Well of course a writer must decide where and when to start his or her story. In my case, my initial decision was pretty stupid. In some people’s eyes, the embers of World War II were ignited by the signing of the Treaty of Versailles in 1919. French Marshal Ferdinand Foch reacted to the treaty’s terms (which he felt were too lenient on Germany) by erupting: “It is not a peace treaty. It is a twenty-year armistice.” This is a vast oversimplification but, given that World War II broke out almost exactly twenty years later, Foch’s assessment was on target.

At one point I foolishly considered starting my book about Winston Churchill and the Royal Navy’s attack on the French fleet in July 1940 with the signing of that armistice in Compiegne in 1919. The time I spent researching events in the nineteen twenties and thirties was mostly …but not completely … wasted. I came across some stories that fell outside of the condensed time period that I finally focused on, but which are, nonetheless, too good not to share. This story, for example:

On January 10, 1940, the pilot of a German Messerschmitt aircraft – Major Erich Hoenmanns - lost his way in the fog during a flight to Cologne. In his panic, he accidentally switched off his fuel supply, and made crash landing on what he thought was German soil. He was accompanied by a fellow officer – fifty-year-old Major Helmuth Reinberger. When a farmer approached shortly after the two men walked away from the ruined plane, the two Luftwaffe officers learned that they had landed in Belgium. Hoenmanns raced back to the plane, grabbed a satchel of documents that he had been carrying, and asked the pipe-smoking farmer for a match. Unbeknownst to Hoenmanns, Reinberger was carrying top secret documents - a copy of Plan Yellow – the German plan for their invasion of Belgium, Holland, Luxembourg, and France.

As told by author Hugh Sebag-Montefiore in Dunkirk: Fight to the Last Man, back in Germany on the very day of the crash landing, “Hitler decided that his attack, based on that same plan, should take place seven days later.” That would have been on January 17, 1940 – almost four months before Germany's eventual attack on the Low Countries.

Two Belgium border guards arrived on the scene and noticed a rising stream of smoke from behind a hedge. The guards found Hoenmanns, who was attempting to burn his papers. They grabbed him, and took possession of the unburnt and charred documents in his possession.

After the two German Majors were locked in a warehouse, Reinberger noticed his papers sitting on a table in their room. He tried once again to incinerate them, shoving them into a burning stove. A quick-moving Belgian soldier reached into the flames and grabbed the documents. The picture that accompanies this story shows a portion of one of the rescued pages.

*Photo: By Hispalois - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0,* *https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=40477326*

With an indeterminate portion of his papers now in Belgian hands, Reinberger recognized what his fate would be when Adolf Hitler learned this news. He begged a Belgian officer for his gun. “I’m finished, I want to put an end to this affair right now.” When the officer refused, Reinberger tried to grab the gun without success.

The incident was followed by days of intrigue. Belgian leaders initially suspected that the crash was a ruse, with false papers intended as a test of their strongly avowed neutrality. If they called on France or Britain for assistance, Germany might then use that as license to attack its no-longer-neutral neighboring country. In Germany, there was panic. Two days after the crash, General Alfred Jodl entered a note in his diary: “If the enemy is in possession of all the files, situation catastrophic.”

A combination of this heightened suspicion and harsh winter weather convinced Hitler to temporarily postpone his invasion plans, and ultimately, to alter them. As mentioned above, German forces invaded Belgium and neighboring countries on May 10, 1940.

Both Reinberger and the hapless Hoenmanns were condemned to death in absentia by a German tribunal. To their good fortune, they were held in custody in a series of POW camps in Belgium, England, and Canada in the early years of the war. To their potential misfortune, both were returned to Germany in prisoner swaps later in the war, and were tried for treason. Somewhat remarkably, Hoenmanns was acquitted (although he had taken his plane without permission, and there was a mistress involved ... there is much more to this story), and Reinberger was simply sacked from the Luftwaffe. Both men survived the war.

As always, I was interested in finding Winston Churchill’s reaction. Churchill was First Lord of the Admiralty at the time of the incident. General Sir Edward Louis Spears, who would later be Churchill’s personal liaison to French leadership, wrote: “Was the landing of the German Staff Officer a plant or an accident? Churchill thinks it was the latter.” A degree of mystery still surrounds this incident, but the weight of evidence in the past 80+ years indicates that Churchill’s opinion was correct, and that the plans carried by Major Reinberger were very real. Although this incident (and the weather) heightened the Allies’ suspicions and bought them four extra months to prepare for an attack, they unfortunately were no more prepared for the attack in May 1940 than they were in January of that year.

Thanks for reading,
Bill

The Plane Crash That Delayed World War II