The French 3rd Armored Division had been formed only six weeks before it went into battle. It lacked antitank guns, radios, repair units, engineers, and artillery, and it was below strength in tanks. However, it was still a powerful unit, its Hotchkiss H39 tanks giving it considerably more strike power than the stripped-down German panzer divisions that were operating farther north.
It was training at Rheims when the German attack started on 10 May. Since it took all orders about two days to arrive from GHQ, it did not receive orders to move to Sedan until 12 May. The division arrived there by dawn on 14 May, but there was a delay while its fuel tankers caught up with it. By noon, however, the division was refueled and moving north along the route taken by the ill-fated counterattack launched by the corps reserve. The men of the 3rd Armored Division were in high spirits and looking forward to hitting the Germans hard.
By three o’clock that afternoon of 14 May, as Guderian began his exposed movement westward with only the Grossdeutschland infantry regiment to protect his flank, the French 3rd Armored Division, in
Company with the French 3rd Motorized Infantry Division, was closing in upon him. Guderian’s two panzer divisions were vulnerable, being astraddle three water courses: the Meuse, the Ardennes Canal, and the river Bar, which ran close beside the canal. Cadets have been thrown out of military academies for a military decision such as Guderian had made. But Guderian put all his trust in the motorized infantry which was following him, the XIV Motorized Corps of General von Wietersheim. Technically it was the army commander’s job to worry about Guderian’s flank and rear. There could be no doubt about the calculated risk that was involved in this decision.
But that was not the way it looked to the French. General J. A. Flavigny, who commanded the 21st Corps of armor and motorized units, was not confident. Only thirty minutes before zero hour he postponed the attack until the next day. General Huntziger, commander of the Second Army, was moving his headquarters back to Verdun and so was not in a position to overrule this cancellation. Flavigny then gave up the idea of counterattacking. He dispersed the French armor along a 12-mile sector, assigning two or three tanks to each road.
After the war Flavigny gave his reasons for the cancellation; it was because the counterattack “was bound to fail.” He added, “I wished to avoid disaster.” General Flavigny’s place in history is assured if he helps us remember that bloodthirsty generals are not the only commanders of whom men should go in fear.
Flavigny did not know that Guderian’s divisions were moving west and, although both RAF and French bombers attacked the bridge over which the German armor was streaming, no aircraft reported the German movement. Nor were any hits made on the bridge.
Huntziger told his superiors that the counterattack had been canceled for technical reasons, adding that the roads were all now sealed off. He was told that the 3rd Armored Division was given to him for a counterattack. It must therefore counterattack—and “energetically.” Huntziger decided to do nothing about this until a confirmation of the order arrived.
At 7 A. M. on 15 May Flavigny was finally ordered to attack. Flavigny took no action until 11:30 a. m. for, having dispersed all the tanks, he decided that it would take at least twenty-four hours to concentrate them again, and blamed General Antoine Brocard, the armored division commander, for not assembling it quickly enough. Huntziger obligingly relieved the tank division commander of his job. Having settled the question of who was to blame for all the delays in the counterattack, the attack itself was forgotten. Huntziger now put
The armor and motorized troops with the rest of his shattered army and formed the kind of defense line his generation so revered. It was Huntziger’s chief of stalf who later told an investigating committee that this proved to be “a defensive success.”
With only a small proportion of his army, which included the armored division, ever having seen combat, Huntziger’s was the greatest failure of the whole campaign (though later he was promoted and became War Minister). The understrength units that Guderian had left to guard his flank proved entirely adequate. Once the Germans crossed the Meuse and headed west, Huntziger’s army was the one best placed to move against them. In fact it did not halt them, harry them, or even inconvenience them.
World History
