“I found him surprisingly quick to grasp the points which our army group had been advocating for many months past, and he entirely agreed with what I had to say,” Manstein wrote later.
The next day, in response to Hitler’s orders, OKH issued new directives that reflected Manstein’s proposals. Manstein’s idea became known in the German army as the Sichelschnitt, or “sickle-cut plan,” an apt description signifying that a strong armored thrust would cut through the weak portion of the Allied defenses like a harvester’s sickle cut through soft stalks of grass or grain.
OKH set up a new “panzer group” of five armored and four motorized divisions under General Ewald von Kleist containing Guderian’s 19th Corps, Hans Reinhardt’s 41st Corps, and Gustav von Wietersheim’s 14th Motorized Corps. These were to be der Sturmbock (battering ram) to breach the Meuse around Sedan. Also allocated was the 15th Corps under Hermann Hoth, whose two panzer divisions would cross the Meuse farther north at Dinant and shield Kleist’s main effort on that flank. OKH allocated 2nd Army to help protect Army Group A’s southern flank. OKH thus transferred the main weight to the southern wing.
At the same time Bock’s Army Group B remained strong enough, with three armies, to attack into northern Belgium and Holland. Bock had the remaining three panzer divisions—two in the 16th Corps under Erich Hoepner to lead his assault, and one (the 9th under Alfred Hubicki) detailed for the Holland operation.
It was a radical and astonishing transformation and the best military decision Adolf Hitler ever made. By shifting the Schwerpunkt to the Ardennes Hitler set up the conditions for an overwhelming victory that could transform the world.
Meanwhile the situation in the Allied camp was changing dramatically. French Premier Edouard Daladier could not summon the courage to dismiss General Maurice Gamelin, the French commander in chief, who was proving to be incompetent.
The French parliament was angry with Daladier because the Allies had done nothing to help Finland, while the Germans were massing on the frontiers of the Low Countries. On March 18, 1940, he lost a vote of confidence in the Chamber of Deputies. Paul Reynaud formed a new government, but had to accept Daladier as minister of defense, and Daladier held on to Gamelin.
This did not sit well with Reynaud, and he resigned, but the president of the republic, Albert Lebrun, induced him to run the government on a provisional basis. Thus France at the moment of its highest need found itself saddled with a weak and indecisive government.
A few weeks later in Britain, Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain could not present a convincing explanation for the Norwegian fiasco to the House of Commons, and his support, already weak because of his appeasement of Hitler, evaporated. On the evening of May 9, 1940, Labour Party leaders Arthur Greenwood and Clement Attlee refused to form a unified government with the Conservatives so long as Chamberlain remained chief of the Conservative Party. This forced his resignation.
The next day, the very day the Germans attacked in the west, Winston Churchill—the strongest and most eloquent voice in England against Hitler—seized the rudder of a unity government. Chamberlain belonged to it as Lord President (a job with little power), Lord Halifax led the Foreign Office, and Anthony Eden switched from the Colonial Office to the War Ministry. Attlee became Lord Privy Seal and deputy premier, while Greenwood became minister without portfolio. Churchill demanded for himself the newly formed Ministry of Defense. From then on, he could make agreements with the chiefs of staff over the head of the minister of war.
The German forces arrayed on the frontiers of Holland, Belgium, and Luxembourg on May 10, 1940, presented a tremendously different picture from armies that had gone before. Ordinary infantry divisions were noticeably absent. These traditional orthodox mainstays that marched to battle and fought on foot had been preempted. In the campaign about to erupt, they were too slow to have decisive jobs. The real agents of victory were in part a few airborne troops attached to the northern group, but mainly the new German Schnellentruppen, “fast troops”—the panzer and motorized divisions.
The campaign in the west was going to be decided by only part of these fast troops—seven panzer divisions in Army Group A—a force representing only 8 percent of total German strength. The three panzer divisions of Army Group B were to play important roles. But the actual disruption of the Allied position took place in the first phase of the campaign, and the seven armored divisions in Army Group A were the instruments.
