BRITISH ARMY IN BELGIUM

Southland Times, Issue 24163, 27 June 1940, Page 7

BRITISH ARMY IN BELGIUM

Story Of Advance From France

When the sound of bombs exploding on the Arras aerodrome at dawn on Friday, May 10, gave most people at British General Headquarters their first hint that Belgium and Holland had been invaded, the main part of the British Expeditionary Force was in a line which covered the Lille salient and ran south to the neighbourhood of St. Amand, wrote G. M. Long, correspondent of The Sydney Morning Herald with the British Army. The greater part of this line was held by regular divisions, the old British Expeditionary Force that had come over in September and October last year.

In conformity with the French on the left and the right, this force left its old line on the day of the German invasion, and began moving along the roads leading north-east to take up a line running through Louvain along the valley of the little River Dyle and through Wavre. This move was not made in a day. Long convoys were still passing along the roads through Toumai on Sunday and on Monday night. At this stage there was not much effective interference by German bombers with the movement of the troops going north-east. Regularly they bombed and machine-gunned our aerodromes round Douai, our aerodromes along the straight road famous in Australian history, leading east from Amiens, and elsewhere, and small German bomber formations aimed salvoes at railway crossings and bridges on the roads along which the British Expeditionary Force convoys were pouring. Nine out of 10 of these salvoes were near misses. In some towns a few houses or churches or factories were blown to pieces, and a few dozen people killed or injured.

tank crews. Low-flying aircraft were used literally as'artillery and as infantry, bombing and machine-gunning the defending infantry and artillery ceaselessly, bombing every road and razing every village in a wide belt behind the lines.

At the same time, parachute troops were used in amazing numbers. These were either picked men, highly trained, superby equipped, who came down behind the lines to blow up bridges (or to prevent the blowing up of others), to cut telephone lines, to blow up dumps; or they were spies and saboteurs, wearing disguise, whose jobs were made easier by the confusion the attack was causing among civilians behind the front.

THE GERMAN PLAN

It was not long before the enemy’s plan became evident. It was to exploit his partial break through the joint of the Allied position on the line VervinsSedan, and to push his armoured divisions, not south towards Rheims and Paris, but west towards Amiens, with the object of separating the B.E.F. and the French armies in Belgium from the main French Army. From then onwards the British Army on the Louvain-Wavre line was somewhat out of the picture from the German point of view. When another correspondent and I last visited the Louvain position late on Thursday evening, it was fighting doggedly along its original line. There had been heavy, sometimes intense, artillery shelling and air fighting since Tuesday morning. The German tanks had crossed the Louvain canal and had been pushed back again. The men had been tired when the battle started; they were more tired now. Bofors anti-aircraft guns were emplaced enfilading the roads with their barrels horizontal so that they could be used as anti-tank guns (though at that stage they had no anti-tank ammunition)

At the same time small bomber units or individual bombers circled over towns where they evidently knew important headquarters were established and bombed the larger hotels and the railway stations. The German policy was evidently to concentrate the main strength of its bomber force on the principal job in hand, namely the armies, French and Belgian, which were barring its drive west and south-west.

