To Lose a Battle (34 page)

Dearest Lu,

We’re packing up at last. Let’s hope not in vain. You’ll get all the news for the next few days from the papers. Don’t worry yourself. Everything will go all right.

All over western Germany, and far behind the Rhine, there were similar scenes of rapid ‘packing up’ and the writing of last letters. The élite Grossdeutschland Regiment, which was to play a key role in the coming battle, received a terse order from its commander, Lieutenant-Colonel Graf von Schwerin: ‘Forward against the enemy!
Mit Gott! Es lebe der Führer!
’ On returning from manoeuvres, Werner Flack, wireless sergeant in a horse-drawn unit that had fought in Poland, and who was hoping to get a day’s pass to enjoy the gorgeous spring weather at Bingen-am-Rhein, was told by his
Feldwebel
that afternoon that the company was to move again in four hours’ time. More manoeuvres? On reaching the wireless office, he found a typewritten slip bearing the unit’s action frequencies. Now knowing that it was the real thing, he recalled that ‘The warmth and brilliance of the day was stunningly oppressive. But I saw
neither the mountains nor the flowers, neither the meadows nor the sunshine. I simply pushed the sheet with the action frequencies on it into the Command folder.’

The conditions of secrecy and speed which Hitler had imposed after the Mechelen Incident were superbly fulfilled. Even commanders of units in the van of attack were kept ignorant of its timing until the last possible minute. On the afternoon of 7 May, for instance, Oskar Reile, an Abwehr officer stationed in Trier and charged with the important task of controlling undercover agents in Luxembourg, had asked for, and been granted, a few days’ leave. His superior had requested him to stay in the neighbourhood, but added, ‘As far as I can see, nothing special will happen in the next few days.’ It was only on the afternoon of 9 May that Reile was recalled from his leave. Captain Graf von Kielmansegg,
¹
the second staff officer at H.Q. of the 1st Panzer Division, which was to spearhead the attack on Sedan, noted that when they received their orders at lunchtime on the 9th, ‘the division’s officers were completely unprepared for the news’. Some had already left on Whitsun leave. Without them, the 1st Panzer departed from its quarters that night, driving with lights extinguished up the winding roads of the Eifel. One of the tankmen wrote:

With every hour that goes by, it becomes more lively on the approach roads, more and more troops quartered here in the Eifel are getting underway. We overtake marching, riding and driving columns. The noise of the motors gets on one’s nerves in this night of uncertainty. The drivers must exert the utmost powers of vision, so as not to end up in the roadside ditches. It’s pitch dark… Now we realize why we came here so often to carry out peace-time operations.

At 0430
²
the 1st Panzer, bearing General Guderian with it, crossed the Luxembourg frontier near Vianden, where that famous propagandist of an earlier Franco–German war, Victor Hugo, had spent his declining years. But Guderian’s men were
not the first Germans to enter the Grand Duchy; on previous days an unprecedented number of ‘tourists’ on bicycles and motor-cycles had been checked through by the unsuspecting frontier guards. Dispatched by the Abwehr, their role was to dislocate telephone communications, and prevent the Luxembourgers from destroying vital road junctions. Further to the north, Rommel and his 7th Panzer were swarming across the Belgian frontier, heading for Dinant on the Meuse, sixty-five miles away. Still further north, along the Dutch frontier facing Maastricht, German stormtroopers had nestled right up to the Dutch customs post. As the first light of dawn came up, the Dutch could hear the rumble of approaching tanks; the tension grew unbearable, but still the frontier guards continued to stroll quietly up and down, apparently noticing nothing. Then the rumbling grew louder and louder as squadron after squadron of Ju-52s, containing the whole of the German 22nd Airborne Division, plus some 4,000 paratroopers, passed overhead. Meanwhile, over the German radio that dawn came the usual martial music and the first news of the day’s sporting events.

