… the definition of the word aile led to a passage of arms between Abel Bonnard and Georges Duhamel. The previous edition had called a wing ‘a muscle’. ‘It’s perfectly ridiculous,’ said Bonnard. ‘A wing is a limb.’ ‘On the contrary,’ said Dr Duhamel, ‘a wing is a muscle. What you eat in the wing of a chicken is the muscle, no more and no less…’
And so the argument continued. Could anything, one might have wondered, could anything alter the basic facts of French life?
But underneath this veneer of ‘business as usual’, reality was still all too evident to the discerning. Pierre Mendès-France, returning on leave from Syria at the beginning of May, was shocked at what he found:
Everyone, civilian and military, thought only of organizing his personal life as well as possible in order to get through this seemingly indefinite period without too much risk, loss or discomfort… One heard only of recreation for the Army, sport for the Army, art and music for the Army, theatrical shows for the Army, and so on…
(Meanwhile, in England Lady Astor had caused a stir in the Commons by inquiring about the number of licensed French brothels at the front.) Since January the amount of leave given the French Army had been vastly augmented. In fact, on 7 May, Gamelin had actually restored normal leave throughout the Army. Major Sarraz-Bournet of the Deuxième Bureau recounts that ‘Despite the warnings of Colonel Gauché, leave at the beginning of May had not been suspended, even at the Grand Quartier Général. I had myself gone off on the eve of Whitsun to go and spend a few days of a brief leave in the Dauphiné…’ But better leave conditions had certainly done little to boost morale. Sarraz-Bournet (whose job was to control postal censorship) detected a belief widespread in the Army by the spring of 1940 that the war would end ‘without battle, by a diplomatic arrangement between the interested Governments… nothing could have been worse for morale’, while Major Barlone from Blanchard’s élite First Army wrote in his diary on 30 April: ‘The General advises us to look after the morale of our men; we must give them some distraction. The postal censorship shows that the men are fed up… ’ Nevertheless, despite all the manifestly disturbing symptoms within the Army, at the beginning of May, General Billotte could still tell some of his corps commanders who had complained to him about arms deficiencies: ‘Why bother yourselves? Nothing will happen before 1941!’
In Germany, rationing had cut food consumption to some 75 per cent of the pre-war average, but nobody was hungry. Over the winter, Joseph Harsch of the Christian Science Monitor remarked, Berliners had been kept ‘in good humour’ by a variety of ‘Japanese tumblers, Italian aerial artistes, Hungarian folk orchestras and clever Viennese skits, often at the. expense of the Party great’. After eight months during which they had not been attacked by the Allies, and particularly after the successes of the Norwegian campaign, German nerves were much restored. But still it was hard to find actual enthusiasm for the war. On Easter Sunday (24 March) William Shirer thought the faces of the Berliners ‘looked blank. Obviously they do not like the war, but they will do what they’re told. Die, for instance…’ On 19 April, the eve of Hitler’s fifty-first birthday, Shirer found only some seventy-five people outside the Chancellery waiting for a glimpse of their Führer, whereas in other years ‘there were ten thousand’. On 1 May, Shirer once again visited the Rhine front: ‘all was quiet… Not a single airplane could be seen in the skies.’ His diary continues:
May 7. For three or four days now the German newspapers have been carrying on a terrific campaign to convince somebody that the Allies, having failed in Norway, are about to become ‘aggressors’ in some other part of Europe… Where is Germany going in next? I’m suspicious of Holland, partly because it’s the one place not specifically mentioned in this propaganda campaign…
May 8. Could not help noticing a feeling of tension in the Wilhelmstrasse to-day. Something is up, but we don’t know what…
May 9. Headlines increased in size to-night ‘BRITAIN PLOTS TO SPREAD THE WAR’ they roar… it may well be, as many people over here think, that the war will be fought and decided before the summer is over. People somehow seem to feel that the Whitsuntide holidays this week-end will be the last holidays Europe will observe for some time.
