Weygand was very much that particularly French creature, a ‘political general’. He was almost as deeply committed to the Right wing as he was to the Catholic Church. Clemenceau described him as being ‘up to his neck in priests’, and he often seemed to harbour an inquisitional notion that sinful France would be required to suffer for her wickedness. It was also Clemenceau who had once issued the warning: ‘Look out. If ever a coup d’état is attempted, it will be by him.’ On more than one occasion Weygand had addressed meetings of de la Rocque’s Croix de Feu, and at one time it was whispered that passionate conservatism had carried him as far as relations with the Cagoulard terrorists. Certainly, during the Russo-Finnish War he had been in the van of those anxious to ‘have a go’ at the Bolsheviks. Spears claimed that Weygand had ‘only two preoccupations: his haunting fear of revolution, and his dislike of Reynaud’. Both were to have their effect on his conduct of the war as Generalissimo.20 Reynaud in his turn had little love for Weygand; about the best thing he could say about him in his memoirs was that he ‘had the gift of explaining things clearly’. Why, then, had Reynaud called forth the elderly general at this most dire moment? He was, in de Gaulle’s caustic words, ‘a brilliant second’ who had never commanded troops in action; he had not had the advantage of studying the German Blitzkrieg technique at first hand, as had, for instance, General Huntziger; and out in the Levant he had not kept himself in particularly close touch with events since 10 May.21 The fact was that his selection was first and foremost an act of patriotism, intended by Reynaud to tap and draw strength from the ‘Verdun stream’ flowing through the French soul. In the popular mind, if Pétain represented honour and endurance in adversity, Weygand was still Foch’s right hand – and Foch signified victory and la gloire. Not every French soldier, however, was thus impressed; many shared the cynicism of Lieutenant Claude Jamet who, on hearing of the new appointment, wrote in his diary:
Gagamelin. Weygand, on the contrary, he’s pure blood. The spirit of Foch. ‘When in danger, call for Weygand’, etc.… what sluggishness of intellect and heart! And Weygand is summoned, regardless… because Foch is dead. For this ‘modern war’, one might just as well have called for Napoleon, the Great Condé – or Vercingetorix!
Certainly the emotive summoning of Pétain and Weygand to stiffen France’s war effort was one measure that would backfire badly on Paul Reynaud.
Weygand had had a gruelling flight from Syria, his aircraft constantly dogged by misfortune. On the 18th he had hoped to make Tunis in one hop, and then Paris by the evening. But there were strong headwinds, and over Benghazi (then in Italian hands, Italy being a dubious neutral) he was forced to turn back to refuel at Mersa Matruh in Egypt, thereby losing three precious hours. Finally, in landing at Étampes, the undercarriage of the plane collapsed, and Weygand had to creep out through the upper gun turret. Just at that moment there was an air-raid warning, and he did not reach Paris until 1100 hours on the 19th. Despite this harrowing journey for a man of his age, Weygand surprised those who saw him; Alexander Werth thought he ‘looked good in uniform’, in contrast to Pétain who was accompanying him (‘Poor old boy – fancy being dragged into all this at his age.’). On arriving at La Ferté, Captain Beaufre (who admittedly became a lifelong devotee of Weygand) was struck by his displaying ‘a swagger, a passion and a fierce will which contrasted sharply with the pale and curdled calm of his predecessor’. Almost immediately the seventy-three-year-old general astonished his new staff at Montry22 by performing a hundred-yard sprint on the lawn.
