Rommel is one of the most exciting and inspiring military leaders of all times. His exploits from World War I, recorded in his 1936 book Infantry Attacks, telling about his actions as a junior officer in World War I. His actions in the Battle of Caporetto in 1917 gives the first insights into Rommel’s unique gifts as a commander, and especially how he was going to wage war in France in 1940 and in North Africa between 1941 and 1942.

Luckily for Rommel he never served on the Eastern Front. He was a Nazi, as so many of the top generals of his age were during the Third Reich, and he would most likely have become involved in war crime activity against the Jews and the Russian partisans. But thankfully that never happened.

This tribute to Rommel’s chivalry was delivered by Winston Churchill on the news of Rommel’s forced suicide after the attempt on Hitler’s life on 20 July 1944. Part of that tribute is a reference back to this praise, surprisingly from Winston Churchill in the House of Commons, in January 1942 when he said of Rommel:

We have a very daring and skilful opponent against us, and, may I say across the havoc of war, a great general.

Rommel’s most astounding accomplishments happened over his few days in the dash to the English Channel in 1940 at the head of the 7th Panzer Division. The time has come to tell you about how Rommel disobeyed Hitler and the senior generals in his dash to the Channel, as they were trying to slow things down to a pace that they could understand, but not win the campaign.

Tag words: Blitzkrieg; Erwin Rommel; Infantry Attacks; Winston Churchill; 7th Panzer Division; Adolf Hitler; Erich von Manstein; Karl-Heinz Frieser; Bltizkrieg Legend; World War 2; General Georg von Sodenstern; General von Brauchitsch; Ardennes; Meuse River; von Kluge;

The wargames that had been conducted by Manstein on 7 February 1940, at the headquarters of Army Group A, and then subsequently other wargames by other people, were all about getting through the Ardennes and then over the Meuse River. I can’t imagine that Manstein would have left his plans up in the air after that point, but Halder had gotten rid of him to command a new Corp that didn’t yet exist and no more forward planning happened.

On 13th May Guderian got across the Meuse, and then everyone at the various Army, Army Group and the Führer’s headquarters scratched their heads. What now? Incredible! The most respected General Staff in the world and they had no idea what to do once they were over the Meuse. The only two people that had the exact plan were Manstein and Guderian – and now Manstein was gone from where he could have helped everything to run smoothly.

So we now have Panzer Corp Guderian and Panzer Corp Reinhardt charging off to the Channel as Manstein wanted, and we have the higher echelons of the German field armies all the way up to the Führer himself all in a flap about this.

Soon the greatest military genius of all times (größte Feldherr aller Zeiten), and I mean Adolf  Hitler of course, was going to go into meltdown.

Tag words: Blitzkrieg; Adolf Hitler; Erich von Manstein; Ardennes; Meuse River; Franz Halder; Heinz Guderian; Kleist; Panzer Leader; Winston Churchill; Gerd von Runstedt; Col-Gen. von Brauchitsch; Major Henning von Tresckow; Karl-Heinz Frieser; Blitzkrieg Legend; Dunkirk; Operation Sickle Cut;miracle on the Marne; Benito Mussolini

Although Guderian didn’t know it, once he began disobeying orders from above in the race to the English Channel there was a first and a second prize awaiting.

The second prize was trapping the Allied armies that had advanced into Belgium against the coast. That would be the bulk of the Allied armies and would effectively end the Battle of France.

The glittering first prize, though, was to take Dunkirk before 24 May, 1940, beating the British there, so that the entire British Army would be captured and Hitler would win the war.

So let’s start the race.

Tag words: Blitzkrieg; Heinz Guderian; Dunkirk; Adolf Hitler; Sedan; Meuse River; Panzer Group Kleist; Panzer Corp Guderian; Panzer Corp Reinhardt; Generalmajor Werner Kempf; Erich von Manstein; General Gerd von Runstedt; Sickle Cut; Franz Halder; General Georg von Sodenstern; Sickle Cut plan; 6th Panzer Division; Army Group A; Colonel Freiherr Baron von Esebeck; Oberst (General Staff) Count von Stauffenberg; Pursuit Detachment von Esebeck;

What the German Panzer Divisions did in May 1940 was not in their training and operational manuals. What they did had never been practised. It was all made up as they went. Improvised.

