To Lose a Battle (52 page)

I asked him whether his entire division could be turned westwards or whether a flank guard should be left facing south on the east bank of the Ardennes Canal.

By way of reply, Kirchner’s senior staff officer, Major Wenck, promptly interjected Guderian’s own favourite slogan,
‘Klotzen, nicht Kleckern.’
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‘That’, says Guderian, ‘really answered my question.’ He immediately issued orders for the 1st and 2nd Panzers ‘to change direction with all their forces, to cross the Ardennes Canal and to head west with the objective of breaking clear through the French defences’. To Kirchner, Guderian supplemented his orders with the dramatic words: ‘For the right wheel, road map Rethel!’ Driving back to corps H.Q. on the east bank of the Meuse to prepare his detailed orders for the 15th, Guderian paused on the heights above Donchery, and, ‘as I looked at the ground we had come over, the success of our attack struck me as almost a miracle’.

Guderian’s order was perhaps the most significant event of the campaign to date, and with it was introduced a third, decisive phase. The first phase had been the tricky approach
march through the Ardennes, with its accompanying deception of the ‘matador’s cloak’ operating to the north; the second, the crossing at Sedan and the constitution of a bridgehead. Now, by facing westwards, Guderian was poised in readiness for the dash to the Channel which would cut in two the Allied armies. The Battle of Sedan was over, and the Battle of France about to begin, bringing with it a complete change in the character of the campaign. By swinging right-handed across the Ardennes Canal – forming as it did the hinge between the French Second and Ninth Armies – Guderian was also altering the immediate tactical situation, gravely to the detriment of his opponents. His back turned upon the battered Huntziger, he would now be striking at the southern flank of Corap’s Ninth Army, already in such disarray where it faced Rommel in the north. But Guderian was undoubtedly taking a colossal risk by offering his southern flank to the major counter-thrust by those reinforcements that Intelligence had warned were on their way. This flank, of which Stonne was the keystone, was to be guarded only by the Grossdeutschland and the 10th Panzer. But the Grossdeutschland had already suffered considerable losses, and it would still be some time before the tanks of the 10th could intervene effectively. Would they be able to hold until the consolidating infantry reinforcements, still marching up through the Ardennes, could arrive? Meanwhile, there was yet a second contingent source of worry confronting Guderian: would the Allied air forces be able to destroy the pontoon bridges across the Meuse, those tenuous lifelines on which everything depended?

Allies bomb Sedan

Towards midday on the 14th, Rundstedt, the Army Group Commander, had himself arrived at Sedan to examine the situation. Guderian reported to him ‘in the very middle of the bridge, while an air raid was actually in progress. He asked drily: “Is it always like this here?” I could reply with a clear conscience that it was.’

Throughout the 14th, French and British bombers attacked the Sedan bridges with a reckless courage that impressed even the German flak gunners. The news of Rommel’s and Guderian’s crossing of the Meuse had reached Air Marshal Barratt on the night of the 13th. Accordingly Barratt, although it had already lost a quarter of its bombers, had warned the A.A.S.F. to be ready to throw in its full strength the next day, but also to prepare plans for retirement. Shortly after daybreak, ten Battles from Nos. 103 and 150 Squadrons took off for Sedan on two separate missions. Catching the German flak by surprise in the early-morning mist and encountering no Messerschmitts, they returned without loss; but, with their light-weight bombs, they caused only small damage to the pontoons, which was speedily repaired. It was then Barratt’s intention to switch to Rommel’s bridges at Dinant, but following the failure of Lafontaine’s counter-attacks, General Billotte made an urgent ‘victory or defeat’ appeal to him for all available Allied bombers to be thrown in at Sedan. At mid-morning, it became the turn of the French Air Force, which could only scrape together the pitifully small total of twenty-eight bombers. First of all eight Bréguets from
Groupement d’Assaut
18, escorted by fighters, attacked troop concentrations on the west bank. Heeding the disastrous losses from the ground-level attacks earlier in the campaign, they flew in at over 2,500 feet; this confused the German flak gunners but it did not make for accuracy. Five of the Bréguets were hit, but only one came down – behind the French lines. Next, shortly after noon, thirteen lumbering and elderly Amiots and six Léos attacked the outskirts of Sedan. Five of the French bombers were shot down, and by evening on the 14th
Groupe
I/12 had only one serviceable machine; consequently, the French air command called off its remaining operations for the day.

