THE DAWN - The Gustave Chapter

Labor Day 2025

Chapter 45 - The Gustave Chapter

I can still recall the marked-up draft that comprised my written understanding of the sequence of events that were the Second Battle of Sedan.  I’m not much of an historical military strategist, but I’d thought that I’d at least gotten down, on paper, the timeline gist of the chaos that reigned there, in France, during those fateful days of 13-14 May 1940.

In my own defense, I must say that I did a pretty good job of conveying the helter-skelter hell of the French High Command.  I’d produced 8 or 10 hand-written pages worth of the berserk battlefield formations fraught with fear.  Dear Hubby reviewed the chronology and, later, much later, handed the pages back to me, with a smile, and a sigh.

He’d circled each decisive battle element and numbered it, in the proper sequence.

I no longer have those marvelously marked-up yellow sheets of 8-1/2x11 legal paper.  But I can hazard a guess as to the out-of-order order.  Living here in northern Northern California helps me to keep in touch with the madness of moronic matters, such as a complete absence of leadership, or even rational thought, among the Puppet-Men and Marionette-Women of Yesteryear, who occupy political office in the Golden State.

Those stuck-on-stupid shills were put in-charge of Today by people who profit from the misery of the citizenry, yesterday, today, and tomorrow.  I’ll not go so far as to say that the ossified generals of the French Army of 1940 profited from the misery of the French citizens.  They did, however, profit from their willful ignorance of the Passage of Time in La France.  Their rear-view vision of the world blithely, though not innocently, enabled the selling out of their nation by her politicians.  Those treasonous acts led directly to the Fall of France.

To return to my non-linear lining up of the sequence of events that tragically took place during the Second Battle of Sedan:  the arrangement went somewhat as follows:

1

2

4

7

3

10

5

9

8

It was thus with great pride in the linear power of engineering thought that my husband saved me from any further battle fatigue regarding my chronology of the futility of a stationary defense in the Ardennes.  I was home-free once those paragraphs got lined up.  Gustave Marquet, however, would not be home-free, not for quite a few more chapters in THE DAWN.

This oldest chid and first-born son of restaurateur Pascal Marquet, and his wife, Marie, was taken prisoner-of-war by the Germans during the Battle of Sedan.  He, and countless other French soldiers, were held hostage by the Germans, but were more despicably held hostage by the Vichy regime, which used the release of those military prisoners as chits, human bargaining chips, to string along the French citizens to:

 Just wait a bit more, believe in us to bring them home, we’re doing all we can, it’s the fault of Charles de Gaulle why these boys can’t come home, these matters are very complicated and need more time, the French people must be patient, we’re doing all we can . . .

The French prisoners of World War II were liberated by the U.S. Army, not by Petain, Laval, and the Vichy regime that gave entirely new meanings to the already French word (derived from Late Latin): collaboration.

On 13 May, relentless bombings by the tactical bombers of the Luftwaffe were joined by tactical dive bombers.  This German aerial attack lasted eight hours.  Hermann Goering was undoubtedly rubbing his fat fingers together in delight.  He had promised General Guderian that there would be a minimum of eight hours of bombing, from dawn to dusk.  This gruesome promise was faithfully and efficiently kept.

This form of monotonous, ever-escalating, and seemingly never-ending assault from air and on land,was an innovation introduced to the world by the Wehrmacht in the 1930’s.  This military entity, the Wehrmacht, had been forbidden the bellicose nation of Germany by the useless Treaty of Versailles, but no one stood in the way of Adolf Hitler, at least not until the summer of 1940 when Winston Churchill and General Charles de Gaulle joined hearts and minds to stand up to this ogre and his militarized ruffians.  Each leader had known war, its gore and its glory.  Each man knew that Nazi Germany was primed for its gory goal of world conquest.  The means to that end included the glorification of ruthless warfare, and a form of barbarism which would set the world back to the Dark Ages.

The glory of the Wehrmacht was literally exploding all over Europe, leaving a thick trail of smoke, fire, ravages, and corpses.  The glory of the Wehrmacht was the Blitzkrieg.  This German term for “lightning war” sums up this completely mechanized and simultaneous assault by concentrated forces of tanks, infantry, artillery, air power, and the beloved motorcycles of the German invaders.  That day on the 13th of May 1940, the soldiers of the French Army learned, in battle, what their military leaders had hidden from them about the war-gamed pretend-battle of 1938.

Near Sedan, above this arc of land formed by the Meuse River, the tactical bombers of the Luftwaffe were joined by tactical dive bombers.  This cacophonous concert of torturous sound and of harrowing death; this chant of conquest composed by the aerial bombardment in and around Sedan; this thunderous death drone played throughout the day of 13 May.

