Flames over France
Read Flames over France Online
Authors: Robert Jackson
© Robert Jackson 1997
Robert Jackson has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.
First published in 1997 by Severn House Publishers Ltd.
This edition published in 2016 by Endeavour Press Ltd.
The inhabitants of the villages dotted over the countryside west of Cologne stirred fitfully in their sleep, disturbed by the rumble in the eastern sky. The noise grew louder, swelling to a crescendo that rattled tiles and window panes. Hands fumbled with blackout curtains, heavy eyes peering up into the pre-dawn light, but the silhouettes of the aircraft were lost against the fading stars. The armada thundered on, heading due west, and silence returned to the land bordering the Rhine.
It was 0345. Twenty minutes earlier, the forty-one Junkers Ju 52 three-engined transports now droning westwards had taken off at thirty-second intervals from the airfields of Butzweilerhof and Ostheim, on opposite banks of the Rhine near Cologne. Each Ju 52 towed a DFS 230 heavy assault glider, laden with troops and equipment. Navigation for the transport crews was simple: they followed a line of flashing ground beacons, stretching all the way to Aachen.
Beyond Aachen, along the frontiers of Belgium and Holland, the massed divisions of the
Wehrmacht
were poised, steel spearheads ready to thrust deep into the Low Countries.
On the hard benches in the swaying gliders, the men of Assault Detachment Koch sat tensely as the minutes ticked by. For six months they had trained for this mission, six months during which each man had learned how to perform his individual task blindfold. They were elite troops, these men, and proud of their status. Moreover, they all knew that the outcome of this initial phase of the invasion depended on them. They were to strike the first blow.
The forty-one gliders were split up into four waves, each with its own specific target. The first, known as Storm Group Granite and consisting of eleven gliders carrying a total of eighty-five men, was to descend on the Belgian fortress of Eben Emael, a formidable strongpoint commanding the Albert Canal south of Maastricht. The second, Storm Group Concrete, with ninety-six men in eleven gliders, was to capture the bridge over the Maas at Vroenhoven and prevent its destruction by the defenders. The third, Storm Group Steel, had as its objective the bridge at Veldwezelt, over the Albert Canal north of Vroenhoven; Steel consisted of nine gliders carrying ninety-two men. The third bridge over the canal, at Kanne, was the target of the ten gliders and ninety soldiers of Storm Group Iron.
The outward flight was not without incident. Trouble hit Storm Group Granite shortly after take-off when the pilot of the eleventh and last Junkers in this wave suddenly saw the blue exhaust flames of another aircraft ahead and to starboard, very close and on a converging course. To avoid a collision the pilot pushed the Junkers into a dive. In the glider behind, the pilot desperately tried to follow the sudden manoeuvre. He was not quick enough; there was a sudden jolt as the tow-rope parted under the strain. The glider pilot turned back and landed in a meadow near Cologne.
Aboard the glider was
Oberleutnant
Rudolf Witzig, the commander of Storm Group Granite. While his men worked like slaves to turn the meadow into a landing-strip, he unpacked his collapsible bicycle and pedalled off down the road. A passing motorist gave him a lift and he was back at Ostheim twenty minutes later, telling his story to the duty officer. All Ostheim’s Junkers were airborne on the mission and a replacement aircraft had to be sent through from Gutersloh. While the duty officer was on the telephone, Witzig looked fretfully at his watch. It was 0410; another fifteen minutes and the others would be going down on their targets.
Meanwhile, the other forty Ju 52s, each towing its glider, droned on towards the frontier. Then came another mishap. The pilot of a second glider in Storm Group Granite saw — or thought he saw — his towing aircraft flash the signal to cast off. He pulled the yellow handle and the tow-rope dropped away. The glider, not yet halfway to the frontier, came down in a field near Duren and the men made their way in commandeered cars to join the
Wehrmacht
units poised for the main assault.
The rest of the force flew on. Because of the rigid radio silence, the other members of Storm Group Granite were not yet aware that their numbers had been seriously depleted. Ahead of them now, in the distance, a lone searchlight probed upward; it was a marker and at its base lay Aachen. The Junkers had been climbing steadily all the way, and by the time they reached that last beacon their altitude would be 8,000 feet. Another fifteen minutes and they would be over the junction of the Dutch, Belgian and German borders; then the Junkers would turn away and the gliders would swoop silently towards their objectives.
