The German War (18 page)

The next day, 15 May, Guderian and the commander of the 7th Panzer Division, Erwin Rommel, disobeyed their direct orders and broke out of their bridgeheads at Sedan and Dinant. Instead of turning south and attacking the Maginot Line from the rear, as the French expected, they headed west and north-west. Rommel’s column encountered the French 1st Reserve Tank Division with its fearsome heavy Char-B tanks. Most of the French vehicles were refuelling at the time and in the fighting the Germans succeeded in disabling 100 tanks, destroying the far superior French division. The two German commanders pushed on. Guderian covered the 80 kilometres to Marle and Rommel 100 kilometres, crossing the river Sambre at Le Cateau. The next two days, 17 and 18 May, were spent eating, sleeping, refuelling and repairing their battered vehicles, while units of motorised infantry were rushed forward to catch up with the isolated panzer divisions.
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Backed up by close air support from the 8th Air Fleet, the tank divisions showed that they could operate as an independent strike force. With his background in logistics and communications in the First World War, Guderian valued good radio links within the panzer divisions and now benefited from excellent land–air connections. When forward liaison officers radioed for air support, the Stukas responded quickly, sometimes within ten minutes, breaking up fortified positions, disrupting the enemy rear and protecting the tanks from flanking attacks. In fact, the tank divisions took a route so far to the west of the main body of the Allied armies that they managed by and large to avoid contact. It was a move which astonished both the German and French General Staffs. The tremendous, almost unopposed, speed of forces working jointly gave the infantrymen following behind a delirious sense of unchecked momentum. The sleep-deprived troops were kept going with 35 million tablets of Pervitin and Isophan. When military supplies ran low, men wrote home asking their families to buy the amphetamines over the counter. On the evening of 20 May, a jubilant reconnaissance unit from the 2nd Panzer Division reached Noyelles-sur-Mer and looked out over the Somme estuary at the English Channel.
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Since the start of fighting ten days earlier, many Germans had not switched off their radios. Despite early shifts, the SD reported, people were waiting up to hear the final Wehrmacht bulletin at midnight. The news that German forces had ‘broken through to the Channel and completed the encirclement of large enemy armies raised the tension in the population to a maximum and released renewed excitement everywhere’. Speculation was already rife that France would soon fall and that the invasion of Britain would follow, ‘with the frequently expressed wish that this time England should experience war in its own land’. The military commentaries provided by the Propaganda Ministry official Hans Fritzsche proved so popular that the SD billed them as the perfect antidote to listening to enemy radio. Göring chose this moment to reveal to the press that the Führer had planned the whole campaign, down to the detail of individual actions. Only enemy bombing of western German cities continued to cause alarm, and, increasingly, provoke demands for retaliation.
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Ernst Guicking was on leave when the western offensive began, and it took twelve days for him to catch up with his regiment in Luxembourg. ‘Yesterday still in the mud in the shell fire of the Maginot Line and the marshy holes of Luxembourg and this morning we are on the flank of the French,’ he wrote to Irene on 28 May. After missing the start of the campaign, he was delighted to be part of it: ‘Irene, that fills us with special pride.’ As for the mortar fire, Ernst adapted the popular sailor’s song, ‘That Can’t Shake a Squaddie’. He and his comrades went swimming morning and evening, but made the local women taste their drinking water first because they feared poisoned wells. For preference they quenched their thirst on wine. On Sunday 2 June, they marched 35 kilometres before making camp. A 200-litre barrel of wine got tent room. A cow was slaughtered and hung from a tree to be carved. The locals, Ernst reported, just kept repeating

‘

’. You don’t hear anything else. They also can’t say anything else. And to their question, ‘where to?’, we answer, ‘to Paris’, to ‘Monsieur Daladier’. Then they run off and cry, ‘

’. We could kill ourselves laughing. Irene, I tell you, a campaign could not be finer than this.

Indeed, ‘the land where dreams come true is nothing to compare with it’. As for the fighting itself, he was glad to have ‘passed the baptism of fire wonderfully well’. The constant drone of what he estimated to be 1,500 German planes flying low overhead gave him a headache, but much of the campaign had become a spectator sport. ‘We look like pigs. But God couldn’t have sent us a better war. Thousands of prisoners.’
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The young high-school graduate Hans Albring began the campaign in the west with a yearning to see the great French cathedrals. Girding himself morally like Christ before ‘this terrible Passion, which our soldiers but especially the French are suffering’, with the help of a dictionary he read Racine and Paul Claudel in his trench. A fervent Catholic from the Münsterland, Hans confided to his closest friend, Eugen Altrogge, that there were so few military chaplains that he feared being ‘without any opportunity for confession and communion’. He wondered too why the French hated the Germans so much. ‘The blacks are particularly bad,’ he confided. ‘They hang in the trees and are good shots.’ Each day swamped Albring with irreconcilable impressions. One moment they were baking potato cakes and drinking old Bordeaux, rejoicing over the sheer quantities of real coffee; the next they came upon a field full of rotting animals lying on their backs, ‘legs in the air like wooden rocking horses’. Along the road they saw ‘a crowd of blacks lying on the way, gruesomely mangled’ – almost certainly, French colonial soldiers from Senegal – and ‘everywhere [there are] crosses with steel helmets on fresh graves’. He begged his friend not to breathe a word of any of this to his family, who believed him safe in the rear. After a shell had burst 200 metres away, Hans broached the personal question of all wars with Eugen: ‘If I . . . and not you, look after my books and pictures. The letters should be burned.’
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Eugen reassured his friend. ‘I believe in your good star – may nothing befall you,’ he replied. ‘We need each other still for the future . . .
Pax Domini sit semper tecum
[May the peace of the Lord be always with you].’ Meanwhile Eugen’s military service saw him posted to Vienna, where he chafed at being so far from the fighting, condemned to spend his evenings going to the opera. Up in the gods, he quickly got to know the other faces and paid a mere 75 pfennig to see Lehár and Puccini (‘easy to listen to’). Like most of his fellow countrymen he preferred Verdi to Wagner, finding his ‘great feeling and his resounding melodies which display power and delicacy far more congenial’. Above all, Mozart’s
Don Giovanni
enraptured him, especially the final descent into hell. It moved him so much that the young would-be artist kept thinking about how he could draw ‘a dance between death and the demons’. While Hans was on campaign, Eugen was more than half at peace.
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Fritz Probst followed the front through Belgium by bus, rebuilding the bridges blown up by the retreating Belgians and French. Whereas Hans Albring took pains to conceal the dangers he was running from his family, the 33-year-old boasted to his wife Hildegard that ‘we are near the front and belong to the fighting troops’. His anxiety to avoid the stigma of serving in the rear trumped his concern to reassure her about his safety. Occasionally, they would come upon a village which had changed hands unscathed, but wherever the French had fought, the Stukas had evidently left nothing intact.
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While battle was still raging in France and Belgium, German radio journalists and cameramen brought the sights and sounds of the conflict to home audiences. Three successive newsreels accompanied the French campaign, and they doubled in length to forty minutes. Embedded in the fighting units, German cameramen had unparalleled access to the front; and also re-enacted key scenes for the camera. People marvelled at the risks reporters ran in order to bring them images of combat, gasping and shouting as they beheld the scenes of destruction. Crafted to give viewers the sense of being eyewitnesses to events, the cameras often looked up into German soldiers’ faces from slightly below, throwing their angular, battle-hardened features into relief. With added sound effects and dramatic musical accompaniment – often adaptations of classical pieces by the house composer Franz R. Friedl – the newsreels aimed to draw in and overwhelm the viewer. This was no ordinary cinema news, but a total visual, acoustic and emotional experience, the mounting tension heightened and channelled by the voiceover: ‘New German tanks ready for attack, ready for a mighty push forward. These tanks carry with them the new romance of fighting. They are what the knights were in the Middle Ages. They are as mobile as cavalry was in the last war.’ Many cinemas ‘simply could not cope with the crush of patrons’, the
Film-Kurier
noted, with some theatres offering up to ten shows per day. The lights were turned on again after the newsreel, instituting an interval to give audiences a chance to calm down, talk to each other. Many people left before the supposed main feature, not wanting to ruin what they had just seen by a ‘shallow feature film’.
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On 24 May, with Calais already under siege, Hitler and Rundstedt agreed to halt the tanks, allowing them to make urgent repairs so that they could be turned against the French armies in the south, and leaving the Luftwaffe to deal with the Allied divisions trudging over the canal-crossed terrain towards Dunkirk. Having enjoyed air supremacy for much of the previous ten days, at this point the Luftwaffe unexpectedly failed. It succeeded in bombing the beaches, sinking many ships, including nine destroyers, and in limiting Allied operations to night-time, but proved unable to prevent the evacuation of 338,000 British and French troops. Flying from its bases in southern England, the RAF played a major part in challenging German air power, making over 4,822 sorties between 26 May and 4 June. For the first time, German losses in the air were considerably greater than Allied ones.
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Travelling in a truck and a signals van, Hans Albring had far more leisure to write than the infantryman Ernst Guicking. With ambitions to become an artist, he tried to sketch word pictures for his rapidly shifting impressions – the old man at the farm gazing in bitter silence through puckered eyelids, the captured officer by the roadside, looking at the victorious Germans ‘confidently and coldly, quite composed with a terrible, extreme calm’. In Poitiers, the beauty of the frescoes in the ancient Baptistery won him over, and he grieved at the loss of so many stained-glass windows. The plump, well-fed women seemed to come straight out of a Van Eyck canvas. From the grunting pigs in the sties where he slept to the prodigious quantities of butter, cheese, meat, home-made preserves, snow-white bread and deep-red wine, as heavy as oil, the cornucopia of France amazed him. Delighted to find a copy of Hölderlin’s ‘Song before Battle’, he took refuge in the Romantic poet’s verse. As for the fighting itself, he could only describe what the faces of his comrades looked like afterwards: ‘Cheerfulness failed them, no one spoke or laughed any more.’ They were dull and ‘witless’. Like so many soldiers, Albring had words for everything except battle.
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Sixty-five French divisions had been thrown into a new line behind the Somme and Aisne rivers, which connected the Maginot Line to the coast. On 5 June, the Germans attacked, rapidly breaking through at numerous points along the Somme and pushing the entire front back towards the Seine. The French government fled on 10 June, declaring Paris an open city. Four days later German troops entered the capital. On 15 June, infantry divisions of the German 7th Army attacked across the Rhine, capturing the cities of Colmar and Strasbourg. The third newsreel of the campaign dwelt on the German infantry and artillery, ensuring that each of the branches of service received its due. Audiences warmed to the glimpses of the everyday routines of ordinary soldiers. Irene Guicking hoped to spot Ernst. Seeing so many faces ‘laughing into the camera, in each soldier I saw you and was content’. If the Führer were to raise a women’s regiment, she mused, she would not hesitate to join.
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On 18 June, the French Army began blowing up the bridges over the Loire, and a new government under Marshal Pétain requested an armistice. As negotiations began, the Germans pushed on. Ernst Guicking and Fritz Probst both found their units heading south towards Dijon. Probst complained about the French prisoners idling away in their camps while he and his comrades rebuilt what they had destroyed: ‘Is that really right?’ he wrote to Hildegard. Quite suddenly, they entered a landscape untouched by war. Quartered in a chocolate factory, Probst and his comrades were prevented by orders against looting from sending any confectionery home, but not from gorging themselves.
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In Poland, Wilm Hosenfeld felt he missed out on the war. At 45, Hosenfeld was a full generation older than the young trainee officers in his unit. He was a veteran of the previous war and the father of five children. Their eldest son, Helmut, had just been called for his army medical and his parents were apprehensive: Wilm tried to assure his wife that the war would be over before Helmut could serve, whilst writing to his son: ‘Better if you stayed where you are; I am glad to be a soldier in your stead. In any case, Mother is sacrificing herself enough for all of us.’ This was not likely to dampen Helmut’s eager idealism, and Wilm tried to warn him that war was like any natural disaster, ‘or some other catastrophe’, and that God sent wars to the world because the ‘people belong to a large extent to the Devil’. Drawing on Catholic teaching, he concluded ‘that the innocent have to suffer as well is the secret of suffering on behalf of others which Jesus took upon himself’. Wilm admitted to his wife that he would have preferred a posting to the west, but he hastened to assure Annemie that ‘my life doesn’t belong to me and my sense of adventure . . . [I am] cooled by thinking of you and the children.’ Although family duty trumped glory, he could not quite quash his craving for the kind of heroic victory which had eluded his generation in 1918.
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