but another seventeen still remained there. In addition, there were the British 51st (Highland) and 1st Armoured Divisions; the latter was now down to about a third of its strength, and its armour consisted chiefly of lightly-clad cruiser tanks. On their way were two more divisions (one of them Canadian), the only two equipped formations now left in the British Isles. In the air, French production and American consignments had helped replace a good part of the losses suffered; Glen-Martin bombers and new Dewoitine 520 fighters, mounting a cannon and four machine-guns, were seen in the air for the first time. General d’Astier’s Z.O.A.N. could now mount 125 bombers, of which 93 were modern and suitable for daylight operations, and about 225 fighters. To General Vuillemin’s pleas for another twenty R.A.F. squadrons, the British had continued to present a firm front. But by 5 June Barratt’s A.A.S.F., after falling to a total of thirty aircraft by 20 May, had once more risen to a total of a hundred (thirty fighters and seventy bombers), a fact not generally appreciated in France at the time. Some 250 bombers from Bomber Command in England were also used in support of operations in France. In all, d’Astier says that 980 aircraft were engaged in the second phase of the battle, but the pilots and the organization needed to keep them in the air were desperately thin on the ground.

  Thus Weygand assessed his total strength at a maximum of sixty divisions, while, against what the Luftwaffe could throw in, he regarded his air forces as ‘ridiculously weak’. For the main strength of the ‘Weygand Line’ behind the Somme and the Aisne, Weygand – at last abandoning the ruined ‘continuous front’ philosophy – relied principally on a ‘chequer-board’ system of ‘hedgehogs’. Each ‘hedgehog’ consisted of troops well dug-in around a natural obstacle (a village or wood) and armed with 75s which were to be used in an anti-tank role. Many of them First War weapons brought out of retirement, the 75s were to be pointed ‘like revolvers’ at the enemy armour. The ‘hedgehogs’ were designed to hold out even when surrounded or by-passed by the enemy. Behind them were groupements de manœuvre constituted from the few remaining units of Allied armour. It was at last an attempt at a defence in depth, but unfortunately the ‘Weygand Line’ lacked the forces with which to provide anything like the depth needed to halt Panzers. True to his belief that he should fight one last battle, ‘for the sake of honour’, and then persuade the Government to sue for peace, Weygand had prepared no succeeding positions on which to fall back once the ‘Weygand Line’ was broken.

  The French Fight Back

  The German plan called for Bock to open the attack on 5 June and Rundstedt to follow four days later. At once Bock’s forces ran into unexpectedly tough resistance. Desperate as their situation was, the French defenders fought back with a determination and a spirit of sacrifice that had not been seen on the Meuse. No longer did the screaming Stukas bring panic in their wake. The French gunners stayed and died with their 75s, knocking out considerable numbers of German tanks. Karl von Stackelberg, the military diarist who had followed the German advance all the way from Nouzonville on the Meuse, wrote: ‘In these ruined villages the French resisted to the last man. Some hedgehogs carried on when our infantry was twenty miles behind them.’ Both at Amiens and Péronne, Kleist’s two Panzer corps were prevented from breaking out of their bridgeheads, after managing to advance only a few miles; and even Rommel had been halted most of the day at Hangest and Le Quesnoy in the marshes of the Lower Somme. By the end of the day, Weygand was impressed by the fact that his troops had held their own better than expected. There were grounds for hope. But the cost had been high, and the material odds were enormous. A sequence in the German film, Sieg im West, taken at this time shows a monster German self-propelled gun (probably 150 mm.) reducing a solitary French sniper in a house, with shot after shot at point-blank range. Nothing could demonstrate more clearly the disparity of might between the two sides in these desperate days.

  Rommel Again

  On the 6th, the French once again stopped Kleist south of Amiens and Péronne. In these two days of battle, one of his Panzer corps had some 65 per cent of its tanks disabled. But disaster overtook the French on the flank. It was precipitated by Rommel, who broke through west of Amiens after some fierce fighting and advanced twenty miles southwards from the Somme. The next day (his wife’s birthday), Rommel swept forward another thirty miles to Forges-les-Eaux on the Beauvais–Dieppe road and only twenty-five miles from Rouen. With his customary swiftness to adapt himself to new situations, Rommel had mastered Weygand’s ‘chequer-board’ system by taking his division cross-country so as to avoid the French ‘hedgehogs’, leaving them to be dealt with by the following infantry. His advance that day split in two General Robert Altmayer’s Tenth Army, of which one of the units left on the coastal flank was the British 51st (Highland) Division. Next, on the 8th, Rommel pushed on to take Elbeuf on the Seine, thereby sealing off the great city of Rouen. He wrote to his wife on the 9th in high spirits: ‘Two glorious days in pursuit, first south, then south-west. A roaring success. 45 miles yesterday,’ and on the 10th:

  Our successes are tremendous and it looks to me inevitable that the other side will soon collapse.

