Germany attacks in the West

At dawn on 10 May 1940, at 5.35 a.m. German time, the Wehrmacht crossed the borders of the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg along their entire length from the North Sea to the Moselle. A little earlier German bombers had attacked airfields, railway junctions and communications centres in the three neutral states and in north-eastern France, while gliders and paratroopers came down on bridges and airfields deep inside the Netherlands and on the Belgian fortifications along the Albert Canal. The Phoney War was over – eight months of waiting during which there had been almost no fighting on land in the West. A campaign had begun that within six weeks would sweep the Dutch and Belgian armies off the map, throw the British off the Continent and bring France to an armistice.

The first day went as the Allies had expected: the Germans struck through the Low Countries, and the French and British armies advanced into Belgium to meet them. That same morning, less spectacularly, the columns of seven German panzer divisions set off through the wooded Ardennes in Luxembourg and southern Belgium. It was they that would decide the campaign.

War chronologies record under 10 May that Germany invaded France and the Benelux countries, and that Belgium declared a state of emergency. Both statements need qualifying. Germany did not declare war on the Netherlands, Belgium or Luxembourg: their governments received notes only when the troops were already crossing the border. The Reich had been at war with France since September 1939, and on 10 May French territory was attacked from the air. German ground forces did not enter French soil in strength until 12 May, when the leading panzer divisions reached the Meuse near Sedan. The sources do not confirm any Belgian act called a “state of emergency” from that day. Belgium, mobilised since the autumn of 1939, went to full combat readiness that night, the King took command of the army, and Parliament, hastily convened, passed legislation for a time of war and occupation.

A plan changed in February

Germany had been preparing this offensive since the autumn. On 9 October 1939, in Directive No. 6, Adolf Hitler ordered an attack through Luxembourg, Belgium and the Netherlands, and the date of the attack was then postponed many times. After the Mechelen incident, when documents of the plan fell into Belgian hands in January 1940, Hitler put off the offensive until the spring. In February, after a meeting at which Erich von Manstein presented his idea to him, the Army High Command turned Case Yellow on its head. The main thrust was now to go not across the plains of central Belgium but through the Ardennes to the Meuse between Dinant and Sedan, and on towards the mouth of the Somme, into the rear of the Allied armies that would advance into Belgium.

In May 1940 three German army groups stood in the West. In the north, Army Group B under Colonel General Fedor von Bock, with General Georg von Küchler’s 18th Army facing the Netherlands and Colonel General Walter von Reichenau’s 6th Army facing Belgium, numbered some 29 divisions, three of them armoured. Its task was to convince the Allies that this was where the main blow was falling. In the centre, Army Group A under Colonel General Gerd von Rundstedt, with Colonel General Günther von Kluge’s 4th Army, Colonel General Wilhelm List’s 12th Army and General Ernst Busch’s 16th Army, had some 45 divisions, seven of them armoured. Five of these were concentrated in the group under General Ewald von Kleist: General Heinz Guderian’s XIX Panzer Corps, with three panzer divisions, was to reach the Meuse at Sedan, and General Georg-Hans Reinhardt’s XLI Panzer Corps, with two, at Monthermé. Two further panzer divisions, in General Hermann Hoth’s XV Panzer Corps, were advancing with the 4th Army on Dinant. One of them, the 7th Panzer Division, was commanded by Generalmajor Erwin Rommel. In the south, Army Group C under Colonel General Wilhelm von Leeb, with some 18 divisions, stood on the defensive opposite the Maginot Line.

The air force committed two air fleets: General Albert Kesselring’s 2nd Air Fleet in the north and General Hugo Sperrle’s 3rd Air Fleet in the centre and south. Kesselring was also given command of Generalleutnant Kurt Student’s airborne forces: the paratroopers of the 7th Air Division (PL) and the infantry of General Hans von Sponeck’s 22nd Air Landing Division, carried in Junkers Ju 52 transport aircraft.

