Early on the morning of Friday, 10 May 1940, Captain David Strangeways of the BEF, whose regiment was stationed near Lille in northern France, was woken by the battalion’s orderly room clerk shouting, ‘David, sir, David!’ It was only as he was about to rebuke the man for addressing an officer by his Christian name that Strangeways remembered that ‘David’ was the codeword for the event that the Allies had been waiting for since September.16 Hitler’s assault on the West had begun.
Considering that the Allies had been at war with Nazi Germany for over eight months it is astonishing that the Wehrmacht achieved such surprise as it unleashed Blitzkrieg on the West, especially as only one month earlier it had equally suddenly invaded Denmark and Norway. The day before the quadruple invasion of France, Holland, Belgium and Luxembourg, the Belgian Army had increased the amount of leave from two to five days per month, and in one strategically vital Belgian fort on the Albert Canal the warning gun was discovered to be out of order. As many as 15 per cent of France’s front-line troops were on leave and General René Prioux, commander of her Cavalry Corps, was 50 miles behind the lines engaged in target practice.
Army Group B under General Fedor von Bock made what Mellenthin called its ‘formidable, noisy and spectacular’ attack on Belgium and Holland at 05.35 hours. Many Dutch and Belgian aircraft were destroyed in their hangars, for very light losses by the Luftwaffe. Paratroopers captured strategic points near Rotterdam and The Hague, including airfields, although fierce resistance the next day allowed Queen Wilhelmina and the Dutch Government to escape capture. In Belgium eleven gliders, towed by Ju-52 transport planes, landed on the roof of the great fortress of Eben Emael, which covered the advance of Reichenau’s Sixth Army into the country. A mere eighty-five German paratroopers debouched from them and destroyed the fortress’s massive gun emplacements from above with specially designed hollow charges, while its 1,100 defenders withdrew to defensive positions beneath the fortress. Later that day, Hitler told the German people that a battle had begun that ‘will decide the fate of the German people for the next thousand years’.17
The French Commander-in-Chief, General Maurice Gamelin, ordered the French and British armies to the Dyle–Breda Line, where they advanced largely unhampered by 12 May, for, as Mellenthin recorded, the OKW ‘was delighted to see the enemy responding to our offensive in the exact manner which we desired and predicted’. When Giraud advanced too far into Holland, however, he was flung back at Tilburg. Some Allied generals, such as Alan Brooke commanding the British II Corps, Alphonse Georges of the French North-West Army, and Gaston Billotte of the 1st Army Group, deeply disapproved of Plan D, but Gamelin’s mind was made up.
The lack of preparation by the Belgians for an eventuality they had known was probable ever since the Mechelen crash-landing in January, was illustrated by their not having removed the roadblocks into Belgium from France, which took an hour to demolish. Nor were there any trains on hand to transport French troops and equipment to the Dyle, as King Leopold III of the Belgians complained to Major-General Bernard Montgomery when British troops went through Brussels.18 ‘All the Belgians seem to be in a panic from the higher command downwards,’ noted Gort’s chief of staff, Lieutenant-General Henry Pownall, on 13 May. ‘What an ally!’ Bad communications, mutual suspicion and, later on, mutual recriminations characterized the relationships between the Allies during this disastrous campaign.
Matters were made worse by the way in which the physical organization of Allied command was ridiculously decentralized: Gamelin’s headquarters were as far back as Vincennes, virtually in the Paris suburbs, because the Commander-in-Chief felt he needed to be closer to the Government than to his own Army. His field commander, Alphonse Georges – who had never truly recovered from being wounded during the assassination of King Alexander of Yugoslavia in Marseille six years earlier – was based at La Ferté, 35 miles east of Paris, but spent much of his time at his residence 12 miles from the capital. Meanwhile, the French General Headquarters was at Montry, between La Ferté and Vincennes, except for the Air Force which was at Coulommiers, 10 miles from La Ferté. Even in the land of châteaux this was taking château-generalship ludicrously far.
