Flames over France Read online

  Just as the bombardier pressed the release, Hohne caught an elusive glimpse of light above the Maas island. Straining his eyes, he saw it again: a red flare. He immediately pulled the Heinkel round in a 180-degree turn and the other pilots followed him, their bombs still on board.

  Fifty-seven out of the hundred Heinkels of KG 54 — those of the first wave and Hohne’s aircraft — had dropped a total of 100 bombs on Rotterdam, pulverising the city centre. Fire swept through the shattered streets, consuming everything in its path. A great pillar of smoke rose into the afternoon sky, darkening the sun. Beneath it lay the bodies of 814 Dutch civilians.

  At 1700, just two hours after the attack, the Dutch garrison surrendered. At 1900, the Panzers rolled across the Maas bridges watched by the airborne troops, who were too exhausted to raise a cheer.

  This was Western Europe in May 1940. This was total war.

  Chapter Five

  Colonel Villeneuve was writing his daily report. He was desperately weary, and his hand trembled a little as he penned the words. The Hawks had been in almost continuous action for the past forty-eight hours, and all the pilots were feeling the strain.

  Thursday, 16 May 1940. Early this morning the Groupe moved to a new airfield at Orconte, near Saint-Dizier, with seven serviceable Hawks — all we have left out of a complement of thirty-four. While we were establishing ourselves at our new location, we were briefed to fly an air cover mission south-west of Charleroi. Take-off was fixed for 1100. All seven available aircraft were to take part. The pilots were selected from the 3rd and 4th Escadrilles: Lieutenant Vincotte, Sous-Lieutenant Baptizet, Sous-Lieutenant Plubeau and Adjutant Tesseraud from the 4th, Capitaine Guieu, Capitaine Armstrong (RAF) and Sergent-Chef Casenobe from the 3rd.

  We climbed without incident until we were over Reims, when we saw a superb V of nine twin-engined bombers heading south-west at 4,000 metres. We decided to attack. They were escorted by half a dozen Me 109s, 1,000 metres higher up and a little behind. Lieutenant Vincotte attacked, perhaps a little too soon. The Messerschmitts came down on our aircraft and the pilots were forced to break away and dive for safety. Only Lieutenant Vincotte stuck to the bombers and made several passes at the left-hand one (a Junkers 88). Meanwhile, Plubeau,

  Tesseraud and Baptizet were involved in a fierce dogfight with the 109s; each shot down an enemy fighter and then climbed rapidly to the aid of Vincotte. Together, they shot down one bomber; the remainder dropped their bombs haphazardly near Warmeriville and we went after them.

  Plubeau’s cockpit was shattered by an explosive shell and he was forced to bail out. Vincotte damaged a second Junkers, then he too was hit in the fuel tanks and also had to bail out as his cockpit was filling with fumes and his oxygen equipment was out of action.

  Meanwhile, Guieu, Armstrong and Casenobe had spotted a Henschel 126 at low altitude, which they attacked and shot down in the forest of Silly-l’Abbaye. In the process Armstrong flew through a treetop at full throttle; by some miracle he managed to reach base and land safely with great gashes torn in his wings. Our Englishman, it seems, bears a charmed life.

  Villeneuve laid aside his pen for a moment and rubbed his eyes, resting his elbows on the trestle table that served as a desk. At that moment, the Englishman in question came into the tent that Villeneuve was using as his office, failing better accommodation. Armstrong saluted; the French officer waved a hand in reply and pointed to a chair. He reached for a half-empty bottle of wine, inspected it by holding it up so that the light of the solitary oil lamp shone through it, and filled two glasses, one of which he handed to Armstrong. Villeneuve raised his glass and gave a lop-sided smile.

  “Well then, let’s drink to treetops,” he said. “I trust you have recovered from your experience?”

  “It isn’t one I wish to repeat in a hurry,” Armstrong admitted. “I still don’t know how I got away with it.” The Henschel, a high-wing army co-operation machine similar to the RAF’s Westland Lysander, had been chugging along sedately at 500 feet, doubtless spying out the land for the approaching Panzers, when Armstrong and the others had pounced on it. Armstrong, intent on delivering a killing burst of fire, had misjudged his speed badly and had almost collided with the enemy aircraft, which by then had descended almost to ground level. Forced to break away sharply, he had not even seen the tree that did all the damage until it was too late.

