Race to the Meuse
THE FIRST British troops had moved forward into Belgium at around 10.20 a.m., nearly four hours after the first orders had been issued. Two British corps were to be in the advance, from which three divisions would hold a six-mile stretch of the River Dyle, sandwiched between the French and the Belgians. Commanding II Corps was the bespectacled and rather hawkish General Alan Brooke, fifty-six years old, a fiercely intelligent career soldier who, as a gunner, had survived the last war and built up a reputation for being a first-class planner. He was also something of a Francophile, having been brought up and educated mostly in France, and as a result speaking with the overly pronounced and crisp English accent of a man raised speaking a different tongue.
Like Gamelin, Brooke rather felt they had plenty of time to reach the Dyle and dig in before the Germans might arrive and so spent the morning ensuring everything was fixed and ready before his infantry got going. All seemed well. There had been plenty of enemy aircraft going over, but they were clearly aiming for targets other than the BEF. In the afternoon, II Corps finally set off, the sun high and bright in the sky. ‘It was hard to believe,’ scribbled Brooke in his diary, ‘on a most glorious spring day, with all nature looking quite its best, that we were taking the first steps towards what must become one of the greatest battles in history!’
Meanwhile, the German invasion was going to plan, with the Luftwaffe destroying much of the Dutch Air Force on the ground and almost all the key objectives for the airborne troops being taken as well. At Dordrecht, Martin Pöppel and his comrades had come into contact with Dutch troops, who had begun firing at them from buildings some 500 metres away. When Oberleutnant Schuller asked for volunteers, Pöppel answered the call, and moments later nine men, led by Schuller, began crawling along the ditches and hedgerows until they were near the buildings from where the Dutch were firing. Crawling under a window, Pöppel could see and hear Dutch soldiers shooting wildly from inside, then suddenly a German machine gun opened up, the enemy took cover, and Pöppel, clutching a Luger pistol in one hand and a grenade in the other, ducked down and hurled the grenade through the window, then moved on to the next. With the explosions and screams from inside, Pöppel’s comrades charged the building and soon after a white cloth was shown and the entire Dutch position surrendered. ‘Sixty-three Dutchmen came out,’ noted Pöppel, ‘and there were only twelve of us.’ None the less, the paratroopers lost several men in the attack – including Schuller, who was mortally wounded. ‘We have seen our first men killed,’ wrote Pöppel, ‘and stand before them in silence.’
Small and large battles had been taking place all across the front, both in the air and on the ground. The Luftwaffe, who had spared the Belgian 4e Escadrille earlier in the day, caught up with them at their new airfield at around 3 p.m. that afternoon, the Stukas with screaming sirens diving down on the men and machines below. Jean Offenberg and his friend Jottard dived for the nearest ditch while bombs fell all around, the ground trembled and the sound of diving bombers and bombs detonating filled their ears. When their attackers had finally gone, there was not a single airworthy aircraft in 3 Squadron left, although their own, in 4e Escadrille, miraculously appeared to be in one piece. It was hardly much cause for joy. News that key bridges had been captured, airfields destroyed and the important fort at Eben-Emael captured was made worse by the news that one of their comrades had been killed. ‘Night,’ wrote Offenberg, ‘fell mercifully on our grief . . .’
The RAF’s 1 Squadron had also been kept busy. They had been pounced on by Me109s as they’d attacked some Dorniers, losing one of their Hurricanes in the process. Back on the ground, the survivors were ordered to move to another airfield at Berry-au-Bac. B Flight took off and Billy Drake managed to help shoot down a Heinkel 111. Landing again, they were attacked once more, although most of the bombs fell wide. Soon after, they took off on yet another patrol. By now the haze had gone and they could clearly see smoke rising from the towns and villages below. Other airfields had also been hit. They finally went to bed, exhausted, as darkness fell. ‘There was a feeling that total chaos was reigning,’ says Drake. ‘Germans were everywhere and we were constantly being bombed.’
René de Chambrun would have no doubt agreed with Drake. It took him all night to travel back to Don, pausing en route to take some wounded children to hospital in Tournai. He finally reached the village only to find the brigade was already on the move and that he was now to report to Alost, the main supply base for the British division due to arrive. The endless congestion of the roads, the frequent air attacks, and the appalling rumours that were circulating and sending the civilian population into a flat spin meant he and his driver did not reach Alost until nightfall on the 11th.