At last, Hitler’s Panzers were ready to roll. On 7 May he had allowed Goering to extract one last postponement, on account of the weather, from him – ‘but not a day longer’. Then, on the evening of 9 May, the Luftwaffe announced that ‘the weather on 10 May will be good’. Like the bearer of good tidings to some oriental despot of bygone years, the head of the Meteorological Service earned a gold watch for his favourable report. Inside the Chancellery and at both O.K.W. and O.K.H. headquarters, however, extreme nervousness prevailed. On the 9th, Halder recorded anxiety aroused by ‘alarming reports’ from Yugoslavia, purporting that French and British tanks had landed there. Nevertheless, that evening Hitler and his entourage embarked on the ‘Führer Special’ from a small railway station near Berlin, heading north. Only after dark would it turn westwards, to bring Hitler to his specially prepared battle H.Q. at Münstereifel, midway between Bonn and the Belgian Ardennes. That night, at 2100 hours,24 the O.K.W. transmitted the codeword ‘Danzig’ to all the formations waiting expectantly behind the western frontiers of the Reich, signifying that the great offensive was to begin at 0535 hours the next morning. In Berlin, Colonel Sas met his friend, Hans Oster, again – for the last time. Oster remarked that, as there had been so many postponements, it could just happen again; but if, by 2130, no counter-order were given, ‘then this is finally it’. At 2130 the two colonels went to O.K.W. headquarters. Sas waited outside in the darkness. When Oster rejoined him, he told Sas that there had been no counter-order: ‘The swine has gone off to the West Front… Let’s hope that we’ll meet again after the war.’ Using a prearranged code, Sas then telephoned The Hague. An hour and a half later he was rung back by the Dutch Chief of Intelligence, who said, doubtingly, ‘I have just received the very bad news about the operation on your wife. Have you now spoken to all the doctors?’ Sas, much vexed, replied, ‘I don’t understand why you bother me now under these circumstances. You know now. Nothing can be done any more about this operation. I have spoken to all the doctors.’ He ended (though it seems extraordinary that German security should have allowed such a conversation to pass in clear down the telephone line): ‘Tomorrow morning, at dawn, it takes place.’ At three o’clock on the morning of the 10th, belatedly, the Dutch blew up the first of their frontier bridges.
In London, as 9 May, the 250th day of the war, came to a close, Neville Chamberlain had resigned; in Paris, Paul Reynaud had offered his resignation to President Lebrun, because Daladier would not let him sack Gamelin. Near Nîmes, Janet Teissier du Cros, a Scotswoman waiting for her French husband to come home on leave, read joyfully in a newspaper she picked up late on the night of the 9th: ‘Détente en Holland’. The cock-eyed war was going to last long enough to allow François to enjoy his leave,’ she thought. ‘Nothing else mattered…’ Nearer the front, the staff officers of General Huntziger’s Second Army H.Q. had spent an agreeable evening watching a play performed by the Théâtre aux Armées at Vouziers. Gontaut-Biron, a mechanized Dragoon from the Third Army’s 3rd Light Cavalry Division, which was to push into Luxembourg if the Germans attacked, recalled that his evening had been ‘very gay… We played bridge very late into the night. We had no fears about anything, we had been so often told that we would be warned at least twenty-four hours in advance by our Intelligence Service. Towards eleven o’clock in the evening we separated, and went back to our respective quarters…’ That same day, her acute journalistic instinct had persuaded Clare Boothe to fly to Amsterdam: ‘Motoring from Amsterdam to the Hague,’ she recalled, ‘you couldn’t have told there was a crisis, except in the wonderful tulip fields, which had reached their maximum bloom and were about to wither.’ She reached Brussels that night, where she stayed with the American Ambassador, Cudahy. He told her: ‘ “I’ve been on the telephone night
and day. But now” – his voice sounded strangely dubious, as though he himself did not quite believe it – “it’s over, thank God. The King has reinstated all his appointments for the week-end…” ’ Near Metz, on that last day of the Phoney War, the Inspector-General of Artillery, General Boris, had comforted artillery commanders of the Third Army by telling them of the modern guns that would be ready ‘next spring’.
