To Lose a Battle (48 page)

The wooden scaffolding still stauds there, the foundations have not yet been dug. Astonishing these Frenchmen! They have had now nearly twenty years to build their lines of defence…

Sedan: the French View

As noted earlier, the French view of what happened down on the Meuse on the 13th is perforce scanty and confused. It was General Lafontaine’s 55th Division’ which, almost exclusively, had borne the brunt of Guderian’s attack. Undoubtedly, most of the odds were against it from the start. Its elderly, poorly trained reservists were in no way a match for the best troops in the German Army, backed by pulverizing air power; they were caught partly moving house, and one battalion had already been mauled almost to death on the Semois. On the other hand, the 55th had very strong artillery support and a fabulous natural position in the shape of La Marfée. Here and there the men of the 55th fought back with gallant, unsung heroism, and Captain von Kielmansegg, on the staff of the 1st Panzer, himself pays tribute to the ‘numerous bunkers which defended themselves desperately’. But out in the open the French infantry seem to have melted away under the aerial onslaught, and by and large most French military historians concur with the summing-up of Colonel Goutard, one of the most outspokenly objective among them, that ‘in general, resistance was very feeble’.

The news reaching divisional and corps headquarters was fragmentary. At 1710 hours, one of the first reports received by Grandsard from the 55th Division stated tersely: ‘The Meuse has been crossed by some forty men
²²
at reference 1572 south of Wadelincourt. A barrage has been opened up. Donchery occupied by a battalion and a half of infantry. Divisional artilleries firing.’ It added ominously: ‘No longer any contact with the infantry regiment on the left.’ At that moment, General Huntziger had himself arrived at Grandsard’s command post, commenting calmly on the numbers of enemy reported crossing at Wadelincourt: ‘There will be just that number of prisoners.’ Huntziger did not intervene in the battle, says Grandsard, leaving him to cope with the situation. Grandsard explains that his first appreciation was that ‘nothing was lost, provided that the position of resistance defended itself, and
provided that orders given to reserves were executed’. However, he continues:

The hours that followed were to give a cruel disappointment to the hopes of the Commander of X Corps. From 1800 to 1900 hours approximately, the situation evolved with a disconcerting rapidity towards catastrophe.

At 1830 hours there came a most disquieting report from the commander of a battery of guns at Chaumont that enemy
tanks
had been spotted in the La Marfée area. This was followed up a quarter of an hour later by an item that was even more disturbing. According to Grandsard:

the colonel [Dourzal] commanding Group B of the Corps Heavy Artillery at Bulson reported to the colonel [Poncelet] commanding the Corps Heavy Artillery that violent fighting had broken out 400–500 metres from his command post and he was requesting orders to withdraw; on a request for details from his chief, he confirmed that there were definitely German machine-guns and that he would be encircled within five minutes; he received from his chief the authority to withdraw.

At more or less the same time, Colonel Poncelet also evacuated his command post back at Flaba, well behind Bulson and over five miles from the nearest Germans, while giving the order for the heavy batteries under his command to withdraw. (It should be noted here that not one German tank reached the west side of the Meuse until the following morning, and that no German infantrymen reached anywhere near Bulson that night.) Yet Poncelet was heard (according to General Ruby) to declare that ‘the German tanks were arriving as he left his command post at Flaba’. Both these gunner colonels, General Ruby comments scathingly, ‘bear a particularly grave responsibility’ for the panic which was to follow. No one, it transpires incredibly enough, seems to have made any attempt to verify these alarmist reports, including Grandsard himself, although later that night he ordered the panicky colonels back to their command posts. Colonel Poncelet, apparently shattered by what had happened at Sedan, fell into a deep depression and committed suicide twelve days later.

