Blitzkrieg, p.1
Blitzkrieg, page 1
Len Deighton
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BLITZKRIEG
From the Rise of Hitler to the Fall of Dunkirk
Contents
Preface to the 2014 Edition
Author’s Note
Foreword by General Walther K. Nehring, aD
PART ONE Hitler and His Army Germany in Defeat
The Spartacus Revolt
The Freikorps
Adolf Hitler
Ernst Röhm and the Brownshirts
Thirteen Million Votes
Chancellor Hitler
Hitler’s Generals
The Night of the Long Knives
‘I Swear by God’
The Destruction of Blomberg and Fritsch
‘Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Führer’
Erwin Rommel
PART TWO Hitler at War Czechoslovakia
Britain and France
Poland Threatened
The Conquest of Poland
The Conquest of Norway: Air Power plus Sea Power
The Western Front
The Maginot Line
The Allied Solution: Plan D
The High Command
PART THREE Blitzkrieg: Weapons and Methods Back to Schlieffen
The Fallacies of 1939
The Invention of the Tank
The Failure of the Tank
Cambrai
The New German Infantry Tactics
J. F. C. Fuller
B. H. Liddell Hart
A Changing World
Heinz Guderian, Creator of the Blitzkrieg
‘That’s What I Need’
Rash as a Man
Tank Design
Tank Armament
Artillery
Half-track Vehicles
Infantry
Combat Engineers
Motorcycles
Armoured Cars
Motor Trucks
The Waffen-SS
The Commander
The Division
The Method of Blitzkrieg
The Air Forces
The Dive Bomber
French Aircraft
Anti-aircraft Guns
French Tanks
French Armoured Divisions
The French Army
PART FOUR The Battle for the River Meuse Blitzkrieg: The Way to Victory
The German Plan
‘Manstein’s Plan’
The Forced Landing
Luncheon with Hitler
Codeword DANZIG, 10 May 1940
1. The Northernmost Attack: Holland
German Airborne Forces
The Gennep Bridge
The Moerdijk Bridges
Rotterdam
2. The Attack on Belgium
3. Army Group A: Rundstedt’s Attack
The Panzer Divisions Reach the River Meuse
Rommel in Dinant Sector
Whitsunday, 12 May
Monday, 13 May, Dinant
Tuesday, 14 May, Dinant
Reinhardt Reaches the Meuse at Monthermé
Guderian at Sedan: The Most Vital Attack
Monday, 13 May, Sedan
Tuesday, 14 May, Sedan
4. The Defence: France’s Three Armoured Divisions
The French 3rd Armoured Division
The French 1st Armoured Division Encounters Rommel
The Defence: Command Decisions
Wednesday, 15 May: Breakout at Monthermé
The French 2nd Armoured Division Encounters Reinhardt
Beyond Sedan
5. The Battle in the Air
Friday, 10 May
Saturday, 11 May
Whitsunday, 12 May
Monday, 13 May
Tuesday, 14 May
The Freiburg Incident
PART FIVE The Flawed Victory General Weygand Takes Command
The Battle at Arras: 21 May
Dunkirk: The Beginning
The Belgian Army
Operation Dynamo
Lord Gort
Dunkirk: The End
Dunkirk: The German Halt Order
The Battles in Central and Southern France
The Missing French Aircraft
Capitulation
Armistice
De Gaulle: One Lonely Voice
Congratulations
One Fatal Flaw
Acknowledgements
Sources and Bibliography
Index
About the Author
Len Deighton was born in 1929 in London. He did his national service in the RAF, went to the Royal College of Art and designed many book jackets, including the original UK edition of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. The enormous success of his first novel, The IPCRESS File (1962), was repeated in a remarkable sequence of books over the following thirty or so years. These varied from historical fiction (Bomber, perhaps his greatest novel) to dystopian alternative fiction (SS-GB) and a number of brilliant non-fiction books on the Second World War (Fighter, Blitzkrieg and Blood, Tears and Folly).
His spy novels chart the twists and turns of Britain and the Cold War in ways which now give them a unique flavour. They preserve a world in which Europe contains many dictatorships, in which the personal can be ruined by the ideological and where the horrors of the Second World War are buried under only a very thin layer of soil. Deighton’s fascination with technology, his sense of humour and his brilliant evocation of time and place make him one of the key British espionage writers, alongside John Buchan, Eric Ambler, Ian Fleming and John Le Carré.
