582 Chapter 29Belgians, who had endured more than four years of
bloodletting without yielding in 1914–18, surrendered
to the Nazis in one week.
The British had sent a large expeditionary force
(the BEF) to the continent, but this army was cut off
and trapped near the coast of the English Channel at
Dunkirk (the northernmost port in France), with its en-
tire left flank exposed by the fall of Belgium and the
Luftwaffepounding it at will. Facing almost certain ca-
tastrophe, the British chose to evacuate the BEF. In one
of the most important retreats in military history, the
British used every available boat (mostly civilian) from
the English coast to ferry their army back across the
channel. Nearly 340,000 men (including 140,000
French and Belgian soldiers) abandoned their equip-
ment and the continental war, but thanks to the armada
of nine hundred small craft (and Hitler’s strange deci-
sion to halt the Panzerassault at Dunkirk), they survived
to fight Germany on more favorable terms.
A vulnerable and demoralized France faced the
Nazi Blitzkriegwithout the allies of 1914. Although the
French army of 800,000 regular forces and 5.5 million
trained reserves had been considered the strongest
army in Europe, it took no significant action against
Germany during the Sitzkrieg,instead sitting in the Ma-
ginot fortications and awaiting a German attack. Many
of the strongest units of the French army were lost in
the debacle in Belgium, however, and much of the
French air force had been destroyed on the ground in a
Nazi preemptive attack. Then, two days after the
Dunkirk evacuation, 120 divisions of the Wehrmacht
poured into northern France, outflanking the Maginot
Line instead of challenging it. Blitzkriegshattered
quickly assembled French lines, as the Nazis drove past
Sedan, site of the German victory of 1870, and Verdun,
symbol of French resistance in 1916. By mid-June (after
less than two weeks of fighting), the French army was
in chaos and Paris, without significant defenses, was
evacuated by the government to spare it the fate of
Warsaw and Rotterdam. With the fall of France seem-
ing imminent, Mussolini declared war on Britain and
France, invading the Riviera with an army of 400,000
men. France had been routed, and when the govern-
ment turned to Marshal Henri Pétain, the hero of Ver-
dun, he immediately surrendered. A gleeful Hitler
accepted the French surrender in Compiègne, signed in
exactly the same railroad boxcar where Imperial Ger-
many had capitulated in 1918 (which Hitler ordered
taken back to Berlin as a tourist attraction). The
Wehrmacht staged a victory parade down the Champs
Elysées and hung a giant Nazi banner from the Eiffel
Tower.
The fall of France led to a German peace much
harsher than the Versailles Treaty. Germany reannexed
Alsace and Lorraine, then occupied the northern half of
France (including Paris) plus the entire Atlantic coast;
all the territory was placed under a German military
government. This partition of France ended the Third
Republic, which had often been a troubled regime but
had pioneered republican government in a monarchical
world. The rump state of southern France, known as
Vichy France because its capital was the spa of Vichy,
was led by the eighty-four-year-old Marshal Pétain and
a former conservative premier, Pierre Laval, who served
as Pétain’s most important deputy. They replaced
French constitutional democracy with an authoritarian
government that had no constitution, collaborated with
the Third Reich, and launched a Fascist National Revo-
lution. Vichy France changed the national motto of
“Liberty, Equality, Fraternity” to “Work, Family, Father-
land” and demonstrated the end of liberty by sending
leaders of the Third Republic, such as Léon Blum, to
German concentration camps. Pétain and Laval emu-
lated the Nazi Gleichschaltung,seen in restricted free-
doms, the regulation of basic institutions, and
institutionalized anti-Semitism.
The highest ranking leader to escape was General
Charles de Gaulle, who had been an obscure brigade
commander in 1939 and whose government post was
undersecretary for war in June 1940. De Gaulle had fa-
vored fighting to the bitter end, but when Pétain chose
to surrender de Gaulle fled to London, where he orga-
nized a government in exile known as Free France. On
his first day in London he addressed a famous radio ap-
peal to the French people: “Has the last word been
said? Has all hope disappeared? Is this defeat definitive?
No! Believe me.” This powerful broadcast (reproduced
on clandestine posters around France) sealed de Gaulle’s
wartime leadership—by 1941, some forty-five thousand
French troops from the Dunkirk evacuation and French
colonies had rallied to him—although the British and
Americans tried to replace him.
The first German defeat came when Hitler turned
his attention to Britain in the summer of 1940. To pre-
pare for an invasion of Britain, the Luftwaffecontested
the RAF for control of the skies over the English
Channel. The future of Britain, and perhaps of Europe,
rested with approximately five thousand pilots during
this battle of Britain and with an untested British
invention—radar—which enabled them to spot planes
seventy-five miles away from the coast of England (see
illustration 29.1). The Luftwaffesent as many as twenty-
one hundred planes over England, greatly outnumber-
ing RAF defenses. During July 1940 the British lost