Loerzer readily agreed but in the meantime von Kleist had gone straight to General Hugo Sperrle, commander of Luftflotte 3, and had arranged a single massed aerial bombardment instead. When Guderian found out, he was incensed, but despite appeals von Kleist would not budge. ‘My whole attack,’ Guderian noted, ‘was thus placed in jeopardy.’
It was with a sense of great anxiety that around 3.30 p.m. General Guderian clambered up a chalky hill just south of the village of Givonne, where his 10th Panzer Division had its advance artillery observation post (OP). From there, on this clear, bright afternoon, he had a good view towards Sedan only three miles ahead. He could just see the River Meuse, twinkling in the sunlight, bending its way through the town. Rising gently behind were the wooded hills in which lay the innumerable bunkers and gun positions of the French.
The 10th Panzer were to attack on the left, on the eastern edge of the town. 1st Panzer would make their assault in the centre, on the western side at Gaulier before a sharp kink in the river, and with the Draperie Sedannaise factory and buildings behind masking their approach. 2nd Panzer would cross further west, across the exposed flood plains around the village of Donchery. Guderian hoped 1st Panzer would cross first then thrust west and eliminate the string of bunkers that overlooked 2nd Panzer’s crossing at Donchery.
That was the plan, but how often was the plan the first thing to crumble the moment the battle began? And there was so much that could go wrong. Sedan was dense with enemy defences; if the French used their heads, his attack could collapse before it had barely started – and with von Kleist’s Luftwaffe bombardment plan there was every reason to think it would.
To his astonishment, however, as he peered through his binoculars, he was firstly relieved by the number of his own guns firing, and then to see the Luftwaffe arrive, only a few squadrons, protected by Me 109 fighters, and delivering their lethal loads in exactly the way he had discussed with Loerzer. He then learned they had been carrying out such attacks since noon. ‘The flyers were doing exactly what I believed to be the most advantageous for our attack,’ he recorded, ‘and I sighed with relief.’
At twenty minutes to four, the Luftwaffe then delivered a massive raid, which targeted the loop in the river at Sedan itself, where 10th and 1st Panzer were about to attack. The town now disappeared behind a mass of smoke and dust. Hurrying back down the hill, Guderian reached his command car and hurried to Gaulier where 1st Panzer were about to start their crossing. Like Rommel, some fifty miles to the north, Guderian wanted to be in the thick of it, at the front and leading his men across the water.
One of those flying over Sedan at four o’clock that afternoon was Oberleutnant Siegfried Bethke, a 23-year-old fighter pilot with the 2nd Staffel of JG 2. It was his third sortie of the day escorting the VIII Fliegerkorps bombers. So far he’d barely seen an enemy plane. ‘We’re almost disappointed,’ he noted.
This was because nearly all the available Allied aircraft were flying over what they still believed was the main German attack across the Low Countries. It had been a bruising few days, in which the Allied airmen always seemed to be flailing around the sky, reacting to rather than dictating the air battle. The Luftwaffe always maintained the initiative, deciding when and where to attack and in what number. What efforts the Allies made to respond to the various crises always seemed to come too late, achieving little other than mounting losses. On the 11th, for example, desperate attempts had been made to destroy the bridges at Maastricht and across the Albert Canal. The Belgian air force had also had the misfortune to have a number of Fairey Battle squadrons. Ten out of fifteen Battles were destroyed as they desperately tried to bomb bridges at Maastricht and across the Albert Canal. Later, eight Air Component Blenheim bombers were sent over; three were lost and two more badly damaged. The RAF Battles also continued to drop like flies. Eight of them were ordered to carry out a low-level attack on a German column in Luxembourg; they never made it. Only one pilot returned – having turned back before they had reached the target.