Len Deighton in Penguin Modern Classics
The IPCRESS File
Horse Under Water
Funeral in Berlin
Billion-Dollar Brain
An Expensive Place to Die
Only When I Larf
Bomber
Close-Up
Spy Story
Yesterday’s Spy
Twinkle, Twinkle Little Spy
SS-GB
XPD
Goodbye, Mickey Mouse
Berlin Game
Mexico Set
London Match
Winter
Spy Hook
Spy Line
Spy Sinker
MAMista
City of Gold
Violent Ward
Faith
Hope
Charity
Short stories
Declarations of War
Non-fiction
Fighter
Blitzkrieg
Blood, Tears and Folly
Illustrations
MAPS
1 Germany and Its Eastern Neighbours, 1918
2 The Pattern of Conquest
3 Poland before the Invasion, 1939
4 The German Invasion of Poland, September 1939
5 The German and Russian Conquest of Poland, September 1939
6 The Invasion of Norway, 1940
7 The Maginot Line
8 Allied Plan D
9 The First World War Style of Attack
10 Blitzkrieg Style of Attack
11 (a) The German Advance, August–September 1914
(b) The German Plan, 1939
(c) The ‘Manstein Plan’, 1940
12 Defence of Holland
13 The German Attack on Rotterdam
14 Maastricht and Fort Eben Emael
15 PLAN YELLOW: The Opening Stages
16 Rommel’s Division Crosses the Meuse
17 Guderian’s Corps Crosses the Meuse
18 The German Armoured Offensive
19 Dunkirk, 25–31 May 1940
20 The German Conquest of France, June 1940
FIGURES
1 The Holt ‘75’ caterpillar tractor, developed from the first regular production model crawler of 1906
2 Matilda Mark II infantry tank
3 The inexpensive PzKw IA tank
4 German PzKw tanks fill up at wayside petrol stations
5 The 81.5-ton French Char 3c and the tiny 7.5-ton Renault tank
6 Torsion-bar suspension for PzKw III
7 Interior of PzKw IV, showing crew positions
8 French one-man gun turret on Renault FT 17 tank
9 Comparison of the 7.5 cm KwK L/24 gun fitted to the PzKw IV tank with the 3.7 cm KwK L/24 gun on the early PzKw IIIs
10 Relative performances of mortar, high-velocity gun and howitzer
11 12-ton Sd.Kfz.8 half-track towing 15 cm sSH.18 heavy gun
12 Carrier Universal No. 1 Mk 1 (Bren gun carrier)
13 Semi-track Sd.Kfz.251 with sloping armour
14 MG34 machine gun and 8.1 cm Kurzer mortar being rafted across a river
15 BMW R75 motorcycle with sidecar passing Sd.Kfz.231 armoured car
16 Opel Medium Truck, type S
17 Junkers 87 Stuka dive bomber
18 Dewoitine 520 single-seat fighter
19 2-/3-seat Fairey Battle bomber, capable of 257 mph
20 Diagram of Flak gun trajectories
21 German 8.8 cm anti-aircraft gun
22 British and German 40 mm Bofors guns
23 Anti-aircraft gun ranges
CHART
1 A Typical Panzer Division
TABLES
1 Tanks and armament in 1939
2 The vehicles of a typical German infantry division until 1943
Permission to reproduce the photographs is acknowledged with thanks to the following sources: AFP/Getty Images (62); Army Historical Section of the Dutch archives LAS/BLS Koninklijke Landmacht (30, 33); Bundesarchiv (18, 25, 36); E.C.P. Armées, France (49, 56); the Imperial War M
Preface to the 2014 Edition
Like many other people, I long cherished the hope of living in rural France in a house with a view, and a small family restaurant within walking distance. I dreamed of a life in which my London-based agent enabled me to continue to enjoy a modest income as a freelance illustrator. Then one evening over dinner in north London, an old friend mentioned that her family owned a house near the small fishing port of Erquy, on the coast of Brittany. It was empty and for rent! It was a now-or-never moment. Erquy is not near anywhere – at least it wasn’t at that time – its fishing boats were few in number, the only road onwards led to the cliff edge and a magnificent view of the sea. The house was old and lovely. It perched on the cliffs overlooking a long curving beach and sand dunes. The local schoolteacher, seeing a chance to improve his English, became a mentor, guide and friend. I shall never forget joining him, and a half-dozen neighbours of varying ages, to climb precariously along the cliffs in search of the cherished ormeau – the local abalone. Afterwards, over crusty bread and coffee from vacuum flasks, I would listen to their wartime stories.
All this happened a long time ago. The war had ended only a few years previously and Brittany has always been last in the line for any French prosperity. The local people lived a hard and frugal life. I came to know the district and the people as I used my VW Beetle. (‘Why are you driving a Boche car?’ I was asked, not without a measure of hostility, every time I filled up. ‘Because it was cheap and second-hand,’ I learned to say in French.) In my Boche car I explored the local towns and villages. It was there that I met men who had been a part of the 1940 debacle and were keen to clear up some of the misunderstandings and distortions that remained concerning that period. Some had maps and souvenirs. Although I didn’t realize it at the time, it was then that this book Blitzkrieg was born.
As summer turned to winter the old house became cold. Any warmth generated by the ancient heating system was funnelled up its rather grand and curving central staircase to a large ornamental glass atrium that released it into the rooftop’s icy coastal gales. Eventually I packed my few possessions into the Boche Beetle and headed south.
