Reinhardt stuck in the Ardennes — 11 May
, 53, commanded the north of Guderian's corps: the under and the under . His sector covered the central Belgian Ardennes forests, with a single river objective: the Meuse at Monthermé, five miles north of Mezieres-Charleville.
Reinhardt's ground was more thankless than Guderian's: narrow winding roads, sharp gradients, obligatory stone bridges, the whole funnelled onto a handful of axes. His armoured columns, which stretched back tens of miles all the way to the Rhine, were vulnerable if the French air force spotted them. And the Belgian Chasseurs ardennais, falling back, blew the bridges and sowed felled-tree barriers that further slowed the advance.
On the evening of 11 May, Reinhardt faced a serious operational problem: his column was frozen in a gigantic traffic jam at the Martelange defile. At the same bottleneck, Guderian's was funnelling onto the same roads. Every hour lost gave the French time to organise the defence of the Meuse. Reinhardt had to decide without delay between forcing through, waiting, or going around.
Force his way through the neighbouring column, wait his turn, or divert north?
Reinhardt respected the priority granted to Guderian. The had to wait for the , which was using the same bottleneck, to clear the road; it thus lost 18 hours at Martelange, and the arrived late. Reinhardt only reached Monthermé on the evening of 12 May and launched his tanks against the Meuse on the morning of 13 May. There, against all expectation, the French 102e Demi-brigade d'Infanterie de Forteresse under Colonel Portzert resisted fiercely in the river loop, and the did not finally break through until 15 May — some 36 hours behind Guderian at Sedan. That gap would weigh on the entire Sichelschnitt timetable. Reinhardt nonetheless finished the campaign successfully, became Generaloberst in 1942, then served on the Eastern Front. Sentenced to 15 years' imprisonment at Nuremberg in 1948 for war crimes in Yugoslavia and the USSR, he was released in 1952 and died in 1963.
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