1st Lieutenant Germer’s Engineer Assault Team Attack
against Fort No. 505 at La Ferté, 18 May 1940
The vanquished contributes to a victory just as much as
the victor.
Field Marshal Graf von Schlieffen
The missions of Army Group B and Army Group C were basically
identical. They were to create a diversion away from the actual main effort in
the center, in the sector of the Army Group A, and coax the strongest possible
enemy forces away from the center toward the wings. Von Leeb, the commander in
chief of Army Group C, thought that it would be incomparably more difficult to
simulate the kind of strength that was not there. Most of his formations had
rather inferior equipment and were more suitable for defense than for taking
the mighty Maginot Line, opposite which they were positioned. Above all, this
army group did not have a single Panzer formation. Its mission, therefore, was
to attract the enemy’s attention to this area through deception measures, to
tie down as many enemy divisions as possible.
Numerous elite formations that were to be moved to the
central sector of the western front after the Polish campaign, were first
routed to the south, either to First Army in the Saarbrücken area or to Seventh
Army along the Upper Rhine. After these troops had moved into their final
standby areas, an attempt was made to suggest the presence of Panzer Troops by
using misleading tactical symbols, stories in the press about maneuver damage,
and so on. This resulted in a rather strange masquerade, as part of which
several officers had to put on the uniforms of the Panzer Troops and to make a
big show in public. Finally, Army Group C got some limited-service Panzers that
were now permanently run back and forth near the border.
Seventh Army was assigned the most important deception
measure. With only four divisions, it was to cover the far-flung sector between
Karlsruhe and the Swiss border. It was to simulate preparations for an offensive
against Switzerland to envelop the Maginot Line from the south. Nowhere else
along the front did the Germans employ such a repertoire of ruses of war. There
were some very ostentatious train switching movements at the marshaling yards
in Freiburg im Breisgau, where General der Artillerie [Friedrich] Dollmann, the
army commander in chief, had his headquarters. Most of the time, however, these
movements were carried out only in darkness so that the enemy’s agents would
not notice that this was always the same military train. In that way it would
also be very difficult to determine whether Panzers and big artillery pieces
were really hidden under the canvas covers, as one might assume by the general
outline. Hush-hush “headquarters” were set up in ostentatious mansions and spa
hotels, although, in reality, only the very military-looking guards out front
were genuine.
In the end, the southern portion of the Black Forest looked
like a huge army camp because there were permanent German troop movements in the
side valleys that were open toward Switzerland—all in keeping with precise
instructions in the script for this show. These troop movements were so managed
that they could be observed from the south and the Swiss guards conscientiously
took down all observations on paper. The clanking noises of moving Panzers and
the engine noises from vehicle convoys were heard over and over again near the
border during the long winter nights. In reality, however, this noise was
manufactured from loudspeakers and was played from tape. The German
Counter-Intelligence Service, under Canaris, also participated in these
deception measures with a specifically target-oriented disinformation drive
according to which an attack through Switzerland was allegedly planned.
In reality, however, the German general staff never
seriously considered an offensive through Swiss territory to outflank the
Maginot Line to the south. Obviously, the German general staff had too much
respect for the reputed Swiss bravery. According to the later Generalmajor Liß,
at that time chief of the Foreign Armies West Section of Army Intelligence,
this option was looked into within the army high command but was soon dropped.
There was indeed a harvest from these deception measures. Thus, it happened
that at the start of the campaign in the west thirty-six French divisions were
concentrated in the area of the heavily fortified Maginot Line facing only
nineteen divisions of Army Group C on the German side.
Immediately after the start of the German offensive,
however, the French high command should have realized that there was no danger
threatening on the right wing. Now the important thing would have been to
employ many of the divisions, stationed needlessly behind the Maginot Line, as
part of a countermove heading north. The real clincher came only at that
particular point in time when Propaganda Minister Goebbels set the scene. The
German troops had just broken through the front at Sedan when in a radio
address he stated that “within twice 24 hours, there will no longer be any
neutral states in Europe.” The way things looked at the moment that could only
have meant an attack against Switzerland. Now the Wehrmacht Intelligence
Service (Abwehr) launched a furious deception operation, employing numerous
diplomats in various countries for the purpose of spreading rumors. The French
and British were made so nervous that they began to prepare for the evacuations
of their embassies in Bern. On 15 May, Colonel Gauché of the French
Intelligence told the Swiss military attaché in confidence: “We know from an
absolutely reliable source that the German attack against Switzerland scheduled
for 16 or 17 May, in the morning, is firm.” The French leadership fell victim
to a mirage: the German attack against Switzerland never took place.
The German general staff believed that the biggest threat
was located along the northern wing of the Maginot Line, which extended to
within just a few kilometers of Sedan. The Achilles heel of Sickle Cut was that
the French could take many uncommitted formations out of this sector and employ
them for a counterattack into the left flank of the Panzer Corps Guderian while
shielded by the mighty fortification line. As mentioned earlier, von Bock, had
remarked rather sarcastically to Halder: “You will be creeping by 10 miles from
the Maginot Line with the flank of your breakthrough and hope that the French
will watch inertly!”
