WESTERN THEATRE: Greatest Battle

Men of middle age who saw what took place last week in Belgium and northern France said that it was more terrible to endure for two hours than all 299 days in 1915 when 278,000 Germans and 460,000 Frenchmen died on the blasted hilltops of Verdun. For this 1940 war was vertical as well as horizontal. To the old curtains of shell and rifle fire were added machine guns spitting from the sky, bombs bursting suddenly upon fields and highways, the unearthly roar of airplane motors drowning even the outcries of men. Fleets of land battleships crushed walls and swept the countryside. Cataracts of fire gushed from tanks advancing like moving walls.

Such war raged across 23,000 square miles of Europe. The explosion of men’s nerves and brains became as commonplace as death and wounds. Casualties were impossible to assess in the flowing confusion. Four million men were engaged in the business of slaughter, their killing power multiplied by tens of thousands of slaughtering engines. Human morale could not long endure such war. Whoever best endured-and the strain was nearly as great on attackers as on defenders-must be the winner.

Strategy. Day by day at German Army Headquarters somewhere in the Rhineland last week, Adolf Hitler, Hermann Göring and their commanding generals-von Brauchitsch, Keitel, Milch, Guderian-contemplated their operations map of Western Europe with profound satisfaction. Everything was working according to plan. Attack has always appealed to the German mind. And now they had such an attack! Their first push had already driven straight across Holland to Rotterdam. Before the Allied Armies rushing northward from the French border had time to reach prepared Belgian positions along the Albert Canal from Antwerp to Liége, a swift and fierce German drive cracked the Liége defenses the second day. *Headquarters watched the progress of German columns up the Meuse Valley towards Namur and westward towards Louvain.

If they heard at German headquarters that to counter this success Allied Generalissimo Maurice Gustave Gamelin rushed reserves to Namur from Sedan and Montmédy they doubtless shook hands with one another in elation. Soon their map recorded another push. In the rough and wooded Ardennes, German spearheads crushed the Belgian Chasseurs and drove straight at the Maginot Extension below Sedan. They made a dent, the dent was widened to a pocket. The pocket became a bulge when other columns crushed through: below Namur near Dinant, Givet, Mèziéres; above Namur at Gembloux. Flinging power behind power to the full extent of their resources. Hitler’s generals watched their plans unfold.

The Schlieffen Plan, master design of Germany’s attack in 1914, called for the German Armies swinging like a scythe pivoted from a point near Metz, to sweep in a wide circle through Belgium far to the westward around Paris and, still sweeping around, finally pin the French Armies against the Rhine and the Alps. Last week, they watched the execution of another plan, another swing, but a swing in the opposite direction. Pivoting at Antwerp, the scythe swept westward. Its point at Sedan swept onward to Rethel, Laon, St. Quentin. For a time it threatened to swing far enough south to take in Paris, but its surest aim as it swept on day by day was to pin the Allied Armies in Belgium back against the Channel.

Meanwhile immobilizing troops of the Maginot Line proper by holding attacks, the Germans kept some 30 divisions poised on the Swiss border ready to strike into France through the Burgundy Gap. South of Switzerland Benito Mussolini’s Army was a final threat.

As the Nazi scythe swept westward be tween Sedan and Namur it threatened to cut the supply and communication lines to Paris of the Belgians, British and French on the Plain of Flanders, threatened to cut them off from France. One day having fought and held Louvain against Nazi attacks, the British next day turned and retired with their Belgian allies. They also withdrew from Brussels, from Antwerp.

They went virtually intact, and without pressure, toward positions along the Escaut River in front of Ghent, Lille, Lens.

“Conquer or Die.” While the French fought north of Laon and St. Quentin with herds of tanks and massed 75s (see p. 25) to stem the German swing-the general commanding the French II Army led its tank counterattack in person-history stood still for France and Great Britain. The world’s battle was to decide whether Adolf Hitler’s apocalypse really showed him the future of Western civilization “for the next 1,000 years.” At least 80 German infantry divisions were in it and ten of twelve Nazi mechanized divisions. At least 5,000 planes with crosses under their wingtips and swastikas on their tails led and supported Germany’s supreme effort (see p. 27). Left behind, beleaguered by the rising German tide, pounded by its heaviest artillery and air bombs were Allied garrisons in forts at Liége, Namur, Sedan, Montmédy, who pounded back desperately at the lava flow of German supply and reinforcement. After the break-through at Sedan, Generalissimo Gamelin issued his last-ditch order:

“Every unit that is unable to advance must accept death rather than abandon that part of the national territory entrusted to it.

