A description of the great battle of Whitsun weekend 1940 would not be complete without a mention of the bizarre and tragic bombing of Freiburg.
At teatime on Friday afternoon, three aircraft came out of the clouds to bomb the fighter airfield on the outskirts of the pretty little town of Freiburg-im-Breisgau in western Germany. The aiming was poor and most of the bombs exploded in the town. Eleven of them hit the railway station, and two fell on a children’s playground. Twenty-two children died, as well as thirteen women and eleven male civilians. There were only eleven military casualties.
The Germans were shocked, and their official news agency report of the raid included a warning that any more such bombing of “illegal” targets would be answered by fivefold retaliation against French and British towns.
Knowing that Bomber Command had not bombed Freiburg and believing the denials of the French air force, it was tempting for the British leaders to suppose that the German propaganda service had invented the story. It was a view that gained many converts when,
Just four days later, Rotterdam was bombed. It seemed as if it might have been the sort of preparation Dr. Goebbels might make for such an attack, the details of which were now being exaggerated beyond recognition and used energetically by propagandists on the Allied side.
The RAF had given up all its prewar dreams of daylight bombing in formation. Until the time of the German thrust westward. Bomber Command had been scattering only leaflets across Germany. One RAF expert at this time estimated that scarcely 35 per cent of its bombers were finding their way to the targets assigned to them. It was to prove a remarkably accurate guess.
Accurate or not, RAF Bomber Command was, on the day following the Rotterdam raid, authorized to bomb the densely populated Ruhr area of Germany. It was the beginning of a bombing policy in which all belligerent powers shared the same ruthless indifference to the destruction of town centers. By December 1940 RAF crews were being told “to concentrate the maximum amount of damage in the centre of town” and were being helped to find it by a “fire-raising force” of aircraft flown by the best crews.
Long before that, however, the police president of Freiburg-im-Breisgau had carefully collected bomb fragments and pieced enough together to read the serial numbers on the casings. He proved beyond doubt that his town had been struck by German bombs. He traced them from the factory where they were made to the Luftwaffe armory at Lechfeld, near Munich. The attack had been carried out by three Heinkel He Ills which had lost their way on a bombing mission to Dijon airfield in France.
The affair was an accident, but by this time the Goebbels propaganda machine had made such capital of it that there was no chance that the Germans would publish the truth. By this time, too, the men who planned strategic bombing had long since forgotten the incident at Freiburg.
The Flawed Victory
‘7 received a postcard at my address, found on the body of an officer of Corap*s army, who had just committed suicide at Le Mans station. He wrote, 7 am killing myself, Mr President, to let you know that all my men were brave, but one cannot send men to fight tanks with rifles.' ”
-PAUL REYNAUD
N 17 May 1940 the world heard the news that Brussels had fallen to the Germans. The next day Paul Reynaud, the French Premier, changed his Cabinet. The sixty-eight-year-old General Maurice Gamelin was replaced as Commander in Chief of the French Army by the seventy-three-year-old General Maxime Weygand. Marshal Henri Philippe Petain, a hero of the previous war, was appointed Vice Premier. Petain was eighty-four years old.
Weygand was a weary, desiccated little man, described by one acquaintance as looking like a retired jockey, an impression fortified by his riding breeches and perfectly polished high boots. Weygand’s undisguised dislike of the British and his contempt for all politicians made him a most unsuitable choice as Gamelin’s replacement. Weygand was in Beirut, in Lebanon, on 17 May, when summoned to Paris; meanwhile, Gamelin’s plan for a counterattack south of Sedan was shelved at the moment that he was relieved of his command.
World History