The attack of General Wilhelm List’s Twelfth Army, part of Army Group A, through the Ardennes was a masterpiece of OKW Staff work. Panzer Group Kleist, under General Paul von Kleist, comprising Heinz Guderian’s XIX Panzer Corps and Georg-Hans Reinhardt’s XLI Panzer Corps, arrived at Sedan and Montherme on the Meuse on 13 May, at the perfect time and place to effect the Schwerpunkt against General André Corap’s Ninth Army. After fierce fighting along the Meuse, especially at Sedan, the far heavier concentration of German armour, closely supported by the Luftwaffe, broke the French force. Kleist ordered the crossing of the Meuse on 13 May without waiting for artillery support, because surprise and momentum were key to the success of Blitzkrieg. ‘Time and again the rapid movements and flexible handling of our Panzers bewildered the enemy,’ recalled a triumphant Panzer commander years later.19 Colonel Baron Hasso-Eccard von Manteuffel agreed: ‘The French had more, better, heavier tanks than we had but… as General von Kleist said, “Don’t tap them – strike as a whole and don’t disperse.” ’20 The battle of Sedan had a moral and historical as well as a strategic significance for Frenchmen: it had been there in 1870 that Napoleon III had been crushed by Bismarck in the decisive battle of the Franco-Prussian War. When General Georges heard about Corap’s defeat at Sedan, he burst into tears. ‘Alas, there were to be others,’ wrote Beaufre of the generally lachrymose French High Command. ‘It made a terrible effect on me.’21
Guderian was at Montcornet by 15 May, Saint-Quentin by the 18th, and his 2nd Panzer Division reached Abbeville on the 20th. ‘Fahrkarte bis zur Endstation!’ (Ticket to the last station!) he called to his Panzer troops, telling them to go as far as possible.22 At one point Guderian was temporarily relieved of his command for going too fast, leaving his superiors fearful of a co-ordinated counter-attack from the north and south, one that he intuitively guessed would never come. Liddell Hart, an admirer of Guderian, described how the German tank commander had long been a proponent of ‘the idea of deep strategic penetration by independent armoured forces – a long-range tank-drive to cut the main arteries of the opposing army far back behind its front’.23 This was Guderian’s moment to prove his pre-war theorizing right and his detractors correspondingly wrong. By stretching the meaning of ‘using his initiative’ to its limits – ignoring orders he disliked and taking the wording of others far beyond their normal meaning – Guderian effected the sickle cut faster than anyone could have imagined possible.
‘I was conscious of a profound sense of relief,’ Churchill later wrote of his feelings when he finally got to bed at 3 a.m. on Saturday, 11 May 1940. ‘At last I had the authority to give directions over the whole scene. I felt as if I were walking with destiny, and that all my past life had been but a preparation for this hour and for this trial.’ On 13 May, he gave his first speech as prime minister in the House of Commons, conscious that Neville Chamberlain received a greater cheer than he when the two men entered the chamber separately. ‘I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat,’ he told parliament and soon afterwards the nation. To the question ‘What is our policy?’ Churchill answered that it was ‘to wage war against a monstrous tyranny, never surpassed in the dark, lamentable catalogue of human crime’. Morale was a vital factor in the Second World War, and Churchill’s oratory was invaluable in focusing British pride and patriotism. Stalin once cynically asked how many divisions had the Pope: Churchill’s larynx was worth the equivalent of an army corps to Britain, as radios were switched on in the nation’s homes at 9 p.m. to hear the Prime Minister’s words of inspiration. Drawing on English history, mentioning figures such as Drake and Nelson, he pointed out that the British had been in dire peril before, but had prevailed.
‘The hammer-blows… in May began to descend upon us almost daily,’ the military historian Michael Howard recalled,
‘like a demolition contractor’s iron ball striking the walls of a still-inhabited house.’24 On 15 May the Dutch capitulated, even though the Dyle-Breda front had not yet been broken by Army Group B. The bombing of Rotterdam had destroyed a large part of the city and left 80,000 people homeless, so the Dutch Commander-in-Chief, Henri Winkelmann, broadcast the Dutch surrender on Hilversum Radio before any other cities were subjected to a similar fate. Although only 980 people died in the raid, it became a stark symbol of Nazi terror-tactics. The fear of such bombing caused an exodus of between six and ten million terrified French refugees from Paris and the areas behind Allied lines, who clogged the roads southwards and westwards. Ninety thousand children were separated from their parents in the process, and the ability of the Allies to respond to the German invaders was severely hampered.
On 18 May the French Prime Minister, Paul Reynaud, reshuffled his Government and High Command. He appointed the eighty-four-year-old Marshal Philippe Pétain, the symbol of resistance during the battle of Verdun in 1916, as vice-premier, and himself took over as minister of war from the ex-premier who had signed the Munich agreement, Edouard Daladier, who became foreign minister. Two days later Reynaud sacked Gamelin and replaced him with the seventy-three-year-old Maxime Weygand, who had never commanded troops in battle and who arrived from Syria too late to affect the struggle that was developing around the Channel port of Dunkirk.
Charles de Gaulle, at forty-nine the youngest general in the French Army, commanded a spirited counter-attack at Laon on 18 May, but was forced back, and a brave attempt was made by the British 50th Division and 1st Tank Brigade south of Arras on 21 May to break through the sickle cut and reconnect with the French forces to the south. If successful this would have isolated Guderian and Reinhardt, but in the event it came to nothing in the face of Major-General Erwin Rommel’s 7th Panzer Division and 88mm anti-aircraft guns being used as artillery. Rommel had won fame at the battle of Caporetto in 1917 when, not even a captain, he captured 9,000 Italians and eighty-one guns. An instructor at the Infantry School at Dresden from 1929, he wrote textbooks on infantry tactics and was commandant of the War Academy in 1938, before going on to command Hitler’s bodyguard. A believer in remorselessly taking the offensive, Rommel understood Blitzkrieg and had a superlative sense of military timing.
With the French armour divided between three armoured cavalry divisions, three heavy armoured divisions (initially all held in reserve) and more than forty independent tank battalions supporting infantry units, other than General René Prioux’s Cavalry Corps no French motorized formations acted in concert during the campaign.25 Having failed to break through southwards, the BEF and French First Army fell back towards Dunkirk. Gaston Billotte died in a car crash on 21 May, an accident that led to a ‘feeling of inexorable Fate’ overcoming the French High Command, whose morale, in Beaufre’s view, was never to recover from Corap’s defeat at Sedan.26 The next day, 22 May, the RAF lost Merville, its last airfield in France, so that henceforth every British plane that flew over the Allied armies had to come from across the Channel, severely limiting the amount of time they could spend engaging the Luftwaffe.
A full week before the evacuation from Dunkirk began on 26 May, no fewer than 27,936 men who were not central to the functioning of the BEF were evacuated, in an operation organized by Lieutenant-Colonel Lord Bridgeman of the Rifle Brigade on the Continent and Vice-Admiral Bertram Ramsay, the Flag Officer in Dover.27 Cartographers, bakers, railwaymen and other ‘useless mouths to feed’, as they were accurately if rather uncharitably described by Bridgeman, were shipped back, a clear indication that things were not expected to go well. Nor did they: on 24 May Army Group A and Army Group B joined forces to push the Allies into a rapidly diminishing corner of France and Belgium, by then stretching only from Gravelines to Bruges and inland as far as Douai.
Then something astonishing happened. With Kleist’s Panzers only 18 miles from Dunkirk, indeed closer to it than the bulk of the Allied forces in the Belgian pocket, they were given an order to halt by Hitler that countermanded the Wehrmacht Commander-in-Chief Brauchitsch’s order to take the town. This specified that the line of Lens–Béthune–Saint-Omer–Gravelines ‘will not be passed’.28 For reasons that are still debated by historians, Hitler’s so-called Halt Order of 11.42 hours supported Rundstedt’s request to halt Kleist’s Panzers at the front line on 24 May and not move into the pocket.29 To the amazement and immense frustration of commanders like Kleist and Guderian, the coup de grâce that might have scooped up the entire northern Allied force was not put into operation, giving the Allies a vital forty-eight-hour breathing space which they used to strengthen the perimeter and begin the exodus from the beaches of Dunkirk. General Wilhelm von Thoma, chief of the tank section of OKH, was right up forward with the leading tanks near Bergues, from where he could look down into Dunkirk itself. He sent wireless messages to OKH insisting that the tanks push on, but was rebuffed. ‘You can never talk to a fool,’ he said bitterly of Hitler (after the Führer was safely dead). ‘Hitler spoilt the chance of victory.’30 When Churchill later spoke of a ‘miracle of deliverance’, it was one performed by the grace of Rundstedt and Hitler, as well as by Gort and Ramsay. It was the first example of very many cardinal errors that were to cost Germany the Second World War.
