Dunkirk

On May 25, 1940, the situation of the French 1st Army and the BEF along the Channel coast was desperate.  The port of Boulogne had been overrun, Calais was isolated by German troops, and Allied troops pulled back northward to Dunkirk.  Lord Gort, the British Commander, judging further combat operations to be futile, decided to organize an evacuation by sea.  As Luftwaffe dive bombers screamed down and panzer divisions stood poised for a final assault, a successful evacuation seemed unlikely.  The British expected Dunkirk to be overrun in a day.  But unknown to the Allies, Hitler had made a decision that would save them from annihilation.  Panzer crews of Army Group A were exhausted, their machines needed repair, and lines of communication and supply had been overextended by the rapid Ardennes incursion and blitzkrieg sweep to the coast.  The panzers were ordered to stop and regroup for two days - just enough time for an evacuation to occur.  When the tanks resumed their advance on May 26, the weather had deteriorated and the Germans became bogged down in heavy rain, giving the British even more time.

On the morning of May 26, Vice Adm. Bertrand Ramsay put operation Dynamo into action when a makeshift fleet crossed the English Channel to Dunkirk.  However, despite the heroic efforts of the RAF, the port city was under such heavy air attack that the harbor could not be used effectively.  The only alternative, using Dunkirk's beaches, meant that most of the evacuation fleet could not get close enough to the beaches for the troops to embark (most ships were a mile or more off the beach). Ramsay now sent out a call for private and commercial shallow-draft boats over 30' long.  In response, approximately 850 fishing boats, cabin cruisers, and barges from coastal areas throughout southern England crossed the Channel.  Many were crewed by their owners, although most were manned by navy personnel.  The little boats worked the beaches, ferrying troops out to the larger ships waiting to take them to safety.  Under constant attack from the air, the evacuation lasted until June 4 by which point over 338,000 soldiers were saved to fight another day.  This included 113,000 French troops who fought bravely, slowing down the German advance.  Other French troops manning the rear guard sacrificed themselves by remaining in defensive positions around Dunkirk until the last boats had pulled away from the beaches.  A further 220,000 Allied troops were rescued by British ships from other French ports - Cherbourg, Saint-Malo, Brest, and Saint-Nazaire - bringing the total of Allied troops evacuated to 558,000.  Approximately 40,000 French soldiers became prisoners-of-war.  At least 243 British ships were sunk during the evacuation, including six Royal Navy destroyers.  RAF Fighter Command lost 100 fighters in the Dynamo operation, and nearly half its aircraft force during the French campaign.  The British troops carried back their rifles but lost all of their heavy weapons and thus, would not be equipped to fight the Germans for a long time. Operation Dynamo, often referred to as "the miracle of Dunkirk" was the largest military evacuation in history.  German ships would now begin operating out of captured bases along the French coast.

Prime Minister Winston Churchill became the living embodiment of Britain's will to resist the Germans.  During his speech about Dunkirk to Parliament on June 4, he expressed confidence that any Nazi invasion of Britain would be defeated, but did strike one note of caution - "We must be very careful not to assign to this deliverance the attributes of a victory.  Wars are not won by evacuations." Operation Dynamo saved the experienced professional core of the British Army from total destruction, but it did nothing to prevent the fall of France.  Only in the context of a much longer war than was expected at the time did the evacuation from Dunkirk begin to take on its true significance. The presence of the BEF in the south of England, even without their heavy equipment, made it much less likely that the Germans would be able to invade successfully, and made it much more likely that Britain would fight on.

Final Stage of the Battle

Having lost almost half its army and much of its heavy weapons, France had to fight on.  The final stage of its defeat began on June 5 with a massive German bombardment in support of assault troops who then crossed the Somme and Aisne Rivers.  The French Army put up strong resistance but were pushed back, and soon Hitler's panzers were advancing south.  Army Group C, held in reserve, now crossed the Rhine into France to seal off French troops manning the Maginot Line.  By June 9, the trickle of surrendering French troops had turned into a flood, panzers had reached the Seine River, and the infantry was close behind.  Once across the Seine, the Germans fanned out into the interior of the country.  The French government, gripped by defeatism,was forced to relocate to Bordeaux to avoid capture, and declared Paris to be an open city.  By June 14 the German Army marched into Paris and raised the Nazi blood banner/swastika above the Eiffel Tower.

Winston Churchill, painfully aware that Britain's costly military investment in the defense of France had been squandered, urged French Premier Reynaud to remain in the fight.  But Reynaud declined to do so, and resigned.  He was succeeded by the 82-year-old World War I hero Marshall Phillippe Petain who immediately asked the Germans for an armistice.