Finally, at long last, he found the divisional camp, spread out around a race course. Setting himself down in the grandstand along with a large number of snoring Tommies, he quickly fell asleep. An hour later, with dawn already spreading, he was awoken again by an air raid on the Brussels suburbs and counted a number of bombers plummeting from the sky.
One of the civilian refugees now clogging the roads was the nineteen-year-old Freddie Knoller, a Viennese Jew who had fled Austria eighteen months earlier following Kristallnacht in November 1938. Austrian Jews had had less time to adjust to the Nazis’ draconian anti-Semitic laws than those in Germany; before the Anschluss, Knoller had not personally noticed much evidence of anti-Semitism in Austria. That night, however, he and his family had seen one of their Jewish neighbours thrown out of his flat, down into the courtyard below and killed. From that moment, Knoller’s parents had been determined that he and his two older brothers should escape the country. Otto, the oldest, managed to get to Holland then England through a friend with good connections; Eric, the second son, found sponsorship to go to America through the cousins of one of their neighbours; and Freddie had been told he would find help from another cousin of his neighbour who lived in Antwerp, and so it was to Holland that he made his way via an illegal entry across the Dutch border at Aachen.
Despite urging his parents to leave too, they had repeatedly assured him and his brothers that it was the young who were in danger – and so they had remained. Freddie had been the first to leave – still only seventeen at the time, he had been severed from his family and all that he knew and loved. His feelings had been mixed. ‘On the one hand,’ he wrote, ‘I had no idea how I would cope without my parents’ guidance or my brothers’ comradeship. On the other the prospect of having nobody to tell me what to do was intoxicating.’ Leaving his family had been heart-wrenching. They all came to see him off on the train. He was weeping and so was his mother. ‘We clung to each other for a long time,’ he noted. ‘I felt only the utter, incomprehensible desolation of parting.’
He had survived, however; the Apte family in Antwerp had helped him; he had made friends, then realized they were leading him astray and so had discarded them; some summer work had been found in a hotel in a Dutch resort; the Jewish Aid Committee had helped too – Knoller had been far from the only Jewish refugee. His parents had even managed to send him his beloved cello – music had been an important part of his family life.
By the summer of 1939, Holland and Belgium were flooded with Jewish refugees and Knoller had been sent to a refugee camp at Merksplas on the Dutch–Belgian border. At the same time, he had heard from his parents that their application for an American visa had been lost. Soon after, another letter told him they were being forced to return to Poland. Unable to help them, Knoller was miserable with worry about them.
However, he did have his cello, and in February he moved to a new camp at Eksaarde and joined a small orchestra that performed for a refugee audience every weekend.
The German attack brought this existence to an immediate end. Told to head to either Ostend or France and to take nothing but essentials, Knoller had been forced to abandon his cello – it felt as though he were leaving a part of himself and his old family life in Vienna for good. He began heading to the French border, along with the mass of other refugees. Knoller was glad he was on foot and not encumbered with vehicles, wagons and older family members to look after. A German plane flew over, strafing them. Knoller managed to quickly dive out of the way, but others were not so lucky.
Eventually, he reached Tournai and, along with many others, squeezed himself on to a platform at the station, desperately hoping to board a train for France. He had not been there long when the town was attacked by Stukas. Knoller managed to take cover in a piece of concrete piping. He was so terrified, he realized he had wet himself. An entire section of the station was engulfed in flames, and as the bombers departed and the all-clear was sounded, Knoller crawled out and looked around through the smoke and dust at the devastation. The moans of the injured, the screams of others, were terrible to hear. ‘As the air cleared,’ he recalled, ‘we saw bodies, whole and dismembered, lying in pools of blood. I vomited what little food I had in me.’
