Authors: Alistair Horne
Precisely what, in fact, had constituted the French effort which caused the Germans such concern? During the morning, just one battalion (the 45th) of H-39 light tanks and a company of ‘B’ tanks from the 3rd Armoured, plus one battalion of infantry, had been thrown into the reflexive counter-attacks attempting to check the Grossdeutschland’s movements upon Stonne. Then, at 1730 hours, Flavigny’s long-awaited set-piece attack went in. But, in the words of General Ruby, it was reduced to ‘a fist blow’. Of the armour, only the 39th Battalion of ‘B’ tanks and a handful of H-39s moved, and no sooner had they entered into action than General Brocard gave the order calling off the attack. Brocard’s other two tank battalions, deployed to the west of the Ardennes Canal, never joined in the counter-stroke that day. As the German accounts testify, those of the French tank crews that did see action fought well; Captain Aulois, a First War veteran commanding one of the ‘B’ tank companies, having lost four of his tanks near Stonne, was dragged badly wounded out of his wrecked machine and ‘congratulated’ by his captors on the admirable action he had fought. But what Flavigny’s force
might
have achieved had it struck with all its available strength, even as late as the afternoon of the 15th, can also be deduced from the gravity with which 10th Panzer H.Q. viewed the thrust on Chémery by this one mere handful of tanks. Writing after the war, General Hoth (Rommel’s corps commander) reckoned that, in the
postponement of Flavigny’s operation, ‘the French missed a favourable occasion; this counter-attack, conducted in a resolute manner, would have transformed defeat into victory’.
It was certainly the last ‘favourable occasion’ to be granted on the Sedan battlefield. That evening Brocard was sent by Huntziger to swell the ranks of sacked generals. Both the French and the exhausted Grossdeutschland recoiled from Stonne. But early the next morning the Germans re-entered it against only ‘slight resistance’. Later that day relief for the Grossdeutschland arrived in the form of the 29th Motorized Division,
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the first of Wietersheim’s XIV Motorized Infantry Corps that had been hastening up behind Guderian. It was, says Kielmansegg, ‘a very welcome relief and certainly a necessary one for the worn-out defenders of the southern front’. The Grossdeutschland had lost nine officers and ninety-four other ranks killed; thirty officers and 429 other ranks were wounded or missing – probably the heaviest casualties of any German unit in the campaign so far.
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But the crucial battle for Stonne had been won. Colonel von Schwerin had more than deserved the case of champagne wagered with Guderian. All that remained on the 16th was the mopping-up of the scattered tanks belonging to the 3rd Armoured, which had been so dismally cast away by the French command.
1st and 2nd Panzer: Bitter Resistance
In comparison with the flamboyant performance of Reinhardt’s XLI Panzer Corps in their break-out from Monthermé, the progress achieved by the 1st and 2nd Panzers during the 15th looks almost unimpressive. Their energies were chiefly absorbed in completing the complicated change of direction imposed by Guderian and in smashing the last elements of resistance which stood between them and the soft interior of France. Of what did these elements consist?
The previous day General Georges had summoned General
Touchon – a much-wounded hero of the First War, when he had commanded a regiment of the Chasseurs Alpins – and dispatched him to the front to take over an ‘Army Detachment’. His ambitious orders were to ‘re-establish liaison and weld the flanks of the Second and Ninth Armies by co-ordinating the activities of the units in the area’. Touchon appears to have frittered away the 14th, calling on various subordinate commanders in his new zone of operations, and only reaching Huntziger’s command post by 1600 and Rethel at 1900 hours. The next day, having set up his own command post at Château Porcien, at 1400 hours he promulgated his first order, which was ‘to hold at all costs the second line at Liart, Signy-l’Abbaye, Poix–Terron and Bouvellemont’. He then set off to find General Libaud of XLI Corps. But Libaud’s headquarters camp was deserted. Returning to Chacarlteau Porcien, Touchon was shot at by enemy armour near Rozoy-sur-Serre, and made a narrow escape. He decided to withdraw his command post to Hermonville, some ten miles north-east of Rheims.
