3. The Affair of Grossenwald
On May 7th the 4th Black Watch took over the Ligne de Contact in the neighbourhood of Remeling from the 1st Gordons. There were French troops on their left and the 154th Brigade on their right. Their Battalion Headquarters were in Remeling, their companies along the forward edges of the woods of Heydwald, the Wölschler, and the Grossenwald. There was, to begin with, no more than normal activity, but on May 10th came the mise en garde: the Germans had begun their attack on the Low Countries, and along the whole front the war quickened.
Two days later, in the early afternoon, a Company Commander of the 4th Black Watch set out for the village of Betting. His battalion was due to be relieved by the 5th Gordons, and a Gordon officer went with him. They did not anticipate trouble, and were surprised when, from the wood, a German machine-gun opened fire on them. Betting, it appeared, was out of bounds, and a few hours later came the news that the village was surrounded, and the Black Watch platoon that held it was being heavily attacked. Some carriers were sent up to help, and the Germans withdrew. On the following morning, at five minutes past four, the enemy began to fire a heavy barrage along the whole battalion front, and the 154th Brigade’s front to the right. To the right of the Divisional front, the Germans attacked and took some French positions. The Allied artillery replied. Behind the enemy’s barrage came infantry armed with grenades, automatic guns, and flame-throwers. They made some progress round the right of the Grossenwald, but Heydwald and the Wölschler were held, and the lonely section that remained in Betting—surrounded and shelled again—was still lively. About nine o’clock at night, when the village was in flames, this section was rescued by Second-Lieutenant Rhodes leading a fighting patrol of the 1st Gordons.
A company of the Black Watch, its communications cut, put up an S O S about half-past five the next morning: it had held off for more than an hour a determined infantry attack, but now it was hard pressed. A troop of the Lothians and Border Horse (Yeomanry) was sent to investigate, but one of its tanks was bogged in the soft ground about the fringes of the Grossenwald, and the other two were hit by anti-tank fire and high explosive. Enemy machine-guns and mortars were in action in the Hermeswald, their artillery was still lively, and some of our posts had been badly knocked about by eight-inch shells. A report came through that the Germans were concentrating about Zeurange, another that they had broken through the 4th Black Watch. A company of Argyll and Sutherlands was sent to cover the gap, but found it was not needed: the 4th were holding on. Young soldiers in their first engagement, they held their positions with commendable endurance.
Before midnight the 4th Black Watch had been relieved—all but one company, which was still in difficulties—and the 5th Gordons were in the line. Watching them go forward, their Colonel, Buchanan Smith, was “very much struck by the seriousness in their faces, and how they put their confidence in the officers. I wondered how many would ever again possess those boyish faces.” To their right were the 1st Black Watch, and according to a letter written by Private J. McCready, of that regiment, they had a profitable tour. They suffered perhaps a dozen casualties, but inflicted more. McCready, talking of his friends, says that “Price and Fisher had an excellent time with a Bren gun and a rifle, their bag of the enemy was put down as 44 in an afternoon. It was all storm-troopers in that action, but the Black Watch was more than a match for them, they proved nothing better than good target practice as some of the boys said.”
The Germans had no Gaelic
To the right of the Black Watch, from the east corner of Hartbuch to the north edge of Spitzwald were the 4th Seaforths, who had newly relieved the 4th Camerons. The Camerons had had a roughish time, losing a couple of section-posts in the Tiergarten, and the Brigade battle-patrol had been isolated by fire in Spitzwald. The Germans, who made a practice of tapping our forward telephone cables, were sadly disappointed by the Camerons, who countered this form of espionage by talking with their platoon-posts in Gaelic. And before being relieved, the Camerons had retaken some of their lost positions.
During the early morning of the 14th, in the Gordons sector, the Germans fired 3,600 shells into a company front within an hour and a half: forty shells a minute, or thereabout. Telephone cables and defensive wire were cut, and German infantry followed the barrage. But the Gordons fought them off, and the Black Watch, on their right, noted the large number of dead in front of one of their posts. The 1st Black Watch were now being relieved by the 7th Argyll and Sutherlands. They had lost six killed and seventeen wounded, but on the wire about one of their platoon positions they counted thirteen German bodies, and the night before, when quietness came with dusk, they had watched the enemy carrying his dead from the Grossenwald. The guns of the 17th Field Regiment, Royal Artillery, had done good work in the sector.