It was certainly the strength of German air power that dominated on that opening day of the battle. Integrating air power into the initial operation on the ground was a key component of the German assault. Although air power was still comparatively new, the principles developed by the Luftwaffe slotted neatly into the age-old Prussian theories of Bewegungskrieg – the lightning war of movement. Feldmarschall Göring had, like Hitler, arrived near the front by personal train. His one was called Asia and was even more elaborate and ornate. On paper, his air forces had amounted to 5,446 aircraft that morning, but strength on paper was not the same thing as actual strength, and actual strength could be quite different again from operational strength. Hajo Herrmann’s III/KG4, for example, now equipped with the heavier and slower but sort-of-dive-bombing-capable Ju88s had an actual strength of thirty-five bombers, but eight were out of action, so the operational strength was twenty-seven. This was quite normal. Almost no unit was fully operational. Furthermore, there were still a large number operating in Norway and yet more held back for home defence. This meant the Luftwaffe had begun its assault in the West with around 1,500 bombers and 1,000 fighters – or, in other words, less than half its strength on paper.
Göring was personally unaware of this – Luftwaffe staff and intelligence officers had learned that it paid to tell the chief what he wanted to hear rather than tedious and unwelcome truths – but the shortfall did not affect the general plan, which was to destroy as much of the enemy air forces as possible and as quickly as possible too. They were confident of doing so too, not least because their intelligence had underestimated the true enemy strength, reckoning the French had under a thousand bombers and fighters and that the RAF, which they calculated had around double that amount, was unlikely to commit all its aircraft to the fighting in France.
In fact, the Allies’ strength on paper was much the same as that of the Germans, and while it was true that the French had just under 900 combat aircraft at the front, they did have a further 1,700 combat-ready which could, in theory, be thrown into the fray quite easily. That they were not was a deliberate policy to avoid being attacked on the ground should the Germans launch a surprise attack. On the face of it, this was quite sensible.
German assessment of the RAF was closer to the mark, however. The RAF was divided into three home commands: Coastal, Bomber and Fighter. Aircraft for France had to be drawn from those commands and then placed in a new set-up, known as British Air Forces in France, which was then further split into thirteen squadrons of the BEF Air Component, and the Advanced Air Striking Force (AASF). The former was answerable to General Lord Gort and to the French, while the AASF was not, command and control instead coming under the auspices of Bomber Command. It was a complicated set-up, but in all, that morning, 10 May, the RAF had around 500 combat-ready aircraft. Add to that the combined Dutch and Belgian air forces, and the Allies had good numbers with which to take on the Luftwaffe.
The big advantage the attackers had, however, was not so much their numbers, but the huge benefit of both surprise and choosing when and where to attack. The Dutch and Belgians certainly had no co-ordinated air defence system, but then nor did the French. With almost no radar and no ground controllers, Allied aircraft did not have the means of anticipating where Luftwaffe aircraft might attack and so were left to patrol the skies, often aimlessly, on the off-chance that they might spy an enemy formation. For those on the ground, such as René de Chambrun, it might have appeared as though the skies were black with German planes, but at 15,000 feet up the sky seemed a much bigger place. The furthest a human eye could see an aircraft at was only around three miles. The invasion front covered thousands of square miles. In fact, command and control of the Armée de l’Air was pretty hopeless. Most of its aircraft were modern types and more or less a match for those in the Luftwaffe, but these were divided into Zones d’Opérations, each with its own aircraft and independent command structure. The net result was that it was unable to bring to bear any concentration of force in the way that the Luftwaffe could. In short, the Allies were not best prepared. Having half-decent aircraft wasn’t enough.
One person witnessing this at first hand was Squadron Leader Horace ‘George’ Darley, who had recently been posted to help run the Operations Room at Merville near Lille. Darley had joined the RAF from school back in 1932 and now, aged twenty-six, was an experienced pilot and officer whose career had developed with that of the Air Force. Stints of operational flying in Aden and East Africa as well as time as an instructor and ground controller made him a very rounded and highly experienced officer.
At Merville, however, Darley’s task was an uphill one. Based in a small house beside the airfield, he was supposed to field calls from the ground forces and then send up fighters in response. ‘But all the communications were by field telephones,’ he said, ‘and I had about twenty.’ One of them would ring and it would take him precious time just to work out which one it was. Needless to say, more often than not, the Hurricanes were scrambled too late to have much effect.
In fact, such was the dispersion of Allied air forces and so disjointed command and control that the comparative parity in numbers became less important. The Luftwaffe could pick them off a bit at a time – bombing airfields, catching them on the ground or pouncing on them when they ventured into the air.