On his first brief interview with Georges on the 19th, Weygand at once got an idea of just how serious the situation was. In ten days’ fighting the French Army had lost fifteen divisions, and in the north another forty-five were in danger of being thrown into the sea; there were no reserves; the arsenals were almost empty. Between Valenciennes and Montmédy, the gap to be filled measured nearly one hundred miles. The proper moment for a co-ordinated counter-offensive here, assessed Weygand, should have been on the 15th or 16th; therefore it was now too late. As for the unnerved and dejected General Georges, Weygand decided that he must remain (at least nominally) at his command; it would be too complicated, as well as too demoralizing for the Army, for him to be replaced at this point. But in contrast to Gamelin, from the beginning the actual conduct of the battle would be in his, Weygand’s, hands. Meanwhile Gamelin’s ‘Instruction No. 12’, decreed only that morning (the 19th), was cancelled. Returning from Georges’s H.Q., Weygand had gone to Reynaud’s office in the evening and, having told the Premier that he would accept the ‘heavy responsibility’ cast upon him, added pessimistically: ‘You will not be surprised if I cannot answer for victory, nor even give you the hope of victory.’ As he left, Baudouin inquired about his immediate plans, to which Weygand replied: ‘I am dead tired, for I had only three hours’ sleep at Tunis. I shall begin by getting some sleep.’ All decisions would be postponed to the morrow. Thus passed another twenty-four of the ‘few hours’ remaining to France.
On to the Channel
Monday, 20 May, was the day of Guderian’s triumph. The previous evening he had once more been granted complete freedom of movement, and at midnight he ordered his corps to strike out for Amiens and Abbeville, prefacing his orders with the words: ‘The enemy opposite the corps front has been defeated.’ The latest aerial reconnaissance reports certainly confirmed this view; they could find virtually no Allied formations ahead of the Panzers. On the Allied side, General d’Astier’s patrols spoke of a ‘whirlpool of armour’ about to burst westwards. With the Canal du Nord behind them, there was now no natural barrier between the Panzers and the coast – just mile upon mile of the flat, featureless Picardy plain, a paradise for armoured commanders.
Guderian himself was on the road at 0400 hours with the 1st Panzer, desirous of being present at the historic moment of the capture of Amiens. The morning began with a sharp row involving Colonel Balck, now commanding the 1st Panzer Brigade, who had moved out from the Péronne bridgehead without waiting to be relieved by the 10th Panzer. His successor, Colonel Landgraf, was enraged by Balck’s casualness, and particularly at his retort: ‘If we lost it, you can always take it again.’ At Albert (a familiar name from the Battle of the Somme), the riflemen formerly commanded by Balck came up against the British troops (the Royal West Kents) for the first time. The 1st Panzer official historian describes them as having ‘fought toughly and bravely without, however, being able to prevent the fall of Albert’. Swinging round the hold-up at Albert, Balck’s tanks were at the gates of Amiens by mid morning, having advanced nearly thirty-five miles.
Never had the armour moved faster. ‘We had the feeling,’ said Kielmansegg, ‘such as a fine racehorse may have, of having been held back by its rider, coldly and deliberately, then getting its head free to reach out into a swinging gallop and speed to the finishing-post as winner.’ William Shirer, who that day had at last been allowed to follow in the wake of the German advance, was fascinated by the spectacle of this army on wheels, which
simply went up the roads… with tanks, planes, artillery, anti-tank stuff, everything… all morning, roads massed with supplies, troops going up… curious, not a single Allied plane yet… and these endless columns of troops, guns, supplies, stretching all the way from the German border… what a target!… Refugees streaming back along the roads in the dust and heat… tears your heart out…
Notwithstanding all the years he had observed the build-up of the new Wehrmacht in Germany, the speed and efficiency with which the German columns moved made a deep impression on Shirer:
It is a gigantic, impersonal war machine, run as coolly and efficiently, say, as our automobile industry in Detroit… thousands of motorized vehicles thundering by on the dusty roads, officers and men alike remain cool and business-like. Absolutely no excitement, no tension. An officer directing artillery fire stops for half an hour to explain to you what he is up to.
On an airfield outside Amiens, the Panzers nearly surprised a
n R.A.F. unit which had lodged there for the night, and the fighters took off literally in the face of the first German tanks. The city was almost empty; the previous afternoon the last line-of-communication troops had marched out,23 accompanied by nuns from the Community of the Holy Family; and, at about the same time, the defeated General Corap was passing through on his way to see Gamelin. Fires caused by the previous day’s bombing had raged all night, and dawn brought the Luftwaffe over again, bombing relentlessly. About all that was left holding Amiens was a battalion of the Royal Sussex Regiment, belonging to the 12th (Territorial) Division, which stood and fought to a finish against Balck’s tanks, and was completely destroyed. By midday the Germans had spread a large Swastika flag in front of the post office, to show the Luftwaffe that the city was in German hands. Methodically, they then pushed on southwards to seize bridgeheads over the Somme, in preparation for Phase Two of the Battle of France. Guderian was there, as intended, to inspect the great city which even Ludendorff had failed to capture in 1918, and somehow found time to visit the cathedral before rushing off to see how the 2nd Panzers were getting on.
