by John Keegan
Such exploits, many times repeated, carried the storming parties of all three Panzer divisions across the Meuse during the afternoon of 13 May. In front of them isolated outposts of French infantry held their ground with great courage; but others ran at the sight of tanks – sometimes at the sight of French tanks, often merely at the rumour of tanks. French tanks did appear towards evening; they belonged to the 3rd Armoured and 3rd Motorised Divisions, but the counter-attack they had been sent to deliver was not driven home. As they withdrew from the river’s edge, the Germans reinforced their own tank units, which by pontoon bridges had been transported to the French bank and prepared for the coming breakout.
That evening Gamelin, still at Vincennes, 120 miles from the crisis-point, issued an order of the day: ‘The onslaught of the mechanical and motorised forces of the enemy must now be faced. The hour has come to fight in depth on the positions appointed by the high command. One is no longer entitled to retire. If the enemy makes a local breach, it must not only be sealed off but counter-attacked and retaken.’
During 14 May Gamelin’s troops – who were far too widely dispersed to ‘fight in depth’ – did attempt counter-attacks against the German bridgeheads. None was successful, in part because the target was diffuse. The blade with which ‘Sickle Stroke’ would be delivered had not yet formed. Its component elements were still struggling out of their bridgeheads: the 6th and 8th Panzer Divisions north of Sedan; the 2nd, 1st and 10th to the south. The danger posed by the 5th and Rommel’s 7th at Dinant had not yet impressed itself on the French high command’s consciousness. In a strict military sense, it would have been best to wait until the Panzer divisions had coalesced and started inland, before their supporting infantry had crossed the river to join them. Then the armoured column might have been caught ‘in flank’ and decapitated. As it was, the French 3rd Armoured Division wandered about the battlefield on 14 May seeking ineffectively whom it might devour. While the Panzer bridgeheads were enlarged, the German tanks refuelled and reammunitioned and the start-lines were drawn for a plunge into the French heartland.
Which of the German spearheads would be first away? The Panzer concentration around Sedan was the stronger, but that further north at Dinant faced the poorer troops of Corap’s Ninth Army. André Corap, a fat and jovial colonial soldier with a talent for making his men like him, was opposed, moreover, by the wiry and ascetic Erwin Rommel, whose soldiers idolised him because he clearly cared only for beating the enemy. Rommel had won the Pour le Mérite, Germany’s highest military decoration, as a captain by a brilliant stroke of personal initiative during the First World War, and destroyed much of an Italian division in the process. On 15 May 1940, by a similar initiative, he broke through Corap’s tentative ‘stop-line’ before it could be manned and advanced seventeen miles for the loss of fifteen German dead. During the afternoon the 6th Panzer Division, crossing at Monthermé, north of Sedan, joined in the Ninth Army’s destruction. The Indo-Chinese machine-gunners who had defended the crossings with devoted bravery for three days were bypassed (their soldierly qualities portended of the bitterness with which Vietnam would be contested by Ho Chi Minh’s followers in the post-war years). Their French comrades-in-arms, whom the 6th Panzer Division met as it drove forward, showed no such tenacity – nothing, indeed, but pitiful demoralisation. Karl von Stackelberg, a war correspondent accompanying the German tanks, was astonished to encounter formed bodies of French troops marching to meet them:
There were finally 20,000 men, who here . . . in this one sector and on this one day, were heading backward as prisoners. Unwillingly one had to think of Poland and the scenes there. It was inexplicable. How was it possible that, after this first major battle on French territory, after this victory on the Meuse, this gigantic consequence should follow? How was it possible these French soldiers with their officers, so completely downcast, so completely demoralised, would allow themselves to go more or less voluntarily into imprisonment?
Not all French soldiers would give up the fight so easily. In the north the First Army was still resisting steadily, as it would do until its remnants were completely surrounded at Lille. And on 15 May Charles de Gaulle, who had been appointed to command the 4th Armoured Division four days previously, received orders from General Georges to attack at Laon, which lay in the German Panzers’ path, and ‘gain time’ for a new front to be established north of Paris. Although the 4th Armoured Division was still in the process of forming, de Gaulle, long an enthusiast for armoured warfare and a patriot whose love of country was fortified, not diminished, by its army’s current demoralisation, accepted the challenge with ardour. ‘I felt myself borne up by a limitless fury,’ he wrote later. ‘ “Ah! it’s too stupid! The war is beginning as badly as it could. Therefore it must go on. For this the world is wide. If I live, I will fight wherever I must as long as I must until the enemy is defeated and the national stain washed clean.” All I have managed to do since was resolved upon that day.’
De Gaulle managed to do little when he finally brought his division into action on 17 May. His tanks made inroads into the positions of the 1st Panzer Division, one of whose staff officers, Captain Graf von Kielsmansegg, who thirty-five years later would command the NATO forces in Germany, decided on showing them that ‘discretion was the better part of valour’. However, they were too few to do more than frighten the Germans and by evening they turned about and withdrew to refuel.