The following morning, Friday 10 May, on a tour of inspection of the sector, General Boris heard explosions: ‘Is that a manoeuvre?’ he inquired. ‘Mon général, it’s the German offensive,’ came the reply. In Brussels, Clare Boothe was woken up by a maid shaking her: ‘ “Wake up! The Germans are coming again!” ’
So the scene opens on the confrontation of the century, of which the Great War – the Marne, Verdun, the Somme, Pas-schendaele and Amiens – was perhaps but a thunderous overture. On one side, France, a nation divided and with little heart for war, led by a Premier weakened by influenza and his mistress, who had offered his resignation, and by a Generalissimo under suspended sentence; guarded by an Army whose morale was to say the least patchy, weak in numbers and equipment, guided by outdated doctrine and commanded by mediocre leaders, and by an Air Force outclassed in every respect; and supported by a solitary ally who could still only contribute a handful of divisions to the coming battle. On the other side, a revolutionary Germany led by a daemonic prophet possessed of total self-assurance, but supported by professional soldiers many of them nervous, hostile and not sharing their Führer’s certainty of success; equipped with a superlative war machine, but with relatively far fewer élite divisions than the Kaiser’s army which had lumbered into Belgium a generation earlier; and marching to one of the most brilliant war plans of all time – but one so risky that any serious setback to it, any breaking of the steel cutting-edge of Guderian’s Panzers, could but end in another calamitous defeat for Germany.
Part Two
Chapter 9
The Crocus Blossoms
10 May
‘When the crocus blossoms,’ hiss the women in Berlin,
‘He will press the button, and the battle will begin.
When the crocus blossoms, up the German knights will go,
And flame and fume and filthiness will terminate the foe…
When the crocus blossoms, not a neutral will remain.’
A. P. HERBERT, ‘Spring Song’
The Germans Move
From the Eifel Mountains on the night of 9 May, a forty-eight-year-old major-general, Erwin Rommel, commanding the 7th Panzer Division which he had taken over less than three months previously, dashed off a brief note to his wife:
Dearest Lu,
We’re packing up at last. Let’s hope not in vain. You’ll get all the news for the next few days from the papers. Don’t worry yourself. Everything will go all right.
All over western Germany, and far behind the Rhine, there were similar scenes of rapid ‘packing up’ and the writing of last letters. The élite Grossdeutschland Regiment, which was to play a key role in the coming battle, received a terse order from its commander, Lieutenant-Colonel Graf von Schwerin: ‘Forward against the enemy! Mit Gott! Es lebe der Führer!’ On returning from manoeuvres, Werner Flack, wireless sergeant in a horse-drawn unit that had fought in Poland, and who was hoping to get a day’s pass to enjoy the gorgeous spring weather at Bingen-am-Rhein, was told by his Feldwebel that afternoon that the company was to move again in four hours’ time. More manoeuvres? On reaching the wireless office, he found a typewritten slip bearing the unit’s action frequencies. Now knowing that it was the real thing, he recalled that ‘The warmth and brilliance of the day was stunningly oppressive. But I saw neither the mountains nor the flowers, neither the meadows nor the sunshine. I simply pushed the sheet with the action frequencies on it into the Command folder.’
The conditions of secrecy and speed which Hitler had imposed after the Mechelen Incident were superbly fulfilled. Even commanders of units in the van of attack were kept ignorant of its timing until the last possible minute. On the afternoon of 7 May, for instance, Oskar Reile, an Abwehr officer stationed in Trier and charged with the important task of controlling undercover agents in Luxembourg, had asked for, and been granted, a few days’ leave. His superior had requested him to stay in the neighbourhood, but added, ‘As far as I can see, nothing special will happen in the next few days.’ It was only on the afternoon of 9 May that Reile was recalled from his leave. Captain Graf von Kielmansegg,1 the second staff officer at H.Q. of the 1st Panzer Division, which was to spearhead the attack on Sedan, noted that when they received their orders at lunchtime on the 9th, ‘the division’s officers were completely unprepared for the news’. Some had already left on Whitsun leave. Without them, the 1st Panzer departed from its quarters that night, driving with lights extinguished up the winding roads of the Eifel. One of the tankmen wrote:
With every hour that goes by, it becomes more lively on the approach roads, more and more troops quartered here in the Eifel are getting underway. We overtake marching, riding and driving columns. The noise of the motors gets on one’s nerves in this night of uncertainty. The drivers must exert the utmost powers of vision, so as not to end up in the roadside ditches. It’s pitch dark… Now we realize why we came here so often to carry out peace-time operations.
