Battle of France

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  The Battle of France began on the 10th of May 1940, and within six weeks an empire that had survived the carnage of the First World War had collapsed. France, the largest army on the continent, with more tanks than Germany and a defensive line that generals called impenetrable, fell so fast that its own prime minister called London to say the battle was already lost. How did a military that outnumbered its enemy in artillery, tanks, and aircraft get swept aside in a matter of days? The answer lies in a chain of decisions, miscalculations, and a single daring plan that gambled everything on a road through a forest no one believed tanks could cross.

• 2. The Maginot Illusion

  ›

  General Philippe Pétain declared the Ardennes region "impenetrable" as long as "special provisions" were taken to destroy any invasion force as it emerged from the trees. The French commander-in-chief, Maurice Gamelin, agreed, noting the terrain "never favoured large operations." The Maginot Line itself, built through the 1930s along the Franco-German border, was a masterpiece of concrete engineering. It ran from the Swiss border and ended at Longwy, designed not merely to hold ground but to channel any German attack northward into Belgium, where the best French divisions could meet it. The French intended to fight the next war outside their own borders, sparing French soil from the destruction of 1914-1918.

  Yet the logic contained its own flaw. French war games in 1937 and 1938 had actually shown that German tanks could penetrate the Ardennes. General André Corap, who would command the Ninth Army on the Meuse, called it "idiocy" to think the enemy could not get through. Gamelin ignored these findings because they did not match his strategy. Only 0.15 per cent of French military spending between 1923 and 1939 had been directed at radio and communications equipment; to maintain signals security, Gamelin communicated with field units by telephone and courier. That choice would prove fatal when the pace of events outran the speed of messages.

• 3. The Plan That Changed Everything

  ›

  Generalleutnant Erich von Manstein wrote his first memorandum outlining an alternative invasion plan on the 31st of October 1939. It proposed concentrating Germany's armoured force at Sedan, deep in the Ardennes, to punch through the Allied line and race westward to the English Channel, cutting off the Allied armies in Belgium. Six more memoranda followed between that date and the 12th of January 1940, each growing more radical. All were rejected by the army's high command. None of their contents reached Hitler.

  Manstein's career appeared finished when, on the 27th of January, he was removed as Chief of Staff of Army Group A and shuffled off to command an army corps in East Prussia. Halder had engineered the transfer to silence him. But Manstein's staff brought his case directly to Hitler, who had already been privately thinking along similar lines. On the 17th of February, Hitler summoned Manstein, General Rudolf Schmundt, and General Alfred Jodl to a conference. The next day, Hitler ordered Manstein's thinking adopted. It offered, he said, the possibility of decisive victory.

  The bulk of the German officer corps was appalled. They called Halder the "gravedigger of the Panzer force" for adapting the plan to more conventional methods. They thought it reckless to concentrate forces along routes that could be cut easily by the French. Their objections were overruled. Halder argued that Germany's strategic position was so precarious that even the slimmest chance of victory had to be grasped. Shortly before the invasion, Hitler confidently predicted the whole campaign would take only six weeks.

• 4. The Armies Face Off

  ›

  France mobilised about one-third of its male population between the ages of 20 and 45, bringing its armed forces to 5,000,000 men. Germany had mobilised 4,200,000 in its army alone, plus 1,000,000 in the Luftwaffe, 180,000 in the navy, and 100,000 Waffen-SS. On paper the Allies held the advantage in almost every category. The French had 3,254 tanks against 2,439 German tanks. Allied artillery amounted to roughly 14,000 guns, some 45 per cent more than the Germans. Even in the air, Allied fighter aircraft outnumbered the Germans: 1,106 Allied fighters against 836 German Bf 109s.

  Yet the numbers concealed critical weaknesses. The German Army was actually far from the mechanised juggernaut of popular imagination: only ten per cent of German forces were motorised in 1940, and the army could muster only 120,000 vehicles against the French Army's 300,000. Most German logistical transport still relied on horse-drawn wagons. Only 50 per cent of German divisions were considered fit for operations, many being worse equipped than the German army of 1914. The difference was not in hardware but in how each side used what it had.

  German tanks had radio receivers that allowed platoon commanders to direct them by voice. French tanks were largely without radios; orders between units were passed by telephone or spoken word. German tactical doctrine, called Auftragstaktik, expected officers, NCOs, and enlisted men to use their initiative and control supporting arms. The French system remained top-down and deliberate. German commanders could call in air support from Luftwaffe dive-bombers within 45-75 minutes of issuing orders. French armoured divisions were designed as infantry support vehicles; doctrine still treated the tank as a tool of the foot soldier, not a weapon of independent manoeuvre.