‘I must say that the English managed to escape that trap in Dunkirk which I had so carefully laid’, recalled Kleist afterwards,
only with the personal help of Hitler. There was a channel from Arras to Dunkirk. I had already crossed this channel and my troops occupied the heights which jutted out over Flanders. Therefore, my panzer group had complete control of Dunkirk and the area in which the British were trapped. The fact of the matter is that the English would have been unable to get into Dunkirk because I had them covered. Then Hitler personally ordered that I should withdraw my troops from these heights.31
Kleist was underestimating Rundstedt’s important role in the initial decision-making, but with Hitler willing to take the ultimate glory for the campaign, he must also take the ultimate blame for not allowing Kleist to scoop up the BEF outside Dunkirk. When Kleist met Hitler on the airfield at Cambrai a few days later he had the courage to remark that a great opportunity had been lost at Dunkirk. Hitler replied: ‘That may be so. But I did not want to send the tanks into the Flanders marshes – and the British won’t come back in this war.’32 Another excuse Hitler gave elsewhere was that mechanical failures, and the subsequent offensive against the rest of the French Army, had meant that he wanted to build up strength before passing on.
Flying over Dunkirk in September 1944, Churchill told André de Staerke, private secretary to the Prince Regent of Belgium, ‘I shall never understand why the German Army did not finish the British Army at Dunkirk.’33 The answer might be that by the morning of 24 May the troops had fought continuously for nearly a fortnight, and from his own time in the trenches in the Great War Hitler knew how exhausting that could be. Moreover the ground around the Dunkirk pocket was not ideal for tanks. The infantry needed time to catch up, considering the startling amount of ground the tanks had crossed since Sedan, and as Franz Halder wrote in his diary: ‘The Führer is terribly nervous. Afraid to take any chances.’ Too much had been achieved already to take the risk of falling into an Allied trap at that late stage, and there were still large French forces and reserves to deal with south of the Somme and Aisne rivers. Street fighting in Warsaw had also shown the vulnerability of tanks in built-up areas, such as Dunkirk was. Furthermore, Hermann Göring was confidently promising that the Luftwaffe could destroy the pocket without any need for the Wehrmacht to do much more than conduct mopping-up operations afterwards.
‘He was mistrusting of his generals,’ Jodl’s deputy General Walter Warlimont recalled years later of Hitler:
thus at Dunkirk he delayed the main aim of the whole campaign, which was reaching and closing the Channel coast before any other considerations. This time he was frightened that the clay plains of Flanders
with their many streams and channels… according to his memories of World War One would endanger and possibly inflict heavy losses on the Panzer divisions. Hitler failed to follow up the overwhelming success of the first part of the campaign, and instead initiated the steps for the second part before the first had been accomplished.34
Rundstedt himself, who was credited with issuing the Halt Order that the Führer later rubber-stamped, vehemently denied having done so. ‘If I had had my way the English would not have got off so lightly at Dunkirk,’ he later recalled with bitterness:
But my hands were tied by direct orders from Hitler himself. While the English were clambering into the ships off the beaches, I was kept uselessly outside the port unable to move. I recommended to the Supreme Command that my five Panzer Divisions be immediately sent into the town and thereby completely destroy the retreating English. But I received definite orders from the Führer that under no circumstances was I to attack, and I was expressly forbidden to send any of my troops closer than ten kilometres from Dunkirk… This incredible blunder was due to Hitler’s idea of generalship.35
This claim can be safely disregarded, since the order was given by Hitler at a meeting at Army Group A’s headquarters in the Maison Blairon, a small château at Charleville-Mézières only after Rundstedt himself had said he wanted to conserve the armour for a push to the south, to Bordeaux, where he feared the British would open another front soon, and anyway the numerous canals in Flanders made it bad country for tanks. Hitler merely concurred, but as his Luftwaffe adjutant Nicolaus von Below recorded: ‘The British Army had no relevance for him.’36
One theory that must also now be safely discarded was that Hitler did not expect or want to capture the BEF because he hoped for peace with Britain. Not only is it illogical – his chances of forcing peace on Britain would have been immensely strengthened by eliminating the BEF – but there is a piece of hitherto overlooked evidence that proves that the OKW assumed the Allied force would be destroyed despite the Halt Order. A handwritten note from Alfred Jodl, written at Führer-Headquarters and now in private hands, to the Reich Labour Minister Robert Ley and dated 28 May 1940, states:
The Storm of War: A New History of the Second World War Page 8