The Go-for-Broke Gamble
THE GERMAN ARMY command may have been sidelined over Norway and Denmark, but they most certainly were not over Case YELLOW. At OKH headquarters in Zossen, the Chief of Staff and chief planner, General Franz Halder, had been tirelessly making preparations. After his somewhat Damascene volte-face in February, he had continued to prepare for von Manstein’s two-fisted assault.
Speed was unquestionably going to be of the essence if Case was to have any prospect of success at all, yet although Halder only belatedly woke up to this realization, the concept of using speed to wrong-foot the enemy was absolutely nothing new at all, and was, if anything, deeply embedded in the Prussian military psyche. Indeed, for all its air of being bold and radical, von Manstein’s plan was nothing of the sort. Making a lightning strike in an effort to knock the enemy off balance and force a rapid result was what the Prussians and Germans always did. It was what they did against Denmark in 1864 (and it worked), what they did against Austria in 1866 (it worked again, just), what they did against France in 1870 (worked initially then ran out of steam), and what they did in August 1914 (failed, but only just). It was also what they had done in Poland (very successfully), Denmark (ditto) and Norway (which was looking good so far), and what they planned to do now against France and the Low Countries. The Prussians had coined a term for this rapid operational level of war: Bewegungskrieg. And the goal of Bewegungskrieg was Kesselschlacht, which translated literally as ‘cauldron battle’, but which really meant a battle of encirclement, in which the enemy would be trapped.
Frederick the Great, the Prussian king whom Hitler so admired, once pointed out that Prussia’s wars needed to be short and decisive because in a long drawn-out conflict discipline would falter and their resources would quickly be exhausted. He was spot on, and not much had changed in the intervening years, although under the Nazis there was every chance discipline would not falter quite so readily. But certainly Germany had extremely limited resources, and its location – in the heart of Europe and with a comparatively narrow coastline – meant it had not only few means of securing the necessary shortfall but was also vulnerable to attack from more than one quarter. That other great Prussian military thinker, von Clausewitz, also pointed out that in war there are two means of achieving victory: through a war of exhaustion or a war of annihilation.
Both geographical insecurity and a shortage of natural resources meant German strategy was the same as it had always been: to strike swift and hard and win the day in quick order, which was why the only real option for Prussia/Germany had always been and remained to follow the principles of Bewegungskrieg and Kesselschlacht – and to aim for annihilation of the enemy.
The trouble was, this was easier said than done, not least because their enemies tended to have around the same resources as them, if not more, in terms of men and firepower – and this was certainly the case for the attack in the West about to be unleashed. The key was to make sure the Allies had their forces spread so the Wehrmacht could focus its attack at one point and ensure it concentrated far more forces at that single point than the enemy. This was known as the Schwerpunkt principle.
In essence, then, von Manstein’s basic plan was not in the least original, because it rigidly adhered to the principles Prussians had been following for ever; and, in truth, they had no alternative, which is why the Allies, if they had studied their history more carefully and applied their knowledge of Germany’s geo-economic situation to a military appreciation, should have been able to anticipate the likely approach their enemy would make. After all, an assault on the Maginot Line made little sense, advancing purely through the Low Countries was very obvious, while a passage through the Ardennes not only had been used in 1870, but was the only real chance the Germans had of achieving tactical surprise. Merely stating that the Ardennes were unpassable, as Gamelin had declared, without ever really working this claim through, was more reckless than the plan itself.
Where Case YELLOW was highly original, however, was in the means by which the spearhead was going to reach the Schwerpunkt – the main point of attack – and then engage the enemy, and for that, the man responsible above all others was not really von Manstein, but rather General Heinz Guderian – the panzer general who had so impressed Leutnant Hans von Luck two years earlier.
