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

Despite their assurances, however, it soon became clear that neither
Billotte nor Blanchard had any intention of taking part in the counterattack
at all. Billotte spent the rest of the day discussing whether an ammunition
dump should be saved or blown up to prevent it falling into the hands of
Germans, rather than marshalling his troops. At First Army HQ, Blanchard
passed the buck to Altmayer, commander of French V Corps, but the latter
informed his army commander that his men might be too tired to fight.
Captain Reid, Blanchard’s British liaison officer, visited Altmayer and
found him sitting on his bed crying silently. Neither Reid nor Archdale at
Billotte’s HQ could then get hold of Gort or Pownall, so not until the
following morning, a few hours before the attack was to begin, did the
British learn that the French would not be contributing, save for a few
tanks.
As it happened, the British thrust south of Arras seriously knocked
Rommel’s combined force of 7th Panzer and Waffen-SS Totenkopf
divisions. At one point, as British armour was threatening to overrun
Rommel’s troops, the German general took personal command of an
artillery battery sited in a quarry on the crest of a long shallow hill. The
British were pushed back after a day of hard fighting, but it had given the
Germans a severe shock. For the first time since crossing the Meuse, Army
Group A had encountered some serious opposition. Von Rundstedt called it
‘a critical moment in the drive’, adding that, ‘For a short time it was feared
that our armoured divisions would be cut off.’ Had the Allies managed to
co-ordinate a combined counter-attack from both north and south, and in
force, the Germans might yet have been checked. But it was not to be.
Not that Général Weygand, the spry septuagenarian brought in to put some
steel back into the French, was giving up just yet – after all, he had not been
brought in to do nothing. Nonetheless, matters hardly improved, and once
again it was communications – or lack of them – that were one of the
biggest problems. On the same day that the British were thrusting south of
Arras, Weygand held a conference in the Belgian town of Ypres, now
rebuilt since its destruction over twenty years before. By the time Gort
finally got there, having been in the middle of a command post move and
then struggling through the swathes of refugees clogging the roads,
Weygand had already left. Billotte was also late, but, deciding to crack on
with the conference anyway, the Belgians eventually agreed to fall back a