To Lose a Battle (44 page)

Between 18th Division H.Q. and its various regiments (the 66th, 77th and 125th) communications became extremely poor in the course of the morning. General Doumenc notes: ‘… lines are cut. They had ceased with the 77th, and could not be re-established with the 125th. The radio did not function. There were no more motor-cycles.’ General Martin, having received no news of the crossing, although his XI Corps H.Q. lay less than fifteen miles from Houx, visited the 18th Division early that afternoon, where he called up the colonel of the 39th Regiment, which did not seem so far to have particularly distinguished itself. The colonel, in some agitation, told him that he had only just managed to escape from a group of German scouts whom he had met, in his staff car, on a railway bridge at Sosoye – eight miles west of the Meuse. Martin then ordered the 39th to prepare a counter-attack aimed at recapturing Surinvaux Wood and throwing all the enemy troops on the west bank back into the Meuse. The operation would be supported by three artillery groups and a squadron of tanks; H-Hour was to be 1930. Meanwhile, the battered 66th Regiment had ‘begun to show signs of exhaustion’, says General Doumenc, and ‘little was known of the rest of the division. The 77th
¹⁰
appeared to have fled. Of the 125th
¹⁰
nothing was known…’ All this had been achieved by Rommel’s dozen-odd infantry companies, unsupported by any heavy weapons on the west side of the Meuse.

Then, at 1830 hours, just one hour before Martin’s counter-attack was due to go in, according to General Doumenc:

the Colonel of the 39th Infantry Regiment communicated by telephone that he would not be ready at the appointed hour. H-Hour was fixed for 2000 hours. At 1945 he reported once again that the attack could not take place at 2000 hours. Thus it happened that, alone, the squadron of tanks moved forward to the Bois de la Grange; the tanks swept all that they found in front of them, and brought back eight prisoners as night was falling.

Realizing that there was no infantry following them to consolidate on the captured ground, the tanks then withdrew.

Thus ended the sum effort of Corap’s Ninth Army on 13 May against the malignant, mortal tumour swelling in its side – one ‘hit-and-run’ raid by a squadron of unsupported tanks. A golden opportunity to wipe out Rommel’s bridgehead and inflict a severe reverse upon him had been lost. All that day, events had been balanced upon a knife’s edge – much more finely balanced, indeed, than was apparent to the French defenders at the time. Without Rommel’s personal leadership on the one side, with just a little more determination on the other, the story might have been different. Presumably Rommel would have made a fresh attempt at crossing the river on the 14th or the 15th; but as his subsequent career after the tide of war had begun to flow against Germany showed, he was a commander exhilarated by success but easily dejected by adversity. If his motor-cyclists and riflemen had been pushed back into the Meuse on the 13th, the reverse might well have seriously blunted the cutting-edge of the 7th Panzer, but indisputably it would have gained for Corap at least some of the commodity which the French Army was to need most desperately throughout the campaign –
time.
Even through the night of the 13th and the early morning of the 14th, Rommel’s position remained extremely critical. His bridgehead was only a couple of miles deep and perhaps three wide; pockets of resistance were still holding out in its rear, and it was by no means certain that he could get his tanks across in sufficient strength before a concerted attack by French armour might
overrun it completely. As the night dragged on, the waiting Panzer crews listened impatiently to the sappers hammering away at their bridge, which had been slightly damaged in an enemy bombing raid the previous evening.

At lunchtime on the 13th, the first news of Rommel’s crossing was transmitted to Gamelin by General Georges’s headquarters, in a brief signal which added simply ‘a battalion had been knocked about’. Colonel Minart at G.Q.G. tells that the news created ‘a lively emotion’. A short time later, G.Q.G. was informed that a counter-attack with tanks was in process. Now, at last, all attention was concentrated on what was happening on the Meuse, says Minart:

but two long hours went by without our being able to know if the announced counter-attack had succeeded and if the Germans had been thrown back on to the right bank of the river. Various rumours, unchecked, began to reach as far as Vincennes. The Germans were supposed to be at Mézières. Anxious about being incorrectly informed, General Gamelin, at two various attempts (1400 and 1415 hours) telephoned – the only time – direct to Ninth Army. General Thierry d’Argenlieu,
¹¹
Chief of Staff to Corap’s Army, replied with his usual calm: ‘Nothing to report at Mézières; we are surveying the region at Monthermé. The incident at Houx is in hand; General Martin is on the spot with General Duffet.’
¹²

