In searching for weapons and tactics with which they could
carry out a swift war of movement, the German strategists fastened
onto the tank and the airplane. Both had been used in World War
I, but not effectively. Tanks had been used solely as a screen
for infantry attacks, not as an independent weapon. Airplanes,
apart from reconnaissance, had little practical value. The dramatic
"dogfights" of such famed air aces of World War I as
Manfred von Richthofen, René Fouck, Billy Bishop, or Eddie
Rickenbacker gave a nostalgic touch of sportsmanship and chivalry
to the drab war of trenches. Bombing by hand-dropped bombs from
airplanes and Zeppelins achieved a certain psychological effect.
But neither use of airpower had any noticeable effect on the outcome
of the hostilities.
After the war, military specialists of many nations worked on
improving the armor, range, and speed of tanks and airplanes and
sought new methods for their use. But it was German soldiers,
scientists, and engineers who thought about and experimented with
tanks and airplanes most consistently. By 1939 the Germans had
organized several independent Panzer divisions, the function of
which was to pierce the enemy's front, like a battering ram, and
to wreak havoc in his rear. By 1939 they had also built up an
efficient, independent Luftwaffe, carefully trained to give close
cooperation to ground forces.
Meanwhile, the generals of the western powers were on the whole
more inclined to put their trust in the methods that had brought
them victory in 1918. The mechanization of infantry and the organization
of special armored divisions using tanks as an independent weapon
was suggested by an obscure French Lieutenant-Colonel, Charles
de Gaulle by name. While instructor at Saint-Cyr (the French military
academy) he wrote a highly original treatise, The Army of the
Future (1934), in which he developed many ideas on mechanized
warfare which were later used with lethal effectiveness by the
Germans against France. But he was dismissed by his superiors
as a "romantic" and incurred the wrath of the politicians
of the Third Republic because of his conservative, Catholic background.
When World War II came, expecting it to be a repetition of World
War I, French generals proposed to wait for the Germans to come
and exhaust themselves by costly and vain attacks against the
supposedly impregnable Maginot Line. Only after this occurred,
at some distant point in the war, would the western Allies have
to pass to the offensive. The drawback of this strategy was that
it left the initiative in the war to the Germans. The Germans
first used it to dispose of Poland, completely unhindered by the
western Allies.
Leaving only a screening force of conventional troops to man the
defenses of the West Wall, the Germans concentrated forty-four
divisions (out of 66 which they then had), six armored and six
motorized divisions, and virtually their whole air force for the
Polish campaign. The Polish army was large enough (22 divisions,
including one division and seven independent brigades of cavalry)
and well enough equipped for the type of warfare that prevailed
on the Eastern front in 1914-18. but it was woefully unprepared
for modern mechanized warfare.
The German Blitzkrieg against Poland, which began at dawn on
September 1, 1939, proved to be "a campaign from the book."
The weather was what newspapermen later came to call "Hitler
weather" -- dry and sunny, perfect for the operations of
airplanes and tanks. Converging on Poland from East Prussia and
Slovkia as well as from Germany, the German Wehrmacht overwhelmed
the Polish army and won a military decision in tend days. The
small Polish air force was destroyed on the ground on the very
first day of the campaign. The Panzer divisions cut through the
Polish forces at will and isolated them for later disarming. by
September 15 organized Polish resistance collapsed. The Polish
government fled to Rumania and France where it was reorganized
as a government-in-exile under President Rackiewicz and Prime
Minister General Sikorski. Only Warsaw heroically held out until
the end of month.
Hitler, flushed with victory over Poland, was impatient to turn
on the Western Allies at once. But his generals felt that Germany
was far from prepared for a major campaign in the West. The British
and French declarations of war had filled them and the whole German
people with evil foreboding. There were no stirring scenes of
patriotism and enthusiasm for the war in Berlin in 1939, as there
had been in 1914, even though the immediate campaign against the
despised Poles was popular. Even Hermann Göring, Hitler's
successor-designate and commander of the Luftwaffe, was moved
to exclaim:
"If we lose this war, then Heaven have mercy on us."
But Hitler brooked no opposition or restraint. On October 9,
1939, he issued orders for the preparation of operation "Yellow,"
the plan of attack on the Netherlands and Belgium, which was to
give Germany a large area on the Channel coast as a base for naval
and aerial operations against Britain, preliminary to the grand
assault on the Western Allies in France. As the date of execution
of his plan he set November 12. But his generals, fearful of the
coming conflict in the West, stalled and again plotted his removal.