This was the day on which Holland surrendered.
“D” company of the 5th Gordons, on the extreme left, of the front at Heydwald, had lost touch with two of its forward posts, and patrols sent over to re-establish contact were driven back by heavy machine-gun fire. At five o’clock on the morning of the 15th, the Germans enclosed three posts of “D” company, as if in a box, by concentrated artillery fire. At six o’clock their infantry attacked, and was driven off. Then the barrage came down again, and for another three hours the shelling lasted. No news came from the forward posts, and every attempt to reconnoitre was driven back by machine-gun fire. Later in the day “D” company reported it was holding its last position with twenty-eight men, and the wire was down. But the Company Commander was still thinking of his lost platoons, and how to get to them. He was imprisoned by the fire of automatic weapons, and sent a request for tommy-guns to deal with them. He wanted tommy-guns to fight forward, with his twenty-eight survivors, and look for his lost men.
But the forward posts had been captured, and “D” company, with nearly seventy casualties, had to withdraw under the covering fire of a fighting patrol. Its withdrawal preceded by only a few hours the withdrawal of the whole Division.
It had become evident that our advanced positions were untenable against the superior forces which the Germans were using. According to a French statement, based on the identification of casualties, they had employed more than a dozen units in the recent attack, and both troops and weapons had been selected for the purpose from the garrison of the Siegfried Line. The estimate of numbers, however, was probably inaccurate: many of the German troops belonged to the Schutzstaffel, who carry, in addition to their S.S. papers, a record of their previous regiments, and this double identification may have misled the French intelligence officers. But the attack was undoubtedly a serious offensive movement, and after consultation with General Condé, General Fortune had decided to abandon Heydwald, the Grossenwald, the Wölschler and Betting village, and form a new line along the ridge of Kalenhofen. But before this movement had begun, withdrawal was ordered to the Ligne de Recueil. It was necessary to make this deep retirement to conform with the movements of the French on either flank, where the Germans were pushing hard.
Elan and Staunchness
To evacuate positions so near to the enemy’s fluid line was by no means easy—a company of the 7th Argylls lost two sergeants and seven men, killed by shell-fire; a company of the 5th Gordons slipped out of the Wölschler, covered by a sergeant of the Kensingtons and his two machine-guns—and the defences of the Ligne de Recueil were by no means complete. It lay about three miles in front of the Maginot Line, on a forward slope. The field of fire was good, but the wire was thin, communication trenches were poor, and an anti-tank ditch had been only half-dug. The Germans, however, did not press their advance. Extensive demolitions had been prepared along the Divisional front, and beside every charge two Sappers had waited patiently for the blessed order to blow. It came—and roads went skyward, bridges collapsed, trees tumbled. The German advance was usefully impeded: they came no farther than the Obsterwald.
For a few more days the battalions were shuffled and dealt among the re
arward lines, the woods and villages of the Saar front. They lay in a forest, or dug slit-trenches. The Sappers filled minefields for tanks, and improved the brisants at Chémery le Petit, and in the Kalenhofen Forest. A fighting patrol of the 7th Argylls went out and found a German officer in the attic of a house, bombed another out of its cellar. The Lothians became infantry and held a sector of the front till the French relieved them on May 22nd.
But all this was mere temporising. The Division had come to the end of its short term of service in Lorraine, and was waiting its order for some other front. It had no reason to be disappointed with itself. In action for the first time, it had behaved well, and the French General Condé, commanding the Third Army, had spoken of its high fighting qualities and high morale. “The Highlanders of 1940,” he said, “have renewed the tradition of Beaumont-Hamel.”