THE ENDLESS STREAM

In front of the German advance through Belgium, streams of refugees began pouring. By Monday, the refugee traffic on the roads the British Expeditionary Force were using between Lille and Louvain was of the kind you see round a big city on a sunny public holiday. In the next three days it swelled every hour, until all day the roads leading south-west from Brussels and eastern Belgium became packed with a pitiable procession of people in crowded motor-cars, tradesmen’s vans, lorries, farm carts, on bicycles, on foot. In the fields along the roads, where young crops were growing, groups of fugitives lay exhausted in the sun gathering strength for another few miles of the journey to France, where they hoped to find safety. There was now little military traffic along these jammed roads by day. At dusk the refugees were stopped in the towns, told where they could camp in the parks and squares, and then the army traffic began roaring along the empty roads. On Monday night I tried to travel from Brussels to Lille after a late evening visit to Louvain, where our troops had been preparing for the arrival of the German advance guard, perhaps next day. After an hour or two of slow travel in a complete blackout, we pulled up off the road and waited for the light, while an apparently endless column of army trucks, motor-cyclists, staff cars, tanks, and machine-gun carriers roared past in the darkness, the tired drivers guided by a spot of light which the vehicle in front of them threw on the road underneath it, so that the truck’s bulk hid it from the sight of anybody flying overhead. On Sunday C.H.Q. had explained to correspondents that the situation was grave. The Belgian resistance had been less effective than had been anticipated, bridges which should have been blown up in the Maestricht area had not been blown up, and the Germans had got through very early. Our bombers had attacked them there—it was our bombers’ first big assignment in Belgium—but the Germans went on, and the Belgian Army was falling back fast.

We were the last correspondents to visit the Louvain position. From then the B.E.F. disappeared into the fog of war, and for the next 10 days practically nothing was heard of it except bare, uncommunicative communiques: Attention was fixed on the German drive diagonally across its lines of communications—a drive which, while we were still on the hills overlooking Louvain, had caused G.H.Q. to order the withdrawal of correspondents "”d the Press Bureau from Lille before the roads to the south were cut.

BOMBING OF TOURNAI ROAD

That evening (Thursday), about 4 o’clock, the German bombers made an effort to block the roads through Tournai, Renaix and Ath, thinking, evidently, that the British Expeditionary Force might try to retire along the roads up which 'it had advanced If so they un-der-estimated the success of their drive towards Amiens, which was soon to make a retreat through Lille and Arras impossible. Along the BrusselsTournai road alone 100 German machines, including the escorts of fighters, bombed every town, and sprayed salvoes of light bombs on the road in between the towns where the refugee traffic was thickest.

As we drove along the road about two hours later we found Enghien in flames. Smoke was pouring from villages on the Mons road to the east. Beyond Enghien a refugee car had received a direct hit, and was a little pile of smouldering wreckage. Farther on several small bombs had hit the road. A weeping peasant pointed to one of his cows lying dead in his field 50 yards from the road. He took me to his little cottage. In the stable his other cow stood with its head drooping, bleeding from half a dozen wounds. All the glass in the peasant’s house had been shattered. “The dirty Germans,” he said, “they make war always on the civilians. It is always the same.”

TACTICAL SUPERIORITY

In brief, in the first three days the Germans had overrun Holland, had broken through the Belgian defence, and started the Belgian Army off on a rapid retreat. It had not yet revealed where its main blow would fall, for clearly it was not the conquest of Holland and Belgium, but the defeat of the armies defending France that was its early objective. It had, however, demonstrated its tactics, and it was the German tactics rather than the strategical situation —that is to say the fighting methods the enemy was employing, rather than his achievements up to date—that caused British G.H.Q. on Sunday to tell us that the situation was “grave.” These tactics were to use big forces >f tanks, including tanks of unexpectedly powerful types, and to throw them into the battle regardless of losses so that the “corpses” of tanks that had been caught by the guns enfilading the anti-tank ditches served as protection for the tanks that came up behind. Anti-tank ditches and barricades were flattened with dynamite by the

At Ath, the railway station had been bombed, and many civilians and refugees killed. The streets were clogged with refugees, and our soldiers, after searching their bundles, were piling distracted fugitives into army trucks and sending them out of town. Leuze had been bombed. Then a new formation of 32 machines had taken over and dropped its whole load on Tournai. Rows of three-storied shops were blazing on each side of the main street. Practically every street was blocked either by holes four feet deep or by the wreckage of high brick walls which had been blown into the street. Standing in front of the main photographer’s shop’of the town, then a blazing shell, stood a little man in a grey overall. He was the proprietor. He had gone home to get something a few minutes before the bombers arrived. No one else who was in his shop had escaped, and ten people had been killed in the store next door.