Knights of our times .
. . Tank units, mobile, fast and hard hitting, and directed by wireless from
headquarters, attack the enemy. This armoured machine paves the way to victory,
flattening and crushing all obstacles and spitting out destruction.
Signal, 1940
Although Britain and France had declared war on Germany in
September 1939, nothing much happened on the Western Front until the Germans
invaded France in May 1940. This was the period known to the Germans as the
Sitzkrieg (sit-down war) during which time both sides faced each other across
the frontier, the Allies waiting for the Germans to make the first move. The
Germans for their part were surprised that the French had not attacked while
the bulk of the Wehrmacht was engaged in Poland. Indeed not only had the
Germans stripped the West of all of their tanks and almost all of their
infantry, they had no defence line worthy of the name to delay any French
thrust. But the French chose instead to renege on their military pact with
Poland and do nothing to help their ally.
The French did launch a half-hearted attack from the Saar
with nine divisions on 9 September, in what was to be the only major French
offensive of the war. But these divisions were ordered to halt after just three
days and were withdrawn completely by early October, largely due to an
unwillingness to provoke the Germans. The Western Front then settled into a
period of prolonged inactivity, broken only by occasional artillery duels and
the continual patrols mounted by each side to discover the strengths and
dispositions of the other. Activity in the air was limited to reconnaissance
and leaflet dropping, both sides wary of encouraging retaliation on civilian
centres.
At least part of the reason for French inactivity can be
attributed to their Commander-in-Chief, the 68-year-old General Gamelin, a
relic of the First World War with an over-inflated reputation. He seemed to
regard his real enemy to be not the Germans, but his own government. Gamelin
set up headquarters in a thirteenth-century castle without radio or telephone
communication and admitted it normally took forty-eight hours for his orders to
reach the front. He was also on poor terms with his chief of staff. Clearly the
French High Command was neither technically nor psychologically prepared for
the pace of the battle ahead.
The Germans had used the winter of 1939–40 to convert the
four Leichte divisions to full panzer status, thus forming the 6th, 7th, 8th
and 9th panzer divisions. The general shortage of tanks meant that once upgraded,
they were equipped with only one tank regiment whereas the earlier divisions
all had two and about half of the 220 tanks each of these new divisions
contained were Czech-built. There were now ten panzer divisions. The process of
replacing the obsolete Pz Is and IIs with the new Pz IIIs and IVs was also
accelerated, but the low numbers of tanks being produced meant that relatively
little progress had been made on this by May 1940.
On 1 March 1940 Hitler issued a directive for the occupation
of Norway and Denmark which he codenamed Fall Wesserubung. It was a daring
operation, devised from a Baedecker guide by General Nikolaus von Falkenhorst
and the Kriegsmarine (German Navy) staff and conducted largely by naval forces
landing infantry at the main ports. The attack was launched on 9 April and
Denmark capitulated almost immediately with Norway subdued by early May.
Although the Panzerwaffe played only a very minor role in the campaign, it is
still worthy of a mention.
A special tank battalion, Panzer Abteilung zur besonderer
Vervendung 40, was formed for use in Norway by taking one company each from the
4th, 5th and 6th panzer divisions. Two of these companies were initially used
in Denmark and the bulk of the third was lost at sea when its transport went
down. An experimental formation called Panzerzug Horstmann was also dispatched
to Norway, comprising three Neubaufahrzeug Panzerkampfwagen VI – these were
prototypes sent with the specific intention of convincing the Allies that the
Germans already possessed heavy tanks. With this purpose in mind, staged
propaganda photographs were taken of the three tanks leaving the harbour.
Whether the ruse worked or not must remain a matter of conjecture, as before
the campaign had ended Hitler had struck in the West.
The total number of German tanks used in the northern
campaign never exceeded fifty and was composed largely of obsolete Panzer Is
and IIs. Despite the limited nature of the Panzerwaffe’s participation in the
Norwegian campaign, the Germans learned some valuable lessons. The prototype
heavy tanks were found to be suitable only for supporting infantry operations
and never went into production. Indeed one proved so heavy it bogged down at a
fjord crossing and had to be destroyed by army engineers – it was replaced with
a sheet-steel mock-up in order to maintain the subterfuge. Experience in
dealing with mountainous terrain was studied and put to good use when the
panzers struck in the Balkans a year later.
The Allies, while slow to honour their pact with Poland, had
devised a plan to counter the likely German assault on France. The plan,
codenamed Plan D after the River Dyle, was to advance into Belgium to meet the
invading Germans there. It was based on two simple premises: an expectation
that the Germans would attack along the lines of the famous von Schlieffen plan
which had come within an ace of success in 1914 and that the Allied southern
front was adequately covered by the supposedly impassable Ardennes forest and
the Maginot line fortifications. A German attack across the plain of Flanders
offered ready access to France’s greatest prizes, Paris and the industrial
region near the Belgian border. To counter this expected revival of Schlieffen,
the Allied plan called for a wheel-like advance along the Belgian border to
establish a defensive line along the rivers Dyle and Meuse. The overall
objective of Plan D was to gain time, not outright victory. The Allies aimed
for a battlefield deadlock until their own armament production got into full
swing and they could then launch a massive offensive of their own in late 1940
or early 1941.
