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

36
The Wall of England
THE NEWLY PROMOTED Oberstgeneral Heinz Guderian had been having an
easy time of it these last six weeks. His Panzer Group had been dissolved,
although the staff had stayed on briefly in Paris, from where he had played
the tourist, visiting Versailles, Fontainebleau and other sites. Then, at the
beginning of August, since he was not involved in any way in invasion
plans, he and his staff moved back to Berlin.
Nonetheless, Halder had allocated both Army Groups A and B to the
invasion, although the main landings along the south-east were to be
conducted by the former. A number of panzer divisions were included in
Halder’s planned second wave, including Rommel’s 7th Panzer. The
division had been transferred to the west of Paris and Major Hans von Luck
was now living in a comfortable villa on a loop in the Seine, right opposite
the American singer Josephine Baker. Along the river – rather than on the
coast – they practised loading and unloading converted barges under
combat conditions. Hans found it wearisome in the extreme.
What Halder was finding wearisome was the apparent diametrically
opposed views of the army and Kriegsmarine over the planning of
Operation SEALION. It was ironic that Germany, with the OKW, should
have been enlightened enough to create the world’s only tri-service high
command, yet thanks to the Nazi practice of divide and rule was rarely able
to reap its benefits. Thus for SEALION no joint planning team had been
organized. Rather, the Kriegsmarine had been left to make its plans and
OKH had been told to draw up its own, almost entirely independently of
each other. From their headquarters, Halder and von Brauchitsch had
decided that the invasion should take place on a broad front. Six divisions
from General Ernst Busch’s Sixteenth Army would cross from the Pas de
Calais and land between Ramsgate and Bexhill-on-Sea, while four divisions
from General Adolf Strauss’s Ninth Army, embarking from Le Havre,
would land between Brighton and the Isle of Wight. Three further divisions
from the Sixth Army, departing from the Cherbourg Peninsula, would land
between Weymouth and Lyme Regis. Some 90,000 men would be put