For the French, General Lafontaine was in charge of the 55th Infantry Division.  This “B” reserve division was composed largely of men over thirty years of age.  These men had experienced very little combat training.  Their time, energy, attention, and any preparations were devoted to the construction of yet more fortifications in and around Sedan.  These Frenchmen might have fought valiantly, but their leader, General Lafontaine, was not a believer in training.  Lafontaine, in true French form, placed his faith in fortifications.  Thus, inexperience in combat plagued these older soldiers, just as it plagued the younger ones.  The truly corrosive factor, however, and the rot which spread so pervasively through the French Army, were the continual, constant, and utterly ineffective changes in organization and structure that were made during the Battle of France.  The French High Command persisted in rearranging chairs while their ship was going down.

Surrounded by the inescapable, recurrent, and unchanging sounds of the attacking warplanes; the smell of gunfire; the moans of the dying; and the final groans of the dead, the French soldiers, already rudderless, became quickly traumatized.  That past spring these men had emerged optimistic from a bitterly cold winter.  They’d felt an invigorated sense of purpose and confidence.  Morale, however, is a tricky commodity.  The French Army had long been based upon a reputation that was built upon the past, a past which no longer existed.  The young, clever French infantrymen had nonetheless begun to believe, by the spring of 1940, that they were fighting for France.  These sons of France would be gloriously fighting for the future of France: the past was irrelevant.

It is difficult for an enemy to dispel from a soldier the determination to defend his country, especially when his will to fight the enemy is imbued with a fierce patriotic love of his country.  In this instance, it was the sacred soil of France that was being defended.  Those eight hours of hell on 13 May 1940 ravaged the morale and spirits of those Frenchmen under attack.  The enemy did not ravage the battlefield as much as it ravaged the willingness of each man to die for France.  Therein lay the shame of the Battle of Sedan, a shame which began with the willful myopia of the leaders of the French military.  The Wehrmacht savagely picked at this festering wound of shame.

The past caught up with the French Army on that day in the middle of May 1940.  The stiffened morale of the French Army ultimately crumbled in the face of these killing machines of the Third Reich.  Dazed, confused, shocked, and disoriented in mind and in body, the French soldiers retreated.  Their wave of panic spread quickly.

. . .   Additionally, there were false rumors and demoralizing lies being spread effectively by Fifth Columnists in France and throughout the battleground of Sedan.  The most destructive and most false of all of the rumors whirling through the ranks of the French Army was that the German tanks, those monsters of rampant motion and murder, were already behind their positions.

In reality, the first German tank would not roll across one of those unguarded bridges for another twelve hours, on 14 May.  It took all of twenty four hours, or just one day, from 13 to 14 May for the French 55th Infantry Division to crumble and essentially cease to exist because of the overwhelming flight of fear-filled and panicked soldiers.

German General Guderian now had a paramount opportunity, one which had been superbly prepared for, well in advance of this battle.  The Germans had planned for victory in the Second Battle of Sedan.  They’d brought in their efficient combat engineers to design pontoon bridges to be used to forge the Meuse River.  The success of their offensive assault, and the key to this entire invasion of France, depended on those bridges.  Those bridges would, inexplicably, remain extremely vulnerable until the Germans hurriedly installed anti-aircraft guns at those crucial bridge heads.

At this point, each French soldier must have wondered the same thing which Guillaume de Vallon had incredulously asked as he listened to the BBC on that dark day, one month later, in June 1940, during the Fall of France: “Where is our air force?”  Indeed, throughout Europe, the French Air Force had been considered superior to the air force of other European nations.  It is a sad commentary that, between the wars that Germany waged to conquer Europe, most of the nations of Europe had not invested much in an air force; neither had France.

It was not until 14 May that French and British bombers raced toward those pontoon bridges in the Sedan Valley.  By this time their mission was suicidal: 200 anti-aircraft guns awaited them.  Of the 150 Allied bombers, over 50 were lost.  The bridges remained intact and fully functional.  The Panzers steadily rolled across the bridges over the Meuse River.  The enemy was now quite ready to break through the very weak French front.  They would be accompanied by the lightning fire of the blitzkrieg, the lightning war.

And what was General Lafontaine doing during all this crumbling chaos?  He dithered for the 24 hours spanning 13-14 May.  He performed reconnaissance forays.  He reconnoitered terrain.  He waited. What was he waiting for?  General Lafontaine was waiting for his superior commander to order an attack.  The obvious bypassed his attention.  He already possessed a mission and a plan of attack with which to carry out his mission.  This mission was to defeat the Germans and retake the Meuse bridgeheads.  The best way to defeat the Germans was to attack them!

For those crucial 24 hours, General Lafontaine hesitated to take action.  He waited to be ordered to carry out his assigned mission.  It boggles the mind that he did not comprehend that his mission involved fighting the enemy, attacking them while they were still vulnerable, and concentrating his forces to do so.  While this French general waited for word from his commander, communication lines were, as might be expected, destroyed by the invading enemy.  While this French general waited, panic expanded and escalated, like a viral contagion.  Waves of paralyzing hysteria overwhelmed the vulnerable French soldiers.  The terrified ones fled, leaving the brave ones to fight.  These intrepid French soldiers, lacking order and organization, heroically waged a losing battle.  They were doomed to defeat by their own leaders and comrades-in-arms.