On the other side of the Albert Canal, the defenders of Fort Eben Emael — the Belgian 7th Infantry Regiment — had been on the alert since 0200, peering into the darkness shrouding the fourteen-mile strip of Dutch territory that separated Belgium from Germany at this point. The men of the 7th Infantry were confident that they could withstand even the strongest assault. Eben Emael was the most impenetrable fortress in the world. Sited on a plateau on the west bank of the Albert Canal, the fort measured 1,000 yards long by 700 yards wide at its broadest part. On its north-eastern flank, the fortress ended in a sheer 130-foot drop into the canal. Its other flanks were protected by wide anti-tank ditches, which in turn were covered by blockhouses mounting searchlights, heavy machine-guns and anti-tank weapons. Inside the perimeter, heavily reinforced concrete and metal bunkers covered every inch of the ground with their field of fire. Any assailants who managed to get across the ditches would be caught in the deadly crossfire of weapons, with calibres ranging from the.5-inch of the machine-guns to the 3-inch muzzles of the artillery.
The designers of the fortress of Eben Emael had proudly claimed that it was invulnerable to attack. So it was, by the standards of the 1914-18 war. But its designers had overlooked, or perhaps disregarded, one eventuality: an attack from the air. As an afterthought, one light anti-aircraft battery had been positioned near the fort’s south-east corner. And that was all.
At about 0420, there was a sudden alert as a flurry of anti-aircraft shellbursts twinkled across the sky in the direction of Maastricht. The fire was directed against the Ju 52s, which had just released their gliders and which were now dropping parachutes, each carrying a dummy festooned with firecrackers, to confuse the Belgians. The garrison of Eben Emael, believing the anti-aircraft fire to be a signal that German bombers were crossing the frontier, strained their ears to catch the sound of aero-engines; they heard nothing and relaxed a little.
Suddenly, a black shadow swept in low from the east, accompanied by a peculiar whining noise. It dropped down between two blockhouses and slid to a stop on a patch of clear ground, a hundred yards from a machine-gun bunker. The Belgian gunners strove frantically to depress and traverse the barrels of their weapons as more gliders touched down. Soldiers burst from the first glider and fanned out towards their objective, Bunker No. 19. A machine-gun stuttered, firing blindly. A German NCO crouched by the bunker wall and dropped a satchel of high explosive through the periscope slit in the armoured dome. There was the dull thud of an explosion and the chatter of the machine-gun stopped abruptly.
A burst of gunfire came from the southern corner of the fort; tracers lanced out into the half-light and three German soldiers fell. The rest went into action and laid an explosive charge against the wall of the bunker. A moment later the stunned and deafened defenders staggered out into the open through the shattered cupola, their hands on their heads.
Within ten minutes, as many bunkers had been destroyed. However, by this time the Belgians had realised that the attacking force consisted of only seventy-odd men. The garrison commander rang the CO of a nearby artillery battery and asked him to lay down a barrage on the fort itself. Soon, the earth was erupting among the abandoned gliders and the attackers themselves were forced to seek shelter in the shattered bunkers. Reeling under the impact of the artillery barrage the Germans prepared to fight it out, holding on if possible until the main
Wehrmacht
thrust reached the canal.
For three hours, a pitched battle raged under the drifting smoke that obscured Eben Emael. Then, at 0730, the unexpected happened; a glider winged in through the smoke and rumbled to a stop near the wreckage of Bunker No. 19. It was Rudolf Witzig and his men, who had at last reached the battle after being pulled out of the meadow near Cologne by the Junkers from Gutersloh. Witzig took command from
Feldwebel
Wenzel, who as senior NCO had been directing operations so far in the absence of any officers.
A few minutes later, a flight of Heinkel He 111 bombers roared overhead and dropped several containers of ammunition to the German sappers, who renewed their attack on the remaining bunkers. Hour after hour the battle swayed to and fro, with the Belgians fighting stubbornly for every square foot of ground. At last, Witzig managed to establish radio contact with Storm Groups Concrete and Iron at Vroenhoven and Kanne; the news he received was not good. It appeared that the bridges in Maastricht itself had been destroyed by the defenders and the one at Kanne, which linked Maastricht with Eben Emael, had been blown up just as the assault gliders touched down. However, the main bridges at Vroenhoven and Weldwezelt had been captured intact, and across them the
Panzer
divisions were flooding into the Low Countries.
