To Lose a Battle (64 page)

Of the 4th North African, about all that in fact reached Anor (on the 17th) was a colonel and a thousand of his
Tirailleurs
who had escaped through the German net at Philippeville, though losing the whole of the regimental H.Q. After a seventy-mile march, without rations, they were then forced to turn and face the Germans in a state of complete exhaustion. This was the tragic end of a division which had acquitted itself bravely. That same night, General Sancelme was taken prisoner with his staff at La Capelle.

Rommel was across the French frontier, travelling, as on the previous day, in Rothenburg’s command tank. Moving towards the village of Clairfayts, the tank column was warned that the road through it had been mined, so

we bore off to the south and moved in open order across fields and hedges in a semi-circle round the village. There was not a sound from the enemy, although our artillery was dropping shells at intervals deep into their territory… Suddenly we saw the angular outlines of a French fortification about 100 yards ahead. Close beside it were a number of fully-armed French troops, who, at the first sight of the tanks, at once made as if to surrender. We were just beginning to think we would be able to take it without fighting, when one of our tanks opened fire on the enemy elsewhere where, with the result that the enemy garrison promptly vanished into their concrete pill-box. In a few moments the leading tanks came under heavy anti-tank gunfire from the left and French machine-gun fire opened over the whole area.

Taking up the story, one of Rommel’s tank commanders describes coming up against one of the French bunker positions towards evening:

It spits fire. Two vehicles knocked out; and also from the right an anti-tank gun fires and hits the command tank of the heavy company. The radio operator has a leg shot off, commander unhurt. I am close by with my tank, but take cover. Enemy artillery fires heavily on us with medium-calibre guns. How are we going to get through the bunker line? Big question. In front of us is a thick wire entanglement, behind it a broad and deep Panzer ditch, and in the middle of the road anti-tank obstacles have been built. Are there still further obstacles? The only possibility; to blow up the anti-tank obstacles, and then rush through, hoping for luck. Meanwhile divisional commander [Rommel] as ever accompanies us in our attack in a tank. Explosion, silence full of apprehension, then two Very lights, the road is passable. Now with a rush shooting wildly between the bunkers. There are one or two casualties, but the mass get through.

Heavy artillery fire now plastered the French fortified zone. Under cover of smoke, engineers crept up to demolish the anti-tank ‘hedgehogs’. Rommel watched as another assault troop dealt with the pill-box ahead of him:

The men crawled up to the embrasure and threw a 6-pound demolition charge in through the firing slit. When, after repeated summonses to surrender, the strong enemy garrison still did not emerge, a further charge was thrown in. One officer and 35 men were then taken prisoner, although they shortly afterwards overcame the weak assault troop and escaped, after French machine-guns had opened fire from another pill-box.

Slowly the sky darkened and it became night. Farms were burning at several points in Clairfayts and farther west. I now gave orders for an immediate penetration into the fortified zone, and a thrust as far as possible towards Avesnes.

With jubilation, Rommel wrote in his diary:

The way to the west was now open… We were through the Maginot Line! It was hardly conceivable. Twenty-two years before we had stood for four and a half long years before this self-same enemy and had won victory after victory and yet finally lost the war. And now we had broken through the renowned Maginot Line and were driving deep into enemy territory. It was not just a beautiful dream. It was reality.

Now the fighting took on an entirely different character, that of a mad nocturnal pursuit. There was a bright moon, and Rommel ordered his tanks to advance at top speed, firing on the move to discourage any enemy anti-tank gunners or minelaying parties. ‘We’ll do it like the Navy,’ he said. ‘Fire salvoes to port and starboard.’

In the moonlight we could see the men of the 7th Motor-cycle Battalion moving forward on foot beside us. Occasionally an enemy machine-gun or anti-tank gun fired, but none of their shots came anywhere near us.

The French were clearly taken by surprise, first that Rommel should have broken through the frontier fortifications with such speed, and secondly that, against all the rules, he should be continuing the advance by night:

The people in the houses were rudely awoken by the din of our tanks, the clatter and roar of tracks and engines. Troops lay bivouacked beside the road, military vehicles stood parked in farmyards and in some places on the road itself. Civilians and French troops, their faces distorted with terror, lay huddled in the ditches, alongside hedges and in every hollow beside the road. We passed refugee columns, the carts abandoned by their owners, who had fled in panic into the fields. On we went, at a steady speed, towards our objective.

As always, Rommel was leading the raiding party in much the same way that, as a young captain, he had led his infiltrators behind the Italian lines at Caporetto. Occasionally he transmitted a brief radio message to his divisional staff, well to the rear. Towards Avesnes, progress became slower:

Military vehicles, tanks, artillery and refugee carts packed high with belongings blocked part of the road and had to be pushed unceremoniously to the side. All around were French troops lying flat on the ground, and farms everywhere were jammed tight with guns, tanks and other military vehicles… Always the same picture, troops and civilians in wild flight down both sides of the road.

On reaching Avesnes, the small town from which Ludendorff had directed the Germans’ last-gasp offensive of March 1918, Rommel appreciated that it might be occupied by strong French forces. Nevertheless, he ordered the Panzer column to thrust forward at full speed. In fact, in Avesnes Rommel’s advance-guard caught the remnants of Bruneau’s 1st Armoured, on its way to La Capelle, completely offguard. There was a disagreeable moment for Rommel when some of the surviving ‘B’ tanks managed to push into a gap in the Panzer column, ‘shooting wildly around them’. Several German tanks were knocked out; then, as dawn was coming up, Lieutenant Hanke – the diehard Nazi who had proved himself on the Meuse – moved in with his Mark IV and polished off the remaining ‘B’ tanks. Out of the whole of the French 1st Armoured Division, only three tanks crept off the battlefield. Later that day its artillery was also mopped up; with the exception of one battery, it had not fired a solitary shell. Having lost his division, General Bruneau ‘gave his staff officers their freedom’, and himself disappeared into the night. The following night he too was captured, east of St Quentin, by two engineers of the 6th Panzer.

After cleaning up in Avesnes, Rommel signalled corps H.Q. for further orders. There was no reply. He decided to continue the headlong rush and try to seize Landrecies and its crossing over the Sambre, eleven miles west of Avesnes. Ammunition was running out, so his column now ‘drove westwards through the brightening day with guns silent’. But Rommel was convinced that the rest of his division, infantry and supplies was following up closely behind him. Once again, he passed more columns of wretched refugees mingled with utterly astonished French troops on the march:

A chaos of guns, tanks and military vehicles of all kinds, inextricably entangled with horse-drawn refugee carts, covered the road and verges. By keeping our guns silent and occasionally driving our cross-country vehicles alongside the road, we managed to get past the column without great difficulty.

One of Rommel’s Panzer commanders recalled simply shouting, loudly and impudently, at the French troop columns to throw away their weapons: ‘Many willingly follow this command, others are surprised, but nowhere is there any sign of resistance.’ Several times his tank men were questioned, hopefully, ‘
Anglais?
’ There was evidently one rare, recalcitrant exception, who brought out the ruthless streak in Rommel – a French lieutenant-colonel overtaken by Rommel as his staff car was trapped in the road jam. On being asked by him for his rank and appointment, ‘His eyes glowed hate and impotent fury and he gave the impression of being a thoroughly fanatical type.’ Rothenburg signalled to him to get in his tank. ‘But he curtly refused to come with us, so, after summoning him three times to get in, there was nothing for it but to shoot him.’

Through Landrecies and across the Sambre via an undamaged bridge, the Panzer spearhead drove into a barrack full of troops. After a tank there had been swiftly destroyed, Lieutenant Hanke ordered the officers to have all their troops paraded and marched off eastwards. Almost out of ammunition and petrol, Rommel finally halted his column on a hill just east of Le Cateau, and nineteen miles on from Avesnes. It was now 0515 on the 17th. Though his tank crews were utterly exhausted, Rommel himself immediately hastened back to bring up the rest of the division.