After this report, some hours elapsed without any further news from the Ninth Army. Then suddenly, at 1615 hours, a first smattering of ill tidings came through about Huntziger’s Second Army. At 2125 hours that night, General Georges rang through to tell Gamelin tersely that there had been ‘
un pépin assez sérieux
’ (‘a rather serious pin-prick’) at Sedan. It was the understatement of the century.

Guderian’s Panzers

That morning at 0715 hours Guderian had issued his final orders for the crossing operation in the afternoon. It would
have the support, he promised in only a modest exaggeration, of ‘almost the whole German Air Force’. The French defences would be smashed ‘by means of uninterrupted attacks lasting for eight hours’. At 1500 hours, his XIX Panzer Corps would effect crossings on either side of Sedan, between the mouth of the River Bar
¹³
and Bazeilles. If it arrived in time, the 2nd Panzer would form the right flank of the assault, crossing the Meuse at Donchery. In the centre, the 1st Panzer would strike at Glaire, on the root of the Iges peninsula formed by a sharp loop in the Meuse, and Torcy on the northern outskirts of Sedan. The 10th was to cross south of Sedan, securing the left flank with the capture of the high ground running along the west bank of the Meuse above Pont Maugis.

But the main effort of the day was to be made by General Kirchner’s 1st Panzer. The task prescribed for it by Guderian was to mop up inside the Iges peninsula and push forward to the Bellevue-Torcy road, then to attack the dominating Bois de la Marfée heights, the anchor of the whole French position at Sedan, and finally to establish itself on a line from Chéhéry
¹⁴
to Chaumont. For this task the division would be reinforced by the Grossdeutschland Regiment, transferred from the strength of 10th Panzer; an entire battalion of
Sturmpionieren
(assault engineers); and the heavy artillery battalions belonging to each of its sister divisions. A tremendous concentration of firepower could thus be brought to bear on 1st Panzer’s front of less than two miles in width, but the success or failure of the day would in the final analysis depend upon the three rifle battalions of Lieutenant-Colonel Hermann Balck’s 1st Rifle Regiment, the four of Lieutenant-Colonel Graf von Schwerin’s Grossdeutschland, and the various
Sturmpionieren
companies. As with Rommel at Dinant, there would be no question of tank support on the west bank until the infantry had secured the bridgehead.

To provide his Panzer Corps with further encouragement, Guderian added the information that the other two Panzers in
Kleist’s group, Reinhardt’s 6th and 8th, would also be crossing the Meuse that day, in the Monthermé and Nouzonville areas. Meanwhile, behind Guderian, Wietersheim’s XIV Motorized Corps would be assembling, ready to support and exploit their success.

The Battle for Sedan

An intense, nervous hubbub surrounds that morning, mingled with a new wariness. From contemporary German news-films one has glimpses of the assault troops covering on foot the last few kilometres of the approach march down to the Meuse: tough, bronzed, enormously fit young men striding in shirt-sleeve order through meadows knee-high with lush grass and spring flowers, brimming over with arrogant self confidence. The sun beats down on them. On the way they pass innumerable heavy weapons destined to help get them across the river. Everywhere the crews are breaking off branches of trees to camouflage their vehicles. Overhead there is a steady, comforting drone of friendly aeroplanes. Inevitably there are moments of confusion; there is still the residue of the traffic tangles in the Ardennes to be sorted out, separated units to be reunited. Sergeant Prümers, with a signals unit of the 1st Panzer, recalls being ordered the previous day to prepare an assault pack, because ‘for two days we would no longer see the transport’. At midnight his unit began to move. In the pitch darkness,

we observed radio silence, so as not to betray ourselves. When we come upon a long transport column, there are hold-ups in the darkness, and suddenly we lose contact. We overtake, and find ourselves on the edge of a huge bomb crater; we attempt to take the road to the right; this too is filled with vehicles, and nobody knows where the Regimental Staff has gone. So we wander about until morning, before we finally come upon Rifle Brigade H.Q.…

Then the enemy artillery began to open up: ‘The French are shooting at every single vehicle, even motor-cyclist signallers. Shot upon shot…’ Voicing the thoughts of hundreds of young Germans that day, Prümers wondered nervously: ‘What on earth will it be like on the other side?’

