The Maginot Line was France’s first line of defense
against a German attack. It was manned
by half a million French soldiers. It
was the most elaborate, the most expensive set of fortifications ever built at
the time. These fortifications would
halt the Germans, providing the Germans attacked in that direction. The Maginot Line extended from the along the
French border from Switzerland to Belgium.
It stopped 250 miles short of the English Channel. The French strategists argued it best to
fight the Germans in Belgium if not Germany itself. It was too expensive to extend the Maginot
Line all the way to the Channel, and the French didn’t want the Belgians to
think that France would abandon them to the Germans when the attack came. But King Leopold opted for neutrality in
1936. He closed the Belgian border to French military observers. The French were very defensive-minded in
their military thinking. Most of their
tactics were derived from the First World War.
They, like the British, didn’t want a repeat of the carnage of World War
I. The French had done much to introduce the tank
and the airplane to warfare, but had done little to develop them. They had made advancements in mechanized
transport, but reverted to using horses and railways.
German thinking was just the opposite. They too didn’t want a repeat of the First
World War, especially since they’re the ones who lost it. During the interwar years, Heinz Guderian
wrote his thoughts on armored warfare in a book Achtung Panzer!
Achtung Panzer!
is not just a work of theory that was intended to help Germany prepare for the
warfare of the future. It is also a
historical work. More than half the book
is dedicated to analysis of how tanks were used on the Western Front in World
War I. It emphasizes on how tanks came
into existence, the technical development of tanks, the organizational
development of the tanks corps, and the actual experience of tank operations. Guderian was lucky to have a patron who agreed
with him [General Oswald Lutz]. Lutz was
the Inspector of the Transport Troops, which was charged with motorizing the
German army. Guderian was soon to become
Lutz’s chief of staff. It was in this
job that Lutz encouraged Guderian to develop his armored warfare theories, even
going as far as to order him to write a book about it [Achtung Panzer!].
The things Guderian wrote about in 1936-37 are
commonplace today, but in his era, it was a revolution in tactical
thinking. Guderian was
multilingual. He spoke French fluently,
and was almost as good at English. He
studied the works of British maneuver warfare theorists [Swinton, J.F.C. Fuller,
B.H. Liddell Hart, and Giffard Martel], as well as one French tank advocate
named Charles de Gaulle. He read
everything he could get ahold of from these sources, and met face-to-face with
German tank veterans from World War I. So sharp was Guderian that he became a recognized tank expert before he ever set
foot in a tank. Guderian’s thinking was close
to that of Mikhail Tukhachevsky, the author of the Deep Battle doctrine
[Guderian had seen Russian armor for himself], though Tukhachevsky is not
mentioned by name. Guderian had an
audience [Adolf Hitler] that was more receptive to what he had to say than his
British, French and Russian/Soviet counterparts.
Prior to World War I, Guderian was attached to a
telegraph unit. During World War, I he
became a radio specialist and it was here he developed his appreciation for the
use of “signals” as a means of enhancing command and control of armored units. In 1930, he took command of a motor transport
battalion. This unit was equipped with
some armored cars, motorcycles, anti-tank guns and dummy tanks [The Versailles
Treaty forbid the Germans from having tanks].
Because the Versailles Treaty limited the size of the Reichswehr to only
100,000 men, the ten-pound brains in the German army [they weren’t allowed to have
a General Staff either] had to find a way to create an effective, highly mobile
force to meet contingencies. Guderian’s
unit was charged with demonstrating how different mechanized combat arms could
work together. The lessons he learned
from World War I include: 1) Tanks should be used in large groups; 2) Tanks
should not be wasted on unsuitable ground like swamps; 3) Tanks are best used
when you have the element of surprise. His
instructions were clear – strike hard, and quickly, and don’t disperse your
forces. Hit the enemy with a fist – don’t
poke them with fingers. His thoughts
about other combat arms included:
Infantry –
called “the Queen of battle” by many, but not so Guderian. He saw infantry as a supporting combat arm rather than a supported combat arm. He thought infantry needed to be combined in
fully motorized formations with other traditional supporting arms – engineers
and artillery – all in support of tanks.
Engineers – go
out and find mines, provide pathways over waterways [build bridges], provide
means to traverse swamps or other soft ground, reinforce bridges that are too
weak to support tanks
Artillery –
must be fast-moving, must be sufficiently well-protected to keep up with tanks.
Suppress targets and geographical features that tanks can’t take on by
themselves. Long bombardments chew up
ground, makes it difficult for tanks to maneuver, betrays the location of
impending attack, permits defenders to enhance the readiness of reinforcements. Joint training of artillery and tanks is a
must.
Aircraft –
Guderian stressed the impact of airpower on operations of the Western
Front. Aircraft created disorder in
German rear areas, hindered the movement of reserves, and brought German
batteries under actual attack. Because
of their “great speed, range and effect on target,” aircraft became an
offensive weapon of the first order.
The French did have a plan. If the Germans attacked through Belgium like
they did in World War I, 40 French divisions, along with 10 divisions of
British troops [the British Expeditionary Force (BEF)], would move into neutral
Belgium to meet them. The plan was to
re-fight the First World War. The French
commander, General Gamelin, looked at the map and decided to guard the Ardennes
Forest with 10 of his weakest, worst equipped divisions. To the French, the Ardennes were impenetrable. The Germans knew what opposed them in this
sector. They also knew the French had
more tanks, better and heavier tanks, but had dispersed them throughout the
army. The Germans had a different idea.
