Lords of the Sky: Fighter Pilots and Air Combat, From the Red Baron to the F-16 (27 page)

Several months later, on the morning of May 10, the Führer’s personal train stopped at Euskirchen on the German-Belgian border.
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A new bunker called Felsennest had been built there expressly for Hitler so he could watch his invasion begin. At 5:30 a.m. Heinz Guderian’s 1st Panzer Division rumbled across the Luxembourg border and headed west into the trees, eventually emerging from the forest on the French border. It was part of
Generaloberst
Gerd von Rundstedt’s Army Group A, which was the largest group, with forty-five divisions. Guderian had seven panzer divisions, three of which would be used to shatter the French defenses at Sedan. Nose to tail, the tanks crept through ditches, along paths and railway lines, always to the west.

Farther north, Army Group B rolled through the Low Countries of Holland and Belgium, thrusting toward Flanders. Accompanied by more than 1,500 dive-bombers and medium bombers, Group B also included Luftwaffe paratroopers.
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In reality, this was a colossal feint designed to draw the Allies toward the center—and it worked.

General Maurice Gamelin, the commander in chief of all French and British forces in France, took the bait. He’d never expected the Germans to attack the Maginot Line, but he also didn’t believe that tanks could penetrate the Ardennes. Given the well-known and purposely well-publicized German fondness for armor, Gamelin naturally assumed the attack would come across the Low Countries. In fact, a German plane had made a forced landing in January near the Belgian town of Mechelen. The Luftwaffe officer on board had all the latest plans detailing an offensive through Belgium. The plans were real at the time and actually turned out to be a very effective subterfuge.

The scale of German air operations over the Low Countries was equally convincing. A key weak point in the Allied defenses, and therefore a critical German objective, was the town of Maastricht. Straddling the Dutch-Belgian border, the town sat at the junction of the Meuse River and the Albert Canal. It was protected by the Belgian 7th Infantry Division and a teardrop shaped fortress called Eben-Emael just south of the town.

Fallschirmjäger
from the 1st Parachute Regiment were formed into a glider assault force to subdue the fortress and capture the bridges intact. At 4:30 on the morning Case Yellow began, 493 paratroopers were towed in fifty gliders to a point 20 miles from the target and released from 7,000 feet. Group Concrete, 96 men in eleven gliders, landed at the Vroenhaven bridge; Group Steel’s 92 men in nine gliders were to take the Veldswezel bridge just west of Maastricht; the 96 men of Group Iron landed near the Kanne bridge; and last, all eleven gliders holding Group Granite’s 85 men came down on Eben-Emael itself.

By 12:30 p.m. two of the three bridges had been captured intact and the fortress garrison had surrendered. A carefully timed and precisely executed airborne operation, though common today, had never been attempted before and would have been unthinkable a few decades earlier. Using a combination of logistics, airpower, and specially trained troops to take a key objective meant that the German Eighteenth Army could bypass heavy border defenses and charge straight into Belgium.
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Reacting exactly as they’d done in 1914, the French lunged forward to meet the visible threat of Field Marshal Fedor von Bock’s Army Group B with their First Army and the British Expeditionary Force. Ironically, they were marching directly over the old Great War battlefields of Flanders and the Somme, where their fathers (and some of them) had fought. The French Seventh Army also swept up the Channel coast to reinforce the Belgians and the Dutch. Germans were nothing if not predictable, and this was simply a beefed-up version of the old Schlieffen Plan . . . or so they thought.

Not that there wasn’t evidence to the contrary. The RAF immediately began reconnaissance flights, and those that survived reported multiple columns of German vehicles moving through the Ardennes. This was duly reported to the intelligence section of the French Ninth Army opposite Sedan—and promptly ridiculed. Despite prepositioned supply depots and trucks carrying fuel for the panzers, there were delays. Within days traffic jams formed, some of them over 150 miles long. If the RAF had been believed, Army Group A could’ve been halted or at least delayed long enough to stall the entire offensive.

