That was the situation at 0135 hrs. Gevaerts, mayor of Veldwezelt, was instructed to evacuate all civilian inhabitants within a radius of 300 metres of the bridge. This measure was far too late, but nobody thought it was a real alarm. Three hours later at 0405 hrs, Lt Bloch, liaison officer of 2.Regt de Carabiniers, visited Captain Jammaers, commanding 6.Company, at the bridge to check that the orders had been carried out.

The demolition of the bridge was the supreme defensive action in the hands of the bunker crew. Corporal William Cornée, commander of the bunker in the absence of Sgt. Georges van der Elst, (acting as an instuctor at Beverlo), received the order. Cornée immediately sent one of the ten soldiers to bunker C at the foot of the bridge support to inform the men there. This bunker had to be evacuated before the bridge was destroyed and only re-occupied afterwards. The order to blow up the bridge was not carried out because the situation was unclear. Even when Major Driessche of 2.Bat/2.Regt de Carabiniers asked for authority to destroy the bridge as the German gliders were landing, it was not forthcoming. That was not his first request; at 0425 hrs when he heard the Fort Eben Emael batteries fire twenty warning rounds he had asked for permission, but the regimental commander assured von Driessche that he had ordered the firing himself.

Towards 0500 hrs several aircraft overflew the Albert Canal, but the Dutch had fired at these aircraft beforehand and given warning. One of the sentries at the border barrier on the Dutch side of the bridge informed his Company commander of seeing aircraft circling silently without engine noise. Shortly afterwards the rest of 6.Company watched in stupefaction the approach of these “silent aircraft” whose nationality markings could not be made out in the darkness⁷. Tense, shocked and with an unpleasant feeling in the pit of their stomachs, the Belgians watched the movements of these strange craft. Guillaume Vranken of the bunker N crew recalled this moment:

“We were going to warn the people who lived near the bridge. Basically all civilian inhabitants in a radius of 300 metres should already have been evacuated. Mayor Gevaerts was responsible for that (….). Suddenly our colleague Jefke Thomason told us that several aircraft were circling above our bunker. The Carabiniers’ captain, Jammaers, came to the bunker and asked anxiously what was going on. He looked at the aircraft through his field binoculars, but could not make out any nationality markings.”

The gliders landed synchronized almost to the second. Five came down on the positions of 6.Company in the immediate vicinity of the bridge, another a little farther south, and one farther north. Jammaers could not believe his eyes and shouted “Open fire!” while making for his command post. The attack had begun.

Heading for Veldwezelt

Early on the evening of 9 May 1940, the paratroopers and glider pilots were brought to the Cologne airfields from where they would take off for the bridges. After months of preparation the hour of truth had now arrived for the spearhead to invade Belgium. In the briefing at 0200 hrs the glider pilots went over the route once more and it was emphasized that the DFS 230s had to disengage from the Ju 52s between Aachen and Maastricht. At 0430 hrs ten Ju 52/DFS 230 of 3.Staffel under the command of Lt.Nevries took off for Veldwezelt, nine from Ostheim and one from Butzweilerhof. Near Aachen after reaching an altitude of about 2,600 metres, the gliders would drop the tow line and make their silent approach to the target.

Heinz Schubert, Rudi Opitz and Ludwig Egner had been training glider pilots for SA Koch since November 1939. They were subsequently conscripted to join the team of pilots to convey the paratroopers to the Albert Canal. Heinz Schubert, who flew one of the gliders as a Staffel leader remembered: