Inferno - Max Hastings [39]
Most of the command telephone system was destroyed in the air attacks. Early that evening of 13 May, there was a “tank panic” three miles south of Sedan. The local commanding general left his headquarters to investigate wild shouting outside, and found a scene of chaos: “A wave of terrified fugitives, gunners and infantry, in cars, on foot, many without arms but dragging kitbags, were hurtling down the road screaming ‘The tanks are at Bulson.’ Some were firing their rifles like lunatics. General Lafontaine and his officers rushed in front of them, trying to reason with them and herd them together, and had lorries put across the road … Officers were mixed in with the men … There was mass hysteria.” Some 20,000 men decamped in the Bulson panic—six hours before German forces crossed the Meuse. In all probability, their flight was prompted by frightened men mistaking French tanks for enemy ones.
The first German river-crossing parties suffered heavily at the hands of French machine gunners, but handfuls of determined men reached the western shore in dinghies, then waded through swamps to attack French positions. A sergeant named Walther Rubarth led a group of eleven assault engineers to storm a succession of bunkers with satchel charges and grenades. Six of the Germans were killed, but the survivors opened a breach. Panzergrenadiers ran across an old weir linking an island to the two banks of the Meuse to establish a foothold on the western side. By 5:30 p.m., German engineers were building bridges, while rafts ferried equipment across. Some French soldiers were already retreating, indeed fleeing. At 11:00 p.m., tanks began clattering across the first completed pontoons: the German sappers’ achievement was as impressive as that of the assault troops.
The French response was painfully sluggish, absurdly complacent. It was suggested to General Huntzinger that the German assault was unfolding like that on Poland. He shrugged theatrically: “Poland is Poland … Here we are in France.” Told of the Meuse crossings, he said: “That will mean 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 Gen. Joseph Georges, commanding the northeastern front, telephoned Gamelin to say that there had been a rather serious upset—“un pepin”—at Sedan. At 3:00 a.m. on 14 May, a French officer described the scene at Georges’s 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 counterattack. 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—31 of 71 British bombers failed to return. Flight 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