The Storm of War - Andrew Roberts [32]
In the all-important sphere of air superiority, whereas the Allies had 1,100 fighters and 400 bombers in the region, the Luftwaffe had 1,100 fighters, 1,100 horizontal bombers and also 325 dive-bombers, of which the Allies had no equivalent.15 Allied planes were committed to aerial reconnaissance and defence, but not to close support of troops on the ground, a tactic which the Germans had perfected in pre-war manoeuvres and in the Polish and Norwegian campaigns, and which was greatly aided by the sophistication of ground-to-air communications. Much French heavy, field and anti-tank artillery was actually better than the Germans’ – except for the Wehrmacht’s superb 88mm anti-aircraft gun, which could double as an anti-tank weapon – and the British Matilda tank’s 2-pounder gun was also a match for the German Mark III Panzer’s 37mm gun. Yet this campaign was to prove once again how much more important psychology, morale, surprise, leadership, movement, concentration of effort and retention of the initiative are in warfare than mere numbers of men and machines and quality of equipment. The German concept of Auftragstaktik (mission-orientated leadership), developed over the previous decade, was to deliver victory just as surely as any piece of weaponry they deployed.
Early on the morning of Friday, 10 May 1940, Captain David Strangeways of the BEF, whose regiment was stationed near Lille in northern France, was woken by the battalion’s orderly room clerk shouting, ‘David, sir, David!’ It was only as he was about to rebuke the man for addressing an officer by his Christian name that Strangeways remembered that ‘David’ was the codeword for the event that the Allies had been waiting for since September.16 Hitler’s assault on the West had begun.
Considering that the Allies had been at war with Nazi Germany for over eight months it is astonishing that the Wehrmacht achieved such surprise as it unleashed Blitzkrieg on the West, especially as only one month earlier it had equally suddenly invaded Denmark and Norway. The day before the quadruple invasion of France, Holland, Belgium and Luxembourg, the Belgian Army had increased the amount of leave from two to five days per month, and in one strategically vital Belgian fort on the Albert Canal the warning gun was discovered to be out of order. As many as 15 per cent of France’s front-line troops were on leave and General René Prioux, commander of her Cavalry Corps, was 50 miles behind the lines engaged in target practice.
Army Group B under General Fedor von Bock made what Mellenthin called its ‘formidable, noisy and spectacular’ attack on Belgium and Holland at 05.35 hours. Many Dutch and Belgian aircraft were destroyed in their hangars, for very light losses by the Luftwaffe. Paratroopers captured strategic points near Rotterdam and The Hague, including airfields, although fierce resistance the next day allowed Queen Wilhelmina and the Dutch Government to escape capture. In Belgium eleven gliders, towed by Ju-52 transport planes, landed on the roof of the great fortress of Eben Emael, which covered the advance of Reichenau’s Sixth Army into the country. A mere eighty-five German paratroopers debouched from them and destroyed the fortress’s massive gun emplacements from above with specially designed hollow charges, while its 1,100 defenders withdrew to defensive positions beneath the fortress. Later that day, Hitler told the German people that a battle had begun that ‘will decide the fate of the German people for the next thousand years’.17
The French