At the appointed hour, Daladier arrived, but no Reynaud. On telephoning his office, Gamelin learned that Reynaud – accompanied by Marshal Pétain, newly returned from Madrid – had left a good hour earlier. Consternation! Had the Premier been involved in an accident? Finally, word came through (‘brusquely’, says Gamelin) that Reynaud and Pétain had gone to see Georges first. Gamelin and Daladier were to await their arrival. The two passed the time in ‘affectionate and confident conversation’, with Daladier (in the words of Gamelin) displaying ‘the soul of a good Frenchman’. It was, he admitted, ‘the first time for ten days that I had remained without any precise occupation’ – which seems a curious admission at such a moment in Allied fortunes.
At 1820 hours, after more than three hours had passed in chat between Gamelin and Daladier, Reynaud arrived with Pétain. According to Reynaud’s account, on the earlier visit to La Ferté, General Georges had
explained the situation to us on a large map, which, with his hand covered by a grey glove, he pulled up and down on its roller. We saw on the map the positions of the Armies, and, prominently marked, those of the ten Panzer divisions. Two or three times he broke off his account to tell us, his brown eyes brooding sorrow-fully on us: ‘It is a difficult situation.’
At Vincennes, Gamelin treated Reynaud and Pétain to a similar run-down on the situation. When the eighty-four-year-old Marshal climbed back into his car, he clasped Gamelin’s hand warmly and murmured, ‘I pity you with all my heart.’ As Reynaud had made no reference to his intentions for the Generalissimo’s future, the full meaning of Pétain’s expression of sympathy was not apparent until the following day. Gamelin then returned to his office to sign the wordy report which he had been preparing at Daladier’s behest. He had still made no move to assume control of the battle.
For the French High Command, the 18th ended with extremely grave news reaching Georges’s G.H.Q. from General Billotte. ‘We had hoped to be able to contain them today, but we were twenty-four hours too late,’ said Billotte. Seeing little prospect now of sealing the hole which gaped between the French First Army and General Frère’s ad hoc Seventh Army, Billotte added ominously: ‘One must reflect upon the conduct to adopt in the event that our forces should find themselves separated.’ In his final order for the day, Georges spoke hopelessly of the importance of ‘envisaging the prolongation of our barrage along the Somme, from Péronne to the sea’ – a measure which in itself certainly ‘envisaged’ no means of halting the Panzers before the Channel. Finally, on the following day, de Gaulle’s 4th Armoured was to make another jab into the southern flank of the Panzers along the axis Laon-Crécy-sur-Serre.
On the political scene that Saturday, Reynaud invited Pétain to join his Government as Deputy Premier. Pétain accepted. According to Reynaud, when he told the Senate that the ‘Victor of Verdun’ was now at his side, there were widespread shouts of ‘At last!’ Spears, who had not seen him since the First War, describes the eighty-four-year-old Marshal shortly after his return to France as being
still erect but so very much older, and in plain clothes which emphasized the break with the past… but he seemed dead, in the sense that a figure that gives no impression of being alive can be said to be dead… when occasionally I looked towards him he seemed not to have heard what was being said.
From now on this venerable but pessimistic old soldier, tragically recalled from the glorious past, was to play a role of increasing weight in France’s fate.
Upon Pétain’s acceptance Reynaud now proceeded to the first stage of reshaping his Cabinet. Daladier at last was ousted from the Ministry of National Defence, which Reynaud took over himself, handing to Daladier the Quai d’Orsay as a sop. The tough Georges Mandel, Clemenceau’s old hatchet man, was transferred from the Colonies to the Interior, a key post when civilian morale was gravely threatened. But to take the lead part in his reshuffle, Reynaud was still awaiting the arrival of General Weygand.
19 May: de Gaulle’s Second Chance
In his orders for 19 May, Guderian stated: ‘The Commander-in-Chief of the Army [Brauchitsch] has explicitly approved further advances by Group Kleist.’ His XIX Panzer Corps was to seize bridgeheads over the Canal du Nord to the west; at the same time, looking ahead to the second phase of the Battle of France, it was to establish bridgeheads over the Somme between Ham and Péronne, in order to make ready ‘to swing south-west when the time comes’. The progress registered on the 19th would, as it happened, be less spectacular than that of the previous day. The divisions’ technical priorities enforced a day essentially of badly needed consolidation and regrouping in preparation for the final lunge to the coast.