As the morning went on, General Kirchner several times informed Guderian that the enemy gunfire was rendering his own movements practically impossible, warning him that the crossing could only succeed if the Luftwaffe knocked out the French artillery. Yet on the whole the French interdiction fire that morning was sporadic and not outstandingly accurate, although to some of the Panzer crews it seemed almost impossible that any single enemy shell could fail to hit a target. Tanks and soft vehicles were cramming into every gulley and hollow leading to the river; the Fond de Givonne, a long open valley of fertile farms and orchards that runs down to Bazeilles on the Meuse, and is partially concealed from the west bank, held the main body of Guderian’s armour in one of the most formidable concentrations of mechanized might ever assembled. With tracks almost touching, the deafening roar of their motors was audible well beyond the French front-line positions on the other side of the Meuse. Using the houses along the river as cover, gunners of the light artillery and flak worked their weapons forward into their firing positions. Engineers, panting under the weight of the heavy rubber assault boats, struggled with them to the dead ground nearest the river, which they aimed to reach in one bound as soon as the signal to attack was given. With the brilliant sunlight shining in their eyes, in many places the assault teams could not make out the individual French strongpoints just sixty, eighty or a hundred yards across the sleek, silver ribbon of water. But from almost all angles, they could gaze up apprehensively at the imposing heights of La Marfée which seemed to dominate the battlefield in every direction. How could anything approach this imposing redoubt and remain unseen or undestroyed?

From La Marfée, the French observers’ view of Guderian’s line-up was indeed superb. Over the whole of his corps frontage, from first light onwards, says General Grandsard, they could see ‘the enemy emerging from the forest… the deployment is general; everywhere observation points report an almost uninterrupted descent of infantrymen, of vehicles either armoured or motorized’. To the gunners there poured in signals pin-pointing ‘at least 200 tanks in the St Menges
area… another 200 in the outskirts and centre of Sedan’. What targets! ‘What an opportunity,’ wrote a French military critic, General Menu, ‘for the artillery to rain down those “hammer blows”, to practise those “sweeping concentrations” which constitute, in the manipulation of firepower, the high point of the five hundred very scientific pages of the “General Instruction on Artillery Fire”!’ But the French guns ‘hammering’ Guderian’s tank concentrations on the morning of the 13th limited their fire to thirty rounds apiece. Why? Grandsard explains that he was anxious ‘to spare ammunition’ (though at Sedan within the next few days large dumps of shells were to fall, unexpended, into German hands). Despite all the evidence of this rapid build-up of enemy might on the opposite bank, Grandsard for one still seems to have been clinging, even on the morning of the 13th, to the archaic belief that Guderian could not attempt a river crossing that day. To General Lafontaine of the 55th Division he declared reassuringly: ‘The enemy would be unable to do anything for four to six days, as it would take them this long to bring up heavy artillery and ammunition and to position them.’

Strictly speaking, and by all the canons of conventional 1918 warfare, Grandsard’s appreciation was correct. On the 13th, Guderian would only be able to bring up a fraction of the heavy artillery available to the defenders, and, according to Kleist, his guns were rationed to ‘only fifty rounds
per battery
’, as a result of the ammunition columns being delayed by the road congestion in the Ardennes. This was indeed a problem which Guderian had foreseen when he wrote
Achtung
–
Panzer!
four years previously, but in the meantime the artillery had been substituted by a powerful air weapon, and it is typical of the unreal world in which the French commanders existed that, by 13 May 1940, Grandsard should not have been capable of envisaging the part that the Luftwaffe would play in a Meuse crossing.