The Luftwaffe had an important task in assisting the panzers. Messerschmitt 109 Bf fighters were to destroy enemy aircraft, and the bombers, principally Stukas, were to give ground support on the battle line.
Behind the fast troops on the German right or northern flank were twenty-five infantry divisions. Stacked up behind Army Group A in the middle were thirty-eight infantry divisions. Their job was to fill out the corridor that the “panzer wedge” was to open. In the south along the Maginot Line were eighteen infantry divisions in Army Group C under Wilhelm von Leeb, with only a holding job.
The Allies had 3,370,000 men in 143 divisions—nine of them British, twenty-two Belgian, eight Dutch, the remainder French. The Germans committed 3 million men in 141 divisions. The Allies had almost 14,000 cannons, the Germans just over 7,000. However, the Allied guns were principally field artillery pieces designed to assist infantry. The Allies possessed too few guns required for the war about to be fought: antiaircraft and antitank weapons.
The Allies had more armor, about 3,400 tanks to the Germans’ 2,700. But Allied armor was mostly spread out among the infantry divisions, whereas all German tanks were concentrated into the ten panzer divisions.
Only in the air was Germany clearly superior: 4,000 first-line aircraft to 3,000 Allied planes. Worse, many Allied planes were obsolete and their bombers were designed to strike area or general objectives, not targets on the battlefields as were the 400 Stukas. The French thought they could use medium bombers as “hedge hoppers” to attack enemy troops. But when they tried it they found the bombers were extremely vulnerable to ground fire.
The French had only sixty-eight Dewoitine 520 fighters, their only craft with performance approaching that of the 520 Messerschmitt 109 Bfs. The British Royal Air Force held back in England the competitive Spitfire, though a few Hurricanes were in France and could challenge the Messerschmitt on only slightly inferior terms.
While the Germans were placing their faith in a new type of warfare based on fast-moving tanks supported by dive-bombers, the French (and to a large degree the British) were aiming to fight World War I all over again.
The French army was by far the strongest challenge, but its doctrine required a continuous front, strongly manned by infantry and backed up by artillery. The French expected the enemy to attack this front fruitlessly and wear down his strength. Only when the enemy was weakened and finally stopped did doctrine permit the French army to go over to the offensive. An attack was always to be a bataille conduite, literally “battle by guidance” but translated as “methodical battle” by the British. This system had been worked out in the late stages of World War I and refined ever since. It was slow in the extreme. French doctrine prohibited action until the commander had perfect information about his and the enemy’s forces, a process requiring extensive, time-consuming reconnoitering.
When the infantry attack started it had to come behind a massive artillery barrage. The foot soldiers could advance only 1,500 meters before stopping to allow the artillery to shift its fires. After several such bounds, they had to stop until the guns could be moved forward.
All this required a great deal of time. A training exercise in 1938, for example, took eight days of preparation for an attack that was to last two days.
Guderian, who was fully aware of the enemy’s battle system, was confident that the speed of the panzer advance would preclude the French from ever having time to mount a counterattack. The situation would change by the hour, and the French would never catch up. This meant to Guderian that the panzers did not h
ave to worry about their flanks. They would reach the English Channel and victory before the French could even begin to react.
The German high commanders, who thought more like their French opposite numbers than like Guderian, were not so sure. Out of these conceptual differences much conflict would emerge.
3 THE DEFEAT OF FRANCE
TRUE TO THEIR PLAN, THE GERMANS DELIVERED THEIR FIRST BLOWS IN HOLLAND and northern Belgium. The strikes were so sensational and convincing that they acted like a pistol in starting the Allies’ dash forward.
In the first great airborne assault in history, 4,000 paratroops of Kurt Student’s 7th Airborne Division descended from the early morning sky May 10, 1940, into “Fortress Holland” around The Hague, Rotterdam, and Utrecht. The sudden appearance of this force in the heart of the Dutch defensive system staggered every Allied commander. The Dutch had expected to defend this region for a couple of weeks, long enough for the French to join them and hold it indefinitely. Immediately after Student’s parachutists grabbed four airports near Rotterdam and The Hague, Theodor von Sponeck’s 22nd Infantry Air-Landing Division (12,000 men) started arriving by transport aircraft.