In the afternoon, Barratt’s A.A.S.F. returned, throwing in every available Blenheim and Battle. Like the French, the British made the mistake of attacking in small packets; and, in any case, as had already been proved in the north, the slow and under-armed Battles were horribly vulnerable both to
enemy ground fire and Messerschmitts.
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By now the German defences were thoroughly prepared. Against an impressive escort of 250 Allied fighters, Loerzer and Richthofen fielded 814 machines; the German flyers called it ‘fighters’ day’. But in truth the day belonged at least as much to Guderian’s light flak teams. With that extraordinary organizational brilliance which characterized the whole Sedan operation, Guderian had somehow disentangled his flak batteries from the columns still stretching across the Ardennes and rushed them forward so that they now ringed the pontoon bridges with an imposing concentration of firepower. Captain von Kielmansegg stood watching near the 1st Panzer bridge at Gaulier:

the summer landscape with the quietly flowing river, the light green of the meadows bordered by the darker summits of the more distant heights, spanned by a brilliantly blue sky, is filled with the racket of war. For hours at a time, the dull explosions of the bombs, the quick tack-tack of the machine-guns, the different notes, and the various effects of the separate flak calibres, mingles with the droning of the aircraft motors and the roar of the divisions passing over the bridges unimpeded. The flak soldiers serve their guns with rolled up shirt-sleeves, covered in sweat, and carry out their defensive role with almost sporting ambition, encouraged by the spectators occasionally coming up from the ranks of the troops waiting at the crossing. Again and again an enemy aircraft crashes out of the sky, dragging a long black plume of smoke behind it, which after the crash of the succeeding explosion remains for some time perpendicular in the warm air. Occasionally from the falling machines one or two white parachutes release themselves and float slowly to earth… in the short time that I am at the bridge, barely an hour, eleven planes alone were brought down.

For the R.A.F. the Meuse that day was an unimaginable hell, a real Valley of Death from which few returned. In it, the targets they had to hit were mere threads sixty yards long by a few feet wide, and more than one German writer testifies to the ‘unbelievable bravery’ with which the hopelessly outclassed
Battles pressed home their attacks. No. 12 Squadron – the ‘Dirty Dozen’ which had already suffered so heavily at Maastricht – lost four out of its remaining five planes; No. 150 Squadron, four out of four. Altogether, out of seventy-one bombers engaged, forty did not return. As the R.A.F. official history soberly remarks, ‘No higher rate of loss in an operation of comparable size has ever been experienced by the Royal Air Force.’

That evening twenty-eight Blenheims from Bomber Command continued the attacks; they lost a quarter of their numbers. The Germans later claimed to have shot down two hundred Allied planes, bombers and fighters; Guderian’s flak – the commander of which, Colonel von Hippel, was decorated with the Ritterkreuz for his work that day – was said to have accounted alone for 112 aircraft. These claims were certainly exaggerated,
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but the losses were high enough to break the back of the Allied tactical bombing potential. The Luftwaffe too had suffered fairly heavy casualties, including the death of two of its most senior combat leaders, Major-General von Stutterheim and Colonel Schwartzkopf, the Stuka ace. The constant bombing attacks had undoubtedly shaken German nerves, and an entry in XIX Panzer Corp’s War Diary for that evening notes that ‘The completion of the military bridge at Donchery had not yet been carried out owing to heavy flanking artillery fire and long bombing attacks on the bridging points… Our fighter cover is inadequate.’ But the bridges had not yet been destroyed; the procession of Guderian’s armour and supplies across the Meuse had been briefly delayed, but not halted. Thus it was a grotesque piece of wishful thinking on the part of General Georges to inform Barratt in the evening that the air attacks had enabled Huntziger to ‘contain’ the bridgehead, and to add a prediction that the ‘centre of interest’ would shift next day to Dinant. As it was, that black day marked the supreme effort of the Allied bomber forces, an effort that could never again be repeated – and it had failed in its objective.

