On the afternoon of 21 May 1940 a small British force of two infantry battalions and 74 tanks attacked south of Arras into the flank of the German armored drive to the Channel. It ran into Erwin Rommel's 7th Panzer Division and the SS Totenkopf Division, overran several villages and took around 400 prisoners, but by evening it had been stopped by German artillery and anti-aircraft guns and had to pull back. The attack failed in its aim, yet it alarmed the German command out of all proportion to its size.
An army cut in two
By 20 May 1940 the German armored divisions that had broken through in the Ardennes had reached the coast, cutting off the British Expeditionary Force and the French and Belgian armies in the north from the rest of France. Arras, held by a British garrison, stood on the northern edge of the German corridor.1
Lord Gort, the British commander, gave Major General Harold Franklyn a force of two divisions, the 5th and the 50th, and the 1st Army Tank Brigade, known as Frankforce. The British official historian, L. F. Ellis, stresses that Franklyn's orders were to support the garrison of Arras and block the roads south of the town, a large mopping-up operation rather than the counterattack it is usually called.2
Two battalions and 74 tanks
The force that actually attacked was much smaller than two divisions. Ellis counts two infantry battalions of the 151st Brigade, the 6th and 8th Durham Light Infantry, with the 4th and 7th Royal Tank Regiments, artillery and motorcyclists, all under Major General Giffard Martel. After long road marches the tank brigade could field only 58 Mark I tanks, armed with a single machine gun, and 16 Mark II Matildas with a 2-pounder gun.3
The two columns were to cross the Arras to Doullens road at 2 p.m., after an eight-mile march through roads choked with refugees, with no time for reconnaissance. The right column, the 7th Royal Tank Regiment and the 8th Durham Light Infantry, fought through Duisans, Warlus and Berneville until it met German infantry and the SS Totenkopf Division and was pinned down by machine guns, mortars and dive bombers. The left column, the 4th Royal Tank Regiment and the 6th Durham Light Infantry, took Dainville, Achicourt, Agny and Beaurains, and a small party got as far as Wancourt.4
Rommel's gun line
The British tanks were too heavily armored for the German anti-tank guns. Ellis quotes the 7th Panzer Division's war diary, in which Rommel wrote that his anti-tank guns were not effective enough even at close range against the heavy British tanks. What stopped the attack was a line of field artillery and anti-aircraft guns, among them a troop of 88 mm guns, which Rommel deployed far forward. Codenames.info describes 88 mm guns knocking out Matildas on Hill 111 and one gun line destroying 24 tanks in a few minutes in the early evening.5
Both British tank battalion commanders were killed. The Tank Museum tells the story of Sergeant Alf Longstaff of the 7th Royal Tank Regiment, who won the Military Medal for trying again and again to reach his commanding officer's knocked-out tank. As evening came, with the enemy working round his right flank, Franklyn ordered both columns back. French tanks of the cavalry corps covered the British flank, and six of them helped to break out the infantry cut off in Warlus.6
A failure that mattered
The figures are partial. Ellis cites the 7th Panzer Division's war diary as admitting nine medium and several light tanks lost and 378 men killed, wounded and missing, while the British took nearly 400 prisoners. Codenames.info puts British tank losses at 60 of the 88 tanks committed, counting French support.7
The effect on the Germans went far beyond the ground won. Rommel thought he was fighting hundreds of tanks, and Ellis notes that his situation maps showed the attack as coming from five British divisions. The 6th Panzer Division was ordered into defensive positions west of Arras instead of moving north, and the war diary of XIX Corps recorded nervousness throughout Kleist's armored group. Codenames.info links this shock to the German order of 24 May that halted the panzers short of Dunkirk, though the halt had other causes as well and historians weigh them differently. The days that followed are told in our article on the Dunkirk evacuation, and the German commander in our biography of Erwin Rommel.8