The next day, 12 Squadron’s Battles were given what was now clearly a suicide mission to attack two bridges over the Albert Canal. ‘B’ Flight of 1 Squadron Hurricanes had been ordered to fly protection cover but there was ten-tenths cloud cover over the target. ‘All we saw was ten/tenths Bf 109s and we could not do a thing,’ noted Billy, ‘so we pissed off.’ Below the cloud, with what was tragic inevitability, all five aircraft were destroyed, although one crew staggered back. The others were killed or captured. Pilot Officer McIntosh had been in a group of three led by Flying Officer Garland attacking the bridge at Veldwezelt. He was the second Battle to approach the bridge at a ridiculously low level. With his aircraft already on fire, he dropped his bombs and then crashed. Still alive, he was dragged out of the wreckage and taken into custody. ‘You British are mad,’ his captor told him. ‘We capture the bridge early Friday morning. You give us all Friday and Saturday to get our flak guns up in circles all round the bridge, and then on Saturday, when all is ready, you come along with three aircraft and try and blow the thing up.’ Garland and his observer, Sergeant Gray, who were both killed, were awarded the RAF’s first VCs of the war.
At Méharicourt, Pilot Officer Arthur Hughes had still not been sent out on a reconnaissance mission; he was one of the lucky ones. Three out of four aircraft sent out on the 11th had not returned. By the evening of the 12th, 18 Squadron had made seven individual recces since the battle began. Of those, four crews had not been seen since, two had force-landed and the other had been shot at. ‘And I am next on the list,’ noted Arthur. ‘I am not really panic stricken, but at intervals a horrid fear seems to seep into my entrails and my stomach grows hollow.’Who could blame him?
The RAF fighter pilots were feeling slightly more upbeat: at least they had some speed and firepower on their side, even if their Hurricanes were not as fast as the Messerschmitt 109s nor their eight Browning machine guns as powerful as the German cannon and machine-gun combination. Most of the French and British fighter squadrons were putting in decent numbers of claims. Indeed, although the Luftwaffe had not suffered anything like the losses of the opening day, sixty-eight aircraft had been destroyed on the 11th and fifty-four on the 12th. Another thirty-five were shot down on the 13th. But the Allies were losing similar numbers too, and it was not only bombers that were being knocked out of the sky.
By the 13th, Billy Drake’s personal score was four and a half confirmed kills and one unconfirmed, making him very nearly an ‘ace’, an accolade that was awarded after five confirmed victories. After only ten minutes’ flying, he developed a problem with his oxygen supply and so over the R/T he told the others he was returning to base. He was on his way, at a height that did not require any oxygen, when he spotted a formation of Dornier 17s. Getting in behind them, he fired off a short burst and saw one erupt into flames and begin to fall away, when suddenly he heard a loud and stunning bang and in an instant flames had started to engulf his Hurricane. Frantically glancing round, he saw a Messerschmitt 110 on his tail and, to his horror, still firing.
Initially, he panicked, and although he managed to undo his radio leads and harness and got himself into position to bale out, he had completely forgotten to open the canopy. ‘By now,’ he noted, ‘I was covered in petrol and glycol and there were flames everywhere.’ He began trying to pull back the sliding canopy but whilst doing so, the Hurricane obligingly turned over on its back and at that moment all the flames, which had been billowing upwards, were now drawn away from him. With the canopy at last open, he fell out of the plane, and pulled the ripcord on his parachute. ‘Still the 110 was shooting at me,’ he wrote, ‘and then he was past and gone.’
Floating down gently, he now became aware that he had been wounded in the back and also the leg. In fact, he had had a miraculous escape and not just from the flames. Only a short time before, the CO, Squadron Leader ‘Bull’ Hallahan, had decided that all the squadron’s Hurricanes should be fitted with armour plating behind the pilot’s
seat. This had duly been done despite the risk to the aircraft’s balance and performance. A bullet had passed underneath this plating and, having hit his harness, wounded Billy in the back. But another bullet had struck the plating directly behind his head. Without it, he would have been dead.
Drifting down into a field, Billy soon discovered that his wounds were not his only problem. With blond hair and blue eyes and wearing peacetime overalls, he looked decidedly teutonic. Frenchmen arrived on the scene armed with scythes and pitchforks, convinced they had captured a Boche. ‘With a little difficulty,’ noted Billy, ‘I was able to persuade them that I was indeed a “pilote anglais”, whereupon they all embraced me.’
Taken to some French medics, he was patched up, put in a schoolroom with a number of wounded Frenchmen, and then finally rescued by his fellow 1 Squadron pilot Paul Richey, who arranged for him to be taken to hospital in Chartres. Billy had been lucky. He would fly again.
