The Forces
On paper, the German and Allied forces were roughly
evenly matched. The Germans offensive
fielded
136
divisions
against 94 French divisions, and the 10 British divisions
of the British Expeditionary Force. 22 Belgian and 9 Dutch
divisions were also involved. The numbers of tanks fielded
on each side was also approximately equal. It was only in
the air that the Germans enjoyed massive superiority: 2500
aircraft against a few hundred British, and largely obsolete
French aircraft.
The quantity of the Allied troops was fine. The quality
was not. Britain and France had been largely unprepared for war,
and the training of their conscript armies was abysmal.
In Britain, ammunition shortages had the notorious result
of each recruit
being allowed only five rounds in total for rifle training.
The French conscripts were more badly trained still.
Fortunately, the small British Expeditionary Force had
many professional troops rather than recent conscripts.
By contrast, the Germans side had had much more intensive
and elaborate
training. Accurate, full-scale mockups of crucial fortifications
were built in Germany, and troops rehearsed their attacks
until perfect.
Tactical Doctrines
It was clear to both sides that tanks and aircraft
would play a much more crucial role in the second
world war than the first, but the tactical doctrines
of the Germans and Allies were still very different.
The Allies viewed tanks as primarily useful for
supporting infantry: it was considered impractical for
large formations of tanks to operate independently.
Without infantry support tanks were considered vulnerable,
and it was assumed that tanks could not effectively attack
fortifications without artillery support. These misconception
utterly crippled the Allied armour. Artillery in World War Two
was horse-drawn, and infantry advanced on foot, as they had
done for the last thousand years. The crucial advantage of
tanks, mobility, was thus lost as they were tied to slow-moving
infantry. Furthermore, tanks were scattered throughout the
army, not concentrated into an effective force.
Under the brilliant General Guderian, the Germans had
adopted very different doctrines. Ironically enough, Guderian
had been inspired by the ideas of British
officers such as General Fuller and Captain Basil Liddel-Hart,
rejected by their own superiors. German armour was
concentrated into large armoured divisions, which operated
alone, without being slowed by infantry. Instead of artillery,
air support, particularly by dive bombers, would be used against
enemy fortifications. Neither Poland, Czechoslovakia, Belgium,
Holland nor France managed to resist these new lightning tactics
effectively.
The air doctrines of the two sides were also very different.
The Allies had adopted the notion of strategic bombing, the
idea that long-range bombers could destroy the capacity of
the enemy to wage war. The Luftwaffe, dominated by former Army
officers, saw their chief role as supporting their ground
forces, and developed the ability to bomb very accurately
at short range. The effect of
Stuka dive bombers on badly-trained ground troops was both
devastating and terrifying.
Strategic Errors
It's an old cliché that generals like to re-fight
the last war. The disastrous errors of 1940 can only be
seen in this light. In spite of the lessons of Czechoslovakia
and Poland, the Allied commanders were still thinking in
first world war terms, of slow, costly advances against
lines of defence. It was this kind of thinking that was
consistently behind the three great mistakes made by the
Allies.
The first great mistake was relying on the Maginot line,
the highly fortified border between France and Germany.
In the first world war it would have been impregnable.
In the second world war, concentrated attack eventually
breached it, but more significantly, the Germans attacked
first through Belgium and Holland instead, rendering it
not just worthless but a handicap, as it required large numbers
of French troops to occupy it.
The second great mistake was the attempted defence of Holland
and Belgium. Relying on neutrality to protect them, the Low
Countries had not heavily fortified their frontiers, and did not
allow Allied troops to enter, even for reconnaissance, until
actually invaded. "He who defends everything, defends nothing"
was Frederick the Great's famous saying, but this
concept was ignored. British and French troops abandoned
their defences on the French-Belgian borders and advanced
into Belgium, with the intention of resisting the German
Panzer divisions in unfortified, open, unfamiliar territory.
Thus the scene was set for the great disaster. Poorly trained
troops, many of whom had fired only five shots in their lives,
commanded by
officers using obsolete tactics, stationed in inadequate
defences in unfamiliar territory; prepared to defend themselves
against the combined firepower of the Panzer divisions
and the Luftwaffe.
Airborne Assault
At dawn on the 10th of May 1940, 16,000 German airborne troops
attacked targets in neutral Belgium and Holland.
Later in the war paratroops would prove vulnerable, but
against neutral troops, unaware they were at war, they
proved highly effective.
The two most spectacular successes were at a Maastricht bridge and
the Eben-Emael fort. At Maastricht, two commandos dressed in civilian
clothes shot the unsuspecting bridge sentry, then deactivated the
demolition charges. Minutes later German paratroops attacked the
fortifications guarding the bridge, throwing grenades into open
doors. They took control in hours with the loss of only 300 men.
Eben-Emael was another large "impregnable" fort, guarding the
critical junction of the Meuse river and
Albert canal. It proved less than impregnable when nine German
gliders landed on its roof. Attacked from the inside,
and shortly afterwards from the outside, Eben-Emael rapidly
surrendered.
Less spectacular but equally effective attacks
gave the Germans control of several other crucial bridges.