The Germans had grown collectively nervous that day – although Guderian, commanding the 2nd and 10th Panzer Divisions, champed at the bit and sought by every means to get forward. But Hitler, recorded Halder, ‘is anxious about our own success, doesn’t want to risk anything and would therefore be happiest to have us halt.’ Halder himself was concerned to line the ‘walls’ of the developing ‘Panzer corridor’ with his infantry, which was lagging behind the tanks; Brauchitsch, the commander-in-chief, was adamant that he should. The Panzers had advanced forty miles since the crossing of the Meuse four days earlier, were converging into a solid armoured mass of seven divisions and had the clear evidence of the collapse of the French Ninth and Second Armies everywhere before their eyes. The French First Army, the BEF and the Belgians were giving ground to the north, while the French to the south, immobilised in the Maginot Line and unable to manoeuvre for lack of transport, were clearly unable to intervene against the Panzers. Nevertheless the German high command, prompted by Hitler’s anxieties, on 17 May imposed a halt on the advance.
German anxieties paled by comparison with those of the Allies. The Belgians, for the second time in the century, faced the prospect of defeat and occupation. The British were confronted by the fear of losing their only army – and large parts of their air force – if they continued to stand by their allies on a collapsing battle line. The French foresaw their army breaking into two, the better part falling victim to encirclement in Belgium and the northern departments, while the remnants struggled to form a new and doubtfully defensible front on the approaches to Paris. The potential for disaster loomed as large as in 1914 but the crisis was actually more acute. Then the French army had suffered defeat in the Battle of the Frontiers but retreated in good order under an imperturbable commander; in 1940 it was retreating in disorder, a disorder which grew worse daily under the nominal orders but not the effective command of a general who was surrendering to events. On 16 May Paul Reynaud, the French Prime Minister, sent for new men: to the Madrid embassy for Philippe Pétain, hero of Verdun, to join him as his deputy; to Syria for Maxime Weygand, chief of staff to Foch in the victory campaign of 1918, as a replacement for Gamelin. Both were very old – Weygand, at seventy-three, five years older than Gamelin, Pétain older still – but at this moment of agony their heroic reputations seemed a reassurance that something might yet be snatched from the yawning jaws of defeat.
Gamelin was now discredited. In Paris on 16 May he conferred with Reynaud and Winston Churchill – Prime Minister since 10 May, when the House of Commons had withdrawn its confidenc
e from Neville Chamberlain – and admitted that he had no troops available to stem the German onrush. ‘I then asked, “Where is the strategic reserve?” ’ Churchill recorded. ‘General Gamelin turned to me and, with a shake of his head and a shrug, said “Aucune” [“There is none”]. There was a long pause. Outside in the garden of the Quai d’Orsay clouds of smoke arose from large bonfires and I saw from the window venerable officials pushing wheelbarrows of archives on to them.’ (The burning of official papers was to be a token of apprehended defeat at capitals and headquarters throughout the Second World War.) ‘I was dumbfounded. . . . It had never occurred to me that army commanders having to defend five hundred miles of engaged front would have left themselves unprovided with a [strategic reserve]. . . . What was the Maginot Line for?’
Churchill left for England promising to send six additional squadrons of British fighters to join the few already in France. However, so complete was German air superiority that fighter reinforcements could make no difference at this stage of the battle. What was needed was the strategic reserve he had discovered did not exist. Weygand, who assumed command from Gamelin on 20 May, attempted to improvise one by proposing (‘the Weygand Plan’) on 21 May that the encircled Allied forces north of the German break-in should co-ordinate convergent attacks against the Panzer corridor with the French armies still operating to its south. This reflected a correct appreciation of how to deal with Blitzkrieg and had in fact been proposed by Gamelin two days before, but the authority to execute it was lacking. Georges was now a broken man, while Billotte, to whom he had delegated authority, was killed in a motor accident on 21 May. The troops were lacking too. De Gaulle had attempted another vain counter-attack with his depleted 4th Armoured Division on 19 May; and on 21 May two British divisions, supported by two tank battalions, succeeded in denting the flank of the Panzer corridor at Arras, so alarming Rommel, commanding on the spot, that he estimated he had been attacked by five enemy divisions. However, these formations represented almost the whole Allied force available to Weygand for manoeuvre. The Ninth Army had disintegrated. The First Army and the BEF were constricted between the North Sea and the advancing Germans. The as yet unengaged French armies south of the Panzer corridor lacked transport, tanks and artillery. Meanwhile, after the German high command’s hesitation of 17 May, the Panzers had driven on. By 18 May they were driving across the battlefields of the First World War, skirting the river Sambre on their northern flank and the river Somme on the south. On 20 May Guderian’s divisions reached Abbeville at the mouth of the Somme, thus effectively dividing the Allied armies into two.
