Читать книгу The French Navy in World War II - Paul Auphan - Страница 18
ОглавлениеThe night of May 9, 1940, the telegraph, the teleprinters, and the telephones crackled and chattered explosively. From the headquarters of Admiral, North, at Dunkirk—from the naval attaché’s office at The Hague—from the various intelligence agencies, from the Foreign Office at Paris, and, above all, from Army General Headquarters at Montry, came messages bringing to Maintenon a flood of fragments of information, the very volume of which indicated that something unusual was happening on the land front. The great difficulty, while waiting, was to determine exactly what was taking place.
At sea, the naval forces, in addition to the Norwegian operation which was at its peak, were busy with their usual patrol and escort missions. They were not directly concerned with developments on land—at least not yet. Still, in the event the war moved into Belgium, the Navy was committed to transport, as speedily as possible, a small contingent of troops to Flushing (Vlissingen) as well as to the Dutch islands at the mouth of the Scheldt, in order to flank the left wing of any new front that reached the North Sea. To insure maximum secrecy this operation had been given the code name, “Expedition of the Isles.”
Three times before—in November, 1939, in January, 1940, and in April, 1940—similar alerts had occurred. Each time a German attack through Belgium and Holland had been believed imminent, just as in 1914. Each time troops had been hurriedly massed at the frontier; the Navy had readied ships to transport the expeditionary corps to Flushing. Each time the alert had turned out to be a false alarm. Eventually the staffs, at all levels, became rather blasé about them.
This time, however, the thing seemed more serious—particularly to the Navy, which had noted several portentous occurrences. For instance, since April 30 the enemy had been increasingly active in laying magnetic mines off Dunkirk, Calais, and Boulogne. On May 5 the French naval attaché at The Hague brought certain information to Dunkirk which influenced Admiral Abrial in making camouflaged preparations to lift troops to Flushing—not, as he wrote, without causing a certain amount of derision in the general staff of the Seventh Army. Yet it was this very Army which constituted the left wing of the French land forces and which was to advance beyond Antwerp in case of a German attack through the Low Countries.
The Royal Navy, too, was suspicious of some new activity on the part of the enemy. On May 6 the British Admiralty set up a barrier of eight submarines—three of them French—off the Dutch coast where a German landing might be expected.11 And on May 7 the Dutch Army had been placed on the alert.
This barrier was to produce no results, as the German surface forces did not take any part in this phase of the offensive. On the contrary, with ships so close together, the danger of mistaken identities was considerable. To avoid regrettable errors, the commanding officer of each submarine received orders not to attack any other submarine! Thus it was that the German U-9, prowling in the area and knowing that it was the only German submarine there, was able to surprise and torpedo the French submarine Doris (Lt. Comdr. Jean Favreul) shortly after midnight on May 9. This was the first French submarine destroyed by enemy action.
But on May 9 the German Government publicly disclaimed any such evil intentions as were being attributed to it. With this disclaimer, tension at The Hague relaxed.
However, the denial was a trick. Beginning that very midnight German forces were in motion; before daybreak, Belgium, Holland, and Luxembourg had all been invaded. Belgium appealed for French assistance. At 5 A.M. Admiral, North, reported: “Region Dunkirk-Calais is at this moment the target of a heavy air attack. Incessant bombings. Magnetic mines.”
A great many French airfields, spared up until then, were attacked at the same time. At 0635 Supreme General Headquarters ordered the execution of Plan “D,” which provided for the entry of the Allied armies into Belgium as far as the Dyle River, and into Holland as far as Eindhoven.
The die was cast. The Battle of France had begun.
For the time being, the Navy only had to carry out its routine escort and patrol duties and transport the expeditionary forces to Flushing, not far away. Despite magnetic minefields and repeated enemy bombing of the port of Flushing, 3,150 men, with an artillery group and all necessary supplies, were landed there without loss on the 11th and 12th of May from four small passenger ships and two freighters. Air cover for the operation was provided by naval air units, which here first encountered the Luftwaffe—and successfully, for while the faster Messerschmitts brought down two French fighters, they in turn had five or six bombers shot down.