The British flyers in France hadn’t been idle but were in an extremely poor position. They should’ve been able to count on the French, but the Armée de l’Air was divided piecemeal into zones of operations, and each commander was independent of any overall command or control. Even so, the French could field 4,300 aircraft, of which 3,800 were modern types. This was arrayed against a Luftwaffe that could put 2,500 aircraft maximum into action during May 1940.

France had emerged from the Great War with a powerful air force and a considerable lead in technology. The Dewoitine 510 reached the magic airspeed of 250 mph before any other operational fighter, and it was the first to fire a cannon through its propeller hub. Eleven of twenty-two world speed records were held by the French, but politics and interservice animosity bred a dysfunctional, myopic mess that surpassed even their fear of the Germans. Even after creating an Air Ministry, the French army and navy retained operational control of most air force squadrons. Each army group fought tooth and nail to retain its own air units, for the primary mission of aviation, they steadfastly maintained, was to support ground forces. It was defensive thinking based on a generally static, infantry-dominated war—it was the Great War all over again.

The army won the catfight, even to the point of controlling air force procurement until 1936. In yet another twist of fate, the government decided to buy many of its fighters and engines from the United States rather than produce them indigenously. Curtiss built a nimble monoplane fighter, mostly metal and powered by a 1,200-horsepower air-cooled radial engine. Armed with either four or six 7.5 mm machine guns, the Americans called it a P-36 Hawk; to the French it was the H75A, and they took delivery of about three hundred. In climb performance, the Hawk was comparable to the Bf 109 below 10,000 feet. But at higher altitudes the Curtiss could barely manage 275 knots, while the Messerschmitt loafed along at 350 knots.

The other front-line fighter was the Dewoitine D-520. Another low-winged monoplane, it had much sleeker lines than the bulkier Curtiss and much better performance. A sliding canopy gave good visibility, and the pilot’s seat was armored in the back. The cockpit was fully instrumented and well set up, barring the typical French throttle mechanization.
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Easy to maintain and rearm, a 20 mm cannon fired through the propeller hub. It could be reloaded in about five minutes, as could the four MAC 39 7.5 mm wing guns. The D-520 was quirky, though, and not easy to fly. The Hispano-Suiza 12Y-45/49 engine was underpowered, even with a supercharger. Deliveries of the plane were delayed until April and by May 1940, only seventy-five had been fielded.

But numbers are only part of the equation, and they rank lower in importance than technology, experience, and training. However, we saw higher levels of training and experience long maintain Luftstreitkräfte air superiority during World War I against a numerically superior but hastily trained Royal Flying Corps. France had fine pilots who fought well as individuals, but the French air force was never a cohesive fighting unit.

During the critical years leading up to the war, infighting and politicking caused serious morale ramifications—as did several air ministers. One of them was a bomber enthusiast, and he turned the air force upside down, reorganizing along those lines. When the generals didn’t support him, he pushed through a law lowering the retirement age and forced many of them out. It also retired about 40 percent of the serving officers, a group that, unfortunately, included those with any combat experience from the Great War. His successor then reversed the bomber prioritization and backed close air support instead. Lack of focus from the top meant that facilities and infrastructure were neglected, while effective control simply didn’t exist.

This was very apparent in the hours and days following the German attack. Even so, fighter squadrons reacted as you’d expect during an invasion and attacked on their own initiative. More than 190 Luftwaffe aircraft were lost on May 10, though this includes losses from ground fire as well. All told, in the first four days, more than 450 German planes were shot down—heavy losses for an air force that was producing only 600 fighters and bombers per month.
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Unfortunately, the defensive nature of French thinking negated any advantage they had in numbers. You see, they’d never really gotten over the horrors of the Great War and were determined that it should never happen to them again. This mind-set prompted construction of the Maginot Line and extensive defensive systems along rivers and canals that could block any westward advance. The key to the whole assault was Allied ignorance of the German southern thrust, and the key to the whole southern thrust was Sedan. James Holland, in his excellent book
The Battle of Britain
, summed it up neatly:

The town effectively formed the hinge between the top of the Maginot Line . . . and the mobile north-east part of the line that had swung up into Belgium at the start of the offensive. Clearly, if this hinge could be broken, the two halves of the French line would be critically severed in two.

