to the House of Commons, it was Chamberlain
whom the Conservatives loudly cheered. Cham-
berlain was soon to earn those cheers for far more
than his readiness to accept second place under
Churchill.
Norway was a serious defeat for the Allied war
effort. The Norwegian fjords could now serve as
ideal bases for the German submarines threaten-
ing to sever the lifeline of war supplies crossing
the Atlantic from the US. The most shattering
blow of all was the defeat of France, on whose
armies the containment of Germany overwhelm-
ingly rested. It seemed unthinkable that a great
power such as France would succumb as quickly
and as totally to the onslaught of the Blitzkrieg
as smaller nations like Poland and Norway had
done. Yet that is what occurred.
The military debacle of the Allied campaign in
France can be briefly summarised. The total
strength of the German army on the one hand
and the French, British, Belgian and Dutch forces
on the other were roughly comparable, as were
the numbers of tanks on each side. Arguably the
French had the edge in the quality of their tanks
and artillery. Germany achieved superiority in the
air but this in itself was not decisive and, contrary
to popular belief, the Maginot Line, to which so
much blame came to be attached, was of advan-
tage to the Allies: it deterred the Germans from
attacking more than half the frontier and it could
be held by a relatively small force. This meant that
the Allies did not have to concentrate on the
Franco-German border but could predict that the
main battles would occur in the regions not
covered by the Maginot Line. The Allies then had
apparently good reason for quiet confidence
before the Germans opened the offensive.
The Allies thought that the obvious route of
invasion lay through the north, the Netherlands
and Belgium, and made their plans accordingly.
The Germans, when they attacked, should not be
allowed to turn industrial northern France
immediately into a battle zone as they had done in
the First World War. The French and British forces
would, and did, have time to meet the German
thrust in Belgium before it reached France. The
Maginot Line ran alongside the whole frontier
with Germany, alongside that of Luxembourg and
alongside the southern tip of the Belgian frontier.
Just beyond was the heavily wooded Ardennes
region, believed by the Allies to be impassable to
any major German offensive with tanks; this sec-
tion of the front was lightly held. Beyond the
Maginot Line to the sea, one careful calculation –
others did not differ appreciably – indicated that
forty French divisions and nine British were facing
two German armies totalling seventy-four divi-
sions. But alongside the Allies another twenty-two
Belgian divisions were expected to fight, even dis-
counting ten Dutch divisions which were quickly
overwhelmed. The purely Anglo-French/German
disparity would have disappeared if thirty-five
French and one British division had not been
allotted to the Maginot Line and upper Rhine.
Germany’s success was based not on superiority of
numbers or equipment but on taking and choosing
the offensives and in so distributing the German
divisions that they would appear in overwhelming
strength at the weak point of the Allied front. The
massed, coordinated use of armour would ensure
that the initial breakthrough could be exploited
with great speed.
The Allies had anticipated no major thrust
through the Ardennes and the Germans achieved
complete surprise there. The second unexpected
development was the direction of the thrust. The
French high command thought in terms of 1914.
They expected the Germans would continue
straight from Sedan in a south-westerly direction
for Paris. Instead, in a great arc the massed Panzers
coordinated with aircraft followed by infantry,
turned west towards the Channel coast at
Abbeville, and north-west to Boulogne, Calais and
in the direction of Dunkirk. The BEF (the British
Expeditionary Force) and northern French armies
were now caught in a nutcracker, with one
German army pressing them through Belgium and
the other swinging behind their rear. It was like a
mirror image of the Schlieffen Plan and had the
advantage that the wheel to the coast was a finite
and limited distance, whereas Schlieffen’s arc had
been huge, and of virtually indefinite length. Had
the Wehrmacht attacked in November 1939, the
plan would then have corresponded to Anglo-
French expectations of an offensive predominantly
through Belgium, the old Schlieffen formula.
1
GERMANY’S WARS OF CONQUEST IN EUROPE, 1939–41 245