The 51-year-old Guderian was not only a dynamic soldier, but also a deep thinker on military matters and a couple of years earlier had published Achtung Panzer!, a treatise on the use of tanks in modern warfare. Von Manstein had since been sidelined but Guderian had not, and was proving instrumental in breathing new, modern life into the old Prussian principles of Bewegungskrieg. Accepted doctrine in the German Army was that tanks could not advance without infantry support. What Guderian was suggesting was that his panzer divisions would carry the motorized infantry with them as part of the division, enabling them to operate entirely independently of the infantry divisions, who, reliant on their feet or horse-drawn carts, would slow them down. Guderian and his staff were therefore working on how to move mechanized divisions of tanks, trucks and other motorized vehicles both swiftly and in such a way that surprise was maintained until the last minute. Then, once they reached the Meuse, armour, infantry and artillery would work together and in harmony with aerial artillery in the form of the Luftwaffe, and controlled and commanded primarily by radio communication. No other side had thought to construct an armoured division in such a way.
In other words, it was the plans they were developing to achieve this breakthrough that were radical and new, not the concept per se.
On 17 March, Guderian and the senior commanders of Armeegruppe A had attended a conference with Hitler at the Reich Chancellery. Guderian was the last of the Army and corps commanders to brief Hitler on his plan. He told the Führer and his Army Group superiors that on the fourth day after the advance began, he would reach the Meuse. By the end of the fifth, he would have established a bridgehead across it.
‘And then what are you going to do?’ Hitler asked.
‘Unless I receive orders to the contrary, I intend on the next day to continue my advance westwards.’ He added that in his opinion he should drive straight to the Channel coast.
General Busch, who commanded 16. Armee, which consisted almost entirely of infantry divisions, said, ‘Well, I don’t think you’ll cross the river in the first place!’ In saying this, he was speaking for almost all Armeegruppe A’s senior officers, including its commander, Feldmarschall Gerd von Rundstedt.
Hitler, visibly tense, turned to Guderian, waiting for his response.
‘There’s no need for you to do so in any case,’ Guderian replied. The last thing he wanted was slow, cumbersome infantry divisions lacking almost any mechanized transportation getting in his way.
Not only was most of Armeegruppe A against the plan, but so too was much of Armeegruppe B. Its commander, Generaloberst von Bock, called in on Halder in his Berlin apartment and pleaded with him to abandon it entirely. ‘You will be creeping by ten miles from the Maginot Line with the flank of your breakthrough,’ he told Halder, ‘and hope the French will watch inertly! You are cramming the mass of the tank units together into the sparse roads of the Ardennes mountain country, as if there were no such thing as air power! And you then hope to be able to lead an operation as far as the coast with an open southern flank two hundred miles long, where stands the mass of the French Army!’ This, he added, transcended the ‘frontiers of reason’.
Von Bock was talking a lot of sense. On paper, it looked hopelessly optimistic. And von Bock knew, as Halder knew, that of the 135 divisions earmarked for the offensive, large numbers were far from being the elite, crack units the rest of the world seemed to think they were. In the entire Army, there were only ten panzer and six fully mechanized divisions. These mere sixteen divisions were the modern, fully equipped units of the German Army. In the spearhead that would thrust through the Ardennes, there were only ten such modernized divisions, divided into three corps, of which Guderian’s had three panzer divisions. Since there were not enough roads through the Ardennes for all three corps to advance at once, the movement would have to be done in stages.
And yes, the panzer divisions were modern and well equipped, but the majority of their panzers were hardly the latest in cutting-edge tank design. Only Panzer IIIs and IVs had decent-sized guns, and there were only 627 of them. The remaining 1,812 were Mk Is, with only their machine guns, Mk IIs, which had a rather feeble 20mm gun, and Czech T35s and T38s, which also had below-par firepower. In contrast, the Allies could call on some 4,204 tanks, almost double the number in the German Army. Of these, a significant number were bigger, better armed and better armoured than anything the Germans had.
Of the rest of the German Army, only a quarter were active-duty troops that could be used in the first wave of the offensive – that is, Regular peacetime units reinforced with reservists, such as Siegfried Knappe’s 87. Division. The second wave consisted of mostly younger fully trained reservists. After that were those reservists who had only been cursorily trained. Then there were the Landwehr units – Territorials – who were mostly older, veterans of the Great War and barely trained at all since 1918.
This meant that only half of all German soldiers had had more than a few weeks’ training, while more than a quarter were over forty. Nazi propaganda had kept this rather startling reality close to its chest.
