The German attack once again began with an onslaught against Holland, Belgium, and Luxembourg. No declaration of war was made, and the enemy air forces were destroyed on the ground. “Fortress Holland” fell in five days. Hitler himself had developed the idea of dropping small, highly trained units of parachute troops at strategically important points behind the front; this proved a decisive factor in the rapid victory. Similarly, the center of the Belgian system of defense collapsed when Fort Eben Emael, the key to the system of fortifications guarding Liège, was eliminated by one such unit, which landed inside the fort area in gliders. Meanwhile, the advance through Luxembourg and the Ardennes, again a complete surprise to the enemy, made rapid progress. By May 13 the tank formations were able to cross the Meuse at Dinant and Sedan. On May 16 Laon fell, on May 20 Amiens; and that same night the first formations reached the Channel coast. At times the advance proceeded so rapidly that the main units lost contact with the vanguard, and Hitler, suspicious as always, distrusted his own triumph. “The Führer is frightfully nervous,” Halder noted on May 17. “He is alarmed by his own success, doesn’t want to risk anything, and consequently would prefer to stop us.” And on the following day: “The Führer is unaccountably fearful about the southern flank. He rages and shouts that we are on the point of ruining the whole operation and exposing ourselves to the dangers of defeat.”5
In fact there was no danger. When Britain’s new Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, alarmed by the situation at the front, flew to Paris, General. Gamelin admitted to him that the majority of his mobile forces had already, fallen into the German trap. Gamelin, commander in chief of the Allied armies, tried to conjure up memories of past glories. In an Order of the Day for May 17 he repeated word for word General Joffre’s proclamation before the first Battle of the Marne in September, 1914, calling upon the soldiers not to yield a foot of soil. But the Allied leaders did not succeed in collecting their retreating armies, building new lines, and organizing a counterattack. The Allied defeat would have been complete if General Guderian’s tank spearhead had not received the order, on May 24, to stop in its tracks. It was at this time only a few miles south of Dunkirk and not in contact with the enemy. The German slowdown for forty-eight hours left the Allies a port and thus the chance to escape. Within a week, in one of the most daring improvisations of the war, with the aid of some 900 largely small ships, fishing boats, excursion steamers, and private yachts, nearly 340,000 men—the greater part of the Allied formations—were ferried to England.
The responsibility for the order to halt before Dunkirk has since been the object of extensive investigation. Some have held that Hitler himself deliberately let the majority of the British Expeditionary Corps escape in order to keep open the way for the compromise with England that he continued to hope for. But such a decision would have contradicted the war aim formulated in his memorandum. It would also have contradicted Directive Number 13 of May 24, which began: “Next goal of operations is the annihilation of the French, British and Belgian forces encircled in Artois and in Flanders by the concentric attack of our northern wing…. During this operation the task of the Air Force is to break all enemy resistance in the encircled parts and to prevent the escape of the British forces across the Channel.” Hitler’s order to halt met with vehement opposition within the army High Command, but was approved by General von Rundstedt, the commander of Army Group A. Its underlying intention was rather to give a respite to the tank formations, exhausted by two weeks of fighting, and enable them to recoup their strength for the impending battle for France. Göring’s boasts that his Luftwaffe would transform the port of Dunkirk into a sea of flames and sink every ship that tried to dock there reinforced Hitler in his decision. When the city, which had been undefended and within Guderian’s reach ten days earlier, at last fell into German hands on June 4, Halder noted tersely: “Dunkirk taken, coast reached. Even the French are gone.”
Yet the superior operational plan was not alone responsible for the German successes. When Hitler’s armies turned south, after completing the encirclement maneuver at the Channel coast, they encountered a discouraged, broken enemy whose defeatism had been only magnified by the debacle in the north. The French command was operating with formations that had already been beaten, with divisions that had been dispersed, had deserted, or had simply passed into dissolution. As early as the end of May a British general called the French army a rabble without the slightest discipline.6 Millions of refugees aimlessly tramped the roads, dragging carts heaped high with possessions, blocking the movements of their own troops, carrying them along into the confusion, overtaken by German tanks, driven into panic by the bombs and the screams of the Stukas. Every step toward organized military resistance was submerged in the indescribable chaos. The country had been prepared for defeat but not for collapse. From the French headquarters in Briare there was only a single telephone link to the troops and to the outside world, and that was not in operation between twelve and two o’clock in the afternoon because the postmistress went to lunch at this time. When General Brooke, commander in chief of the British Expeditionary Force, asked about the divisions assigned for the defense of “Fortress Brittany,” General Weygand, the newly appointed supreme commander, shrugged resignedly: “I know they’re a pure figment of the imagination.” Many commanding generals stared at their maps as if these were a blank wall. It was in fact as if the sky were falling down upon France.
Although the German planning for the Battle of France had provided for scarcely any reactions on the enemy’s part, and although the directives seemed to suggest extensive marching drills rather than a campaign, Hitler was nevertheless surprised by the speed of the advance. On June 14 his troops marched through the Porte Maillot into Paris and lowered the tricolor from the Eiffel Tower. Three days later Rommel covered 150 miles in a single day. And when Guderian on the same day reported that he had reached Pontarlier with his tanks, Hitler wired back to ask whether it was not a mistake: “You probably mean Pontailler-sur-Saone.” But Guderian reported back: “No mistake. I am myself in Pontarlier on the Swiss border.” From there he advanced northeast and broke into the Maginot Line from the rear. The defensive line that had dominated France’s strategy and all her thinking fell almost without a fight.
With the German victory now tangible, Italy rushed in to help. Mussolini hated, as he was wont to say, the reputation of unreliability that clung to his country, and he wanted to banish it by “a policy as straight as a sword blade.” But the matter was not so simple. His decision to stay out of the war for the present had started to waver in October, in view of the German triumphs in Poland. In November he had regarded the idea that Hitler might win the war as “utterly intolerable.” In December he had said to Ciano that he “openly wished for a German defeat.” He had informed the Dutch and the Belgians of the date set for the German attack. Early in January, 1940, he wrote to Hitler, advising him against his present course. As the “dean of dictators” Mussolini tried to turn Hitler’s momentum toward the East:7
Nobody knows better than I, who possess nearly forty years of political experience, that politics makes its own tactical demands. This also applies to revolutionary politics…. Therefore I understand your… having avoided the second front. In Poland and the Baltic region, therefore, Russia has become the great gainer from the war, without risking anything. But I, who am a revolutionary by birth and have never changed my views, tell you that you cannot constantly sacrifice the principles of your revolution in favor of the tactical requirements of a momentary political situation. I am convinced that you may not lower the anti-Semitic and anti-Bolshevistic banner that you held high for twenty years… and I am only doing my absolute duty when I add that a single further step to extend your relations with Moscow would have devastating consequences in Italy….