| May 9, 1999 |
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Dispatch from Sedan, France: to the weak-willed politicians driving NATO to defeat in their timid campaign against Serbia. Here is how to fight and win a war:Copyright: Eric Margolis, 1999Sedan, France, 13 May, 1940: - The lead tanks of the 1st Panzer Division of Gen. Heinz Gudrians XIX Panzer Corps brushed aside the scattered elements of a French cavalry division and reached the banks of the gently flowing Meuse River at 1400 hrs on a sunny spring afternoon.
The German high command had achieved complete tactical and strategic surprise in one of the boldest and most brilliant operations in military history.
After months of inaction, the French 7th, 1st, and 9th field armies, supported by the British Expeditionary Force, with as many troops and more tanks and guns than their German foes, were massed to the north on the Belgian and Dutch borders, preparing to drive east into Germany's industrial Ruhr Valley. The French 2nd Army, with low-grade reserve divisions, was held back south, covering the Belgium-Luxembourg border. France's eastern border with Germany in Alsace and Lorraine was protected by the 3rd Army, and forts of the mighty Maginot Line.
`Operation Sickle Stroke,' devised by the great German generals Erich von Manstein and Heinz Guderian, called for an enormously powerful mailed fist to smash apart the French lines at their weakest, most vulnerable sector: Sedan on the Franco-Belgian border, the vital strategic hinge between the French field armies to the north, and the Maginot Line to the east.
In a remarkable feat of staff work and logistics, the XIX Corps managed to get its hundreds of tanks, armored vehicles and guns down narrow paths through the huge Ardennes Forest, which the French believed was impassable to modern armies. As a result, the southern edge of the Ardennes near Sedan was only lightly defended by a screen of cavalry units. The Allied Air Forces failed to halt - or even spot - the crush of German vehicles.
To throw the Allies off balance, the Germans launched diversionary attacks on the Maginot Line, and seized the Belgian fortress Eben Emael on 10-11 May, the most powerful fort in Europe, in a dramatic `coup de main' by landing glider-born paratroopers atop the work whose guns commanded the strategic Albert Canal. A Belgian veteran of the attack described to me how 85 Germans, using shaped charges for the first time in warfare, had managed to subdue the entire fortress and its garrison of 1,100 men.
On the same day, further north up the Meuse at Houx, a little-known general, Erwin Rommel, stormed his 7th Panzer Div. across the river in the face of intense French resistance. At Sedan, Guderian was using his tanks, deadly 88mm guns, and pinpoint attacks by Stuka dive-bombers, to neutralize the 43 French casemates (large pillboxes), armed with anti-tank and machine guns, that guarded the river crossing.
Incredibly, the French northeast commander advised French supreme commander, Gen. Gamelin, not to worry, dismissing German attacks at Sedan as mere `pinpricks.' Meanwhile, during the night of the 13-14th, the Germans were crossing the Meuse under heavy French fire, using rubber boats, rafts, and pontoons. By dawn, the German Panzer troops had established bridgeheads on the south bank of the Meuse. Guderian and Rommel ordered their exhausted men to keep advancing. Fierce, but poorly coordinated, French counter-attacks were beaten off.
Stunned by the blitzkrieg - a new form of war using fast-moving armored columns linked by excellent radio communications, and supported by close air attacks - the French reeled back in mass confusion. War, until now, had been a relatively leisurely process. France's generals had prepared to fight a replay of World War I; instead of static, positional warfare, they faced a war of high-speed, fluid movement, and round-the-clock combat.
French communications were terrible. The high command at La Ferte lost track of the swirling battle and became addled by floods of contradictory reports. The Allied air forces proved stunningly inept and lent little help to the beleaguered ground formations. Hordes of refugees clogged the roads.
The Germans had not only torn through the French lines, they had divided the French armies. As German troops poured through the gap, the French left recoiled northwest, while the right fell back, uncovering the western flank of the Maginot Line. French troops thrown pell mell into the fray to halt the German advance were chewed up by the advancing Panzers. The French 1st Mechanized Div. was caught and destroyed by German tanks while still on its flatbed rail cars; the 2nd Div was overrun in its assembly area.
Retreating under fire is the most difficult of all military operations. French divisions had no time to form new defensive lines before they were overrun, outflanked, or taken from the rear by the racing German Panzers. Individual French units fought bravely and tenaciously, but were swept away by the armored deluge. Stunned French commanders simply didn't understand how to react to the blitzkrieg.
Nine Panzer divisions, supported by infantry and 1,000 aircraft, sped across the Meuse, then turned west, racing for the Channel behind the French and British armies trapped in Belgium. By 21 May, the German van reached the coast. The British and French retreated to the Dunkirk pocket where Hitler, in a colossal blunder, allowed most of the British Army to escape to England.
Then the Germans wheeled south, overrunning each successive river defensive line the French struggled to establish. France's pride, the Maginot Line, deprived of its interval divisions, was outflanked from the west, as Hitler had predicted, then penetrated in the undefended Saar gap, which the French unaccountably failed to flood. The Line's forts held to the last: it was the French field army that failed.
By 20 June, France's armies were shattered and demoralized. The Germans had taken Paris on 14 June, and then raced on to the Loire, the Rhone Valley, and Bordeaux. As France lay dying, Mussolini declared war, announcing Italy would `liberate' Nice: 350,000 Italian troops attacked from the Swiss border to Menton on the Mediterranean. Defending southern France was Gen. Olry's gallant 35,000-man Army of the Alpes - and the little-known southern arm of the Maginot Line. The guns of the Maginot forts and Olry's Alpine troops savaged the advancing Italians and stopped them in their tracks.
On 25 June, the French leader, Marshall Petain signed an armistice with Germany. Half of France was occupied by the Third Reich. The Germans lost 27,000 dead and 111,000 wounded in the campaign, less than a third of the number lost at one battle alone at Verdun in 1916. France's losses were 90,000 dead, 200,000 wounded, 1.9 million taken prisoner; the British, Belgians, and Dutch suffered some 100,000 casualties.
The key elements in this superbly planned and executed campaign were surprise, speed, clarity of purpose, concentration of overwhelming forces, effective communications, and the superb fighting quality and valor of Germany's soldiers. Above all, speed and shock were vital. As the noted 19th century German general Graf von Gneisenau said: `We can always recover ground, but never lost time.'
This week, another German general, Klaus Naumann, the second ranking NATO officer, confessed the alliance's feeble, inept campaign against Serbia had been a failure because it had violated all of these military axioms. May and June, 1940, were France's darkest hour. May 1999 may prove an equal disaster for dithering NATO, which, for all its military power, has demonstrated neither the will nor courage to win the Balkan war upon which it has embarked.
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