In the way that God is often so kind to reckless optimists, I found a vacant cottage in the Dordogne region near Sarlat. It was a demanding routine: a long walk to get drinking water from the roadside pump and coffee only after burning logs had got the kettle boiling. There, between ever-fewer illustration assignments, I started writing my first book: The Ipcress File. My notes concerning the events of 1940 were put aside but they were not forgotten. The voices of the disillusioned French veterans who had shared their stories with me would not go away. From that time onwards I collected material and more memories of France in 1940 and, in a methodical way that all writers need, and historians prefer, I organized it for easy reference without actually planning a history book.
Eventually my dream of living in rural France was ended in the way that many dreams end: a lack of money. The combined postal services of England and France did not cater to illustration jobs for which urgent changes were demanded. To continue in my freelance work I would have to live in London. I was back where I started but I had a half-completed book – The Ipcress File – and a bundle of notes about the Fall of France.
Over the years, my notes about 1940 joined some work I had done on the Battle of Britain and I suppose I became a little obsessive about the material I was collecting. I decided to set aside time to tackle the two history books (which became Fighter and Blitzkrieg) on a full-time basis. By now I had another car. It was a light blue Hillman Minx convertible. I had seen it in a showroom in Piccadilly, offered second-hand but gleaming like new. It would never replace my first one, that Volkswagen Beetle with its crash gearbox and the dull grey paint, but it was more powerful and roomy enough to move furniture, pet animals and uncounted passengers.
I took my Hillman Minx to the Tank Museum at Bovingdon. I grew to know the museum well and I had found a comfortable little hotel that was said to be a favourite for Thomas Hardy, and had featured in his Dorset stories. Its most important facility for me was its proximity to the museum and the tank training grounds.
In the period leading up to the outbreak of war in September 1939, French and British generals had considered the various ways that the German army – now well equipped with modern tanks – could attack France (and perhaps the neutral countries of Holland, Belgium and Luxembourg). The system of fortifications that came to be known as the Maginot Line was reckoned to be a major impediment for the German planners. Virtually every expert agreed that the Germans would have to keep to the flat northern regions near the coast. It seemed obvious that an invading army, let alone an army using tanks, would not be able to tackle the Maginot forts nor negotiate the narrow roads that wound through the dense Ardennes Forest. And yet this is exactly what the Germans did. The only way to understand how this ‘Blitzkrieg’ could have succeeded was to follow the German routes in a tank. Without a tank, my Hillman Minx would have to do.
In the Tank Museum I took the measurement of the two largest German tanks of the 1940 period – the Mark III and Mark IV – and compared them to the dimensions of my Hillman motor car. In 1940 no German tank was wider than 9 feet 7 inches, so I could easily determine how much wider than my car they were. I then embarked on a series of Continental motoring trips. Using maps, diaries and memoirs, I followed the prongs of the German attack. Step by step I travelled the routes of each element from the German concentration areas through Holland, through Belgium, through Luxembourg and France to the final positions facing England on the Channel coast.
The Ardennes Forest can be a dark and forlorn region. I was alone in my car and it wasn’t designed to splash its way through the grimy little tracks. It was impossible not to be impressed that the Germans had pushed their armour through these trails. There were hump-backed bridges, prehensile vegetation and steep river banks to negotiate. Many times I hit a muddy patch and sat in the car, gunning the pedal, wheels spinning as I wondered how many cold lonely nights I might spend in the car until some itinerant foresters found me. Of course the German tank crews were not lonely, they were provided with combat engineers, bridging units, infantry and support troops. The Panzer men had other problems, among them was the weight of their tanks. In this sort of going, with dense forest either side, the tank was not the all-terrain vehicle that it was said to be. Even my Hillman had trouble.
The defeat of France changed everything. This huge industrialized nation, with its vaunted army and modern air force, succumbed in what became known as ‘the sixty days’. And yet few people at the top, who were responsible for the debacle, wanted to talk or write about it. The British had little desire to examine the humiliating retreat to Dunkirk and the evacuation in detail, and the French had even less desire to rake over the Blitzkrieg that had broken both their military and morale. At war’s end the German historians showed little interest in the events of 1940. When the Germans wrote about their war it was about the vast wastes of the East where millions of Germans died at the hands of the Red Army.
I felt that my conversations with French participants had provided me with an important opportunity. The Fall of France was the key to much else both before and after. It was the only true Blitzkrieg as I demonstrate in this book – although the word has been carelessly applied to all kinds of clashes. (I have always loved France; we lived there happily and my sons went to school there.) I had no difficulty in finding people with vivid memories of 1940; I can’t remember ever going to a town in France that didn’t have a plaque commemorating the local men who died fighting the Germans in those summer months. I visited many of the places where units of the French army had fought and died gallantly, and there was no way that I could forget that it was the sacrifices made by the French rearguard that enabled so many soldiers to be evacuated from Dunkirk.