In Italy, Mussolini had now put down on paper a ‘secret report’ summarizing the situation and outlining future military strategy. In effect, it was a kind of war directive, because he had now convinced himself utterly that Italy had no choice but to intervene. To act like puttane – whores – with the West was not an option; neutrality would simply downgrade Italy for a century; it was absurd to think they could simply sit by and watch. The only conceivable course was a war parallel to that of Germany and which would unshackle them from their Mediterranean prison.
This report was issued to his senior commanders at the beginning of April, but although Maresciallo Badoglio showed a small inkling of offensive spirit, there was hardly much enthusiasm from anyone else, which came spectacularly to the fore at a meeting of service chiefs held in Rome on 9 April – the same day the Germans were invading Denmark and Norway. Maresciallo Rodolfo Graziani, the grizzled Chief of Staff of the Army, was appalled, particularly when it became clear that there was no suggestion of any joint operations with Germany. ‘But we won’t be able to do anything in that case,’ he complained to Badoglio, ‘even if France collapses.’ Amiragglio Domenico Cavagnari, the Chief of Staff of the Navy, was equally despairing. The enemy, he said, would place one fleet at Gibraltar and another at Suez, ‘and we shall all asphyxiate inside’. Generale Pricolo of the Air Force, no less unenthusiastic, warned that too many illusions were being entertained about what might be achievable. All agreed that an offensive against the British from Libya was impossible, while even in Abyssinia the current situation was precarious – and that was just dealing with current unrest from native Africans.
The only person slightly thawing about Mussolini’s bellicose rhetoric was Count Ciano. Contemptuous about the Allied response in Norway, he was also scenting a whiff of desperation in the escalating diplomatic efforts from France and Britain. On 24 April, a personal letter for Mussolini from Reynaud was presented to Ciano by François-Poncet, the Ambassador, inviting the Duce to meet the French Prime Minister. ‘Mussolini read the letter with pleasure and scorn,’ noted Ciano, adding, ‘it is a strange message, a little melancholy and a little bragging.’ Mussolini refused the invitation with a reply that was, Ciano recorded with ill-concealed glee, ‘cold, cutting and contemptuous’.
Yet however contemptuous he may have been feeling towards the French as a whole, Ciano was certainly quite content to shower attention on one particular French woman. The film star Corinne Luchaire was making a new film in Rome called L’Intruse and was thoroughly enjoying being made a fuss of by Roman society, and not least Ciano, who took her to dinner and gave her the full broadside of Italian aristocratic charm. Luchaire, for her part, was flattered but refused to give in to him, knowing his reputation as a philanderer. None the less, she thought him handsome and good company. ‘I was proud to go everywhere arm in arm with the Italian Foreign Minister,’ she noted. ‘Our friendship got me prestigious invitations.’
But although she never once talked politics or was particularly aware of the increasingly strained relationship between her country and Italy, she was none the less playing a dangerous game for one quite so beautiful and famous and, as a result, so often photographed and written about. One day, she was taken to a show-jumping competition, which was eventually won by the German team. Conscious that many eyes were looking at her to see how she would react, she decided that since it was only a sporting event, it would be acceptable to applaud. But then a swastika was raised, the German national anthem began to be played and the entire crowd stood and gave the Nazi salute. Suddenly, she was aware how compromised she had become. ‘I, only, remained sitting among thousands of people standing up,’ she recorded. ‘My behaviour was noticed.’
And after that, the invitations dramatically dried up. Ciano no longer came calling or sent her flowers. The press turned on her, and she was strongly advised to return to France. The film, however, was not yet finished, so she remained in Italy. It would prove a bad mistake.
Back in Paris, the political and military leadership was as fractious as ever. Reynaud had been desperately trying to instil some resolve and fighting spirit and, more importantly as far as he was concerned, a sense of urgency. Back on 30 March, Amiral Darlan had warned Gamelin to get ready for swift action in Norway, quite sensibly pointing out that Germany was unlikely to stand idly by once British mining operations began. A few days later, Reynaud had also asked him to be ready to move at a moment’s notice; three days later, on 8 April, the Prime Minister had rung him to tell him of German shipping movements towards Norway.
