On the way there was very nearly a repeat of the Mechelen Incident, which might have had much graver consequences for the Germans. The inexperienced young pilot of the Fieseler Storch could not find XIX Corps landing strip ‘in the fading light, and the next thing I knew’, says Guderian, ‘we were on the other side of the Meuse, flying in a slow and unarmed plane over the French positions. An unpleasant moment. I gave my pilot emphatic orders to turn north… we just made it.’
Safely back at corps H.Q., Guderian got to work on drawing up his orders for the next day. In an interesting revelation of just how thorough German training for this momentous operation had been since the redrafting of Fall Gelb three months previously, Guderian states:
In view of the very short time at our disposal, we were forced to take the orders used in the war games at Koblenz from our files and, after changing the dates and times, issue these as the orders for the attack. They were perfectly fitted to the reality of the situation. The only change that had to be made was that at Koblenz we had imagined the attack going in at 0900 instead of 1500 hours.
Yet while all eyes of the German High Command were focused upon the Meuse crossing being prepared by Guderian, no one was aware that to the north Major-General Rommel, allotted only the secondary role of providing flanking cover to the main thrust, already had a toe-hold on the far side of the river and was indeed about to develop a major offensive of his own.
Chapter 12
The Crossing
13 May
It seems that the Germans are not interested in France this time…
New York Journal American, 13 May
‘La description d’une bataille devrait être une leçon de Moral.’
JOSEPH JOUBERT
Rommel Emerges
On the eve of an adventure which would launch a reputation ultimately more familiar to the world at large than that of any other German general of the Second World War, Erwin Rommel was a name completely unknown outside the Army even at home, and little enough known inside it. He came from a simple middle-class family of moderate means, with no military tradition; both his father and grandfather had been school-teachers. Rommel was a Württemberger, a race more renowned for its solidity and shrewd thriftiness than for any martial attributes. Aged forty-eight in 1940, he had been commissioned in 1912, with not particularly brilliant marks, into a not particularly brilliant line regiment. He appears to have made an early impact as a meticulous regimental officer, intolerant of anything slipshod, but – as his British biographer, Desmond Young, remarks – he was one of those soldiers who only ‘find in war the one occupation to which they are perfectly adapted’. It was on the southern fringe of those fateful Ardennes, near Longwy, that Lieutenant Rommel had his first opportunity three weeks after the war broke out in 1914. With only three men and suffering painfully from food poisoning, he ran into some fifteen to twenty French troops; instead of calling up the rest of his platoon Rommel immediately opened fire and, taken by surprise, the enemy scattered. Five months later, after recovering from a thigh wound, Rommel won the Iron Cross by crawling with his platoon through barbed wire into the middle of the main French position, knocking out four blockhouses and then withdrawing with light losses before the defence could make an effective riposte. Although this was only a small-scale action, it was as characteristic of Rommel’s expertise in the tactics of infiltration – which, as a senior commander, he was to bring to a supreme art – as it was of his nerveless audacity. Later in 1915 Rommel’s skill at this kind of operation gained him transfer to a newly-created mountain battalion, designed to perform special tasks in ‘battle groups’, the commanders of which were granted a freedom of action far in excess of their rank. In the brief Roumanian campaign of 1916–17, Rommel carried out some almost incredible exploits, often with up to a whole battalion under his control, although he was still no more than a 1st lieutenant.
But the real summit of his First War career came during the Battle of Caporetto in October 1917, against the nation that would fight under his command in the Western Desert twenty-five years later. Penetrating the Italian lines at dawn, Rommel first surprised an enemy gun battery without a shot being fired. Then, diving still deeper behind the enemy positions, he surprised from the rear a counter-attacking Italian battalion. That too surrendered. After this success, Rommel was reinforced to a total of six companies and now took up position astride an important supply road well behind the enemy lines. Here he succeeded in capturing the best part of a brigade of crack Bersaglieri moving up towards the front. After fifty hours constantly on the move, he returned with the astonishing bag of 150 Italian officers, 9,000 men and 81 guns. For his feat, he was promoted captain and awarded the Pour le Mérite, the equivalent of the Victoria Cross when given to a junior officer.
