To Lose a Battle (83 page)

At 1030 the next morning, Hitler went to Rundstedt’s Army Group ‘A’ H.Q. at Charleville, which was now many miles behind the battle being fought out in Flanders. Rundstedt
explained the situation in detail. He told Hitler that once again the security of the southern flank was still bothering him. According to Army Group ‘A’ War Diaries, ‘The possibility of concerted action by Allied forces in the north and French forces south of the Somme had to be reckoned with.’ He stressed the extreme nervousness which had been caused to Kleist’s Armoured Group by the British attack at Arras, and pointed out that Kleist had reported up to 50 per cent of his tanks
hors de combat,
although neither he nor Kleist mentioned that the larger part of these would in fact be repaired during the next few days. What if, in the marshy Flanders terrain which Hitler and Rundstedt knew so well from twenty-five years ago, the British ‘Matildas’
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should inflict even more grievous losses on the German armour? How then would they be able to muster the tanks with which to pursue ‘Operation Red’, the battle to crush the still considerable French forces protecting the rest of France south of the Somme? The capitulation of the encircled Allied forces in the north was but a matter of time; preparatory groundwork for ‘Operation Red’ must assume priority.
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The previous night he had sent out a preliminary order to Kleist’s and Hoth’s Panzers to halt where they were the next day, in order ‘to allow the situation to clarify itself and to keep our forces concentrated’. This was the burden of what Rundstedt told Hitler.

For the second time in the campaign, Hitler found himself in complete accord with Rundstedt. He was delighted by the measures the Army Group commander had already taken, and agreed particularly with the necessity to husband the armour for the next phase of the battle. Orders were thereupon sent out calling for the indefinite halt of the Panzers and bearing the stamp ‘By the Führer’s orders’– which made total compliance mandatory.

It was, as two eminent German historians have pointed out, a situation ‘probably unique in modern German military history’. What Hitler was in fact doing (not for the last time) was deliberately short-circuiting his top Army advisers, the O.K.H. As might be expected from the stands previously taken, Brauchitsch and particularly Halder strongly disagreed with Rundstedt’s and Hitler’s appreciation. Already by midday on the 22nd, Halder had noted down in his diary ‘a decrease in tension in the overall situation: the enemy is yielding at Arras, west of Arras our Panzers have come up against only a weak enemy’. The next morning, he was showing himself principally concerned over administrative friction between the two Army Groups, Rundstedt’s and Bock’s, now jostling each other in increasingly confined quarters. Noting the considerable difficulty Army Group ‘A’ was having in controlling its huge mass of seventy-one divisions,
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Halder added — in what was obviously a slap at Rundstedt – ‘It seems to me questionable whether it is sufficiently flexible and energetic with its staff.’ Later that afternoon, doubts were exchanged concerning Kleist, who

feels himself not entirely up to his task, so long as the crisis at Arras is not resolved. Losses in Panzers up to 50 per cent. I tell him that the crisis will be overcome within forty-eight hours. I know the size of the task imposed. Tenacity must be demanded.

The following day (24 May) Halder’s entries continue in much the same vein:

the power of resistance of the enemy is no longer to be rated very highly, apart from local fighting. Thus matters will take their own course; we must only have patience, let them mature.

That night, Halder baldly records the transmission of the ‘Halt Order’, adding that it was ‘on express wish of the Führer! Within the area specified, the Luftwaffe is to settle the fate of the encircled armies!!’ The exclamation marks themselves contain a wealth of meaning. Ulrich Liss, the Intelligence chief of ‘Foreign Armies West’, noted that the usually punctual Halder
arrived nearly an hour late for the O.K.H. evening conference, ‘in a clear state of rage, such as I have never before nor afterwards seen him in. “For the decision that has just been taken, the General Staff is not to blame…” were his approximate words.’