For the most part, the signs were encouraging for the Germans. Eben-Emael had been taken, the airborne landings around Rotterdam had been a success, key bridges had been captured, the Dutch Air Force had been all but destroyed. The RAF had seventy-five aircraft lost or damaged, the French seventy-four. Airfields had been bombed. Chaos had reigned.
Yet the Luftwaffe had suffered horrendously that opening day, with 192 bombers and fighters lost and damaged and a staggering 244 transport planes. In all, 353 German aircraft and 904 pilots and crew would never fly again. After one day of battle. These were substantial losses.
Across the Atlantic, the President of the United States had heard the news of the German attack at around 11 p.m., Eastern Standard Time, on the night of 9 May. Sitting in the presidential study in the White House in Washington DC, he called together several of his key people, including the Secretary of the Treasury, Henry Morgenthau Jr, and gave the order to freeze all Low Countries assets immediately.
The dilemma facing Roosevelt was how to make the majority of the American people see the rapidly worsening crisis in Europe as one that threatened the security of the United States as well – especially when he had been so firmly isolationist himself throughout much of the 1930s. FDR still hoped that America might keep out of the war, but clearly they had to be ready. His approach was twofold: to help the Allies, Britain and France especially, who would be, in effect, the USA’s first line of defence, and to build up America’s own defences, which had, during the 1920s and 1930s, dwindled to almost nothing, partly due to cost and partly because of a deliberate policy based on the belief that maintaining large armed forces during peacetime was unnecessarily provocative. As a result, much of its Navy had been mothballed, the Air Corps had been reduced to just 20,000 men, and the Army had shrunk to just 119,913 in 1932, and on 1 July 1939 had increased only to 188,565 – just 10 per cent of the German troops marching into Poland. In 1939, the US Army was the nineteenth largest in the world, smaller than that of tiny Portugal.
Small amounts of growth had been instigated. A new shipbuilding programme had been launched back in 1938, and warships had been brought back into eastern ports for the first time since the last war. A small increase in the Army had also been authorized, but only to 227,000 men. The United States in May 1940 could hardly have been less ready to go to war.
This needed to change, but FDR’s problem was that most Americans simply did not believe the threat. Poll after poll revealed that around 95 per cent of all Americans believed the US should not be drawn into the war, and while an increasing number thought America should strengthen its own defences, this was not a voice loud enough to convince Congress, where the isolationist lobby still shouted the loudest. And no matter how sound his reasons, the truth remained that Roosevelt was making a major political u-turn.
Compounding matters was the upcoming presidential election in November 1940. A precedent had been set by George Washington that no president should hold office for more than two terms; FDR had served two, but he was pretty certain he was the only leading political figure who could both win the next election and lead the US in the direction it needed to go. But could he really stand for a third term? It was something being muttered about, something FDR had clearly been thinking over, but for the time being he was keeping his thoughts and plans to himself. It was, however, the elephant in the room and would have to be confronted soon.
The biggest immediate challenge was how to build up US defences quickly and efficiently and organize the economy in such a way as to get this done without challenging the basics of democracy or unduly rousing the isolationist lobby, among whose number were some powerful and very vocal names, including the celebrated aviator Charles Lindbergh and the Ambassador to Britain, Joe Kennedy. Mistrust seethed through Washington. Isolationists and interventionists traded blows, and so did New Dealers with the big businessmen; there was, it seemed, no middle ground: capitalism or social revolution, war or isolationism. Roosevelt had a very tricky line to walk, and well he knew it.
None the less, the German assault in the West unquestionably acted as a spur. Roosevelt had been careful to play his hand very lightly; now he would have to take risks and push forward his plans both for rearmament and for educating the American public. And to do this, he would need a new team of men around him.
