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

perfect mine-laying terrain, while the open countryside beyond should also
have been pasted with them. Mines were comparatively cheap and easy to
make – far easier to build and lay than bunkers – yet the 55th Infantry
Division had been given just 422 for its part of the line. Most of these had
not been laid, however, and those that had been, had been dug up and
moved to a nearby depot to be re-greased to protect them from soil
moisture. Needless to say, they had not been relaid by 10 May.
Curiously, it was a politician rather than a soldier – Pierre Taittinger, a
member of the Parliamentary Army Committee – who first warned Gamelin
about the poor defences at Sedan. ‘In this region,’ he told Gamelin in
March, ‘we are entirely too much taken with the idea that the Ardennes
woods and the Meuse River will shield Sedan and we assign entirely too
much significance to these natural obstacles. The defences in this sector are
rudimentary, not to say embryonic.’ His warning was not heeded.
Of course, once the bunkers were overrun, the poorly trained French
infantry inside them did not know what to do. The Germans followed a
‘mission command’ principle, known as Aufstragstaktik. This meant that an
officer or NCO would be given a mission or goal, such as to capture a
specific bunker or to destroy an enemy gun position. How he then achieved
it was entirely up to him. This was not a concept that the French – or British
for that matter – understood at this time. Oberleutnant Korthals of the 1st
Panzer Division was given the order to destroy a key bunker overlooking
the Meuse, but not told how to do it. Using his initiative, he then went on to
destroy a large number more.
Guderian, Rommel and Kempf led from the front – almost recklessly so
in the case of Rommel – but by being near the action they were able to
inspire their men at crucial moments and also see for themselves how the
battle was going. At Sedan, Général Lafontaine, commander of the French
55th Infantry Division, remained in a bunker built into a hidden quarry
some eight miles south of the town. When the panic occurred on the night
of the 13th, he hastily vacated his command post and moved even further
back.
The French were not prepared for the unexpected. The last war had
been about having the most concrete and the best guns; so this was what
they had concentrated on developing during the intervening years. They
were to be proved half right, but when they discovered they had been
certainly half wrong, they could not adapt quickly enough. Instead they