He discovered General Veiel and the 2nd Panzer at Albert, where they had just captured a British gun battery which had exhausted its ammunition. The division was nearly out of fuel, and was proposing to halt at Albert. Guderian says that ‘they were soon disillusioned’ and he ordered them at once to push on to Abbeville. Having somehow mastered their fuel problem, the 2nd Panzers reached Abbeville by 1800 hours that evening, after an advance from Albert of forty-five miles, taking by surprise a French unit drilling on its parade ground. Its tanks then broke in between positions held by Territorials of the British 35th Brigade, only a few remnants of which managed to fall back across the Somme. Abbeville too had been bombed (indiscriminately, like Rotterdam, it seems) all through the 20th, and severe damage caused. But in fact the Luftwaffe probably granted the hard-pressed British Territorials a respite by mistakenly bombing the bridgeheads which the Germans had seized, forcing them to withdraw that night until the error was resolved.
Because of a delay in the transmission of orders, Reinhardt’s troops did not move until 0800 on the 20th. At 1300 hours they ran into their first British at Mondicourt, who – in the words of the 6th Panzer War Diary – ‘in contrast to the French, cause surprise by their tough way of fighting and are only overcome after a one-hour battle’. Two hours later Ravenstein’s force was again fighting a hard battle against the British 36th Brigade defending Doullens, which, though hopelessly outnumbered, managed to hold out until shortly before nightfall. Nevertheless, despite this stubborn resistance, Reinhardt’s armour swept around Doullens to reach its objectives at Hesdin and Le Boisle. By the end of the day the two British Territorial Divisions, the 12th and 23rd, had all but ceased to exist.24 Widely dispersed, and inadequately prepared as they were to encounter German Panzer divisions, each had given a good account of itself against impossible odds, as the various German accounts testified.
As agreed with Hoth the previous day, Rommel launched forth on another of his famous night attacks just after midnight on the 19th. By 0500 he had reached the village of Beaurains, two and a half miles south of Arras. But, as had happened at Avesnes, his motorized rifle regiments did not follow the armour as closely as intended. Rushing back in an armoured car to find them, Rommel was nearly trapped by French cavalry tanks infiltrating across his lines of communication. These knocked out Rommel’s accompanying tanks, and for several hours he and his Signal Staff were surrounded. The situation was restored only by the arrival of an infantry regiment and artillery. Once again Rommel had the narrowest of escapes. For the rest of the day the 7th Panzer hammered unsuccessfully at Arras, held by British troops under Major-General R. L. Petre. It was Rommel’s first serious check since crossing the Meuse, his casualties the highest since the 13th. On the evening of the 20th, the 7th Panzer was placed on the defensive around Arras – an unusual posture for Rommel.
Meanwhile, as night descended over northern France on 20 May, Guderian’s men pulled off the ace achievement of the campaign so far. Pushing out down the Somme from Abbeville, Austrians from Lieutenant-Colonel Spitta’s battalion from the 2nd Panzer reached Noyelles on the Atlantic coast, not far from the Hundred Years War battlefield of Crécy-en-Ponthieu. They had advanced over sixty miles since the morning. The dog-tired Panzer crews filled their lungs with sea air and wondered in amazement at how much more they had already achieved than the Kaiser’s Army before them. In ten short days they had covered two hundred miles25 and encircled the cream of the Allied armies. What could they not aspire to! In his orders that night, Guderian told his corps: ‘Today’s battles have brought us complete success. Along the whole front the enemy is in retreat in a manner that at times approaches rout.’