But the enemy did indeed stand by and do nothing. This can
be traced to the following operational chess move: The German Sixteenth Army
initially only had the mission of providing a defensive screen for the left
breakthrough flank of Panzer Corps Guderian. Its VII Corps, however, was to
make a maximum effort and attack the left flank of the Maginot Line at La Ferté
in order to tie down strong enemy formations here. The 71st Infantry Division
was to attack Fort No. 505 that constituted the western corner post of that
fortification line. The fight for La Ferté finally was played up as much as if
the Battle of Verdun had to be fought a second time at this spot. So, Georges,
the commander in chief of the Allied northeast front, already on the afternoon
of 15 May had personally phoned the commanding general of XVIII Corps and
appealed to him with these words: “You must hold at all costs the Inor-Malandry
shoulder [at La Ferté]. The whole issue of the war may depend on it.”
The explosives that Germer had thrown inside caused a fire
in the armored turret that spread immediately and, due to the heat generated,
gradually caused the shells stored there to explode. The blast waves from the
detonations ripped the steel doors open and made way for the fire. Thereupon,
the occupants fled to the lower floors down to a connecting gallery that was 35
meters below ground and led to Block I of the fort, 250 meters away. In the
end, Germer’s assault team also put out of action that fortification, with its
steel gun turrets and observation cupola.
A fire also broke out inside, so that the occupants there
had to flee to the connecting gallery. Now the disaster was complete. The
situation of the trapped men resembled a disaster in a coal mine, where the
fire from the higher galleries not only blocks the exit for the mine workers
but also deprives them of oxygen. The air became increasingly worse so that the
soldiers had to put on their gas masks. Again and again, blast waves blew
through the galleries as more ammunition was ignited, knocking the trapped men
to the ground. Finally, the electric lights also failed.
But there was continuous contact with the outside world via
a field telephone. The French commander, 1st Lieutenant Bourguignon, requested
permission to surrender the fort that the Germans had already put out of action
because poisonous powder gases kept spreading more and more inside the system
of galleries and tunnels. Because the explosions let up, there was still a
chance of climbing up to one of the blocks and getting out into the open from
there. His superiors required him to hold out—an order that a French historian
later on described as a “monstrous absurdity.” The last contact with the
trapped fort occupants took place at 0539 on 19 May. The French sergeant Sailly
reported in a weak voice, interrupted by coughing: “I cannot stand it anymore.
. . . The 1st lieutenant is next to me. . . . We will try to climb up again.”
Several days later, after the smoke and the poison gases released during the
explosions had evaporated, German soldiers climbed down into the underground
tunnel system. There they found the corpses of the 107 men of the fort garrison
who had died as a result of carbon monoxide poisoning.
In their theatrical plays and novels, the French
existentialists again and again gave full rein to their imagination in order to
conjure up hopeless situations. But reality by far outdid them in the light of
this drama that took place thirty-five meters below ground. Perhaps the real
tragedy of 1st Lieutenant Bourguignon and his men was that holding on to
Armored Fort No. 505 for such a length of time had not only become meaningless
but, in an operational sense, was even counterproductive. After all, the VII
Corps attack against La Ferté was primarily a deception maneuver to divert
attention from the real point of main effort at nearby Sedan. When the Germans
launched their attack on the fort on 16 May, a crack in the front line,
amounting to far more than a hundred kilometers, already gaped north of La
Ferté—the entire Meuse River line had collapsed.
Widening the breach by three or four kilometers to the south
was bound to seem insignificant. The issue in this fight for Fort No. 505 that
was fought so bitterly by both sides was something entirely different, that is,
the myth of the “impregnability of the Maginot Line.” No French general could
afford to give up even a small piece of it.
The irony of destiny, however, was that this myth fatally
tripped up the French. After the breakthrough at Sedan, the situation was so
desperate that the only chance was to strip the Maginot Line, which “almost
defended itself,” of all personnel and to use the bulk of the formations not
tied down here to attack the southern flank of the German breakthrough. Instead
of shifting the troops, the French generals even dispatched reinforcements from
the Sedan sector of all places to protect the Maginot Line. And so, the Char B
tanks of the 41st Tank Battalion, 3d Armored Division, were taken out of the
bitter fighting around Stonne and sent to mount a counterattack against La
Ferté. The attempt to relieve the encircled Fort No. 505 failed.
This incomprehensible behavior cries out for a comparison to
the situation in August 1914. The French supreme commander Joffre had
concentrated his troops precisely on the wrong wing, that is to say, on
France’s eastern border. Now the Germans who were attacking according to the
Schlieffen plan had outflanked his left wing and threatened to hit him in the
rear. In that situation, he did the only correct thing: He stripped the right
wing that was protected anyway by strong border fortifications, such as the
Maginot Line in 1940, and dispatched as many troops as possible by rail to the
opposite wing. In doing so, he was even inclined, if necessary, to sacrifice
the prestige target of Verdun and ordered artillery pieces to be withdrawn from
there. In that way, he was successful in hitting the Germans by surprise in the
flank and stopping them along the Marne River. For his successors, however, the
Maginot Line had almost become an end in itself. To that extent, during the
crucial phase, the nineteen moderately armed divisions of Army Group C were
successful in checkmating the thirty-six French divisions that were protected
by the Maginot Line.
