This is not Your Father's War

Bundesarchiv

It started badly. The code word to start the war in the west had come in the night before, many officers were on leave, not expecting anything to happen until later in the month. Fahnenjunker-Unteroffizier Jürgen von Lüttwitz's platoon leader, Leutnant Fritz Acker, had been forced to step up to take command of the entire company as the company commander was at home in Leipzig.

His squad leader, Feldwebel Max Harzer had to step up to command the platoon which left Jürgen, the assistant squad leader, now in command of 3rd Squad. He wasn't sure if he was ready. But ready or not, the Germans stepped off on schedule, crossing into the Netherlands just before dawn.

There had been two Dutch soldiers at the border crossing, at the town of Vaals. Confident that the Netherlands would again sit this war out, as they had in 1914, the Dutch had not gone into a higher state of alert in this area. They had seen the men coming out of the early morning mist and commanded them to halt.

Told to lay down their arms, the Dutch soldiers had not complied. They now lay dead in their bullet-ridden border post as the Germans marched past. Jürgen had seen dead men before, in Poland and in Norway, but this seemed particularly obscene. The men were both young, it was a beautiful spring morning, the birds were singing, and the day looked to be a fine one.

But for two Dutch families the end of all things had just occurred, their sons lying dead at their post, their country invaded. It was not the first time Jürgen had had qualms about his country's actions in this war.

He understood what he had been taught, that Germany had not started the Great War, the Versailles Treaty unfairly punished Germany as the only surviving nation of the Central Powers in 1918.

The Austro-Hungarian Empire was gone, as was the Ottoman Empire, as for the Kingdom of Bulgaria, it was too small and insignificant for the vengeful powers of the West to extract reparations from. While the English may have not really cared, so Jürgen thought, the French wanted their pound of flesh from the hated Germans. No other substitute would do.

The French remembered all too well the humiliation of 1871, when the victorious Prussians had proclaimed the founding of a new German Empire in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles. The enemy proclaiming its victory in the very heart of France.

Hitler had risen to power promising to return Germany to its "place in the sun." Many believed him, and after the first few years of his time in office, he had fulfilled many of his promises. The Rhineland was taken back into the fold, Austria was incorporated into the Reich, the Sudetenland and then the rump of Czechoslovakia were occupied.

No one expected the English and the French to go to war over Poland, but they had, at least on paper as they had sat in their lines and done nothing as Poland was overrun.

They did move against Norway in an effort to prevent ore shipments from Sweden reaching Germany. But only after the Germans had invaded, if the Reich had waited a few days, the onus of extending the war to Norway would have been on the western powers.

But that was all in the past, it was men under Jürgen's command who had killed two Dutch soldiers whose only crime was to be wearing the wrong uniform on a beautiful morning in early May. He knew that it was war, he was simply a soldier obeying the commands of his superiors, but why did it feel wrong here, but had not in Poland? He would have to think on that.

"Lüttwitz! Get your squad over to the right, the Belgians¹ are slipping away!" Harzer gestured in the general direction of the platoon's right flank.

Jürgen gritted his teeth, Harzer hadn't impressed him as a squad leader, he was even less impressive as a platoon leader. Did the man think that his squad could envelop an enemy who had already fled? What were they, Fallschirmjäger²?

The machine gun was set up, the Belgians had vanished, Jürgen decided to exercise a bit of initiative at this point. "Hans, take your section further out, do you see that clump of trees?" he pointed at the trees he had in mind. "Get your boys up there, we'll cover you with probing fire. If the Belgies are out there, we'll hold their attention while you maneuver. Stay low, go fast!"

Hans Warstadt nodded and said, "On it!"

"Short bursts, Walter, we don't want to waste too much ammunition." Jürgen had clapped his machine gunner on the shoulder as he said that.

When Warstadt reached the small clump of trees, he signaled back that they had the enemy in sight. He then waved the machine gun team over to his position. Within minutes Jürgen's squad had rejoined, around a hundred meters away he could see troops pulling back over a rise in the ground, "That has to be the canal," he thought.

If that was the bank of the Albert Canal, they were close to the Belgian border and their objective, making contact with the paratroopers who had dropped on the Belgian fort of Eben-Emael. If those paratroopers had succeeded in taking the fort, the way would be open into the Belgian heartland!

Jürgen and his men were on the objective, they had linked up with the paratroopers who were in a jubilant mood, they had taken their objective with minimal casualties. The Belgian defenders were stunned that their fortress, designed to interdict three bridges which led from the Netherlands over the Maas³ River and the Albert Canal, had been taken from an unexpected direction. The air.

Defenses designed to fight an earlier war had proven completely ineffective in the light of this new technology, dropping troops from airplanes directly onto the objective. Jürgen had to wonder, what other surprises were in store? This was nothing like the fighting his father and uncles had described to him from the Great War.

Little did he know that in less than a week, the Netherlands would surrender. A couple of weeks after that, the Belgians would also surrender. But in the meantime, Jürgen and the 223rd Infanterie-Division would be on the march, to meet the French advancing into Belgium.

They thought to intercept and stop the Germans at the Dyle River. In truth, they were opening themselves up to utter defeat.

German panzers were moving through the lightly held Ardennes forest.

As they had in 1870, as they would again in 1944.

History often rhymes ...

¹ The Belgians had sent forces into the Netherlands to screen the approaches to the fort on the Dutch side of the river.

² Paratroopers (German)

³ The German name for the Meuse River.