Far back at the rear, both the O.K.H. and O.K.W. were quite taken by surprise at the news. On the 19th, Jodl had been worrying that the Allies in northern Belgium might slip out to the south, and even on the morning of the 20th Halder was expressing concern lest Bock’s pressure in the north might result ‘in driving the game away, as it were, past Kleist’. But at the Felsennest, Jodl found a Hitler ‘beside himself with joy. Talks in words of highest appreciation of the German Army and its leadership. Is working on the Peace Treaty… First negotiations in the Forest of Compiègne as in 1918.’
In Paris, Alexander Werth recorded:
Cheerful news reached me from the censors’ office at night that all telephone (and telegraph?) communications between Paris and London had been broken off – lines cut; Fifth Column at work, or what?… Colonel Thomas said there was some heavy fighting ‘around’ St Quentin and Péronne. He tried to suggest that the German progress was slowing down. I’ve noticed that when they mention places ‘round’ which there is fighting, it means these places are already in German hands.
As usual the French censor was forty-eight hours behind with the news. For the Allies this was unquestionably the darkest day of the war so far; few in the five years to come would be darker.
Chapter 18
Encirclement
21–23 May
In the West, the greatest offensive of all time has had its first strategic result, after a series of major tactical successes; our forces have reached the sea.
Wehrmacht communiqué, 21 May
The Germans have not yet stood the final test… we are the old opponent of the Marne, the old opponent of Verdun. Pétain appears to us like a symbol, a promise. Weygand brings back to us the genius of Foch.
Le Journal, 21 May
A serious technical fault in the cable, it was learned, caused the cancellation of the public telephone service between London and Paris and beyond on Monday night and yesterday… A Post Office official said: ‘We have no idea when the service will be restored.’
Daily Telegraph, 22 May
The recapture of Arras may prove to be a turning-point in the present battle which will have a vital effect on the whole war.
Daily Mail, 23 May
German High Command: More Vacillations
For the jubilant Germans, the next three days would also be potentially the most dangerous of the campaign. The vulnerable ‘tortoise-head’ of the Panzers was now further extended than ever before,1 the vacuum between them and the weary, forced-marching infantry divisions greater than it had been when Hitler had lost his nerve on the 17th. Would the Allies, despite their disarray, yet be able to launch a successful counter-attack to break through the ‘Panzer Corridor’ before this frail wedge between their armies became a thing of steel?
At no time since 10 May had the outcome of the battle become such a race for time. On the German side, Guderian, up in the forefront with his Panzers, was supremely aware of this. After his remarkable achievements of the 20th, he fretted that night that ‘we did not know in what direction our advance should continue’. Nor, he added, had Kleist himself received any further instructions on how to proceed. In his orders for the 21st, Guderian simply told his Panzers
to regroup and consolidate on the positions gained the previous day.
So the 21st of May was wasted while we waited for orders. I spent the day visiting Abbeville and our crossings and bridgeheads over the Somme. On the way I asked my men how they had enjoyed the operations up to date. ‘Not bad,’ said an Austrian of the 2nd Panzer Division, ‘but we wasted two whole days.’
‘Unfortunately,’ Guderian commented bitterly, ‘he was right.’
The reasons for this delay in the transmission of orders lay in renewed vacillations within the German High Command, which was again partially caught off balance by its own successses. The objective of Sichelschnitt had been reached, the Allied armies in the north were encircled, but the master blueprint had laid down no precise directives as to what the next step should be. Halder seemed to be still toying with notions of immediately continuing the advance southwards from the bridgeheads gained across the Somme, and leaving Bock’s Army Group ‘B’ to ‘mop up’ the encircled Allied forces in the north. Meanwhile, Hitler’s jubilation was once again tempered with renewed misgivings about the weakness of that southern flank, and later that day he was again lecturing Brauchitsch on the slowness of the infantry in catching up with the Panzers. It was thus not until midday on the 21st that the German High Command decided to concentrate all its forces upon reducing the Allied forces trapped in the north, so that by the time Guderian received his orders to swing northwards to seize the Channel ports the campaigning day was over. In the meantime, Rommel and the forces grouped around Arras had run into serious trouble.
To Lose a Battle Page 57