Short History of World War II - James L. Stokesbury [46]
But there was nothing to do this with. The mass of French armor was in Belgium and Holland and busy with its own battle. The French tried; they threw an armored division, newly organized under General de Gaulle, at the southern German flank. This attack later became one of the pillars of de Gaulle’s reputation—he at least had fought—yet it achieved nothing more than the destruction of his division. The few gains the French tanks made could not be held against the Germans sweeping by, and they hardly noticed that there was anything special about this attack.
As the Germans went on toward Cambrai, toward the sea, the new British Prime Minister, Churchill, came over to see what on earth was going on. He visited Gamelin and looked at the maps. Surely, he said, if the head of the German column was far to the west, and the tail was far to the east, they must be thin somewhere. Why did the French not attack with their reserves? In his terrible French he asked Gamelin where the French reserves were. Gamelin replied with an infuriating Gallic shrug: there were no reserves. Churchill went home appalled.
The truth was, the Germans were indeed thin, and in many ways their high command was as scared as the French were. Von Rundstedt, in command of Army Group A, was so worried by his flanks that he tried to slow his Panzers down. The tank commanders, Guderian, Reinhardt, and Rommel, were aghast. When ordered to stop and wait for support, they asked permission to carry out local reconnaissances. This qualified permission granted, they drove on again full tilt. Occasionally, there was heavy fighting. On the northern shoulder of the drive, the French put up a good resistance, the French 1st Army giving them hard knocks around Arras a bit later. But the Germans were not going to bang their heads against failure. They just sideslipped their armor and kept on. The farther they went, the more the Allies lost cohesion. On the 21st, the Germans reached the sea at Abbeville; the northern Allied armies were cut off.
Gamelin was gone by then. Utterly outpaced by the speed of events, he had become completely defeatist; he could do nothing and therefore decided that nothing could be done. On the 19th, he was replaced by General Maxime Weygand, flown in from the French territory of Syria to take over. By the time Weygand figured out what was happening, he was too late to do anything but preside over the disaster.
Ordered to attack south and break through, the Anglo-Franco-Belgian forces were unable to pull themselves together, change fronts, and coordinate their efforts. Allied cooperation began to break down. The French still wanted to move south, but were incapable of doing it. Lord Gort, commanding the B. E. F., and mindful that his army was all Britain had, began thinking instead of evacuation. Out of these thoughts came the “miracle of Dunkirk,” as well as a great deal of Anglo-French recrimination.
The Germans now held their southern shoulder along the line of the Aisne and Somme rivers, and turned their attention north. The Allied forces began to contract into a perimeter around the small Channel ports, especially Dunkirk. Boulogne fell on the 23rd; Calais was reinforced from England and, isolated, held until the 27th. To the north, the Belgians, fought out, surrendered on the 28th. King Leopold believed he had done all he could, and he was probably right, but the Allies flung charges at him of leaving them in the lurch, and that was right too. The defensive perimeter shrunk and shrunk around Dunkirk, while the B. E. F. and the French 1st Army held off the Germans.
With no alternative now but evacuation, the British government hoped they might pull off