After the First War, Rommel became a natural candidate for the élite cadres of Seeckt’s tiny Reichswehr. Promoted major in 1933, he chose to remain with his mountain troops as a regimental officer until two years later, when he was appointed instructor at the Potsdam War Academy, with the rank of lieutenant-colonel. During that time he was also assigned on special attachment to the Hitler Youth, but this ended after a short while when Rommel fell foul of their leader, the arrogant Baldur von Schirach. After three years at Potsdam, he was then sent to command the War Academy at Wiener Neustadt. He was by this time a full colonel, which, considering the huge expansion of the Wehrmacht, did not in any way denote a meteoric career. But he had neither connections with any of the great military clans, nor affiliations with the Party. His relationship with the Nazi machine in pre-war days was, in fact, not dissimilar to Guderian’s; never remotely a Party man, he admired Hitler as a technician, and was responsive both to his kindred dynamism and receptiveness to unorthodox ideas. It was in 1938 that Rommel first caught Hitler’s eye after publication of a simple but admirably clear textbook on infantry tactics, based on his own personal experiences from the First War and called Infanterie Greift An (‘The Infantry Attacks’). At the time of the occupation of the Sudetenland, he was selected to command the battalion entrusted with Hitler’s personal safety. On the outbreak of war the following year, Rommel was promoted major-general and, as Headquarters Commandant, again made responsible for guarding Hitler during the Polish campaign. He chafed at having no operational command, found himself antipathetic to the Party potentates like Martin Bormann, but was fascinated by the front-row view his job gave him of the campaign and its techniques. When it was over he asked Hitler for command of a Panzer division, by way of reward for past services. This was granted. On 15 February, Rommel arrived at Bad Godesberg to take over the 7th, one of the four ‘light’ divisions1 to be converted into Panzers that winter. Weaker than the original Panzer division, the 7th had three instead of four tank battalions, 218 instead of 276 tanks, and over half of these were Czech-made light-medium T-38s.
It was quite one of Rommel’s most astonishing achievements that, in middle age, after a lifetime spent with the infantry and without any experience whatever of armour or mechanized forces, he should within three short months not only have been able to master the technique, but also to so mould a new unit that it would become perhaps the most consistently successful of all the Panzer divisions employed in France – and this despite the relative lightness of its armoured contingent. There were indeed those among his critics who considered that he never really understood the principles of armoured warfare. Again and again, he handled his large bodies of tanks very much as he had led those few raiding companies on their deep penetrations behind the Italian lines, with a bold unorthodoxy that sometimes shocked the purists. Often he had miraculous luck. Even more than Guderian, he was a commander whose constant closeness to the front provided him with an instant grasp of events.
Rommel’s Opponent
The unhappy French commander against whose army Rommel would strike the first hard blow on 13 May, General Corap, was perhaps as representative of the median of the old-style French officer as Rommel was of the
élite of the new, revolutionary Wehrmacht. Sixty-two in 1940, Corap was a Norman who had passed out top of his class in St Cyr in 1898. Joining the Algerian Tirailleurs, he spent most of his career on colonial operations in North Africa. A captain in 1914, he was appointed to Foch’s staff the following year and in 1918 switched to Pétain’s, ending the war as a lieutenant-colonel. Afterwards he returned to Morocco, where in 1926 he achieved the summit of his career by capturing the famous rebel, Abd-el-Krim. He was what in the French Army was called a typical baroudeur, an old sweat from North Africa, and this largely conditioned his thinking. André Maurois remarks of him: ‘His conversation was very interesting, but one felt his attention was directed entirely toward the past. He told me how, at the time of Fashoda, he had been mobilized against England as a young second lieutenant…’ Corap is described by Maurois as being ‘a timid man, held in high esteem by his superiors, unmilitary in appearance, and running to fat around the middle. He had trouble getting into a car…’ In contrast to the elegant, slim and aloof Huntziger, Corap had a certain vulgar, fat man’s geniality that made him well liked by the troops, although politically he was known to have a particularly violent antipathy towards the Popular Front. But even more than Huntziger, his military education had ceased with 1918, and he was totally ignorant of mechanized warfare; above all, he had not the faintest idea of just how quickly an opponent like Rommel could move in 1940.
Rommel Crosses the Meuse
At 0300 on the 13th, Rommel with his A.D.C., Captain Schraepler, drove down to Dinant to find out what was going on. There he found shells falling from the French artillery on the other side of the Meuse, and a number of knocked-out tanks lying about in the streets leading down to the river. Enemy fire made it impossible for him to go any further in his conspicuous command vehicle, so he and Schraepler clambered on foot down to the river. Here his 6th Rifle Regiment was about to cross to the other bank in rubber assault boats, to reinforce the foothold made during the night by the motorcycle battalion. From here on, Rommel’s own account remains probably the best and clearest of the day’s events. The riflemen, says Rommel, were
being badly held up by heavy artillery fire and by the extremely troublesome small arms fire of French troops installed among the rocks on the west bank.
The situation when I arrived was none too pleasant. Our boats were being destroyed one after the other by the French flanking fire, and the crossing eventually came to a standstill. The enemy infantry were so well concealed that they were impossible to locate even after a long search through glasses. Again and again they directed their fire into the area in which I and my companions – the commanders of the Rifle Brigade and the Engineer Battalion – were lying.
The early-morning mist, which had provided such invaluable cover for the motor-cyclists in their crossing at Houx, was meanwhile dissipating. A smoke-screen was desperately needed with which to render innocuous the searing fire of the enemy infantry:
But we had no smoke unit. So I now gave orders for a number of houses in the valley to be set alight in order to supply the smoke we lacked.
Minute by minute the enemy fire grew more unpleasant. From up river a damaged rubber boat came drifting down to us with a badly wounded man clinging to it, shouting and screaming for help – the poor fellow was near to drowning. But there was no help for him here, the enemy fire was too heavy.