The opposing forces

On land the Germans had no numerical superiority. According to the calculations of the German military historian Karl-Heinz Frieser, Germany committed 135 divisions to the offensive, 42 of them in reserve, some 2,440 tanks and some 7,400 guns. The Allies had around 150 divisions on this front: 104 French, ten British infantry divisions and three poorly armed labour divisions, 22 Belgian, ten Dutch and two Polish. The French alone had more than 3,200 tanks on the north-eastern front, often better armoured than the German ones. Where the Germans held the advantage was in the air, especially in bombers, and in organisation: radio communications, the concentration of tanks in independent panzer divisions, and co-operation with the air force.

On the Allied side, the French 1st Army Group under General Gaston Billotte stood on the Belgian border: from the sea, General Henri Giraud’s 7th Army, Lord Gort’s British Expeditionary Force, which since the autumn had been fortifying its sector of the Belgian border, General Georges Blanchard’s 1st Army, General André Corap’s 9th Army and General Charles Huntziger’s 2nd Army. The last two, made up largely of reserve divisions, held the Meuse opposite the Ardennes, which the French command regarded as difficult terrain for large armoured formations. The north-eastern front was commanded by General Alphonse Georges, and the land forces as a whole by the Commander-in-Chief, General Maurice Gamelin.

The Polish forces being rebuilt in France were only just entering this war. Brigadier General Bronisław Duch’s 1st Grenadier Division was completing its preparations in Lorraine, while the 2nd Infantry Fusiliers Division was still being organised. The Independent Highland Brigade was at that time fighting at Narvik in Norway.

Warnings and the night of 9–10 May

The surprise lay not in the attack itself but in its direction. Colonel Hans Oster of German military intelligence, an opponent of Hitler, had for months been passing the dates of the attack to his friend Major Gijsbertus Sas, the Dutch military attaché in Berlin. Because Hitler had postponed the offensive so many times, The Hague and Brussels had stopped believing these warnings. On the evening of 9 May the codeword “Danzig” went out to the German divisional headquarters, signifying that the attack would begin the next morning. That same evening, as he left the headquarters of the High Command, Oster told Sas that this was it. Sas sent The Hague an agreed phrase which, according to Dutch accounts, ran: “Tomorrow at dawn. Hold tight!” Around midnight Belgian General Headquarters raised the alarm, and for the third time since mobilisation the troops took up their battle positions; the Dutch units were placed on alert.

Hitler left Berlin by special train on the afternoon of 9 May and towards morning reached the prepared headquarters at Felsennest near Bad Münstereifel in the Eifel hills. His order of the day was read out to the soldiers of the Western Front: “The battle beginning today will decide the fate of the German nation for the next thousand years.”

The blow from the air

The first explosions came from the sky. Early in the morning, before the ground forces moved, Luftwaffe bombers attacked airfields in the Netherlands, Belgium and France. The Dutch army air force lost about half of its roughly 140 combat aircraft on the first day. The Belgian air force, which according to the Belgian official account was caught on the ground, lost 83 of its 179 aircraft within twenty-four hours. In France, where aircraft were dispersed, losses on the ground were smaller, but from the first day the Germans won air superiority over the Low Countries.

That day German bombs also fell on a German city. In the afternoon three Heinkel He 111 bombers of Kampfgeschwader 51, which had lost their way en route to Dijon, bombed Freiburg im Breisgau, mistaking it for a French town. Fifty-seven inhabitants were killed, many of them children. Propaganda blamed the raid on the Allies.

The British and French responded cautiously that day. In the afternoon the British Advanced Air Striking Force sent Fairey Battle light bombers against German columns in Luxembourg. According to the British official history, thirteen of the 32 aircraft failed to return and the rest were damaged.

The Netherlands

The boldest part of the plan was carried out in the Netherlands. Hitler, who had personally approved the operation, was counting on an airborne landing near The Hague to seize Queen Wilhelmina, the government and the high command within a few hours and force the country to capitulate. About an hour after the bombing, paratroopers landed at the Ypenburg, Ockenburg and Valkenburg airfields around The Hague, and transport aircraft carrying infantry of the 22nd Division began to land behind them. The Dutch, forewarned, met them with fire. At Ypenburg the wrecks of burning Junkers blocked the runway, the following waves landed in meadows and on beaches, and by evening Dutch counter-attacks had retaken all three airfields. The landing near The Hague ended in failure, although the shattered German units fought on for several more days. In the following days the Dutch managed to ship some 1,200 German prisoners to Britain.

