The Germans reach the English Channel

On the evening of 20 May 1940 soldiers of the German 2nd Panzer Division entered Abbeville on the lower Somme, still burning after an air raid, and a few hours later one of its battalions stood on the seashore at Noyelles-sur-Mer, where the river flows into the English Channel. Ten days after the start of the offensive in the west and a week after the breakthrough on the Meuse, the German armoured wedge had cut France in two from the Ardennes to the sea. North of it lay the Belgian Army, the British Expeditionary Force and three French armies – more than a million men in all – severed from the rest of France, from their depots and from their supply routes. On the same day General Erwin Rommel’s division came up to Arras, where the next day the British tried to cut the German corridor.

War chronologies often spread these events over two days. Under 19 May they record the “siege” of Amiens, the encirclement of Arras by Rommel’s troops and the arrival of “other German units” at Noyelles on the Channel, and under 20 May the capture of Abbeville by Guderian’s “armoured groups”. The sources show a different sequence. For the German tanks 19 May was rather a day of regrouping and refuelling. Amiens was bombed but not taken until 20 May. Arras was not surrounded on 19 May. Rommel approached the town from the south-east on 20 May, and even then the British garrison kept its communications with the north open. The Germans reached Noyelles only on the evening of 20 May, and they were men of the same division that had taken Abbeville. All these events therefore belong to 20 May.

The race to the sea

After the breakthroughs at Sedan, Dinant and Monthermé, General Ewald von Kleist’s Panzer Group and General Hermann Hoth’s Panzer Corps broke out into open country. Between Namur and the Maginot Line the French front had ceased to exist. The German command, however, feared its own success more than the enemy. On 17 May the Chief of the Army General Staff, General Franz Halder, noted that Hitler was “terribly nervous”, frightened of every risk and eager to rein in the advance; he “rages and screams” that the generals were going to ruin the whole campaign. Hitler and the commander of Army Group A, General Gerd von Rundstedt, feared a French blow against the long, thinly covered southern flank of the corridor before the infantry could come up.

On the morning of 17 May Kleist flew to an airstrip near Montcornet and accused Heinz Guderian of disobeying the order to halt. Guderian asked to be relieved of his command and was, but after the mediation of the commander of the 12th Army, General Wilhelm List, he was allowed to carry out a “reconnaissance in force”. Under that label his divisions kept moving west. On the evening of 18 May the ban was lifted. Meanwhile, near Montcornet, the French 4th Armoured Division under Colonel Charles de Gaulle struck the southern flank of the corridor on 17 May and attacked again towards Crécy-sur-Serre on 19 May. Both attacks, broken up by Stukas and by the hastily brought-up 10th Panzer Division, were of only local significance.

On the northern wing advanced Rommel’s 7th Panzer Division. On the night of 16–17 May it broke through the fortifications of the Maginot Line extension near Clairfayts, passed Avesnes, where it scattered French units caught at rest, and in the morning stood before Le Cateau-Cambrésis, far ahead of the rest of its own division. Rommel, who had ignored the order to halt at Avesnes, reported 10,000 prisoners for a loss of 36 men. For several hours corps headquarters did not know where its division was. On 18 May it took Cambrai. That same evening the spearheads of Guderian’s 1st Panzer Division entered Péronne on the Somme and the Canal du Nord. Only the Somme valley, leading straight to the sea, now lay ahead of the Germans.

The line that was not there

No regular army stood between the German tanks and the coast. The French 7th Army, being brought back from Belgium to the Somme, was only just assembling. The commander of the shattered 9th Army, General Henri Giraud, was taken prisoner on 19 May. In practice the road to the sea was barred only by two British Territorial Army divisions, the 12th and the 23rd, sent to France in the spring as labour troops for work in the rear and to guard the lines of communication. They had no divisional artillery and almost no anti-tank weapons. In the 35th Brigade there were five anti-tank rifles, with 35 rounds for them, for several battalions. On 18 May they were combined with the Arras garrison into an improvised force under General Roderick Petre and scattered in small groups along the Canal du Nord and at Doullens, Albert, Amiens and Abbeville.

On 19 May, at the headquarters of Lord Gort, commander of the British Expeditionary Force, a withdrawal of the whole army to the coast, towards Dunkirk, was seriously considered for the first time. His chief of staff, General Henry Pownall, put this option to the War Office by telephone. The War Cabinet in London rejected it and ordered the BEF to fight its way south-west, towards Amiens, to link up with the French. On the morning of the same day the Commander-in-Chief, General Maurice Gamelin, issued his Order No. 12, calling for an attack on the corridor from the north and the south simultaneously, and in the evening Prime Minister Paul Reynaud replaced him with General Maxime Weygand. The new commander suspended his predecessor’s order, and several days passed before he formulated a plan of his own.

20 May: Amiens, Abbeville, Noyelles

On the morning of 20 May Guderian’s corps moved off with three panzer divisions. The 10th Division took over flank protection at Péronne in order to free the others. The 1st Panzer Division overran a British battalion holding the road at Albert, then destroyed the 7th Battalion of the Royal Sussex Regiment on the approaches to Amiens and took the city, which the Luftwaffe had bombed in the preceding days. Before the day was out it had established a bridgehead on the south bank of the Somme. To Guderian’s right, the 6th Panzer Division of General Georg-Hans Reinhardt’s corps ran into two battalions of the 36th Brigade at Doullens, which held it up for two and a half hours before they were overwhelmed. Of the two battalions, together almost 1,200 men, little more than 150 came out of the fight. South of Arras the 8th Panzer Division destroyed the 70th Brigade of the 23rd Division, caught on the roads near Wancourt, Mercatel and Ficheux.