This is exactly what occurred on the evening of May 12 as Rommel’s 7th Panzer Division appeared from the Ardennes near Houx, north of Sedan. They found an intact dam with a footpath big enough to cross, so a reconnaissance in force did just that. Remarkably, it was the same dam that had been used by German troops in 1914, and it was
still
undefended. It also happened to be on the border between two French corps who couldn’t decide who should take the defensive responsibility—so neither did.

Despite the surprise and confusion on the French side, the Germans also had their issues. Fuel was ingeniously brought alongside the panzers in jerry cans, and the crews refueled on the move. Field kitchens put out tens of thousands of bread loaves, sausages, dried fruit, and coffee. But engines failed and tank tracks broke down, so a huge logistical chain was constantly working. The tanks themselves were another cause of concern, and a majority of early German models carried light armor and were only armed with machine guns.

May 12 was historic for another reason as well. Adolf Galland, frustrated warrior and fighter pilot, had finally gotten back into the air and opened his account. Flying some three hundred close air support missions with the Condor Legion, he’d emerged from Spain as the Luftwaffe’s expert on ground attack. This meant he’d been relegated to planning during Poland, and “Dolfo,” as he was known, had had enough. Somehow he’d convinced a doctor to pronounce him unfit to fly open-cockpit aircraft (the air would affect his ears!) and he’d finally gotten back into fighters.

Now, as the adjutant for Jagdgeschwader 27, he was closer to the action but still not in it. Knowing that his skill and experience were wasted behind a desk, on May 12 he simply took off on his own authority and joined a patrol over Belgium in the Maastricht area. Just west of Liege Dolfo found eight Belgian Hurricanes and immediately pounced from above. Using proven Bf 109 tactics, he slashed into them from behind and shot down two. Later that same day he added another Hurricane to his score. Galland would become the highest-scoring German ace during the upcoming Battle of Britain and the youngest general officer in the German military. But that was yet to come.

In any event, by the following morning Rommel’s engineers were laying pontoon bridges, and the first tanks crossed the Meuse into France on the evening of May 13. Caught in the past, the French had always planned on the response that had saved them in 1914. They’d counted on mobilizing their reserves and bringing them ponderously forward to wherever in Flanders the front stabilized. But in 1940 there was no front; the invaders had moved too fast for that. The ten to fourteen days the French had planned on having to prepare just hadn’t happened.

And the Germans weren’t going to give it to them.

THE BATTLE FOR
France was lost by the morning of May 14, 1940. Astonishingly, the French High Command still hadn’t grasped the significance of the German panzers and mechanized infantry near Sedan. Not until 3:00 a.m. on May 14 did Gen. Alphonse Joseph Georges, commander of the French North East Front, piece it all together. André Beaufre, a junior officer in 1940, later wrote, “Georges was terribly pale. He flung himself into a chair and burst into tears. He was the first man I had seen weep in this campaign.”

The British were too busy fighting to cry.

Their BEF was the only coherent fighting force left to oppose the Germans, but with its flanks left unprotected by French surrender fever, it had no option other than falling back to the coast. Churchill made the correct call in committing his RAF
only
to protect the withdrawal of ground forces to the Channel ports. After all, every fighter lost in France was one less available to protect Britain.

Guderian himself had crossed the Meuse on May 13 in a dinghy with his infantry. Disobeying orders to halt and consolidate, he pressed forward with his exhausted men and captured Hill 301 southwest of Sedan. The 1st and 10th Panzers began moving across in force early on the fourteenth, headed for Bulson Ridge, south of town. French armor had been ordered forward to take the Bulson Ridge at 4 p.m. the
previous
afternoon but, inexplicably, took more than seventeen hours to travel 12 miles. By the time they finally arrived the Germans were waiting in ambush. A short, bloody fight ensued, and the French remnants fled, joining most of the French field artillery and Gen. Pierre Lafontaine, commander of the 55th Infantry Division. Shortly thereafter, Guderian learned that the bridge over the Ardennes Canal west of Sedan had been taken intact and the way for his panzers was open—due west into the heart of France.