“I was dumfounded,” Churchill later related. It was unheard of that a great army, when attacked, held no troops in reserve. “I admit,” says Churchill, “that this was one of the greatest surprises I have had in my life.”12
It was scarcely less a surprise to the German High Command, or at least to Hitler and the generals at OKW if not to Halder. Twice during this campaign in the West, which the Fuehrer himself directed, he hesitated. The first occasion was on May 17 when a crisis of nerves overcame him. That morning Guderian, who was a third of the way to the Channel with his panzer corps, received an order to halt in his tracks. Intelligence had been received from the Luftwaffe that the French were mounting a great counterattack to cut off the thin armored German wedges which extended westward from Sedan. Hitler conferred hastily with his Army Commander in Chief, Brauchitsch, and with Halder. He was certain that a serious French threat was developing from the south. Rundstedt, commander of Army Group A, the main force which had launched the breakthrough over the Meuse, backed him up when they conferred later in the day. He expected, he said, “a great surprise counteroffensive by strong French forces from the Verdun and Châlons-sur-Marne areas.” The specter of a second Marne rose in Hitler’s feverish mind. “I am keeping an eye on this,” he wrote Mussolini the next day. “The miracle of the Marne of 1914 will not be repeated!”13
A very unpleasant day [Halder noted in his diary the evening of May 17]. The Fuehrer is terribly nervous. He is worried over his own success, will risk nothing and insists on restraining us. Puts forward the excuse that it is all because of his concern with the left flank … [He] has brought only bewilderment and doubts.
The Nazi warlord showed no improvement during the next day despite the avalanche of news about the French collapse. Halder recorded the crisis in his diary of the eighteenth:
The Fuehrer has an unaccountable worry about the south flank. He rages and screams that we are on the way to ruining the whole operation and that We are courting the danger of a defeat. He won’t have any part in continuing the drive westward, let alone southwest, and clings always to the idea of a thrust to the northwest. This is the subject of a most unpleasant dispute between the Fuehrer on the one side and Brauchitsch and me on the other.
General Jodl of OKW, for whom the Fuehrer was nearly always right, also noted the discord at the top.
Day of great tension [he wrote on the eighteenth]. The Commander in Chief of the Army [Brauchitsch] has not carried out the intention of building up as quickly as possible a new flanking position to the south … Brauchitsch and Halder are called immediately and ordered peremptorily to adopt the necessary measures immediately.
But Halder had been right; the French had no forces with which to stage a counterattack from the south. And though the panzer divisions, chafing at the bit as they were, received orders to do no more than proceed with “a reconnaissance in force” this was all they needed to press toward the Channel. By the morning of May 19 a mighty wedge of seven armored divisions, driving relentlessly westward north of the Somme River past the storied scenes of battle of the First World War, was only some fifty miles from the Channel. On the evening of May 20, to the surprise of Hitler’s headquarters, the 2nd Panzer Division reached Abbeville at the mouth of the Somme. The Belgians, the B.E.F. and three French armies were trapped.
Fuehrer is beside himself with joy [Jodl scribbled in his diary that night]. Talks in words of highest appreciation of the German Army and its leadership. Is working on the peace treaty, which shall express the tenor: return of territory robbed over the last 400 years from the German people, and of other values …
A special memorandum is in the files containing the emotion-choked words of the Fuehrer when receiving the telephone report from the Commander in Chief of the Army about the capture of Abbeville.
The only hope of the Allies to extricate themselves from this disastrous encirclement was for the armies in Belgium to immediately turn southwest, disengage themselves from the German Sixth Army attacking them there, fight their way across the German armored wedge that stretched across northern France to the sea and join up with fresh French forces pushing northward from the Somme. This was in fact what General Gamelin ordered on the morning of May 19, but he was replaced that evening by General Maxime Weygand, who immediately canceled the order. Weygand, who had a formidable military reputation gained in the First World War, wanted to confer first with the Allied commanders in Belgium before deciding what to do. As a result, three days were lost before Weygand came up with precisely the same plan as his predecessor. The delay proved costly. There were still forty French, British and Belgian battle-tested divisions in the north, and had they struck south across the thin armored German line on May 19 as Gamelin ordered, they might have succeeded in breaking through. By the time they moved, communications between the various national commands had become chaotic and the several Allied armies, hard pressed as they were, began to act at cross-purposes. At any rate, the Weygand plan existed only in the General’s mind; no French troops ever moved up from the Somme.
In the meantime the German High Command had thrown in all the infantry troops that could be rushed up to strengthen the armored gap and enlarge it. By May 24 Guderian’s tanks, driving up the Channel from Abbeville, had captured Boulogne and surrounded Calais, the two main ports, and reached Gravelines, some twenty miles down the coast from Dunkirk. The front in Belgium had moved southwestward as the Allies attempted to detach themselves there. By the 24th, then, the British, French and Belgian armies in the north were compressed into a relatively small triangle with its base along the Channel from Gravelines to Terneuzen and its apex at Valenciennes, some seventy miles inland. There was now no hope of breaking out of the trap. The only hope, and it seemed a slim one, was possible evacuation by sea from Dunkirk.
