Flames over France (2 page)

The task of securing the bridges was assigned to General Kurt Student’s 7th
Fliegerdivision
. Early on 10 May, while
Stukas
attacked defensive positions on the banks of the Maas, 120 paratroops jumped from Ju 52s and captured the Moerdijk and Dordrecht bridges intact. The Dutch counter-attacked furiously at Dordrecht, but the paras managed to hold on.

Meanwhile, at 0700 on the 10th — as the German troops consolidated their positions at Waalhaven — twelve curious aircraft roared along the Nieuwe Maas, six coming from the east and six from the west, converging on Rotterdam. They were obsolete Heinkel He 59 seaplanes, aircraft whose normal task was air-sea rescue. On this occasion, each He 59 carried ten fully-equipped storm troopers. From their base at Bad Zwischenahn, the two flights of seaplanes had followed separate courses so that they would approach Rotterdam from opposite directions, each machine’s twin floats almost brushing the surface of the river. Their objective: the bridges over the Maas.

The twelve Heinkels touched down on the water in a flurry of spray and taxied towards the big Willems bridge. The troops scrambled into rubber dinghies and paddled frantically for the river banks. Within minutes they were crouching behind the girders of the twin bridges, heavy machine-guns in position. As the He 59s took off and flew away, their job done, the Dutch launched their first counter-attack. Bullets whined among the girders and chipped splinters of concrete from the bridge walls. The Germans kept up a brisk fire and the Dutchmen fell back, unable to gain a foothold on either bridge. A few minutes later, a tram came rumbling up to the bridges from the south; from it leaped a company of German paratroops fifty strong. They had been dropped a short distance south of the Maas to assist in the capture of the bridges. Dropping under cover beside their comrades, the new arrivals set up their machine-guns, surrounded themselves with belts and clips of ammunition and prepared for a bitter fight. It was to last five days and four nights while a paratroop battalion from Waalhaven tried in vain to battle its way through the streets to reach them. At least they would be safe from air attack; the
Luftwaffe
ruled the sky.

As the sun climbed higher, formations of German bombers, strongly escorted by Messerschmitts, headed west to pound Allied airfields in Holland, Belgium and France. To the aircrews, climbing away on their respective missions, the roads leading through the forests of the Ardennes towards the Meuse presented an almost unbelievable sight. Packed nose to tail, churning slowly forward, was the mightiest concentration of armour in the history of warfare: 1,500 tanks, moving in three great phalanxes. The whole column was a hundred miles long, and behind it, still deep inside Germany, came the infantry divisions whose task it would be to consolidate the ground won by the initial thrust of the
Panzers
— ground over which a path was already being blasted by the bombers.

This was western Europe in May 1940. This was
Blitzkrieg
— Lightning War.

Chapter One

Armstrong was awakened by the sound of the curtains being drawn. He raised himself on one elbow, squinting against the spears of light that entered his room, which faced east, and massaged his forehead.

A figure was silhouetted against the window. The slight stoop of its shoulders as it turned towards him told him that it was his batman, Smithson. Scrawny, with mournful eyes peering past a huge hook of a nose, Smithson didn’t look fit to be wearing the uniform of a lavatory attendant, let alone that of an RAF airman; but he was an excellent officer’s servant, and he had an uncanny knack of knowing exactly what was going on. On this occasion, however, as the man placed a mug of tea on the bedside locker at Armstrong’s elbow, the latter felt that he could well have done without the information Smithson had to impart.

“Mornin’, sir,” he said, in his nasal cockney accent. “It’s five-thirty, sir, and a lovely mornin.’ I’ve run your bath. By the way, sir, the balloon’s gone up. Jerry’s invaded Belgium and Holland, sir. There’s a signal for you, sir. Just come in.”

Armstrong sat bolt upright in bed and took the slip of paper from Smithson’s hand. He opened it, turning it towards the window so that the early morning light fell on it. It was from the Air Ministry, and addressed personally to Flight Lieutenant K. Armstrong, OC Photographic Reconnaissance Flight, RAF Deanland. The handwritten words hit him in the face like a splash of cold water, bringing him wide awake.

“Early indications of enemy airborne landings Belgium/Holland,” it read. “Deploy immediately to Berry-au-Bac. Support facilities in place. Confirm.”

There was more, but that was the important part. He stuffed the signal into the pocket of his pyjama jacket and, for once, took a swig of the tea that Smithson had brought him. He normally never touched the stuff, which was good for stripping paint, but this time he was glad to feel the impact of the scalding liquid on the back of his throat. It brought him fully alert.

“Where the hell is Berry-au-Bac?” he mused aloud.

“France, sir. About thirty miles from Reims,” Smithson told him, as though it were the kind of question he was called upon to answer every day. Armstrong glanced at him as he swung his legs out of bed.

“Smithson,” he said, “you never cease to astonish me. You’d better pack some kit. There’s no telling how long I might be away.”

So soon, he thought, as he donned his uniform after a quick bath and shave. It was barely a fortnight since he had got back from Norway, evacuated by the Royal Navy as the Germans closed in on the port of Namsos. Fighting was still going on there, and the two other Spitfires of the PR flight were in northern Scotland, keeping a watch for German warships — in particular for the battlecruisers
Scharnhorst
and
Gneisenau
, which were thought to be operating in the Norwegian Sea.

Within a few minutes Armstrong was on his way to the operations hut, inhaling the fresh Suffolk air as he walked. It was nine months now since he had first arrived at Deanland; then, the place had masqueraded as a civil aerodrome, tenanted by a flying club and manned by personnel dressed in civilian clothes. Those days were gone. The personnel were in uniform, the canvas hangars and wooden huts were camouflaged, there were coils of barbed wire around the perimeter fence, and anti-aircraft machine-gun posts were sited at various points. The airfield was coming alive; he noted with satisfaction that his Spitfire had been pushed from its hangar and was being refuelled. An airman was at work loading the F24 camera into its compartment. Intent on his job, he did not see Armstrong as the pilot walked briskly past.

Armstrong’s stomach was rumbling, but breakfast would have to wait. There was much to be done in the meantime. He returned the salute of the armed guard at the door of the operations hut and went inside, his footsteps clattering on the polished linoleum of the corridor that led to the operations room.

Apart from some new maps on the walls, concealed behind roller blinds, the room was exactly the same as it had appeared when he had first walked into it what seemed a lifetime ago, when the world was still at peace. There was one other occupant, an orderly corporal, bending over a teleprinter that had just begun to chatter out a message. He turned and straightened up when he heard Armstrong enter, then returned to his task at the response of a wave from the pilot.

Armstrong passed through a door beside a small briefing dais at the far end of the room. It gave onto another corridor, a short one this time, with a couple of rooms on one side. The door of the first one was open; Armstrong paused at the threshold and looked inside.

A man sat behind a table that was littered with documents. He was old and completely bald. He wore an ancient pinstriped suit topped by a wing collar of the kind affected by the Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain. But there was nothing ancient about the eyes that greeted the newcomer; they were blue and piercing, the eyes of a young man.

Armstrong came into the room and took off his cap, hanging it on a convenient hook. He nodded at the man behind the desk, who half rose in greeting and then sat down again. The pilot settled himself in a chair opposite before speaking.

“Well, Max. So they are on the move again. How much do you know?”

The man he addressed as Max was something of an enigma. He had been at Deanland when Armstrong first arrived, and the pilot had been firmly advised — warned, more like — against asking questions about Max’s background by the previous commanding officer, Wing Commander Horace Royston, who was now a German prisoner of war. What Armstrong did know was that Max seemed to have all the answers, and suspected that he was well up the ladder of Intelligence. Although the old man spoke flawless King’s English, several months’ association with him had taught Armstrong to detect the undertone of an accent which he only knew to be Lithuanian because Royston had told him.

Max surveyed him, his eyes suddenly hard. He placed his hands on the desk top and pushed himself upright.

“I can tell you what I know better with the help of a map, Kenneth. Shall we go next door?”

Armstrong smiled. Max was the only person he knew, apart from his mother, who addressed him by his full first name. They went into the operations room and Armstrong instructed the orderly corporal to leave them for the time being. Max reached into a pocket of his waistcoat and produced a key, locking the entrance door after the man had passed through. He crossed to one of the concealed maps and pulled a cord; the blind shot up with a rustle and a crack, revealing a relief map of north-west Europe. Max pointed to a green and brown area that covered most of Luxembourg and extended across the frontier into Germany.

“The Ardennes,” he said quietly. “First reports are sketchy, but they indicate that the Germans are massing tanks and infantry in this area in readiness to make a thrust towards the river Meuse, here.” His finger moved over the map, tracing a line along the blue snake of a river that ran roughly north-south along the western border of Luxembourg until it entered Belgium, where its name changed to the Maas. Armstrong looked closely at it, picking out one name that stood out: Sedan.

“If the Germans’ intention is to attack here, as seems likely,” Max went on, “it will make a mockery of the much-vaunted French main line of defence — the Maginot Line.”

Armstrong was familiar with that defensive structure; he had seen its massive fortifications from high altitude, zig-zagging like a brown snake across the landscape, during a reconnaissance flight he had made into Germany soon after his return from Norway. Its origin went back to 1922, when a French Army Commission was appointed to look into the country’s existing defence policy and make recommendations for the future. Led by Marshal Joffre, the Commission visited the famous battlefield of Verdun, where a series of underground forts had defied a whole German Army Corps and the biggest concentration of artillery in history for ten months. The French generals were suitably impressed; what might have been the outcome of the war, they thought, and the saving of life and territory, if France had possessed an interlocking web of such forts along the whole of her eastern frontier in 1914!

For the best part of a decade the Commission and successive governments argued over the feasibility of a fortified “eastern wall” running the length of the frontier; one blueprint after another was studied, only to be torn up. On two things only the military were agreed; the fortified front would have to be continuous — and it would cost an enormous sum of money to create. Finally, in January 1930, both chambers of the French National Assembly voted for work on the fortified line to begin immediately and set aside the vast sum of three thousand million francs, to be spread over four years, for its construction. The deadline for its completion was to be 1935, the year in which — under the terms of the Versailles Treaty — French forces of occupation were to be withdrawn from the Rhineland.

The line was to extend from Basle on the Swiss frontier to Longwy, at the junction of the Belgian, Luxembourg and French frontiers. Its strongest points, covering a length of eighty-seven miles, were designed to protect Lower Alsace and the Metz-Nancy sector, both of which were particularly vulnerable to a large-scale attack from the east. The line varied in depth, but at its strongest points it consisted of a series of anti-tank obstacles and barbed wire entanglements facing the frontier, supported by reinforced concrete blockhouses and pillboxes. Behind them was a deep anti-tank ditch, beyond which lay the line’s network of underground casemates and forts. Each casemate, protected by up to ten feet of concrete, was equipped with quick-firing anti-tank guns, machine-guns and grenade-throwers; it had a garrison of twenty-five men whose living quarters were on a lower level.

Every three to five miles along the line, supporting the casemates, was a subterranean fort of concrete and steel. These forts were truly remarkable feats of engineering; the biggest, with a garrison of twelve hundred officers and men, consisted of eighteen blockhouses, each with a retractable turret housing guns ranging in calibre from 37-mm to 135-mm. There were powerful generators to supply the forts with heat and light, compressors to ensure a constant supply of fresh air, stores and ammunition magazines, the whole linked by a series of corridors which were completely bombproof and up to a mile and a half long. In the larger forts, a miniature electric railway provided a rapid means of transport for personnel and material. Each fort was divided into two separate units, so that if one was knocked out, the other would continue to function independently, and the field of fire of each fort covered all neighbouring forts and casemates. Backing up the whole structure were mobile infantry units, with supporting artillery, which could be moved up rapidly to support the fort complexes in the event of enemy infiltration.

Work went ahead on the fortifications — known as the Maginot Line after Andre Maginot, the War Minister of the day — at a fast rate, and its eighty-seven miles of main defences were substantially completed by 1935. By this time the line had already cost seven thousand million francs, far in excess of the budgeted figure, and the cost of maintaining it imposed an almost intolerable burden on a country whose economy was ailing — and one, moreover, where a strong Left Wing, opposed to rearmament in any form, made its voice continually heard. The result, inevitably, was that the French Army was compelled to suffer severe cuts in other areas.

Most serious of all, the Maginot Line remained at best only a partial shield against an attack from the east against metropolitan France. At its northern end there was no extension of the fortifications to cover the 250-mile common frontier between France and Belgium — and this despite the fact that in 1914 the German Army, following the brilliantly-devised Schlieffen Plan, had debouched into France across the drab Belgian plains. There were a number of reasons for this omission, apart from the question of cost. The first, and not the least important, was that an extension of the line would have to pass right through the middle of the big industrial areas around Lille and Valenciennes, which would lead to unacceptable disruption; the second was that Belgium herself, separated from her French ally by a fortified line, might feel justified in adopting a policy of complete neutrality. In view of this, the French were prepared in Belgium’s case to adopt an offensive posture-although it went very much against their overall defensive policy — by sending their forces across the border to fight a delaying battle on Belgian soil. This strategy was feasible enough in 1935, when the French Army still enjoyed considerable numerical superiority over the
Wehrmacht
; but by 1939 the German tactics, combining the use of tanks and dive-bombers, had made nonsense of it.

Between 1935 and 1939, then, while the Germans broke all records to develop their offensive capability, the French — like a tortoise retreating into its shell — retired behind the mythical impregnability of the Maginot Line, apparently oblivious to its glaring deficience; deficiencies which should have come to the fore when, in October 1936, King Leopold III of Belgium revoked his country’s treaty with France and opted for a return to neutrality. The French northern flank had been wide open ever since.

“And the Germans know it only too well,” remarked Max, who had been rapidly filling in the gaps in Armstrong’s knowledge of France’s defensive system as the two pored over the map in the operations room. “That’s why a massive assault in this area is their logical choice. And I will let you into a secret; we have known of their intentions for several months.”