  “The aircraft is just about fit to fly again,” he added. “The boys have been working on it all day.”

  “Then that gives us five serviceable aircraft for the morning,” Villeneuve commented. “Five! And there are rows of brand-new fighters, Dewoitines, sitting outside the factory at Toulouse because no one will take it upon himself to sign the necessary paperwork so that they can be released to the frontline squadrons. It is criminal, Armstrong. Criminal!” The Frenchman sighed in resignation and reached for his pipe.

  While Villeneuve lit up, Armstrong reflected on the day’s other events, or at least those he knew about. If Villeneuve’s Groupe had taken a beating, the Escadrille that shared the airfield with it, a Morane 406 squadron, had fared even more badly. Nine of them had taken off that afternoon and had been attacked by twelve Me 109s over Charleroi; using their comfortable margin of speed to good advantage — they were about 60 miles per hour faster than the French fighters — the 109s had flown round the Moranes in a circle some 5,000 feet higher up and attacked in pairs, afterwards zooming up to altitude once more. With the 109s’ first passes two Moranes went down in flames; neither pilot bailed out.

  More 109s arrived on the scene and the remaining Moranes soon found themselves attacked by three or four adversaries each. A third French fighter went down in flames and this time the pilot managed to bail out, although he was seriously wounded. A fourth pilot, his Morane riddled with shells, crash-landed on the airfield at Soissons, his aircraft a total wreck. A fifth pilot was hit in the head by shell splinters while racing for safety at treetop height and lost consciousness; when he came to he found that his aircraft had made a perfect wheels-up landing in a field. Only four Moranes had returned from the sortie.

  Everywhere, Armstrong reasoned, it must be the same story. The Luftwaffe ruled the sky over the battle front. He wondered what the true situation was, and how quickly the collapse was taking place.

  Armstrong had no way of knowing it, but the situation in eastern France had only just been made brutally clear to a very important person who had arrived in Paris at four o’clock that afternoon aboard a de Havilland Flamingo airliner, having taken off from London an hour earlier. After a preliminary briefing at the British Embassy, Winston Churchill, Prime Minister for only five days, had gone on to the Quai d’Orsay for a meeting with the French Premier, Paul Reynaud. The previous day, Reynaud had telephoned Churchill with a grim message. “We have been defeated. We are beaten; we have lost the battle. The front is broken near Sedan … ”

  We are beaten. Every man for himself. Sauve qui pent. The mentality of defeat had penetrated the inner circle of the French Government …When Churchill arrived at the Quai d’Orsay, accompanied by General Lord Ismay, head of the Military Wing of the War Cabinet Secretariat, and General Dill, Vice-Chief of the Imperial General Staff, he was confronted by the sight of French civil servants making bonfires of government archives in the grounds. Already, they were preparing to evacuate the capital.

  Churchill and his companions were conducted to a magnificent conference room where Reynaud was waiting to receive him. Edouard Daladier, the Minister of National Defence and War, and General Gamelin were also present. Churchill noted utter dejection written on all their faces.

  With the aid of a map mounted on an easel, Gamelin explained the battle situation. The Germans had broken through to the north and south of Sedan, and the French Army in that sector was destroyed or scattered. Enemy armoured columns were pushing on with great speed towards Amiens and Arras, apparently with the intention of reaching the Channel coast in the region of Abbeville and driving a wedge between the
Allied armies. Alternatively, Gamelin thought, they might make for Paris. Behind the armour came eight or ten German motorised infantry divisions, steadily widening the gap as they pushed through the two dislocated French armies on either side.

  When Gamelin stopped talking, there was a long silence. Then Churchill, in his barely understandable French, asked: “Ou est la masse de manoeuvre — where is the strategic reserve?”

  Gamelin’s reply was a shake of the head, a shrug, and a single word. “Aucune.” None. There was no reserve.

