Eagles of the Third Reich: Men of the Luftwaffe in WWII (Stackpole Military History Series) (20 page)

Meanwhile, the two armies of Bock’s Army Group B (Kuechler’s Eighteenth and Reichenau’s Sixth) invaded Holland and Belgium, respectively. German paratroopers seized key positions and bridges in an effort to quickly penetrate the frontier defenses. These forces were under Student’s Air Landing Corps (later redesignated XI Air Corps) and had the mission of capturing two positions of critical importance: Eben Emael, the vital Belgian fortress on the Albert Canal, and the Moerdijk Bridge, sixteen miles south of Rotterdam, the key to a quick victory over Holland. Table
7
shows the order of battle of the Air Landing Corps.

Eben Emael and the three adjacent bridges at Veldwezelt, Vroenhoven, and Canne were attacked by Assault Group Koch, a specially trained parachute engineer unit led by Capt. Walter Koch, a very brave officer from the 1st Parachute Regiment. Koch had been a member of the Prussian Security Police prior to joining the service as a second lieutenant in 1935 or 1936. He was only twenty-nine years old when he led the attack on the seemingly impregnable Belgian fortress, which was garrisoned by 1,000 men. It featured concrete walls, flood gates, machine guns, field artillery, antiaircraft guns, and searchlights. It had one major weakness, however: it had a flat roof.

TABLE 7: ORDER OF BATTLE, AIR LANDING CORPS, MAY 10, 1940

Air Landing Corps: Lt. Gen. Kurt Student
7th Air Division: Student

1st Parachute Regiment
I Battalion, 2d Parachute Regiment
16th Infantry Regiment
KG 6 z.b.V. (a transport wing)

22nd Air Landing Division: Lt. Gen. Count Hans von Sponeck

II Battalion, 2d Parachute Regiment
47th Infantry Regiment
65th Infantry Regiment
KG 2 z.b.V. (a transport wing)

Air Support Formations: Major General Putziger

4th Bomber Wing (He-111s)
26th Fighter Wing (Me-109s)
51st Fighter Wing (Me-109s)
26th Destroyer Wing (Me-110s)

Corps Units:

9th Special Air Group
11th Special Air Group
12th Special Air Group

Koch’s men approached the fortress in eleven DFS-230 gliders, which had been released over Germany several minutes before. Their approach was silent and their landing on the roof completely surprised the sleepy garrison. Soon eighty-five parachute engineers were on the roof, where they crippled the rooftop gun emplacements and artillery periscopes with hollow charges (
Hohlladungen
), used here for the first time. Gun ports and other openings were attacked with flame throwers; other paratroopers tossed explosives down the ventilating shafts and threw 110-pound charges down the staircases. In all, fourteen Belgian guns were knocked out. Despite counterattacks by the Belgians, Koch’s men took the upper gallery of the fortress, making the entire complex useless. It was finished off the next day by combat engineers from the rapidly advancing Sixth Army.

The fall of Eben Emael broke the Belgian Albert Canal line and forced the Belgian army to retreat to the west, pursued closely by the Sixth Army. Perhaps more important, the fall of Eben Emael had a tremendous psychological effect on the Belgians. They never managed to completely regain their equilibrium and were forced to surrender within three weeks.

Meanwhile, a parachute battalion landed near the railroad and highway bridges at Moerdijk in the Netherlands. Because the bridges were more than one mile long, two companies were dropped north of the bridges and two came down in drop zones south of it. This coup effectively separated “Fortress Holland” (i.e., the core region of Holland, including the major cities of The Hague, Rotterdam, and Amsterdam) from the French and British armies. Later that afternoon the French 25th Infantry Division, the spearhead of the French Seventh Army, advanced to Breda, ten miles south of the bridges, but they were attacked by the Luftwaffe and were “flattened.” The next day the 25th Infantry, now reinforced by elements of the French 1st Light Mechanized Division, was attacked and beaten back by the 9th Panzer, the SS Verfuegungs Motorized Division, and the SS Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler (Motorized) Regiment. Fortress Holland could not be reinforced; it would have to hold out on its own.

Further north, at The Hague, the attempt to seize the Dutch capital met with disaster. Many paratroopers landed in the wrong places. Thirteen Ju-52s, carrying infantrymen from the 22d Air Landing Division, tried to land at Valkenburg Airfield, and eleven of them were shot down. Lt. Gen. Count Hans von Sponeck, the divisional commander, was critically wounded. Kesselring quickly cancelled the operation and diverted the second assault wave—which was already in the air—to Rotterdam.

Rotterdam was the key to the defense of Fortress Holland. The Luftwaffe seized the Willems Bridge here on May 12 in a unique manner. A dozen Heinkel seaplanes, carrying a total of 150 men, landed on the Lek River and seized the vital bridge, which they held against repeated Dutch attacks. The Dutch even sent the destroyer
Van Galen
up the river to shell the bridge and the nearby Waalhaven Airport (which had been captured by the paratroopers), but the
Van Galen
was sunk by the Luftwaffe before it could interfere with the operation. The vanguard of the 9th Panzer Division arrived the next day, and by May 14 the Dutch resistance began to weaken.

Surrender negotiations at Rotterdam began on the morning of May 14, but the Dutch were in no hurry. They still outnumbered the Germans, held most of the city, and were helping their allies by stalling like this. Kuechler’s Eighteenth Army, after all, could not join Bock in Belgium until Holland capitulated.

They did not know that Kesselring had ordered a massive air raid for 3
P
.
M
. that afternoon. At 2:15
P
.
M
., the Luftwaffe signals unit at Waalhaven sent a message to the 2d Air Fleet, asking that the bombing be postponed. However, 100 He-111s had already taken off. They had wound in their trailing antenna and could not be contacted by wireless; however, they had been instructed to fly to secondary targets if they saw red signal flares. This is where the tragedy began. Due to the smoke of burning buildings and Dutch antiaircraft fire, only forty-three of the bombers saw the red flares. Fifty-seven Heinkels dropped their high-explosive (HE) bombs on the city.

HE bombs do not normally cause major fires, but some of these hit a margarine warehouse, causing a major blaze which spread quickly. The Rotterdam water mains were broken, so there was no water in the fire hydrants. Citizen fire brigades, with their antiquated two-wheel hand pumps, could not handle the flames, which devastated 1.1 square miles in the center of Rotterdam. Nine hundred eighty people were killed and 78,000 were left homeless.
¹⁹

The horrified Dutch supreme commander, Gen. Henri Winkelman, surrendered early that evening with his army virtually intact. German fire engines were dispatched from as far away as the Ruhr to save what was left of Rotterdam. Meanwhile, Kuechler and his men turned south, where the French, British, and Belgians were still trying to stave off defeat. Kurt Student was not with them, however; he had been hit in the head by a stray bullet and almost killed. Major General Putziger, the corps air units commander and former commander of the 6th Air Division, assumed temporary command of the 7th Air Division. He, in turn, was succeeded as transport commander by Maj. Gen. Wilhelm Suessmann.

The Allies had been thoroughly deceived by the strength and fury of Bock’s attack. Thinking that Army Group B’s advance was the main one, General Gamelin committed his main forces—the French First and Seventh Armies and the British Expeditionary Force (B.E.F.)—to the north, in Belgium and the Netherlands. Hitler was overjoyed. “When the news came through that the enemy were moving forward along the whole [northern] front I could have wept for joy,” he recalled later. “They had fallen into the trap. It was vital that they should believe that we were sticking to the old Schlieffen Plan, and they had believed it!”
²⁰
Now, as planned, Panzer Group Kleist struck to the south, spearheaded by Guderian’s XIX Motorized Corps. Supported by the Stukas of Richthofen’s VIII Air Corps, Guderian broke across the Meuse on the morning of May 13. “The assault proceeded as if it had been a training exercise,” Guderian said later.
²¹

The French sector at Sedan was held by two Class B divisions: the 55th and 71st Infantry of the X Corps. The corps commander, General Gransard, called them “fat and flabby men in their thirties who had to be re-trained.”
²²
The key to holding the sector rested with the French artillery. General Georges had reinforced the already strong X Corps Artillery, and on May 13 the 71st Division had three artillery groups and the 55th had seven. However, they had almost no antiaircraft guns. Richthofen’s mission, then, was to neutralize this potent force.

Instead of launching one large raid (as Sperrle proposed), Guderian persuaded Richthofen to carry out a constant, though less intensive, aerial bombardment. As a result, the French batteries were paralyzed by the constant threat of air attack. The Stukas did little real damage, but their effect on French morale was “enormous,” according to General Gouhard. The artillery especially “went to ground.”
²³
The Stukas continued to make passes over French positions even after they had dropped their bombs, their “trumpets of Jericho” screaming. Throughout the day about two hundred Stukas, covered by several fighter wings, flew multiple missions in the Sedan sector. French artillery fire slackened while the panzer engineers began building bridges across the Meuse. Then the panic began. Rumors circulated through shaken French artillery channels that strong panzer forces had broken through. This was not true. Only the German infantry and combat engineers had crossed the river, using rubber assault boats. Not a single bridge had been completed and not a single tank had crossed the Meuse. Nevertheless the X Corps’ and 55th Division’s artillery commanders abandoned their command posts and headed for the rear, followed by most of their men. Naturally this panic affected the other branches, especially the ill-trained infantry. The rout was on.

The next afternoon the R.A.F. joined the battle. They hoped to destroy Guderian’s bridges across the Meuse before XIX Corps could cross the river in strength. The Luftwaffe was ready for them, however. The entire area was crowded with flak from 20mm, 37mm, and 88mm guns. The approaches to the bridgehead were protected by the fighter gruppen. The German fighter pilots flew 814 sorties that day and shot down more than ninety British and French aircraft on May 14, which became known as
Tag der Jagdflieger
—the “Day of the Fighter Pilot.” It was the Luftwaffe’s most successful day of the French campaign.
²⁴
Of the seventy-one British Battle and Blenheim bombers committed to the attack on the bridgehead, thirty-nine were shot down—56 percent of the total. That evening they tried again, this time with strong fighter support. Of the twenty-eight Blenheims committed, five were shot down and two others crash-landed in France.
²⁵
The bridges were not damaged. The tanks continued to roar across, heading towards the English Channel. The next morning, French prime minister Paul Reynaud called British prime minister Winston Churchill, who had replaced Neville Chamberlain only five days before. “We are beaten,” Reynaud said bluntly. “We have lost the battle.”
²⁶