Authors: Alistair Horne
Slowly the German engineers were getting the captured railway networks running again; by the 17th, there were troop trains already coming up as far as Libramont in the Ardennes; three days later, they had reached Dinant. At the same time, the Luftwaffe was leapfrogging its bases forward so that its squadrons were always there to provide the advancing Panzers the close support they needed. The organization functioned with superlative smoothness; experiences in Spain and Norway paid off. Close up behind the Panzer spearheads came special Luftwaffe task-forces, with the function of putting back into service at top speed all captured enemy airfields. They were followed by signals units that had been training all winter so that they could lay cables from vehicles and motor-cycle sidecars moving at 21 m.p.h., thus providing immediate communications with the Luftwaffe’s new forward bases. But the backbone of the whole operation was the workhorse Ju-52, in which spares, fresh crews, bombs and ammunition were flown into airfields within hours of their capture from the Allies. Even fuel came up this way; by siphoning out its own tanks and carrying an additional seven big drums, each Ju-52 could fly in nearly a thousand gallons a trip (a noteworthy feat in those days), enough to keep a Messerschmitt squadron in the air for an hour.
Allied Air Forces Withdraw
On the other side of the lines, the withdrawal of the Allied air
forces during the 16th and 17th proceeded with considerably less smoothness. By the 16th, Barratt had been forced to evacuate his A.A.S.F. bases astride the Aisne. Fortunately they had somewhere to go, as – with commendable foresight –some grass landing-fields had been prepared around Troyes during the months of the Phoney War. But they had virtually nothing to go in, despite Barratt’s urgent representations of the past winter. As the R.A.F. official history comments:
its transport resources were still hopelessly insufficient for a simultaneous move of the kind now required. Six hundred vehicles short even of its official complement, the Force would have been crippled but for two pieces of good fortune.
The first of these was that the Germans did not try to cross the Aisne southwards, and the second the fact that the A.A.S.F. in some mysterious way managed to ‘borrow’ three hundred new American lorries from the French, which ‘in spite of protestations’ they kept until the final evacuation. Airfield accommodation was also aided by the ‘rolling-up’ of four of the worst hit
15
of Barratt’s ten bomber squadrons. Barratt himself moved his H.Q. from its dangerous position in the path of the Panzers, at Chauny west of Laon, back to Coulommiers south of the Marne. On the 17th, the Air Component backing Gort in the north was also forced to withdraw, and Barratt, south of the enemy ‘Bulge’, henceforth found himself completely out of communication with it. Two days later the Air Component would be removed to England. Needless to say, in the highly charged emotions of the moment, the withdrawal of the R.A.F. bases was widely regarded by the French as a sign that it was ‘running away’ – a rumour that hardly improved French morale.
At the same time as Barratt, however, General d’Astier was also obliged to move his Z.O.A.N. H.Q. back from Chauny to Chantilly. On the 16th, some ten French units had to withdraw from the Rheims-Mézières–Laon triangle, and the next
day they were followed by a further four
Groupes
of fighters and one of bombers. It was at this point that the weakness of the French Air Force supply organization began to show up. General d’Astier notes that, incredibly enough, it was the responsibility of each
Groupe
to send its own pilots to the rear to ferry up replacement aircraft; meanwhile, even at the peak of battle, the depots closed down on Sundays and after hours! In the chaos that accompanied the withdrawals of the Allied air forces, air activities were reduced to a minimum – at the worst possible moment. On the 16th, 250 sorties were flown by French fighters (compared with 340 on the 14th), of which only 153 were over the critical fronts;
16
on the 17th, a similar effort was made, but also dispersed across an area stretching from Antwerp to the Maginot Line. Only twenty-two victories were claimed. While the Luftwaffe was launching single attacks on communications of a hundred bombers at a time, all that could be scraped up to support de Gaulle’s attack towards Montcornet was about twelve Léos escorted by about thirty fighters. The air supremacy of the enemy was becoming more and more marked. In the French Air Force, units such as
Groupe
I/54 had been reduced to one serviceable aircraft. In an encounter over Gembloux in northern Belgium on the 17th, eleven out of twelve Blenheims from No. 82 Squadron were shot down, the sole survivor being heavily damaged. The useless, lethal Battles had now been withdrawn from daylight operations, and used only at night; yet, in the words of the official historians,
In fact, so many Battle crews now dropped their bombs with no more precise identifications of their target than that provided by their watches, that Barratt was compelled to forbid bombing ‘on estimated time of arrival’. After that the phrase ceased to appear in the pilots’ reports. The practice, however, continued.