The Germans tried to seize The Hague and the government by a coup de main, but failed, taking many casualties. They were, however, able to capture key bridges in the Dordrecht-Moerdijk-Rotterdam area and hold them until the 9th Panzer Division broke through the frontier and rushed to the bridges on May 13, 1940, eliminating all possibility of resistance.
On the same day the Germans carried out the first major aerial atrocity of World War II: their aircraft rained bombs down on the undefended center of Rotterdam, killing about a thousand civilians and terrorizing the country. Two days later, the Dutch capitulated. Their army had scarcely been engaged.
Another dramatic scenario played out at the bridges over the Maas (or Meuse) River and the Albert Canal around Maastricht—fifteen miles inside the Dutch frontier. The bridges here were vital to the Germans to get their panzers across and into the open plains of Belgium beyond. Dutch guards were certain to blow the spans the moment they heard the Germans had passed the frontier. The Germans, accordingly, decided on a surprise strike.
In addition, a way had to be found to neutralize the Belgian fort Eben Emael about five miles south of Maastricht. It guarded the Albert Canal and the Maas just to the east. Eben Emael, constructed of reinforced concrete and housing casemated 75-millimeter and 120-millimeter guns, had been completed in 1935 and was regarded as virtually impregnable. There was only one undefended part of the fort: the flat roof. This was Eben Emael’s undoing.
Adolf Hitler personally selected paratroop Captain Walter Koch to lead the mission. His force included a platoon of army combat engineers, under Lieutenant Rudolf Witzig.
Early on May 10, 1940, twenty-one ten-man gliders drawn by Junker 52 transports pulled off from fields near Cologne. Over Aachen at 8,000 feet, the gliders unhooked and slowly descended over Dutch territory, ten landing beside four key bridges, and nine landing right on top of the Eben Emael roof. Lieutenant Witzig was not among them. His and another glider’s ropes snapped, and his glider had to be retrieved by another Ju-52. Before Witzig arrived, his sergeant, Helmut Wenzel, had taken charge and set explosive charges in gun barrels, casemates, and exit passages. In moments the German engineers had incapacitated the fort and sealed the 650-man garrison inside. The next day German infantry arrived, and the fort surrendered.
While this attack was going on, storming parties under Captain Koch seized four Albert Canal bridges before the astonished defenders could destroy them.
But special detachments of German spies failed to grab the Maas bridges at Maastricht, and the Dutch blew them. This held up part of Erich Hoepner’s 16th Corps panzers for forty-eight hours. Then they burst across, and opened a wide path for Walther von Reichenau’s following 6th Army.
The Allied commander, General Maurice Gustave Gamelin, ordered the main Allied force on the left wing, the 1st Group of Armies under Gaston Harvé Billotte, to rush to the Dyle River. Included in this force were France’s three “light mechanized divisions” of converted cavalry with 200 tanks apiece. On the left of this army group was the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) of eight divisions under Lord Gort. The British moved to the line Louvain-Wavre south of the Belgian army, while the French swung in below the British from Wavre southward to Namur and Dinant on the Meuse. Meanwhile Gamelin directed French cavalry— motorized forces, armored cars, and horse brigades—to penetrate into the Ardennes and hold up the Germans.
Gamelin also ordered the French 7th Army under Henri Giraud to rush to Breda, about thirty miles southeast of Rotterdam, intending to link up with the Dutch. But with Fortress Holland breached, the 7th Army withdrew to Antwerp, Belgium.
To serve as a hinge around Sedan between the Maginot Line and the armies that had swept northeastward, Gamelin relied on two French armies (the 2nd and 9th) of four cavalry divisions and twelve infantry divisions, composed mostly of older reservists. This Sedan sector was the least fortified portion of the French frontier. Cavalry would be useless against tanks, and the infantry possessed few antitank or antiaircraft guns.
Meanwhile the Luftwaffe exerted all its efforts to beat down Allied air defenses and knock out enemy aircraft on the ground. The Germans were successful in large degree because the Dutch, Belgian, and French fighters were inferior to the Messerschmitt 109s, and the British Royal Air Force held back its Spitfires in England.