The forces initially placed at the disposal of ‘Army Detachment Touchon’ (later to become the Sixth Army) were XLI Corps (the southernmost unit of Corap’s Army), General Etchberrigaray’s 53rd Division, Chanoine’s cavalry
groupement,
the 14th Division, and later the 2nd Armoured Division, plus the valueless shell of Grandsard’s X Corps. We have already examined the fate of XLI Corps at the hands of Reinhardt’s Panzers during the 15th, and seen how the confusion of repeated counter-orders on the 14th had diminished the effectiveness of the 53rd Division, which, as a ‘B’ unit, was modest enough even before the tide of battle caught up with it. The tragic, futile saga of the 2nd Armoured Division, the last of General Georges’s ‘rocks’, will be followed later. The 14th Division, commanded by General de Lattre de Tassigny, who had led a company at Verdun and was to become a
Maréchal de France
and one of the great heroes of the Liberation, was one of the finest infantry units in the Army. But, sent from Lorraine, it had just arrived at Château Porcien, on the Aisne west of Rethel, with the result that only one of its regiments, the 152nd, could reach the front in time to take part in the
day’s fighting. Thus it was that the main resistance against Guderian’s swinging lunge on the 15th was put up by this one regiment around the village of Bouvellemont and, just to its north, by Colonel Marc’s 3rd Spahi Brigade at La Horgne.
On the other side, the hardest fighting once again fell to the redoubtable Colonel Balck and his riflemen of the 1st Panzer. All day he hammered away against a magnificent defence put up by the Spahis and de Lattre’s men. At one point Balck’s troops, already much fatigued by their unremitting efforts of the past days, seem to have become extremely dispirited by their losses. More than half their officers were either dead or wounded, and many companies were little above half strength. They had received hardly anything to eat or drink during a day of burning heat. Some of the officers complained at the new demands being made on the regiment; Balck alone was fully aware that what now confronted them was the very last of the French defensive lines. ‘Suddenly’, wrote one of his N.C.O.s, with perhaps just a touch of hero-worship, ‘there appeared our regimental commander. Like a tower in the battle he stood between us, equipped with only a field cap, a walking cane, gas-mask and a pistol. Quickly he put himself in the picture, and immediately produced the order expected by us all.’ Visiting Balck in the burning ruins of Bouvellemont the following day, Guderian tells us:
Ammunition was running low. The men in the front line were falling asleep in their slit trenches. Balck himself, in wind-jacket and with a knotty stick in his hand, told me that the capture of the village had only succeeded because, when his officers complained against the continuation of the attack, he had replied: ‘In that case I’ll take the place on my own!’ and had moved off. His men had thereupon followed him. His dirty face and his red-rimmed eyes showed that he had spent a hard day and a sleepless night.
By nightfall on the 15th, de Lattre’s regiment, abandoning Bouvellemont, was forced to fall back towards Rethel. Though it had claimed some twenty German tanks, all its anti-tank guns and a third of its men were lost. At La Horgne, the 3rd Spahis
had fought back with perhaps even grimmer determination, fully atoning for their disastrous withdrawal from the Semois three days previously. Attacked by both tanks and infantry, the brigade resisted until 1800 hours, when it had been literally wiped out. Colonel Marc had been captured at his post, while his two regimental commanders, Colonels Burnol and Geoffroy, were both killed. Out of thirty-seven officers, twelve were killed and seven wounded; casualties among the other ranks was roughly proportionate. For his leadership that day, Balck was awarded the Ritterkreuz and singled out for the rare privilege of a special mention in the Wehrmacht communiqué.
Although the resistance at La Horgne and Bouvellemont succeeded in checking the impetus of the 1st Panzer, to the north the main weight of the 2nd Panzer smashed through the disordered elements of the 53rd Division without much difficulty, and by the close of the day its reconnaissance detachments were already making contact with Reinhardt’s Panzers at Montcornet. The Signy-l’Abbaye–Poix–Terron line, which Touchon had only that afternoon ordered to be held ‘at all costs’, was no longer anything more than an entry in a staff officer’s log-book. Guderian’s route westward lay open, with virtually no obstacles ahead of it. Of even more fundamental significance was the fact that, whereas twenty-four hours previously the German bridgeheads across the Meuse had consisted of three isolated bulges, they now formed one continuous pocket sixty-two miles wide – with no bottom. It is thus perhaps hardly an exaggeration to say, as has more than one French historian, that 15 May was the day France lost the war.
