The Need for Organisational Resilience - Chapter 2

Command (OKH − Oberkommando des Westens ) to start detailed planning. Only ten days

later, the first plan, code named ‘Deployment Directive Yellow’ (Aufmarschanweisung Gelb) ,

was presented to Hitler. This plan strongly resembled the Schlieffen plan used in WWI (see

Map 2.2):

It was manifestly a bad plan, so conservative and uninspiring that it might well have

been thought up by a British or French General Staff of the inter-war years, and through

its many imperfections glimmered the half-heartedness of the OKH and the Army

commanders. (Horne 1990, 187)

The following weeks saw a string of revised plans, all thrusting north of the Maginot Line,

very much in line with the Schlieffen plan. Such a thrust would not have come as a surprise

to the Allies. The continuous in-fighting between the general staff of the OKH – used by

Hitler to gauge loyalty to him personally – and the perceived reluctance to commence an

attack against a supposedly stronger enemy, led Hitler to berate his general staff on 28

December, although he stopped short of accusing them of cowardice.

The onset of bad weather in December made a Winter offensive in 1939 unfeasible, and

1940 began with the ‘phoney war’, a period of subdued hostilities between two major

European powers in a state of war. On 9 th January 1940, an incident occurred that was to shape the conception of an entire

campaign. Helmuth Reinberger, a German major involved in the deployment of airborne

troops, was summoned to a meeting in Cologne. At a local airbase in Münster, he was

offered a lift to Cologne in a tiny Me-108 airplane. They set off in the early hours and made

their way westwards. On board, Reinberger carried a small briefcase, containing top-secret

documents outlining the German air plan for invading the Low Countries.

Bad weather was closing in; suddenly the engine cut out for no apparent reason and

they were forced to make an emergency landing. The pilot made a quick assessment of their

location and they realised they had landed in Belgium, near a town called Mechelen. In a

frantic hurry, Reinberger tried to burn the documents, with the help of a Belgian peasant who

lent him a lighter. Not long after, Belgian troops arrested Reinberger and his pilot and they

were marched to the Belgian gendarmerie. Reinberger tried to destroy the remaining papers

once more by throwing them into a stove. Nevertheless, quick action by the Belgian captors

provided the Belgian High Command with insights into the German plan to repeat the

Schlieffen strategy, with the main thrust through Holland and Belgium.

The mishap of the German invasion plans falling into Allied hands increased the haste in

which new plans were conceived. Gradually, planning driven less by strategy and more by

operational necessity was conceived; to provide a ‘hammer blow’ to the Allies from which

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