This was courtesy indeed, but the courtesy had been earned. The Division had already shown something of its traditional élan, and, for troops at their baptism of fire, their defence of the outpost line had been most staunch and resolute. To savour the individual quality of the men, consider these reports of action in the Grossenwald. Here is Platoon Sergeant-Major Fullerton of the 5th Gordons: “On 14th May, Stand To and Stand Down normal. After Stand Down Boche started shelling. After 2 hours it died down. I took a patrol back to Coy. H.Q. and chased a couple of skulking Germans. The distance to Coy. H.Q. was about 400 yards. Then on Capt. Lawrie’s orders I took a patrol to 16 PI. on the left to 2/Lt. Langham who reported everything O.K. but bothered with snipers from Bois Carré. On getting back to 17 Pl. extreme left section commander just in front of Bois Carré had a man wounded by snipers in tree. I got both snipers fixed with Bren gun. Breakfasts in containers from Coy. H.Q. Bn. Intelligence Officer, 2/Lt. Morrison, arrived up and I helped him establish a post in Bois Carré. We found about 25 Germans there and killed them all. They were behind a hedge. We patrolled right through and took identity papers, etc., from the corpses and took back 2 German L.M.G.’s.”
And here is a Company Commander in the 1st Black Watch: “There was a heavy barrage on the three section posts. S O S from left, and then from Command Post. I crawled with my runner to the right post, where the men stated they had shot a number of Boches. The attitude of this section was most aggressive. They had put three Boche machine-guns out of action. While I was there a German, presumably the commander of the attacking party, was shouting a great deal. The platoon commander distributed ammunition which I had brought up. At the left-hand post I found the enemy on three sides, but they had not penetrated the wire. At 1500 hrs. the 7th A. & S.H. fighting patrol arrived: Orr Ewing and three men went out and brought in a German machine-gun, 500 rounds, a sniper’s rifle and three bodies. German casualties here were estimated at forty.”
Both on the Saar front and later in Normandy, the two machine-gun battalions—Northumberland Fusiliers and Kensingtons—were for tactical purposes divided among the Brigades, and because they did not fight as a whole it is difficult to assess or describe their work. But wherever the infantry were in action there were machine-gunners to support them, and perhaps it is sufficient to say that the battalions which had Kensingtons attached to them speak well of the Kensingtons, while those which were assisted by the Northumberland Fusiliers were convinced that they had the better support. The conclusion is that both were good.
4. The Division Moves Westward
On May 20th the Fifty-First went into reserve to a French army-group, and was ordered to the neighbourhood of Etain, some twenty miles north-west of Metz. The movement, from Hombourg-Budange to Etain, was completed on May 22nd, and before dawn broke on the 23rd, the 154th Brigade was on its way to Varennes, north-west of Verdun, followed a few hours later by the Lothians. There was news that the Germans had broken through west of Montmédy, and the Fifty-First was being sent to meet them. By daylight on May 25th, all who could be moved by motor-transport were concentrated in the Grandpré-Varennes area, and the remainder had entrained and were on their way.
By this time the battle of France had been split in two, and the Germans were pouring their motorised divisions through the widening gap between Arras and the Somme to spill them against the Channel ports. The Guards had been driven out of Boulogne, and the Riflemen of Calais were fighting their desperate battle against time and two Panzer divisions. In the north the British Expeditionary Force and the Belgian Army were steadily withdrawing: the area of battle was shrinking westward to the coast. There was confused and furious fighting between Valenciennes and Cambrai and Arras.
The first intention of the Grand Quartier-Général had been to use the Fifty-First in the defence of Paris. Then, more urgently, the danger seemed to come from Montmédy, and the Division was ordered to Varennes. But it did not stay. There was a day when plans were changeable as April weather, and every command was hotly pursued by countermand. Even before leaving the Saar, the Officer Commanding the 6th Royal Scots Fusiliers had discovered a certain indecision in higher ranks. In search of information, he had asked the Colonel of the 7th Argyll and Sutherlands what news he had of intended movement; the latter gravely answered that the Corporal in charge of the Divisional Concert Party had just assured him they would remain where they were. A few days later the Fusiliers’ Colonel records in his diary: “We reached Verdun in order to be told we were going to Le Mans.”
