rise-and-fall-of-the-third-reich-william-shirer-pdf

VICTORY IN THE WEST 651The first couple of days had gone fairly well for the Allies, or so they thought.To Churchill, plunging with new zest into his fresh responsibilities as PrimeMinister, ”up until the night of the twelfth,” as he later wrote, ”there was noreason to suppose that the operations were not going well.” 854 Gamelin, thegeneralissimo of the Allied forces, was highly pleased with the situation. Theevening before, the best and largest part of the French forces, the First, Seventhand Ninth armies, along with the B.E.F., nine divisions strong under Lord Gort,had joined the Belgians, as planned, on a strong defensive line running alongthe Dyle River from Antwerp through Louvain to Wavre and thence across theGembloux gap to Namur and south along the Meuse to Sedan. Between theformidable Belgian fortress of Namur and Antwerp, on a front of only sixtymiles, the Allies actually outnumbered the oncoming Germans, having somethirty-six divisions against the twenty in Rekhenau’s Sixth Army.The Belgians, though they had fought well along the reaches of their northeastfrontier, had not held out there as long as had been expected, certainly notas long as in 1914. They, like the Dutch to the north of them, had simply notbeen able to cope with the revolutionary new tactics of the Wehrmacht. Here, asin Holland, the Germans seized the vital bridges by the daring use of a handfulof specially trained troops landed silently at dawn in gliders. They overpoweredthe guards at two of the three bridges over the Albert Canal behind Maastrichtbefore the defenders could throw the switches that were supposed to blow them.They had even greater success in capturing Fort Eben Emael, which commandedthe junction of the Meuse River and the Albert Canal. This modern,strategically located fortress was regarded by both the Allies and the Germansas the most impregnable fortification in Europe, stronger than anything theFrench had built in the Maginot Line or the Germans in the West Wall. Constructedin a series of steel-and-concrete galleries deep underground, its gunturrets protected by heavy armor and manned by 1,200 men, it was expected tohold out indefinitely against the pounding of the heaviest bombs and artilleryshells. It fell in thirty hours to eighty German soldiers who under the commandof a sergeant had landed in nine gliders on its roof and whose total casualtiesamounted to six killed and nineteen wounded. In Berlin, I remember, OKWmade the enterprise look very mysterious, announcing in a special communiquéon the evening of May 11 that Fort Eben Emael had been taken by a ”newmethod of attack,” an announcement that caused rumors to spread – and Dr.Goebbels was delighted to fan them – that the Germans had a deadly new”secret weapon,” perhaps a nerve gas that temporarily paralyzed the defenders.The truth was much more prosaic. With their usual flair for minute preparation,the Germans during the winter of 1939-40 had erected at Hildeshcim areplica of the fort and of the bridges across the Albert Canal and had trainedsome four hundred glider troops on how to take them. Three groups were tocapture the three bridges, the fourth Eben Emael. This last unit of eighty menlanded on the top of the fortress and placed a specially prepared ”hollow” explosivein the armored gun turrets which not only put them out of action butspread flames and gas in the chambers below. Portable flame throwers were alsoused at the gun portals and observation openings. Within an hour the Germanswere able to penetrate the upper galleries, render the light and heavy guns ofthe great fort useless and blind its observation posts. Belgian infantry behindthe fortification tried vainly to dislodge the tiny band of attackers but theywere driven off by Stuka attacks and by reinforcements of parachutists. By the