The French Seventh Army was allocated the bulk of motorised
units as it was expected to advance along the coast, at the rim of the
imaginary wheel, and hence had the farthest to travel. The ten motorised
infantry divisions of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) occupied the centre
of the front with the French First Army, to their south. Corap’s French Ninth
Army was at the hub of the wheel and was composed of second-rate reservists and
older troops. Their advance was to be the shortest as these troops were not up
to the rigours of the long forced marches expected of their northern comrades.
Little or no consultation was taken with the Belgian
military, as the Belgians, keen to maintain a neutral stance, did not want to
provoke the Germans with overtly belligerent behaviour – an attitude hard to
reconcile with the fact that all her defences, including the fortress of Eben
Emael, pointed toward the Reich. As a result no common defence plan, central
command or framework for co-operation was agreed on for use in the event of a
German attack. This unhelpful Belgian attitude to their own allies hampered the
successful prosecution of Plan D, as the twenty-two Belgian divisions would be badly
missed if they were destroyed in the initial stages of a German attack.
The French for their part had invested a lot of money and
effort in the Maginot Line, the series of underground fortifications built
along the central part of her north-eastern frontier during the 1930s. These
forts were the physical manifestation of the French static warfare mentality.
It is often said that generals always expect the next war to be fought in the
same way as the last one and in the case of the French, this was certainly
true. They anticipated the battle ahead would be First World War, Mark II with
a deadlock on the battlefield forcing both sides to dig into defensive
positions like the trenches of 1914–18. They seemed to have forgotten that
Napoleon had once said that the side that stays within its fortifications is
beaten.
Each of the large forts was the equivalent of a two-storey
building sunken into the ground with only the big guns on its roof visible.
They were designed to be self-sufficient and indestructible, the larger ones
capable of housing up to 1,000 defenders for a prolonged period. Some were
interconnected by tunnels and the guns were given a good range of fire, even
capable of firing at neighbouring forts if they fell into enemy hands. This
impressive piece of engineering formed a formidable obstacle stretching along
the French border from Luxembourg to Switzerland. However it must be stressed
that large parts of the line were less well defended and consisted of minor
secondary works.
There was only one problem with the Maginot Line: it was
clearly in the wrong place. No invader of France had ever followed the route it
defended – from the time of the Romans they had always come further north. The
Germans had come through Belgium in the First World War and even the Allies
expected them to do so again in the coming attack. Why then was the Maginot
Line not extended as far as the Channel coast?
The main reasons were political. For one thing, building a
defensive line between Belgium and France would mean abandoning the Belgians to
their fate. If it had been built, it would have left the Belgians to fight the
initial German advance alone, while the Allies stood by and watched the Belgian
Army’s inevitable destruction from behind their defensive walls. More importantly,
Allied military thinking was based on the notion of advancing into Belgium to
meet the Germans there, thus keeping the fighting off French soil altogether.
There were also the peacetime considerations of the detrimental effect such a
barrier would have on trade, industry and communications.
Once war broke out, the French did begin work on extending
the defensive line to the sea, but it was much too late by then and it didn’t
take the panzers long to breach these flimsy westward extensions when they met
them in May 1940. In the end the Maginot Line proved more of a propaganda
success than a military one. One commentator later stated that the Maginot Line
did prove a formidable barrier, not to the Germans but to ‘French understanding
of modern war’.
In September 1939, Hitler had ordered his army to produce a
plan for the conquest of France. The work was allocated to the planning staff
of the OKH (Oberkommando das Heer – Army High Command) led by Generaloberst
Franz Halder, Chief of the General Staff. The bureaucratic, pince-nez-wearing
Halder, a typical product of the German General Staff, looked and behaved more
like a pedantic school-master than a soldier. This colourless functionary had
no real faith in the possibility of a successful Western offensive, and aided
(or hindered) by a 58-page memo from Hitler, the OKH under Halder’s guidance
produced an unambitious plan which bore some resemblance to the Schlieffen Plan
of 1914, but fell far short of promising the quick and decisive victory Hitler
needed in France.