Despite all the good omens, the 19th began on an anxious note for Guderian. At 0135, XIX Panzer Corps H.Q. received a radio message reporting that the fuel depot at Hirson had been ‘burnt out’. This was extremely serious news, as it was from here that Guderian’s tanks were to be refuelled that night. Consequently, they would have no more than one day’s ration of fuel. Later in the morning the 10th Panzer reported that its attack against Ham had failed. Then Luftwaffe reconnaissance revealed the massing of some hundred tanks south of Crécy-sur-Serre. This was accompanied by a report that one of the ‘blocking detachments’ had been overwhelmed by an enemy attack on the south flank.
De Gaulle had begun to move forward at dawn. The objective of his second attack was to strike across the Serre bridges near Crécy and then cut Guderian’s line of advance through La Fère. He had received further reinforcements in the form of an artillery regiment of ’75s, the famous cannon of the First War, and two squadrons of Somua tanks, bringing his armour to a total of some 150 tanks. Of these, however, only thirty were ‘B’ tanks, forty Somuas or D.2s, the remainder obsolete R.35s. The Somua crews consisted of a commander/gunner who had never fired the gun and a driver who had done no more than four hours’ driving. With only a single battalion of infantry he was once again poorly supported.
At first de Gaulle seemed to be advancing into empty space. After overwhelming or dispersing light enemy forces, he reached the Serre within four hours. Here his tanks came up against heavy opposition. Guderian had reacted with his customary speed. ‘Crécy is a fortress of anti-tank guns, an enormous ambush,’ declared Captain Idée. ‘The R.35s came to a halt and withdrew in a shambles. Already several are burning.’ His D.2s now moved up. Just before the bridge over the Serre the first tank blew up on a mine, the second had a track blown off. In third position, Idée’s own tank, the Rocroi, came under violent fire:
A formidable shock. The turret shakes, struck at the base. The traversing gear is jammed. The turret won’t move any more. I struggle furiously with it, strike the gear, and just at the moment when I am despairing, unjam it. The turret moves. I fire. Bang! A heavy shell strikes obliquely at the top of my turret, which glows red.
As on the 17th, the infantry never materialized; so – having lost two tanks – Idée decided to withdraw. In the two days’ fighting, his company of fourteen tanks had lost six destroyed and two ‘missing’.
De Gaulle’s misfortunes on the 19th were compounded by a piece of bad liaison that was typical of the inefficient communications existing between the French ground and air forces. To ward off the shattering Stuka attacks that had disrupted de Gaulle’s first attack, General d’Astier had been called upon to provide the most powerful fighter cover that his reduced circumstances would allow. But the time of the attack was changed without d’Astier being informed. The Stukas once again descended on de Gaulle’s column out of an empty sky. Answering a desperate plea for help, d’Astier ordered up every fighter patrol already in the air at the time. But by the time they arrived over the Serre it was too late; de Gaulle’s force had been badly knocked about. Early that afternoon he received an order from Georges, instructing him ‘not to commit himself too deeply, as the division was needed on another front’. Under repeated Stuka bombing, de Gaulle once more pulled his forces back in good order, behind the Aisne. In most bitter fr
ustration, he says:
I could not help imagining what the mechanized army of which I had so long dreamed could have done. If it had been there that day, to debouch suddenly in the direction of Guise, the advance of the Panzer divisions would have been halted instantly, serious confusion caused in their rear, and the northern group of armies enabled to join up once more with those of the centre and the east.
19 May: the Germans Consolidate
From Guderian’s point of view, the various local difficulties besetting him that morning, of which de Gaulle was one, imposed three choices of action: he could halt his westerly advance and establish a defensive face towards the south; counter-attack southwards with the main weight of his forces; or change nothing in his orders and continue the advance as before. Typically he chose the third possibility, leaving it to the 10th Panzer alone to block de Gaulle’s attack. Once again events proved his decision right.11 Meanwhile, as de Gaulle’s attack was in progress, a corrective radio signal resolved Guderian’s major anxiety; the report about the Hirson fuel depot should have read ‘ready for distribution’, instead of ‘burnt out’!12 The Panzers could forge on.