The Luftwaffe Attacks

The Luftwaffe bomber crews too had not been warned of the imminent offensive. Roused out of their beds during the early hours of 10 May, while it was still dark, they were ordered to attend briefings at fifteen minutes’ notice. There was no time even to shave. Shortly before sunrise, every available aircraft left its field. Ranging far out, they laid mines off the Dutch and British coasts, struck at airfields in Holland, Belgium and France, and bombed road and railway centres deep in France. At Abbeville, a sugar warehouse was set on fire; burning for several days it produced rivers of treacle, which the inhabitants did not allow to go to waste. At the R.A.F. airfield of Conde-Vraux south of Rheims, Dorniers (‘Flying Pencils’) destroyed six of 114 Squadron’s eighteen Blenheim bombers, all neatly lined up in a row, and rendered the remaining twelve unserviceable, though otherwise the R.A.F. were fortunate enough to sustain little serious damage on the ground that day. Altogether
nearly fifty French airfields, in General d’Astier’s Z.O.A.N. and behind Paris, were attacked that day. General d’Astier himself claims that all the fields were quickly restored, and that only four planes were destroyed and another thirty damaged. Three Heinkel 111s setting out to bomb Dijon strayed, and bombed the German city of Freiburg-im-Breisgau by mistake, killing fifty-seven civilians, including twenty-two children.
³

It was against little Holland, however, that the main weight of Goering’s fury was turned on the 10th. Flying over the Dutch pastures that morning, Theo Osterkamp, a fighter ace who had won the Pour le Mérite (Germany’s highest decoration) in the First War, thought to himself how peaceful it all seemed:

… children playing by the stream, a white dog jumps around them barking, and they wave and laugh and are happy. How crazy! Why is this lovely peaceful land suddenly ‘enemy territory’?… Why will those girls with rakes in their hands be threatening and screaming tomorrow, instead of waving with their coloured handkerchiefs and laughing?

The answer was not hard to arrive at, as at the same moment less idyllically-minded young Germans were already machine-gunning the streets of The Hague. Curving out into the North Sea so as to take the Dutch by surprise (not unlike the Israeli fighter-bombers of June 1967), the Heinkel 111s hammered the airfields at Amsterdam–Schiphol, Bergen op Zoom, and Rotterdam–Waalhaven. At Waalhaven bombs killed a large number of Dutch soldiers who, despite Colonel Sas’s warning, and the ensuing alert, had been allowed to ‘sleep on’ in vulnerable hangars. Most of the few planes of the Dutch Air Force were wiped out. After the bombing and strafing came the paratroops and German airborne forces in what was to be the first major attempt in history to occupy and conquer a nation from the air.

With the main visible effort of the Luftwaffe concentrated over Holland, there was nothing here that might betray to Allied Intelligence the true direction of
Sichelschnitt.
Meanwhile, over the Panzers creeping slowly along the densely-packed roads of the Eifel and into the Ardennes, an immense fighter umbrella flew cover against any Allied ‘spy’ planes that might attempt to intrude. But few did.

To the vigilant Luftwaffe patrolling above, the roads leading towards Sedan and the Meuse presented the spectacle of a lifetime. Nose to bumper was the greatest concentration of tanks – between 1,200 and 1,500 of them – yet seen in war. Kleist’s massive Armoured Group was moving forward in three blocks, one densely closed up behind the other. ‘Like a giant phalanx,’ remarked General von Blumentritt, Rundstedt’s Chief of Operations, ‘they stretched back for a hundred miles, the rear rank lying fifty miles to the
east
of the Rhine. Had this mass formation of Panzers been placed in single file, the tail-end would have been in Königsberg, in East Prussia, and the head of the column in Trier.’ First came the tanks and the motorized infantry shock-troops; then the heavy supply echelons; and finally, far beyond the Rhine, singing lustily and marching against each other as if in competition, the infantry regiments whose job would be to hold and consolidate the ground conquered by the Panzers. It would be another two days before they would even reach the frontier. Occasionally the columns would be halted by a single vehicle breaking down. But such halts were rare; the moment a tank or a car showed signs of stalling, it was ruthlessly pushed off the road. Uneasily, the Panzer commanders, aware of what a superb target the dense, crawling columns presented, gazed up to the skies; but there they saw only the reassuring black crosses of the Luftwaffe.

Guderian

The passage of Guderian’s column through Luxembourg took place smoothly and peacefully.
Feldwebel
Schwappacher of the Grossdeutschland Regiment, which was leading the Panzers
across the Ardennes, recorded how the outlines of the last houses in the frontier town of Echternach

appear and fade in the early morning mists… An old grandmother greets us happily and gives us her blessings for the forthcoming battle… The Luxembourgers try to blow up the bridge over the Sauer; it only half succeeded, so that our engineers were immediately able to put it back in order by using a few boards…