Yet, as far as Reynaud could make out, Gamelin had done absolutely nothing, and at an emergency meeting of the War Cabinet on 12 April he tried desperately to secure both a greater and swifter reinforcement of Norway. The trouble was, the operation was largely a British one, and such was the structure of the French military machine, it was simply incapable of acting quickly. The petty squabbles, the poisonous personality clashes, the fact that Reynaud was stymied by the cabal of Radicals controlled by Daladier, and the inherently backward-thinking French military machine all worked directly against quick-fire military action. It wasn’t so much that Général Gamelin was not willing to act, but that he was simply unable to do so with the urgency Reynaud was demanding. As it happened, after the emergency meeting, he offered his resignation to Daladier – not Reynaud, who would have accepted it – but it was refused.
So the meeting got them no further. A frustrated Reynaud had to sit back and listen to reports showing that in this contest of speed between Germany and the Allies, Hitler was winning hands down.
On 22 April, the British war leaders arrived in Paris for a further meeting of the Supreme War Council. That day, at the Quai d’Orsay, the mood was fairly buoyant. The first troops had landed near Narvik a few days earlier, although not in a direct assault on the town as Churchill had requested, but spread out so as to cover the main landing area and approaches to the town, and from where a firm base could be established first. The capture of both Narvik and Trondheim was enthusiastically supported, despite the footholds the Germans already had and despite the gobbling up of the southern half of Norway. Even Churchill had warmed to the Trondheim enterprise, although he pushed for, and got, the promise of further chasseurs alpins for Narvik. After Narvik had been taken, air forces were to fly in to establish a firm base. Denying Swedish iron ore to the Germans, it was agreed, was still to be a top priority, which could be achieved by capturing the port through which it passed. For about the first time since discussions had begun about their involvement in Scandinavia, the Supreme War Council appeared to be finally singing pretty much from the same hymn sheet.
The following day, discussion focused on the Western Front and an agreement that the moment the Germans made a move in the West, Allied forces would advance into Belgium, whether the Belgian government agreed to it or not. Reynaud, however, gave a sombre appreciation. The Germans, he told them, now had 190 divisions, of which 150 could be used in the West. Germany, he said, had an advantage in manpower, in artillery and in stocks of ammunition. None of this was true; once again, German projection of military might was clouding judgement, and there is no doubt that it was putting the Allied war leaders into a defensive – not to say demoralized – mindset. Had Hitler, Goebbels or even generals like Halder been flies on the wall, they would have been delighted.
Meanwhile, in Norway, the German troops appeared to be backing up the image so carefully presented by the Nazis, although the opposition in central Norway was weaker than anything they had experienced in Poland. It was hardly the fault of the hapless British 148th Brigade, which was appallingly badly equipped, having no mechanized or tank support, almost no guns and no air support. Taking on the advancing Germans with only their rifles, a few Brens and some grenades but with nowhere near enough ammunition even for those meagre weapons, and with ill-trained and equally ill-equipped Norwegians fighting alongside them, was only ever going to end one way.
In truth, the situation was quite hopeless by the time they had finally reached Åndalsnes. Splitting the force originally intended for Narvik and then splitting it again between Namsos and Åndalsnes had merely made an already bad situation much worse. At the same time, to the north, a further brigade, the 146th, had landed at Namsos, but so too had a French demi-brigade of chasseurs alpins. Since the French were also without transport, they remained at Namsos while 146th Brigade then began the march south towards Trondheim. These depleted and poorly equipped troops were made short work of by German Gebirgsjäger, whose own position was strengthened by a landing of reinforcements. The road to Trondheim was now blocked. An evacuation was the only option.
Meanwhile, to the south, the first half of 148th Brigade had managed to reach Dombås, where the Fallschirmjäger had unexpectedly been defeated by the Norwegians, and then head on further south, almost to Lillehammer. This was the largest town in central Norway and by the evening of 21 April, when the first British troops reached the front, it had already fallen. The men were tired, hungry and very badly armed. It was also bitterly cold, with thick snow all around. The men had greatcoats but nothing more.
