The Breaking Point
Page 10
Colonel Keltsch's battle group, however, made the most important crossing for the 1st Panzer Division. Though their fighting skills and combat leadership were important, luck was clearly on their side. During the afternoon of the 11th, the 1st Motorcycle Battalion, the 2/2nd Panzer Battalion, and an artillery battery from the 73rd Regiment received orders from Colonel Keltsch to move from Fays-les-Veneurs (six kilometers west of Bertrix) toward Cornimont (nine kilometers northwest of Bouillon). The 2/1st Infantry received orders to move toward Poupehan (five kilometers northwest of Bouillon) and seize a crossing site over the Semois.
Around 1915 hours on the 11th, the 3rd Company of the motorcycle battalion received orders to advance toward Mouzaive (ten kilometers northwest of Bouillon). Reinforced by a tank platoon, the motorcyclists were supposed to seize the bridge across the Semois if it were intact. If the bridge had been destroyed, they were to take the northern part of the small village (Alle) to its south and establish a bridgehead.78
Although the source of the orders to take the bridge at Mouzaive is not clear, they probably came from Colonel Keltsch, who had the mission of seizing a crossing site west of Bouillon. They evidently did not come from division headquarters, or at least the division staff did not claim credit for the order in the daily log. Mouzaive lay outside the 1st Panzer Division's area and was supposed to be a crossing site for the 2nd Panzer Division. Thus the explanation for the seizure of a crossing site in another division's area probably resides in the aggressiveness of a subordinate commander, rather than in the eagerness of the division's headquarters to push aside a sister division.
Nonetheless, shortly before dark on the 11th, about thirty minutes after receiving the order, the motorcyclists raced toward Mouzaive. As they passed through the woods to the northeast of the bridge, fallen trees across the road forced them to dismount from their motorcycles and move forward on foot. When they emerged from the woods, they came under machine gun fire from across the river in the vicinity of Mouzaive. During this firefight, a French horse cavalry patrol appeared and managed to pass by the Germans and cross over the bridge into Mouzaive. A hasty attack from the 3rd Company succeeded in securing the bridge around 2335 hours.79
Even though the area was outside the division's zone, the motorcyclists cleared out the northern part of Alle and began expanding the bridgehead. Division headquarters immediately requested permission from corps headquarters to use the crossing site, and since the 2nd Panzer Division was far to the rear, soon received permission. Around 0500 hours elements of the 2nd Panzer reached Mouzaive, expecting to seize a crossing site.80 The area, however, clearly was under the control of the 1st Panzer Division.
At 0200 hours on the 12th, the 1st Company of the 1st Motorcycle Battalion arrived to reinforce the 3rd Company. Then at 0700 a tank company, evidently from the 2/2nd Panzers, arrived and crossed the river at a fording site alongside the bridge. At 0800 hours a company from the 4th Armored Reconnaissance Battalion also arrived to strengthen the defenses at the crossing site. The 2/1st Infantry, which had attempted to force a crossing at Poupehan and failed, received orders to move to Mouzaive, and it too quickly crossed the Semois. By 0730 hours German tanks and motorcycles were moving south from Mouzaive and headed toward Alle and eventually St. Menges (three kilometers northwest of Sedan). The 2/1st Infantry followed behind them.81
While Keltsch's battle group seized the crossing site at Mouzaive, Krüger's battle group pushed across the Semois at Bouillon. After Krüger's forces reached Bouillon and pushed units toward the south, they did not move directly toward Sedan. Even though an awkward change in directions was required, the division had to move west toward Corbion and then turn south toward Sedan. The reason for this awkward change in direction was an order from corps headquarters that gave the 10th Panzer Division priority in the use of the road that ran south of Bouillon toward Sedan and directed the 1st Panzer Division to use routes farther to the west. The 10th Panzer Division had to move ten kilometers to the west from its crossing site at Mortehan, because the road south of Bouillon was one of the few routes it could use to move toward the eastern side of Sedan where it was supposed to cross the Meuse.
Before the engineers arrived on the morning of the 12th and began building a bridge across the Semois at Bouillon, as mentioned earlier, elements of the 1st Panzer Division that were already across the river began expanding the bridgehead seized on the morning of the 12th. The 3/1st Infantry moved into this bridgehead and then quickly advanced toward Corbion (four kilometers west of Bouillon). Although French demolitions had created a large crater and had partially destroyed the road along which they marched, the German infantry passed around the obstacle with no difficulty. In Corbion the infantry battalion encountered very little resistance and cleared out the enemy with only one company.82
Behind them, however, the staff of the 1st Regiment tried to move in vehicles along the road from Bouillon and Corbion but were halted by the crater. As they awaited the arrival of engineers to take care of the crater and enable their vehicles to cross, the staff came under heavy enemy artillery fire that had apparently been registered on the site. The after-action report on the event noted that the staff suffered “heavy losses.”83 The crater on the road and the artillery fire that protected it thus created major problems for the division.