At 04302 the 1st Panzer, bearing General Guderian with it, crossed the Luxembourg frontier near Vianden, where that famous propagandist of an earlier Franco–German war, Victor Hugo, had spent his declining years. But Guderian’s men were not the first Germans to enter the Grand Duchy; on previous days an unprecedented number of ‘tourists’ on bicycles and motor-cycles had been checked through by the unsuspecting frontier guards. Dispatched by the Abwehr, their role was to dislocate telephone communications, and prevent the Luxembourgers from destroying vital road junctions. Further to the north, Rommel and his 7th Panzer were swarming across the Belgian frontier, heading for Dinant on the Meuse, sixty-five miles away. Still further north, along the Dutch frontier facing Maastricht, German stormtroopers had nestled right up to the Dutch customs post. As the first light of dawn came up, the Dutch could hear the rumble of approaching tanks; the tension grew unbearable, but still the frontier guards continued to stroll quietly up and down, apparently noticing nothing. Then the rumbling grew louder and louder as squadron after squadron of Ju-52s, containing the whole of the German 22nd Airborne Division, plus some 4,000 paratroopers, passed overhead. Meanwhile, over the German radio that dawn came the usual martial music and the first news of the day’s sporting events.
The Luftwaffe Attacks
The Luftwaffe bomber crews too had not been warned of the imminent offensive. Roused out of their beds during the early hours of 10 May, while it was still dark, they were ordered to attend briefings at fifteen minutes’ notice. There was no time even to shave. Shortly before sunrise, every available aircraft left its field. Ranging far out, they laid mines off the Dutch and British coasts, struck at airfields in Holland, Belgium and France, and bombed road and railway centres deep in France. At Abbeville, a sugar warehouse was set on fire; burning for several days it produced rivers of treacle, which the inhabitants did not allow to go to waste. At the R.A.F. airfield of Conde-Vraux south of Rheims, Dorniers (‘Flying Pencils’) destroyed six of 114 Squadron’s eighteen Blenheim bombers, all neatly lined up in a row, and rendered the remaining twelve unserviceable, though otherwise the R.A.F. were fortunate enough to sustain little serious damage on the ground that day. Altogether nearly fifty French airfields, in General d’Astier’s Z.O.A.N. and behind Paris, were attacked that day. General d’Astier himself claims that all the fields were quickly restored, and that only four planes were destroyed and another thirty damaged. Three Heinkel 111s setting out to bomb Dijon strayed, and bombed the German city of Freiburg-im-Breisgau by mistake, killing fifty-seven civilians, including twenty-two children.3
It was against little Holland, however, that the main weight of Goering’s fury wa
s turned on the 10th. Flying over the Dutch pastures that morning, Theo Osterkamp, a fighter ace who had won the Pour le Mérite (Germany’s highest decoration) in the First War, thought to himself how peaceful it all seemed:
… children playing by the stream, a white dog jumps around them barking, and they wave and laugh and are happy. How crazy! Why is this lovely peaceful land suddenly ‘enemy territory’?… Why will those girls with rakes in their hands be threatening and screaming tomorrow, instead of waving with their coloured handkerchiefs and laughing?
The answer was not hard to arrive at, as at the same moment less idyllically-minded young Germans were already machine-gunning the streets of The Hague. Curving out into the North Sea so as to take the Dutch by surprise (not unlike the Israeli fighter-bombers of June 1967), the Heinkel 111s hammered the airfields at Amsterdam–Schiphol, Bergen op Zoom, and Rotterdam–Waalhaven. At Waalhaven bombs killed a large number of Dutch soldiers who, despite Colonel Sas’s warning, and the ensuing alert, had been allowed to ‘sleep on’ in vulnerable hangars. Most of the few planes of the Dutch Air Force were wiped out. After the bombing and strafing came the paratroops and German airborne forces in what was to be the first major attempt in history to occupy and conquer a nation from the air.
To Lose a Battle Page 25