Mechelen Incident

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Mechelen Incident of 10 January, 1940 also known as the Mechelen affair, was an incident during the Phoney War. A German plane with an officer on-board carrying the plans for Fall Gelb, a German attack on the Low Countries, crash-landed in neutral Belgium near Vucht, in the present municipality of Maasmechelen, revealing the plans to the French and British command and causing an immediate crisis situation, that however soon abated. It has been argued that the incident led to a major change in the German attack plan, but this hypothesis has also been disputed.

Contents 1 The Crash 2 Initial German Reaction 3 Deception 4 Belgian reaction 5 French reaction 6 The warning by Sas 7 Dutch reaction 8 Climax and anti-climax 9 The Germans call off the Invasion 10 Results 11 References

[edit] The Crash

The affair began with a mistake made by the German aviator Major Erich Hoenmanns, the fifty-two year old airbase commander at Loddenheide airport, near Münster. He had in the morning of 10 January been flying a Messerschmitt Bf 108 Taifun, a plane used for reconnaissance, from Loddenheide to Cologne when he lost his way, extensive low fogbanks obscuring his view of the landscape. While searching for the River Rhine, which, he hoped, would enable him to regain his bearings, changing course he flew too far west, having already crossed the frozen over and indistinguishable Rhine, and ended up circling Vucht near the River Meuse, at this point the border river between Belgium and The Netherlands.^[1]

It was then that he appears to have inadvertently cut off the fuel supply to the plane's engine by moving a lever inside the cockpit.^[2] The engine spluttered, then stopped, and Hoenmanns was forced to land in a nearby field around 11:30 AM. What resulted was more of a crash than a landing, both of the wings were broken off when they hit two trees as he sped between them; the heavy engine tore off the nose section from the remainder of the aircraft. Despite the fact that the plane was a write-off, Hoenmanns survived unscathed.

Had he been alone on the plane nothing of great import would have happened, he would have been interned for landing without permission in a neutral country and that would have been the end of it. But he had a passenger, one Major Helmuth Reinberger, who was responsible for organising the supplying of 7. Fliegerdivision, the unit that was to land paratroopers behind the Belgian lines at Namur on the day of the coming attack. He was going to Cologne for a staff meeting and Hoenmanns had the previous evening in the mess of the base invited him over a drink to fly him there; usually Reinberger would have had to make the tedious trip by train, but Hoenmanns needed some extra flying hours anyway and wanted to bring his laundry to his wife in Cologne. Hoenmanns was unaware that Reinberger would have with him Germany’s plan for the attack on The Netherlands and Belgium, which at the day of the flight was decreed by Hitler to take place a week later on 17 January.^[3]

Hoenmanns only discovered that Reinberger was carrying secret documents when after landing they asked a farmhand where they were, to be told that they had unknowingly crossed Dutch territory and had landed just inside Belgium. On hearing this Reinberger panicked and rushed back to the plane to secure his yellow pigskin briefcase, crying that he had secret documents that he must destroy immediately. To let him do this Hoenmanns moved away from the plane as a diversion. Reinberger first tried to set fire to the documents with his cigarette lighter but this malfunctioned; he then ran to the farmhand who gave him a single match. With this Reinberger hid behind a thicket and piled the papers on the ground to burn them. But soon two Belgian border guards arrived on bicycles, Sergeant Frans Habets and private Gerard Rubens, and seeing smoke coming from the bushes, Rubens rushed over to save the documents from being completely destroyed. Reinberger fled at first but allowed himself to be taken prisoner after two warning shots had been fired.

The men were taken to the Belgian border guardhouse near Mechelen-aan-de-Maas (Mechelen-sur-Meuse). There they were interrogated by Captain Arthur Rodrique, who placed the charred documents on a table. Reinberger tried, after Hoenmanns had distracted the Belgian soldiers by asking to make use of the toilet, to stuff the papers into a burning stove nearby. He succeeded, however, as the lid of the stove was extremely hot, when lifting it he yelled with pain. Startled, Rodrique turned and snatched the papers from the fire, burning his hand badly. The documents were now locked away in a separate room. The failure to burn them made Reinberger realise that he was finished, as Hitler's henchmen would surely kill him if they got hold of him, for letting the attack plan fall into the hands of the enemy. He decided to commit suicide and tried to grab Rodrique's revolver; when the infuriated captain knocked him down, Reinberger burst into tears, yelling 'I wanted your revolver to kill myself'. Hoenmanns came to Reinberger's support saying: 'You can't blame him. He's a regular officer. He's finished now.'

