There was much sense in what von Bock said. On paper, it looked hopelessly optimistic. And von Bock knew, as Halder knew, that of the 135 divisions earmarked for the offensive, large numbers were far from being the elite, crack units the rest of the world seemed to think they were. In the entire army, there were only ten panzer and six fully mechanized divisions. These mere sixteen divisions were the modern, fully equipped units of the German army. The other 141 were really rather old-fashioned, lacking mechanization and dependent on horses, carts and the oldest means of transport in the world – the soldier’s two feet he stood on – to get from A to B. In the spearhead that would thrust through the Ardennes, there were only ten such modernized divisions: in Panzer Group Kleist, Guderian had three panzer divisions, General Reinhardt’s corps two panzer and one mechanized (i.e. mainly lorried infantry), while von Wietersheim’s corps had two mechanized divisions. Since there were not enough roads through the Ardennes for all three corps to advance at once, Panzer Corps von Wietersheim would be following behind the spearhead in any case. The remaining two panzer divisions in Army Group A were those of Panzer Corps Hoth, which included Rommel’s 7th Panzer Division.
And yes, they were modern and well equipped, but the majority of their panzers were hardly the latest in cutting-edge tank design. Only Panzer Mks III and IV had decent-sized guns and there were only 627 of them. The remaining 1,812 were Mk Is, which had machine guns only, Mk IIs, which had a rather feeble 20 mm gun, and Czech 35s and 38s, which also had below-par firepower. In contrast, the Allies could call on some 4,204 tanks, almost double the amount in the German army. Of these, a significant number were bigger, better armed and better armoured than anything the Germans had.
Of the rest of the German army, only a quarter were active duty troops that could be used in the first wave of the offensive – that is, regular peacetime units reinforced with reservists, such as Siegfried Knappe’s 87th Division. The second wave consisted of mostly younger fully trained reservists. After that were those reservists who had only been cursorily trained. Then there were the Landwehr units – territorials – who were mostly older, veterans of the Great War and barely trained at all since 1918.
This meant that only half of all German soldiers had had more than a few weeks’ training, while more than a quarter were over forty. Nazi propaganda had kept this rather startling reality close to its chest.
Consequently, just ten German panzer and mechanized divisions – around 140,000 men – were being expected to do the lion’s share of the main thrust, and drive a wedge through around 2.5 million French and British forces all the way to the Channel coast. It was a very, very tall order indeed.
But what other choice was there? Hitler’s invasion of Poland had got Germany in a terrible predicament. Do or die, a go-for-broke gamble, was the only chance she had of wriggling out of it.
On this Friday, 10 May, Case Yellow was finally underway. Germany would live or die by the sword. There could be no turning back. Hitler, at least, was confident of success. Guderian believed in it, and so did his men and his fellow commanders amongst the panzer elite. Von Brauchitsch and Halder hoped it might work. Most of the rest of the army command, however, did not share their Führer’s confidence. They went along with it because they had no choice; only a miracle, it seemed, would save them.
At Führer Headquarters, reports were coming in regularly. Halder was reading them all, assiduously noting them down in his diary. By 10 a.m., news had arrived that Panzer Group Kleist was advancing according to plan; Fallschirmjäger (paratroop) units dropped into Holland to capture key forts and bridges similarly seemed to be progressing well. The railhead at Luxembourg, essential for the passage of supplies to the front, had been captured. So far, then, so good. But what of the enemy? Were the British and French northern armies moving into Belgium to meet the German onslaught in the north? For Halder, the man responsible for organizing the operation, these were desperately tense and long hours of waiting. And in the same building was the Führer, the man just a few months earlier he had planned to kill.
All morning and into the afternoon, Leutnant Siegfried Knappe and the rest of the 87th Division moved not an inch. Everything was ready, as it had been since 5 a.m.; ammunition loaded, guns jacked up to their carriages, the troops standing around in march order. Siegfried spent the time talking to Major Raake and the battery commanders, speculating about what lay in store. Would it be over quickly? Or would it soon bog down into trench warfare as it had a quarter of a century before? ‘It was a very long day,’ noted Siegfried, ‘just sitting and waiting for orders to move out.’