It had been assumed that the Meuse river and Albert canal
would be significant obstacles to a German advance, but by
rapidly taking the crucial bridges, German paratroops
rendered them negligible obstacles.
Retreat
As the Germans advanced, confusion reigned among the
defenders. Radio communications were rare within
the allied forces: traditional couriers were preferred.
Cooperation between the French,
Belgian and Dutch forces was poor. The British
Expeditionary Force was under the French high command:
at first successfully, but later on conflicts would
occur between British and French orders.
Road networks was rapidly overwhelmed by fleeing refugees.
The Luftwaffe bombed and strafed the overcrowded roads,
causing further panic. This hampered Allied
troop movements, and the messenger-based communications
were severely disrupted.
With German air superiority, the Allied troops were
vulnerable to air attack, in particular to the accurate
and effective
Stuka
dive-bombers. Some of the bombs,
and sometimes the planes themselves, were equipped with
"screamers", devices to emit a loud noise during a
dive. The poorly-trained conscripts found dive-bomber
attacks terrifying.
In places the defenders managed to hold.
On 14th of May, the French managed to recapture the town
of Stone in a counterattack. However, a line that is partly held
is not held at all. The allies were forced to retreat. Much of the
French horse-drawn artillery was abandoned, the vulnerable horses
killed from the air.
Evacuation
Breathing space was twice given to the retreating allies, when
the German high command ordered the advance to be halted,
much to the fury of the German commander, General Guderian.
The reasons, and even the origins of the orders, are still
unclear. Some opinions are that the halts were believed
necessary due to the tanks needs for maintenance and
the establishment of secure supply lines. Others blame
rivalries within the German military.
Guderian managed to partially ignore the initial order
on the 17th of May,
under the guise of claiming that the advance had stopped,
but he was carrying out a "reconnaissance in force". Later,
on the 24 of May, he would be forced to halt before taking
Dunkirk. This pause was critical in that it allowed
340,000 troops
to be evacuated over several days at Dunkirk.
This managed to preserve the small professional core
of the British army. 100,000 French troops were included,
many of whom became the Free French troops, serving
under Charles de Gaulle after the official surrender
on the 22nd of June.
Analysis
Historians such as Max Hastings have
drawn
parallels between the Battle of France
and the disastrous first phase of the Korean War.
Once again, poorly-trained infantry troops were sent
out into unfamiliar country to oppose an armoured advance
by the North Koreans.
The parallel is not exact: the Chinese
had not yet entered the war, and unlike their German
counterparts the North Koreans had virtually no aircraft.
Also, the U.S. training was quite not so bad: they had at least
fired their rifles on occasion.
The results, however, were similar. Completely unable to stop
the advance, the U.S. troops of Task Force Smith
retreated in disarray, frequently
abandoning their weapons and their own wounded.
In another curious
similarity, it proved easier to blame the
problems on the cowardice of the soldiers; rather than
questioning the wisdom of sending lightly armed, poorly
trained infantry into open, unfamiliar territory to stop a tank
advance. This action is easy to
contemplate from behind a desk, rather harder to carry out
in front of a tank.
With the benefit of hindsight, it's always easy to look back
and declare authoritatively what should have been done,
especially since your ideas will never actually be tested by
the enemy. In the case of the Battle of France, because the
armoured assault tactics were new, it was not clear how to
defend against them.
In 1940 it was not clear that air superiority would be such
a decisive factor in a ground conflict. It was expected that
strategic bombing would be more effective than it was. It
was not known that urban areas could provide effective
resistance to tank assaults, as happened in Stalingrad.
The critical weakness of paratroop attacks,
that they are vulnerable during and immediately
after their descent, was not certain. The importance
of fortifying positions all around, rather than relying
on a line that faces one way only, was underestimated.
The potential of radio communications,
and the inability of traditional couriers to cope with
rapidly moving fronts, were not accepted.
When faced with the first effective use of new tactics by
an enemy, it
is easy to be appalled in hindsight that they were not
anticipated. In practice, it takes time and experience
to develop and deploy defences. In the Second World War
neither Poland, Belgium, Holland, France nor Russia
were at first able to resist the combination of armoured divisions
and air superiority.
With fewer mistakes, the German attack could have been made
more costly for them, and the battle more protracted.
However, without the crucial factor of experience, it is
doubtful that the final outcome of the Battle of France could
ever have been different.
Aftermath
On the 22nd of June France surrendered to the Germans. Fighting
continued for a few days before dying out. German
casualties were only 27,000 dead, 100,000 wounded.
French military
casualties about 100,000 dead, 200,000 wounded. Worse
was to come for the French: about 400,000 civilians would die
in bombings and in forced-labour camps under the
German occupation, and another 100,000 military would die
during and after the liberation. In the cruellest cut of all,
1,147 French sailors would be killed by their
British allies at
Mers-El-Kebir
on the 3rd of July, when the British decided they
would destroy
the French fleet themselves, rather than risk it falling
into German hands.
On 18th of June, Churchill made a
speech
to Parliament. "The battle for France is over,"
he warned.
"The whole fury and might of the enemy must very soon be turned on us".
"The Battle of Britain is about to begin."
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