Short History of World War II - James L. Stokesbury [45]
Almost if not quite the same thing happened in Belgium. The forward face of the Belgian defense position ran from Antwerp to Liège along the Albert Canal, and its southern anchor was the great fortress of Eben Emael, about seven miles out of Liège. The fortress was billed as impregnable, and the Belgians were very proud of it. It was a complex of tunnels, steel cupolas and casemates made of heavy concrete; self-contained and with a garrison of about 800 men, the fortress was the key to Belgium. The Germans landed an assault detail on it by glider, blew open the casemates and gun turrets with shaped hollow-charges, and were masters of the fort in twenty-eight hours, just in time to greet the armor forcing its way across the Albert Canal. The canal bridges were seized by similar if slightly less spectacular feats, and the whole Albert Canal line was gone before the Belgians knew what hit them. The Panzers roared on, past Liège, toward the Dyle and and the Gembloux Gap.
The British and French reached the Dyle on the 12th. They had left their more or less prepared positions along the French frontier, hoping and expecting to find the same thing on the Dyle. They found nothing. The Germans were on them before they had time to site their batteries. The Royal Air Force contingent in France, the Advanced Air Striking Force, made desperate attempts to bomb the bridges over which the Germans were pouring. The lumbering Fairey Battle bombers were decimated; the attacks won several posthumous medals for the R. A. F., but did not even slow the Germans down. The pressure was so great that all reports were sure this had to be the main attack; the Germans pushed over the Dyle by the 14th, but the frantic resistance of the Belgians, French, and British at last began to take effect, and it looked for a moment as if the northern front, minus Holland, might stabilize.
Between Namur and the northern end of the Maginot Line, however, things were ominous. Corap’s 9th and Huntziger’s 2nd French armies had taken their positions on the western side of the Ardennes. As the 9th and 2nd waited on their quiet sector, three German armies, including seven armored and two motorized divisions, were bearing down on them. The Germans had poured through the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg and been swallowed up in the forest. But it was not impassable after all. It was garrisoned by a Belgian unit, the Chasseurs Ardennes, basically the government forestry workers of the area, put into uniform and issued rifles. They had no heavy weapons, and more important, no demolition material. The Germans were virtually unopposed. It took them two days of careful driving, and on the night of the 12th, they were on the Meuse, the main French defense position. With frantic reports of their arrival in force reaching him, Gamelin began shifting reserves north to meet them.
He was far too late. The Germans were operating at the speed of a truck or tank, the French at that of a marching man. The next two days were crucial. On the 13th, the Germans surged across the Meuse. Some of the French formations, made up of overage and underarmed reserves, fled precipitately before the tanks and Stukas; others fought to the last man, but nowhere were they a match for the constant German superiority of material and numbers at any vital spot. Corap ordered a retreat on the night of the 13th, but it was an order given to an army already out of existence. By next morning there was a fifty-mile hole in the French line, and within two days the German armor was on the Aisne, rolling into open country.
The whole situation was incredibly fluid. Here was this enormous gap in the French line,