Inferno - Max Hastings [38]
French vanguards crossed into Holland to find that the Dutch army had already retreated too far northeastward to create a common front, while the Belgian army was falling back in disarray. Gamelin’s formations fought hard in the significant battles that followed in Belgium: although short of antiaircraft and antitank guns, they had some good tanks, notably the SOMUA S35. In a long slogging match at Hannut between 12 and 14 May, 165 panzers were knocked out, for the loss of 105 French tanks. The French front on the Dyle remained unbroken. But its defenders were soon obliged to fall back, because they found their right flank turned. The Germans, gaining possession of the Hannut battlefield, were able to recover and repair most of their damaged armour.
For the first two days of the campaign, the French high command was oblivious of its peril: a witness described Gamelin’s demeanour as positively jaunty, “striding up and down the corridor in his fort, with a pleased and martial air.” Another observer spoke of the C-in-C as “in excellent form with a big smile.” Now sixty-seven years old, as Marshal Joseph Joffre’s chief of staff in 1914 he had been widely perceived as the architect of France’s triumph in the Battle of the Marne. A self-consciously cultured figure, he enjoyed discussing art and philosophy; also intensely political, he was much more popular than his future successor, the splenetic Maxime Weygand. Gamelin’s crippling weakness was an instinct for compromise: he strove to avoid making hard choices. Anticipating “une guerre de longue durée,” a protracted confrontation on the frontier of France, he and his subordinates were confounded in May 1940 by events unfolding at a speed beyond their imaginations.
The Germans had committed seventeen divisions to demonstrate against the Maginot Line in the south, twenty-nine to seize Holland and northern Belgium, and forty-five, including seven panzer, to attack in the centre, then swing northwest towards the Channel coast after crossing the Meuse, cutting off the French and British in Belgium. Only half of the German attacking troops were fully trained, and more than a quarter were reservists aged over forty. The principal burden of defeating the French army rested upon 140,000 men of the panzer and mechanised divisions making the vital thrust across the Meuse. The first German troops reached the river at 2:00 p.m. on 12 May, having seen scarcely a French soldier since they broke clear of the Ardennes; they had thus far conducted a march rather than an attack. The Meuse line was defended by reservists of Charles Huntziger’s Second Army. On the morning of 13 May, these French troops suffered a devastating bombardment by more than a thousand Luftwaffe aircraft, attacking in waves. This, the first such attack of their war, did little material damage but impacted severely on morale. A soldier wrote: “The noise of their engines is already enormous and then there is this extraordinary shrieking which shreds your nerves … And then suddenly there is a rain of bombs … And it goes on and on! Not a French or British plane to be seen. Where the hell are they? My neighbour, a young bloke, is crying.”
A French staff officer at Sedan wrote: “The gunners stopped firing and went to ground, the infantry cowered in their trenches, dazed by the crash of bombs and the shriek of the dive-bombers; they had not developed the instinctive reaction of running to their anti-aircraft guns