German bombers attacked railways, roads, and troop assembly areas. They created fear and chaos, and made the German ground advance much easier. Planes, mainly Stukas, stayed with the German advance troops, guarding flanks, knocking out defensive positions, and stopping enemy armored movements. After a week the Luftwaffe enjoyed superiority, and by another week it had achieved air supremacy.
Behind Hoepner’s panzers (3rd and 4th Divisions), the 6th Army advanced quickly, encircled the Belgian fortress of Liège, and pressed the Allies and Belgians back to Antwerp and the Dyle line. Georg Küchler’s 18th Army, which had moved into Holland, turned on Antwerp as soon as the Dutch surrendered, and seized the city on May 18. The French cavalry that had advanced into the Ardennes made little impression on the German forward elements, and withdrew behind the main Allied positions.
The French First Army, with thirteen infantry divisions and 800 tanks, had been ordered to hold at all costs the “Gembloux gap,” the twenty-two-mile space between Wavre on the Dyle and Namur on the Meuse. Unfortunately, the commander distributed his armor all along the line.
On May 14–15, German panzers struck around the town of Gembloux. Here about 150 French tanks were concentrated, more than the Germans brought up in the beginning. The French drove the German panzers back in a fierce, rolling battle. But more German tanks kept coming up, and the French, now outnumbered, withdrew on May 15, opening the flood gates to the German panzers.
The Belgians and the Allies fell back to the Scheldt River, fifteen to thirty miles west. It was beginning to look like a rout. But the German high command didn’t want to hurry the Allies into too rapid a retreat before the net had stretched across their rear. Accordingly, it took 16th Corps away to back up the drive through the Ardennes, and also withdrew Luftwaffe support.
The German successes had stunned the world. At this moment a great voice lifted to rally the Allies, inspire democratic peoples everywhere, and defy Hitler. Winston Churchill stood before the House of Commons on May 13 and said: “I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears, and sweat. If you ask me, what our war aim is, I give you only one answer: Victory! Victory whatever the cost!”
While the world’s attention was riveted on the spectacular battles in Belgium and Holland, the actual Schwerpunkt, or center of gravity, of the German offensive plunged almost unnoticed through the Ardennes toward the weakest point of the French line, sixty miles away. Well behind the panzers plodded the German infantry divisions on foot, their supply wagons and artillery pieces being pulled
mostly by horses.
The leading element was the 19th Panzer Corps (1st, 2nd, and 10th Divisions), commanded by the father of German armored warfare, Heinz Guderian. His tanks were targeted at Sedan on the Meuse. Just to the north was Georg Hans Reinhardt’s 41st Panzer Corps with two divisions (6th and 8th), aimed at Monthermé, about fifteen miles northwest of Sedan. Each of the five panzer divisions averaged 253 tanks.
About twenty-five miles north of Reinhardt was Hermann Hoth’s 15th Panzer Corps with two divisions, the 5th and 7th (under Erwin Rommel, soon to be famous), with a total of 542 tanks. This corps’s job was to get across the Meuse at Dinant and keep the Allies in Belgium from interfering with Guderian and Reinhardt in their thrust westward.
Everything depended on speed. The Germans had to cross the Meuse before the Allies woke up to the danger. If they did, they still had time to assemble a formidable defensive line along the river and delay the offensive long enough to bring up reinforcements. If that happened, the Allies might counterattack through Army Group A and endanger Army Group B to the north, or they might hold the panzers along the Meuse and prevent the campaign of annihilation that Manstein had designed.
Guderian had to worry not only about the French but also about his own superiors. He met little resistance in the Ardennes, but near the frontier the French contested the advance firmly and held the Belgian town of Bouillon, eleven miles from Sedan, at nightfall on May 10.
General Charles Huntziger, commander of the French 2nd Army, asked the mayor of Bouillon whether one of the local hotels could be used for the wounded. “Of course not, General,” the mayor replied. “This is a summer resort, our hotels are reserved for tourists. Do you really think there is any danger?”
How Hitler Could Have Won World War II Page 3