The heroic sacrifice of Barratt’s Battle squadrons had certainly not halted the impetus of the crucial right-wheel by the 1st and 2nd Panzers. During the morning, even before Guderian’s momentous decision, the forceful Colonel Balck had already seized a crossing point over the River Bar and the closely parallel Ardennes Canal near Omicourt, against light resistance. All the way down to its confluence with the Meuse, the Bar valley is very wide and open, and there are no natural defensive positions comparable to the La Marfée heights to the east, now lost to the French. The Bar itself is no more than what is sometimes described in France as a
pipi du chat,
thirty feet wide in most places, and the bridges over it appear not to have been destroyed. Westwards from the Bar, the country transforms itself rapidly into the great monotonous plain of northern France, stretching all the way to the Channel, with no serious defensive feature until the River Oise just short of St Quentin. Swiftly the tanks of the 1st and 2nd Panzer began pushing over the Bar crossing places secured for them by Balck’s riflemen. Shortly after midday, there was a third French tank attack, coming up from the south-west, against the 1st Panzer, which had to refurnish its tanks with ammunition right up in the firing line. But by 3 p.m. there was a noticeable slackening in the French resistance south-west of the Bar. At least in this direction, the audacity of Guderian’s right-wheel seemed justified so far.

French Reinforcements to Sedan

On the French side, the forces sent by Huntziger (on the night of the 13th) to hold the Bar consisted of the 5th D.L.C. and the 1st Cavalry Brigade – both badly knocked about during the early skirmishes in the Ardennes – under command of General Chanoine. To link up with them, on the Second and Ninth Army hinge, General Corap had dispatched Colonel Marc’s 3rd Spahi Brigade, which had retired with such disastrous precipitancy from the Semois, and the 53rd Division. But owing to a series of typical counter-orders which had sent the 53rd chasing around in circles all night, only the Spahis and
Chanoine’s group were in position that morning, and it was upon them that the weight of Guderian’s right-wheel had fallen.

Commanded by General Etchberrigaray, the 53rd was the third of those ‘B’ divisions so disastrously located around Sedan at the time of the German attack. It had spent the winter building the fortifications in the north, and the early spring working on farms outside Paris. Constituting Corap’s reserve for his right-hand sector, on 12 May the 53rd had been ordered to back up General Libaud’s XLI Corps, between Mézières and the Bar. At 2100 hours on the 13th, Corap warned Libaud that contact had been lost with the Second Army at Sedan, and therefore the 53rd Division should be sent to hold the Bar, facing east. Then, three-quarters of an hour later, when the 53rd was already under way, Libaud received another message from Corap, announcing (for no very clear reason) that the situation had become less critical and that the 53rd was to resume its position facing
north,
i.e. in support of the Ninth Army, anticipating a threat coming via Mézières. At 2230 hours, Libaud re-transmitted this latest order to General Etchberrigaray, but on his way the liaison officer carrying it received another counter-order direct from Corap, instructing the 53rd once again to deploy along the Bar. Meanwhile, to add to its sense of insecurity, the division in its peregrinations was soon running into those demoralizing fugitives encountered by other reinforcements on that night of 13 May. Says General Doumenc:

elements of our own artillery passed with their trucks but without any guns. Their officers declared that there was no longer any infantry in front of them; that the Germans had crossed the Meuse near Donchery, that they were already on the Ardennes Canal.

In this nocturnal confusion, General Etchberrigaray had the greatest difficulty in catching up with his troops to marshal them. By morning the 53rd Division was so dispersed that it would be unable to reach the Bar in time to be of any use during the 14th. Thus neither in its quality nor its location
was it exactly the ideal formation with which to bar the vital gateway between Huntziger and Corap against the all-out onslaught Guderian was about to mount.

After some hard fighting, in which the French cavalry put up a splendid resistance, by nightfall on the 14th Colonel Balck’s riflemen, still at the apex of Guderian’s thrust, had reached their objective at Singly. Their losses had by no means been light; Balck had lost a large number of his officers and riflemen, while only three-quarters of the 1st Panzer’s tanks were still fit for action. But the division had already captured 3,000 prisoners and twenty-eight guns, and had knocked out some fifty French tanks. During the night, the 1st and 2nd Panzer brought all their tanks across the Bar in readiness for the big push westwards on the 15th.