At this point Rommel turned his attention northwards to Houx, where the motor-cyclists were clinging precariously to their gains of the previous night. Most of the battalion had now reached the west bank, but the French resistance was mounting. Shortly after crossing, the commander of No. 1 Company, Captain Heilbronn, was wounded; then the Battalion Adjutant, Senior Lieutenant Pflug, and another subaltern were killed. Leading two companies himself, the Battalion Commander, Major Steinkeller, pushed up inland on to high ground after a brief struggle, taking the small hamlet of La Grange. But by mid-morning all contact with the east bank of the river had been effectively severed, there were still enemy pockets of resistance behind and heavy gunfire was coming down on the crossing area; the motor-cyclists had not yet been able to bring over any anti-tank guns, and in the event of any early French counter-attack accompanied by tanks, their position would of necessity be extremely perilous.
Not particularly happy, Rommel now drove south in a Mark IV tank to the 7th Rifle Regiment which, under Colonel von Bismarck,2 was trying to cross the Meuse opposite Bouvignes, about two miles south of Houx. On the way, he came under fire again several times from the west bank, and shell splinters wounded Schraepler in the arm. Bismarck had already managed to get a company across the river; but, says Rommel, the enemy fire had then become so heavy that their crossing equipment had been shot to pieces and the crossing had had to be halted. Large numbers of wounded were receiving treatment in a house close beside the demolished bridge. As at the northern crossing point, there was nothing to be seen of the enemy who were preventing the crossing…
Rommel decided that there was no hope of getting any more men over the Meuse without bringing right down to the river bank ‘powerful artillery and tank support to deal with the enemy nests’. To effect this, he drove back to divisional H.Q., where he found both his corps commander, Hoth, and the commander of the 4th Army, Kluge, following his progress with interest. Then he returned to the Meuse, to Leffé on the northern outskirts of Dinant, so as ‘to get the crossing moving there’. At Leffé, Rommel continues:
we found a number of rubber boats, all more or less badly damaged by enemy fire, lying in the street where our men had left them. Eventually, after being bombed on the way by our own aircraft, we arrived at the river… The crossing had now come to a complete standstill, with the officers badly shaken by the casualties which their men had suffered. On the opposite bank we could see several men of the company which was already across, among them many wounded… The officers reported that nobody dared show himself outside cover, as the enemy opened fire immediately on anyone they spotted.
The Mark IV tanks3 called for by Rommel began to arrive, and Captain König of the 25th Panzer Regiment takes up the story:
Only half the tanks reach the edge of the Meuse, the rest remain with tracks that have been thrown off and other damage, somewhere on the slope. On the Meuse all hell is let loose – the enemy defends himself from a mass of bunkers and provisional battle positions – every house on the other side of the bank is equipped to assist the defence. Concentrated fire is coming down on the positions of our engineers, and the Meuse water is whipped up by constant artillery and mortar-shell explosions.
The tanks cruised slowly along the river road, with their turrets traversed at 90 degrees, firing at little more than one hundred yards’ range directly into the French bunkers and machine-gun nests on the opposite bank.
The fire of the Panzer guns [continues König], the 75-mm. shells as well as the well-scattered 20-mm. quick-firing cannon, soon show an effect… the companies shoot almost as if they were in training, and no recognized target, no suspicious movement of the enemy, remains unnoticed. The enemy fire begins to slacken noticeably, but nevertheless the crossing of the first storm boats, the engineers, remains a hard task, a task from which many don’t come back. In impotent rage, the tank crews watch boats torn to pieces by direct hits…
One particularly troublesome pill-box4 was engaged by Lieutenant Hanke,5 who, after firing several rounds, knocked it out.
Under cover of the tanks’ gunfire, the crossings slowly got under way again, and a cable ferry using several large pontoons was started up. During these operations, according to Captain König, ‘General Rommel is everywhere. He is with the engineers, he leaps on to a Mark IV tank in order to give it the target himself. He is no easy chief for his staff…’ To whip up the flagging zeal of his obviously badly shaken riflemen, Rommel seems to have returned to a previous incarnation that morning, and to have acted more like the junior officer leading his raiding parties behind the Italian lines at Caporetto than a division
al commander. He states:
I now took over personal command of the 2nd Battalion of the 7th Rifle Regiment and for some time directed operations myself.
With Lieutenant Most6 I crossed the Meuse in one of the first boats and at once joined the company which had been across since early morning. From the company command post we could see Companies Enkefort and Lichter were making rapid progress.
I then moved up north along a deep gully to Company Enkefort. As we arrived an alarm came in: ‘Enemy tanks in front.’ The company had no anti-tank weapons, and I therefore gave orders for small arms fire to be opened on the tanks as quickly as possible.
From this there arose the belle légende, long attributed to Rommel, that he told his hard-pressed infantry to fire their Very pistols at the French tanks, to simulate the tracer effect of anti-tank shells. Whether true or not, the result was indisputable and the tanks withdrew, while Rommel reported that ‘large numbers of French stragglers came through the bushes and slowly laid down their arms’.
To Lose a Battle Page 32