Battle of Sedan (1940)

Background

Germany invaded Luxembourg, the Netherlands and Belgium on 10 May 1940. The Allied plan was to rush their best mobile armies forward into Belgium to meet the expected German main effort there. The German plan, Fall Gelb, put that effort elsewhere: Army Group A was to push its armour through the wooded Ardennes, cross the Meuse at Sedan and drive west towards the Channel coast, behind the Allied armies in Belgium.

The French high command did not expect a major blow here. Gamelin called the Ardennes Europe's best tank obstacle, and General Huntziger of the Second Army rejected the idea of an Ardennes thrust and put his faith in concrete; on 11 April he was refused four more divisions. The Sedan sector was a quiet front held by second-line troops. The 71st Infantry Division was being moved up beside the 55th to shorten the 55th's frontage from 20 to 14 km, but by 10 May the move was only partly done.

The spearhead of Panzer Group Kleist was General Heinz Guderian's XIX Panzer Corps. Kleist wanted to cross at Flize, west of Sedan, but Guderian's plan for Sedan was adopted. The approach march through the Ardennes was a huge traffic problem (the 2nd Panzer Division was held up in jams nearly 250 km long), but the panzers entered Sedan without resistance on 12 May, and that evening Guderian reported no sign of the enemy. He would have to cross the river the next day with much of his artillery still on the road.

The armies

XIX Panzer Corps had about 60,000 men and three panzer divisions: the 1st (Kirchner), 2nd (Veiel) and 10th (Schaal), with the elite Infantry Regiment Grossdeutschland attached to the 1st. Of its roughly 770–790 tanks, nearly half were light Panzer Is and IIs; the 1st Panzer Division had the most Panzer IIIs and IVs. Its weakness was artillery: 141 guns against the French 174, and some of its batteries reached the river with only a few shells per gun. The Luftwaffe was meant to make up the difference, and the Germans had some 1,470 aircraft over this sector against about 152 Allied bombers and 250 fighters. The crossing was an infantry and engineer job: riflemen and assault engineers in 96 rubber boats.

The 55th Infantry Division (General Lafontaine) under General Grandsard's X Corps was a 'Series B' division, mostly reservists, many over 30. It was poorly trained, worn down by building work, and short of cohesion. Its 147th Fortress Infantry Regiment manned the Meuse bunkers: 42 when war broke out and 61 more built by May, most of them unfinished. Behind them stood counter-attack forces, including battalions of FCM 36 light tanks and, further back, the 3rd Armoured Division.

The battle

CDB90 records the crossing and its exploitation as one engagement, number 486 (SEDAN-MEUSE RIVER), from 13 to 15 May. Times are as given in the sources and differ by up to an hour.

The bombardment (13 May, 08:00–16:00). Instead of a short, massed strike, the Luftwaffe hammered the French positions for about eight hours in what has been called the heaviest air bombardment the world had then seen, with several thousand sorties according to Hooton. It did little physical harm: the 55th Division reported 56 casualties, and no bunker was destroyed by a direct hit. But it cut telephone cables and broke the nerve of the reservists. The Germans lost six aircraft.

The crossings (13 May, afternoon to midnight). The assault went in during the afternoon on three sectors. On the right, at Wadelincourt, French artillery wrecked 81 of the 10th Panzer Division's 96 rubber boats, but a team of eleven engineers and infantry under Staff Sergeant Rubarth got across and knocked out seven bunkers; follow-up units were over by 21:00 and took Hill 246. In the centre the 1st Panzer Division and Grossdeutschland crossed into the Glaire loop near Gaulier, broke through on Hill 247 by 20:00 and took Hill 301 by nightfall. Balck's 1st Rifle Regiment reached the Bellevue château by about 19:00 and pushed on to Cheveuges. On the left, at Donchery, the 2nd Panzer Division was pinned by flanking fire for hours; it infiltrated the French line at 20:00 and began regular ferrying at 22:20.