1940 Armistice

The site Hitler selected for the armistice agreement was calculated to provide Germany with a supreme moment of revenge - a French national shrine in the Compiègne Forest commemorating the Allied victory in the Great War.  The formalities would occur in the original railway carriage in which the Germans had signed the humiliating 1918 Armistice.  (The railway car had been removed from a museum building, placed on the precise spot where it was located in 1918, and Hitler sat in the same chair in which Marshal Foch sat when he faced the defeated German representatives.)  After listening to the reading of the preamble, Hitler - in a calculated gesture of disdain to the French delegates - left the crowded carriage, leaving the "negotiations" to his Armed Forces chief, General Wilhelm Keitel. French General Charles Huntziger tried to soften the harsher terms of the armistice, but Keitel replied that they would have to accept or reject the armistice as it was.  Given the military situation that France was in, Huntziger had "no choice" but to accede to the armistice terms.  None of the French delegation, believing the war would last just a few more weeks now that the United Kingdom and its Commonwealth were fighting alone, objected to a clause that said all French prisoners-of-war were to remain prisoners until the end of all hostilities with the British.  Thus, nearly one million Frenchmen were forced to spend the next five years in prisoner-of-war camps (about a third of the prisoners taken were released or paroled by the Germans before the war ended). The cease-fire went into effect on 25 June 1940.  Hitler then ordered the Compiègne site destroyed.

According to William Shirer in Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, General Huntzinger complained that the armistice terms imposed on France were far more harsh than those imposed on Germany in 1918.  The terms provided for German occupation of three-fifths of France, demarcated to give the German Navy access to all French Channel and Atlantic ports.  All persons who had been granted political asylum had to be surrendered.  All occupation costs had to be paid by France, amounting to 400 million French francs per day.  A minimal French Army would be permitted.  In one of Hitler's few concessions, the French Navy was to be disarmed but not surrendered, for he realized that pushing France too far could result in France fighting on from French North Africa.  An unoccupied region, called the zone libre, was left relatively free to be governed by a token French administration based in Vichy, which also administered the occupied zones (under severe restrictions).  A final peace treaty was intended, but never negotiated.  In November 1942, the Axis forces also occupied the zone libre, and metropolitan France remained under Axis occupation until after the Allied landings in 1944.

Reflections on the French Collapse

The dramatic and swift failure of the French Armed Forces in 1940 confounded many experienced observers.  France had the largest land army in Europe at the time, with tanks of equal or superior quality and in greater numbers than that of the Germans. Defenders of the Maginot Line strategy claimed that it did exactly as intended -sealing off a section of France, and forcing an aggressor around it.  As originally envisioned, the Maginot Line was part of a larger defense plan in which the attackers would meet with resistance from the French Army.  However, the Army was not able to stop Hitler's blitzkrieg through Belgium, leading to the overall failure of the Line.  In addition, the very existence of the Maginot Line created "Maginot-mindedness," a defensive mentality that discouraged offensive tactics and blinded the French toNapoleon's famous maxim: "the side that stays within its fortification is beaten."  It also promoted a rigidity of thought ill-suited to dealing with the highly fluid German battle plans and tactics.

Another key factor: the French commanders were elderly World War I veterans who were still visualizing and fighting the last war.  Apparently they were blind to the German blitzkrieg tactics so stunningly demonstrated in Hitler's invasions of Poland and Scandinavia and described in detail beforehand by General Heinz Guderian in his 1937 book, Achtung Panzer!  (Ironically, Guderian was one of the panzer commanders in Army Group A that passed through the "impenetrable" Ardennes and raced through northern France to the English Channel.)  Little importance was attributed to command communications and intelligence: for example, the superiority of French armor was wasted by the fact that individual tanks could not communicate with each other or with their commanders, whereas all German panzers were equipped with radios.  The result was a colossal tactical mismatch among French units because they could not coordinate their reactions to battlefield conditions against the Germans, who had the technology and experience to do so.  These problems existed at strategic as well as tactical levels: French Army Commander Maurice Gamelin, rarely stepped out of his headquarters, which was not connected by telephone or radio to subordinate units.  The French high command relied upon couriers to carry written messages back and forth to the battlefront.  Nor did other senior officers leave their headquarters to conduct first-hand inspections of the front. As for the information the generals actually received, it is difficult to imagine any intelligence analysis system that could explain their simply ignoring reports in early May that 50 German divisions had massed in the Ardennes Forest.  Despite shockingly poor leadership, many French combat units, particularly those engaged in the defense of Dunkirk and others attempting to stop the advance of Army Group A, fought bravely.  But once the Army got into a pattern of continued retreat, defeatism set in and the will to fight faded.

Epilogue

For four bleak years the French disappeared from the forefront of the war, except for those evacuees who remained in England and continued to fight with the Allies. Some French civilians chose courageous resistance at home; others settled into a routine of apathetic collaboration.  Many connived with Hitler's new order for Europe, such as the Vichy government.  It had taken the German Wermacht only five weeks to humble their historic foe.  In the words of Winston Churchill, " ... the Battle of France is now over.  The Battle of Britain is about to begin.  Hitler knows he will have to break us on this island or lose the war ... Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties ... If the British Empire and its Commonwealth last a thousand years, men will still say this was their finest hour."