Other German soldiers were astonished to see farmers in the fields continuing to plough and barely raising their heads as the Panzers rumbled past. The ‘tourists’ of Admiral Canaris had performed their tasks well; there were few hold-ups caused by demolitions, while on the main Trier-Luxembourg road the advancing columns found several stretches that had been mined, but not detonated. The German engineers carried wooden ramps with them, specially designed to fit over the paltry Luxembourg tank obstacles, so that the Panzers could roll across them with the minimum delay. Backing up the Abwehr ‘tourists’ was the first of Hitler’s ‘special operations’ brain-children. A detachment of 125 volunteers, commanded by Lieutenant Hedderich, had been landed before dawn by twenty-five Fieseler Storchs near Esch-sur-Alzette on the Franco-Luxembourg border with the task of holding this vital communication centre until Guderian’s main force arrived. After halting and turning about a number of Luxembourg workers cycling to collect their Friday pay-packets, Hedderich’s group were accosted by a bewildered but amicable gendarme who informed them that they were ‘on neutral territory’, and ordered them to leave it. He was quietly arrested. Narrowly missing the present Grand-Duke, Jean, who happened to be passing in a car, the Germans then settled down to wait for Guderian. By 0900 that morning the forward elements of the 1st Panzer had already reached the Belgian frontier after traversing the whole of Luxembourg. Hardly a shot had been fired; total Luxembourg casualties amounted to six gendarmes and one soldier wounded, seventy-five captured, none killed.

Rommel

Out beyond the right flank of Kleist’s Armoured Group, the 5th Panzer reported that its first tank to cross the Belgian frontier had bravely managed to shoot up a group of unprepared Belgian infantrymen, lolling about on a frontier bridge. Later that morning the 5th was attacked by two enemy bombers, which dropped their bombs aimlessly in the woods. One was shot down by the German light flak, and a parachute opened. Just south of the 5th Panzer, Rommel was encountering elaborate obstructions prepared by the Belgians:

All roads and forest tracks had been permanently barricaded and deep craters blown in the main roads. But most of the road blocks were undefended by the Belgians, and it was thus in only a few places that my division was held up for any length of time. Many of the blocks could be by-passed by moving across country or over side roads. Elsewhere, all troops quickly set to work to deal with the obstructions and soon had the road clear.

Nevertheless, the Belgian frontier works, undefended as they were, proved sufficient to slow Rommel’s advance down to six kilometres in three hours, a first setback which made the impatient Rommel distinctly nervous. Much of the Belgian demolition work had certainly been effected with consummate skill: bridges so well dynamited that their remains provided little of use for emergency bridges; roads blown up with charges dug so deep into their foundations as to make them completely impassable. At Martelange, just inside the Belgian frontier from Luxembourg, minefields and a destroyed river bridge presented the 1st Panzer with its first minor check, forcing it to postpone its attack on the Belgian main line of resistance until the following day. But, obeying their orders to the letter, the Belgian Chasseurs Ardennais, having completed their demolitions, withdrew from the scene. How much more the delicately balanced German timetable might have been thrown out of gear, even on the first day, if those frontier obstructions could have been supported by resolute covering fire! Here was perhaps the first of the painful consequences of Belgium’s return to neutrality of 1936

Operation ‘Niwi’

So far the most demonstrative sequences in the land fighting on 10 May had followed from Hitler’s airborne ‘special operations’, the first time that these had ever been employed in warfare on so large a scale. Lieutenant Hedderich’s airborne commando dropped outside Esch in Luxembourg has already been mentioned, but further north in the Belgian Ardennes a more ambitious endeavour, Operation ‘Niwi’, was also under way. ‘Niwi’, so named because of the two villages concerned, involved a landing of some 400 men of the Grossdeutschland at Nives and Witry in the Belgian Ardennes, roughly midway between Neufchâteau, and the frontier towns of Bastogne and Martelange. Neufchâteau, sitting on a very commanding height with roads radiating out of it in all directions, was potentially a most important defensive position, and its rapid capture was also essential to Guderian’s advance upon Sedan. Dispatched in two groups aboard ninety-eight of the light Fieseler Storchs, ‘Niwi’s’ instructions were to keep open the roads running eastwards from Neufchâteau, impede the passage of enemy reinforcements through Neufchâteau, and aid the progress of Guderian’s XIX Corps by attacking the Belgian frontier position from the rear. The Witry group, under the ‘Niwi’ commander, Lieutenant-Colonel Garski, landed according to schedule, but Captain Krüger’s group heading for Nives was beset with the errors that so often plague airborne operations.