The Bulson panic (13 May, from about 19:00). A French artillery observer's report was passed on wrongly, and a rumour spread that German tanks were at Bulson, behind the French line. In fact the first German tank would not cross for another twelve hours. Troops and gunners of the 55th Division abandoned their positions and much of their heavy equipment; the corps artillery left its guns, and part of the 71st Division gave way too.

The race for Bulson (14 May, 01:00–10:45). A pontoon bridge at Gaulier was finished by 01:00 and the first panzers crossed at 07:20. Lafontaine, waiting for Grandsard's orders and reconnoitring, did not order his counter-attack until 05:00. The 213th Infantry Regiment and the 7th Tank Battalion advanced alone on the northern axis because the 205th Regiment and 4th Tank Battalion were late. They covered the last two kilometres to the Bulson ridge between 07:30 and 08:45 and found German units had reached it minutes before. The 7th Tank Battalion was shattered, and Lafontaine ordered a retreat at 10:45.

The bridges (14 May). Ten RAF Fairey Battles attacked the bridges early without loss. The few French bombers available went in around noon and lost so heavily that their remaining sorties were cancelled. Between 15:00 and 16:00 the Advanced Air Striking Force sent every Battle and Blenheim it had: of 71 bombers, 40 did not return, a loss rate the RAF's official history calls unmatched in an operation of that size. Bomber Command Blenheims followed that evening. More than 300 German flak guns, and fighters outnumbering the escort, defended the crossings; perhaps three bridges were damaged and one destroyed, and Loerzer, commanding one of the Luftwaffe air corps, called it the day of the fighter. By nightfall at least 600 tanks were over the Meuse.

The turn west (14–15 May). Guderian left the 10th Panzer Division and Grossdeutschland to hold the southern shoulder and swung the 1st and 2nd Panzer Divisions west towards the Channel. From 15 May French counter-attacks around Stonne turned into a three-day fight in which the village changed hands repeatedly, but the breakout had already been made.

Aftermath

German losses for 12–17 May were about 5,000 killed and wounded, many of them at Stonne; the French lost over 5,000 men at Sedan and the Allies 167 aircraft. The material cost was modest; the strategic cost was total. Guderian's panzers reached the Channel on 20 May, and the Allied armies in Belgium were cut off. Military historians agree that the battle sealed the fate of Belgium and France. The artillery commander of X Corps, Colonel Poncelet, later took his own life, and Frieser sees Lafontaine's slow counter-attack on 14 May as the decisive lost chance to crush the bridgehead before the tanks crossed.

Sedan became the textbook case of 'Blitzkrieg', but the German historian Karl-Heinz Frieser has argued that the 1940 campaign was not planned as one. On his account the German high command expected a long struggle like the First World War; the speed of the victory came from the Sedan breakthrough and from panzer commanders such as Guderian pressing on beyond, or against, their orders, while Hitler and senior officers, fearing for the open flanks, tried to rein them in. Other German commanders later described the methods as ad hoc solutions to the situation. Some historians accept that the speed was unplanned but argue that Germany would probably have won even without the breakthroughs at Houx and Sedan.

Wargaming it

Sedan rewards several scales. The crossing on 13 May works at platoon or company level, one stand per section or platoon and turns of 15–30 minutes: rubber boats against bunkers, with the German player racing the light and the French player rationing artillery and hoping the cables hold. The whole bridgehead from 13 to 14 May suits battalion level, with turns of an hour and the Bulson ridge as the objective of both sides.

The key terrain is compact and well mapped: the Meuse and its loops, the Glaire peninsula and the Gaulier bridge site, the bunker line along the bank, Hill 247 and Hill 301, the Marfée heights above Wadelincourt, the Bellevue château, and the Bulson ridge and village to the south.

The decisions are about time. Does the French command hold its nerve after the bombardment, or roll for panic as rumours spread? Can the counter-attack be launched in the night of 13–14 May, before a single panzer has crossed? Guderian's choice, to hold the shoulder or run west, is a good campaign-level decision.

The 14 May bridge raids make a separate air game: slow light bombers, a fighter escort outnumbered three to one, and a valley full of flak. What if the bombers had come in strength a day earlier?

Maps and pictures