‘Why Don’t Our Planes Protect Us?’
So strained had the Allied air resources become that, among
their many tasks, they were unable either to come to the aid of the Second Army, which was still being heavily bombed by the Germans by way of breaking up any fresh threat to the flank at Stonne, or to assist the withdrawal of the armies in northern Belgium. This absence of friendly planes above them was having its cumulative effect on the morale of the French ground troops. Their progressive despair is well summed up by an account kept by a French N.C.O., René Balbaud, moving up with reinforcements towards Maubeuge. On first being machine-gunned by enemy aircraft on the 14th, he wondered ‘How the devil did these planes escape being pursued by our squadrons? Probably an accident.’ The next day, after his unit headquarters had been bombed, he remarked: ‘But they can’t really know where it is. It’s just luck. We don’t, in fact, see much of the French planes.’ On the 16th, following more bombing, he is questioning: ‘Why don’t our planes protect us? No one says it aloud any more, but everyone is thinking it.’ After a night spent in hastily dug trenches, and still more bombing, he admits: ‘This bombing has tired even the toughest. What can one do with light machine-guns against 150 bombers?’ Finally he concludes:
Not to see the enemy face to face, to have no means of defence, not to see the shadow of a French or Allied plane during hours of bombing, this was one of the prime reasons for the loss of our faith in victory.
Meanwhile, on the morning of 17 May, there had been some disagreement between Barratt and the French High Command on the employment of the additional R.A.F. fighter squadrons promised by Churchill. Should they be used to escort Allied daylight bombing missions, or to shoot down the German bombers attacking the ground troops? The two tasks were obviously irreconcilable. General Georges pleaded that the troops could not stand up to the devastating combination of tanks and aircraft. Finally it was agreed to reduce still further the modest French daylight bombing effort, so as to concentrate on providing the ground forces with more air cover.
Retreat from Belgium
In northern Belgium the methodical withdrawal of the Allied armies began on the 16th and continued through the 17th. The 3rd and 4th Panzers of General Hoeppner’s XVI Corps, still hammering away at the Gembloux Gap, were now transferred from Bock to Rundstedt’s Army Group ‘A’, swinging south-west for Charleroi and Maubeuge to assure the northern flank of the ‘Bulge’. Thus all but one of the ten German Panzers were now concentrated in the encircling thrust towards the Channel. But the bulk of Bock’s forces continued to push hard behind the retreating Allies, so as to grant them no possibility of disengaging. Although the Germans were nowhere able to breach the Allied positions, over the 16th and 17th the B.E.F. experienced its hardest fighting of the campaign so far. On re-reading his diary the next day, Lieutenant-General Alan Brooke found the following entry:
I was too tired to write last night, and now can barely remember what happened yesterday. The hours are so crowded and follow so fast on each other that life becomes a blur and fails to cut a groove in one’s memory.
General Prioux, depressed and annoyed at seeing most of his Cavalry Corps dispersed in small packets to fill the
ad hoc
needs of the First Army, went on the 17th to Army Group H.Q. at Douai to see Billotte, who told him: ‘We are on the way to a new Sedan, and more terrible still than that of 1870.’ Despite the speed with which Rundstedt’s drive in the south was moving, bearing with it the threat of annihilation for Billotte’s armies in the north, their withdrawal was proceeding with painful slowness. Nevertheless, on the 17th Billotte proposed that the move back to the Dendre line, scheduled to take place that night, be postponed twenty-four hours. In agreement with the Belgian High Command, Gort managed to dissuade Billotte, and the original plan was adhered to, amid some confusion and costly errors. By nightfall on the 17th, German troops were marching into Louvain and Brussels for the second time in a generation. Falling back
with his unit on Maubeuge that day, René Balbaud wrote, baffled:
We don’t understand. A liaison officer’s driver brings strange news. The Germans, he says, have entered France at Sedan. We have no radio… Somehow the old jokes about our coming occupation of Germany have become scarce.