It was at this juncture, on May 24, that the German armor, now within sight of Dunkirk and poised along the Aa Canal between Gravelines and St.-Omer for the final kill, received a strange—and to the soldiers in the field inexplicable—order to halt their advance. It was the first of the German High Command’s major mistakes in World War II and became a subject of violent controversy, not only between the German generals themselves but among the military historians, as to who was responsible and why. We shall return to that question in a moment in the light of a mass of material now available. Whatever the reasons for this stop order, it provided a miraculous reprieve to the Allies, and especially to the British, leading as it did to the miracle of Dunkirk. But it did not save the Belgians.
THE CAPITULATION OF KING LEOPOLD
King Leopold III of the Belgians surrendered early on the morning of May 28. The headstrong young ruler, who had taken his country out of its alliance with France and Britain into a foolish neutrality, who had refused to restore the alliance even during the months when he knew the Germans were preparing a massive assault across his border, who at the last moment, after Hitler had struck, called on the French and British for military succor and received it, now deserted them in a desperate hour, opening the dyke for German divisions to pour through on the flank of the sorely pressed Anglo–French troops. Moreover, he did it, as Churchill told the Commons on June 4, “without prior consultation, with the least possible notice, without the advice of his ministers and upon his own personal act.”
Actually he did it against the unanimous advice of his government, which he was constitutionally sworn to follow. At 5 A.M. on May 25 there was a showdown meeting at the King’s headquarters between the monarch and three members of the cabinet, including the Prime Minister and the Foreign Minister. They urged him for the last time not to surrender personally and become a prisoner of the Germans, for if he did he “would be degraded to the role of Hacha” in Prague. They also reminded him that he was head of state as well as Commander in Chief, and that if matters came to the worst he could exercise his first office in exile, as the Queen of Holland and the King of Norway had decided to do, until eventual Allied victory came.
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br /> “I have decided to stay,” Leopold answered. “The cause of the Allies is lost.”14
At 5 P.M. on May 27 he dispatched General Derousseaux, Deputy Chief of the Belgian General Staff, to the Germans to ask for a truce. At 10 o’clock the General brought back the German terms: “The Fuehrer demands that arms be laid down unconditionally.” The King accepted unconditional surrender at 11 P.M. and proposed that fighting cease at 4 A.M., which it did.
Leopold’s capitulation was angrily denounced by Premier Reynaud of France in a violent broadcast, and Belgian Premier Pierlot, also broadcasting from Paris but in a more dignified tone, informed the Belgian people that the King had acted against the unanimous advice of the government, broken his links with the people and was no longer in a position to govern, and that the Belgian government in exile would continue the struggle. Churchill when he spoke in the House on May 28 reserved judgment on Leopold’s action but on June 4 joined in the general criticism.
The controversy raged long after the war was over. Leopold’s defenders, and there were many in and outside Belgium, believed that he had done the right and honorable thing in sharing the fate of his soldiers and of the Belgian people. And they made much of the claim that the King acted not as chief of state but as Commander in Chief of the Belgian Army in surrendering.
That the battered Belgian troops were in desperate straits by May 27 there is no dispute. Valiantly they had agreed to extend their front in order to free the British and French to fight their way south. And that extended front was fast collapsing though the Belgians fought doggedly. Also Leopold was not told that on May 26 Lord Gort had received orders from London to withdraw to Dunkirk and save what he could of the B.E.F. That is one side of the argument, but there is another. The Belgian Army was under the over-all Allied Command and Leopold made a separate peace without consulting it. In his defense it has been pointed out that on May 27 at 12:30 P.M. he telegraphed Gort that he soon would “be forced to capitulate to avoid a collapse.” But the British commander, who was extremely busy and constantly on the move, did not receive it. He later testified that he first heard of the surrender only shortly after 11 P.M. on May 27 and found himself “suddenly faced with an open gap of twenty miles between Ypres and the sea through which enemy armored forces might reach the beaches.”15 To General Weygand, who was the King s superior military commander, the news arrived by telegram from French liaison at Belgian headquarters a little after 6 P.M. and it hit him, he later said, “like a bolt out of the blue. There had been no warning …”16
Finally, even as Commander in Chief of the armed forces, Leopold in this constitutional, democratic monarchy was bound to accept the advice of his government. Neither in that role nor certainly as chief of state did he have the authority to surrender on his own. In the end the Belgian people, as was proper, passed judgment on their sovereign. He was not recalled to the throne from Switzerland, where he took refuge at the war’s end, until five years after it was over. When the call came, on July 20, 1950, after 57 per cent of those voting in a referendum had approved it, his return provoked such a violent reaction among the populace that civil war threatened to break out. He soon abdicated in favor of his son.