  We never imagined war in the west would be like this.

  The 5th Panzer had meanwhile captured Rouen, and on Rommel’s left the Lower Seine had been reached by the XXXVIII Infantry Corps, commanded by General Erich von Manstein – allowed at this late date to participate in the triumph which owed so much to his genius. Rommel was now ordered to countermarch to the north-west, swing around Rouen, and head for the sea near Fécamp in order to cut off the retreat of Altmayer’s isolated left wing. After another sixty-mile advance, Rommel reached the coast in a day, and began to push back up it towards Dieppe. At the small port of St Valéry-en-Caux he fell upon the cut-off part of Altmayer’s army, then attempting to form a bridgehead prior to evacuation. But no ships arrived, and on 12 June the Allied garrison surrendered. That day Rommel took 40,000 prisoners, including twelve generals. They included the whole of the 51st Highland Division, with its commander, Major-General Fortune – one of Britain’s finest fighting units.

  On the 14th, Rommel occupied Le Havre. Then, after two days’ rest, he was ordered to advance on Cherbourg, passing through terrain which, as a Field-Marshal and almost exactly four years later, he would be called upon to defend against American tanks enjoying almost the same numerical superiority that the Germans had had in 1940. On 17 June he established an alleged all-time record, by advancing 150 miles in a single day. Two days later he accepted the capitulation of Cherbourg. This was the end of the campaign for Rommel and the 7th Panzer, nicknamed by the French the ‘Phantom Division’. In six remarkable weeks, it had captured 97,648 prisoners, together with 277 guns, 458 armoured vehicles, and over 4,000 trucks. Its own casualties had totalled 682 killed (including the relatively large number of 52 officers), 1,646 wounded and 296 missing, while its loss in tanks was only 42 complete write-offs.5

  Guderian Again

  On 9 June, Rundstedt’s attack had duly gone in. In an Order of the Day to the French armies that morning, Weygand declared: ‘We have come to the last quarter of an hour. Stand firm.’ The German assault was led by Guderian’s Armoured Group, which, after a 150-mile march largely retracing the route of his victorious advance, was concentrated on either side of Rethel. Meanwhile, the main weight of the Armoured Group belonging to his former chief and antagonist, Kleist, was also being switched eastwards to the Aisne, after being checked south of Amiens and Péronne on the direct route to Paris. In contrast to the Meuse crossings, this time the infantry were to attack first and seize bridgeheads across the Aisne before Guderian committed his Panzer divisions. But, says Guderian,

  At 1200 hours [German] I received messages from the front on either side of Rethel that the Rethel attacks had failed. My observes from the other fronts reported that the infantry had only succeeded in
establishing a single bridgehead, a small one a mile to a mile and a half deep, in the neighbourhood of Château-Porcien.

  Once again, the French defenders were fighting back heroically; de Lattre de Tassigny’s tough 14th Division alone claimed some 800 German prisoners. If only Grandsard’s men could have put up the same kind of resistance at Sedan, when the odds had been so much less in favour of the Germans! Guderian now decided to move tanks of the 1st Panzer into the solitary bridgehead under cover of darkness. The next day the armour pushed out of the bridgehead, but made only slow progress; in the afternoon a hard tank-versus-tank battle was fought around Juniville against the remnants of Guderian’s old adversary, the French 3rd Armoured Division. Colonel Balck personally captured the colours of a French regiment, but Guderian admitted to having suffered heavy casualties. On the 11th, Guderian records that the 1st Panzer progressed ‘as though this were a manoeuvre’. French resistance on the Aisne sector of the ‘Weygand Line’ was clearly coming to an end. Soon Reinhardt’s two Panzer divisions, then Kleist’s four, were across the Aisne, thrusting southward in an irresistible mass of armour. By nightfall, Rheims was reached; the following morning (12 June) Guderian captured Châlons-sur-Marne.

  Paris Abandoned