The naval units assigned to support the troops and safeguard their lines of communication were under the command of Rear Admiral Charles Platon, who installed himself at Flushing. These units consisted of two divisions of small destroyers, five submarine chasers, and some twenty minesweepers and smaller craft. The constant enemy air attacks made life very difficult for these ships at the mouth of the Scheldt, where two sweepers were lost on May 15.
To defend the Belgian coast against enemy attack from the sea, two mobile coastal batteries of the Navy, each made up of four 155-mm. guns, were positioned on the south bank of the Scheldt. At the urgent request of Army General Headquarters, also, a mobile naval 90-mm. antiaircraft battery from Dunkirk was placed to defend the tunnel under the Scheldt at Antwerp, which was of vital importance to the French troops, who by now were in Breda. Also, two divisions of magnetic minesweepers were sent to Ostend and Zeebrugge to assist in insuring supplies to the Army. Antwerp itself was the responsibility of the British Navy.
The Flushing expeditionary force had one serious weakness, however: the troops assigned to the outpost of Walcheren Island were lightly armed, green troops originally intended for coast defense duty. Although the Walcheren Island force was doubled on May 13 by an additional detachment detailed to the advanced post of Zuid Beveland, these were mainly Reservists, with little training and with a commanding officer who shortly had to be relieved. His successor was capable and valorous, but had no time to bring the troops to the high state of morale necessary in such an exposed position.
The French High Command had expected to find prepared positions in Belgium against which the German offense would exhaust itself, but the assault was so fierce that the newly arrived troops on the Dyle and on the Gembloux plateau did not have time to catch their breadth.
Dutch resistance began to crumble on May 14, and the French Seventh Army had to pull its advance elements back south of Antwerp. On the 16th the French High Command had to order a general withdrawl from Belgium, because, three days earlier, German tanks had broken through the Meuse River front between Dinant and Sedan. The order, unfortunately, came too late; most of these troops were to find themselves hemmed in shortly in the Dunkirk pocket.
Walcheren and the Zuid Beveland outpost were left uncovered by the precipitous withdrawal. On May 14, a French naval reconnaissance party penetrating the Hollandsch Diep found German tanks already crossing over the bridge at Moerdijk. The German advance captured Bergen op Zoom on the same day and arrived at the Zuid Beveland isthmus by 3 P.M. Despite constant attacks by the Luftwaffe, the French submarine chasers No. 6, No. 9, and No. 41, and the torpedo boat L’Incomprise fired on the Germans until their magazines were empty. On the 16th and 17th the fleet-destroyers Fougueux and Frondeur joined in the action, assisted by the destroyers Cyclone and Siroco, two naval air attack squadrons, and two 155-mm. batteries firing from the vicinity of Breskens.
Unfortunately, the regiment holding Zuid Beveland gave way that afternoon, and only 300 men succeeded in reaching Walcheren. The next day Walcheren too was taken, despite the bravery of its commanding officer, General Marcel Deslaurens, who fell at the head of his men, rifle in hand, like any private. Admiral Platon, with five sub-chasers, succeeded in rescuing 1,800 men, the only ones rescued of the 6,000 men stationed there. The harbor installations had already been so badly bombed that the torpedo boats were unable to go alongside the docks. While trying to do so, Commander Charles de la Fournière, of the Bouclier, had both cheeks pierced by an automatic rifle bullet when his mouth was open to give the order to the men on the docks to take his lines. The men were German soldiers, advance troops in the assault! Equally strange, Commander de la Fournière did not lose a single tooth!
The Expedition of the Isles was over. During it—a week of almost continuous air attacks—the French, however, lost only three small sweepers sunk, and two sweepers and one torpedo boat damaged. The British escort ships, fighting valorously to fend off the enemy bombers, suffered losses also.
The period following the failure in Flanders was to be spent by the Navy mostly in evacuating everything that was mobile in the path of the enemy’s advance, and destroying everything else. This painful task was to occupy them for the next month—a period during which they had to witness the fall of the North Sea ports, the Channel ports, and then the Atlantic ports before the overland sweep of the enemy.
Ahead of that tide rolled an equal wave of refugees. Everything that floated in Dutch and Belgian waters, everything that moved on the roads, was attempting to flee before the invasion. Despite all the traffic congestion, however, the three naval batteries that had been positioned at the mouth of the Scheldt succeeded in reaching Dunkirk without loss of a gun or a man.