Two hours later the first officers of the Belgian intelligence service arrived, bringing the papers to the attention of their superiors in the late afternoon.

[edit] Initial German Reaction

Late in the evening of 10 January news of the incident reached Berlin via press reports about a crashed German plane. In the OKW it caused general consternation, as it was soon deduced that Reinberger must have had the attack plan with him. On 11 January an enraged Hitler fired both the commander of 2. Luftflotte, General Helmuth Frey, and the latter's chief of staff Colonel Josef Kammhuber. It was nevertheless decided to proceed with the attack as originally planned, while the Luftwaffe attaché in The Hague Lieutenant-General Ralph Wenninger, and the military attaché in Brussels, Colonel Friedrich Carl Rabe von Pappenheim, would investigate whether the plan had been fatally compromised or not. On the 12th, the day of the attachés' first meeting with Reinberger and Hoenmanns, General Alfred Jodl, the Wehrmacht's (armed forces) Chief of Operations, gave Hitler a worrying assessment of what the Belgians might have learned from it. A note in Jodl's diary on 12 January summed up what he had said to Hitler: 'If the enemy is in possession of all the files, situation catastrophic!^[4]. However, the Germans would at first be falsely reassured by Belgian deception measures.

[edit] Deception

The Belgians decided to trick Reinberger into believing that the papers had been destroyed and give him the opportunity to pass this information onto the German authorities. There were two parts to the deception, in the first the Belgian investigators asked Reinberger what was in the plans and told him that he would be treated as a spy if he did not tell them. Later Reinberger testified saying: 'From the way this question was asked, I realised he [the interrogator] could not have understood anything from the fragments of the documents he had seen'.^[5] The second part of the plan was to let Reinberger and Hoenmanns meet the German Air and Army Attachés, Wenninger and Rabe von Pappenheim, while their conversations were secretly recorded. During this meeting Reinberger informed Wenninger that he had managed to burn the papers enough to make them unreadable.^[6] This act of deception was fairly successful, at least in the short term. After the meeting at the police station (with Wenninger and Rabe von Pappenheim), His Excellency Vicco von Bülow-Schwante, Germany's ambassador in Belgium, telegraphed to his superiors: 'Major Reinberger has confirmed that he burnt the documents except for some pieces which are the size of the palm of his hand. Reinberger confirms that most of the documents which could not be destroyed appear to be unimportant.'^[7] This appears to have convinced General Jodl. His diary for 13 January included the entry: 'Report on conversation of Luftwaffe Attaché with the two airmen who made forced landing. Result: despatch case burnt for certain.'^[8]

[edit] Belgian reaction

During 10 January the Belgians still doubted the authenticity of the documents, that had been quickly translated by the Deuxième Section (military intelligence) of the general staff in Brussels. Most had indeed been badly damaged by Reinberger's consecutive attempts to burn them, but the general outlines of an attack against Belgium and The Netherlands were clear from the remaining passages, though the date of the attack was not mentioned. As their content conformed to earlier warnings from the Italian Count Galeazzo Ciano about a German attack to take place around 15 January, on 11 January it was concluded by General Raoul van Overstraeten that the information was basically correct. That afternoon King Leopold III of Belgium decided to inform his own Minister of Defence General Henri Denis and the French supreme commander Maurice Gamelin; at 17:15 the French liaison officer, Lieutenant-Colonel Hautcoeur, was given a two page abstract of the contents, be it without any explanation how the information had been obtained. Also Lord Gort, the commander of the British Expeditionary Force, was warned and Leopold personally phoned the Dutch Princess Juliana and the Grand Duchess of Luxembourg Charlotte telling the first: "Be careful, the weather is dangerous" and the second: "Beware of the flue", predetermined code phrases indicating the Belgians considered a German attack to be imminent.

[edit] French reaction

On the morning of 12 January Gamelin held a meeting with the highest French operational army commanders and the Chief of Military Intelligence Colonel Louis Rivet. Rivet was sceptical of the warning but Gamelin considered that, even if it all were a false alarm, this would be an excellent opportunity to pressure the Belgians into allowing a French advance into their country. Gamelin intended to execute a decisive offensive against Germany in 1941 through the Low Countries; their neutrality would however be an obstacle to these plans. If this invasion scare would make the Belgians take the side of France and Britain, this awkward problem would be solved and strategically vital ground from which to launch the attack effortlessly gained. On the other hand, if Germany really went ahead with the invasion, it was very desirable that the French forces could entrench themselves in central Belgium before the enemy arrived. Both to intensify the crisis and to be ready for any occasion that presented itself, Gamelin thus ordered 1st Army Group and the adjoining Third Army to march toward the Belgian frontiers.