French High Command: a Bogus Calm
Back at La Ferté, General Georges came to the disagreeable conclusion during the morning of the 17th that there was now no good prospect of holding the Panzers on the Oise. Accordingly, he sent out another Special Order, stipulating:
Should No. 1 Army Group be forced to abandon the Sambre–Oise line north of La Fére, it must re-establish itself on the line of the Escaut at Valenciennes, Cambrai, Le Catelet, St. Quentin, St. Simon, the Crozat Canal, and La Fère in conjunction with Touchon’s Army Detachment.
To block the approaches to Paris, Georges decided to create a ‘new’ Seventh Army and introduce it into the hole left by Giraud’s vanishing Ninth Army, to link up Touchon’s forces with the rest of No. 1 Army Group, along a line south-eastwards from Péronne on the Somme. To command this army he chose General Frère, a corps commander from a quiet sector, whom he had summoned urgently to La Fertè to receive his orders. At Frére’s disposal would be some ten divisions, mostly drawn (at last!) from those standing as reinforcements behind the Maginot Line or the Alps, as well as the 3rd Light Division, which had originally been dispatched to Brest for embarkation to Norway, then recalled and placed at the disposal of Governor Hering for the defence of Paris. But on the morning of the 17th, the ‘new’ Seventh Army comprised only General Frère and two staff officers.
After the panic of the previous day, a kind of bogus calm descended once more on Vincennes as the dawn of the 17th brought realization that the Germans were no nearer to Paris. At 0800 hours, Gamelin received a brief letter from Daladier
asking him to produce a report on the conduct of operations and his personal appreciation of the situation. This was very much Gamelin’s forte, and with gusto he sat down to devote his day to preparing a copious memorandum – while the battle for France raged less than a hundred miles away. Once again, there would be no intervention in Georges’s handling of the battle that day from Gamelin. After completing his paperwork, he visited La Ferté, where ‘they seemed to be calm’. At this time, reassuring news was reaching Georges’s H.Q. that the Panzers had been halted and were possibly even turning away from Paris. Certainly the threat did not seem as acute as it had on the 16th. Meeting General Frère, Gamelin made vague reference to a major counter-offensive he was contemplating, whereupon (says Gamelin) ‘I saw his face light up; he has the soul of a great leader.’
That day Gamelin received a telephone call from Reynaud, insisting that he should draft a new Order of the Day for broadcasting to the forces. ‘I showed some coolness towards this,’ says Gamelin, ‘having addresed two already to the troops.’ However, Reynaud’s wish prevailed and an Order was prepared ending on a Verdun-like note that, however, somewhat lacked conviction:
… Every soldier who might not be able to advance must let himself be killed on the spot rather than abandon the portion of national soil which has been entrusted him.
As always, in the grave moments of our history, the order today is:
Conquer or die. One must conquer.
GAMELIN
Meanwhile, another telegram was sent off to Churchill suggesting that perhaps the German supply columns might be impeded if the R.A.F. were to drop magnetic mines in the Meuse.
In Paris Too
The false sense of relief was general in Paris on the 17th. Senator Bardoux noted that ‘this morning, the Press seem to
have unwound, slightly. The taxis have received a counter-order.’ Later he picked up a dangerously, falsely comforting rumour to the effect that Churchill had promised to send France every single fighter based in England. Paul Baudouin also recorded:
The military situation appears to be no worse, possibly because the German armoured divisions have had to regroup and revictual. The truth is that everybody is optimistic because Paris is not yet under fire from the German tanks.
This showed some profundity. But, in the evening,
the news brought by Colonel Villelume was not so good. The German columns are turning away from Paris towards the Channel ports. The enemy advance has become very rapid again, and it seems as if it cannot be stopped.