After clearing Corbion, the 3/1st Infantry moved south from Corbion and then turned west for about three kilometers. Before reaching the road from Alle to St. Menges, the battalion turned south toward Fleigneux, but as it marched forward, it received heavy fire from a “harmless looking house.” This fire apparently came from what the French called a “fortified house.” Using covering fires from a Mark IV tank, a lieutenant assembled an attack squad and soon captured the French position. The narrow trails, however, prevented the German vehicles from dispersing, and French artillery fire began landing at the front of the column.84 When other units moved forward, they too came under the heavy artillery fire. The result was that the German forces moving west toward Corbion and then south toward Sedan did not advance as rapidly as the forces that had crossed at Mouzaive.
The 1st Panzer Division had reacted rapidly to the fortuitous seizure of the crossing site at Mouzaive and had opened a large hole in French defenses along the Semois. Though initially stymied in the attempt to shift forces west from Bouillon to Corbion, the rapid advance to the south from Mouzaive enabled German forces to reach the edge of the woods near Fleigneux (three kilometers north of Sedan) around 1010 hours. The 2/1st Infantry, however, did not attack the French village of St. Menges (two kilometers to the southwest of Fleigneux) until around 1300 hours. To the north, the 1/1st Infantry received orders at 1300 hours to move south toward Sedan. Pressure from the 1st Panzer Division against the last French defenders north of the Meuse thus initially came from Mouzaive in the northwest and Bouillon in the north, but Germans soon began moving forward in the center.
When the first German elements broke out of the heavy woods north of Fleigneux around 1010 hours and entered the rolling, open terrain north of the Meuse River, their presence signaled the successful crossing of the Ardennes by the Germans and the opening of a new phase of the campaign. The first Germans reached the Meuse around 1400 hours.
It had taken them about fifty-seven hours.
THE FINAL PUSH TO THE MEUSE RIVER
The three divisions of the XIXth Panzer Corps thus crossed the Semois River along a front of about twenty kilometers. Though the 2nd Panzer Division on the corps’ right flank crossed later than the other two divisions, the concentration of overwhelming force along the narrow front enabled the Germans to brush the last French defenders aside easily. As tanks from the 1st Panzer Division poured across at Mouzaive and as the infantry from the 10th Panzer raced south from Mortehan, the Germans threatened to encircle the French defenders along the Semois. This danger hastened the collapse of an already fragile defensive effort.
CHAPTER 3
The French Fight in the Ardennes
Because of Belgium's sensitivity about remaining neutral, little or no coordination had been accomplished between the French and Belgian forces. The lack of coordination and the unexpected encountering of the main enemy attack ensured the two forces did not operate in a combined fashion to delay or defeat the Germans. The result was a somewhat disorganized fight in the Ardennes during which the French cavalry failed to recognize and report the significance of the large German forces they encountered.
FRENCH INTELLIGENCE ASSESSMENTS OF THE GERMAN ORDER OF BATTLE
Before 1940 the French devoted considerable effort to develop as much and as accurate intelligence as possible about Germany. The Second Bureau of the Army's High Command had primary responsibility for the collection and analysis of data concerning foreign military forces. Another important part of the French intelligence community was known in peacetime as the Service de Renseignements and in wartime as the Fifth Bureau. This office had responsibility for all of France's clandestine intelligence collection operations, including counter-espionage, agents, secret listening posts, and so on. The information it gathered was forwarded to the Second Bureau, which combined it with information received from other sources.1
As part of their effort to monitor German radio traffic and break their codes, the French developed close relations with the Poles as they worked to duplicate the principal German cipher machine, Enigma, which was used for encrypting and decrypting messages. During this sensitive endeavor, a French agent who was involved in the German communications-intelligence system supplied critical information that enabled the Poles to break the German code with their duplicate of an Enigma machine. At the end of July 1939, the Poles sent one of the recently fabricated machines to London and the other to Paris, and French intelligence specialists quickly asked a firm in which they had great confidence to manufacture forty duplicates.2
After the fall of Poland and the escape of some Polish communications specialists to France, a small cipher section in the Fifth Bureau of the French Army's General Staff, which had been known in peacetime as the Service de Renseignements, used the duplicate Enigma machines to decipher much of the high-level telegraphic traffic of the German Army and Air Force. Since the German Army relied primarily on Teletype machines linked with communications wire, most of the traffic monitored and decrypted by the French came for the Luftwaffe. Between 28 October 1939 and 14 June 1940, the French decrypted 4,789 messages. With the cipher section providing the messages to the Fifth Bureau of the army and the Second Bureau of the High Command, which analyzed the decrypted messages, the French acquired a great deal of information about the German order of battle, but the information pertained primarily to the enemy air force.3
The flow of information continued essentially uninterrupted from 28 October 1939 until 12 May 1940, when the Germans changed their codes. After working night and day, the French broke this code, and beginning on 20 May once again began decrypting German radio traffic.4 Thus the only interruption in the French reading of German encrypted message traffic occurred during the crucial period when the Germans crossed the Meuse River and turned west.