All that day and all the next night, Storm Group Granite clung doggedly to its foothold in Eben Emael, with the help of air support from German dive-bombers, Junkers Ju 87
Stukas
and Henschel Hs 123 biplanes. Finally, at 0700 on 11 May, the weary, unshaven soldiers were relieved by shock troops, who proceeded to wipe out all remaining resistance. By noon, it was all over. In the clear sunshine, under a sky dappled with cirrus cloud, the haggard, uncomprehending Belgian soldiers — 1,200 of them — threw down their weapons and marched into captivity under the sub-machine guns of the victors. Eben Emael had fallen and the way was now open for the armoured spearheads of General Fedor von Bock’s Army Group B, spreading out across the drab Belgian plain west of the Meuse.
As the battle for Eben Emael moved towards its climax in the gathering daylight, twenty-eight Heinkels of
Kampfgeschwader
4 thundered inland over the Hook of Holland. They had taken off from their bases at Gutersloh, Fassberg and Delmenhorst at 0500 and were now approaching their target: the airport of Waalhaven, on the outskirts of Rotterdam.
In an attempt to confuse the Dutch defences the bomber formation had made a wide detour around northern Holland and was now making its run-in from the west, from the direction of the British Isles. But the Dutch were wide awake; as the bombers crossed the coast they ran into heavy flak, and a few seconds later they were attacked by Fokker D.21 fighters of the 2nd Air Regiment, Netherlands Army Air Force. The leading Heinkel went down with both engines on fire; the crew bailed out.
The remaining bombers droned on towards Waalhaven. In Rotterdam, the air raid sirens were howling full blast. Simultaneously, other formations were bearing down on the airfields of Amsterdam-Schipol, Ypenburg and Bergen op Zoom, their object to paralyse Holland’s air defences in one blow.
The twenty-seven Heinkels of KG4 swept across Waalhaven and unloaded their bombs with deadly precision. Dozens of troops of the Queen’s Regiment were killed when the hangars in which they were billeted collapsed on top of them and caught fire. Thunderous detonations crashed out through the pall of smoke which rose high in the calm air above the aerodrome.
Minutes later, a second formation of German aircraft came in, this time out of the sunrise. They were Junkers 52s, and as they flew over Waalhaven at low altitude the paratroops of the 3rd Battalion, 1st
Fallschirmjäger
Regiment, cascaded from their open doors. Within five minutes the sky was a mass of billowing white canopies as the paras drifted down in a great ring around the airport. One Junkers, hit by flak, swerved violently off course just as its stick of paratroops was leaving it. Helplessly, sucked in by the heated air, they drifted towards the blazing hangars. They were still more than a hundred feet off the ground when their parachute canopies caught fire and they dropped like stones into the inferno. The other paras landed round the airfield perimeter and relentlessly began to close in on the Dutch defences. In the general confusion, six more Ju 52s landed on the airfield; before they had rolled to a stop German troops had spilled from them and were attacking the defenders from the rear. Within twenty minutes it was all over. Hopelessly outnumbered and outfought, the defenders were overwhelmed and the last isolated pockets of resistance mopped up.
Half an hour later, by which time Waalhaven was crowded with Ju 52s, three ungainly Fokker TV bombers of No. 1 Squadron, 1st Air Regiment, lumbered over and dropped a few bombs among the parked transports, one group of which burst into flames. Two of the TVs were quickly shot down by patrolling Me 110 fighters; the third managed to escape.
Waalhaven was in German hands, but the most important objectives still remained to be secured. These were the bridges over the Maas in the centre of the city, and it was essential that the Germans captured them before the Dutch had time to destroy them. To make the invasion’s northern flank secure, Holland had to be overrun as quickly as possible. The wide estuaries of the Maas and the Rhine formed a great natural barrier over which there were only three main crossing-points: the bridges at Rotterdam, Moerdijk and Dordrecht. The German airborne forces had to capture these three points in a lightning attack and hold them until the 9th
Panzer
Division fought its way through to them. Once this was achieved, the way into ‘Fortress Holland’ would be wide open.