  Churchill was visibly shocked. Suddenly, he had come face to face with the appalling shortcomings of the French High Command. With 500 miles of front to defend, they had left themselves with no insurance against an enemy breakthrough — no divisions with which to launch a strong counter-offensive once the first fury of the enemy attack had spent itself.

  To make matters worse, the British had never been informed of this deficiency, even though the British Expeditionary Force was serving under French command. But Gamelin, despite his evident despair, was not yet finished. He began to speak of the possibility of striking at the flanks of the German advance, using divisions withdrawn from the Maginot Line to the south. There were two or three armoured divisions which had not yet been engaged. Eight or nine more divisions were being brought from North Africa, and would arrive in the battle zone within two or three weeks … suddenly, both the general and his argument collapsed. With another shrug of the shoulders, he complained about inferiority of numbers, inferiority of equipment, inferiority of tactics. And where were the British, with only ten divisions in Europe after eight months of war? Where were the additional promised squadrons of the Royal Air Force?

  Fighters were needed not only to give cover to the French Army, but also to stop the German tanks.

  Churchill was vehemently opposed to this idea. “No!” he objected. “It is the business of the artillery to stop the tanks. The business of the fighters is to nettoyer le ciel, to cleanse the skies over the battle.”

  That morning, Churchill’s Cabinet had given him authority to move four more squadrons of Hurricanes to France. Now, at the close of the meeting with Gamelin, he sent a telegram to the Cabinet to ask for the despatch of six more. The reply came shortly before midnight, when Churchill was being entertained at Reynaud’s apartment. Approval was given for the despatch of ten fighter squadrons in total.

  Six squadrons were assembled on airfields in Kent, within easy reach of the Continent. It was arranged that every morning, three squadrons would cross over to France, operate from French bases until midday, and return to England after being replaced by three more. But, much to Air Chief Marshal Dowding’s relief, the squadrons were never based permanently on French soil.

  Events were happening much too swiftly for that.

  Chapter Six

  The weariness clutched at every fibre of Armstrong’s body. He had flown five sorties since dawn; now, at six o’clock in the evening, grimy and unshaven, his body clammy with the sweat that had poured from him as he sweltered under the hot May sun in his fighter’s cockpit, he wanted nothing more than to bathe some of the tension away, snatch something to eat and fall into a coma.

  He had lost count of the days. Today was 20 May, he thought, but without looking it up on the calendar he couldn’t be sure. The day before, the Groupe — its complement increased to eight aircraft with the arrival of some replacements, the survivors of another unit that had been decimated in the fighting — had moved again, this time to Anglure, north of the Seine, from where it had operated almost continuously in support of a doomed French counter-offensive aimed at preventing the Germans breaking through the Oise valley.

  Armstrong had seen the failure of the counter-offensive for himself, etched in the smoke of burning French tanks as, high above, the French lighter squadrons had striven desperately to keep the Luftwaffe at bay.

  On 17 May the Germans had crossed the River Sambre and by nightfall had penetrated the Forest of Mormal. The French counter-attack had not started until the evening of the 19th, having been delayed because of the difficulty in moving troops and equipment up to the jump-off point under constant air attack. In the small hours the attacking force reached its first objective, the railway line running between Berlaimont and Le Quesnoy, but the Germans rapidly reinforced their troops and succeeded in surrounding the French right flank near Englefontaine. By this time the French armoured support had collapsed through lack of fuel, and it was only with the greatest difficulty that General Mesny, the French commander, managed to extricate most of his forces from the rapidly closing trap.

  That morning, Armstrong and his fellow pilots had flown two sorties in response to a desperate plea for help by the French 43rd Division, which had abandoned its positions and begun the march westwards. The move had been forestalled by a heavy German attack on the French fortified positions at Bavai, and the remaining seven battalions of the 43rd had found themselves involved in fierce fighting.

  The fighter pilots had strafed the Germans until their ammunition had run out, but they had been unable to stave off the inevitable. One by one, the 43rd’s battalions had been annihilated, except for a few men who managed to get away. The 10th Chasseurs battalion, forming the rearguard, was assailed by a whole German infantry regiment. The Chasseurs fought on until their ammunition was exhausted, then they burned their colours, fixed bayonets and charged the enemy. To a man, they were mown down by the German machine-guns.

