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

mass of the French armour fought a day-long battle with 5th Panzer
Division.
Despite the superior firepower of the French tanks, the 1 Division
Cuirassée, one of the best tank divisions in the French army, was destroyed,
with burning wrecks littering the sweeping countryside much as RAF
bombers were strewn around Sedan. The 1 Division Cuirassée had begun
the day with 170 tanks. By the day’s end, it had just thirty-six. By the
morning of the 15th, that figure stood at sixteen. The 1 Division had been
utterly destroyed.
That same day, 15 May, Panzer Corps Reinhardt also managed to break
out from its bridgehead at Monthermé and thrust more than thirty miles. It
was all the more extraordinary because only Generalmajor Werner Kempf’s
6th Panzer Division had actually made it across the Meuse – the rest of the
corps was still labouring through the gridlock of the Ardennes. The
following morning, 16 May, Generalmajor Kempf met Guderian in the
marketplace at the small town of Montcornet; the two Panzer Corps had
linked up, some fifty miles west of Sedan.
Earlier, as Guderian had passed through an advancing column of the 1st
Panzer Division, his men had cheered him. He had been worried that
perhaps he had been pushing them too hard: the men were exhausted and
ammunition was just beginning to run low. The day before he had seen
Oberst Balck after a hard fight against ‘a good Normandy infantry division
and a brigade of Spahis’, his eyes red and his face covered in dirt. Now,
though, Guderian knew there must be no more hesitancy. ‘The men were
wide awake now,’ he wrote, ‘and aware that we had achieved a complete
victory, a break-through.’
Guderian was right. The entire Meuse front had now collapsed. As the
motorcycles, tanks, half-tracks and armoured cars of those half-dozen
leading panzer divisions thundered through the dusty May roads, French
soldiers, stunned to see German troops where no German troops could
possibly be, surrendered in their droves.
For the Allies the realization that they had been well and truly
humbugged came as a profound shock. In London, Churchill learned the
news on the evening of 14 May, when the Cabinet received a message from
M. Reynaud, the French Prime Minister, telling it that the Germans had
broken through at Sedan, and asking for ten more fighter squadrons. Further