The destruction of Antwerp and the bottling up of the various ports was the responsibility of the British, who had made preparations for such an emergency a long time before. The French had the assignment of destroying the installations at Ostend and Zeebrugge.
The King of the Belgians, concerned over what might be the results to his countrymen, objected to the destruction. Consequently the enormous petroleum stock at Antwerp fell into the hands of the Germans before more than 10 per cent could be sabotaged.
Also, through improper liaison, the French battalion22 defending Zeebrugge had not been informed of the British plans to block the navigation channels, and they opened fire on the blockships, impeding the work for some time. However, Admiral of the Fleet Sir Roger Keyes, hero of the famous Zeebrugge raid of World War I, made it a special point to congratulate these French soldiers for their faithfulness in carrying out their orders.
This battalion, oddly enough, belonged to one of the two divisions the elements of which had made such a poor showing at Walcheren and Zuid Beveland. Later it was to distinguish itself by its last-ditch stand in defense of the beaches of Dunkirk—proving that all the division lacked was training under fire before the decisive battle.
Differently from Zeebrugge, which was thoroughly sabotaged and blocked, Ostend was evacuated intact on May 28, only two hours before the arrival of the Germans. However, over 25,000 Belgian and 28,000 British soldiers were successfully evacuated from its harbor, which had been kept open by French minesweepers despite the numerous bombs and magnetic mines dropped by the enemy throughout the whole period of the offensive.
The German invasion of Holland and Belgium was in reality only a deceptive maneuver to conceal the direction of their real thrust, which was to be at Sedan, pivot point of the Allied left wing just beyond the Maginot line. Convinced that the Franco-British left wing, containing the Allies’ best divisions, would swing around into Holland and Belgium at the first sign of a threat there, the German High Command had determined to deliver their principal attack on the Meuse River front, between Sedan and Dinant. The attack was to be made through the wooded mountains of the Ardennes, supposedly impassible to tanks—yet the Germans had assigned to this attack seven of their ten armored divisions, containing 1,800 tanks, and two air fleets.
The breakthrough exceeded even their fondest hopes. After a short pause to regroup, the Panzers drove swiftly ahead toward the Channel coast, thus cutting off and trapping the Allied troops which had advanced into Flanders. These troops, already fighting off attacks from the north, had no time to disengage, change front, and attempt to cut their way through the enemy now to their southward.
What would have happened if the Allies had not been duped into advancing into Belgium—or whether better technical preparation or less rigid strategy on the part of the French Army might have checkmated the German maneuver—is open to debate. What is certain is that the maneuver succeeded—although perhaps its success lay less in the boldness of its conception than in the daring and precision with which the envelopment was executed.
The German tanks first crossed the Meuse on May 13. Two days later they had broken completely through the front. On May 17, having taken scarcely any losses, they drove down the Oise River, beyond Saint-Quentin.
On May 19, only two days later, two new Panzer divisions were hurled through the gap between Saint-Quentin and Sedan. These were tanks which had originally been used in the deceptive opening attack in Belgium. When they encountered stiff resistance there—proof that the Allies had advanced into Belgium in force—they were shifted around to the Sedan front.
In this area there were now nine armored divisions—a concentration of practically the entire German tank strength—and all traveling at full speed over the excellent French roads to the sea. On May 20 the first detachments arrived at the mouth of the Somme River. Such speed left the French general staffs hopelessly behind. The French tank divisions, although as well equipped and as well manned as the enemy, were poorly placed; they found it impossible to intercept the fast moving Panzers.
Strong, well-handled airpower might have done something toward stemming that German tide. But the only attack squadrons existing in France at that time were the Navy’s Air force, operating under the orders of Admiral, North.
At the urgent request of the Army High Command these magnificent squadrons, especially trained to fight at sea, were thrown against the German tanks in the Oise valley on the 19th and 20th of May, at the cost of half their strength. The sacrifice of this elite group was the result partly of lack of fighter protection, which could not be given, and the highly effective German antiaircraft fire. Both here and at the Meuse the German flak had proved astoundingly accurate.
