War and Game

Despite French General Georges’s tears, the German bridgeheads need not in themselves have been catastrophic. The real failure on the French side was not so much allowing the crossing to occur as being unable to mount an effective counter-attack. The French doctrine of ‘methodical battle’ proved quite inadequate to respond to the speed of warfare as the Germans were practising it.

At Sedan a counter-attack, which should have taken place on the evening of 13 May, when the German bridgehead was still extremely vulnerable, was fatally delayed until the next morning. At 7 p.m. on 13 May two infantry regiments and two battalions of light tanks had been made available to General Lafontaine of the 55DI to mount a counter-attack. Only nine hours later did he issue the order for the counter-attack to go ahead. Lafontaine, schooled in the doctrine of colmatage and the careful preparation of combined infantry and artillery response, was reluctant to send his forces in too fast. His ability to do so was compromised by faulty communications and by the difficulties of moving troops forward along roads clogged with retreating soldiers. His tanks were only able to crawl forward. The delay was disastrous. All this time the Germans were feverishly transporting tanks over the river and then moving them ahead immediately.

When the French tank finally attacked at dawn, they were initially successful until German tanks began to arrive in sufficient quantity to overwhelm them. Most of the light French tanks were destroyed. After this, the 55DI, which had already been badly mauled and demoralized on the previous day, ceased to function as a fighting force. The collapse of the 55DI had a terrible effect on the morale of its neighbouring division, the 71DI, also made up of B-Series reservists. The divisional commander of the 71DI, General Baudet, had moved his command post back and lost contact with his troops. Lacking any clear orders and demoralized by rumours about the collapse of the 55DI, many of the troops fled. By the end of 14 May the 71DI had more or less disintegrated without ever seeing action.

One remarkable feature of the battle had been the almost complete absence of the Allies in the air (apart from two bombing raids around Houx). This was due partly, of course, to their inferiority in the air, but also to the fact that they had concentrated their limited air resources in the wrong place—in central and northern Belgium. On 13 May, Air Chief Marshal Barratt, in charge of the British air force in France, had felt it necessary to rest his forces for a day after the heavy losses they had incurred in Holland and Belgium. Once the Allies had realized their mistake, they did send planes to Sedan at dawn on 14 May to attack the German bridges over the river. About 152 bombers and 250 fighters concentrated over Sedan, suffering 11 per cent losses. The small size of the target made their task difficult, and the effectiveness of the operation was reduced by sending in the planes in small groups of 10 to 20. Of 71 British bombers only 41 returned. According to the official RAF history, ‘[N]o higher rate of loss in an operation has ever been experienced by the Royal Air Force.’25 In the afternoon, for lack of any other bombers, the French were reduced to sending in obsolete Amiot 43 bombers, which were entirely unsuitable for operations of this type and also suffered heavy casualties.

On 14 May there was nothing the air force could do to retrieve the situation: all would depend on the armoured reserves. As we have seen, on 11 May Georges had begun sending forces to reinforce the Second Army, among them the 3rd DIM and 3rd DCR. Grouped together into the XXI Corps, under the command of General Flavigny, one of France’s most experienced leaders of mechanized operations, these units were dispatched on the evening of 13 May towards the left flank of the Second Army to prepare a counterattack. To the south of Sedan lies a ridge on which is situated the Mont-Dieu wood and the village of Stonne. This position was important because it controlled the route south into the centre of France. In fact, although the French did not know this, Guderian, instead of pushing forward to secure this ridge, had decided immediately to pivot two of his Panzer divisions to the west and drive them deep into French territory, leaving only the 10th Panzer Division to consolidate the position. His superior, Kleist, had initially opposed this strategy as too risky, because it exposed his flank to a counterattack from the south. Guderian’s plan offered a real opportunity for the DCR to cause the Germans difficulty.

The deployment of the 3rd DCR proved, however, very disappointing. Formed only on 20 March 1940, it had had little time to train, was short of key equipment (tracked fuel tankers, anti-tank batteries, radios) and had never yet manoeuvred as a division. Having only just arrived from Châlons, where the division had been stationed in reserve, the tanks needed to refuel. For all these reasons, the commander of the DCR, General Brocard, did not consider that he would be ready to attack before 15 May, while Flavigny wanted him to move in on the morning of 14 May. Finally they settled on the afternoon of 14 May, but further delays intervened. Flavigny was now rapidly losing confidence in Brocard’s ability to mount a rapid attack, and he decided against launching the operation on that day. Instead he ordered Brocard to disperse his tanks in ‘pockets’ along a 12-mile front west of the River Bar to Stonne. Thus, the French squandered the best chance of checking Guderian before he broke out of his bridgehead.

On the next morning (15 May), there was fierce fighting at Stonne between a company of B1 tanks from the 3rd DCR and tanks from the 10th Panzer Division. But before the French could launch a concerted counterattack, to reassemble the tanks that had been dispersed on the previous evening and refuel those that had participated in the fighting during the morning. Eventually the long-awaited counterattack fizzled out as a raid by a tank battalion in the evening while many tanks were still idling uselessly, away from the action. Further fighting took place at Stonne on 16 May and subsequent days. The French tanks performed well, and the village changed hands several times. Unfortunately, this battle had become irrelevant, since Guderian was already pushing north-westwards into France. The caution and hesitation of Flavigny and Brocard, and the impetuosity and boldness of Guderian perfectly encapsulated the difference between the French and the Germans in 1940.