Whatever may be said of Leopold’s behavior, there should be no dispute—though there has been*—about the magnificent way his Army fought. For a few days in May I followed Reichenau’s Sixth Army through Belgium and saw for myself the tenacity with which the Belgians struggled against insuperable odds. Not once did they break under the unmerciful and unopposed bombing of the Luftwaffe or when the German armor tried to cut through them. This could not be said of certain other Allied troops in that campaign. The Belgians held out for eighteen days and would have held out much longer had not they, like the B.E.F. and the French northern armies, been caught in a trap which was not of their making.
MIRACLE AT DUNKIRK
Ever since May 20, when Guderian’s tanks broke through to Abbeville on the sea, the British Admiralty, on the personal orders of Churchill, had been rounding up shipping for a possible evacuation of the B.E.F. and other Allied forces from the Channel ports. Noncombatant personnel and other “useless mouths” began to be ferried across the narrow sea to England at once. By May 24, as we have seen, the Belgian front to the north was near collapse, and to the south the German armor, striking up the coast from Abbeville, after taking Boulogne and enveloping Calais, had reached the Aa Canal only twenty miles from Dunkirk. In between were caught the Belgian Army, the nine divisions of the B.E.F. and ten divisions of the French First Army. Though the terrain on the southern end of the pocket was bad tank country, being crisscrossed with canals, ditches and flooded areas, Guderian’s and Reinhardt’s panzer corps already had five bridgeheads across the main barrier, the Aa Canal, between Gravelines on the sea and St.-Omer, and were poised for the knockout blow which would hammer the Allied armies against the anvil of the advancing German Sixth and Eighteenth armies pushing down from the northeast and utterly destroy them.
Suddenly on the evening of May 24 came the peremptory order from the High Command, issued at the insistence of Hitler with the prompting of Rundstedt and Goering but over the violent objections of Brauchitsch and Halder, that the tank forces should halt on the canal line and attempt no further advance. This furnished Lord Gort an unexpected and vital reprieve which he and the British Navy and Air Force made the most of and which, as Rundstedt later perceived and said, led “to one of the great turning points of the war.”
How did this inexplicable stop order on the threshold of what seemed certain to be the greatest German victory of the campaign come about? What were the reasons for it? And who was responsible? The questions have provoked one of the greatest arguments of the war, among the German generals involved and among the historians. The generals, led by Rundstedt and Halder, have put the blame exclusively on Hitler. Churchill added further fuel to the controversy in the second volume of his war memoirs by contending that the initiative for the order came from Rundstedt and not Hitler and citing as evidence the war diaries of Rundstedt’s own headquarters. In the maze of conflicting and contradictory testimony it has been difficult to ascertain the facts. In the course of preparing this chapter the author wrote General Halder himself for further elucidation and promptly received a courteous and detailed reply. On the basis of this and much other evidence now in, certain conclusions may be drawn and the controversy settled, if not conclusively, at least fairly convincingly.
As for responsibility for the famous order, Rundstedt, despite his later assertions to the contrary, must share it with Hitler. The Fuehrer visited the General’s Army Group A headquarters at Charleville on the morning of May 24. Rundstedt proposed that the panzer divisions on the canal line before Dunkirk be halted until more infantry could be brought up. * Hitler agreed, observing that the armor should be conserved for later operations against the French south of the Somme. Moreover, he declared that if the pocket in which the Allies were entrapped became too small it would hamper the activities of the Luftwaffe. Probably Rundstedt, with the approval of the Fuehrer, issued the stop order at once, for Churchill notes that the B.E.F. intercepted a German radio message giving orders to that effect at 11:42 that morning.17 Hitler and Rundstedt were at that moment in conference.
At any rate, that evening Hitler issued the formal order from OKW, both Jodl and Halder noting it in their diaries. The General Staff Chief was most unhappy.
Our left wing, consisting of armor and motorized forces [he wrote in his diary], will thus be stopped dead in its tracks on the direct orders of the Fuehrer! Finishing off the encircled enemy army is to be left to the Air Force!
This exclamation mark of contempt indicates that Goering had intervened with Hitler, and it is now known that he did. He offered to liquidate the entrapped enemy troops with his Air Force alone! The reasons for his ambitious and vain proposal were given the writer in the letter from Halder on July 19, 1957.
During the following days [i.e., after May 24] it be
came known that Hitler’s decision was mainly influenced by Goering. To the dictator the rapid movement of the Army, whose risks and prospects of success he did not understand because of his lack of military schooling, became almost sinister. He was constantly oppressed by a feeling of anxiety that a reversal loomed …
Goering, who knew his Fuehrer well, took advantage of this anxiety. He offered to fight the rest of the great battle of encirclement alone with his Luftwaffe, thus eliminating the risk of having to use the valuable panzer formations. He made this proposal … for a reason which was characteristic of the unscrupulously ambitious Goering. He wanted to secure for his Air Force, after the surprisingly smooth operations of the Army up to then, the decisive final act in the great battle and thus gain the glory of success before the whole world.
General Halder then tells in his letter of an account given him by Brauchitsch after a talk which the latter had with the Luftwaffe Generals Milch and Kesselring in Nuremberg jail in January 1946, in which the Air Force officers declared
The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany Page 116