The Germans take Brussels and Antwerp

On 17 May 1940, the eighth day of the German offensive in the west, troops of General Walter von Reichenau’s German Sixth Army entered Brussels without a fight. The Belgian capital, which the authorities had declared an open city to spare it from destruction, came under German occupation for the second time in a quarter of a century. The government had already left, and the Allied armies, which only two days earlier had been successfully holding the Dyle Line, were falling back westwards towards the Scheldt. The next day, 18 May, the Germans entered Antwerp, the country’s largest port and its strongest fortress, which the Belgian army had abandoned without fighting for the city itself.

Some chronologies list under 17 May both the German entry into Brussels and the capture of Antwerp, and then under 18 May the capture of Antwerp once again. The date for Brussels is correct. According to Belgian, Dutch and French studies, the Germans took Antwerp on 18 May. The discrepancy arises because Belgian troops were already leaving the fortress positions on 16 and 17 May, so that the city was in practice lost a day before the Germans marched in. Neither Brussels nor Antwerp was taken by storm: both were lost because a breakthrough several dozen kilometres away, on the Meuse, forced the Allies to abandon a line on which they had not in fact been beaten.

The Dyle Line

Under the Dyle Plan, put into effect from 10 May, the best Allied armies advanced deep into Belgium and by 14 May had occupied a line from Antwerp to Namur. In the north, from Antwerp to Leuven (Louvain), stood the Belgian army, which had fallen back from the Albert Canal after losing Fort Eben-Emael and the bridges near Maastricht. In the centre, along the little River Dyle, from Leuven to Wavre, Lord Gort’s British Expeditionary Force dug in. South of Wavre, as far as the fortress of Namur, the gap near Gembloux was held by the French First Army, which until then had been screened by General René Prioux’s Cavalry Corps, bled white at Hannut on 12–13 May.

On 14 May the Germans attacked along the whole of this line. At Leuven, where General Bernard Montgomery’s 3rd Infantry Division had earlier relieved the Belgian 10th Division in its positions, German infantry attacked the suburbs and the railway station on 14 and 15 May, but the British held the town. From 14 May Leuven was shelled by German artillery. In the Belgian sector too, along the anti-tank barrier known as the KW line, the Germans failed to break through.

Gembloux

The heaviest fighting took place near Gembloux, where General Erich Hoepner tried to break the French defences on the move with his two panzer divisions, the 3rd and 4th, without waiting for the infantry. His superiors, convinced that the French were retreating, urged him on in pursuit. In his path stood the French IV Corps, with General Albert Mellier’s Moroccan Division and General Alphonse Juin’s 15th Motorised Infantry Division, and to their left III Corps with the 1st Motorised Infantry Division. Most of these soldiers had their baptism of fire on 14–15 May.

On 14 May Hoepner’s tanks ran into a manned position between the railway line and the Wavre–Gembloux road and had to halt. On the morning of 15 May, after a dive-bomber attack and an artillery bombardment, both divisions attacked along the stretch from Gembloux to Ernage and Perbais. The French artillery, which had shelled the German start lines all night, pinned the German infantry down by the railway, and the tanks that had moved ahead of it drove into the fire of anti-tank guns and into a minefield. At about half past twelve the commander of the 35th Panzer Regiment, Lieutenant Colonel Heinrich Eberbach, refused to renew the attack, having lost half his tanks, his own among them. The commander of the 4th Panzer Division, General Stever, was wounded. At midday the division pulled its tanks back to their start lines. The Moroccan riflemen and French reservists, despite heavy losses, held their positions at Ernage and in Gembloux itself. In the evening the Germans withdrew from the railway line.

The battle of Gembloux was one of the few occasions in this campaign when German panzer divisions were stopped in the field. The American historian Jeffrey Gunsburg called his account of the battle “The ‘Blitzkrieg’ Checked”. The cost was high on both sides. According to studies based on the war diaries, the 4th Panzer Division had 105 killed, 413 wounded and 29 missing on 15 May, and between a fifth and a half of the vehicles in the two panzer divisions were put out of action. The Moroccan Division lost about 2,000 men, more than a quarter of its strength. Some of its battalions ended the battle with a hundred and something men out of seven hundred.

The order to retreat

The French, however, could not exploit their victory. On 13 May the Germans had broken through the defences on the Meuse at Sedan and at several other points in the sectors of the Ninth and Second Armies, and on 15 May their panzer divisions burst out of their bridgeheads into open country and headed west, into the rear of the armies that had entered Belgium. The right wing of the First Army, anchored on Namur, was left hanging in the air. That same day the Dutch army capitulated, freeing General Georg von Küchler’s German Eighteenth Army for operations against Antwerp. On the evening of 15 May, at about eight o’clock, the First Army, which had just repulsed Hoepner, was ordered to begin retreating towards the French border. General Gaston Billotte, commander of the 1st Army Group and co-ordinator of the Allied forces in Belgium, then extended the order to the British and the Belgians.