During the afternoon, Guderian’s 1st and 2nd Panzers crossed the Canal du Nord and reached the old Somme battlefield of the First War, an event giving rise to strong emotions among the many veterans who had sat there for months on end in 1916, under gruelling attack by the British and French. There were now warnings from both men and machines that seemed to make a brief pause imperative; when the commander of his prize 1st Panzer Brigade, Colonel Nedtwig, collapsed from sheer exhaustion,13 even Guderian had to take note. That night the main weight of his corps halted on the line Cambrai-Péronne-Ham.
To Guderian’s immediate north, Reinhardt’s Panzers mopped up French resistance around Le Catelet by the middle of the day after more brisk fighting. By nightfall they too stood shoulder to shoulder with Guderian in a consolidated position west of the Canal du Nord defence line. For Rommel the fast going of the previous days came to an end with the capture of Cambrai. He too was forced on the 19th to pause in order to regroup and give his exhausted crews some sleep. By nightfall he had pushed forward a bare six miles to Marquion, where the Canal du Nord crosses the Arras road. Visited by his corps commander, General Hoth, during the afternoon, the impatient Rommel asked to be allowed to mount another night attack so as to seize the vital high ground south-east of Arras, some twenty miles on, by daybreak on the 20th. Hoth demurred, on the grounds that the men could not take it. ‘The troops have been twenty hours in the same place,’ countered Rommel, ‘and a night attack during moonlight will result in fewer losses.’ Hoth yielded, and Rommel was allowed to prepare to move towards Arras shortly after midnight. On Rommel’s right flank, the 5th Panzer was again sharply engaged in the Forest of Mormal with elements of the 1st D.L.M. and the 1st North African Division. But pushing on towards Solesmes, its advanced units also began to draw level with Rommel. Meanwhile, still further north the 3rd and 4th Panzers of Hoeppner’s XVI Corps, now transferred to Rundstedt, were battering back the southern anchor of Blanchard’s First Army in the direction of Valenciennes. Thus by the end of the 19th, after their various itineraries, all but one of Hitler’s ten Panzer divisions14 were now lined up as a dense phalanx of armour in what has been called the ‘rendezvous of 19 May’. Here, just fifty miles from the sea, they stood poised for the final act of Sichelschnitt.
The Maginot Line: the Forgotten Army
Down in the Maginot Line, life during the previous eight days of the battle had continued very much as in the months of the Phoney War. The desperate struggle to the north left it untouched. Inside its steel and concrete turrets, observers peered out, waiting for an enemy who never came. There was an occasional long-range artillery duel, but that was about all. Then, on the 18th, General von Witzleben’s First Army suddenly attacked a small fort, curiously enough called La Ferté. It lay in an awkward defensive position, and after a savage struggle La Ferté fell on the 19th. This first capture of a Maginot Line fortress was greeted with maximum acclaim by the German radio, though its strategic significance was negligible. The action, however, was not just braggadocio. It was carefully and deliberately timed, for the French High Command had at long last given the order to withdraw the hitherto immobilized ‘interval troops’ as reinforcements for the battle in the north. Here, then, was a warning not to go too far in denuding the Maginot Line – one which, as the Germans expected, the French High Command would be bound to heed; by the end of May it was actually sending back precious tanks to help guard the forts.
The Luftwaffe Ascendant
In the air, the 18th and 19th witnessed a further marked deterioration of Allied strength.15 By the 19th, General d’Astier’s Z.O.A.N. could count no more than 170 serviceable fighters, and because of damage to the telephone lines, it was becoming increasingly difficult for his group commanders to bring their planes into action. There were still six groupements of bombers left, but two consisted of Amiots and Blochs, which could only be used by night; of the three equipped with Léos and Bréguets, two were on the move, while the third was caught (on the 19th) by the Luftwaffe just as it was about to take off on a mission and lost two-thirds of its machines; the sixth, consisting of newly arrived American Glenn Martins, was waiting to have the bomb-release mechanisms fixed. As far as the British were concerned, on the 18th Barratt’s Advanced Air Striking Force was still virtually out of action on account of its move. The following day telephone contact between Barratt and the Air Component with the B.E.F. had been severed by the German advance, and Lord Gort agreed with the Air Ministry that it should now be withdrawn to operate from southern England. Within two days nothing but a few Lysander liaison planes remained in France. The evacuation of the Air Component was, alas, carried out in such haste that most of its ground equipment and stores had to be abandoned to the enemy. A total of 261 Hurricanes had flown with the Component; 75 had been destroyed, but only 66 of the remainder returned to England. The balance of 120 consisted of damaged machines that also had to be abandoned in France. Thus in ten days’ operations over northern France alone, Britain had lost 195 Hurricanes, roughly a quarter of her entire strength of modern fighters. Henceforth based on Kent and under control of the Air Ministry, the Component was now too far removed from the battle to provide effective collaboration with the B.E.F., and its activities were largely limited to night operations of doubtful value.
The R.A.F. continued to pound the Ruhr by night with its heavy and medium bombers, and continued to deceive both itself, the Government and the public as to the results. L’Œuvre spoke on 19 May of ‘catastrophic effects’ reported by eye-witnesses; the disorganization following the raids was claimed to have ‘almost crippled the movement of reinforcements to the front over the past twenty-four hours’. In his diary General Ironside quoted a pilot who ‘said that over Hamburg he could read a book at 10,000 feet. They also touched up the Ruhr again, finding very little A.A. defence guns’, a statement that perhaps reveals just how lightly the Germans were taking these raids. Passing Cologne aerodrome on the 19th, William Shirer noted:
It was packed with planes, but the hangars had not been touched. Beautifully camouflaged with netting they were. Obviously these night attacks of the British have failed not only to put the Ruhr out of commission, but even to damage the German flying fields. A phony sort of war the Allies still seem to be fighting.
Meanwhile, Churchill was grumbling to his Chief of the Air Staff at the Allied impotence to strike at the Panzers which were doing all the damage: ‘Is there no possibility of finding out where a column of enemy armoured vehicles harbours during the dark hours, and then bombing?’ On the evening of the 19th, twenty Chance-Vought dive-bombers belonging to the French Navy and based on Boulogne and Berck were thrown in for the first time to help the forces desperately engaged in the Forest of Mormal, but ten of them were shot down, the remainder badly holed, and the effect on the Panzers apparently was minimal. With the steady extensi
on of the ‘Panzer Corridor’ and the decreasing number of Allied planes available, it was becoming more and more difficult to pinpoint the spread-out enemy columns. Early on 19 May, reconnaissance spotted a large armoured force (presumably Rommel’s) moving in the direction of Arras, but no bombers were on hand at the time, and the Panzers were allowed to move on unmolested. The next morning two R.A.F. bomber squadrons were dispatched from England to attack Panzer columns spotted at 0830. The first reached the target area at 1130 and bombed a column moving westwards; shortly afterwards the second could find nothing at the same point. Both had in fact arrived too late to attack the initially designated target, an advanced unit of the 6th Panzer, which was by then well dispersed.
On the German side, the Luftwaffe was now well established in Belgian airfields close behind the front, so that its Stukas were able to fly as many as six or seven missions a day, thereby multiplying its already imposing numerical superiority. Apart from this never-failing tactical close support work, the medium bombers of the Luftwaffe were concentrating effectively on smashing up the French railway system by which Georges was trying to bring up reinforcements to the Aisne and the Somme. At midday on the 19th, a powerful force of German bombers struck savagely at Amiens, ‘softening up’ for the next day’s Panzer attack. The city appears to have been all but undefended, whether by fighters or anti-aircraft guns. Four-fifths of the population had already left the threatened city, but casualties were heavy; fortunately twenty ambulances manned by volunteers of the American Field Service happened to be passing through the city and were able to help with the wounded.
To Lose a Battle Page 55