Then the Division went to Normandy, and the rail-parties that were slowly moving towards Varennes were diverted to Rouen; the road-parties turned their transport westward to the sea. Their route was by Vitry le François, Sézanne and Gisors—from Lorraine through Champagne and the He de France—then north-westward to Neufchâtel, where they make cream-cheese in the shape of a bung, and so to the battlefield of the three rivers—the Somme and the Bresle and the Béthune. On May 30th the Colonel of the Royal Scots Fusiliers records with a brief satisfaction: “‘C’ Company had trout for dinner, caught in a dry-fly stream passing the door of their billet.”
Mechanised Migration
The Divisional transport and the lorry-borne troops travelled about three hundred miles of French roads. In peace time, in a civilian car whose driver has only his private responsibility, such a journey would be neither remarkable nor difficult. But the movement of soldiers is never a simple operation, and the Fifty-First’s march to the sea was made against time, in a country stupefied by sudden invasion, over roads that were roughly parallel to the German corridor and no more than thirty-odd miles away from it. From the Forest of Argonne, where men, wagons and guns had lain hidden among the trees, to the Haute Forêt d’Eu, where they assembled for battle, was a three-days’ journey in drill-order: over an indicated route, at an ordered speed, in a fixed density of so many vehicles to the mile. Supply points and staging areas had to be arranged. Advanced-parties must be told off, road-pickets detailed, motor-cyclists sent forward at such-and-such a time. The huge assortment of vehicles—there were about three thousand of one sort or another—had to be marshalled according to their purpose and their kind: troop-carriers and Bren-carriers, company vehicles and cooking trucks, blanket lorries in the transport echelon, water-trucks, utility-trucks, and trucks mounting light machine-guns for anti-aircraft defence. The migration of an Asiatic tribe, with all its flocks and herds in search of summer pasture, is a simple matter when compared with the time-tabled movement of Divisional transport through an invaded country; but the movement was completed speedily and without appreciable loss. As far as Paris the roads were almost empty, but throughout the journey drivers were troubled by great clouds of dust, and despatch-riders with inflamed eyes were temporarily blinded by it. Yet barely half a dozen vehicles were lost. Some idea of the problem of fuel supply may appear in the fact that during the final month of its existence the Division’s average petrol-consumption was sixteen thousand gallons a day.
The train parties took a long route south of Paris. They too went to Vitry le François, where, according to an officer of the 8th Argylls, “the train stopped, as a F
rench ammunition-train in the station had been hit by a German bomb about ten minutes before our arrival, and was still in the process of exploding.” When the ammunition-wagons had finished their feu de joie, the troop-trains went on and fetched a great circle by the Loire; and through open doors in summer weather the men could see among the trees the walls and turrets of the châteaux of Orléans and Blois, Amboise and Tours. Then they turned north to Le Mans and Rouen, left the railway and took to the roads and the Norman woods. French buses bore them forward, buses that were battered and bruised, fore and aft, by frequent collision, and pitted with numerous bullet-holes. The drivers, French civilians, drove at a furious pace, and the column was directed by a French subaltern—with a megaphone—in a small Citroën that travelled more furiously still. This, providentially, was a day of heavy mist and pouring rain, the only bad weather the Division had till its last day came with a more wretched dawning. The long column, grouped far too closely on the open road, was protected from German bombers by cloud-cover and the low sky: sixty miles were covered without mishap.
By cornfield and soaking pasture, by dripping orchard and dales that were full of mist, the Division advanced. Over the hedgerows loomed the spire of a village church, or the shadowy chancel of a ruined abbey. Above a river, pocked with the rain, stood the square keep of a fallen castle, and heavy trees disappeared in cloud over the low hills. Down the weeping roads, drenched and miserable, came refugees fleeing from the north.
Basques and de Gaulle
First flight of the Division—152nd Brigade—arrived in the Haute Forêt d’Eu, overlooking the river Bresle, on May 28th. There the Camerons found the very gallant fragment of a Basque regiment. The Basques had come back from Breda in Holland. They numbered a Captain, four subalterns, and a hundred and fifty other ranks. Addressing them in Blangy, their Captain told them that he proposed to hold the line of the Bresle from Blangy to Gamaches. Because of their heavy casualties in Holland, he said, they were in the happy position of having a very high proportion of mitrailleuses and fusils mitrailleurs, with plenty of ammunition and abundance of wine. They would hold the shallow Bresle for ever, he declared.
The Highland Division Page 2