The retreat was planned over three nights. On the night of 16–17 May the troops were to fall back to the River Senne and the Willebroek Canal, on the night of 17–18 May to the Dender, and on the night of 18–19 May to the Scheldt. For the British and the Belgians, who had not been beaten in their sectors of the Dyle Line, this was a blow. The Belgian command long resisted abandoning Brussels and Leuven, and with them almost the whole centre of the country. But there was no real choice: had they stayed on the Dyle, the northern armies would have been cut off from France. The French withdrew from Gembloux on the night of 15–16 May, and the British and Belgians from the evening of 16 May. That same day in Paris Winston Churchill heard from Gamelin that France had no reserves with which to close the breach.

Brussels and Leuven

The Belgian government, with the prime minister, Hubert Pierlot, and the foreign minister, Paul-Henri Spaak, left Brussels once the decision to retreat had been taken. King Leopold III, the army’s commander-in-chief, remained with his troops. The burgomaster, Joseph Vandemeulebroek, and the city authorities, on the other hand, stayed in the capital to look after the population. For several days thousands of refugees from Limburg, Brabant and the province of Liège had been passing westwards through Brussels, and residents of the city now joined them. The authorities declared Brussels an open city, meaning that it would not be defended and should not be attacked.

On 17 May the Germans marched into Brussels without a fight, and German flags once again flew over a city that remembered the occupation of 1914–1918. Burgomaster Vandemeulebroek tried to defend the interests of the inhabitants and within months came into conflict with the occupier. In 1941 the Germans removed him from office, arrested him and deported him to Germany.

The same day the Germans occupied Leuven, which the British had abandoned. At around three in the morning of 17 May a fire was noticed in the University Library of the Catholic University of Louvain. With no water there was nothing to fight it with, and the building was burnt out, leaving only its walls. According to the university, of some 900,000 volumes perhaps fifteen thousand survived. It was the second destruction of the library: in August 1914 German soldiers had burned it, and the new building had been erected in the 1920s with the help of American donors. The cause of the 1940 fire has never been established. The Germans accused the retreating British of starting it; the Belgians pointed to German shelling. The town was deserted at the time and there were no witnesses. Most historians believe that it was most probably set alight by shells during an exchange of fire between the two sides.

Antwerp

Since the nineteenth century Antwerp had been Belgium’s “national redoubt”. A ring of forts and barriers surrounded it on the landward side, and in 1914 it was here that the king and the army took refuge. In the defence plan of 1940 the fortress closed the northern end of the Antwerp–Namur position, and its approaches were defended by Belgian divisions, supported in the first days by General Henri Giraud’s French Seventh Army. After the Dutch capitulation the French army withdrew southwards, while the German Eighteenth Army was approaching from the north and east.

Once the decision to withdraw from the Dyle had been taken, holding Antwerp no longer made sense: the fortress would have been cut off from the rest of the army and from France. Belgian troops began leaving it on 16 May. Some forts were still firing on 16 and 17 May, covering the retreat of the divisions towards Ghent. On 18 May the Germans entered the city. The burgomaster, Camille Huysmans, a socialist and a long-standing declared opponent of fascism, had earlier left for France and later for London. The country’s largest port passed into the occupier’s hands.

Place in the war

The fall of Brussels and Antwerp within two days came as a shock to the Belgians. A country that in 1914 had held on to a sliver of its territory on the Yser for four years had, in eight days, lost its capital, its main port and most of its land. On 18 May Adolf Hitler had already signed a decree annexing to the Reich the districts of Eupen, Malmedy and Moresnet, which Belgium had received after the First World War under the Treaty of Versailles.

The Belgian army withdrew to the Scheldt and into the Ghent bridgehead, and then to the Lys, where it fought its last battle. On 20 May the German panzer divisions that had crossed the Meuse at Sedan reached the Channel near Abbeville, and the Allied armies in Belgium and northern France were encircled. On 28 May Leopold III announced the capitulation of the Belgian army, and the British and some of the French were evacuated through Dunkirk. Brussels and Antwerp remained under occupation until September 1944: on 3 September the British entered Brussels, and on 4 September Antwerp, its port almost intact, was liberated by the British 11th Armoured Division. In the autumn and winter of 1944 Antwerp became the main target of German V-1 and V-2 missiles. The library in Leuven was rebuilt after the war for the second time.