Erich von Manstein was Gerd von Rundstedt’s Chief of
Staff when he served in Army Group A in 1939-40. When he saw the original plan to attack
France he saw a plan that was not a recipe for swift and decisive victory over
the Allies. He saw a plan in which the
bulk of the attack would happen north of France through Belgium. At first he thought it was a rerun of the Von
Schlieffen Plan used to attack France in the First World War. In that plan, the armies moved like a wheel
through Belgium, sweeping along the English Channel coast and then heading
south toward Paris. Upon further review,
he still saw that the northern forces [Army Group B] would head straight for
the Channel coast, which would allow the Allies to counterattack its southern
flank [see Map 3 below]. What he
proposed [and Hitler eventually agreed to] was to shift the bulk of the attack
from Army Group B to the more southern Army Group A. While Army Group B would attack through
Belgium like it would have in the original plan, a more beefed-up Army Group A
would attack through the Ardennes, make a breakthrough, get into the enemy’s
rear and make a dash for the Channel [see Map 4 below]. His proposal was like a Von Schlieffen Plan
in reverse. Once the breakthrough was
made, Army Group A would swing to the northwest while Army Group B pressed directly west, thus catching the Allies in a pincer, cut off from the rest of
France. With the bulk of the French and
British armies cut off from France, France would be ripe for the taking. The French received reports of 50 German
divisions on the move. They even found
out the day of the attack, but they preferred to “wait for events”.
The waiting ended on May 10th. At 5:30am, the Germans attacked neutral
Holland from the air. Their targets were
the bridges over the Maas River [Meuse in France and Belgium]. The boldness of the German attack stunned the
Dutch. Dutch soldiers surrendered in
large groups. The Germans had stunning
success in Belgium as well. Glider
troops landed on the roof of Fort Eben Emael, the largest fort in the world at
the time, and was the lynchpin of Gamelin’s defensive line. Gamelin moved his 50 divisions north into
Belgium and Holland, straight into the trap the Germans set for them. The column of troops heading through
Luxembourg was a target-rich environment for Allied aircraft, but they were too
busy covering the French/British advance into Belgium. The Luftwaffe hit Allied airfields, catching
many aircraft on the ground while they were lined up in neat rows. fThe Luftwaffe attacked Fifty Allied airfields on that
first day.
On the third day of the German offensive, the panzers
reached Sedan. Of historical note, Sedan was the place where the Prussians
captured French Emperor Napoleon III during the Franco-Prussian War. Gamelin didn’t think the panzers could get
that far so fast. According to his
calculations, the Germans were six days ahead of schedule. The French had blown all the bridges over the
Meuse except for one. The Germans found
a weir to cross 40 miles north of Sedan.
A panzer division commanded by Erwin Rommel found this weir relatively
unguarded. As Rommel got his tanks
across the Meuse, the Luftwaffe went into action near Sedan. Gamelin and his generals were target-fixated
on what was going on in Belgium. By the
end of the fourth day of the attack [May 13th], German infantry were
across the Meuse in large numbers, and German engineers were building bridges
across the Meuse to get more panzers across.
The French tried to counterattack Army Group A, but their
attacks were poorly organized. On May 14th,
the Allied air forces attacked the German bridges over the Meuse, but Allied
losses were heavy. Only 50 percent of
the planes that made the attack returned to base. After May 14th, the Luftwaffe had
achieved air superiority. Holland
surrendered that same day. After the
German victory at Sedan, Gamelin thought the Germans would head straight for
Paris, so he pulled troops away from the Meuse to protect the capital. That move just gave the Germans more room for
maneuver to make their dash for the Channel coast. Brussels fell on May 17th, and on
that same day Gamelin was relieved. He
was replaced by General Weygand, who was recalled from virtual retirement in
Syria. A 73-year old general was
replacing a 68-year old general. The
French were desperate. Marshal Henri
Petain also became Deputy Prime Minister, and he was 84. At that time, Petain was the French
Ambassador to Spain. Before he left
Spain, Petain told Franco that his country was beaten, a result of “30 years of
Marxism”. French troops surrendered by
the thousands.
On May 20th, the Germans that had broken
through at Sedan reached the English Channel.
The British withdrew to Dunkirk. The
French were not happy with the British.
On May 25th Boulogne fell, and Calais fell the next day. On May 28th, news reached Paris
that Belgium surrendered. Dunkirk held
out until June 4th. The
British managed to evacuate over 300,000 troops back to Britain before then,
but they left behind their tanks, their trucks, all their heavy equipment. The evacuation was celebrated, but Churchill
remarked that “wars aren’t won by evacuations.”
The panzers had time to reorganize, re-equip, and catch their breath and
began the push south toward Paris on June 5th. After three days of fighting, Rommel reached
the Seine. On June 10th, the
French government fled Paris. Two days
after Paris fell, Petain [who by then was Prime Minister] asked the Germans for
an armistice.
Hitler insisted on using the same railroad car in Compiegne
used to sign the armistice that ended World War I. The Battle of France was over. It took Hitler’s Wermacht five weeks to do
what the Kaiser’s armies couldn’t do in four years.
Sources:
The World at War - France Falls: May-June 1940
Heinz Guderian - Achtung Panzer!
Erich von Manstein - Lost Victories
Sources:
The World at War - France Falls: May-June 1940
Heinz Guderian - Achtung Panzer!
Erich von Manstein - Lost Victories
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