Appalled at the crushing breakthrough, Prime Minister Reynaud made an impassioned appeal to the French public to emulate the military glories of their fathers in World War I. Although with few illusions as to the outcome, but with unselfish devotion, Marshal Philippe Pétain—despite his eighty-four years—accepted the post of Vice President of the Council of Ministers. Similarly, General Maxime Weygand, former Chief of Staff to Marshal Fredinand Foch, and himself seventy-three years old, consented to replace General Gamelin at the head of the French Army.
General Weygand’s first act as Commander in Chief was to see what was happening to the Armies of the North, already isolated from the rest of the country. On May 21, following an eventful trip to Ypres, he held a conference with King Leopold III, commanding the Belgian Army, General Gaston Billotte, commanding the French First Army Group, and Admiral Abrial—Admiral, North. Unfortunately he was not able to have a talk with General Lord Gort, commanding the British Expeditionary Force, to discuss the preparation of a counteroffensive toward the south, which was mandatory in order to close the gap opened by the German tanks.
Weygand’s plan for a counteroffensive along the entire front had already begun that day, below Arras, where two English divisions, along with elements of the French cavalry corps, had been hurled against the enemy Panzers. The attack started off well, yet the day ended with no decisive results. The next day the English were no longer available. The French attacked again, this time alone, and made some progress toward Cambrai, but were eventually brought to a halt by heavy enemy air attacks. The attempt to break out of the German encirclement was doomed to failure.
The causes for this failure were many. Outstanding were the death of General Billotte, killed in an automobile accident; the caving in of the Belgian front; the withdrawl of the British toward the sea; the compromising situation of the French divisions, making it impossible for them to pull quickly out of Belgium; the disorganized state of communications and resulting confusion; and the excessive delay in concentrating the divisions which were to attack from the south.
Half a million French and British soldiers were to remain cut off from their supplies and their normal lines of communication—with the two Navies the only hope of supplying them or of evacuating them from the beaches.
Such was the situation around Dunkirk, headquarters of Admiral, North. But there were two other large ports threatened by the German advance: Boulogne, a fishing port and the most important such on the European continent, with over 30,000 inhabitants, and Calais, an ancient city of 50,000 souls, terminus of the rapid cross-Channel traffic to Dover. These two ports had been handling practically all the British Expeditionary Force’s lighter traffic with the home country—both light material and individual passengers going on leave or to hospitalization in England or on errands of military importance.
With the exception of French and British workers attached to the various auxiliary services there, these two cities had no garrisons, even.
Yet there did exist an element of defense. In France it is the Navy which is charged with defense of the coast against attack from the sea. On that basis Boulogne and Calais were surrounded by a certain number of rather antiquated coast defense batteries, all primarily mounted to fire toward the open sea. Never, before this war, did the Navy ever expect to engage in a critical battle in that region; the officers and men who manned these batteries—or the Navigation Police Service—were mostly reservists who had not been on active duty for years. There were practically no antiaircraft defenses. The beaches themselves were patrolled only by a few territorial troops.
Boulogne and Calais had been subjected to initial heavy air attack on May 10. This was soon to become a daily occurrence. Numerous magnetic mines menaced the ship channels, despite constant sweeping by the Navy. Victims of either bombs or mines, many ships which had escaped safely from Holland and Belgium ended their cruising forever in the Boulogne roadstead.
Moreover these ports were the Meccas of the innumerable Belgian or French men, women, and children fleeing before the German approach. Many civil servants thought they were carrying out their duties by trying to carry their archives to safety. The prefect of the Pas-de-Calais Department was preparing to evacuate all able-bodied men. Mingled with these refugees were even some disorganized persons in French or Belgian uniforms. All surged toward the ports seeking to embark. The most pessimistic rumors were rife. The imaginative populace saw German parachutists and spies everywhere.
Everyone was confused by the speed of the Panzers. The lessons of the Polish campaign had not been well learned. It was practically the first time in history that a great battle had been fought on land at the speed of an automobile. In fact, when questioned by the Navy, the Army High Command did not imagine it possible that the Germans could be in force in the port areas of the north, and put all such reports down as cases of “audacious infiltrations by isolated units.”
The French Admiralty, nevertheless, was distinctly uneasy over the situation. The revictualling of the encircled armies depended entirely on the ports. Holding on to them was a vital necessity. No sooner had he returned from Ypres, than General Weygand asked Admiral Darlan to do the impossible—defend the ports against enemy land attack by checking them with Navy personnel.