The plan proposed a strong right hook across Holland and
Belgium led by Generaloberst Fedor von Bock’s Army Group B. Holland would be
overrun by Armee-Abteilung N (an army detachment – this was a small army made
up of two or three army corps) while the three armies under von Bock were
expected to engage and defeat the Allied armies in Belgium somewhere in the
region of Liege. For this task Bock’s Army Group was to receive eight of the
ten panzer divisions and over half of the available forces in the West. At the
same time Army Group A under Generaloberst Gerd von Rundstedt was to cover the
southern flank of these operations using two armies and a single panzer
division, but with little hope of getting much farther than the Meuse. Army
Group C, commanded by Generaloberst Ritter von Leeb, was left to hold the
Siegfried Line. Although the attack on Holland was repeatedly dropped and
re-included over the coming months, the plan in essence remained the same.
Neither Hitler nor his army chiefs had any great faith in
the ‘Fall Gelb’ (Case Yellow) plan. If the Germans failed to defeat the Allies
outright in Belgium, all they could then hope for was to push them back to the
Somme, at the same time aiming to seize as much of the Channel coast as
possible for future operations by the Luftwaffe and Kriegsmarine. What was to
happen after that was unclear, but it looked as if the battle would then settle
into a protracted First World War style war of attrition, which the Germans
knew from experience they couldn’t win. Victory had to be quick if war in the
West was to be viable.
The launch of Fall Gelb was postponed nearly thirty times,
generally caused by poor weather prospects, but one wonders how much Hitler’s
basic dislike of the plan influenced these postponements. In the months before
the attack he constantly sought modifications and improvements. Finally a new
and radical plan came to his attention and he enthusiastically adopted that
instead.
In October 1939 the Fall Gelb plan fell into the hands of
General von Manstein, now Chief of Staff to Army Group A under his old boss,
von Rundstedt, and he wasn’t at all impressed. Manstein, who had ably proven
his own planning credentials during the Polish campaign, remarked in his
memoirs that he felt deep disgust that the General Staff could do no better
than try an old formula, and even then on a less ambitious scale: ‘I found it
humiliating, to say the least, that our generation could do nothing better than
repeat an old recipe, even when this was the product of a man like Schlieffen.’
By the end of the month he had formulated an entirely different plan.
Manstein was of the opinion that what was required was a
decisive result from the campaign, not merely grabbing as much of Belgium as
possible – he wanted to defeat the Allies completely. The strategic surprise so
obviously lacking in Fall Gelb could only be attained by attacking through the
Ardennes. With these ideas in mind, he proposed a feint attack in the north
through the Low Countries and Belgium, as the Allies no doubt expected, by Army
Group B. The new Schwerpunkt would now however lie along the front of Army
Group A, reinforced with an extra army and most of the armour. Army Group C
would continue to harass the Maginot Line and man the Siegfried defence line.
Once the Allies had been lured north into Belgium to meet the threat of Bock’s
armies, phase two would be set in train. Rundstedt’s forces would strike out
for the Meuse and once that obstacle was overcome, would thrust in the
direction of the Channel coast, thus severing the Allies’ communications and
supply lines and trapping their best troops in a pocket.
Manstein conferred with Guderian when the tank expert’s new
command, the XIX Panzerkorps, was transferred to Army Group A on Hitler’s order
to conduct an attack south of Liege. Guderian assured him that the terrain
through the Ardennes was not in fact tank proof as all serious military experts
assumed. He had personal experience of the Ardennes and the Meuse river valley
from the First World War and study of the maps did nothing to discourage his
view. He therefore became an enthusiastic supporter of Manstein’s plan,
realising that the panzer divisions were the ideal force to deliver the
surprise blow needed. Armed with this assurance, Manstein now attempted to get
his plan adopted.
Although in essence events evolved as Manstein had foreseen,
the real struggle for France was in getting the Supreme Command to accept his
proposals. Manstein bombarded the OKH with a whole series of memoranda, all
countersigned by von Rundstedt, but to no avail. Halder and the Army’s
weak-minded Commander-in-Chief, Generaloberst Walther von Brauchitsch, lacked
the imagination to appreciate the subtle genius of the plan. Manstein’s
persistence eventually led to him being sidelined to command an obscure
infantry corps, which later backfired on the arch plotter Halder and his
vacillating Commander-in-Chief.
On 10 January 1940 German plans received a serious setback
when a Luftflotte II liaison officer was forced to land his plane in Belgium
during a storm. In strict contravention of standing orders, he carried a full
set of plans detailing Fall Gelb. Despite his frantic efforts to destroy the
documents, they were captured relatively intact and sent post haste to Paris
and London. In any event, the Allied High Command chose to dismiss them as a
deliberate plant and made no effort to change their dispositions, but the
Germans couldn’t have known this and had to assume that the element of surprise
was lost.