Karl-Heinz Frieser in his book Blitzkrieg Legend says:

As earlier emphasized, the operations plan of the army high command was only a half-hearted and inconsistent implementation of Manstein's bold Sickle Cut idea. The decisive breach point was at Sedan. Manstein and Guderian had assumed that after crossing the Meuse River the Panzer formations would immediately have to push to the Channel coast, disregarding their exposed flanks, or otherwise lose the race against the Allies. All of the higher-ranking generals from the army high command and all the way down to Army Group A and von Kleist had discarded precisely this requirement as being too risky.

So now the panzers were across the Meuse – what next?

Tag words: Blitzkrieg; Karl-Heinz Frieser; Blitzkrieg Legend; Erich von Manstein; Heinz Guderian; Sickle Cut; Fritz Halder; General Georg von Sodenstern; Meuse River; Great War; 1st Panzer Division; 2nd Panzer Division; un pépin assez sérieux; a rather serious pin prick; General Georges; größte Feldherr aller Zeiten; greatest military genius of all times; Führer; Adolf Hitler; Walther Wenck; Klotzen, nicht kleckern!; Hit with the fist, don't feel with the fingers!; 10th Panzer Division; Infanterieregiment Großdeutschland; Infantry Regiment Großdeutschland; Winston Churchill; Pierre Le Goyet; Le mystère Gamelin; The Mystery of Gamelin; Oberleutnant Günther Korthals; major Philip Gribble; Oberst i.G. Kurt Zeitzler; Graf von Kielmansegg; Dunkirk;

From the moment of the first German attack in the north, the air forces of both sides had been deployed in the skies over the northern sector where the main German attack was expected.

At noon on the 13th May, the Luftwaffe suddenly vanished from the skies in the North. Soon the Allies would learn why.

Tag words: Sir Basil Liddell Hart; Colonel Bourguignon; General Gamelin; General André Prételat; General Heinz Guderian; Meuse River; Ardennes; Deuxième Bureau; Panzer Group Kleist; General Francois d'Astier de la Vigerie; Marshal Henri Philippe Petain; World War I; Dyle Line; General Franz Halder; General Charles Huntziger; Generalleutenant Bruno Loerzer; General Sperrle; Rolling Raid;

On 15 March 1940, less than two months before the launching of the German offensive in the West, Hitler summoned a meeting of General von Runstedt, the commander of Army Group A, the commanders of the individual armies under his command, and the commanders of the panzer forces, Heinrich von Kleist and Heinz Guderian.

The purpose of the meeting was for each of the generals to present their plan for the first phase of the looming offensive. Guderian was the last to speak. He began explaining what he’d do once he‘d crossed the Meuse.

As Guderian was speaking, General Ernst Busch, the commander in chief of the Sixteenth Army, interrupted him saying:

Well, I don't think you'll cross the river in the first place!

Hitler was silent. It was a disturbing suggestion. He looked to Guderian to – hopefully - firmly rebut this comment. Guderian turned to Busch and said: 

There's no need for you to do so, in any case.

Long after everything had gone better than anyone of those doubting generals at that meeting had imagined, Guderian spoke of a

hard task ahead, in whose successful outcome nobody at that time actually believed, with the exception of Hitler, Manstein and myself.

Hitler honestly had no idea of the breathtaking operations that Guderian was intending to unleash, as he lost it on more than one occasion when things were under way and going unbelievably as expected. Hitler wasn’t the sort of ally that Guderian was going to need when his panzers were racing ahead of the infantry – no one protecting the flanks or rear of the panzers.

Manstein had been gotten out of the way by Franz Halder the German Army chief of staff who detested the man on the personal level and hadn’t wanted Hitler to hear about Manstein’s ridiculous idea of attacking out of the Ardennes, something Hitler himself was keen to do. Until February 1940 Halder had, managed to keep Hitler in his cage – that was when Hitler’s Army adjutant, Schmundt, had brought the two together – and that plan became THE plan.

The only people who were involved with the execution of the Sichelschnitt (Sickle Cut) Plan, who believed in what Guderian was going to do, who were on the spot, were a few of his younger subordinate generals who increasingly believed in this insane plan. Realising what, until then, had been the largely unsuspected possibilities that slumbered in the German Panzer force. Luckily, commanding one of the panzer divisions, the 7th Panzer Division, was its new commander, Erwin Rommel. Rommel had in fact conducted a blitzkrieg in World War I, commanding infantry, not tanks, in what was going to be the style of the panzer blitzkrieg, exhilaratingly recounted by him in his 1936 book, Infantry Attacks describing his operations during the Battle of Caporetto in north Italy in 1918. His leadership of that Panzer Division resulted in his enemy calling it the ghost division, because no one knew where it was, advancing so swiftly once it was thrown into the fight.

In this programme I’m going to look at the disbelief of the German officer corp, with a few exceptions, at this wild scheme that Manstein and Hitler had cooked up.

Tag words: Blitzkrieg; Meuse River; General von Runstedt; Adolf hitler; General Heinrich von Kleist; Heinz Guderian; General Ernst Busch; Erich von Manstein; Franz Halder; Sichelschnitt Plan; Sickle Cut Plan; Erwin Rommel; 7th Panzer Division; Infantry Attacks; General Alfred Jodl; General Georg von Sodenstern; General Water von Brauchitsch; Schlieffen Plan; Bock; Karl-Heinz Frieser; Blitzkrieg Legend; Oberst i.G. Kurt Zeitzler;

The deception measures that the Germans put in place for their surprise attack out of the Ardennes forests, and then heading to Sedan, were remarkable and they never get much attention.

The German high command, and many officers, were worried that Manstein’s plans was a repeat of the massive gamble of the Schlieffen Plan that had been badly executed in World War I and had lost Germany the war.

In the Schlieffen Plan the German Army attacked through Belgium and then wheeled to the south. At the same time the French attacked into Alsace-Lorraine. The original Schlieffen Plans were to defend that Alsace-Lorraine area with weak German forces that the French would be able to drive back. It was, broadly, a repetition of the tactics used by Hannibal’s great victory over the Romans at Cannae in 216 BC. where the Roman Army, commanded by Gaius Terentius Varro, was lured into attacking the deliberately weak Carthaginian centre. As his legions plunged deeper into the centre, the Carthaginian cavalry enveloped both flanks and encircled and totally destroyed the Roman Army.

By the time the Schlieffen Plan was launched in 1914, over the years since it had first been planned, important aspects of the plan had changed. The Germans kept adding more forces to their southern wing. For reasons of German nationalistic pride, they couldn’t bear the French to succeed – which was the whole point of the Schlieffen Plan. The result was that the Germans defeated the French attack in the south which defeated their whole concept of luring the French armies forward there so that the German armies in the north could then wheel to the left, trapping all of the French armies.

In 1940 the German high command worried that Manstein’s plan involved the same sort of gamble that the Germans had made in 1914 which had failed. Everything staked on one throw of the dice. How could they be sure that the French, British and Belgians would advance forward into Belgium. The whole of Manstein’s plan depended on them doing just that. But then, remember the two German officers, one Major Helmuth Reinberger, who bungled their flight in appalling weather and bungled their way over the border of Belgium where they crash landed in January 1940, carrying some of the German plans to repeat the Schlieffen Plan.

The Germans weren’t happy about this situation. They didn’t know whether the enemy had captured all, some or none of their plans. But they didn’t scrap their plans. They just changed the way that they were going to execute them, that is until that fateful meeting between Hitler and Manstein in February 1940.

But that crash landing accident almost guaranteed that if the German Army went with Manstein’s Sichelschnitt (Sickle Cut), they knew for sure and certain that the French were going to walk into his trap. How was revealed in a book published in 1941 by a French man, André Maurois, during the war, called The Tragedy of France. He wrote this:

The Germans knew exactly what movements we would make in case of an invasion of Belgium because we were kind enough to stage a "dress rehearsal" for that, before their very eyes. Here is how that happened. One fine day, a German aircraft landed in Belgium. Its passengers were general staff officers who carried with them a. . . plan for the invasion of Belgium ...

....

This the Germans did magnificently as the campaign opened and before their hand had finally been shown and understood by the enemy – to their total horror.

Tag words: Blitzkrieg Legend; Karl-Heinz Frieser; Von Kielmansegg; Operation Sichelschnitt; Operation Sickle Cut; Erich von Manstein; Heinz Guderian; Schlieffen Plan; Cannae; Hannibal; Gaius Terentius Varro; Roman Army; Carthaginian cavalry; Major Helmuth Reinberger; Adolf Hitler; André Maurois; The Tragedy of France; the Dyle Line; Bernhard von Loßberg; Admiral Canaris; Abwehr; Army Group A; Army Group B; Maginot Line; Wehrmacht; Fort Eben Emael; Schwerpunkt; Gamelin; General Pierre Jacomet; Ardennes; Sedan

I probably shouldn’t be mentioning George Washington and Adolf Hitler in the same sentence, but I’m going to. George Washington said:

Success has many fathers. Failure is an orphan.

So the brilliant Operation Sichelschnitt (Sickle Cut) was claimed by Erich von Manstein, Adolf Hitler and Franz Halder as its father. If it had failed I think Manstein would have been given the credit by Hitler and Halder. Maybe I should have given a spoiler alert before I said that.

So let’s first look at Adolf Hitler, the man proclaimed to be the greatest military genius of all times (größte Feldherr aller Zeiten).

Tag words: Operation Sichelschnitt; Operation Sickle Cut; George Washington; Adolf Hitler; Erich von Manstein; greatest military genius of all times; größte Feldherr aller Zeiten; Nicholas von Below; von Rundstedt; General Jodl; Karl-Heinz Frieser; The Blitzkrieg Legend; Blitzkrieg; Heinz Guderian; Luftwaffe; Graf von Kielmansegg; Franz Halder; 4th Deployment Directive;

Manstein had seen the army high command’s hopeless, unimaginative plan, for the attack on France. He’d come up with a better idea – an attack through the impenetrable Ardennes Forest in Belgium in the centre using the new, and really untested, panzer divisions.

As fate would have it, the father of Germany’s panzer forces, Heinz Guderian was in the town of Koblenz where Manstein was also based as the chief of staff of Army Group A. Manstein should have been Chief of Staff of the German Army but that’s another story. That job had ended up with General Franz Halder. A remarkably capable and brilliant general but, to be honest, not in the class of Manstein.

Manstein and Guderian got together in Koblenz. Manstein revealed his plan for what would come to be known as Operation Sichelschnitt (Sickle Cut). The German Army manuals contained nothing about how to fight the war that Manstein so clearly so in his head, which he shared with Guderian. Together they were going to have to work out how to make this new way of war work. Together they ticked all of the boxes.

Selling it to the German High Command was now Manstein’s job. He needed to put a plan together on paper. That sounded like a plan!

Tag words: Erich von Manstein; Blitzkrieg; Ardennes Forest; Heinz Guderian; General Franz Halder; Operation Sichelschnitt; Operation Sickle Cut; Adolf Hitler; Karl-Heinz Frieser; Schwerpunkt; Major Helmuth Reinberger; General Gerd von Runstedt; Luftwaffe; War Directive No.6; Teilsieg; Matador’s Cloak; Sir Basil Liddell Hart; General von Brauchitsch; Leibstandarte; Grossdeutschland; Kriegsspiel; Oberst Gunther Blumentritt; Major Henning von Tresckow; Rudolf Schmundt; Major Gerhard Engel; General Alfred Jodl; Fall Gelb; Case Yellow; Rommel;