The Second World War by Antony Beevor Read Free Book Online

Corap’s Ninth Army had failed to get troops forward in time to defend the sector.
    On 13 May, Rommel’s troops began to force a crossing of the Meuse at two other points, but came under heavy fire from well-positioned French regulars. Rommel came to the crossings near Dinant in his eight-wheeled armoured car to assess the situation. Finding that his armoured vehicles had no smoke shells with them, he ordered his men to set some houses on fire upwind of the crossing point. Then, bringing in some heavier Mark IV Panzers, he had them firing across the river at the French positions to cover the infantry in their heavy rubber assault boats. ‘ Hardly had the first boats been lowered into the water than all hell broke loose,’ wrote an officer with the 7th Panzer’s reconnaissance battalion. ‘Snipers and heavy artillery straddled the defenceless men in the boats. With our tanks and our own artillery we tried to neutralize the enemy, but he was too well screened. The infantry attack came to a standstill.’
    This day marked the start of the Rommel legend. To his officers it appeared as if he was almost everywhere: climbing on to tanks to direct the fire, accompanying the combat pioneers, and crossing the river himself.His energy and bravery kept his men going, when the attack might have flagged. At one stage he took command of an infantry battalion across the Meuse when French tanks appeared. Perhaps it is part of the myth, but Rommel is supposed to have ordered his men, who had no anti-tank weapons, to fire signal flares at them. The French tank crews, thinking they were armour-piercing shells, promptly withdrew. German losses were heavy, but by the evening Rommel had two bridgeheads established, the one at Houx and the other at the heavily contested crossing at Dinant. That night his pioneers built pontoon bridges to take the tanks across.
    Guderian, preparing his own crossings either side of Sedan, had been involved in a furious row with his superior, Generaloberst von Kleist. Guderian took the risk of ignoring him and persuaded the Luftwaffe to support his plan with a massive concentration of aircraft from II and VIII Fliegerkorps. The latter was commanded by Generalmajor Wolfram Frei-herr von Richthofen, a younger cousin of the First World War air ace the ‘Red Baron’ and the former commander of the Condor Legion responsible for the destruction of Guernica. Richthofen’s Stukas, screaming down with their ‘Jericho trumpets’, would shake the morale of the French troops defending the Sedan sector.
    Astonishingly, the French artillery, which had a great concentration of German vehicles and men to aim at, had been ordered to limit their fire, to save ammunition. The divisional commander had expected the Germans to take another two days to bring up their own field guns before crossing the river. He still had not realized that the Stukas were now the flying artillery of the panzer spearheads, and the Stukas attacked his gun positions with remarkable accuracy. As the town of Sedan burned furiously from heavy shelling and bombing, the Germans rushed the river in their heavy rubber assault boats, paddling furiously. They suffered many casualties, but eventually assault pioneers were across and attacking the concrete bunkers with flamethrowers and satchel charges.
    As dusk was falling, a wild rumour spread among the terrorized French reservists that enemy tanks were already across the river and that they were about to be cut off. Communications between units and commanders had virtually collapsed as a result of the bombs severing field telephone lines. First the French artillery, then the divisional commander himself, began to retreat. A spirit of sauve qui peut took hold. The ammunition stockpiles which had been hoarded for another day fell to the enemy without a fight. The older reservists, nicknamed ‘crocodiles’, had survived the First World War and did not wish to perish now in what they saw as an unfair fight. The