To Admiral Abrial—Admiral, North—was given the responsibility of carrying out that hopeless mission. As early as May 17 the French Admiralty had informed him that “the axis of advance of the enemy armored divisions is westward.” The Panzers were even then at Saint-Quentin, and on the direct road to the outskirts of Boulogne. And on the 20th the Admiralty ordered: “Direct your efforts in the defense of the ports against all enemy armored or motorized vehicles and against parachutists or planes landing on the beaches.”
It was understood, of course, that in case of an attack in force, and if no Army troops were covering the port, the Navy had only to destroy everything it could, and then evacuate.
Before all these various directions reached their proper destinations, however, a tragic incident had occurred at Boulogne.
On May 17 the British had begun the evacuation of noncombatants. This evacuation gave rise to various comments, not altogether inspiring. During the night of the 20th a French general, separated from his troops and demoralized, arrived at Boulogne and informed the captain in command of the naval unit that the Germans were almost on his heels. The Navy captain telephoned immediately to inform Admiral, North, and to ask instructions. Unluckily he did not succeed in getting a message through to Dunkirk. Convinced thereupon that the Germans indeed were at the gates, and laboring under the general delusion, the naval commander gave the order to evacuate. A few hours later an emphatic counterorder came from Admiral, North. Unfortunately a great deal of destruction had already been done, and many of the sailors had already sailed on the better ships that were available. The remaining ships had been scuttled.
For that temporary lapse, the naval captain was tried by general court-martial at Cherbourg within three days, and was sentenced to twenty years at hard labor. Admiral Darlan wanted to make an example: a Navy man must not lose his head. It is regrettable, perhaps, that this procedure was not followed in dealing with other leaders—civil or military—who gave way under less dramatic circumstances.
On the afternoon of May 22, Captain Audouin de Lestrange arrived from Cherbourg on a fast motor boat to take charge of the defenses of Boulogne. By then the situation had been somewhat remedied, due to the efforts of Commander Henri Nomy,33 commanding the naval air force at Berck, who had hurried to Boulogne late the preceding day. Later a few troops returned to man the installations. For the French, General Pierre Lanquetot brought in about two battalions and some artillery, drawn from a French division retreating from Belgium. To these were added a British brigade sent from Dover, as London was anxious to keep communications open with Boulogne as long as possible.
Now an admiral and Chief of Naval Operations.
The German attack began that very evening and continued throughout the night. Although the guns of some of the coastal batteries could not be brought to bear on the inland roads, they entered the fight and continued firing until overrun by the enemy infantry.
The morning of the 23rd, the defenders suddenly received powerful support from French naval forces under Captain Yves Urvoy de Porzamparc, commanding the 2nd Destroyer Flotilla and flying his flag in the Cyclone. Backed up by naval aviation, two super-destroyers and eight destroyers, plus additional small craft, fired on the advancing German columns until they had exhausted their ammunition, after which they had to return to Cherbourg to replenish. The naval gunfire had momentarily checked the German tanks, and General Heinz Guderian, commanding the armored corps, had to call on the Luftwaffe for assistance. The latter had responded in force. The destroyer Orage, commanded by Lieutenant Commander Vanblanc, took a direct hit and had to be abandoned, its flaming wreck illuminating the battlefield for a long time.
But the garrison ashore had been bolstered long enough to permit a squadron of British destroyers from Dover to evacuate 4,368 British troops from almost under the enemy guns. This was a magnificent accomplishment by the Royal Navy, although it had no effect on the battle for Boulogne itself.
For by now the battlefront had reached the heart of the city. Captain de Lestrange was captured at his command post after a bitter hand-to-hand fight during which a French petty officer shot down a German soldier attempting to hoist the swastika flag over the building.
Fierce fighting still continued at centers of resistance through the night of the 23rd. At daybreak a small sweeper succeeded in landing a few supplies for the defenders despite heavy machinegun fire from nearby enemy posts. With dawn the Luftwaffe reappeared. The super-destroyer Chacal, under Commander Jean Estienne, took two direct bomb hits and sank just off the jetties with heavy loss of life. Other ships were more or less seriously damaged.
