June 1940: Fall of France

What:

On 10 May 1940, Germany invaded France and the Low Countries of Belgium, Netherlands, and Luxembourg. After only 46 days of fighting, less than two months, France had surrendered to German forces. France had fought Germany to a standstill for four years in WWI, but now lost to Germany in record time.

Everyone expected the German war against France to be fought on the scale of the First World War, with the conflict lasting for years and taking grueling tolls on both sides. This assumption was common among Britain, France, Germany, and the USSR.

 

Why:

France had prepared a huge defensive line and had the largest and best armies in Europe, rivalled only by Germany in 1940. The reason for French defeat was that they were unable to properly garrison Belgium, where the German offensive took place; concentrated their forces in an area that was not attacked; left virtually undefended an area that was attacked; and had adopted a warfare doctrine that prevented them from quickly responding to earlier strategic mistakes.

In WWI, Germany had invaded France by passing through Belgium and, correctly, everyone assumed that they would do it again. Accordingly, Belgium was important to the defense of France. However, in 1936, Belgium adopted a position of official neutrality to avoid getting involved in a European war. This hampered French planning and meant that, when French forces did enter Belgium in May 1940, there was a delay, there was little initial cooperation between their forces, and that most modern Belgian fortresses were built to defend against French, rather than German, aggression. France thus spent the first crucial days of battle getting set up in Belgium.

France concentrated its forces along the Maginot Line and in western Belgium, believing that the latter was the most likely spot for a German attack. Instead, Germany attacked through the Ardennes forest, a thick and hilly woodland. France and Belgium had assumed that this region was impenetrable to tanks and trucks, making it an extremely unlikely spot for the tank-focused Germany to attack. Knowing that their attack would not be expected, Germany attacked through the Ardennes, proved that tanks could pass through there, and entered France on 13 May 1940.

France had adopted a warfare doctrine based on the ‘methodical battle’, whereby artillery and tanks are tied to their role as infantry support and small advances are used to totally control territory and prevent the formation of salients or additional fronts. This is a fairly sound doctrine, but it was unsuited for the situation that France found itself in after German penetration of the Ardennes. France needed to respond rapidly to a sudden change in the position of the front and was unable to do so. All units were tied to the slowness of French infantry and artillery, tanks were not given the okay to operate independently, and a highly coordinated military doctrine inhibited rapid reactions to hugely changed circumstances. As a result, the French response to Germany’s invasion of the Ardennes was sluggish and French forces did not move quickly enough to cut off the main portion of the German armored offensive.

Following their push through the Ardennes, German forces turned west and moved toward Paris and the sea. As a result of the concentration of the most significant French armies, as was the British Expeditionary Force, in western Belgium, the German advance westward threatened to encircle these forces. This maneuver was successful in that German forces now blocked the strongest French units from rejoining the fighting in France and forced the trapped British to retreat across the English Channel. France lost a large portion of its professional army in that encirclement and, without significant French forces remaining in the region, Paris was captured by Germany on 14 June 1940. Without its capital, a significant portion of its army, or any coherent military plan, the French government was under sharp pressure from the rightist opposition to surrender. On 22 June 1940, it did so; northern France was occupied as a military zone to prepare for an invasion of Britain and southern France came under the control of a fascist dictatorship led by Philippe Petain based in Vichy.

 

Impact:

It had been assumed by every major power that France was one of the most powerful and capable militaries in the world and that any war against France would last for years. The Germany victory in France shattered these assumptions. The sudden victory panicked both Britain, which now fought alone, and the USSR, which had assumed Germany would have years of additional preparation before having to fight Germany itself.

Firstly, the fall of France is important in and of itself, as France was Germany’s main enemy in Europe and its defeat freed Germany to pursue its grand strategic ambitions in eastern Europe. The invasion of the USSR would not have been possible without German victory in France. When Germany did fight other wars, it now did so with French industries and with weapons and supplies looted from a defeated France. German success in France also encouraged Germany’s otherwise reluctant allies to expand their own war efforts, with Italy invading the French city of Nice and Japan invading French Indochina in the following months; the Axis was created only after German victory over France.