Only now were conditions ripe for the adoption of the
Manstein plan. On 17 February Manstein and all other newly appointed corps
commanders were summoned to meet Hitler for lunch. As they rose to leave,
Hitler asked Manstein to remain and expound on his ideas for a thrust through
the Ardennes. Manstein outlined his ideas succinctly, calling for a shift in
emphasis to Army Group A, which would then attack across the Meuse towards the
lower Somme, while Army Group B attacked the Allies frontally in Belgium. Once
Army Group A reached the Channel coast, the Allied forces would then be
surrounded and destroyed. He argued that for this Rundstedt now needed three
armies: one to intercept the Allied forces driven back by Bock; a second to
cross the Meuse at Sedan and destroy any French forces massing for a counter
attack and a third to cover the southern flank of the Group. He also insisted
that Guderian’s XIX Panzerkorps was insufficient to force the Meuse crossings
and demanded the motorised infantry of Wietersheim’s XIV Armeekorps to
reinforce them.
Hitler was attracted to his proposals for three reasons.
Firstly, they were audacious and appealed to Hitler’s liking for the
unorthodox; secondly they tied in with his earlier calls for an attack south of
Liege; and thirdly they were in complete contrast to the proposals of the hated
General Staff. Whatever his shortcomings as a warlord, Hitler can never be
accused of lacking imagination and a taste for novel schemes. Manstein himself
received precious little credit for his masterstroke; he was to command a mere
infantry corps in the second wave of the attack while Hitler later claimed the
idea for the plan as his own.
On 20 February Manstein’s Sichelschnitt (Sickle Cut) was
officially adopted, although not without much opposition from within the High
Command. The pedantic Halder declared the plan ‘senseless’ and wanted the
panzers to wait on the Meuse till the infantry and artillery caught up for what
he called ‘a properly marshaled attack in mass.’ Guderian was violently opposed
to this. The vain and ambitious General Bock, appalled at the erosion of his
Army Group, developed an irrational jealousy of Rundstedt that was to have dire
consequences for the entire Wehrmacht within eighteen months. Even Rundstedt
seemed doubtful that his Army Group could carry out its task and uncertain
about the capabilities of tanks. In fact there was so little enthusiasm for the
plan among the High Command that Guderian states in his memoirs that only three
people believed it would actually work – himself, Manstein and Hitler.
On the eve of battle the German Army in the West comprised
136 divisions. These forces were opposed by 135 Allied divisions: 94 French, 10
British, 22 Belgian and 9 Dutch divisions. There was rough parity in the
numbers of troops, about 2.5 million men each. The Germans were outnumbered
however when it came to most important weapons: in field artillery pieces they
had 2,500 versus the French’s 10,000 and in tanks they fielded 2,600 to the
French 4,000. The only place the Germans had superiority was in the air where
they could pit 5,500 planes against the Allies’ 3,100.
Of course as it turned out the tank was to be the crucial
weapon in this campaign – not so much because of their quantity or quality, but
because of the way they were handled. The BEF, though small, was entirely
motorised and the French had a total of 7 armoured divisions; these were the 3
Divisions Légères mécaniques (DLMs), mechanised cavalry divisions which carried
out the traditional roles of cavalry, and the 4 Divisions Cuirassées Rapides
(DCRs) which acted as infantry support units. There were also 25 independent
light tank battalions engaged in infantry support. In total 1,300 of France’s
tanks were concentrated within these armoured divisions, which were spread
across the front in line with the fatal French reluctance to concentrate their
armour.
The French main battle tanks included 300 massive Char B1
heavy tanks, bigger and better armoured than anything the Germans had and
carrying two guns, a 47 mm in the turret and a low-velocity 75 mm in the body
of the tank. They proved almost impossible to destroy and the Germans who
encountered them dubbed them Kolosse; their only vulnerable point proved to be
a small ventilation grill in the side – it took a steady and calm gunner to hit
it at close range. The French were also able to field over 250 Somuas, widely
regarded as the best tank in Europe at the time and the model for the American
Sherman; like the Char B1, it mounted the superb 47 mm gun and at least 55 mm
of armour. The French also had plenty of light tanks, including 800 Hotchkiss
H35s or H39s, nearly 1,000 Renault R35s and about 2,500 of the tiny First World
War vintage Renault FTs. All these light tanks were armed with 37 mm guns and
mainly used for infantry support.
The Char B1 was the only French tank with four crewmen. The
Somua had three, all the rest only two. This proved to be a major disadvantage,
especially as many of the French tanks incorporated a one-man turret where the
commander was expected to choose targets and then load, aim and fire the gun
all by himself; in the German turrets there were three men to carry out these
tasks. Also, very few of the French tanks had radios, making formations hard to
control in battle.
The French Army had neglected higher formation staff
training for tank officers such as was needed for handling several divisions at
once. This was in keeping with their belief that tanks should function either
as infantry support or in the traditional cavalry roles. The French had
completely failed to grasp the possibilities offered by tanks deployed
independently and in concentration, instead sticking to the tired old formula
of ‘penny packeting’ their armour.