Lofty Kynoch and the missing halves of the two British battalions reached the small village of Tretten to the north of Lillehammer the following day, 22 April, where the British and Norwegians had hastily retreated to make their next stand. A German bomber circled overhead as they clambered out of the train, then swooped so low that Kynoch could see the pilot as it flew off. Soon after, Messerschmitt 109 fighters appeared, hurtling low over them, strafing them with machine-gun fire. Kynoch found the experience petrifying.
‘Geddown and lie flat!’ yelled the Company Sergeant Major, as bullets whistled past, snicking through the pine trees around them and kicking up gouges of snow and dirt. Moments later, the fighters were gone.
Of course, this tiny force of British and Norwegian infantry had no chance. More aircraft arrived, this time Stukas. The explosions of the bombs was deafening in the narrow confines of the valley, with smoke and debris fizzing and swirling into the air. Kynoch, totally unprepared from his training for such an eruption of violence, watched the scene with mesmerized terror. He felt barely able to move a muscle. The following morning, 23 April, the Luftwaffe was back.
Around 10.30 a.m., German troops reached the British and Norwegian defenders, blasting their way forward with artillery and mortars and then tanks and infantry, and they were quickly forced back, around a sharp bend in the narrow valley to Tretten itself. Lofty Kynoch, earlier sent on a patrol up into the mountains, had watched with dismay as Norwegian troops valiantly began firing an ancient artillery piece that looked to him more like something from the Napoleonic era.
Later that afternoon, it was all over and the stragglers were falling back. Kynoch and the rest of his patrol had managed to work their way back down to the valley and get a lift on a civilian lorry along with a number of other men, leaving the carnage temporarily behind. What had become of most of their mates, they had no idea. Hungry and freezing cold, Kynoch, for one, felt utterly demoralized and miserable.
Back in London on the evening of 23 April, after the end of the Supreme War Council meeting in Paris, the British contingency learned that while landings at Namsos and Åndalsnes had been unopposed, the attempt to take Trondheim in a pincer movement had failed and that news from central Norway was hardly any better. Jock Colville found the Prime Minister somewhat depressed by the meetings in Paris, less because of the unfolding situation in Norway than by Churchill’s evident frustration and accompanying rampages.
‘I have an uneasy feeling that all is not being as competently handled as it might be,’ scribbled Colville in his diary the following day. It worried him that troops had been sent to the snowy north of Norway without skis or snowshoes, that the judgement of the Chiefs of Staff appeared to be wanting, and that there was an absence of clear, well-thought-through clockwork efficiency. ‘Of one thing I am convinced,’ he added, ‘we make our minds up lamentably slowly and we do not ensure against every eventuality like the Germans do.’ A young man he may have been, but Colville was perceptive with regard to Allied failings. Singleness of purpose, decisiveness, clear-headed military thinking and efficiency had been strikingly lacking in the Allied adventure in Norway. It was no wonder it was all going so badly wrong.
By the end of April, it was only Narvik, the original objective, which was still within Allied grasp. The Gebirgsjäger there were effectively surrounded by a combination of British, Norwegian and, with the arrival of the chasseurs alpins on 28 April, French troops. However, because the British and French had been landed at various points around that web of headlands, fjords and inlets, any concerted Allied assault would be difficult, and these problems were compounded by the terrain, heavy snow and freezing conditions. Three thousand men of the French Légion étrangère (Foreign Legion) arrived on 6 May, followed three days later by a brigade of Poles. Here, at least, the Allies had some kind of manpower and material advantage even if they still had no air support – Narvik was well beyond the range of Allied aircraft.
