the campaign’s focal point. Broken terrain made the option a risk—but a calcu-
lated risk, taking maximum advantage of the principal German force multipliers:
leadership and technology. Hitler, disgruntled with his generals’ conventionality
and angered by a security breach that put copies of the original plan in Allied
hands, took advantage of Manstein’s temporary presence in Berlin to discuss his
ideas. A few days later, he issued a new operational plan: a ‘scythe cut’ (Sichelsch-
nitt) through northern France.
The ‘phoney war’, theSitzkrieg,came to a brutal end in the spring of 1940. In
February, Hitler, influenced by his admirals’ demands for a coastline long enough
to provide some operational flexibility, launched an invasion of Denmark and
Norway. The Allied response was limited and ineffective. Outnumbered, at the far
end of a long supply line, the Wehrmacht, nevertheless, bested the British at their
own historic game of power projection—albeit at the cost of most of the ships
originally expected to take advantage of the Norwegian bases. Scandinavia,
however, became a strategic backwater when, on 10 June, Nazi Germany launched
an all-out offensive through Holland, Belgium, and northern France.
The developed German plan used almost a third of the armoured force as bait.
One panzer division was part of a ‘shock-and-awe’ attack on the Netherlands. Two
more, plus a motorized division, provided the mobile core of an otherwise foot-
powered thrust into Belgium. A chess player might speak of a knight’s move, a
bullfight aficionado might think of a matador’s cape. But the other half of the knight
fork, the sword delivering the killing blow, was a ‘panzer group’ of five armoured and
three motorized divisions. Nothing like it had ever existed in the German command
structure. Armies and corps, yes, but a ‘group’ was generally understood as a
temporary organization for secondary missions. Rundstedt left no doubt that the
concept was on trial by keeping the panzer group organically subordinated to one of
his field armies during the campaign. This was anything but a vote of confidence,
and proved a constant source of confusion, friction, and bad temper.
Sichelschnitt, on the other hand, benefited from an obliging enemy. An
‘obliging enemy’ is one that not so much makes mistakes, but behaves as though
its orders had been written by the opposition. French generals and staff officers
were students and creatures of a doctrine emphasizing the importance of fire-
power and management. They had no intention of playing to the German army’s
obvious strength by seeking an encounter battle of the classic sort, as opposed to
deploying along a line offering a shorter and stronger position than the one
defined by the Franco-Belgian frontier. The Allied high command rushed every
available man, gun, and tank into Belgium and Holland. Its goal was to establish a
killing ground for the managed battle that would decide the war. 72
The weight of the German attack, however, was further south, through an
Ardennes Forest considered impassable by large motorized forces. Pre-war intel-
ligence reports of German intentions to attack through the Ardennes were
processed as referring to no more than a secondary offensive. Initial reports of
massive tank columns seemingly everywhere in the forest were dismissed as first-
battle jitters. Besides, even if the Germans made it through the trees, they would
surely be stopped by the river.
54 The Evolution of Operational Art