6 For more complete details, see Jacques Mordal, La Campagne de Norvège—(“The Norwegian Campaign”).
7 Germany’s naval casualties were 3 cruisers, 10 destroyers, 4 submarines, 1 gunnery training ship, and 10 small ships lost; and the battle cruisers Scharnhorst and Gneisenau damaged. British ship casualties were 1 aircraft carrier, 1 cruiser, 7 destroyers, 3 submarines, 1 sloop, 1 antiaircraft escort ship, and 14 trawlers lost, plus 1 Polish destroyer. French casualties were 2 super-destroyers (the Bison, lost under the circumstances already stated, and the Maillé-Brézé, destroyed at Greenock on April 30 by the explosion of one of its torpedoes). Despite Germany’s Air Force and submarines, not one single British or French troop transport was sunk.
8 The proposal was presented by the British on April 16, and the French Admiralty immediately gave its agreement. But at a meeting of the Interallied Supreme Command on April 23, it was decided to maintain the status quo.
The night of May 9, 1940, the telegraph, the teleprinters, and the telephones crackled and chattered explosively. From the headquarters of Admiral, North, at Dunkirk—from the naval attaché’s office at The Hague—from the various intelligence agencies, from the Foreign Office at Paris, and, above all, from Army General Headquarters at Montry, came messages bringing to Maintenon a flood of fragments of information, the very volume of which indicated that something unusual was happening on the land front. The great difficulty, while waiting, was to determine exactly what was taking place.
At sea, the naval forces, in addition to the Norwegian operation which was at its peak, were busy with their usual patrol and escort missions. They were not directly concerned with developments on land—at least not yet. Still, in the event the war moved into Belgium, the Navy was committed to transport, as speedily as possible, a small contingent of troops to Flushing (Vlissingen) as well as to the Dutch islands at the mouth of the Scheldt, in order to flank the left wing of any new front that reached the North Sea. To insure maximum secrecy this operation had been given the code name, “Expedition of the Isles.”
Three times before—in November, 1939, in January, 1940, and in April, 1940—similar alerts had occurred. Each time a German attack through Belgium and Holland had been believed imminent, just as in 1914. Each time troops had been hurriedly massed at the frontier; the Navy had readied ships to transport the expeditionary corps to Flushing. Each time the alert had turned out to be a false alarm. Eventually the staffs, at all levels, became rather blasé about them.
This time, however, the thing seemed more serious—particularly to the Navy, which had noted several portentous occurrences. For instance, since April 30 the enemy had been increasingly active in laying magnetic mines off Dunkirk, Calais, and Boulogne. On May 5 the French naval attaché at The Hague brought certain information to Dunkirk which influenced Admiral Abrial in making camouflaged preparations to lift troops to Flushing—not, as he wrote, without causing a certain amount of derision in the general staff of the Seventh Army. Yet it was this very Army which constituted the left wing of the French land forces and which was to advance beyond Antwerp in case of a German attack through the Low Countries.
The Royal Navy, too, was suspicious of some new activity on the part of the enemy. On May 6 the British Admiralty set up a barrier of eight submarines—three of them French—off the Dutch coast where a German landing might be expected.11 And on May 7 the Dutch Army had been placed on the alert.
This barrier was to produce no results, as the German surface forces did not take any part in this phase of the offensive. On the contrary, with ships so close together, the danger of mistaken identities was considerable. To avoid regrettable errors, the commanding officer of each submarine received orders not to attack any other submarine! Thus it was that the German U-9, prowling in the area and knowing that it was the only German submarine there, was able to surprise and torpedo the French submarine Doris (Lt. Comdr. Jean Favreul) shortly after midnight on May 9. This was the first French submarine destroyed by enemy action.
But on May 9 the German Government publicly disclaimed any such evil intentions as were being attributed to it. With this disclaimer, tension at The Hague relaxed.
However, the denial was a trick. Beginning that very midnight German forces were in motion; before daybreak, Belgium, Holland, and Luxembourg had all been invaded. Belgium appealed for French assistance. At 5 A.M. Admiral, North, reported: “Region Dunkirk-Calais is at this moment the target of a heavy air attack. Incessant bombings. Magnetic mines.”
A great many French airfields, spared up until then, were attacked at the same time. At 0635 Supreme General Headquarters ordered the execution of Plan “D,” which provided for the entry of the Allied armies into Belgium as far as the Dyle River, and into Holland as far as Eindhoven.
The die was cast. The Battle of France had begun.
For the time being, the Navy only had to carry out its routine escort and patrol duties and transport the expeditionary forces to Flushing, not far away. Despite magnetic minefields and repeated enemy bombing of the port of Flushing, 3,150 men, with an artillery group and all necessary supplies, were landed there without loss on the 11th and 12th of May from four small passenger ships and two freighters. Air cover for the operation was provided by naval air units, which here first encountered the Luftwaffe—and successfully, for while the faster Messerschmitts brought down two French fighters, they in turn had five or six bombers shot down.
The naval units assigned to support the troops and safeguard their lines of communication were under the command of Rear Admiral Charles Platon, who installed himself at Flushing. These units consisted of two divisions of small destroyers, five submarine chasers, and some twenty minesweepers and smaller craft. The constant enemy air attacks made life very difficult for these ships at the mouth of the Scheldt, where two sweepers were lost on May 15.
To defend the Belgian coast against enemy attack from the sea, two mobile coastal batteries of the Navy, each made up of four 155-mm. guns, were positioned on the south bank of the Scheldt. At the urgent request of Army General Headquarters, also, a mobile naval 90-mm. antiaircraft battery from Dunkirk was placed to defend the tunnel under the Scheldt at Antwerp, which was of vital importance to the French troops, who by now were in Breda. Also, two divisions of magnetic minesweepers were sent to Ostend and Zeebrugge to assist in insuring supplies to the Army. Antwerp itself was the responsibility of the British Navy.
The Flushing expeditionary force had one serious weakness, however: the troops assigned to the outpost of Walcheren Island were lightly armed, green troops originally intended for coast defense duty. Although the Walcheren Island force was doubled on May 13 by an additional detachment detailed to the advanced post of Zuid Beveland, these were mainly Reservists, with little training and with a commanding officer who shortly had to be relieved. His successor was capable and valorous, but had no time to bring the troops to the high state of morale necessary in such an exposed position.
The French High Command had expected to find prepared positions in Belgium against which the German offense would exhaust itself, but the assault was so fierce that the newly arrived troops on the Dyle and on the Gembloux plateau did not have time to catch their breadth.
Dutch resistance began to crumble on May 14, and the French Seventh Army had to pull its advance elements back south of Antwerp. On the 16th the French High Command had to order a general withdrawl from Belgium, because, three days earlier, German tanks had broken through the Meuse River front between Dinant and Sedan. The order, unfortunately, came too late; most of these troops were to find themselves hemmed in shortly in the Dunkirk pocket.
Walcheren and the Zuid Beveland outpost were left uncovered by the precipitous withdrawal. On May 14, a French naval reconnaissance party penetrating