South of Louvain two panzer divisions, supported by waves of Junkers Ju 87s—“Stuka” dive-bombers—mounted an even stronger attack on the grounds of an agricultural school at Gembloux. Instantly General Jean-Georges-Maurice Blanchard ordered a counterattack by the French First Army. These were crack troops, descendants of the poilus whose valor, inspired by the tricolor and their fierce national anthem, had awed Europe in the century and a half since the French Revolution.
They drove the Germans back and back, and Gamelin felt vindicated. This, he said, proved that he had anticipated the German schwerpunkt; the Nazis had come where he expected them to come, and the Allied Line was unbroken. The British were less sure. The RAF had not been caught on the ground, but it had been battered in the air. On Sunday, May 12, Air Chief Marshal Sir Cyril Newall reported “undue losses of medium bombers in relation to the results attained,” and on Monday, when the Chiefs of Staff committee met in Admiralty House, with Churchill in the chair for the first time as minister of defence, the consensus was that “it was not yet certain” where the enemy’s main effort was to be made. General Ironside, Chief of the Imperial Staff, believed the Germans might be consolidating their position on this front before mounting an offense elsewhere, possibly “an intensive air attack in Great Britain.” Churchill thought the situation “far from satisfactory.” One officer noticed an ominous sign. The Luftwaffe bombers, he pointed out, had achieved air superiority over the northern battlefield, yet they were leaving columns of French reinforcements marching to the front unmolested. Why should the Germans want more Allied troops on this front?26
No one, not even Pétain, had declared the Ardennes Forest to be absolutely impenetrable, though his error was equally egregious. What he had said was that the Ardennes was “impassable to strong forces.” In fact it was good tank country, with many fields and trails. The French should have known that—they had held maneuvers there in 1939. The forest’s trees were actually an asset, serving to camouflage armor and troop movements from aerial surveillance.
The German strategy in 1940 could be summed up in the code word by which the Wehrmacht general staff in Zossen anointed the operation: “Sichelschnitt,” or “scythe cut.” Here, as in Poland, the scythe would exploit the Reich’s new concept of warfare: deep penetration of enemy territory by mobile armored forces, with infantry following. In planning his drive, Hitler had divided his forces into three army groups. The one that had struck in the Low Countries comprised thirty divisions, including three panzer divisions. A second, tying down the Maginot Line, in the west, was given nineteen divisions. The great blow would be delivered in the center by the third: forty-five divisions, including seven panzer divisions, commanded by Gerd von Rundstedt. This juggernaut would plunge through Luxembourg and the Ardennes, and vault over the Meuse River north and south of Sedan, some 70 miles southwest of Liège, on the east bank of the Meuse and a dozen miles inside France. That would put the main German force at a point roughly 125 miles from Paris and 175 miles from the Channel ports of Calais, Gravelines, and Dunkirk. The German high command knew the Allies were vulnerable in the Sedan sector; the line was thinly held by two French armies of older, poorly trained, and ill-equipped married men.
The French high command had estimated that it would take at least fifteen days for any strong enemy force to negotiate the thickets and deep wooded ravines of the Ardennes. The Germans, who had rehearsed elaborately in the Black Forest, did it in two, sweeping Belgian infantrymen before them. To the horror of the unprepared French defenders in the vicinity of Sedan, on Sunday the twelfth, the mechanized spearhead of Rundstedt’s seven panzer divisions—1,800 tanks, 17,000 other vehicles, and 98,000 men—appeared on the east bank of the Meuse. The answer to the question of why the Luftwaffe had allowed French reinforcements to drift northward toward Holland had arrived with terrible certainty: the real schwerpunkt was at Sedan.
The Meuse, the Nazis had known, would be their most forbidding obstacle. It was narrow and swift at this point; confronting the attackers on the far bank were well-placed batteries of heavy artillery. That would have sufficed in 1918, but this was a different war. On Monday, Rundstedt silenced every French field piece, every howitzer, by skillful use of tactical air—Stukas and other low-level bombers—which so terrorized the gunners that they abandoned their cannons. Nazi rubber boats reached the opposite shore unmolested; beachheads were established north and south of Sedan; pontoon bridges spanned the Meuse, then heavy bridges, and, finally, on Tuesday morning, lumbering and growling, came the Nazi tanks. By noon on Tuesday, May 14, the Germans had established a formidable pocket on French soil, three miles wide and two miles deep.
It was time, and past time, for a French counterattack. At 5:30 P.M. on the thirteenth, orders were issued, and a strong force of French tanks advanced, backed by the infantry of the 55th Division. History’s first great battle of mechanized armor seemed imminent. The French position was far from hopeless. The German flank was exposed to the French tanks, and not all the panzers, artillery, and infantry were across the Meuse and in position. French tanks were well armored; many carried 75mm cannon, heavier than the guns on many German tanks. Unfortunately, the French chose not to mass their tanks for a steel-fisted assault, instead dispersing them along too broad a front. More unfortunately, the Conseil Supérieur de la Guerre, having determined that armor was to be used only in support of infantry, had forbidden the installation of radios in their turrets. The French drivers, unable to communicate with one another, could not coordinate an assault. The consequence was disastrous. Within two hours of the battle opening on the fourteenth, the panzers had destroyed fifty French tanks; the rest, a few dozen, fled.
That was the small disaster. The great disaster began sometime between 6:00 and 7:00 P.M., when, according to the French corps commander, “the situation evolved with a disconcerting rapidity toward catastrophe.” Bluntly put, the defenders panicked. Men threw down their rifles and ran, crowding the roads, and they did not stop until they had reached Reims, sixty miles away. Few officers tried to discourage them. One who did later recalled their response. “Colonel,” they said, “we want to go home, back to our little jobs (nos petit boulots). There’s no use trying to fight. There’s nothing we can do. We’re lost! We’ve been betrayed!”27
In a well-disciplined army they would have been shot on the spot. But everyone, officers and men, seemed infected with the fear, which spread. “The roof fell in,” wrote William L. Shirer. One regiment after another broke, until the entire Ninth Army—some two hundred thousand men—ceased to exist. A dazed divisional commander wandered into the army’s headquarters to report: “Of my division I fear I am the only one left.” The Second Army, on the right flank of the Ninth, fell back. Meantime the Germans, who were arriving in great numbers, began to capture them. Charles de Gaulle, moving up to take command of a brigade, was shocked to see “many soldiers who had lost their weapons…. Caught up, as they fled, by the enemy’s mechanized detachments, they had been ordered to throw away their arms and make off to the south so as not to clutter up the roads. ‘We haven’t time,’ they had been told, ‘to take you prisoners!’ ”28
The French defensive line was now breached by a hole sixty miles wide, and German armor, followed by infantry, was streaming through it. Incredibly, no one in Paris knew what was happening. Field commanders, ashamed to report the truth, played down the debacle, assuring General Georges’ headquarters that everything was under control, and hour by hour Georges relayed their optimism to Gamelin in Vincennes. As late as Wednesday, when the Battle of the Meuse was over and the French hopelessly routed, Gamelin’s communiqué reported: “To sum up, the day of May 15 seems to show a lessening in the intensity of enemy action…. Our front, which was ‘shaken’ (‘ébranlé’) between Namur and the region west of Montmédy, is reestablishing itself little by little.”
