The Battle of Britain Five Months That Changed History, May—October 1940 by James Holland (z-lib.org).epub

time in the world to reach the Dinant area, dig in and build up strength. The
weir at Houx was also, bizarrely, the boundary between two French corps –
the II and the XI. Coincidentally, it was the precise place that German
troops had crossed back in 1914. Why a corps boundary had to be at such
an obvious weak spot is not clear; but it explains why, when the Werner
Detachment crossed, they found a surprising lack of enemy troops on the
night of the 12th. They had inadvertently hit upon a French troop vacuum.
As it happened, the French soldiers from II Corps to the north of Houx
had already arrived by the 12th but had not dug in with any urgency at all.
To the south, only five of the nine infantry battalions of the 5th and 18th
Infantry Divisions had reached the Dinant area. In other words, two German
panzer divisions had taken considerably less time to travel the seventy
kilometres of their attack than the French divisions had for their almost
entirely undisturbed fifty-mile approach. Guderian and von Manstein had
always recognized that it would be a race to the Meuse, and at Dinant the
Germans had emphatically won hands down.
Further south, near Sedan, Guderian was also managing to keep to his strict
three-day timetable and by the evening of the 12th his three divisions had
smashed their way through the five major obstacles that barred their way to
the Meuse, the last of which was the French border posts some six miles to
the east of the river, which had fallen by the afternoon. His men had done
all he had asked of them: charging hell for leather, without a break, pumped
up on stimulants, and supported by a meticulously planned and unique
logistical system. This included pre-prepared fuel dumps and inserting
lorries full of laden jerrycans in with the spearhead that could roll past
handing out petrol without stopping. Relief crews had also been transported
with the lead panzers. These measures had been simple, effective and
ingenious.
They had also had little interference from the air. Guderian’s lead
panzers might have benefited from being the spearhead, but Panzer Corps
Reinhardt, following behind, had soon found itself in the world’s biggest
gridlock as the infantry divisions supposed to be following behind and
along strict march routes began deviating from these orders. In places,
divisions competing for road space found themselves cutting across one
another – or trying to, at any rate – which led to the kind of traffic jam that
would make the M25 in rush hour seem like a race track. General