From the beginning, decoded messages contributed to the French understanding of the German order of battle. Using information from a variety of sources, including Enigma intercepts, the Second Bureau of the High Command had located by April 1940 about 110 to 120 German divisions along the Dutch, Belgian, and French frontiers. It also had concluded that the Germans possessed 10 to 12 armored divisions and that these divisions could be used in a blitzkrieg attack similar to the one used against Poland.5 Between 1 May and 10 May, French intelligence received a large number of reports from agents indicating a German attack was imminent and would probably be concentrated north of the Moselle River. One report also said the Germans intended to occupy all of France after only a month of fighting.6
As more and more indicators suggested an imminent German attack, one of the most important questions for the intelligence community pertained to the location of the main attack. From September 1939 until 10 May 1940, detailed analyses of information pertaining to the locations of German units suggested that attack would come “north of the Moselle.” However, locating the most probable German zone of attack north of the Moselle did not specify whether the main enemy attack would come through Holland, through Maastricht and the Gembloux Gap, or through the Ardennes in eastern Belgium. To French intelligence specialists, the German forces that could be employed through the Netherlands or through eastern Belgium seemed to be “secondary concentrations.”7 Sufficient forces for the main attack were apparently located where they could attack through Maastricht and the Gembloux Gap, much as the Germans had done in 1914.
Even though most of the intelligence community believed the Germans would probably come through the Low Countries, the French became more concerned on the eve of the German attack about the possibility of an attack through Luxembourg and eastern Belgium. In early March 1940, the Belgians observed a strengthening of German forces south of Liège, but after warning Gamelin, neither the Belgians nor the French saw a need to change their strategy. In the middle of March, aerial reconnaissance identified large German armored and motorized forces east of Luxembourg, which suggested some shifting of enemy forces for possible moves through Luxembourg or against the Maginot Line. Other reconnaissance flights, however, did not identify a major shift in German forces,8 even though several Panzer divisions had moved into the area southwest of Koblenz along the Moselle River. In the middle of April, a reliable agent informed the French about the Germans’ gathering information about terrain and roads along the axis Sedan-Charleville-St. Quentin. The agent also said the Germans would attack in the early days of May and intended to reach the Seine River in less than a month.9 Coupled with these reports were analyses of Enigma intercepts that suggested a higher probability of an attack through the Ardennes.
Most of the increased concern about the Ardennes apparently came from the Fifth Bureau of the French Army. In mid-April, two intelligence officers from the Fifth Bureau, including Colonel Rivet who was its head, tried to meet with General Gamelin to express their heightened concern, but his executive officer said that Gamelin was too involved with ongoing events in Norway and told them to meet instead with General Georges. At his headquarters at La Ferté-sous-Jouarre, they met with Georges to discuss a possible German move through the Ardennes. After a detailed examination of the new assessment, Georges thanked them and departed. His attitude was probably best reflected by his operations officer, who explained to Colonel Rivet that the new information contradicted other intelligence suggesting the main enemy effort would be aimed farther west, toward the Netherlands and northern Belgium.10
Though Georges’ intelligence officer, Colonel Baril, may have accepted the possibility of the German main attack coming through the Ardennes, the overall assessment of the French intelligence system did not change. The assessment by the Second Bureau of the High Command (under Colonel Gauché) about the most likely “zone of action” by the Germans basically remained the same from November 1939 until 10 May 1940. The last formal intelligence assessment, which was presented to the French High Command on 5 May, emphasized the absence of any major changes for about two months in the German distribution and location of forces. Though he may have had some personal reservations about the subject, Georges’ intelligence officer, Colonel Baril, gave the briefing on the German order of battle and noted that no important indicators suggested a move directly against the Maginot Line or through Switzerland. According to the briefing, the most likely zone of action for the Germans remained the area “north of the Moselle.”11
Since the Moselle
River flowed from the southeastern corner of Luxembourg northeast to the Rhine River, this assessment—in a practical sense—did little more than rule out the possibilities of an attack through Switzerland or directly against the Maginot Line. Thus the large amount of new intelligence did little to shift the gaze of the French High Command from Maastricht and the Gembloux Gap toward the Ardennes.
Despite an overriding concern with the northern avenue of invasion, some doubts clearly existed in the hierarchy of the Army. Georges and Gamelin exchanged some correspondence in the middle of April about whether it was “ipso facto” necessary to give orders for Franco-British troops to penetrate into Belgium and about whether it would be better to remain on the Escaut line, rather than move forward to the Dyle line.12 Georges’ meeting with the intelligence specialists from the Fifth Bureau occurred after his correspondence with Gamelin began. Despite Georges’ concerns about the Germans possibly coming through the Ardennes, his thinking evidently did not differ dramatically from that of other members of the French High Command.
Very few doubts existed among the French about the Ardennes being a difficult obstacle. Though the Ardennes was not considered impenetrable, the combination of natural and man-made obstacles would—in the French view—make any penetration a slow and arduous operation. Most of the Ardennes west of Luxembourg is fairly open and consists of rolling countryside, but the areas around the Semois River and along the Meuse between Mézières and Dinant have narrow winding roads and heavily forested, rugged hills. Felled trees, minefields, and roadblocks could theoretically prevent a large force, especially a mechanized one, from crossing rapidly. Additionally, if an enemy successfully made his way through the Ardennes, he still had to cross the Meuse River, whose depth, width, and surrounding terrain made it a reasonably strong obstacle.