Way ahead, at the spearhead of Army Group A, Panzer Corps Guderian was leading the race to the Meuse. Every man knew what was at stake. Since 0530, the clock had been ticking; every minute counted. The General’s three panzer divisions were the 1st, 2nd and 10th. He had warned his men they should not expect to get much sleep for three days and nights. With this in mind, the senior staff officer of 1st Panzer Division had ordered 20,000 tablets of Pervitin in an attempt to keep the men awake. No-one needed such stimulants this first day, however. Adrenalin alone saw to that. By 8.30 a.m. they had successfully passed through Luxembourg and swept aside Belgian defences at the town of Martelange. The next town on their route through the Ardennes, Bodange, proved a tougher nut to crack, but by evening they were through the main Belgian frontier defences. So far, the rush to the Meuse was on schedule, although Guderian was keenly aware there was still much that could go wrong between now and reaching the famous river. Belgium road demolitions, for example, needed to be cleared without delay.
In the north, it was the troops of Army Group B who were experiencing the most action as they thundered into Belgium and Holland. Unteroffizier Hellmuth Damm and his Gruppe – or half-platoon in a machine-gun company – of a dozen men realized the offensive was beginning when they heard aircraft droning overhead. At 6 a.m. came the order to attack. Just as they had trained, the battalion began moving forward: four companies, each of around 120 men divided into three rifle platoons and one machine-gun platoon. The rifle companies led the way, the machine-gun company following behind with their heavy gear. The two MG08s weighed over sixty kilograms each, and the gun mounts around thirty kilos. On top of that each man had to carry two twelve-kilo ammunition boxes, plus rifle, pouches, bread bags, spade, gas mask, pack, anti-gas cape, rations, hand-grenades, wire cutters and other personal gear. As Gruppe leader, Hellmuth also carried a message bag, a pair of binoculars and sighting equipment. It was quite a load.
Up ahead, Hellmuth soon heard gunfire, but he could not see any enemy. The word filtering back to them was that the Dutch troops had withdrawn behind the River Meuse.
Later in the morning, they reached the river. New orders arrived, and Hellmuth and his Gruppe were instructed to take up position on the first floor of a nearby house to cover the assault engineers as they attempted to cross the river in rubber boats. He soon found a suitable building, informing the bewildered and frightened inhabitants that he now needed to use their front-facing bedroom as a machine-gun post. Moving beds and furniture out of the way, he quickly got his two MG teams ready and radioed back to company headquarters that he was in position to fire. In the meantime, the artillery behind had arrived and unlimbered, and had begun firing. With shells hurtling through the air and with small arms beginning to crackle, Hellmuth was given the order for his men to open fire. Ahead, he watched the assault troops, crouching in their rubber boats, paddling furiously across the river. Soon the room was thick with the smell of cordite and oil. Through the haze of battle, Hellmuth saw white flags appearing from the enemy already as the assault troops began scrambling out of their boats and up the far bank, their flame-throwers and hand-grenades ready. More infantry were now pouring across the river, the signal for Hellmuth to dismantle his MGs and get his men across the water as well. ‘To our surprise,’ noted Hellmuth, ‘the owner of the house invited us to a cup of hot coffee even though we hadn’t exactly been pol
ite to him.’
Quickly swigging back the coffee, they then found a couple of spare boats and made their way across the river. On the far bank, they came up against a large wire fence. Lying on his front, Hellmuth cut a hole and then his men hurried through the gap, lumbering their gear as quickly as they could. Ahead were the blackened remains of a Dutch concrete bunker. Prisoners sat around it and Hellmuth was surprised that no-one seemed to have taken responsibility for them. Shrugging to himself, he ordered his men forward, the infantry either side and in front of them.
During the rest of the day, Hellmuth’s Gruppe never had cause to fire their machine guns again. Instead, they merely followed the advance, carrying their heavy loads through field after field, the sound of gunfire always up ahead of them. Late in the afternoon, they reached the village of Horst. There they learned they had achieved the day’s objective – a distance of about twelve miles.