Meanwhile, about three hours after the first crossings had taken place, General Lafontaine of the 55th Division was taking stock of the situation at his command post at Fond-Dagot, just behind Bulson, with a certain calmness. The bombing had ceased; he had established liaison with the 53rd Division belonging to Corap on his right; and he had dispatched a battalion to reinforce La Marfée (which would in fact succeed in checking the German advance there until dawn the next day). Then, suddenly, says General Ruby,

A wave of terrified fugitives, gunners and infantry, in transport, on foot, many without arms but dragging their kitbags, swept down the Bulson road. ‘The tanks are at Bulson!’ they cried. Some were firing their rifles like madmen. General Lafontaine and his officers ran in front of them, tried to reason with them, made them put their lorries across the road… Officers were among the deserters. Gunners, especially from the corps’s heavy artillery, and infantry soldiers from the 55th Division, were mixed together, terror-stricken and in the grip of mass hysteria. All these men claimed actually to have seen tanks at Bulson and Chaumont! Much worse, commanders at all levels pretended having received orders to withdraw, but were quite unable to show them or even to say exactly where the orders had come from. Panic brooked no delay; command posts emptied like magic.
²³

There is no doubt that the real collapse at Sedan began with the gunners. Ever since Napoleon, in the French Army the artillery has always occupied a far more exalted position than in other armies. During the First War it became almost axiomatic that, so long as the artillery ‘held’, the infantry would hold. But when the guns fell silent, the infantry would give up. By a strange coincidence, the first German success on the opening day of the Battle of Verdun had also come when they broke a second-line Territorial unit of elderly
pépères
, comparable to the ‘B’ divisions of 1940. But in contrast the
French artillery at Verdun had stood its ground, and the hole had been plugged by counter-attacking infantry, though at terrible cost. Why had the French gunners at Sedan not been able to ‘endure’ as their fathers had? Undoubtedly the mass onslaught of the Stukas that afternoon had been a horrifying experience, difficult to recapture at this range in time; but was not the terrible hammering of the German 210s and 150s at Verdun, prolonged over an infinitely longer period, just as injurious – if not more so – to human nerves? And had not the Polish artillerymen in 1939, though fighting at even greater material disadvantage, stood by their guns under Stuka attack until they were literally pulverized? But the Poles were fighting for their very existence; and, in May 1940, what were the Frenchmen of the Third Republic fighting for? In attempting to isolate the reasons for the breaking of the Sedan gunners, one comes face to face once again with the twenty-four corrosive years separating the
poilus
of Verdun from the men of Sedan; here is the terrible harvest of those years of mutual mistrust, disunity, despair at the losses of 1914–18,
je-m’en-foutisme
and defeatism in France.

Paradoxically, there were still determined and courageous pockets of French infantry continuing to hold out
in front of
the artillery, while the commanders of the latter were pulling out. But when the word got round that the gunners had deserted their guns, panic and all its repercussions spread like a vast ugly oil-slick. There semed to be no stopping the fugitives of the 55th Division, or the escalation of the rumours they carried. As far back as Vouziers, the Second Army Provost-Marshal, Colonel Serin, called in two companies of Gardes Mobiles in an attempt to ‘canalize’ the flood. Yet still, according to General Ruby, the fugitives managed to reach Rheims before they could be rounded up – having in the meanwhile ‘pillaged from top to bottom Ste Menehould and Vouziers’. Even Huntziger’s H.Q. at Senuc was not immune to this tide of panic: ‘Towards 2100 hours,’ says General Ruby, ‘two sapper officers presented themselves to the General; much affected, they testified to having seen German tanks at Vendresse. Coldly, General Huntziger called them
liars. They had taken our 7th Tank Battalion for a Panzer unit!’ Still further afield, Jean Muray, at a village where his division was in reserve behind Corap’s front, thirty-five miles from Sedan, met men from Sedan the very next morning, bearing terrible tales: ‘They had seen it; the scattering of French divisions. The pulverizing of a whole army… the courage of some, the cowardice of others…’ Roland Dorgelès, the famous novelist, tells of ten gunners and a medical officer fleeing from Sedan in a truck who were stopped at Auxerre, in the middle of France, six days after the débâcle; interrogated about his departure from the front, the officer replied, ‘But,
mon capitaine
, bombs were falling…!’ In the ensuing days, wretched tales like this could be multiplied a thousandfold.

Closer to the front at Sedan, however, the consequences of this wave of panic were much more immediately disastrous. Never pausing to check the rumour that ‘the Panzers are at Bulson!’, General Lafontaine requested Grandsard to be allowed to move his command post back to Chémery. Grandsard said he must decide what was best. Lafontaine did. Half in transport, half on foot, his headquarters hastily retired. This in itself, according to Grandsard, had a baneful effect; officers presenting themselves for orders at Lafontaine’s former command post during the night found it abandoned, and ‘deduced a definitive withdrawal on the part of the 55th Division. They saw therein an argument for their own pride.’
²⁴
At Chémery, General Ruby tells us, Lafontaine

fell into the middle of unimaginable chaos; the flood of fugitives traverses the village without pause; all the echelons of the division, accumulated in this region – fighting units, regimental H.Q.s, supply columns, vehicle parks… – all are heading for the south, swelled by stragglers; as if by magic, their officers have naturally received a mysterious order to withdraw. Barriers established by the military police are swept aside.