[edit] The warning by Sas

That their deception plan seemed to prove that the documents were genuine, that day further increased Belgian anxiety; the next day they became convinced the situation was critical. In the evening of 13 January, a message from Colonel Georges Goethals, Belgium's Military Attaché in Berlin, included these words: 'Were there tactical orders or parts of them on the Malines^[9] [sic] plane? A sincere informer, whose credibility may be contested, claims that this plane was carrying plans from Berlin to Cologne in relation to the attack on the West. Because these plans have fallen into Belgian hands, the attack will happen tomorrow to pre-empt countermeasures. I make explicit reservations about this message, that I do not consider reliable, but which it is my duty to report'.^[10] The "sincere informer" was the Dutch Military Attaché in Berlin Gijsbertus Sas who spoke with Goethals around 17:00; his informations always had to be carefully considered because he was in contact with a German intelligence officer who was an opponent of the Nazi regime, that we today know to have been Colonel Hans Oster. General Van Overstraeten, the King of Belgium's military adviser, who was informed of the message around 20:00, was astonished that the informant appeared to know about the capture of the plans. It had not been mentioned in any press report of the crash. It was possible that it was part of a grand German deception plan, but equally possible that it was genuine.^[11] Acting on the assumption that it could be taken seriously, Van Overstraeten altered the warning that the Belgian Chief of the General Staff Lieutenant-General Édouard van den Bergen had drafted which was about to be sent to all Belgian Army commanders on 13 January to the effect that whereas it had stated that an attack on the next morning was 'probable', it now said attack was 'quasi-certain'.^[12] Van den Bergen, who had in secret promised Gamelin to bring Belgium to the the allied side,^[13] then decided to broadcast on the popular current affairs radio programme that night around 22:30 an immediately recall to their units, of all the 80,000 Belgian soldiers on leave, "Phase D", to ensure that these would be at full strength at the moment of the German attack. This dramatic gesture was made without reference to the King or Van Overstraeten and without knowing the decision that had been taken to keep Germany in the dark about whether Belgium was in possession of its attack plans.^[14][15] Then again without reference to the King or Van Overstraeten he ordered the barriers to be moved aside on the southern border with France so the French and British troops could march in swiftly when they were called in, in response to the German attack.^[16] If the Germans had indeed attacked on the 14th January, Van den Bergen would probably have been congratulated for his energetic decision-making. Now Van den Bergen fell in disgrace for acting in this way without the King's permission, as King Leopold was the Supreme Commander of all the Belgian armed forces. Van den Bergen was rebuked so harshly by Von Overstraeten that the Belgian Chief of Staff's reputation never recovered, and at the end of January he resigned. One of Van Overstraeten's complaints about Van den Bergen's actions was that he had given the Germans reason to believe that the Dutch had their attack plans.

[edit] Dutch reaction

Though the Dutch Queen Wilhelmina and her government were alarmed by the Belgian warning, Dutch supreme commander Isaac Reijnders was sceptical of the information; when the Belgian military attaché in The Hague, Lieutenant-Colonel Pierre Diepenrijckx, handed him a personal memorandum from Van Overstraeten on the 12th, he reacted: "Do you believe in these messages yourself? I don't believe in them at all". Again the Dutch were not informed of the precise source and the Belgians hid the fact that the Germans in these plans only intended a partial occupation of The Netherlands, without the Dutch National Redoubt, the Vesting Holland.^[17]

Whether Reijnders was the next day also warned by Sas is still unknown; after the war he even denied having spoken the Belgian attaché^[18], but in the morning of the 14th, in reaction to the Belgian alert, he ordered that no leaves were to be granted to any soldier — unlike the Belgians the Dutch thus did not recall anyone — and to close the strategic bridges while fuses should be placed within their explosive charges. The population in the afternoon became worried by the radio broadcast about the leaves; it feared that the Germans would take advantage of the severe cold to cross the New Hollandic Water Line, now that it was frozen. The next week, to reassure the people, much press coverage was given to the motorised circular saws that were available to cut the ice sheets over inundations.

[edit] Climax and anti-climax

The Belgian Government's desire to keep their possession of the plans a secret was yet further undermined, this time by he King himself. On the morning of the 14th of January, he had sent a message to Winston Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty, via Admiral Sir Roger Keyes asking for certain guarantees. This was sent through Keyes because he had established himself as the secret link man between the British Government and the King.^[19] The aforementioned guarantees included assuring that the Allies would not open negotiations for a settlement of any conflict without Belgium's agreement.^[20] Keyes added a rider that he believed Leopold might be able to persuade his government to call the Allies immediately if the guarantees were forthcoming. This was of interest to the Allies because both Britain and France had been trying to persuade Belgium to let their troops in ever since the war had started. There is no transcript of Keyes conversation with Churchill but if Keyes really did say what he meant to say then it was changed the further down the line it went.^[21] By the time that it reached the French that afternoon, there was no reference to the fact that Keyes was only giving his opinion about the calling in of the allies. The French record of what was on offer stated that 'the King would ask his Government to ask the Allied armies to occupy defensive positions inside Belgium immediately', if the Belgians received satisfaction in related guarantees.^[22] Édouard Daladier, the French Président du Conseil in January 1940, quickly told the British Government that, as far as France was concerned, the guarantees could be given. So the French believed that the Belgians would receive a satisfactory response from the British Government in relation to the guarantees, and would then immediately invite the Allied Armies to march in.

At 15:50 Daladier informed Gamelin that the Belgians had in principle agreed to a French advance and asked whether he was ready to execute it. Gamelin was very pleased, responding that due to heavy snowfall at the Belgian-German border the Germans would be themselves unable to advance quickly, that a German invasion was therefore unlikely and that this posed an ideal situation for a French entrenchment, adding "We must now seize the occasion". Gamelin ordered that the Allied troops under his control during the night of 14-15 January should make their approach march to cross the Franco-Belgian border so that they would be ready to enter at a moment's notice. At 16:45 he was however phoned by his deputy, the commander of the Western Front General Alphonse Georges. Alarmed by the order, Georges worried that the decision was irreversible and would set a series of events into motion that would make a German invasion inevitable at a moment the French army and airforce had not yet completed their rearmament. Gamelin lost his temper and abused Georges, forcing him to agree with the order. During the night, the Belgians were told of the manoeuvre. It was only at 8 a.m. on 15 January that Gamelin saw the British response to the guarantees: they were offering a watered down version that was most unlikely to be acceptable to the Belgians.^[23] At the same time he received messages from the advancing forces that the Belgian border troops had stopped removing the border obstacles and had not been ordered to allow them entrance into their country. Three hours later Daladier, prompted by the desperate Gamelin who insisted that the premier would make the Belgian government "face up to its responsibilities", told Pol le Tellier, Belgium's Ambassador in Paris, that unless the French had an invitation to enter Belgium by 8 p.m. that evening, they would not only withdraw all British and French troops from the border but would refuse to carry out similar manoeuvres during further alerts until after the Germans had invaded. ^[24]

The Belgian cabinet that day proved unable to come to a positive decision about the invitation. The invasion had after all already been predicted for the 14th but failed to materialise. Heavy snowfall continued on the eastern border, making an immediate German attack unlikely. The King and Van Overstraeten, both staunch neutralists, hoped a diplomatic solution could be reached to end the war and had no intention to involve their country unless it were absolutely necessary. Around 12:00 Van Overstraeten ordered the Belgian border troops to rebuild the barriers and reminded them of the standing order to "repulse by force any foreign unit of whatever nationality which violated Belgian territory". At 18:00 Daladier told a disappointed Gamelin he "could not take the responsibility of authorising us to penetrate preventively into Belgium", i.e. violate Belgian neutrality.

[edit] The Germans call off the Invasion

When Jodl learned on the 13th that the documents were probably unreadable, he called off plans to execute the attack three days early on 14 January — the same plans that would cause the crisis in Belgium — and postponed them to 15 or 16 January, to be decided as the circumstances demanded. In the evening came the surprising news that the Belgian and Dutch troops — that already had been mobilised since September 1939 — had been put on alert. This was attributed to the crash and the too obvious approach march of the Sixth Army. The element of surprise was thus lost. On 15 January the road conditions were so poor due to the snowfall and the weather prospects so bleak that Jodl advised Hitler to call the invasion off indefinitely. The Fuehrer hesitantly concurred on 16 January, 19:00.