One person who was there to help the President was Harry Hopkins, who had not, as widely expected, died the previous autumn. Rather, Hopkins had made a very slow but steady recovery. The problems had not gone away – they never would with two-thirds of his stomach gone – and he was thin, anaemic and physically weak, but his mind, it seemed, was as sharp as ever. The son of an Iowa harness-maker, Hopkins had a very different background to Roosevelt, with his privileged East Coast upbringing, yet they shared a razor-sharp sense of humour and equally razor-sharp political instincts. ‘He knows instinctively when to ask, when to keep still, when to press, when to hold back; when to approach Roosevelt direct, when to go at him roundabout,’ wrote one columnist about Hopkins. ‘Quick, alert, shrewd, bold and carrying it off with a bright Hell’s bells air, Hopkins is in all respects the inevitable Roosevelt favourite.’ Both men had also fought life-threatening illness – in Roosevelt’s case, it was the polio that had crippled a once tall and athletic man in his prime and confined him to a wheelchair for the rest of his life. Their mutual affection ran deep, and it was no surprise that on 10 May, the day the Germans had launched their offensive in the West, and the day of political turmoil in Britain and France, FDR should dine with his closest and most trusted friend, colleague and political advisor.
After dinner, Hopkins had started to make a move for home – back to the rented house in Georgetown – but the President instead insisted he stay. Hopkins acquiesced, and after being lent some pyjamas was given a bedroom on the second floor overlooking the South Lawn – the very room in which President Abraham Lincoln had signed the Emancipation Proclamation seventy-seven years earlier.
Hopkins not only stayed in the White House that night of 10 May, but the following night too, and the next after that as well. Roosevelt needed him close at hand, and, as ever, Hopkins was willing to do his master’s bidding and embark on a new stage in his career. Throughout his political life, he had been concerned primarily with social reform. Military matters and foreign affairs had not interested him. That, however, was about to change.
Back across the Atlantic, the momentum in the battle now raging in the West was all with the Germans, despite the aircraft losses; everyone felt it: the civilians fleeing from their homes, the defenders, who seemed to be overawed by the combination of air power and the speed with which the Germans were operating, and the Germans themselves. Hans von Luck, for example, was now in the Reconnaissance Battalion of 7. Panzerdivision, commanded by the young and dynamic Generalmajor Erwin Rommel. They were part of Armeegruppe A, but in Panzerkorps Hoth, aiming to cross the Rhine further north than Guderian, at Dinant. Von Luck and his men were highly trained, believed in the new panzer tactics of speed, and were confident of success. When some of the older men had warned them it would not be a walkover like Poland, ‘We younger ones replied that there could not, and must not, be any trench warfare as in 1914–18,’ noted von Luck. ‘Our tank force was too mobile, our attitude too positive.’
While von Luck and the rest of Panzerkorps Hoth were hurrying through the Ardennes, the Allies were lumbering into Belgium and Holland to meet the northern thrust, and in so doing had fallen for the German deception plan hook, line and sinker. By 12 May, the German 6. Armee, part of Armeegruppe B, had linked up with the airborne troops still holding Eben-Emael. The Albert Canal, a key obstacle that ran from Antwerp to Liège, had been crossed. The Dutch Army had fallen back to Rotterdam and appeared to be finished. Gerrit den Hartog and his fellows in 28th Regiment had stumbled from one confused encounter to another. On the 11th, they had headed north from Amstelwijk to the bridges at Zwijndrecht, linking the island of Dordrecht to Rotterdam, which had been taken the day before. By this time, den Hartog was exhausted, hungry and scared. Rather than wrest the bridges from the Germans, however, they had been met by unarmed Dutch soldiers warning them not to shoot. As they had approached, German troops had appeared and captured the lot, Gerrit den Hartog included.
Meanwhile, to the south, the French 7e Armée, fulfilling their role as part of the Breda Variant, had advanced only to be forced back towards Antwerp. By the 13th, German troops had reached the Dutch coast, while the Belgians were starting to fall back too, desperately trying to link up with the British and French now taking up positions along the Dyle. Not all were yet there, however. The French 1e Armée was still struggling to wade through the mass of refugees clogging the roads ever more densely. Bombing by the Luftwaffe continued; telephone lines were cut and roads blocked, and dispatch riders were heading into the morass on little more than a fool’s errand. The Allied air forces, having proved themselves worthy opponents in the air, were being butchered on the ground instead.
And, all the while, the panzers in Armeegruppe A that were the main thrust were pushing through the Ardennes, forging their way past the long list of obstacles and potential time hazards so that miraculously, by 13 May, just as Guderian had predicted, they had reached the River Meuse.