After an ugly, angry scene with the commander in chief of the
army, Hitler postponed the operation. The Allies, feeling smugly
safe believed the maginot line, also did not stir. The period
of inactivity which resulted, was dubbed by the Germans Sitzkrieg
and by American war correspondents, disgruntled by lack of news
copy, "phoney war." But both sides continued to arm
feverishly, and the Germans, at least, continued to plan.
In January 1940 the plans for operation "Yellow" fell
by accident into Belgian hands and had to be recast completely.
Meanwhile, Hitler's attention was drawn to an operation suggested
by the naval command, namely, to seize Denmark and Norway as bases
for submarine operations against the British navy. It was approved
by Hitler on March 1 and received the code name "Exercise
Weser."
Naval warfare in World War II took the same form as in World War
I. Immediately after declaring war on Germany, the British navy
blockaded the German coast. The French navy meanwhile kept an
eye on Italy, which had not yet entered the war. The German navy
in 1939 was much more modest than it had been in 1914. The submarine
fleet consisted of only 57 U-boats, of which only 26 were suitable
for Atlantic operations, but thereafter the submarine fleet grew
rapidly. The Germans endeavored to effect a counter-blockade of
Britain and France by mines and submarines.
On September 4, one day after the British and French declaration
of war, a German U-boat sank the British liner Athenia without
warning, causing loss of over 100 lives. Air raids and a new type
of "magnetic" mine inflicted heavy destruction of British
shipping, forcing the merchant vessels to crowed into western
harbors which were at the time beyond the range of German bombers.
The British navy countered the German move by multiplying their
sea and air patrols, tightening the blockade, scrutinizing all
neutral shipping. Sowing mines in German harbors, and bombing
their port installations.
In December three British cruisers chased a German battleship
Graf Spee into the Montevideo harbor. When the Uruguayan government
asked it to leave, it was scuttled by its crew. On February 17,
1940 the British seized a German ship, which served as a prison
for Allied seamen, in Norwegian coastal waters. Despite protests
from the Norwegian government, the British and French announced
that they had mined Norwegian coastal waters to halt the transit
of German vessels which had been eluding the Allied blockade.
This was done on April 8. On the following day the Germans launched
"Exercise Weser."
The German army invaded and occupied Denmark, which offered
no resistance. German naval units attacked Norwegian ports, while
hundreds of paratroops floated down on their airfields. Oslo,
Bergen, Trondheim, Stavanger, and Narvik were occupied in surprise
invasions, but after momentary consternation the Norwegians rallied
courageously. The Allied expeditionary force, originally destined
for Finland, was rushed to aid them, and Trondheim, Bergen and
Narvik were temporarily recovered. Prime Minister Churchill was
of the opinion that this time Hitler had "missed the bus."
Unfortunately for the Allies, the Germans maintained complete
superiority in the air. This enabled them to pour troops at will
into any vital point. German troops advanced steadily north and
by June 8 extinguished the last Norwegian resistance and forced
the Allies to evacuate Narvik.
The King of Norway, Haakon VII, escaped with his ministers to
London, where he set up a government-in-exile. In Norway the German
occupants set up a puppet government under a pro-Nazi politician
Vidkun Quisling, whose name became speedily synonymous with perfidy
and treason. All parties, except Quisling's Nasjonal Samling,
were abolished and for five years Norway passed into the darkness
of "totalitarianism."
The British government had suffered a grievous loss of prestige
and Chamberlain was forced to resign. On May 10 Winston Churchill
formed a National government. Daladier had earlier been replaced
by Raynaud. it was high time for these changes, for on the same
day that Churchill assumed power the Germans launched operation
"Yellow." The battle in the west had begun.
The Germans had assembled for it a mighty host of 135 conventional,
ten armored, and four motorized divisions and two air fleets (1500
fighters and 3500 bombers). Opposing them, apart from the small,
ill-equipped Belgian army, were the Allied armies consisting of
ninety-five French and ten British divisions. Part of the French
strength, however, was tied up in manning the Maginot Line and
guarding the Alpine passes against a possible Italian attack.
In total armored strength the Allies were equal to the Germans
(about 2450 tanks on both sides). But only a portion of their
armor (4 divisions) had been recently organized into independent
mobile units. The rest was distributed in brigade, battalion,
and regimental strength all along the front to support the infantry.
In the air the Allies were quite inferior to the Germans (1000
French and 700 British planes in France).
The Allied generals firmly expected the Germans to repeat the
Schlieffen plan of 1914 and invade France through the flatlands
of Belgium. Therefore they decided to anticipate the Germans by
marching into Belgium as soon as the German violation of Belgian
neutrality permitted it. But the Germans had decided to follow
not the invasion route of 1914 but the more difficult and unexpected
invasion route of 1870. The revised plans for operation "Yellow"
called for sending inferior forces into the Low Countries and
concentrating their armored and motorized divisions for a powerful
blow against the Allied lines at a point where the Germans, French,
and Belgian frontiers meet.
When on May 10 the Germans hurled their divisions against the
west, little Luxembourg put up no resistance and the resistance
of neutral Holland collapsed in five days. Queen Wilhelmina and
the Dutch government fled to London. On May 13 the main German
force, spearheaded by the Panzer divisions and supported closely
by the Luftwaffe, broke through the Allied lines in the Ardenne
Forest to Sedan, just where the Maginot Line ended. The public
learned then for the first time that this famous line, in which
the French put an almost mystical faith, covered only the Franco-German
but not the Franco-Belgian borders.
Meanwhile, the whole British expeditionary force and three French
armies marched north into Belgium -- and thereby walked into a
German trap. After the main German force broke through at Sedan,
there was nothing much to stop its advance down the Somme valley
toward the sea. The Germans exploited the advantage fully. One
French armored division which tried to intercept them ran out
of gas and was defeated. Another one, under de Gaule, which engaged
them further west, was pushed aside. On May 20 the German spearheads
reached the English Channel at Abbeville, isolating the Allied
armies in Belgium from the Allied armies in France. Panic broke
out in Allied councils. The Allied commander-in-chief, General
Gamelin, was replaced by General Weygand.
The new commander, after surveying the situation, ordered the
Allied armies in Belgium to attack south to break through the
thin German spearhead separating them from the forces in France.
Simultaneously, he moved north to aid the breakthrough by attacking
the Germans. However his attack was beaten off and Lord Gort,
the commander of the British expeditionary force, disregarded
his orders. This was to provoke bitter French recriminations,
but in the light of subsequent events the British decision was
probably correct. The Battle of France had already been lost.
The thing to do was to prepare for the coming Battle of Britain.
Lord Gort feared lest the Germans, who had reached the Channel
and turned north, cut off his egress to the sea. On May 28 the
King of Belgium, Leopold III, ordered the Belgian army to surrender.
For this the Belgian government, which had fled to France and
was later to go to London, declared him deposed. On the same day
the British began to pull out of Belgium by way of the Dunkirk
beaches. By June 4 a motley armada of ships, from liners to tugboats,
had succeeded in evacuating to Britain some 220,000 British and
112,000 French soldiers.
The public in Britain was unaware of the extent of the catastrophe.
The press even hailed the "Miracle of Dunkirk" as victory.
But Churchill soberly reminded the country that "wars are
not won by evacuations." Indeed, the evacuated army had left
behind all its heavy equipment and some 600,000 soldiers, mostly
French, who were captured by the Germans or had been killed. If
the Germans had a plan and attempted to invade Britain immediately
after Dunkirk, they might very well have succeeded. Instead, however,
they regrouped to carry out operation "Red," the conquest
of France herself. General Weygand tried to throw up a defense
line north of Paris, but it caved in at the first German touch
(June 5). The French army had been organized for and conditioned
to a stationary war. The fluid war of movement, imposed on it
by the Germans, bewildered it. Above all, it lacked anti-tank
guns, without which it was completely helpless against the German
Panzers.
The government evacuated Paris, which was declared an open city
and left undefended, and when the Germans entered it on June 13
they found it largely deserted. The population had panicked and
fled by the thousands, clogging up the roads to the south and
impeding the movements of the army trying to throw up a new defense
line along the Loire River.
On June 10 Italy declared war on France and attacked in the Alps
and along the Riviera. With the lack of vision characteristic
of many continental statesmen, Mussolini assumed that the approaching
fall of France meant the end of the war. His transparent intention
to share in the spoils before the war was over provoked President
Roosevelt to break the silence imposed on him by American neutrality
and brand the act "a stab in the back."
The second line of defense on the Loire proved no more effective
than the first. The government, which had moved to Bordeaux, began
to discuss surrender. In a desperate effort to persuade the French
government to continue the struggle, if need be from North Africa,
Churchill flew to Bordeaux. To move his French colleagues he made
a startling proposal: complete fusion of the British and French
empires until final victory. But the French statesmen, who regarded
France as the heart of the anti-German coalition, to move to Africa
appeared absurd and Churchillian rhetoric a counsel of despair.
with the fall of France, they were firmly convinced, the war would
be over. An era of Pax Germanica was about to begin and the best
course for France was to try to accommodate herself to it.
On June 21, 1940, in the same old railway car of Marshal Foch
at Compiegne which the Germans had signed the armistice terms
on November 11, 1918, the French delegation faced Hitler. On the
following day the second Compiegne armistice was signed. For the
moment France had ceased to be a great power.