The German War (17 page)

German radio broadcast the first military bulletin that evening, announcing the start of the general German offensive in the west and the news that the Führer had set off for the front. When he left his hectic office, Wantzen entered another world. ‘Münster’s street scene’, he observed that evening, ‘was unchanged, everything was calm and peaceful’, only the higher demand at the newspaper kiosks telling of the events taking place. He fully expected Münster to be bombed that night: ‘If the English don’t accomplish that,’ he opined, ‘then they have already lost the war.’
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The bombers did not come, but on 10 May some sixty bombs were dropped on the small Badenese city of Freiburg. It was the first time a German civilian target had been hit. Most of the bombs fell near the railway station. The German communiqué blamed the action on ‘three Allied planes [which] dropped bombs in the middle of Freiburg, killing twenty-four civilians’, and threatened that ‘from now on, every enemy bombing of German civilians will be answered by five times as many German planes bombing English and French cities’. The following day, it was announced that thirteen of the victims were children, killed while playing in the municipal playground. The death toll had risen to fifty-seven. The media kept the Freiburg bombing in the news. When people heard that the planes were French, the SD immediately registered the response as ‘general outrage . . . and in the final instance feelings of hatred against France’. The incident of 10 May was endlessly invoked as the ‘Children’s murder at Freiburg’. In fact, the planes were German bombers, which had lost their way in heavy cloud and struck the wrong target, mistaking Freiburg for Dijon. The media did issue a correction later, though not one which admitted German culpability: the French planes became British ones. They were to blame for starting the war against children.
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The young doctor’s son Helmut Paulus was in the middle of a training exercise with fixed bayonets when the news broke. Many of his comrades came from the Badenese Rhineland, or even had family in Freiburg, and were deeply affected. One man who was generally known for his even temper and optimistic outlook ‘couldn’t cope any more and suddenly started to weep in the middle of the exercise’, Paulus wrote home. The drill was cut short that day, so that the men had time to collect themselves. It was just as well, because the bayonet of one his comrades went straight through its leather cover before sliding off Helmut’s steel helmet and lightly scratching his throat. It was the daily claustrophobia of wearing gas masks which made them fear the worst for their families at home. Helmut was not alone in his belief that the British would drop poison gas. Throughout Germany, it was one of the most widely shared fears about aerial warfare. In Pforzheim, his parents cancelled their planned trip to Vienna and his father installed air raid windows in the cellars and kept them shut ‘till these grave days are past’.
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Most people’s anxieties dwelt on the events unfolding at the front. ‘Now the long-feared event has happened. The battle in the west has begun,’ Wilm Hosenfeld wrote home from W
grów in occupied Poland. He had woken that day at 4 a.m., filled with a sense of gratitude at being alive. Later he had taken his new captain for a ride on horseback to see the Jewish quarter, where Hosenfeld was in the habit of throwing sweets to the hordes of ragged children. However alienated the brutality of German actions in Poland made him feel, Hosenfeld had become completely involved: ‘It’s now a battle of life and death,’ he continued to Annemie. ‘I can’t rid myself of thoughts about the events taking place in the west. They weigh on my soul like a nightmare.’
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Hurriedly collecting reports from across the Reich, the SD reported how surprised the population was by the sudden invasion of Holland and Belgium and admitted that the general mood quickly changed ‘into
deep seriousness
’. The Führer’s proclamation ‘that the hour of decision has come has made the population realise that the battles beginning in the west will demand the greatest sacrifices. If a deep seriousness and concern for their family members in the field is palpable among mothers and wives, the
fundamental attitude
in the population is
firm and confident
.’ All regional reports confirmed that people were ‘inwardly convinced of the necessity of this grave step and of the sacrifices it will require’.
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The German attack had begun with the infiltration of troops into Luxembourg during the night. Just before dawn on 10 May, the full-scale invasion of Belgium and the Netherlands began. Although the Netherlands had remained neutral in the previous war, in all other respects it looked as if the Wehrmacht was repeating a variant of the 1914 Schlieffen Plan, by attacking France through the Low Countries. Everyone knew that there could be no guarantee of repeating the swift advance across Belgium of August and September 1914, as the Belgians had done much to fortify their eastern border in the interwar years. Massive reinforced concrete forts now protected their three lines of canals and river defences, with the Albert Canal and Fort Eben Emael at their centre. It was here that the German invasion began, with the silent arrival of ten gliders on the flat roof of the fort complex at dawn; the eleventh, carrying the young lieutenant in command of the operation, blew off course, but the eighty paratroopers had been well rehearsed and carried on until he rejoined them. Scaling the fort’s hydraulically controlled gun turrets, they used hollow charges, a new weapon, to disable them. Firing flame-throwers into the openings of the concrete casements, they flushed out the confused defenders. By the end of that day, the fort and the two key bridges it controlled at Veldwezelt and Vroenhoven were in German hands and the way into central Belgium lay open for the tanks of the German 6th Army. When the news was broadcast on Saturday 11 May, it had an immediate effect on morale at home.
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In the evening, the Belgian Command withdrew its forces behind the Dyle Line, its third and final line of defence, stretching from Antwerp to Namur. Its weak point was the wide and open countryside at Gembloux, between Wavre and Namur, perfect terrain for tanks and devoid of prepared or entrenched positions. It was into this gap that the French now sent their own mechanised and motorised divisions along with their strongest formation, the 1st Army. On 12 May, General Erich Hoepner’s Panzer Corps crashed into General René Prioux’s Cavalry Corps at Hannut. The 176 SOMUA and 239 Hotchkiss tanks wrought carnage on the German armour, most of them the lightly armed and armoured Mark I and II machines, which had already fared badly in Poland. They could not damage the French medium battlefield tanks, and Hoepner had too few medium tanks with sufficient firepower. On the following day he attacked again, pinpointing his effort to break through the long and thin French tank line. Without radio in their vehicles, the French could not manoeuvre rapidly and had no choice but to pull back when the Germans broke through, leaving the technically inferior German corps in command of the field, a gain which allowed them to retrieve and repair a hundred of their broken machines. It was the first large-scale tank battle.
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From an Allied point of view, the battle of Hannut had served its purpose by slowing the German advance and giving the massed infantry divisions of the French 1st Army time to reach the Dyle Line. Anticipating just such a rerun of the 1914 invasion as seemed to be under way, this was where the French Commander-in-Chief, Maurice Gamelin, had always intended to hold the Germans. Because of the fall of Fort Eben Emael and the Dutch evacuation northwards into ‘Fortress Holland’, the German advance had been much swifter, and the Allies had had a mere five days rather than the planned three weeks to deploy into Belgium. But by committing most of his modern mechanised units, Gamelin had also achieved the first aim of his campaign and entrenched his best forces along the Dyle. It was also exactly where the Germans wanted them to go.
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Twenty-nine German divisions had attacked through the southern Netherlands and central Belgium to the Dyle. Meanwhile, another forty-five were advancing through the hills of Luxembourg and southern Belgium towards the French border and the river Meuse. It was a surprising and highly risky move, as 41,000 German vehicles tried to drive up the four narrow, winding access roads into the hilly, densely wooded Ardennes. Stretching back to the far side of the Rhine and presenting a near-stationary target for French and British bombers, the German columns could have been destroyed before they ever got going. The Chief of the General Staff, Franz Halder, and other German generals, had opposed this plan because it seemed too reckless. But the French failed to send aircraft there, despite confidential warnings from the Swiss of major German troop movements in the area: most Allied air squadrons were already suffering heavy losses in the air battles in the north. At the head of the slowly uncoiling traffic jam were seven panzer divisions: an independent strike force of 1,222 tanks and 378 support vehicles, carrying motorised infantry, anti-tank and anti-aircraft batteries, under the command of Generals Heinz Guderian, Georg-Hans Reinhardt and Hermann Hoth.
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The weak French forces that encountered the Germans in the Ardennes on 10 and 11 May pulled back to the far bank of the river Meuse, which was held by the French 2nd Army. Gamelin’s deputy, General Georges, ordered French reserve divisions there on 11 May, the day before the first German units reached the river. The French generals thought that they had time to bring up infantry and tanks, because they estimated it would take the Germans until about 20 May to build up sufficient artillery and infantry to force the river crossings. This was in fact exactly the same as Halder’s planned schedule.

On 13 May, Luftwaffe bombers carried out 3,940 sorties, carpet-bombing the French positions, while two squadrons of Stukas flew a further 300 strafing and dive-bombing missions. The Luftwaffe had already earned its sobriquet as ‘flying artillery’ in Poland, where it had perfected the battlefield and ground attack roles it had pioneered in the Spanish Civil War. Göring delivered at the Meuse eight hours of continuous bombing, unprecedented in its ferocity and unmatched by the Luftwaffe even later in the war. They were unable to destroy French gun emplacements and bunkers, but they did break French morale.
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Throughout that afternoon, the German motorised infantry attached to Guderian’s 19th Panzer Corps and the elite Grossdeutschland infantry regiment tried to force their way across the river. Manning 103 pillboxes, the French front line held on and pinned the Germans down. In the late afternoon assault engineers from the Grossdeutschland regiment penetrated the one part of the bank where a bend in the river prevented the pillboxes from covering it with flanking fire. By midnight, the Germans had crossed the Meuse in three places, although at Monthermé they only held a tiny strip of 1.5 kilometres, and their bridgeheads at Sedan and Dinant remained highly vulnerable too.

Where the Germans had attacked precipitously, taking heavy casualties to bring their rubber assault boats across the river, the French stuck to their tactical doctrine of ‘methodical battle’, waiting until they had brought up more armour and artillery reinforcements before counterattacking Guderian’s Sedan bridgehead at dawn on 14 May. Where the German position had been precarious the previous evening, they had managed to bring sufficient tanks of their own across during the night to weather the French tanks’ assault and then destroy them. Disregarding orders, the French infantry began to retreat. Panic spread to the neighbouring 71st Infantry Division, with troops fleeing even before the battle reached them. Throughout the day French and British bombers attempted to destroy the German pontoon bridges. Flying in small groups of ten to twenty planes they sustained high casualties without hitting their targets. They lacked the dive-bombing precision of the German Stukas or the carpet-bombing tactics the medium bombers had displayed the day before. According to Halder’s dispositions, after winning their bridgeheads, the panzer corps were to dig in and safeguard them, while the mass of the German infantry divisions crossed the Meuse. This would leave the German armies free to prepare for a classic battle of encirclement or, if the Allied armies turned back from Belgium to meet them, for an open encounter in which the Germans would have the advantage of pressing from two sides. When Guderian asked to enlarge his bridgehead by 20 kilometres, both Kleist and Rundstedt stuck to plan and ordered him to stay within 8 kilometres.
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That day brought no fewer than four Special Announcements to the German home front, lessening the mood of collective anxiety: ‘Now wide sections of the population are of the opinion that there is a “lightning campaign” in the west’, the SD reported, noting the confidence that ‘the Luftwaffe has succeeded in securing its predominance in the air from the outset’. After fearing a repetition of the static war of 1914–18, the German people were fascinated by the paratroopers’ capture of Eben Emael, the ‘strongest fort’, they were told, in all of Europe.
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