Hellmuth and his men were absolutely exhausted. His first day in action had left a strong impression on him. It was real war at last and yet they had been largely unhindered by the enemy, making it feel rather like a tight exercise carried out by the book.
Back at Felsennet, General Halder’s anxious waiting game was far from over, but by nine o’clock that evening intelligence had arrived that motorized enemy columns were moving in the direction of Brussels. Just as he had hoped and prayed, it seemed the Allies were moving forward to meet the northern thrust. This part of the trap, at least, appeared to be working.
4
Hook, Line and Sinker
GUNNER STAN FRASER WAS woken up in his billet near Arras at around 4.50 a.m. by the drone of aircraft. Wearing his pyjamas – a habit that amused his comrades no end – he slipped on his pumps, scampered down the steps of the loft over the large stable below and out into the yard, only to see three German bombers, the dark crosses on their wings clearly visible, streak across the sky against the dark glow of the rising sun. Almost immediately the regiment’s heavy 3.7-inch anti-aircraft guns opened fire.
Hurrying back up into the loft, he hastily put on his trousers and began watching the opening salvoes of the German offensive from the window, gradually joined by his mates as they, too, were woken by the noise of bombs exploding and guns booming. From their window they could quite clearly see the regiment’s batteries firing, and puffs of black smoke littering the sky as the shells exploded. Soon the raiders passed, the guns quietened down and they all clambered back into bed again. An hour later, however, there was a loud explosion nearby and the entire building shook, followed by several more blasts as bombs detonated. A keen amateur film-maker, Stan sprang out of bed once more as another wave of aircraft thundered overhead, and grabbing his cine camera ran down into the yard with two of his comrades, then sprinted up a shallow wooded hill behind their billet. As they crested the hill, machine-gun fire rattled out from an aircraft somewhere nearby. With his camera ready, Stan saw two aircraft suddenly roar into view through a gap in the trees. ‘The last we saw of the planes,’ jotted Stan, ‘was when they were streaking away across the house tops of Arras.’
Not so far away from Stan and the rest of the 4th Heavy Anti-Aircraft Regiment was the Headquarters of the British Expeditionary Force. Habarcq, a pretty and normally quiet village of old brick farmhouses, lime trees and horse-chestnuts now in leaf, lay just eight miles west of Arras, amidst the wide, rolling arable countryside that some twenty and more years before had been at the heart of the Western Front. In the white-stoned chateau that served as General HQ, Major-General Henry Pownall was woken at 4.40 a.m. with the sound of four or five bombs exploding in the distance, followed by the boom of anti-aircraft fire. An hour later, Pownall, along with the rest of the staff officers, was washed, shaved and dressed, and anxiously awaiting news and orders from Général Georges’s North-East Front, the French command under which the BEF had been placed.
It was Brigadier Swayne, head of the BEF’s mission at Georges’s HQ, who rang at around 5.30 a.m. with the instructions that Alerts 1, 2 and 3 had been given simultaneously. As Chief of Staff of the BEF, Pownall was with the British commander, General Lord Gort, when at about 6.15 a.m. a further message arrived from Général Georges’s Headquarters. Orders had been issued by the French Supreme Command for the immediate implementation of Plan D, the forward movement of troops to occupy positions along the River Dyle in Belgium.
It could not be carried out quite immediately, however. The system of alerts, as devised by the French, was to warn the Allied forces along the front to prepare for various stages of readiness. Yet although they had been expecting a German offensive, the campaign in Norway of the past few weeks had distracted them somewhat, whilst during the previous days there had been the diversion of a political crisis not only in London, but in Paris too. Consequently, no alert of any kind had been issued in the last twenty-four hours and as a result no troops were ready to get moving right away. With this in mind, Gort announced that Zero hour for beginning the march into Belgium was 1 o’clock that afternoon, nearly seven hours hence.
In 1914, the British Expeditionary Force had been sent to France, and so it had again in 1939, following the outbreak of war. The name was telling; it suggested that the enterprise was an ‘expedition’, an adventure, rather than a force soon to be embroiled in a bitter and bloody war. That its name harked back to an earlier age was also indicative of a mindset that had not moved forward as much as it should have done.