As at Dinant, it was the infantry within the panzer divisions that actually made it across the Meuse, destroyed the mass of French bunkers, and established a tentative bridgehead. Reaching the bank of the river at the Draperie Sedannaise, Guderian was delighted to see that a number of men had already safely made it to the other bank. Quickly jumping in a dinghy himself, he followed, and clambering up the other bank was met by Oberstleutnant Balck, commander of the 1st Rifle Regiment.
‘Joy riding in canoes on the Meuse is forbidden!’ he said with a grin. The joke was not lost on the general; he had used the very same words during an exercise in preparation for the operation a month before.
Fierce fighting was now raging around both crossing points in Sedan, while to the west 2nd Panzer were struggling to even reach the river. The town itself was burning, smoke billowing into the sky. Heavy gunfire boomed through the valley, while small arms chattered constantly. Yet in many ways, although the crossings were principally being made by a handful of German infantry divisions, the key encounters were being engaged by just a handful of men. As the 1st Rifle Regiment pressed forward to relieve the pressure on 2nd Panzer’s crossing, for example, it was Oberleutnant Günther Korthals with only around seventy men from the 43rd Assault Engineer Battalion who managed to achieve the decisive breakthrough. His highly trained men worked their way from bunker to bunker, using the lie of the land as cover and making the most of blind spots in the bunkers’ embrasures to creep up upon them, and then, with a combination of explosives and flame throwers, destroyed one after another, including the key Casement 103, which stood sentinel over a bend in the river and barred the way of both 1st and 2nd Panzers’ advances. Korthals did not lose a single man; it was an astonishing achievement.
Possibly even more valiant was the performance of Feldwebel Walter Rubarth and his Gruppe of fourteen men. In 10th Panzer’s sector, the crossing attempt seemed to have stalled dead until Rubarth and his men, under heavy fire, managed to get across the river and destroy a number of key bunkers. In doing so, he and his men enabled the rest of the infantry to successfully make the crossing.
As evening approached, the bridgeheads began to link up, yet it was another key moment that sealed the day. 1st Panzer’s objective for the day had been Hill 301, a crucial feature overlooking Sedan which held a number of further French positions that were ranged over all three bridgeheads. With the village of Frenois at the foot of the hill captured, Oberst Balck saw his men were exhausted, but he also recognized that the stunned French were now in disarray. Recalling an episode in the First World War when his unit had failed to exploit a hard-won encounter, he urged his men forward. ‘Something that is easy today,’ he said, ‘can cost us rivers of blood tomorrow.’ Dusk was falling as his weary men began their assault up the slopes of Hill 301. But Balck had been right. His second battalion took the strongpoint on the summit by storm, and by 10.40 p.m. the hill was theirs.
Below, Sedan continued to burn as the gunfire at last died down. Behind, in the rolling hills and farmland to the south of that historic town, the French were panicking. A rumour had started that the panzers were already across and heading towards them. Soon it had spread like wildfire. First the artillery retreated, then so too did Général Lafontaine, commander of the 55th Infantry Division that held the Sedan sector. Before long, waves of troops were falling back in disarray. By the time it was realized that the rumour was false, it was too late: the damage had been done.
As darkness fell, General Guderian, a proud and relieved man, returned to his command post and there he finally spoke to General Loerzer, thanking him for keeping the air plan they had discussed. ‘The order from Luftflotte 3, which turned everything upside down,’ replied Loerzer, ‘came, let us say, too late. It would only have caused confusion among the air groups. That is why I did not forward the orders.’ Guderian had not been the only one to disobey senior commanders that day.
And thirty miles to the north, at Monthermé, Panzer Corps Reinhardt, despite the huge traffic problems they had faced in the Ardennes, had also managed to gain a toe-hold across the Meuse. At nightfall on the 13th, all three crossings over the Meuse had been made: at Sedan, at Dinant and at Monthermé, just as Halder and Guderian had planned.
But it was still a long way to the Channel, and although the infantry had made it across, the race was now on to get both panzers and artillery over the river as well before the French brought their enormous reserves to bear and pushed them back again. Much still hung in the balance.
