34 FLYPAST May 2015194019401940
I
t is easy to imagine the sense of
trepidation in British homes as
British Prime Minister Winston
Churchill made his famous ‘finest
hour’ speech on June 18, 1940.
Germany had just achieved in a
matter of weeks what it had failed
to accomplish in years of fierce
fighting in the previous war.
The enemy’s success had come
largely as a result of its strategy- a method popularly known as
‘Blitzkrieg’ (it translates literally
as ‘lightning war’). Though more
the result of ad hoc ‘in the field’
solutions than a consistent tactical
doctrine, Blitzkrieg involved
massive co-ordinated attacks at
specific points involving heavy
armour divisions and aircraft.
Such incursions through Belgium,
the Netherlands and France proved
devastating to Allied resistance.
World War Two had begun the
previous year, following Germany’s
BLITZKRIEGBLITZKRIEG
LIGHTNING WAR
HISTORYinvasion of Poland on September
1, 1939. While Britain, France and
numerous Commonwealth nations
had declared war on the aggressors
on September 3, virtually nothing
was done to thwart the attack on
the Poles. Hitler then made peace
overtures to Britain which were,
in the light of past experience,
not taken seriously by Prime
Minister Neville Chamberlain’s
government.
In April 1940 Germany
successfully invaded Denmark
and Norway. The worsening
crisis led to Chamberlain being
replaced by Churchill on May- On the same day, Germany
launched its offensive against
France. For tactical reasons,
it also attacked Belgium, the
Netherlands and Luxembourg,
despite their supposed neutrality,
heightening the sense of outrage
both in Britain and further afield.
TWO-PRONGED
AT TAC K
The invasion consisted of two
parts, Fall Gelb (Operation Yellow)
and Fall Rot (Operation Red).
The first of these saw German
armoured forces powering through
the supposedly impenetrable
Ardennes Forest, effectively
bypassing concentrated Allied
defences massing in Belgium and
the heavily fortified Maginot Line.
The latter had been built in the
1930s close to France’s border
with Germany – it was wrongly
assumed that an invading German
Army would need to directly
engage these defences.
Instead, enemy troops poured
into Belgium and the Netherlands,
launching shattering attacks and
outflanking the Allied forces that
were moving into the former. It was
the combination of concentrated
firepower and unexpected speed34-35_Blitzkrieg_fpSBB.indd 34 09/03/2015 09:46