General Lafontaine had granted more than enough time to the Germans to consolidate their bridgehead. The Panzers then were free to cross those vital bridges over the Meuse.  They advanced inland to Bulson, where the panic among the French troops reached its deadliest crescendo.  It sounds like a cruel joke, but at this juncture of the battle, General Lafontaine, who had passively witnessed the disintegration of an entire infantry division, was then given command of the 7th and 4th Tank Battalions.  These battalions were aided by the 213th and 205th Infantry Regiments.

The task of this hesitant general was a furious, last-ditch effort to turn back the invaders.  Lafontaine retreated his men further and further back, back, back, until he was totally lacking a communications system.  He thereafter could not ascertain, amidst the masses of fleeing French infantrymen, which troops could mount a counterattack against the Germans.  Thus, no counterattack was forthcoming from this reluctant French general.

These young French soldiers must have sensed, if not outright understood, that their leaders, the military leaders of France, had abandoned them through ineptitude, arrogance, uncertainty, vacillation, stubborn tentativeness, and their unyielding faith in the unsound strategies of the past.  These young Frenchmen were not alone in these perceptions.  Colonel Charles de Gaulle was leading the fight on a different battlefield in the north of France.  He was experiencing a watershed event within his proud impermeable self, and he was arriving at the same conclusions, albeit with the magnitude and velocity of a man who was magnetically headed into a vortex of history.

At dawn on May 14, the 7th Tank Battalion led the too long-awaited counterattack from the town of Chémery near Sedan in the now fully penetrated Ardennes.  Gustave Marquet was part of the 7th Tank Battalion.  This battalion was yet another huge collection of units dispersed in the chaos of a losing battle.  These soldiers and their French tanks fought heroically, advancing aggressively and waging war fiercely under horrifying conditions and circumstances.  But their tanks were eventually mauled.  Most of them were destroyed as the Panzers capitalized upon their astute observation that these French tanks were very vulnerable between the chassis and the turret.  A design flaw, created by the French decision to invest in war machines on the cheap, contributed to this part of the Débâcle.

The helpless sense of failure and tragedy suffusing the French Army during the Second Battle of Sedan numbed the men, young and old, alike, for the French Army of 1940 was composed of young infantrymen who lacked vision because of their inexperience; and of elderly commanders who lacked vision because of their experience.  Indeed, the lessons of the previous war, the Great War, had blinded these veterans to seeing this new type of war, total war.

The Second Battle of Sedan was won by the Germans through fear, just as much as it was won by force and by the ruthlessly swift ticking of the clock.  The Panzers, first the 1st, followed by the 10th, and then the 2nd, operated like Swiss clockwork.  Eventually, fatefully, the Germans freely and victoriously crossed the Meuse River.  The French Army engaged these attackers at various points along the river, but at Bulson they were overcome by “le phénomène d’hallucination collective,” the phenomenon of collective hallucination.

The Germans had been perfectly willing to risk men and materiel to advance even the smallest of gains, thereafter parlaying a minimal success into a larger advantage, and ultimately into a huge victory.  The French, frozen emotionally and huddled physically behind their barricades, had been unwilling to risk anything.  The French military had invested all in a strategy of defense, which is a losing proposition in battle.  Without risk there is no gain.  Because of a complete void of leadership within the French High Command, the terrifying paralysis of fear overtook the soldiers of the French Army in this Second Battle of Sedan.

France fell there, in and around the fateful town of Sedan.  France fell there, in the face of the folly of the French High Command which believed more in failed military doctrine than in the valor of their soldiers.  The failure of these supreme generals to properly prepare and deploy these brave Frenchmen defies rational explanation.  The archaic, rigidly staunch belief in a stationary defense doomed the French Army strategists to blindness and inevitable failure as they dismissed the vital importance of events occurring at Sedan.  And thus it was, there, in the dark forests of the Meuse Valley, that the soldiers of France became the final link in the disintegration of a military lacking leadership and any grasp of reality.  Many Frenchmen fled; many fought; and many were captured by the advancing Germans.

One of the many French soldiers captured was Gustave Marquet.  He was taken prisoner-of-war by the Heer somewhere outside of Bulson.  It was midnight.  Gustave had become too fatigued to fight any longer.  Indeed, many Frenchmen like this brave young Provençal had fought more than their share of this battle, a battle which their commanders had never believed could ever happen.  Once this battle began, these same commanders failed to believe that these brave sons of France could ever triumph.  The French High Command failed these soldiers; these soldiers did not fail France.