1,222 were tanks, began threading their way through the Ardennes forest to deliver the decisive blow of the campaign against the weak centre of the French line. Germans joked afterwards that they created ‘the greatest traffic jam in history’ in the woods of Luxembourg and southern Belgium, forcing thousands of tanks, trucks and guns along narrow roads the Allies had deemed unsuitable for moving an army. The advancing columns were vulnerable to air attack, had the French recognised their presence and importance. But they did not. From beginning to end of the struggle, Gamelin and his army commanders directed operations in a miasma of uncertainty, seldom either knowing where the Germans had reached, or guessing whither they were going.
Disproportionate historical attention has focused upon the operations of the small British contingent, and its escape from Dunkirk. The overriding German objective was to defeat the French army, by far the most formidable obstacle to the Wehrmacht. The British role was marginal; especially in the first days, the BEF commanded the attention of only modest German air and ground forces. It is untrue that France’s defence rested chiefly on the frontier fortifications of the Maginot Line: the chief purpose of its bunkers and guns was to liberate men for active operations further north. Scarred by memories of the 1914–18 devastation and slaughter in their own country, the French were bent upon waging war somewhere other than on their own soil. Gamelin planned a decisive battle in Belgium, heedless of the fact that the Germans had other ideas. The French C-in-C’s gravest mistake in the early spring of 1940 had been to move the French Seventh Army to the left of the Allied line in anticipation of the Belgian incursion.
French vanguards crossed into Holland to find that the Dutch army had already retreated too far north-eastward to create a common front, while the Belgian army was falling back in disarray. Gamelin’s formations fought hard in the significant battles that followed in Belgium: although short of anti-aircraft and anti-tank guns, they had some good tanks, notably the Somua S35. In a long slogging match at Hannut between 12 and 14 May, 165 panzers were knocked out, for the loss of 105 French tanks. The French front on the Dyle remained unbroken. But its defenders were soon obliged to fall back, because they found their right flank turned. The Germans, gaining possession of the Hannut battlefield, were able to recover and repair most of their damaged armour.
For the first two days of the campaign, the French high command was oblivious of its peril: a witness described Gamelin’s demeanour as positively jaunty, ‘striding up and down the corridor in his fort, with a pleased and martial air’. Another observer spoke of the C-in-C as ‘in excellent form with a big smile’. Now sixty-seven years old, as Joffre’s chief of staff in 1914 he had been widely perceived as the architect of France’s triumph in the Battle of the Marne. A self-consciously cultured figure, he enjoyed discussing art and philosophy; also intensely political, he was much more popular than his future successor, the splenetic Maxime Weygand. Gamelin’s crippling weakness was an instinct for compromise: he strove to avoid making hard choices. Anticipating ‘une guerre de longue durée’, a protracted confrontation on the frontier of France, he and his subordinates were confounded in May 1940 by events unfolding at a speed beyond their imaginations.
The Germans had committed seventeen divisions to demonstrate against the Maginot Line in the south, twenty-nine to seize Holland and northern Belgium, and forty-five including seven panzer to attack in the centre, then swing north-west towards the Channel coast after crossing the Meuse, cutting off the French and British in Belgium. Only half of the German attacking troops were fully trained, and more than a quarter were reservists aged over forty. The principal burden of defeating the French army rested upon 140,000 men of the panzer and mechanised divisions making the vital thrust across the Meuse. The first German troops reached the river at 1400 on 12 May, having seen scarcely a French soldier since they broke clear of the Ardennes; they had thus far conducted a march rather than an attack. The Meuse line was defended by reservists of Charles Huntziger’s Second Army. On the morning of 13 May, these French troops suffered a devastating bombardment by more than a thousand Luftwaffe aircraft, attacking in waves. This, the first such attack of their war, did little material damage but impacted severely on morale. A soldier wrote: ‘The noise of their engines is already enormous and then there is this extraordinary shrieking which shreds your nerves…And then suddenly there is a rain of bombs…And it goes on and on! Not a French or British plane to be seen. Where the hell are they? My neighbour, a young bloke, is crying.’
A French staff officer at Sedan wrote: ‘The gunners stopped firing and went to ground, the infantry cowered in their trenches, dazed by the crash of bombs and the shriek of the dive-bombers; they had not developed the instinctive reaction of running to their anti-aircraft guns and firing back. Their only concern was to keep their heads well down. Five hours of this nightmare was enough to shatter their nerves.’ Soldiers, like most human beings in all circumstances, react badly to the unexpected. Through the long winter of 1939–40, there had been no attempt to condition the French army to endure such an ordeal as it now experienced.
Most of the command telephone system was destroyed in the air attacks. Early that evening of the 13th, there was a ‘tank panic’ three miles south of Sedan. The local commanding general left his headquarters to investigate wild shouting outside, and found a scene of chaos: ‘A wave of terrified fugitives, gunners and infantry, in cars, on foot, many without arms but dragging kitbags, were hurtling down the road screaming “The tanks are at Bulson.” Some were firing their rifles like lunatics. General Lafontaine and his officers rushed in front of them, trying to reason with them and herd them together, and had lorries put across the road…Officers were mixed in with the men…There was mass hysteria.’ Some 20,000 men decamped in the Bulson panic – six hours before German forces crossed the Meuse. In all probability, their flight was prompted by frightened men mistaking French tanks for enemy ones.
The first German river-crossing parties suffered heavily at the hands of French machine-gunners, but handfuls of determined men reached the western shore in dinghies, then waded through swamps to attack French positions. A sergeant named Walther Rubarth led a group of eleven assault engineers to storm a succession of bunkers with satchel charges and grenades. Six of the Germans were killed, but the survivors opened a breach. Panzergrenadiers ran across an old weir linking an island to the two banks of the Meuse, to establish a foothold on the western side. By 1730, German engineers were bridge-building, while rafts ferried equipment across. Some French soldiers were already retreating, indeed fleeing. At 2300, tanks began clattering across the first completed pontoons: the German sappers’ achievement was as impressive as that of the assault troops.
The French response was painfully sluggish, absurdly complacent. It was suggested to Gen. Huntzinger that the German assault was unfolding like that on Poland. He shrugged theatrically: ‘Poland is Poland…Here we are in France.’ Told of the Meuse crossings, he said: ‘That will mean all the more prisoners.’ Earlier that day, Gamelin’s headquarters declared: ‘[It] is still not possible to determine the zone in which the enemy will make his main attack.’ But that night General Joseph Georges, commanding the north-eastern front, telephoned Gamelin to say that there had been a rather serious upset – ‘un pépin’ – at Sedan. At 0300 on the 14th, a French officer described the scene at Georges’ headquarters: ‘The room was barely half-lit. Major Navereau was repeating in a low voice the information coming in. General Roton, the chief of staff, was stretched out in an armchair. The atmosphere was that of a family in which there has been a death. Georges got up quickly…He was terribly pale. “Our front has been broken at Sedan! There has been a collapse.” He flung himself into a chair and burst into tears.’ An officer described Gen. Georges Blanchard, commander of First Army, ‘sitting in tragic immobility, saying nothing, doing nothing, but just gazing at the map spread on the table between us’.
The decisive moment of the campaign came later that morning. The German crossing of the Meuse need not have been calamitous, had it been reversed by a swift counter-attack. But French troops assembled lethargically, then advanced hesitantly and piecemeal. Attacks by 152 bombers and 250 fighters of the RAF and the French air force failed to damage the German bridges, while costing heavy losses – thirty-one of seventy-one British bombers failed to return. F/Lt. Bill Simpson’s