End of the Ninth Army

Since the previous morning, Rommel had advanced nearly fifty miles. By all the existing canons of warfare, the way he had driven this thin finger, perhaps less than a mile wide, deep into the French lines by night seemed almost an act of recklessness. But its effect on an already demoralized enemy was quite devastating. Over the two days of the 16th and 17th, Rommel’s own casualties amounted to one officer and less than forty men
and N.C.O.s, while some 10,000 enemy prisoners were counted and a hundred tanks knocked out or captured. The wider consequences of the ‘Avesnes Raid’ were even more significant; by seizing their starting-off points, it shattered what little prospects there were for the counter-strokes on the northern flank of the ‘Bulge’ scheduled to take place on the 17th, and, by capturing the bridge at Landrecies, it breached the Sambre–Oise line which Georges in his Order No. 14 had been determined to hold come what may. Finally, it virtually administered the
coup de grâce
to the Ninth Army. The fate of II Corps and its solitary division, the 5th Motorized, was a case in point. On the left wing of the Ninth Army, this formation had played only a marginal part in the battle so far. During the afternoon of the 16th, General Bouffet (the corps commander) ordered Boucher (commanding the 5th) to withdraw on Avesnes that night. Almost immediately afterwards a violent air attack wiped out II Corps H.Q., killing Bouffet and nearly all his staff. Shaken, the 5th Motorized began to withdraw in some confusion. Then, on reaching Avesnes, it was stopped dead by Rommel. Panic sown by fear-ridden fugitives spread like fire in the dark. In the vivid words of General Doumenc, out of the ensuing chaos the division emerged ‘volatilized’. Gone was the last of the divisions originally under Corap’s command.

As Victor Hugo wrote of Waterloo, ‘There faded away this noise which was a great army.’

Chapter 16

The Panzers Halt

17 May

We can always recover ground, but never lost time.

FIELD-MARSHAL GRAF VON GNEISENAU

… the spokesman of the French Ministry of Information, referring to reports of a penetration of the French lines by German armoured columns, said that ‘a marked improvement’ had taken place in the situation.

He described the penetration of the German armoured columns as being ‘in a long straight line,’ and said that some short lapse of time had been necessary before measures were taken to deal with this armoured column, owing to the necessity of collating reports of its progress to enable the Allies to make the counter-blow as hard as possible.

The Times
, 17 May

There is no ground for a suggestion that the French Army showed itself ‘overwhelmed’ by the striking force of the German armoured divisions and bombers [at Sedan]. It is true that they lost ground in several places and had their line of advance ruptured; but that is only the inevitable outcome of the advantage the attacker has in choosing his point of attack. The French General Staff were prepared for such a temporary reverse; and more are bound to occur before the Allies succeed in stabilising the front.

Manchester Guardian
, 17 May

All Quiet on the Kurfürstendamm

Inside Germany, the tremendous developments of the first week of the campaign had aroused astonishingly little excitement. True, as part of the German deception campaign, the full scope and direction of the breakthrough had been extensively played down. Not until 15 May did the Wehrmacht communiqué even mention that the Meuse had been crossed at Sedan, and then it was subordinated to news about the capitulation
of Holland. That same evening German radio commentators also dwelt at length on the glories of the Dutch surrender, adding almost
en passant
that ‘the crossing of the Meuse south of Namur… offers the best prospects of threatening the fortress of Namur from the flank and of taking the northern sector of the Dyle Line from the rear’. Nevertheless, announcements of such triumphs as the conquest of Holland, the capture of Liège and the seizure of Fort Eben Emael were given tremendous emphasis – interpolated with loud fanfares and occasional bursts from the
Deutschlandlied
, or ‘We Sail Against England’ – and it was quite clear from the occasional hints dropped by Berlin officialdom that other startling successes were being scored at the front.

Yet by comparison with the electric days of August 1914, the lack of enthusiasm among the German public amounted almost to apathy. On 10 May, housewives gave the appearance of being principally concerned with laying in provisions for the Whitsun holiday. William Shirer, sensitive as always to the prevailing temper of the Berliners, noted how few even ‘bothered to buy the noon papers which carried the news’ that day. Two days later he recorded: ‘A typical Sunday in Berlin to-day, with no evidence that the Berliners, at least, are greatly exercised at the battle for their thousand-year existence’. As a modest air-raid precaution, cafés were closed at 11 p.m. instead of 1 a.m., and dancing was
verboten
for the time being. The next day, Shirer’s diary begins to reveal a sense of astonishment at the speed of events: