Hitler's Panzers (19 page)

The 3rd DLM, moreover, fought alone against superior numbers. The 2nd Light Mechanized Division remained in its positions all day, facing front and fixed in place by German infantry, force- marched forward. As the Germans freed themselves from the melee and resumed their advance, Prioux, his local reserves exhausted, ordered a withdrawal to the main positions by now established around Gembloux. The cavalry corps had done its job; no reason remained to risk an elite force in an isolated forward position.

When losses were tallied, 3rd DLM had accounted for 160 German tanks at the cost of around 100 of its own. It was true that the Germans held the field, and so were able to recover and repair a good many of their losses. It was true as well that casualties had been absurdly light by Great War standards—only 150 total in the entire 4th Panzer Division. Nevertheless the consciousness of superiority recorded in the corps war diary did not translate to immediate pursuit in a deepening twilight, where all tanks seemed to look alike.

For Erich Hoepner it had been a good day’s work. Committing his panzers en masse had paid off despite the losses. German tanks might be inferior in a stand-up fight, but their mobility and the skill of their crews and commanders had set the stage for the next scene: breakthrough at Gembloux. Preliminary orders went out at 3 AM; the French spent the next 18 hours executing a fighting retreat that tied the panzers in knots and completed the cavalry’s delaying mission. Instead of overrunning the gap before the French could assume the position, Hoepner’s corps confronted a solid defense line manned by three first-class divisions: 1st Moroccan and 1st and 15th Motorized Divisions, with Prioux’s tanks deployed by battalions in their rear. A few tentative probes were so strongly received that Hoepner ordered his advanced units to fall back and prepare for a coordinated corps-scale attack the next day.

The resulting engagement of May 15 was the first time the panzer divisions were used to break through a major, prepared defensive position. Both division commanders led with riflemen going in afoot under air and artillery cover, the panzer regiments following closely either to meet enemy armor or exploit the expected breakthrough. Matters unfolded differently. A French army proverb says, “Algerians are men; but Moroccans are lions.” From the first exchange of shots, the men from the Atlas Mountains proved a match and better for 4th Panzer Division’s infantry. The tanks suffered no less in trying to carry the riflemen forward against gun positions the Luftwaffe failed to find, let alone silence. Particularly disconcerting was the heavy loss of Mark IVs, brought forward for their guns but all too vulnerable to antitank fire. By 4 PM nothing resembling a breakthrough was in sight, and 4th Panzer Division’s commander suggested an attack the next day would have no better prospects given the same conditions.

The 3rd Panzer Division initially held its tanks farther back, but also wound up committing them piecemeal to support the infantry against resistance no less determined and no less effective than that confronting the 4th Panzer Division. Results were no better. The Berliners ground forward slowly, a company here and a battalion somewhere else, against constant counterattacks. Late-evening reports that the defenses had finally been breached were unconvincing. Hoepner decided instead to continue the attack the next day, but to replace the panzers with two infantry divisions, presumably better suited to the nature of the fighting and certainly more expendable. The decision proved moot as on May 16 the French withdrew, finally reacting to the breakthrough at Sedan. Hoepner’s panzers followed briefly then redeployed as part of the drive to the Channel.

The fighting around Gembloux tends to be overshadowed by the more dramatic events to the south. Tactically, Hannut had shown the worth of spearheading an attack by using tanks in masses, even against superior material. Gembloux indicated the limitations of that approach against an organized defense. The panzers might well have broken through and broken out in another day or two. But on the morning of May 14, 4th Panzer Division reported only 137 tanks ready for action—less than half the authorized strength. Third Panzer Division reported as many as a quarter of its tanks out of action. Even with top-grade field repairs, these were not statistics calculated to inspire trying the same thing again. Crew morale might be as high as the officers said, but there were limits to the number of times men shot out of one tank could simply be assigned to another.

Operationally, the panzers had inverted French doctrine by keeping the Cavalry Corps fixed in place instead of the other way round. On the night of May 14, Gamelin considered pulling it out of the line and turning it against the right flank of the German spearhead coming from Sedan. It was a mission well suited to the DLMs’ tactics and training—before the losses inflicted by the panzers, and before the corps was integrated directly into the Gembloux position. Instead the cavalrymen were ingloriously drawn into the general retreat to Dunkirk, just like any second-line foot-marching division caught in one of history’s greatest envelopments.

The panzer groups’ operational mission was clear: drive northwest between Arras and the Somme, then cut off the Allied forces withdrawing from Belgium. But by now Halder, in the best opportunistic tradition of the General Staff, was considering swinging the bulk of the panzers south into France, fulfilling the original Schlieffen Plan by means of the internal- combustion engine while Army Group B, reinforced by the rest of the armor, mopped up what remained north of the penetration. Hitler, still anxious for the security of the southern flank, rejected this prospect out of hand in favor of halting the mobile forces west of Arras and giving the infantry time to close up.

Meanwhile the panzers rolled on and their opposition dithered. General Alphonse Georges, commanding the French Northwest Front, collapsed in tears when informed of the breakthrough at Sedan. Gamelin called for a decisive counteroffensive against a German spearhead whose vulnerability increased with every mile it traveled. A newly organized armored division commanded by an obscure colonel with something of a reputation as a military theorist, nibbled at 1st Panzer Division’s rear echelons on May 17. But Charles de Gaulle was unable to work a miracle. A report from 1st Panzer Division described a lone B-2 trundling down the road with no obvious intention, shrugging off repeated hits from Panzer IIIs. “We observed that our [37mm shells] were not penetrating,” sagely noted the company commander. The French vehicle was then engaged by a 20mm antiaircraft gun and by pioneers and infantrymen with hand grenades. Nothing. The captain then took on the B-2 from the rear with three Panzer IIIs. At around 250 yards the purportedly armor-piercing rounds continued to bounce harmlessly off the turret and the rear plates. The French responded by shooting up a passenger car, and then abandoning the tank and surrendering when a 37mm round—finally, one might add—knocked out the engine.

This event epitomized the nature of the Allies’ response to Sichelschnitt. Either formations assigned to counterattacks shed pieces on the way, or the mission was given to improvised forces lacking the cohesion to develop any local success they might gain. Gamelin was dismissed with ignominy on the nineteenth. His replacement, seventy-four-year-old Maxime Weygand, planned a pincer attack on both sides of the breakthrough. The southern arm never got beyond the preliminary orders stage. An attempt to mount a corps-strength attack from the north on May 22 was seen off essentially by the Luftwaffe alone. British Expeditionary Force commander John Vereker, Viscount Gort managed to assemble two British tank battalions, a couple of infantry battalions, and some field and antitank guns on the old World War I battlefield of Vimy Ridge, with ephemeral promises of French support and concrete orders to strike the Germans when they came within range.

The resulting counterattack gave Rommel and 7th Panzer Division a few bad quarters of an hour around Arras on August 21. The operational effect was the military equivalent of throwing a handful of boiled peas at a wall. But whether gallant thrust or forlorn hope, the move focused what Roland Friesner describes as a “flank psychosis,” a “crisis psychosis” that produced a layered controversy in the German high command.

AT 2 AM on May 21, 1940, the first German troops reached the Channel coast, west of Abbeville. Appropriately enough they were infantrymen, from 2nd Panzer Division’s 2nd
Schützen
Regiment. If any aspiring clas sicists in the ranks cried “Thalassa!” in imitation of Xenophon’s 10,000 Greeks, history is silent. Second Panzer Division had advanced 60 miles that day. More than a million men—the entire BEF, a Belgian army that had fought better than anyone expected, a French army group plus bits and pieces of several more—were cut off in Flanders, 80 or 100 miles at best from the coast that offered a still- ephemeral salvation. The German infantry that would decisively close the corridor were still advancing. A lot of ground remained free from German boots or treads. But real-world prospects for a successful mass breakout to the south were finished.

Guderian for one had no doubts. He proposed to turn his divisions north, to the channel ports: 1st to Calais, 2nd to Boulogne, and 10th to Dunkirk, and the sooner the better. In desperation the British threw sacrificial garrisons into Calais and Boulogne. But the road to Dunkirk, designated as the main evacuation port, lay virtually open for 10th Panzer Division—or rather, it did until Kleist responded to high-echelon anxiety over the abortive British attack at Arras by pulling the division into reserve.

Not until May 22 was Guderian allowed to resume his advance. By then the British had settled in. It took 2nd Panzer Division three days of street fighting to take Boulogne. Calais held out until the twenty-sixth in one of the campaign’s epic stands. By then the nerves of Hitler, and those senior generals still awaiting the grand Allied counterattack, were strained to breaking point. The situation was not helped by the Führer’s recurrent presence at various field headquarters, his anxieties trailing like a cloak. The panzer generals, the bit between their teeth, wanted to press the attack. Army Group A preferred a brief halt to sort out the mobile forces and allow the infantry to catch up and secure the corridor opened by the tanks. Halder and the High Command advocated a bold advance in a strategic context—arguably even the “Schlieffen option” mentioned earlier. Hitler sought a
Verschnaufpause
, a breathing space, partly to evaluate a situation that had outrun even his imagination, but also to demonstrate that he was supreme commander in practice as well as by title.

The situation was tinder for what Carl von Clausewitz called “friction.” Kleist provided the spark when, on May 23, he complained to Rundstedt that his group was so dispersed and had suffered such heavy losses, including more than half its tanks, that it was too weak to mount an attack against strong forces. Halder dismissed the message as an attack of nerves. Rundstedt, however, responded by shutting down the panzers for a day, with the advance to resume on the twenty-fifth. The High Command in turn reassigned both panzer groups to Army Group B—as drastic a reaction as possible short of ordering Rundstedt’s outright relief. Order, counter order, disorder—and in the midst of it, Hitler appeared at Rundstedt’s headquarters. He promptly reversed the transfer orders, which had been issued without his knowledge. He then declared himself completely in agreement with Rundstedt’s perspective. Army Group A at 12:45 PM confirmed the shutdown of the panzers. Hitler complemented this with a directive establishing the next objective as the destruction of Allied forces in Flanders. He also gave Rundstedt a free hand in the conduct of operations—a factor that had significant consequences.

Halder on one end, and Kleist and his commanders on the other, reacted with varying combinations of fury and bewilderment. Even Guderian, seldom at a loss for words, declared himself speechless. Efforts by Halder and Brauchitsch to change the Führer’s mind were predictably futile. Noteworthy in that context is Hitler’s reiterated denunciation of what he described as challenging his authority by transferring the panzer groups without permission. That was arguably more significant than such generally cited factors as hope for peace with Britain, worry about the boggy Flanders terrain, concern with sparing the panzers for future operations, or even desire to give Hermann Göring and his “National Socialist Luftwaffe” the glory of finishing off a trapped enemy. Not until May 26 did Hitler rescind the “halt order”—and even then only at Rundstedt’s urging. By that point it was hours too late to make a difference.

Gerd von Rundstedt gave Hitler all the backup he needed by using his free hand to hold the tanks firmly under his thumb. Only on the morning of the twenty-fifth did he allow Kleist and Hoth to change his mind. Not until the morning of the twenty-seventh were panzer divisions able to shift from refueling, repairing, and relaxing to combat readiness—with, just possibly, a slight loss of cutting edge. In that interval the German infantry were unable to reach Dunkirk before the withdrawing troops established a defensive perimeter stronger than anything at Sedan or Gembloux, and even more resolutely manned. The Luftwaffe was unable to shut down the evacuation, as overcast skies and calm seas facilitated movement off the beaches. Nor were the panzer divisions exactly eager to come to grips with Dunkirk’s defenses. Writing darkly of tank strength reduced by half and soft, rain-saturated ground impassable for those remaining, even Guderian recommended Dunkirk be left to the infantry and artillery while the panzers refitted for the coming battle of France.

This did not represent some sudden change of heart or loss of confidence. For Guderian, timing and momentum were the keys to mechanized victory. Both had been lost. Continuing to play out the changed scenario was more reckless than folding the hand and awaiting the next round of play. His sudden apparent pessimism silenced those voices still talking of an all-out armor-tipped effort to break through the Allied perimeter. The tankers more or less contentedly turned south, leaving an unanswered question: Could the Dunkirk evacuation have been prevented, or even significantly disrupted, had the Führer and his generals ridden a hot hand and kept the tanks rolling towards the beaches?