The furthest advance was made by General Rudolf Veiel’s 2nd Panzer Division. After marching through Albert, its spearheads reached Abbeville in the afternoon; the Luftwaffe had earlier turned the town into a sea of flames. The British 35th Brigade, defending the eastern suburbs, withdrew across the Somme, having lost about half of its roughly 2,400 men. According to French studies the Germans entered the town at about 5.30 p.m., and a battalion of the 2nd Rifle Regiment under Major Spitta reached Noyelles at about 8.30 p.m., the first German unit to see the sea. The division had covered about a hundred kilometres to the coast from the positions it had set out from on 17 May, and more than two hundred from the Meuse, which it had crossed a week earlier.

The British official history states that after this day the 12th and 23rd Divisions had “practically ceased to exist”, the whole area between the Scarpe and the Somme had passed into German hands, and the British lines of communication had been finally cut. Historians stress, however, that every hour by which these poorly equipped battalions delayed the Germans was of immense value to the rest of the BEF. German war diaries wrote with respect of their tenacity.

Rommel’s division, supported by the motorised SS Division “Totenkopf”, moved from Cambrai towards Arras on the night of 19–20 May. Its panzer regiment reached the southern outskirts of the town, but the rest of the division lagged behind. Rommel, who as usual was travelling with the spearhead, lost contact with his division for several hours. As he himself described it, near Vis-en-Artois he and his staff came under fire from French tanks before the infantry arrived. Arras, defended among others by a battalion of the Welsh Guards, was surrounded only on the south and east. Hoth ordered it to be bypassed, and on 21 May Rommel was to swing round the town from the west and strike north.

The Allies face disaster

On the morning of 20 May the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, General Edmund Ironside, arrived at Gort’s headquarters from London with the Cabinet’s instruction that the BEF should break through towards Amiens. Gort explained that seven of his nine divisions were fighting on the Scheldt and that he had at most two available for an attack. Ironside therefore went on to Lens, to the commander of the French 1st Army Group, General Gaston Billotte, who was supposed to coordinate the operations of the Allied forces in the north. He later wrote in his diary that he had found him, together with General Georges Blanchard, in a state of “complete depression”, with no plan and “ready to be slaughtered”. He lost his temper and shook Billotte by the button of his tunic. He extracted a French promise to attack southwards, but returned to London convinced that the BEF was in mortal danger.

On the same day in Dover Vice Admiral Bertram Ramsay began conferences on a possible evacuation of troops from France. For the time being this concerned men not needed at the front and the wounded. An officer was sent to Dunkirk to begin shipping the BEF’s rear echelons back to England. At Hitler’s headquarters the mood was quite different. On the evening of 20 May General Alfred Jodl noted that the Führer was “beside himself with joy”, spoke in the highest terms of the army and was already thinking about a peace treaty that would return to Germany the territory “robbed” from it over four hundred years.

The counter-attack at Arras

On the afternoon of 21 May the British struck south from Arras. General Harold Franklyn’s force could muster for the attack only two infantry battalions of the Durham Light Infantry and two tank battalions, 74 tanks in all, including 16 Matilda IIs, whose armour the German anti-tank guns could not penetrate. The tanks smashed columns of the 7th Panzer Division and caused panic in part of the “Totenkopf” division. Rommel, directing the defence in person, stopped them with artillery and 88 mm anti-aircraft guns firing over open sights. His aide-de-camp was killed beside him. In the evening the British withdrew with heavy losses. Rommel put the enemy’s strength at five divisions, and for a day the German command feared a larger counter-attack, halting the advance of some of the panzer divisions. That same evening General Billotte was fatally injured in a car accident. The only man who knew Weygand’s intentions and coordinated the operations of the three armies in the north was gone.

Place in the war

The German arrival at the sea near Abbeville was the moment at which the campaign in the west was decided. The manoeuvre later called the “sickle cut” (German: Sichelschnitt), outlined in the Manstein Plan, succeeded faster than anyone on either side had expected. The Allies, who on 10 May had sent their best divisions into Belgium in accordance with the Dyle Plan, now had them in a pocket. In the following days the Weygand Plan, which envisaged attacks from the north and the south against a corridor only a few dozen kilometres wide at Arras, never got off paper. The German panzer divisions wheeled north, towards the Channel ports. On 22 May they attacked Boulogne, on 24 May Hitler halted them some fifteen kilometres from Dunkirk, and from 26 May more than 330,000 British and French soldiers were evacuated to England from its harbour and beaches.

The bridgeheads over the Somme taken on 20 May, at Abbeville, Amiens and Péronne, proved just as important. At the end of May French and British units, among them de Gaulle’s division, tried in vain to eliminate the Abbeville bridgehead. On 5 June it was from these very bridgeheads that the Germans launched the second phase of the campaign, which within three weeks ended in France’s defeat and armistice. For Guderian and Rommel the days between 17 and 21 May became the source of their fame as commanders who win by pressing forward in defiance of their superiors’ fears. Hitler drew the conclusion that the generals’ nervousness had been unfounded and that he himself had been right to back the Manstein Plan.