[edit] Results

In the short term no damage appeared to have been done but it has been argued^[25] that in the longer term the consequences of this incident were disastrous for Belgium and France. When the real invasion came, on 10 May 1940, the Germans had fundamentally changed their strategy and this change resulted in the quick Fall of France, whereas arguably even a partial German victory would have been far from certain if the original plan had been followed. Determining the exact nature of the causal connection between the incident and the change in strategy has however proven to be problematic.

In the more traditional account of events, the incident caused Hitler to ask for a drastic change of strategy. He asked Jodl that "the whole operation would have to be built on a new basis in order to secure secrecy and surprise". ^[26] The Belgians felt obliged to tell the Germans they had the attack plan. When Joachim von Ribbentrop, Germany's Foreign Minister, retorted that it was out of date, he would then have been more truthful than he intended. In reaction to Hitler's demand the German High Command would have gone on a search for an alternative, finally finding it in the proposals of General Erich von Manstein, the former Chief of Staff of the German Army Group A, who for some months had been championing a new concept: instead of being committed to the attack detailed in the captured documents, whose principal thrust was on Belgium's north-eastern frontier, the German Panzer Divisions were to be concentrated further south. Jodl recorded on 13 February that Hitler concurred, referring to the Mechelen Incident: 'We should then attack in the direction of Sedan,' Hitler told Jodl. 'The enemy is not expecting us to attack there. The documents held by the Luftwaffe officers who crash landed have convinced the enemy that we only intend to take over the Dutch and Belgian coasts.' Within days of this discussion Hitler had personally talked to Von Manstein and the Führer had given it the green light. The plan that had caused so much mayhem when it was captured by the Belgians in 1940 was replaced.^[27]

However, the importance of the incident has also been vehemently denied.^[28] Hitler was already hesitant about the original plan from its very beginning. The postponement was one out of many and even on this occasion more to be attributed to the weather conditions than to the disclosing of the content of the documents. As the plan was rather traditional and predictable, no fundamental secrets were compromised and as such there was no direct need for a change. Hitler's demand for suprise referred not to a surprising new strategy but to a shortened approach and concentration phase, so that a tactical surprise could be gained before the enemy could react; to this end the armoured divisions were located further west and organisation improved. There was no direct change in strategic thinking and when an improved concept was finished, within a continuous process of amendments, on 30 January, this Aufmarschanweisung N°3, Fall Gelb did not fundamentally differ from earlier versions. In this view only the fact that some of Von Manstein's friends managed to bring his proposals to the attention of Hitler, really caused a fundamental turn. The main consequence of the incident would have been that it disclosed, not the German plan, but the way the allies would deploy in case of an invasion, allowing the Germans to adapt their attack accordingly.^[29]

The adoption of the revised Case Yellow (Fall Gelb) by the Germans, while the Allies were still expecting Hitler to go ahead with the captured version meant that the Germans could set a trap. There would still be an attack made on central Belgium but this would merely be a diversion to pull as many troops as possible to the north while the main German attack fell on the Ardennes, and would then cross the Meuse between Sedan and the area north of Dinant, to penetrate as far as the Channel coast. In doing so the armies in Belgium would be cut off from their supplies and forced to surrender. This ruse may have been clever, but it would only work if Gamelin stuck to his original strategy; which was asking rather a lot, given that until 14 January 1940 his intuition had been impeccable. Had he not guessed correctly the content of the German's original Aufmarsschanweisung Fall Gelb (Deployment Directive Case Yellow)?

However, Gamelin failed to change his strategy on the presumption the Germans would change theirs, despite misgivings from Lord Gort and the British Government. Perhaps the Allies still believed that the captured documents were a 'plant'.^[30][31] And perhaps the British were embarrassed by the small contribution the Britain was making, and therefore hesitated to overly criticize their ally's strategy.

Gamelin has been severely criticized for not changing his plan.^[32] His stance has been explained as an inability to believe that the very traditional German High Command would resort to innovative strategies, let alone to the even more novel "Blitzkrieg" tactics needed to make them work; any large concentration of forces being supplied through the poor road network of the Ardennes would have had to act very quickly. Also in this respect the incident would thus not have important consequences.

Erich Hoenmanns and Helmuth Reinberger were in Germany condemned to death in their absence. Transporting secret documents by plane without explicit authorisation was strictly forbidden and a capital offence. The verdicts would however never be executed. Hoenmanns was evacuated, first to Britain and then to Canada. However his wife did not long survive an interrogation by the Gestapo; his two sons were allowed to serve in the army and were killed in action during the war.

[edit] References