Another chance was missed by the 1st DCR further north on 14 May, while Rommel’s bridgehead was still vulnerable as he waited for the bulk of his forces to cross the river. A counter-attack was launched on that day by the 4th North African Division, but this would have been more effective in conjunction with the 1st DCR. Originally assigned to the reserve of the First Army, this unit had been dispatched on 10 May towards Charleroi. This meant that on 13 May its tanks were only 40 km north of Rommel’s bridgehead, but Billotte, still unsure where the main German attack was coming, hesitated to order them south. Not until the early morning of 14 May was the DCR instructed to head for the rear of Corap’s army. There were delays in transmitting this order, and when the division did set off at 1 p.m., its progress was slowed by columns of refugees clogging the roads. On the next morning the DCR’s commander, General Bruneau, was still not ready to attack because his tanks needed to refuel. He had made the mistake of placing his fuel tankers at the rear of his columns. Delayed by the chaos on the roads, they took several hours to arrive. Moving south-west out of the bridgehead, Rommel’s troops came upon two battalions of B1 tanks, which were refuelling. Some confused fighting ensued. If the bulk of the French tanks had been ready, they could have posed a serious challenge to Rommel. Instead he was able to continue his progress, leaving the 7th Panzer Division to deal with the rest of the French tanks. In the afternoon, there was fierce fighting between the Panzers and the French tanks whose refuelling was now complete. Although about 100 German tanks were knocked out, the French also suffered heavy losses because their tanks had been thrown in piecemeal. By the end of the day the DCR had been more or less wiped out.

By now Corap’s Ninth Army was in a state of total disintegration, with Rommel threatening his northern flank and Guderian his southern one. In the early hours of 15 May, Corap was granted his request to abandon the line of the Meuse and fall back on a line running roughly north–south from Charleroi to Rethel. But this was a position with no natural defences and the chaos of implementing the withdrawal merely hastened the collapse of Corap’s troops.

The most remarkable German advance on 15 May was made not by Rommel or Guderian, but by Reinhardt from the third bridgehead at Monthermé. For two days the French defenders had successfully contained him, but on the morning of 15 May he finally broke through. The penetrations by Rommel and Guderian on either side had fatally weakened the French centre. In Alistair Horne’s vivid description, Huntziger had opened up one sluice gate on 14 May and Corap another the next day: ‘[T]hrough the pair of them the flood was about to burst into France.’ 27 Nothing now lay in Reinhardt’s path. The problem, as we have seen, was that once Georges had identified a threat to the Ardennes, he had initially thought that the danger lay on Huntziger’s right flank, and moved his reserves to deal with this eventuality. This caused him to neglect the possibility of a danger to Huntziger’s left flank, that is of a breach opening up between the Second and Ninth Armies. When he became belatedly aware of this possibility, he had decided to assemble a force (soon dubbed the Sixth Army) under General Touchon to plug (colmater) the gap and attack the flanks of the German advance.

It proved difficult to assemble Touchon’s troops fast enough. One of the units assigned to him was the 2nd DCR. Early on 14 May, it had been ordered to move from Châlons, where it was stationed in reserve, to Charleroi in order to join the counterattack against Rommel. Before the tanks had set off, this order was countermanded once it was clear that they would not be able to reach Charleroi fast enough. This mission was given to the 1st DCR, while the 2nd DCR was ordered to head for the Signy-l’Abbaye area for a counterattack against the central German bridgehead. Unfortunately, its accompanying wheeled vehicles had already set off for Charleroi and had to be redirected in mid-morning. They were slowed down by troops fleeing from the east. Meanwhile the tanks were being loaded on trains for transportation to Hirson, which was a time-consuming operation. The result was that on 15 May the units of the 2nd DCR were widely dispersed around the region lying between the Oise and Aisne rivers. Some tanks were being unloaded; others were still on the trains; the wheeled vehicles were still on the move. As Reinhardt’s Panzers moved west, they passed unwittingly through the centre of the area in which the tanks were being unloaded from the trains. The 2nd DCR ended the day scattered uselessly on both flanks of Reinhardt’s thrust—the tanks mainly to the north and most of the wheeled vehicles and supporting artillery to the south. Of the abortive counterattacks by the three DCRs, this unit’s effort had proved most futile.

By 4.00 p.m. on 15 May Reinhardt, reaching Montcornet, had covered about 60 km, meeting little opposition. By the end of that day Touchon recognized that there was nothing he could do to plug the gap, since Reinhardt’s troops were already west of the point where he had intended to position his forces. He therefore ordered his army to fall south below the River Aisne. Nothing now lay between the Germans and the Channel.

On the next day (16 May), it was Rommel’s turn to take the lead. In one of the most daring exploits of the campaign, he surged forward with two tank battalions ahead of the bulk of his forces. Moving through the day and the night, and circumventing larger agglomerations in order not to slow himself down, he stopped only when reaching Le Cateau at 6 a.m. on 17 May. He had covered about 110 km. Pushing so exposed a force so far ahead of the infantry and artillery was both unconventional and dangerous, but its very audacity only served to demoralize the French and further disorganize their lines. Rommel’s advance was less a battle than a moppingup operation as French troops moving forward to reinforce the line were stunned to find themselves encountering German forces so far west. By 16 May the three German bridgeheads across the Meuse formed one compact mass, which measured about 95 km at its widest point. This was the situation when Churchill arrived in Paris on 16 May for his crisis meeting with Reynaud.