One man knew better. It says much about France’s military establishment that the first Parisian to learn the truth was a civilian:
Paul Reynaud. The premier had studied the possibilities of tank warfare, and he had spies in the army, informers who sent him word of what was actually happening. At 5:45 P.M. on Tuesday, May 14, the fifth day of the enemy offensive, he wired Churchill: “The situation is indeed very serious. Germany is trying to deal us a fatal blow in the direction of Paris. The German army has broken through our fortified lines south of Sedan…. Between Sedan and Paris there are no defenses comparable with those in the line, which we must restore at almost any cost.” He then asked for ten more Royal Air Force squadrons “immediately.”29
The prime minister told Ironside to check this; the CIGS (Chief of the Imperial General Staff) sent a liaison officer “to find out what the real situation is.” Later in the day Ironside told Churchill, “We could get nothing out of” either Gamelin or Georges. Ironside suggested that perhaps Reynaud was being “a little hysterical.” But the French premier knew he was right. At seven o’clock the next morning he woke Churchill with an anguished telephone call. “We have been defeated!” he cried in English. “We are beaten! We have lost the battle!” The P.M., his mind still mired in the trenches of 1914–1918, said, “Surely it can’t have happened so soon!” As Churchill recalled afterward, Reynaud replied, “The front is broken near Sedan; they are pouring through in great numbers with tanks and armored cars.” Churchill told him, “All experience shows that the offensive will come to an end after a while.” Within five or six days, he said, the enemy would have to halt for supplies; that would be the moment for a counterattack. But the premier repeated, “We are defeated; we have lost the battle.” Churchill said he was willing to come over “and have a talk.”30
Ringing up Ironside, the prime minister repeated the conversation, commenting that Reynaud had seemed “thoroughly demoralized.” Ironside told him that “we have no extra demands from Gamelin or Georges, both of whom are calm, though they both consider the situation serious.” The P.M. then called Georges, an old friend. Georges, quite cool, reported that the breach at Sedan was “being plugged.” But late that afternoon Reynaud sent another message: “Last week we lost the battle. The way to Paris lies open. Send all the troops and planes you can.” Churchill sent four squadrons of fighters, then decided it was “imperative to go to Paris.” At 3:00 P.M. on May 16 he took off in an unarmed Flamingo, a civilian passenger plane, accompanied by General Ismay, General Sir John Dill, and Inspector Walter Thompson of Scotland Yard, a fifty-year-old ex-copper who had served as Churchill’s bodyguard a decade earlier and had been called out of retirement to again protect the Great Man.
Over the French coast the prime minister peered down, and Thompson saw his face go gray. Churchill was looking, for the first time, at the war’s refugees. There were now over seven million of them fleeing from the Germans, swarming down the highways, shuffling, exhausted, aching from the strain of heavy loads on their backs. No one had told them to evacuate the battlefields; they were evacuating themselves. Barns, sheds, and garages had disgorged into throughways an extraordinary collection of vehicles: farm carts, trucks, horse-drawn carts, hay wagons, and ancient automobiles saddled with sagging loads of mattresses, kitchen utensils, family treasures, and bric-a-brac. Cars bombed by the Luftwaffe stood in flames, and here and there among straggling vagabonds lay corpses of children and the very old, who, unable to keep up, had been machine-gunned by Nazi pilots who saw panic as an ally of their comrades in the Wehrmacht.31
In their memoirs the generals on both sides would complain about the obstacles these people created, but the refugees looked at it differently, and Churchill saw it their way. The great tragedy was coming into focus for Churchill. He was also beginning to understand Reynaud’s alarm. He later wrote: “Not having had access to official information for so many years, I did not comprehend the revolution effected since the last war by the incursion of a mass of fast-moving heavy armour.” This Nazi drive would not have to pause for supplies; as de Gaulle had foreseen, the panzers were filling their tanks at the filling stations of northern France.32
The prime minister’s Flamingo landed at Le Bourget, and as they alighted, Ismay felt “an unmistakable atmosphere of depression.” Events were moving swiftly in Paris. Gamelin foresaw the end. William Bullitt, the American ambassador, had been with Daladier when the généralissime called to break the news. He had told them: “It means the destruction of the French army. Between Laon and Paris I do not have a single corps at my disposal.” The panic had reached the French capital. Parisians realized that there were an extraordinary number of automobiles with Belgian license plates on the streets “just passing through,” the drivers told them; “the Boche is right behind us.” Everyone seemed to know that Gamelin had told the highest officials of the republic, “Je ne répons plus de rien” (“I am no longer responsible for anything”).33
At the Quai d’Orsay Reynaud, Daladier, and Gamelin awaited the British in a large room looking out on a garden “which,” Ismay wrote, “had appeared so lovely and well-kept on my last visit, but which was now disfigured with clusters of bonfires.” The French were burning their official papers. This was Churchill’s first meeting as a member of the Allied Supreme War Council, and Ismay was “interested to see how he handled the situation.”