The 25th, Haider records, ‘began again with unpleasant disagreements between Brauchitsch and the Führer’. Hitler, with Rundstedt ranged behind him, steadfastly held out against any repeal of the ‘Halt Order’ in the face of the strongest representations from Brauchitsch and Halder. In evident despair, Halder wrote in his diary:

A complete upset is thus occurring. I wanted to make Army Group ‘A’ the hammer, and Army Group ‘B’ the anvil; but now ‘B’ is to be the hammer and ‘A’ the anvil. Since ‘B’, however, is faced with an organized front, this must necessarily be very costly and take a long time. Another thing, the Luftwaffe, on which so much hope is now being placed, is completely dependent on the weather.

The whole thing was ‘more wearing to the nerves than the entire organization of the campaign itself.

Finally, at 1230 on the 26th, Brauchitsch was called to
Felsennest.
To his great satisfaction, Hitler informed him that he had given orders, though with certain reservations, for the Panzers to advance on Dunkirk again, in order to end the evacuation of the British there. But it would take a further sixteen hours to get them moving again. By then, says Guderian, ‘it was too late to achieve a great victory’. For during the three days the ‘Halt Order’ had been in force, much had happened. Four British divisions and a number of French had managed to escape from the cauldron forming at the bottom of the pocket, around Lille, which they certainly would not have done had Rommel been allowed to continue his encircling thrust. The construction of a tough perimeter defence line guarding a Dunkirk bridgehead was well under way. In Britain, the ‘Dynamo’ evacuation fleet was assembled and, as Hitler informed Brauchitsch, the first embarkations were already being made from Dunkirk. Finally, there came, miraculously, the first
break in ‘Goering’s weather’, so crucial to the Luftwaffe if it were to ‘finish the job from the air’. Bad weather grounding the German planes proved Goering’s boast to Hitler to be as disastrously wrong as his promise to save the encircled German troops at Stalingrad in 1943.

Before leaving this episode, which (as Guderian rightly remarks) was ‘to have a most disastrous influence on the whole future course of the war’, three myths can be usefully dispatched. In the first place, the excuse that the Flanders mud was responsible for the ‘Halt Order’ is supported by none of the German tank experts who fought over the area; Guderian, who should have been able to judge better than anybody else, simply dismisses it as ‘a poor one’. Secondly, the notion of the ‘golden bridge’ offered by Hitler to the B.E.F. now finds few supporters, and certainly stands directly at odds with the very definite orders given to the Luftwaffe, which were the ‘destruction’ of all the encircled enemy forces. The myth in fact appears to have been propagated by Rundstedt’s ex-Chief-of-Staff during his interrogation by Liddell Hart immediately after the end of the war. Thirdly, the fault for the ‘Halt Order’ cannot be placed solely at Hitler’s door. Since the war, German generaldom has been committed for various reasons, which include both self-preservation and professional pride, to blaming every war-time error and crime upon Hitler, and in this instance even Guderian is to be found disputing the view that Rundstedt was responsible for holding up the Panzers. But if anyone was primarily to blame, both on the evidence of the episode itself and of his past performance during the campaign, it was Rundstedt. In his exchange with Hitler he was a completely free agent, not a Party hack just playing back Hitler’s own wishes. Rundstedt’s integrity as a soldier was too great for this. He was an outstanding battle commander, but as a strategist he showed himself throughout to be almost as preconditioned by the experiences of the First World War as his French counterparts. On 24 May, it was the shock of what the British
had done,
coupled with his ineradicable fears of what the French still
could do,
which principally decided Rundstedt, and, through him, persuaded Hitler, to halt the Panzers.

Here, in this disarray within the German High Command, of which the ‘Halt Order’ of 24 May was the culminating episode, lay the Achilles’ heel in Hitler’s superlative machine and its superlative plan. Through it the B.E.F. was to be saved; if the Allies could have taken advantage of this Achilles’ heel by more resolute action earlier in the battle, could still more have been saved?

The Panzers Move Again

During the Panzer halt, the German infantry formations were still keeping up an unremitting pressure on all sectors of the encircled area. For the Allies, the principal danger points were in the east along the line held by the rapidly flagging Belgian Army, and at the bottom of the pocket where the French First Army, now commanded by General Prioux, was situated. As King Leopold had finally agreed, following the Ypres conference, the Belgians had withdrawn from the Escaut to the Lys on the 25th, but almost immediately Reichenau’s infantry had broken through the new line on either side of Courtrai. The next day the Belgians were trying to anchor their right wing between Ypres and Roulers. Blanchard, having succeeded Billotte, was urging them to fall back on the Yser – as Weygand had wanted originally. But the Belgian Chief of the General Staff, Michiels, declared that a further retreat was out of the question, and would only result in the disintegration of his units. On the afternoon of the 26th, the Belgian High Command warned Blanchard: ‘The limits of Belgian resistance are very close to being reached.’