These were heady days for Heinz Guderian. He was dedicated to the development of the Panzer arm and even before Hitler’s rise to power was an advocate of what would be called Blitzkrieg. Frustrated by the timidity of his own high command – Brauchitsch, abetted by Halder, represented the fainthearts – he had had to restort to subterfuge in evading its orders to proceed with caution after crossing the Meuse. His creative disobedience had not yet won a great victory; he and the whole of the German Panzer force would have difficulty in achieving it. On 20 May Hitler reviewed plans for ‘Case Red’, the advance into the French heartland which would complete ‘Sickle Stroke’ and also complete the destruction of the French army – as long as the Panzer arm was kept intact. So it was that the British counter-attack at Arras, which had so alarmed Rommel, now alarmed Hitler once again. Rundstedt, commanding Army Group A, agreed with him that the Panzers had advanced too far for safety and should not proceed until the slower-moving infantry had lined the ‘walls’ of the Panzer corridor against a repetition of the Arras surprise. Brauchitsch, supported by Halder, now abandoned his earlier caution, urged that the Panzers should press home their attacks against the encircled Allies in the north, and even tried to transfer command of part of the striking force from Rundstedt to Bock, the situation of whose Army Group B, advancing on a front through Belgium, had now aroused Hitler’s anxiety. When Hitler learned of the attempt on 24 May, however, he cancelled it and reiterated his refusal to allow the Panzers to press into the coastal lowlands which he claimed, from his own trench experience of the First World War, were quite unsuitable for armoured operations.
Hitler’s ‘stop order’ would keep the Panzers halted for two whole days, until the afternoon of 26 May – two days which in retrospect have been deemed strategically decisive for the outcome of the Second World War. Unbeknown to the Germans, the British government had on 20 May decided that part of the BEF might have to be evacuated from the Channel ports and had instructed the Admiralty to begin assembling small ships on the British south coast to take them off. The operation would be codenamed ‘Dynamo’. It was not yet to comprehend a full-scale evacuation; the government still hoped that the BEF, with the French First Army, would be able to break through the Panzer corridor to join the surviving bulk of the French armies on and south of the Somme – which was the point of the Weygand Plan. However, the BEF was itself becoming wearied by its battle in Belgium which had entailed a fighting withdrawal from the Dyle to the Schelde, and Gort was increasingly concerned by his responsibility for safeguarding Britain’s only army. On 23 May he had received an assurance from Anthony Eden, who was serving as War Minister, that the government would make naval and air arrangements to assist them should they have to withdraw on the northern coast. On the same day he concluded that the Weygand Plan could not be realised for lack of troops, tanks and aircraft, and withdrew from Arras the two divisions which had attacked Rommel with such effect on 21 May. ‘Nothing but a miracle can save the BEF now,’ Alan Brooke, commanding Gort’s II Corps, wrote on 23 May; but on that day Gort’s decision to disengage and draw the BEF back towards the coast in effect laid the basis for its salvation.
For Hitler had anticipated events. He was right to fear that the Panzers would get bogged down in the canals and rivers around Dunkirk, to which port Gort now directed the BEF. He was wrong to give the ‘stop order’ when he did, two days before the British – and a substantial portion of the French First Army – reached the watery sanctuary of the ‘Canal Line’. When the stop order was revoked on 26 May that part of the Allied army he most wanted and needed to destroy was – temporarily – safe. Protected by the Aa Canal and the Colme Canal, the fugitive enemy could start embarking in the flotillas of destroyers and small boats which Admiral Bertram Ramsay began to send cross-Channel from the headquarters of Operation Dynamo that same day. Hitler had been assured by Goering that the Luftwaffe would prevent any evacuation from the Dunkirk pocket. During 24-26 May its aircraft did indeed raise havoc inside it and would continue to do so as long as the evacuation lasted, until 4 June. But it could not stop the evacuation ships closing the shore – the total it sunk was six British and two French destroyers in nine days of air attack – nor could it reduce the resistance of the Dunkirk defenders, many of them French, many of those French colonials, who gave ground with extreme reluctance against concentric German attack.
The Belgian army was forced into a capitulation north of the Dunkirk pocket at midnight on 27 May. It surrendered in almost exactly the same area where, in 1914, it had been able to consolidate a defensive position and continue the fight until 1918. Then, however, it had been supported by French and British armies which remained intact and combatant. Now, unfairly condemned for deserting them by allies who were themselves on the point of collapse, it had no option but to ask for terms. So, too, shortly would the divisions of the French First Army which were encircled at Lille and running out of ammunition. So bravely had they fought that, when they marched out to surrender on 30 May, the Germans rendered them the honours of war, playing them into captivity with the music of a military band. It was significant evidence of the fighting spirit of the French army of 1940 that a large proportion of these stalwarts were not French at all, but North African subjects of the French empire.
The evacuation of the BEF – and the French troops in the Dunkirk pocket who could be got to the beaches – was now in full
swing. Only 8000 were got off on 26-27 May; but on 28 May, as the fleet of naval ships and civilian small craft standing in to the shore grew, 19,000 were embarked. On 29 May 47,000 were rescued; on 31 May, the day Gort himself left for England, 68,000. By 4 June, when the last ship drew away, 338,000 Allied soldiers had been saved from capture. The number included almost the whole manpower of the BEF less its temporarily irreplaceable equipment, and 110,000 French soldiers, the majority of whom on arriving in England were immediately transhipped and returned to French ports in Normandy and Brittany to rejoin the rest of the French army still in the field.