The Lost Band of Brothers Read Free

Belgian neutrality: only if German troops invaded Belgium would French and British troops move forward in the execution of ‘Plan D’. To the British left and right were the French Seventh and First armies, units of what was commonly recognised to be the best army in the world. But, as cursing British troops hunched down into their greatcoat collars, stamped frozen feet on wooden duckboards and rubbed wet, gloved hands together for warmth, they were aware of a niggling and growing unease about the calibre of the much-vaunted poilus on their flanks: the French soldiers they saw manning concrete defences and on muddy route marches did not look to them like the best soldiers in the world, not at all. Slovenly, ill-disciplined, permitted to smoke on duty, poorly dressed, the word that came down the line was that some sentries even stood guard in bedroom slippers. And no one seemed to mind. Senior officers noticed too. General Alan Brooke of 2 Corps and subsequently 2 BEF wrote after watching a parade of French troops:

    Seldom have I seen anything more slovenly and badly turned out. Men unshaven, horses ungroomed, clothes and saddles that did not fit, vehicles dirty and complete lack of pride in themselves and their unit. What shook me most however was the look in the men’s faces, [their] disgruntled and insubordinate looks, and, although ordered to give ‘Eyes Left’, hardly a man bothered to do so. 1

    It was not just the French rank and file who preferred not to look their allies in the eye. The malaise of martial disinterest, of a basic reluctance to fight , it transpired, was a contagion that infected the entire French chain of command; a chain of command, moreover, that Britain had agreed could control the tactical deployment of all British troops in France. It was an agreement that was based upon the premise, the unquestioned British assumption, that France would fight and that France would hold. Yet it was a premise that would prove to be fatally flawed. That process of realisation began on 10 May 1940 when Sitzkrieg exploded into blitzkrieg . The waiting war was over.
    As the German High Command had both hoped and predicted, France’s generals fell for the sucker punch, the feint. As Generalfeldmarschall Von Manstein’s Fall Gelb (Plan Yellow) kicked into action, the twenty-nine divisions of General von Bock’s Army Group B stormed across Holland and the northern Belgian frontier supported by massed formations of Ju 87 Stuka dive-bombers, the Luftwaffe’s aerial artillery. As they did so the BEF carried out their pre-planned Operation David : they left their carefully prepared defensive positions and lumbered forward obligingly towards the River Dyle in Belgium to block the threat to their front. Even as they abandoned those carefully prepared positions, far to their right, the forty-five divisions and massed armoured units of von Rundstedt’s Army Group A poured through Luxembourg and the supposedly impenetrable forests of the Ardennes to hook right into the British rear and crash north-westwards towards Calais and the coast. It was what Generalfeldmarschall Erich Von Manstein, the author of Fall Gelb , called Sichelschnitt – the ‘sickle cut’ – and sickles have sharp edges. In the days of terror, rout and onslaught that followed, French units collapsed and British forces found themselves in chaotic, headlong retreat westwards towards the coast, their corridor of access through to the channel port of Dunkirk held open by an ever-shrinking British and French rearguard who sacrificed their own chances of escape so that comrades could move back to the coast. These harassed units retreated down a pinched and shrinking corridor that initially was 60 miles deep and between 15 and 25 miles wide. They struggled north-westwards under constant attack from three sides as German artillery, infantry and armoured units hacked into the retreating columns where a rag-tag of