flank. The German counter-attacks were supported by VIII ( Wolfram von Richthofen) and the French lost and armoured vehicles. On 19 May, after receiving reinforcements, the 4e DCr attacked again and was repulsed with the loss of of its vehicles, much of the loss being caused by the aircraft of VIII, which attacked French units as they massed to attack the flanks of German units. By the end of the Battle of Montcornet, much of the French Ninth Army on the Meuse had disintegrated under the attacks of VIII. German spearheads broke through the Peronne–Cambrai gap and threatened Boulogne and Calais, cutting the lines of communication of the Allied armies of 1 (General Gaston Billotte) in the North-East Theatre of Operations ( Alphonse Joseph Georges), separating them from the main French armies south of the Somme. On 19 May, General Edmund Ironside, the British Chief of the Imperial General Staff, conferred with Lord Gort, commander of the BEF, at his headquarters near Lens and urged Gort to save the BEF, by attacking towards Amiens to the south-west but Gort had only two divisions available for an attack. Ironside met Billotte, finding him apparently incapable of taking action. Ironside returned to Britain and ordered urgent anti-invasion measures. On the morning of 20 May, General Maurice Gamelin, the Commander-in-chief of the French armed forces, ordered the armies trapped in Belgium and northern France to fight their way south, to link up with French forces attacking northwards from the Somme river. On the evening of 19 May, the French Prime Minister Paul Reynaud had sacked Gamelin and replaced him with General Maxime Weygand. Weygand cancelled the orders and after a delay, ordered a similar counter-offensive from the north and south against the German "corridor", to break the encircled armies out of the pocket. In the north the British combined their available divisions with the 50th Infantry Division, which was holding the Vimy area, to create a contingent which was code-named Frankforce. Frankforce was to hold the line of the river Scarpe to the east of Arras with the 5th Infantry Division, while the rest of the force attacked to the south of Arras and the new French 3 ( Antoine-Marie-Benoît Besson) attacked north from the Somme. King Leopold III of Belgium told Gort that he did not expect the BEF to risk itself to keep contact with the Belgian army, but warned the