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

had seemed like an impossibly long and exhausting march, which had
begun near Cologne. Ahead of them, they had often been able to hear the
sounds of battle, and as they passed first into Belgium and then France, they
could see the evidence of fighting too: burned tanks, blown-up bridges,
dead livestock. Pontoon bridges had already been built across most of the
rivers they came to, and felled trees pushed from their path. At Bra, in
Belgium, they had to leave behind their first horse. ‘Other candidates for
exhaustion,’ noted Siegfried, ‘were the battery blacksmiths.’ This was how
most of the German army moved: by horse, by bicycle and on foot.
Siegfried’s battalion crossed the Meuse at Rommel’s crossing point
south of Houx then, once in France, was assigned to Panzer Group Kleist.
The scenes of battle grew steadily worse. ‘Dead cattle and other livestock
were everywhere,’ he noted, ‘the victims of bullets, mortars, artillery shells
and bombs. Their bloating carcasses lay in the fields with their legs sticking
up. I learned that the smell of rotting flesh, dust, burned powder, smoke,
and petrol was the smell of combat.’ He was also shocked by the sight of
his first dead soldier. They had been trained to deliver death quickly and
efficiently and, of course, he knew that in wars people get killed. Indeed,
comrades of his had died in Poland, but it had always had a clinical
connotation for him; he mourned their loss, but now seeing a bloodied,
stinking and mutilated corpse that had recently been a living, young human
being was quite a shock. The men he saw were French Moroccans, their
eyes and mouths open, limbs skewed in grotesque fashion. ‘The experience
was impossible to forget,’ he wrote. ‘From that moment on, death hovered
near us wherever we went.’ And he was also shocked by the numbers of
refugees, traipsing along the roads with their paltry belongings and clearly
without much idea of where they were headed. ‘I felt sorry that we had to
do this to them,’ he noted. ‘They were paying a terrible price because
France had declared war on us.’
When Hitler heard the news that Guderian had reached the Channel coast
he was beside himself with joy, and immediately began to occupy his
thoughts with peace terms. ‘We are seeking to arrive at an understanding
with Britain,’ Halder noted after a Führer Conference the following day, ‘on
the basis of a division of the world.’ That same day, Hitler met
Grossadmiral Erich Raeder, C-in-C of the Kriegsmarine – German navy –
and the admiral asked Hitler whether he had any plans for an invasion of