French 2nd Armoured Cut in Two
On paper, there remained General Bruché’s 2nd Armoured Division. But of all the units sent to stem the German breakthrough, none was subjected to a sadder or more wasteful Calvary. Formed in January 1940, the 2nd Armoured had, like its sisters, been located in the Champagne area on 10 May. The next day Georges had earmarked it to reinforce the Second Army, along with the 3rd Armoured, but then appears to have
forgotten about it for the next forty-eight hours. On the afternoon of the 13th, Georges finally dispatched it towards Charleroi in the tracks of the 1st Armoured and
away
from the main danger area at Sedan where Guderian had already crossed the Meuse. Because of the shortage of tank transporters, the tanks and other tracked vehicles were sent by train on flat-cars while the wheeled transport constituting the supply echelons went by road under their own steam; furthermore, as the movement of the 1st Armoured had taken up most of the available railway flat-cars, the loading of Bruché’s tanks at Châlons station was protracted from the afternoon of the 14th to the morning of the 15th, and little aided by the repeated German bombing attacks. Consequently, the 2nd Armoured became thoroughly scattered over a wide area just at the worst possible moment. Reporting early on the morning of the 14th at First Army H.Q. in Valenciennes, Bruché was forced to admit to General Blanchard that he did not know where his various units were, or in what order they would arrive. The poor man was then told that his division had now been put at Corap’s disposal. The next day, when Bruché’s liaison officer reported to Ninth Army H.Q., pointing out that the change in plan now made it impossible to attack before midday on the 17th, he was told ‘The 2nd Armoured no longer belongs to us. It has been given to the “Army Detachment Touchon”, to whom we are transmitting your report.’ Meanwhile, on General Georges’s instructions, the road column which had just reached Guise was redirected eastwards to Signy-l’Abbaye, the southern anchor of Corap’s ‘stop-line’, while the tanks were to be unloaded at Hirson, as soon as they reached it, and then to go under their own power to Signy.
But just at the time when this manoeuvre – so complex that it would have required all the skill of a Guderian – was being executed, Reinhardt’s Panzers were already tearing through Signy on the way to Montcornet. Caught on the road at Blanchefosse (near Brunehamel) at about 1700 hours on the 15th, one artillery battery of Bruché’s division had ten out of its twelve guns overrun by tanks; another tractor-drawn battery, sent by road since there were no flat-cars for its guns,
simply disappeared into thin air. In effect, Reinhardt, without realizing it, had driven a wedge slap through the centre of the 2nd Armoured. The road column, having progressed farther than the armour, was forced southwards and took refuge beyond the Aisne at Rethel. Moving in a south-easterly direction from the rail terminal at Hirson, the tanks made a totally unexpected first contact with the Panzers along the Liart–Rozoy road, and had promptly headed away – towards the north. Thus by dawn on the 16th, almost all of General Bruché’s armour lay scattered over a vast area between St Quentin and Hirson on one side of Reinhardt’s Panzer thrust, without any means of supply and having lost half its supporting artillery. On the other side, south of the Aisne, was General Bruché himself, with all the wheeled transport of the division, one gun battery, a company of H-39 light tanks, four solitary strayed ‘B’ tanks, and two companies of Chasseurs. So the third and last of Georges’s powerful ‘rooks’ had simply broken up before it could even be committed to the battle. To make matters worse, for a considerable period both General Georges and Touchon were to remain disastrously unaware of the true state of affairs with the 2nd Armoured.
Giraud Replaces Corap
At dawn on the 15th, Billotte had telephoned Georges: ‘The Ninth Army is in a critical position… It is absolutely essential to put some life into this wavering army. General Giraud, whose vigour is well known, appears to me to be best fitted to take on this difficult task.’ In a telephone call with the unhappy Corap later in the morning, Georges realized that he had ‘lost his sang-froid’, and that evening what broken fragments there remained of his army were removed from the old colonial soldier. ‘I left at 0400 hours on the 16th,’ wrote Corap, ‘heartbroken.’
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Giraud, his successor, is described by Beaufre as having been ‘our most ardent commander’; less flatteringly by
General Alan Brooke as a Don Quixote who ‘would have ridden gallantly at any windmill regardless of consequences’ and who ‘inspired one with little confidence when operating on one’s left flank’. But more than Quixotic ardour was required to restore the situation on the Ninth Army front, and would the elements of Giraud’s own Seventh Army, which had survived the Breda fiasco and were now following him to the Ninth Army, prove sufficient to plug the gaping holes that had been rent there? That night Giraud sent a first disquieting message to Billotte, summing up the situation as he found it: