William S. Lind learned some lessons on a staff ride through the Ardennes to Sedan, where he got to see firsthand the battlefields of the famous Sichelschnitt, or sickle-cut:
For me, the biggest lesson was the relationship between operational results and tactical risk. The German attack through the Ardennes, called Sichelschnitt or sickle-cut, promised to be decisive operationally. But until I actually saw the terrain I did not realize how risky it was tactically. While parts of the Ardennes are rolling, relatively open country, some of the sections through which XIX Panzer Corps had to pass were extremely constrained. They gave the French and Belgians repeated opportunities to turn Guderian’s Panzers into a world-class traffic jam. When one Belgian company did not get orders to withdraw, its resistance caused the Germans serious problems. But such resistance occurred only by accident; French doctrine called for delay, not defense, so the French threw opportunity after opportunity away. The French were defeated as much by their own doctrine as by the Germans, a point of some relevance since U.S. Army doctrine today remains largely French, especially in its focus on synchronization.
One of the mysteries of the 1940 campaign, as I read about it, was the rapid fall of the new, powerful Belgian fort of Eben Emael. As we walked through its kilometers of tunnels, a Cav officer solved the mystery: “It’s a blind giant,” he said. The fort had only a handful of small vision cupolas, which the Germans quickly took out with shaped charges. Why was it so designed? Because it was a “system of systems,” dependent on others to tell it what was going on. When that information did not come, its situation was hopeless.
The critical point in the campaign was the crossing of the Meuse River at Sedan. There, over and over, we saw the central difference between a Second and a Third Generation army. The Germans, focused outward, cooperated laterally and took initiative at every level to get the result the situation required, while the French, focused inward, could act only in response to orders from higher headquarters. The fact that the German senior commanders were all forward at the decisive points enabled them to see the real situation quickly and act on it.
In contrast, we visited the very comfortable, landscaped bunker that was the headquarters of the French 55 th Division, well to the rear of the fighting. As we reflected on that headquarters’ isolation, I asked one of the Cav officers if a modern U.S. Army division’s command element could fit in the same bunker. The answer was no, by a large margin. In the size and complexity of our headquarters, we have out-Frenched the French.
Our staff ride ended at the heights of Stonne, south of Sedan. Again, until I saw terrain, I did not appreciate how commanding it was. Here, what we learned dispelled one of the myths of the 1940 campaign; that the French did not fight. Stonne was captured and recaptured some seventeen times in one day, in actions where the French fought bitterly and the Germans, especially the Grossdeutschland Regiment, took heavy casualties. At one point, a single French Char B heavy tank entered the village, destroyed thirteen German tanks and then left, intact, despite taking 140 hits. That illustrated both the French superiority in equipment and the rarity of French initiative and cooperation. A bit more of both and the battle for the heights at Stonne could have gone the other way, which might have kept even Hurrying Heinz from turning west toward the English Channel and operational victory.
Indeed, this campaign was not preordained to be a French defeat, as Americans tend to assume.
French historian Marc Bloch, who fought in WWI and volunteered for WWII (serving as a logistics officer) identified one of the main problems as slow decision-making: “the metronomes at GHQ were set at too low a rate.” Things happened a lot faster than they were expecting.
A valuable source on this campaign is General Andre Beaufre, who as a young captain served on the French staff between the wars and in 1940. His observation about the general staff’s culture: