The Invasion of France
Events
May 10, 1940 Germany begins invasions of Belgium, the
Netherlands, and France
May 13 French and British troops move into
Belgium but are trapped between German armies
May 14 Luftwaffe bombs central Rotterdam;
Netherlands surrenders to Germany
May 27 British troops begin mass evacuation from
Dunkirk
June 3 Luftwaffe initiates air raids on Paris
June 12 German forces penetrate France’s final
lines of defense
June 22 France signs armistice with Germany
June 23 Hitler visits Paris
The Western Front
After months of nervous speculation, Germany
brought war to western Europe on May 10, 1940, with the primary goal of conquering France.
German bombers hit air bases in France, Luxembourg, Belgium,
and the Netherlands, destroying large numbers of Allied planes on
the ground and crippling Allied air defenses. Elite squads of German
paratroopers were dropped onto fortified Allied points along the front,
neutralizing a key element of France’s defense strategy.
On the ground, German forces advanced in two
directions: one through the Netherlands and northern Belgium (where Britain and
France had expected) and the other, larger force to the south, through
Luxembourg and into theArdennes Forest on a path that led directly
into the French heartland. Unaware of the German advance to the south, Britain
and France sent the bulk of their troops to Belgium.
The Fall of the
Netherlands
During the first days of the attack, the
Germans made slower progress toward Brussels and The Hague than expected, as
the Dutch forces fought back formidably. In response, on May 14, the German air
force, the Luftwaffe, unleashed a massive bombing attack on central Rotterdam,
even while surrender negotiations with the Netherlands were under way. Although
efforts were made to call off the attack at the last minute, only some of the
German pilots got the message, so part of the attack was carried out. Over 800 civilians
were killed, and the Netherlands surrendered that day.
Belgium
The British and French plan to defend Belgium was
to make a stand at a line of forts between the cities of Antwerp and Liege.
Unaware that these forts had already been captured by German paratrooper units
on the first night of the invasion, the British and French armies found
themselves under assault on May 13. At the same time, the second, unexpected
German offensive to the south emerged from the Ardennes Forest. Over the next
few days, the main Allied armies were trapped between the two German forces,
able neither to protect Paris nor to stop the Germans from advancing to the
English Channel. Then, when the German troops to the south moved between the
French and British forces, the Allies were divided and thus weakened further
still. The Allied defense of Belgium was unequivocally a disaster.
The Evacuation from
Dunkirk
While the main French army was trapped between
the two German armies, theBritish Expeditionary Force (BEF) was
being pushed to the coast near the French port of Dunkirk. With the
BEF cornered with its back to the sea, and with little hope of reuniting with
French forces, the British government decided that the BEF had to be evacuated.
The evacuation, called Operation Dynamo, began on May 27, 1940. It took a
full week to accomplish, using more than 800 civilian and military sea vessels. In
all, more than 300,000 men were
brought back across the English Channel to British soil. The feat was heroic—it
was done under nearly constant bombardment from the Luftwaffe—but it left
France completely on its own.
The Fall of France
With the British out of the way, the Germans
began their final push against France. By June 12, German tanks had broken through the
main fronts along the Somme River and the fortified Maginot
Line, moving ever closer to their goal, Paris. During this
time, the British vigorously encouraged France to resist at all costs. The new
British prime minister, Winston Churchill, even flew to Paris
himself to offer his personal encouragement. At the same time, though, the
British government denied French requests for military assistance, wanting to
conserve strength for Britain’s own defense in the near future.
By this time, the size of the French army had
been reduced by roughly half, and French leaders became resigned to an
inevitable surrender. On June22, 1940, France signed anarmistice with Germany. Hitler
insisted that it be done in the same railway car in which Germany had
surrendered to France in 1918, at the end of World War I. On June 23, Hitler flew to
Paris for a brief sightseeing tour of the occupied city, during which a widely
published photo was taken of Hitler standing against the backdrop of the Eiffel
Tower.
Reasons for France’s
Defeat
Although many have attributed Germany’s rapid
conquest of France to simple weakness of France’s armed forces, this conclusion
is incorrect. France’s military at the time was actually larger and more
technologically advanced than Germany’s. In fact, before the invasion, a number
of senior German military leaders felt strongly that Germany was unprepared to
take on France militarily. During the invasion, Hitler himself was highly
apprehensive and expressed disbelief at his own victories.
Rather, France fell primarily due to mistaken
assumptions about how the attack would be carried out. Germany’s advance
through the Ardennes Forest was not anticipated, and even when French
intelligence received word of it, they took little action because they did not
believe that German tanks could make their way through a dense forest. Thus,
the core of the French forces, reinforced by the British, was sent into
Belgium, where the main attack was incorrectly expected to take place.
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