In central Norway, however, British intervention had been disastrous, and the fighting there was all over by the time the French Foreign Legion had arrived at Narvik; it was as though two quite different campaigns were being fought, albeit in different parts of the same country. Lofty Kynoch and the remnants of 148th Brigade had managed to fall back to Åndalsnes, in part thanks to 15th Brigade being thrown into the fray and briefly holding up the German advance. A squadron of British biplanes had been posted to Norway and had landed on a frozen lake, only to be wiped out within two days – one of them was shot down by Helmut Lent in his Me110 Zerstörer. At Åndalsnes, the remaining British troops began to be evacuated on the night of 30 April, but not before the Luftwaffe had pounded the largely wooden town so that it was left burning and with dark smoke pluming thousands of feet into the sky. Lofty Kynoch was one of around 150 men from 148th Brigade to reach the wreck of the town early on the 30th after a long, fraught and repeatedly disrupted forced march and then train journey. They spent two terrible days waiting to be lifted off, hungry and exhausted, watching the town burning and the repeated air attacks, several of which were too close for comfort.
Among the ships steaming to Åndalsnes for the evacuation was HMS Delight, which as part of the screen around the cruiser HMS Manchester was cutting through the glassy-calm waters at some 25 knots. As they entered the fjord, First Lieutenant Vere Wight-Boycott looked in awe at the snow-capped mountains rising sheer from the water’s edge. ‘Their height, combined with the narrowness of the fjord,’ he noted, ‘gave one the impression of steaming down a corridor so narrow that there was no room to turn out of it.’ They soon came under air attack, but the cruisers and destroyers swiftly responded. Delight’s own 3-inch gun opened fire and with the first shot hit a leading plane, which burst into three flaming pieces. The rest of the aircraft then melted away.
Reaching the town, Vere-Boycott was shocked to see the burning remains and the still smouldering pier. Through his binoculars, he wondered how long it was going to take to lift 4,000 men and rather gloomily guessed it would not be done before daylight. However, one ship pulled alongside the pier, then another next to her, and then Delight, and much to his surprise the operation was a lot quicker and smoother than he had imagined. Delight cast off around 1 a.m. and skimmed through the water at 29 knots on the way out.
Delight was not carrying Lofty Kynoch, who managed to board HMS Sheffield and get away. ‘I turned and took one last look at the place where we had landed just a few days ago,’ wrote Kynoch. ‘No pretty houses now, only smouldering black chimney stacks standing erect like ghostly fingers. Over all a black pall of smoke that rose in the air and spilled outwards and upwards over the fjord.’ By 2 a.m., it was in German hands.
Only at Narvik, nearly eight hundred miles north of Åndalsnes, was there any hope left for the Allies. This small – but crucial – port was finally within their grasp, although how they would hold on to it once it was captured was another matter.
None the less, German successes elsewhere in Norway had not stopped Hitler from becoming increasingly agitated about Narvik. On 17 April, as it became clear British landings around Narvik had been made successfully, he had urged the Army to evacuate the town; by the following day, he had calmed down, but with the further Allied landings, his anxiety rose to fever pitch once more.
Placated by continued good reports from central Norway, he had been told on 30 April that the campaign had now all but been won. As Warlimont noted, success had been achieved ‘in spite of his amateurish interventions’.
Hitler was now ready to launch his assault in the West. After months of planning, after all the delays, soul-searching and long winter months of stockpiling, the moment had at last arrived. The days had lengthened, the weather was good, and the men involved in this huge undertaking were as ready and confident as they were ever going to be.
Yet despite the victories in Poland, Denmark and over much of Norway, Hitler’s forces were not as strong as Nazi propaganda liked to make out. There were 157 divisions in the German Army, not 190 as Reynaud had claimed, and 135 divisions available for Case YELLOW. As soon as they crossed into Holland and Belgium, those two neutrals would join the Allies, who together would then have no fewer than 151 divisions. Germany would be attacking with 7,378 artillery pieces, but the French alone had 10,700 and the Allies collectively more than 14,000 – that is, almost double those of the Germans. France alone had a third more tanks than Germany. Even in terms of aircraft, the Allies could call on more planes than the Luftwaffe. It was one thing thundering into militarily weak nations like Poland and Norway, or even defeating poorly equipped and disorganized British infantry operating in snow-covered and mountainous terrain, but quite another to take on such massed forces in their own back yard.
But there was now no other choice. Hitler’s invasion of Poland had got Germany into a war it was ill-equipped to fight. A go-for-broke, all-or-nothing gamble was the only chance Germany had of victory.