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By Root 1224 0

all the more prisoners.’ Earlier that day, Gamelin’s headquarters declared: ‘[It] is still not possible to determine the zone in which the enemy will make his main attack.’ But that night General Joseph Georges, commanding the north-eastern front, telephoned Gamelin to say that there had been a rather serious upset – ‘un pépin’ – at Sedan. At 0300 on the 14th, a French officer described the scene at Georges’ headquarters: ‘The room was barely half-lit. Major Navereau was repeating in a low voice the information coming in. General Roton, the chief of staff, was stretched out in an armchair. The atmosphere was that of a family in which there has been a death. Georges got up quickly … He was terribly pale. “Our front has been broken at Sedan! There has been a collapse.” He flung himself into a chair and burst into tears.’ An officer described Gen. Georges Blanchard, commander of First Army, ‘sitting in tragic immobility, saying nothing, doing nothing, but just gazing at the map spread on the table between us’.

The decisive moment of the campaign came later that morning. The German crossing of the Meuse need not have been calamitous, had it been reversed by a swift counter-attack. But French troops assembled lethargically, then advanced hesitantly and piecemeal. Attacks by 152 bombers and 250 fighters of the RAF and the French air force failed to damage the German bridges, while costing heavy losses – thirty-one of seventy-one British bombers failed to return. F/Lt. Bill Simpson’s single-engined Battle caught fire when it crashed, and he was dragged half-naked from the flaming wreckage by his crew. Sitting shocked on the grass nearby, he stared at his hands ‘with unbelieving terror … The skin hung from them like long icicles. The fingers were curled and pointed, like the claws of a great wild bird – distorted, pointed at the ends like talons, ghostly thin. What would I do now? What use would be these paralysed talons to me for the rest of my life?’

By nightfall on the 14th three French formations around Sedan had collapsed, their men fleeing the battlefield. One of these was the 71st Division. A notorious episode passed into legend, of one of its colonels who sought to check fleeing men and was swept aside by soldiers crying: ‘We want to go home and get back to work! There is nothing to do! We are lost! We are betrayed!’ Some modern historians question the reality of this incident. Pierre Lesort, another officer of the same formation, retained a different and more heroic memory of the day: ‘I saw very well, about 800–1000 metres on my left, an artillery battery … which never stopped firing at the diving Stukas which ceaselessly attacked it; I can still see the little round clouds which its guns created in the sky around the swirling planes which continuously dispersed and returned … As for the reactions of the machine-gunners in my company, we never stopped shooting desperately at the planes.’ Yet Lesort acknowledged the progressive erosion of morale: ‘It must be said that this control of the sky by the Germans for these two days made the men discontented and impatient. At the start it was just a sort of grumbling: “Christ, there are only German planes, what the hell are ours doing?” But on the following days … one felt the growth of a kind of helpless resentment.’

Through the succeeding days, French armour launched desultory attacks on the Meuse bridgehead from the south. Gamelin and his officers made another disastrous and probably irrecoverable mistake: they failed to grasp the fact that von Rundstedt’s spearheads did not intend to continue their advance west into the heart of France, but instead were racing north, for the sea, to cut off the British and French armies in Belgium. The Germans’ ‘expanding torrent’ was now advancing across a front sixty miles wide. The French Ninth Army, charged with defending the region, had almost ceased to exist. The advancing panzer columns were acutely sensitive to the risk of an Allied counter-attack on their flanks, but the French high command lacked the will or the grip to initiate