Hitler Moves West



The German Generals had put to good use the "Twenty-Years-Armistice" since 1918. They brooded over their defeat in 1918 and studied its causes carefully. The principal cause of the German defeat in 1918 had been the costly stalemate in World War I, which permitted the Allies to mobilize their superior manpower and resources and overwhelm the Germans. The German strategists therefore determined that in the next war there must not be a stalemate, but that their new opponents -- who were likely to be their old ones -- must be overwhelmed by a Blitzkrieg before they could bring their superior economic and manpower potential to bear again.

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 Compiègne in which the Germans had signed the armistice terms on November 11, 1918, the French delegation faced Hitler. On the following day the second Compiègne armistice was signed. For the moment France had ceased to be a great power.



Send questions and suggestions to Professor Gerhard Rempel, Department of History, Western New England College. Last Revised 12-18-95.