  On 17 May, with the aid of five divisions which had just reached the front, the French had attempted to form a new field army to block the Germans’ advance along the Oise. Even at this stage, the French General Staff still believed that they had enough tanks left to launch a strong armoured counter-attack; in reality, the only armoured formation at their disposal was the embryo 4th Division, with two scratch battalions. This lay in the open country between the forward elements of General Guderian’s 1st Panzer Division and the River Oise, and was commanded by a tall, dignified tank officer, a certain Colonel Charles de Gaulle.

  The first objective of de Gaulle’s two weakened and under-strength armoured brigades was the village of Montcornet, which had recently been captured by Guderian and commanded a strategic position astride the crossroads leading to Saint Quentin, Laon and Reims. The 6th Brigade approached the objective from Laon, following the left flank of the road, while on the right the 8th Brigade passed through Boncourt and Ville aux Bois, each column followed by a detachment of the 2nd Dismounted Dragoons and some groups of Chasseurs.

  After a preliminary skirmish, the attack against Montcornet was launched in daylight and de Gaulle’s tanks penetrated into the outskirts of the village. With only one battalion of Chasseurs to support them, however, they could not hold on and were compelled to withdraw after destroying a single German tank. De Gaulle’s forces were pulled back, attacked by German aircraft all the way, and found shelter in the Forest of Samoussy between Sissonne and Bruyeres. The colonel summed up the situation to his staff officers in a single sentence.

  “We are like lost children thirty kilometres in front of the Aisne,” he told them.

  The situation brightened a little on 18 May with the arrival of some reinforcements, including forty Somua tanks of the 3rd Cuirassiers. The new arrivals came just in time, for by the morning of the 18th the 4th Division had only sixty tanks left, twenty of which were heavy 33-ton ‘B’ types. On the 19th, with the aid of these reinforcements, de Gaulle was ordered to cross the River Serre and attack Guderian’s lines of communication.

  The attack was launched at 0700, the French tanks moving forward in three parallel columns, but by this time the Germans had had ample opportunity to mine the approaches to the Serre bridges and bring up their anti-tank batteries, and before the attack had been under way half an hour, the Stukas appeared in full strength. By 0900 de Gaulle’s thrust had ground to a halt, while on its right flank the supporting infantry were attacked again and again by bombers and German tanks, followed by infan
try assault groups.

  Desperate to hold on for as long as possible, the 4th Armoured Division’s infantry clung to their positions just short of Laon and suffered further attacks throughout the night, finally extricating themselves with great difficulty the next morning.

  The gallant failure of de Gaulle’s small counter-offensive marked the French Army’s last chance to blunt the German advance with the use of armour. As Armstrong and the other pilots were climbing wearily from their aircraft at the end of the day’s last sortie, what was left of the French 4th Division was pulling back across the Aisne.

  The pilots sat on the grass or in deckchairs near the dispersal hut, despairing now of a proper evening meal. Everything was in chaos, and they had to be content with bread and cheese, washed down by black coffee dispensed by a couple of orderlies. They chewed on their food mechanically, speaking in monosyllables between mouthfuls. Having finished, some wandered off to their tents, dog-tired, while others stayed where they were to smoke a last cigarette before turning in. Nobody took much notice when a telephone bell shrilled inside the hut.

  Armstrong rose stiffly to his feet and was about to wander off to bed when Villeneuve emerged from the hut, looking perplexed, and caught sight of him. The day before, he had made Armstrong a flight commander; the Englishman was now one of the Groupe’s senior surviving pilots and has passed the five-victory mark which made him, as the French called it, an ‘ace’.

  “There’s something odd going on, Armstrong,” Villeneuve said. “Here we are in the thick of things, and suddenly I’ve been ordered to take all available aircraft to Le Bourget — that’s the civil airport at Paris, as you may know — first thing tomorrow morning. I’m supposed to report to a Commandant Daurat. I knew someone of that name years ago. If it’s the same fellow, he’s a transport pilot. I wonder what it’s all about?”