Free Flames over France by Robert Jackson Page A

speed of the German thrust. Shortly after 1800, ten batteries of X Corps artillery fell intact into German hands. They had been abandoned by their crews as soon as German troops approached to within half a mile. While 1st Panzer’s , assault troops and the Grossdeutschland Regiment crossed to the west of Sedan, 10th Panzer’s assault group stormed the river banks at Wadelincourt, to the south-east of the town. Progress was slow here, for the air attacks and shelling had not succeeded in destroying many of the defensive bunkers, and these put up heavy machine-gun fire against the attackers.
    The main problem for the Germans here was the lack of artillery support, and flanking fire from the Maginot Line fortifications was giving them trouble. There were delays, too, in the assault of the 2nd Panzer Division, which was to have stormed the Meuse at Donchery to the west of Sedan. In fact, only the advance elements of 2nd Panzer , the reconnaissance battalion and the motorcycle battalion, together with the division’s heavy artillery, saw action on 13 May, and these did not succeed in forcing a crossing. Most of the division’s tanks were still on the Samois river, and would not arrive until after dark. These setbacks, however, were more than compensated for by the rapid thrust of the 1st Panzer Division. By nightfall, the German assault troops had torn their way through the French defences in the Marfee Wood region, two miles inland from Sedan. By midnight the division’s rifle brigade was pushing still deeper into French territory, while a battalion of the Grossdeutsehland Regiment mopped up around Wadelincourt.
    At Gaulier, German engineers built a bridge across the river, enabling the 2nd Panzer Division to begin moving across at dawn, the tanks rolling past thousands of French prisoners herded into pockets on the river banks. Since the Luftwaffe would not be able to lend its full support to the battle on the Meuse until the following day, its bombers being needed elsewhere, it was vital that the Germans got as much armour as possible over to the left bank to meet an anticipated French counter-attack. When this developed, the French ran headlong into the tanks of the 1st Panzer Division, blasting its way into France, and in the brief, one-sided battle that followed the French lost eleven out of fifteen Hotchkiss light tanks.
    The lightning speed and the relentless push of the German attack threw the French into total confusion. Frantic troops streamed back from the front with wild reports of masses of German armour converging on the French posts from all sides. Panic swept through the whole of the 55th and 71st Divisions, and the trickle of men abandoning their positions quickly became a flood. In fact, the rout began even before the first German tanks crossed the Meuse.
    The total breakdown of morale spread through all sectors like an inferno and could not be stopped. Corps and Divisional headquarters, their lines of communication with the front shattered by the German bombing, were incapable of exercising the slightest control over the surging hysteria. On the morning of 14 May, the roads leading back from the Meuse were crammed with struggling columns of French troops, officers and men alike. In their haste to get away, they abandoned well-prepared defences, artillery batteries, rifles, webbing, sometimes even boots.
    “ Suave qui peut !” the cry hung like a cloud over the retreating columns. French colonial African troops took it up and mimicked it, their accents turning the French words into “Shof ki po!”
    Sauve qui pent ; shof ki po . That was the motto of the French Army of the Meuse on this thirteenth day of May, 1940. Every man for himself.

 
    Chapter Four
     
    On the day after the German attack on Martigny the remainder of the Curtiss Hawk group moved to the airfield from its more usual location at Saint Dizier to be ready for large-scale escort missions over the Meuse. With it came the group commander,