“As always in the critical hours of our history, the watchword today is ‘Conquer or die!’ We must conquer.”*

Men & Methods. In recent years General Gamelin had walked attentively, at the brisk half-trot he learned in the Chasseurs, over almost every square mile of the terrain to which Germany now brought the war. He knew minutely its potentialities for defense by war of position-the prevailing school of French Army thought ever since the Maginot Line was conceived and erected. At the war’s outset he announced that he would be miserly in spending human life. His stand-and-take-it order meant that the Germans had forced him out of position and into a war of maneuver-the German specialty.

With that order, Gamelin, never able to get along with the politicians of the French Government, admitted failure, and a shake-up in the High Command became inevitable. Prime Minister Churchill (who named the fight then raging “The Battle of the Bulge”) flew to Paris for a meeting of the Allied War Council. Premier Reynaud announced that the moment had come for “a change of men and methods.” He called Marshall Pétain, hero of Verdun, to be his adviser, himself took charge of the Defense Ministry (see p. 34).

Eyes then switched to towering, handsome General Henri Honoré Giraud, 61, Reynaud’s boyhood schoolmate, right-hand man for years to France’s great colonial conqueror, the late Marshal Lyautey, and later to Marshal Pétain, in the French Army’s tough practice ground, Morocco. It was Giraud who finally captured the Riff bandit, Abd-el-Krim. In the last war he served under the late General Charles (“Butcher”) Mangin, whose savagery in the attack made him the Britishers’ beau ideal of a French general. Upon Giraud was thrust command of the Allied armies operating in northern France.

Then came more important news that galvanized French morale: Maxime Weypand would succeed Gamelin as Allied Generalissimo.

Pint-sized (5 ft., 120 lb.), fox-smart-born Belgian but a French soldier for 54 years-Weygand was General Foch’s Chief of Staff when Foch was called upon to save France in 1916. He was sent by Foch to save Italy in 1916, and did so; to save Poland in 1920, and did so. His mastery of maneuver, his preference for and agility on the attack are fabled in France. “Action, vigilance, decision” was his citation when he was made a Commander of the Legion of Honor. He preceded Gamelin as Commander in Chief of the French Army, had been retired only three years when recalled last year to organize and lead France’s Armies in the Near East. Now the homeland needed him and he looked no 73 years old as he bounded up the War Ministry steps two at a time to accept the commission.

Race to the Sea. As this week began the Battle of the Bulge had three aspects:

1) Again as in 1914, the Germans seemed to be racing to the sea, but this time attempting to cut through the centre of the Allied Armies instead of around their flank.

2) The central German thrust, delivered by five whole armored divisions, was a threat to Paris until it veered west toward Amiens and Arras.

3) A German attack southward sought to flank the Maginot Line proper.

As the week ended, the German High Command in a special communique announced that in “the greatest enveloping movement in western military history” its troops had:

∧Captured Amiens, Arras and Abbeville, 12 miles from the English Channel at the mouth of the River Somme. ∧ Cut to the north and bottled up between vastly outnumbering German forces and the Sea, some 550,000 British and Belgians. ∧ Dispersed the Ninth French Army and captured its commander, Henri Giraud, and his staff (flatly denied by Paris).

In the south the Germans claimed their forces were within sight of the Eiffel Tower in Paris, where Premier Reynaud confirmed before a hushed senate the fall of Amiens and Arras-because “the truth alone can save the Fatherland.”

*The “Secret Weapon” used to subdue the Eben Emael fortress north of Liege was said last week by Lieut. Colonel Otto Hesse of the German General Staff, writing in Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung, to be a flamethrower which generates 2,000° Centigrade. This heat, blasted into gun ports and ventilators from 70 yards, melts gun muzzles and sears their crews’ lungs. With it, claim Nazis, the Maginot Line can be “melted.” -General Joffre (whose chef de cabinet was Gamelin) on Sept. 6, 1914 before the battle of the Marne: “. . . . The time for looking backward has passed; every effort must be devoted to attacking and driving back the enemy. Troops that can no longer advance must hold on to the ground won at any cost and die in their tracks rather than retreat. In the present circumstances no weakness can be tolerated.”