World War II: Stopping Field Marshal Erich von Manstein’s Panzers

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On the morning of January 10, 1940, engine failure forced a Messerschmitt Bf-108 Taifun to land in a deserted field just inside the Belgian border. From the downed plane emerged Luftwaffe Majors Erich Hoenmanns, the pilot, and Helmuth Reinberger, who was carrying in his briefcase the highly secret plan of an impending German invasion of neutral Belgium and the Netherlands. Reinberger’s attempt to burn the documents was frustrated by a Belgian border patrol, which quickly arrived on the scene, arrested the two German officers, seized the partially charred papers and handed them over to the Belgian high command.

The capture of the German invasion plan initiated a chain of events that had a profound impact on the course of World War II in Western Europe. During a council of war on January 12, 1940, the French high command concluded that the Reinberger documents were genuine and not a German foil. They drew this conclusion in part because the documents reinforced their belief that the main thrust of the German offensive would come through northern Belgium rather than across the Maginot Line, the 87-mile-long fortified barrier that straddled the Franco-German border from Belgium to Switzerland.

The Reinberger documents also appeared to confirm the supposed wisdom of the Allied war plan approved on November 14, 1939. Code-named ‘Plan Dyle,’ it called for four of the five Anglo-French armies to advance to the line of the Dyle River in Belgium at the outset of the battle to stop the Germans before they could reach French soil.

On the extreme left flank of the Allied armies advancing into Belgium were the seven divisions of General Henri Giraud’s French Seventh Army. It would be accompanied, on its right flank, by the nine divisions of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF), under General John Lord Gort. To the right of the BEF, the French First Army, comprising 10 divisions under General Jean-Georges Maurice Blanchard, would have the responsibility of blocking a likely German attack through the Gembloux Gap, a 30-mile-wide corridor between the Dyle and Meuse rivers.

On the right flank of the First Army, only the left wing of French General André Corap’s Ninth Army (nine divisions in all) would advance into Belgium, marching to a line running along the Meuse River from Namur south to the French frontier. The right wing of Corap’s army would remain fixed on French soil, holding the line of the Meuse, from the French-Belgian border to the town of Sedan. To the right of the Ninth Army, the five divisions of General Charles Huntziger’s French Second Army would also remain stationary in France. It would be responsible for defending the frontier from Sedan to the Maginot Line. These fortifications, plus the Rhine River defenses, would be manned by the Second and Third army groups.

General Alphonse-Joseph Georges, who would command the Allied advance to the Dyle Line, argued vigorously against the plan. He feared that his units would not have time to prepare defensive positions in Belgium before the Germans attacked them. He was even more horrified to learn that General Maurice Gamelin, the French commander in chief and author of the Dyle Plan, had also decided to send Giraud’s Seventh Army — the only available reserve army — into Holland, at least as far as Breda, to forge a link between the Dutch and Belgian defenses.

Georges warned Gamelin that sending the Seventh Army far from the center of the Allied front, which was opposite the Ardennes Forest, was a potentially disastrous move. ‘If…the main enemy attack came in our center,’ a concerned Georges wrote, ‘on our front between the Meuse and the Moselle, we could be deprived of the necessary means to repel it.’But Gamelin did not believe the main German thrust would come through the Ardennes. A German army advancing through the forest, Gamelin was fond of pointing out, would have to use narrow, winding roads that threaded through rugged and heavily wooded hills — all of which were supposedly a defender’s dream landscape.

The French chief of staff, however, overestimated the deterrent value of the Ardennes. The forest was not as thick as he thought it was, and in reality the mountains were nothing more than a series of not-too-steep hills. Moreover, a good road network traversed the Ardennes between Sedan and the German border.

Nevertheless, an Allied advance into Belgium presented advantages that Gamelin was not prepared to abandon and which no doubt caused him to downplay the Ardennes threat. Not only would the move add the 22 divisions of the Belgian army to his combined strength, it would also shorten the Allied front by 35 miles. Moreover, an advance into Belgium would keep the German army away from the northern industrial and mining region of France. It would also keep the Luftwaffe from establishing bases near the English Channel, from which German warplanes could more easily attack Britain. This was a factor that prompted the British to support the Dyle Plan in the first place.

What is mind-boggling, however, is Gamelin’s refusal to keep the Seventh Army in general reserve after he began to receive intelligence reports as early as November 1939 that indicated the Germans had shifted the center of their planned attack farther south. In March 1940, Allied intelligence had located seven German panzer divisions deployed along the Franco-Belgian frontier between Sedan and Namur, the sector defended by the French Ninth Army. Gamelin did nothing to reinforce the Sedan sector even after he received another intelligence report, on the last day of April, warning that the German attack was set for May 8-10 and that Sedan would be at its center. Gamelin simply could not envision abandoning the Dyle Plan.

Hitler, by contrast, was much less rigid when it came to reconsidering his plans. The capture by the Allies of Reinberger’s documents had prompted the enraged Führer to scrap the now compromised German war plan, code-named Fall Gelb (Plan Yellow), and demand that his generals quickly work up an alternative. This new plan would ultimately bring about the defeat of France in six weeks and carry the Nazi warlord to the brink of total victory in the West.

On February 17, 1940, the gist of the revised version of Plan Yellow was described to the Führer by its primary author, Lt. Gen. Erich von Manstein. Manstein insisted that the point of attack for the German armored blitz, which would employ concentrated masses of panzer divisions, mechanized infantry and close-support aircraft, must avoid northern Belgium, where the Allies anticipated it. Instead Manstein believed that the center of the attack must be moved to the weakest point of the French line — that is, near Sedan, on the Meuse River. After breaking through the French defenses, the panzers should speed across northern France to the Channel coast near Abbeville. If the plan worked, the bulk of the Allied armies would be cut off in Belgium. After their destruction, Manstein added, the rest of the French army could be enveloped and destroyed ‘with a powerful right hook.’

Hitler agreed with most of Manstein’s revisions to Plan Yellow. As early as October 1939, he had expressed his first misgivings about the original plan. After listening to army chief of staff General Franz Halder give a presentation on the plan, Hitler said, ‘That is just the old [World War I] Schlieffen Plan, with a strong flank along the Atlantic coast; you won’t get away with an operation like that twice running.’

Hitler had quite a different idea. He suggested a vast encirclement of the enemy, led by panzer divisions thrusting across the Meuse River and then on to the English Channel. This was terrain he had fought on during World War I, and he knew it was ideal for tanks.

But Hitler envisioned only a few divisions participating in the attack through the Ardennes. Manstein, on the other hand, insisted that the spearhead had to be as strong as possible. Therefore, he argued that all of Germany’s 10 existing panzer divisions should be concentrated opposite the Ardennes. Hitler decided to compromise. Seven panzer divisions would be deployed opposite the Ardennes, while three would be stationed farther north, so as not to alert the Allies to the change in the German war plan.

The new version of Plan Yellow was aptly christened Sichelschnitt (Cut of the Sickle). It called for the spearhead of the western offensive to strike the French on the Meuse River between Namur and Sedan, as Manstein desired. The attack on Sedan was assigned to General Heinz Guderian’s XIX Panzer Corps, consisting of the 1st, 2nd and 10th Panzer divisions, assisted by Hitler’s elite Grossdeutschland motorized infantry regiment. These units would be followed and supported by General Gustav von Weiterscheim’s XIV Motorized Infantry Corps and other divisions of General Sigmund von List’s Twelfth Army.

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Tags: 20th - 21st Century, Historical Conflicts, World War II

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