On the rescinding of the ‘Halt Order’, Rommel’s first task was to break across the La Bassée Canal east of Béthune, which was held by the B.E.F. Once again, Rommel had the armour of the 5th Panzer placed under his control. After some hard and costly fighting, by the end of the 27th
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he had broken through
the British line. The 5th Panzer surged forward to capture Armentières, while Rommel swung eastwards to meet German infantry advancing from the opposite direction. Nearly half the French First Army was now cut off in a smaller pocket around Lille. For four more days General Molinié fought an immensely courageous but hopeless action (largely with North African troops), which in fact enabled the B.E.F. and the remainder of the First Army to fall back safely into the Dunkirk bridgehead.
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But when the jaws of the trap closed, one of those to be taken (along with some 35,000 French troops) was the valiant General Prioux, captured at his command post in Steenwerck by men of the 4th Panzer. During the fighting, Rommel once again came close to losing another of his nine lives when German heavy shells landed by mistake a few yards from his signals vehicle, killing one of his battalion commanders. On 29 May, the 7th Panzer was pulled out of the line for six days’ rest and reorganization before taking part in ‘Operation Red’. The encirclement of Lille marked the end of Rommel’s role in the first phase of
Sichelschnitt.

Guderian, after the lifting of the ‘Halt Order’, pushed across the Aa Canal to capture Wormhoudt and Bourbourgville on 28 May and Gravelines, midway between Calais and Dunkirk, on the 29th. (Meanwhile Boulogne had been captured on the 25th; Calais on the 26th, after a last-ditch resistance by the Rifle Brigade under Brigadier Nicholson.) Then, like Rommel and the 7th Panzer, Guderian’s XIX Corps was withdrawn to prepare for ‘Operation Red’. Bitterly he remarks of the brakes applied to his Panzers in these critical days:

What the future course of the war would have been if we had succeeded at the time in taking the British Expeditionary Force prisoner at Dunkirk, it is now impossible to guess.

French Despair

Behind the lines in France, the appointment of Weygand and his flight to Flanders had been accompanied by another brief flicker of optimism. It was to be the last. On 23 May, Alexander Werth in Paris observed that the bookstalls along the
quais
had reopened and that workmen were busy completing the pedestal of one of the statues on the Pont-du-Louvre – which struck him, under the circumstances, as being rather ‘queer’. At a cocktail party two days later he found people expressing confidence that things were ‘going far better’; there was talk that ‘Weygand has organized his Somme front; that the Flanders and Somme armies will, within the next twenty-four or forty-eight hours, join and cut the German pincer, and that Hitler made a mistake in not attacking Paris on 16 May.’ On the 26th, French Army spokesmen were still deriding the ‘armchair strategists’ who concluded that the Flanders armies had been encircled. The following day, Werth recorded a further sign of continuing normalcy in the shape of Picasso – ‘dark jealous mistress and all’ – holding forth at the Café Flore, but now even Colonel Thomas in the Hôtel Continental was half-admitting the loss of Calais, while ‘the juncture of the Somme and Flanders armies is no longer even mentioned’.

In this last week of May, defeatism began to spread unchecked in France. The signs of despair assumed varied shapes; Vincent Sheean first sensed it on visiting the Quai d’Orsay, when he spotted that one of the grand old
huissiers,
the guardian dragons defending the portals of French diplomacy, had allowed his heavy silver chain, the badge of service, to fall askew so that it was almost dropping off one shoulder. ‘It was an arrow pointing toward disaster; anybody who ever knew those stiff, proud lackeys of the Third Republic would have known by this that the Republic was dying.’ Arthur Koestler, in between arrests as a suspicious ‘alien’, discerned the advent of despair in