He dominated the proceedings from the moment he entered the room. There was no interpreter, and he spoke throughout in French. His idiom was not always correct, and his vocabulary was not equal to translating with exactitude all the words that he required. But no one could have been in any doubt as to his meaning.34
He began by telling them that although their plight was grave, this was not the first time they had been in a crisis together; the Ludendorff offensives of early 1918 had nearly destroyed them and their ally, the United States. He was confident that they would survive this one. Then he asked for a briefing. Gamelin gave it. Stepping up to a map on an easel, he talked for five minutes, describing the Germans’ breakthrough. He said they were advancing with unprecedented speed. Their intentions were unknown; they could reach the coast or turn on Paris. At the end Churchill slapped him heartily on the shoulder—the general winced—and told him that this would become known as “the Battle of the Bulge.” (“Boogle” was the closest he could come to this.) Then he asked him where his strategic reserve was: “Où est la masse de manoeuvre?” Gamelin shook his head and replied: “Aucune.” He had none.
There was a long pause while Churchill, speechless, stared absently at the elderly men carrying wheelbarrows of documents to the fires. No strategic reserve. It had never occurred to him that commanders defending five hundred miles of engaged front would have left themselves without reserves; no one could defend with certainty so wide a front, but when the enemy broke the line, the defenders should have a mass of divisions ready to counterattack. He was, he wrote, “dumbfounded.”35
After the war it was Churchill’s recollection, confirmed by Ismay, that he did not argue strategy with Reynaud, Daladier, and Gamelin. “There couldn’t have been a disagreement,” he said. “We didn’t know enough about the situation to disagree.” However, the French notes on this point are quite detailed. According to them, Churchill vigorously opposed ordering a general retreat by the Allied troops in Belgium. This, the P.M. said, was a time to “hold fast.” He did not believe the panzer breakthrough was “a real invasion.” As long as the tanks were “not supported by infantry units,” they were merely “little flags stuck on the map,” because they would be “unable to support themselves or to refuel.” The French records quote him as telling them, “I refuse to see in this spectacular raid of the German tanks a real invasion.”36
Churchill may not have argued strategy that day, but he proposed one—to hold fast—and it was unrealistic. It was characteristic of him that he always approved of attacks, and seldom retreats, even when, as here, failure to withdraw would mean encirclement and annihilation. Reynaud silenced him by pointing out that all the field commanders, including Lord Gort, believed the French should fall back.37
Churchill was, however, thoroughly justified in asking Gamelin when and where he proposed to attack the flanks of the German bulge. The généralissime’s dismaying, unresponsive reply was “inferiority of numbers, inferiority of equipment, inferiority of method,” followed by a hopeless shrug of the shoulders. The généralissime saw only one hope of salvation: the commitment of six more RAF squadrons to the battle. It was, he said, the only way to stop the panzers.
Churchill vigorously replied that tanks should be the target of artillery, not of fighter planes; fighters should “cleanse the skies” (“nett le ciel”) over the battle. Bombing the Meuse bridges was not a proper job for the RAF; nevertheless they had attempted to do it, at great risk, and had lost thirty-six aircraft. “You can replace bridges,” he said, “but not fighters.” He had just sent four more squadrons, forty-eight planes, and it was vital that Britain’s metropolitan air force be available to command the air over Britain in order to protect defense factories from the Luftwaffe. Britain had only a limited number of squadrons in England, and, he said, “We must conserve them.” He did not think another six squadrons would “make the difference.”
Daladier replied, “The French believe the contrary.” The discussion became acrimonious. Gamelin had touched a vital nerve. Both sides were, to a degree, disingenuous. What the French really believed was that the British should throw everything they had into the struggle for France, and that if the Allied cause were to lose, both countries should go down together. The British believed that if France went down—and they were beginning to contemplate that possibility—Britain and the Empire should go on alone. That was why Air Chief Marshal Sir Hugh Dowding had put himself on record as “absolutely opposed to parting with a single additional Hurricane.”
At the British embassy that evening, the prime minister weighed the French appeal. He should have rejected it, but his sympathy for them outweighed his reason, and he wired the War Cabinet that they should give this “last chance to the French Army to rally its bravery and strength. It would not be good historically if their requests were denied and their ruin resulted.” The War Cabinet was apprehensive, but it was difficult to say no to the P.M. They reluctantly agreed, provided the Hurricanes returned to English bases each night. In the interests of security this decision was sent to Ismay, a veteran of the Indian army, in Hindi—“Han,” for “yes.”38