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

offensive. Clearly, if this hinge could be broken, the two halves of the
French line would be critically severed in two. With this in mind, it would
perhaps have been sensible to err on the side of caution and make sure this
stretch of the line was exceedingly well-defended.
It was not, however. There had been frantic bunker-building in the area
over the winter so that by May there were 103 in all, but many were only
half finished, lacking steel gun port shutters and doors, and still surrounded
by their construction pits. Most of the construction work had been carried
out by infantrymen rather than engineers; instead of training for combat
they were busy building bunkers. As it was, the 55th Infantry Division was
a second-rate division made up mostly of reservists. When the crunch came,
and determined German troops were storming their positions, far too many
realized they had no idea what they should do, so large numbers either fled
or surrendered.
And there was another curious French practice that was a hangover
from the last war. The individual infantry companies were constantly being
rotated between construction work of various kinds, even agriculture, and
infantry training. Once back in the line, they rarely returned to their former
sector, but took over the positions of the company they were relieving. This
meant they never got to know any stretch of the line particularly well. In the
static attritional war along the Western Front, rotation had been more
important than local knowledge, but that was not the case in 1940.
Furthermore, by rotating companies in such a way, these units had become
separated from their parent battalions. One company might be at one end of
the sector, another in the middle, sandwiched between two companies from
entirely different battalions. As a result cohesion – and hence strong
communication – had been crucially lost between units.
Guderian had chosen his principal crossing point at Gaulier next to the
Draperie Sedannaise for a very good reason. First, his approach was hidden
by a multitude of buildings, but, second, there was not one single bunker
along the far bank of the Meuse at this particular part of the river. Even
though this mile-long stretch lent itself very obviously to the siting of a
string of machine-gun and anti-tank gun posts, there was nothing. This was
incomprehensible and doubly so because it had been at precisely that point
that the German army had crossed the Meuse in August 1914.
To make matters worse, there was a complete absence of mines at
Sedan, even though the narrow flood plains either side of the river were