General Lanquetot, holding out in the citadel, received his last telephone message from Admiral Abrial, at Cherbourg, on the morning of May 25. The message said, “Warmest congratulation of the High Command on your heroic resistance!”
But the fight was coming to an end. One by one the last defenses fell. General Lanquetot accepted the German terms, and the citadel’s defenders surrendered with the honors of war.
Similar battles were taking place at the same time at Cape Gris-Nez and Calais.
At Gris-Nez itself there were no coastal batteries. Construction of a battery to control the channel between the minefields and the shore had been started several months before, but never completed. The four 100-mm. guns which constituted its armament had been installed a few days previously but not yet supplied with ammunition. The several hundred Navy men stationed there had nothing but a couple of 37-mm. guns, 4 machine-guns, and 20 rifles. Yet their commanding officer, Lieut. Commander Ducuing, refused the German demands to surrender. After resisting all attacks for 24 hours he met his death at 0900 on May 25, under the flag which he himself had hoisted during the height of the fight.
Calais had no stronger French garrison than Boulogne, but the British Army was doubly interested in holding on to the port as a vital link in the British communications with England. On May 19 British infantry, coming from the front, installed themselves in the city, along with strong artillery and searchlight detachments. During the next few days a fresh infantry brigade and a regiment of tanks arrived from England. These forces made a series of attacks in an effort to cut through the enemy to the south and relieve Boulogne, as well as to rush 350,000 rations through to Dunkirk for the use of the British Expeditionary Force pocketed there.
Not one of these attempts succeeded. Upon their failure, the British set fire to their truck trains, destroyed their tanks, and prepared to evacuate. Dumfounded, the naval commander at Calais informed Admiral, North, of the British intentions.
Admiral Abrial had just been personally directed by General Weygand to defend the northern ports at all costs. For without entry ports for supplies, the surrounded troops could not be maintained.
The British War Office, upon receiving the French protest, changed its orders. The English troops in Calais remained. It was in the ensuing siege that Brigadier C. N. Nicholson, in command of the polyglot collection of English troops and French soldiers and sailors, was to win honor and fame.
With all its forces fully occupied elsewhere, the French Navy was unable to send any combatant ships to Calais. The British Admiralty sent one cruiser and five or six British and Polish destroyers, of which two were seriously damaged in bombing raids by the Luftwaffe.
Training their guns inland over the roofs of the city, the French coastal batteries fired on all targets that appeared in the field of fire. When the shifting zone of battle rendered the guns of Bastion No. 2 (three 194-mm. guns) useless, the gun crews received orders to destroy their guns and attempt to cut their way to freedom through the German lines already encircling the city. But in the effort another tragic mistake occurred. The lieutenant who had commanded the bastion stumbled into an English position, gave the wrong answers to the questions—which he did not understand—and was shot on the spot as a spy.
Bastion No. 11 was defended until May 25 by a handful of French sailors and soldiers, aided by some 30 Moroccan infantrymen and a detachment of British soldiers. Before overwhelming the position the Germans had to call in all their artillery and air forces in that sector.
Finally, on the evening of May 26, after a heroic resistance that lent added luster to the proud history of the ancient city, General Nicholson was forced to surrender to overwhelming forces.
When one hugs the French coast from Gris-Nez toward Calais and Dunkirk, the cliffs dominating the sea fall away to make room for a flat and sandy moor, intersected, 20 kilometers from Dunkirk, by the river Aa. The Aa is a canalized stream, not over 20 meters wide a little bit up from Gravelines. Under no circumstances could it be considered a serious military obstacle. Yet, other than the Aa, there was nothing else in the plain that could stop even an automobile driving toward the waterfront at Dunkirk.
It was at the Aa, therefore, that Admiral Abrial made an attempt to throw up a barrier to check what he was still advised were no more than mere “infiltrations” by isolated German tanks.
As a matter of fact, on May 22—just when the first assaults were taking place at Boulogne and Calais—a third German armored division was arriving in sight of the Aa. The only Allied forces there, at Gravelines, were some units of the Services of Supply, which, finding their further retreat blocked, had stopped there, all mixed in with a horde of refugees.