7
Inside the Third Reich
IT WAS TRUE THAT THE vast majority of Americans instinctively felt that the war in Europe was no affair of theirs; after all, the war-mongering of Hitler posed no immediate threat to them on the far side of the wide Atlantic Ocean. Yet the United States was not entirely inward-looking in its view, particularly not the President, Franklin D. Roosevelt, who had played his part in trying to avert war during the previous spring and summer, and who had, since the September, led from the front in persuading Congress to modify the Neutrality Acts of 1935–7, which had decreed that the US should neither export goods to any foreign belligerents nor grant them any kind of loan or credits.
The new measures, whereby America would allow belligerents of their choosing to procure goods on a cash-and-carry basis, became law on 4 November. It showed, at least, that the United States wanted the Allies to win. And while polls consistently revealed that around 95 per cent of the population was against American entry into the war, this did not mean there was a lack of interest; on the contrary, the newspapers, magazines and newsreels were full of it, which was why there were so many newspaper and radio men – and women – over in Europe, including London, Paris and Berlin.
The broadcasting company CBS was one of the biggest radio stations, having been formed in 1928 when its owner, William S. Paley, bought a collection of sixteen independent stations which he formed into one and renamed the Columbia Broadcasting System. By the early 1930s it had developed its news division and began hiring among the best journalists and writers around. One of those was Ed Murrow, who, at twenty-nine, had been sent to London as CBS’s Director of European Operations.
One of the first people Murrow hired in Europe was William L. Shirer, who since 1934 had been in Berlin reporting for Hearst’s Universal News Service. When UNS folded in 1937, Shirer was taken on by Hearst’s other wire service, the International News Service, then promptly laid off once more. So when Murrow called and suggested a meeting, the timing could not have been better. Murrow needed an experienced journalist on the Continent and offered Shirer a job on the spot, subject to approval of a trial broadcast for the CBS directors back in the States.
CBS duly hired him, despite his flat, slightly reedy voice – albeit largely at Murrow’s insistence, who knew that Shirer’s fluency in languages, contacts and sources would be invaluable. And so they proved when Shirer, the only American journalist in Vienna at the time of the Anschluss in March 1938, secured a major scoop. The late thirties were still early days for radio news, however,
and Shirer’s regular broadcasts did not begin until shortly after, when, following the Anschluss, CBS asked him and Murrow to produce a European Roundup programme of news. From then on, Americans would regularly hear Shirer’s distinctive timbre from all over Germany, but particularly Berlin, where he was based. ‘Hello, America,’ he would usually begin. ‘Hello, CBS. This is Berlin.’
By May 1940, Shirer was thirty-six, balding, with a round, genial face, spectacles and a trim gingery moustache. Although married, he and his wife Tess agreed that after the birth of their daughter it would be safer for her to move with baby Inga to Switzerland, from where she could run the Geneva office of CBS. Although Shirer lived in some comfort in the Hotel Adlon next to the Brandenburg Gate at the heart of the city, he had a deep dislike of the Nazis and felt keenly the sense of menace that pervaded the capital. His room was bugged, while he suspected staff at the Adlon of being Gestapo informers. ‘The shadow of Nazi fanaticism, sadism, persecution, regimentation, terror, brutality, suppression, militarism, and preparation for war,’ he jotted in his diary soon after getting the CBS job in September 1937, ‘has hung over all our lives, like a dark, brooding cloud that never clears.’
Although the Nazis allowed print journalists to cable their pieces uncensored, that was not the case for broadcast journalists. Each piece had to be submitted not only to Goebbels’s Propaganda Ministry but also to the Foreign Office and OKW, a routine annoyance that never ceased to rankle with him. In his broadcast on 10 May, he was allowed to announce that the offensive had begun, and to express the surprise of most Berliners, who had not been expecting it at all. ‘The people in Berlin, I must say,’ he added, ‘took the news of the beginning of this decisive phase of the struggle with great calm. Before the Chancellery an hour ago, I noticed that no crowd had gathered as usually happens when big events occur. Few people bothered to buy the noon papers which carried the news.’
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