William L. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich
William L. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich
Winston S. Churchill, The Gathering Storm
Giraurd’s army was the ONLY French reserve before the French decided to move it. It had been positioned behind Corap’s Ninth Army [reservists and second tier troops], which was located at Sedan - on the Meuse - right where Guderian’s XIXth Panzerkorps would cross.
When he [Manstein] was summoned to the Reich Chancellery on 18 February together with von Brauchitsch, he was already able to submit a completely new operations plan that accommodated Hitler's ideas.- Karl-Heinz Freiser, The Blitzkrieg Legend: The 1940 Campaign in the West, pp.67-68.The result of that conference was the fourth deployment directive, which was submitted 24 February. The most important sentence in this last and final version of the operations plan for Fall Gelb (Case Yellow) reads as follows: "The Schwerpunkt of the attack to be mounted across the territory of Belgium and Luxembourg is sout of the Liège-Charleroi line." Army Group B had the mission of attacking north of that line to draw as many elements of the French-British army as possible toward it:
- Eighteenth Army was to push into Holland
- Sixth Army was to cross the Meuse at Liège and attack through northern Belgium.
- Army Group A had the mission of crossing the line of the Meuse River between Sedan and Dinant with an operational probing attack by armored and motorized elements and of pushing toward the mouth of the Somme River.
- Fourth Army was to attack south of the Liège-Namur line and cross the Meuse River on both sides of Dinant.
- Twelfth Army was to advance through southern Belgium and Luxembourg and cross the Meuse River in the Sedan sector.
- Second Army initially had the mission of following the offensive, echeloned in depth to take over the sector of the front that was freed after Fourth and Twelfth Armies had veered off toward the Channel coast.
- Sixteenth Army was to seal off the left flank of the penetration south of the Sedan.
- The main effort of Army Group C in the southern sector was geared toward the defensive. It was to simulate attacks against the Maginot Line across the way and thus tie down strong enemy formations.