Amid this scene of anarchy, with
ad hoc
lines of communication even worse than those at Bulson, so badly disrupted by the German bombing, Lafontaine was attempting to organize a counter-attack. But the commander of his principal reserve formation, Lieutenant-Colonel Labarthe of the 213th Infantry Regiment, depressed by the effect the prevailing atmosphere was having upon his men, kept mumbling to him,
‘Surtout, pas de contre-attaque!’

Next, the impact of the panic on the 55th’s front swiftly made itself felt upon its sister ‘B’ division, the 71st, which, although still slowly moving up into line, had suffered little during the day’s fighting. Almost immediately after receiving the first news of the purported enemy tanks being at Chaumont and Bulson, Grandsard had relayed it to General Baudet, requesting him to make the necessary dispositions. Baudet at once decided to pull
his
freshly established command post at Raucourt back three or four miles, taking with him the commander of the divisional artillery. This withdrawal of the division’s chief gunner had its attendant repercussions on the various batteries; in the absence of authority, the personnel of some dispersed in the woods, where they wandered all night, only returning (‘naturally, incomplete’, says Ruby) to their guns in the morning; others, on notional orders, destroyed their weapons and headed for the rear. All too few were the battery commanders who, like Major Benedetti of the 363rd Regiment, actually man-handled their guns forward during the night, against the demoralizing flood tide of fugitives. On the 71st Division’s front, says General Ruby, already ‘three groups of 75s out of four had been abandoned by their crews… four out of six groups of the heavy artillery’. These were the guns which had halted the German crossings at Wadelincourt by their flanking fire. The prospects for the 71st, if attacked the following day, were hardly auspicious.

Sedan: the French counter-attack

We have seen the results of the first French counter-attacks mounted against Rommel’s bridgehead at Dinant. What was being prepared to repulse Guderian’s at Sedan? Under his command Grandsard had in reserve two tank battalions, the 4th and the 7th, and two infantry regiments, the 205th and the 213th, the latter led by the reluctant Lieutenant-Colonel Labarthe. Behind them, the powerful units ordered up by General Georges, the 3rd Armoured and the 3rd Motorized Division, were now arriving to be placed under Huntziger’s control. Grandsard had put all four of his reserve units at Lafontaine’s disposal, and at 0130 hours on the morning of the 14th the harassed Lafontaine ordered them to carry out a two-pronged dawn counter-attack. If the operation had been executed as planned, before Guderian’s armour had begun to reach the west side of the river, and before the Luftwaffe returned, it would have had a good chance of success; and even if it had not overrun Guderian’s soft-skinned riflemen, it would at least have gained valuable time for Huntziger to swing his main punch.
²⁵
But, in the event, not one unit was ready to attack on time. Lieutenant-Colonel Labarthe managed to persuade Lafontaine that, in view of the uncertain morale of the 213th Regiment, it would be too risky to undertake a night march through all that calamity-crying débris reeling back from the front; the 7th Tanks, detailed to accompany it, claimed never to have got the order in time. The 205th Regiment (belonging to the 71st Division) was held up in the approach march by lorry-borne fugitives crying ‘Infantrymen, don’t go forward! The Boches are there!’, and finally received orders from a dispatch-rider to halt (‘From whom came this counter-order?’ queries General Ruby); while its
supporting tank battalion, the 4th, having been met by one of Grandsard’s own staff captains at about 2100 and told that there were Panzers at Chaumont, decided to camp down for the night, never meeting up with the infantry from the 205th until morning. There was, says Grandsard with admirable restraint, ‘too great a facility to interpret an order than to execute it as received; too great a facility to modify under the pretext of initiative, when confronted by unchecked information’. As a result, instead of getting off the ground at 0400 hours, Grandsard’s counter-attack would not start until three hours later. By then, the whole picture in the German bridge-head would have changed. In essence, the story was much the same as at Dinant. The French Army had forfeited its second big opportunity of the campaign.