During the day, however, Admiral Abrial brought up some detachments of reconnaissance groups retreating from Belgium, the two mobile batteries he had pulled back from the mouth of the Scheldt, and an infantry battalion. Other elements were to follow—among them isolated groups of sailors from the ships that had been sunk in the harbors. In all, there were around 4,000 or 5,000 men, to which were to be added a very weary British battalion, which took position before Gravelines—and then retired as soon as the French arrived.
There were also two motorized 75-mm. guns and three English tanks which arrived from Calais. How they got there in the night, they did not know—but when daylight came, they found themselves practically surrounded by German tanks! From seaward, the coastal batteries of Fort West (164-mm. guns) and of Fort Philippe (95-mm. guns) provided supporting fire on the improvised front, and the 194-mm. guns of the Mardyck fortifications also chimed in. These latter guns were entirely manned by the crew of the French destroyer Adroit, which had just been sunk off Dunkirk.
Fortunately the German tank division headed for Gravelines was delayed by a confusion of orders and then counterorders from the German High Command. But, farther upstream, one SS division and two other Panzer divisions took position on the left bank of the Aa all the way up to Saint-Omer, 28 kilometers above Gravelines. This was a far stronger force than would be required to break through the improvised French positions.
The critical battle began on May 24, and for a time all went well at Gravelines. The morale of the French Army, Navy, and Air Force, as well as of the British units participating, was, as Admiral Abrial reported that evening, exceptionally high. The three British tanks did wonders. The Navy’s 155-mm. guns fired through open sights on the German tanks, stopping them dead in their tracks, though not without suffering considerable loss in return. An intercepted German message testified to the stern resistance encountered on the lower Aa.
But, farther upstream, the river was crossed at several points. Nothing—nothing except an order from Adolph Hitler—could now prevent these enemy columns from emerging the following day on the very docks of Dunkirk and thus completely encircling a half million French and British fighting men in this Flanders trap.
Nothing except an order from Hitler. And, amazingly, that order came!
The reasons for it are still being debated.
One contention is that the German High Command had already begun planning for the operations to come. It considered—too soon, no doubt—that this first phase of the Battle of France was virtually over—and won. The tanks needed a breathing spell; they should be regrouped before driving ahead in the second phase—the march on Paris and the annihilation of the remaining French Armies.
Another view is that Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring had persuaded Hitler that he could eliminate the Dunkirk pocket with his Luftwaffe alone—the psychological value of which would have been tremendous.
At all events the German generals, acting under strict orders, but mad with rage, halted on May 24 on the left bank of the Aa. There they remained immobilized for three days—a delay that was to prove the salvation of the trapped men of Dunkirk.
Even so, there is no doubt that had it not been for the unexpected resistance at Gravelines, and, to a lesser degree, the heroic combats of Boulogne and Calais, the order to halt would have found the German tanks at Dunkirk instead of still back at the Aa. It can even be supposed, without too great a stretch of imagination, that General Guderian would have been better advised to proceed with his Panzers directly toward Gravelines instead of delaying for the capture of Boulogne and Calais. Those two bypassed cities could have no effect on the main German drive, and thus Guderian would have been at Dunkirk itself before he received the order to halt.
The French Navy’s role in all this had been extraordinary in that it is not part of the naval profession to fight on land. Nevertheless it had done its utmost to hold back the land forces of the enemy. It had made possible the delays which immediately preceded Hitler’s amazing order to his tanks to halt—delays without which the British Expeditionary Force would most likely never have seen England again.
1 This barrier was to produce no results, as the German surface forces did not take any part in this phase of the offensive. On the contrary, with ships so close together, the danger of mistaken identities was considerable. To avoid regrettable errors, the commanding officer of each submarine received orders not to attack any other submarine! Thus it was that the German U-9, prowling in the area and knowing that it was the only German submarine there, was able to surprise and torpedo the French submarine Doris (Lt. Comdr. Jean Favreul) shortly after midnight on May 9. This was the first French submarine destroyed by enemy action.
2 This battalion, oddly enough, belonged to one of the two divisions the elements of which had made such a poor showing at Walcheren and Zuid Beveland. Later it was to distinguish itself by its last-ditch stand in defense of the beaches of Dunkirk—proving that all the division lacked was training under fire before the decisive battle.
3 Now an admiral and Chief of Naval Operations.