In fact, the British Expeditionary Force was a large field army. An army can be called as such if it contains two or more corps. A corps, in turn, should contain at least two divisions. This latter is a major tactical and administrative unit that contains within its structure all the various forms of arms and services necessary for sustained combat, such as infantry, tanks, artillery, engineers and support troops. Divisions could have different emphases. An armoured – or panzer – division, for example, would have at its heart a couple of armoured brigades – or regiments of several battalions – while an infantry division would have as its core two or more infantry brigades (in the British example), or infantry regiments in the case of the German organization. The French system was also much the same, with infantry divisions comprising around 16,000–17,000 men in total and armoured divisions around 14,000.
The BEF contained about half a million men, and consisted of I, II and III Corps, with – on 10 May at any rate – three, four and two infantry divisions, and the equivalent of an armoured division attached to General Headquarters. In another echo of the previous war, British Headquarters had found a well-appointed French chateau in which to base itself, and an excessive number of staff officers. Its Commander-in-Chief, General the Viscount Gort, was also a hero of the First World War. His bravery was legendary – not for nothing did he wear the ribbons of an MC, two DSOs and Britain’s highest award for valour, the Victoria Cross. As a man whose command abilities were widely believed to be suited to a division but no higher, he had been a surprise choice when he took over as Chief of the Imperial General Staff (CIGS) – Britain’s top military job – in 1937, although no-one doubted either his work ethic or his enthusiasm. He was an equally surprising choice when, on 3 September, he stood down to take command of the BEF instead. Although, at fifty-three, he had age on his side, he was no intellectual nor even particularly experienced in command. The prospect of fighting once more was of great excitement, however. ‘Here we go again,’ he said with relish, ‘marching to war,’ then admitted, ‘I can’t expect everybody to be as thrilled as I am.’ It seems likely that Gort himself pressed his case for the appointment. The problem, however, was that he and Henry Pownall, his Chief of Staff when he was CIGS, and who he insisted should accompany him to France, were the two soldiers with the greatest knowledge and understanding of British war plans. It might have made more sense had they stayed in London.
That Britain could field 500,000 men at all was some achievement. Having had the best army in the world by November 1918, Britain had, after the armistic
e, forgotten most of the lessons learned at the cost of so much of her young men’s blood. Rapid disarmament went hand-in-hand with a reversion to its pre-1914 role: policing the Empire. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, rebellions and upturns in violence in Iraq, Afghanistan and along the Northwest Frontier, for example, had kept British troops busy. Fighting against tribesmen, however, had not required many tactical advances. In any case, hadn’t those long years of 1914–18 been the war to end all wars? In its aftermath, Germany had been disarmed, the Rhineland was to be permanently occupied by Allied troops, and a League of Nations had been formed to settle international quarrels by less violent means. Why would Britain need a large army or even air force any longer?
There was no money for maintaining large forces in any case. An assumption was made that there would be no major war for ten years and as each year passed, so the ten-year rule was moved forward too. No other country followed Britain’s lead, however, although not until 1932 was this finally accepted and the ten-year policy abandoned. Even so, subsequent rearmament was painfully slow, and all the while not only was Hitler’s Germany building up its strength, but so too were Italy and Japan; the latter was spending nearly half her national income on rearming. Suddenly, not just Europe was under threat, but British possessions and interests in the Middle East, Africa and the Far East were as well.
Although British rearmament began to gradually speed up, financial constraints as well as endless debate hampered progress, as did too many years of inactivity. By April 1938, the British Government considered that any future war with Germany should be conducted with primarily air and naval forces; another Continental land war was to be avoided. Not until Hitler marched into Czechoslovakia in March 1939, thus reneging on his promises at Munich the previous autumn, was it finally agreed that the Territorial force should be doubled and conscription introduced. Even so, the British Field Force (as the BEF was originally known) that headed over to France in September consisted of only two corps of four divisions. And there was the rub: it was all very well declaring war on Germany, but in 1939 there was no question of Britain taking the attack to the enemy. Britain’s war policy was entirely defensive – at any rate, certainly until sufficient strength had been built up, and that, it was recognized, was not going to be any time soon.
The Battle of Britain Page 6