• 5. Forty-Six Words From the Meuse

  ›

  At Sedan, the Meuse Line was a strong defensive belt 6 km deep, strengthened by 103 pillboxes, manned by the 147th Fortress Infantry Regiment. The terrain favoured the defender. On the morning of the 13th of May, Panzergruppe Kleist forced three crossings near Sedan, executed by the 1st, 2nd, and 10th Panzer divisions, reinforced by the elite Infantry Regiment Grossdeutschland. Instead of massing artillery in the methodical way the French expected, the Germans concentrated nearly all their air power to blast a narrow hole in the line. Guderian had been promised an eight-hour continual air attack from 08:00 until dusk. It was the heaviest air bombardment the world had yet witnessed. Two dive-bomber wings flew 300 sorties against French positions. Nine bomber groups flew a total of 3,940 sorties.

  The physical damage to pillboxes was limited; many held. But the morale of the 55th Infantry Division troops behind the front collapsed. French gunners fled their positions. By midnight on the 13th, German infantry had penetrated up to 8 km into the French defensive zone, at a cost of a few hundred casualties. The breakthrough owed more to panic than to destruction. At 19:00 that evening, troops of the 295th Regiment holding the Bulson ridge 10 km behind the river fled after alarmist rumours spread that German tanks were already behind them. No German tanks had crossed the river. The "Panic of Bulson" consumed the divisional artillery along with the infantry. The Germans did not actually attack that position until 07:20 the following morning, twelve hours after the troops abandoned it.

  General Gaston-Henri Billotte, commanding the 1st Army Group, saw clearly what the breach meant. Convinced that "over them will pass either victory or defeat," he ordered every available Allied light bomber to destroy the bridges. They lost about 44 per cent of Allied bomber strength and achieved nothing.

• 6. The Race to the Channel

  ›

  Guderian turned the 1st and 2nd Panzer divisions westward on the 14th of May and they advanced swiftly down the Somme valley toward the English Channel. On the 15th of May, French Prime Minister Paul Reynaud telephoned Winston Churchill: "We have been defeated. We are beaten; we have lost the battle." Churchill flew to Paris on the 16th. He immediately recognised the gravity of the situation when he saw French government officials already burning their archives and preparing to evacuate the capital.

  In a sombre meeting, Churchill asked Gamelin where the strategic reserve was. Gamelin's reply, as Churchill later recalled hearing it, was the most shocking moment of his life. When pressed about where and when the general proposed to counter-attack, Gamelin simply answered: "inferiority of numbers, inferiority of equipment, inferiority of methods."

  Meanwhile, Erwin Rommel's 7th Panzer Division had broken through French lines within 24 hours of the battle's beginning. Rommel refused the division any rest and they advanced by day and night, covering 30 miles in 24 hours and losing contact with his superior, General Hermann Hoth, by disobeying orders not to wait for the French to form a new line. By the 17th of May, Rommel claimed to have taken 10,000 prisoners while suffering only 36 losses. Halder's diary entry for that day read: "Führer is terribly nervous. Frightened by his own success, he is afraid to take any chance... He rages and screams that we are on the way to ruin the whole campaign." Front-line commanders, through deception and different readings of conflicting stop orders, kept driving toward Abbeville.

• 7. Dunkirk and the Fall of Paris

  ›

  British, Belgian, and French forces were pushed to the coast, where Operation Dynamo evacuated encircled elements of the British Expeditionary Force and the French and Belgian armies from Dunkirk. Germany then launched Fall Rot, Case Red, on the 5th of June 1940. The remaining Allied divisions in France, sixty French and two British, made a determined stand on the Somme and Aisne rivers. Italy entered the war on the 10th of June and began its own invasion of France from the south-east. German armies outflanked the Maginot Line and pushed deep into French territory, occupying Paris unopposed on the 14th of June.

  The French government had already fled. German commanders met French officials on the 18th of June to negotiate an armistice. On the 22nd of June 1940, the Second Armistice at Compiegne was signed. Marshal Philippe Pétain, who had once declared the Ardennes impenetrable, now led the collaborationist Vichy government that replaced the Third Republic. The zone libre, a nominally free zone in the south of France, was retained by Vichy. German military occupation extended along the French North Sea and Atlantic coasts and their hinterlands. Italy occupied a small area in the south-east.

  In November 1942, following Operation Torch, the Allied invasion of French North Africa, Germany and Italy moved under Case Anton to take control of the zone libre as well. That occupation lasted until France was liberated by the Allies in 1944. Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands, who had established a government in exile in Britain after the Dutch capitulation on the 15th of May 1940, would not return home for four years.