Further south the Germans fared much better. Twelve Heinkel He 59 seaplanes landed on the Maas in the centre of Rotterdam, and the troops they carried seized the Willemsbrug. Paratroopers took Waalhaven airfield on the south side of the city, the bridge at Dordrecht and the long bridges at Moerdijk over the Hollands Diep estuary. It was across these that the 9th Panzer Division was to arrive from the south. According to figures cited in the literature, in the whole Dutch campaign the Germans lost more than two hundred of the roughly 430 Junkers Ju 52s they committed there, most of them around The Hague.

On land the Germans tried to capture the bridges over the IJssel and the Maas intact by ruse. Special units, some disguised as Dutch military police, approached the bridges at night, but the Dutch usually managed to blow them up. At Gennep the ruse worked: a German armoured train crossed the captured railway bridge, followed by a train carrying an infantry battalion, which detrained behind the Dutch Peel-Raam defence line. In the evening the Dutch abandoned that line. In the east the Germans reached the Grebbe Line. In Limburg, Maastricht fell before noon, but the Dutch had blown the Maas bridges and the German tanks had to wait until the next day to cross.

Early in the morning the German minister in The Hague handed the Dutch Foreign Minister, Eelco van Kleffens, a note in which the Reich announced that it would “ensure” the Netherlands’ neutrality “by all military means”. The government replied that it considered itself at war with Germany. In a proclamation to the nation Queen Wilhelmina made a “flaming protest” against this violation of good faith.

Belgium

In Belgium the first blow fell on the strongest point of its defences. Early in the morning DFS 230 gliders landed on the roof of Fort Eben-Emael, regarded as the most modern fortress in Europe, and beside the bridges over the Albert Canal at Veldwezelt, Vroenhoven and Kanne. With hollow charges the sappers put the fort’s armoured cupolas out of action. Two bridges fell into German hands intact; the Belgians managed to blow the third. Belgium’s main defence line had been breached on the first day, at the point considered the most secure.

King Leopold III, like his father in 1914, took personal command of the army and went to its headquarters at Fort Breendonk near Mechelen. In a proclamation to the nation he recalled that Belgium had been invaded by Germany “for the second time in a quarter of a century”, despite solemn undertakings. Early in the morning, while fighting was already under way on the Albert Canal, the government of Prime Minister Hubert Pierlot appealed for help to France and Britain, which in 1937 had reaffirmed their guarantees to Belgium. When the German ambassador, Vicco von Bülow-Schwante, came in the morning to the Foreign Minister, Paul-Henri Spaak, with a note similar to the one delivered in The Hague, Spaak, by his own account, interrupted him and read out the Belgian protest first. In it he recalled that in October 1937 the Reich had given an assurance that it would always respect Belgian territory. Parliament, hastily convened that same day, passed legislation allowing officials to assume the powers of their superior authorities should communication with them be cut. During the occupation it became the basis for rule by the secretaries-general of the ministries.

In the south, in the Belgian province of Luxembourg, the Chasseurs Ardennais of the 1st Chasseurs Ardennais Division (PL) blew bridges and blocked roads before four in the morning and then, in accordance with their orders, began to withdraw northwards. Using Fieseler Fi 156 Storch light aircraft, the Germans flew two companies of the Großdeutschland Regiment into their rear. At Bodange a small detachment of Chasseurs Ardennais, which the order to withdraw had not reached, held up Guderian’s 1st Panzer Division for about eight hours.

Luxembourg

The Grand Duchy had no army capable of defending it. The border was closed only by the Schuster Line, concrete barriers and steel gates on the roads. At 4.35 a.m. local time the leading columns of the 1st, 2nd and 10th Panzer Divisions crossed the border at Wallendorf, Vianden and Echternach, getting over the barriers on wooden ramps. Grand Duchess Charlotte and her family, together with Prime Minister Pierre Dupong and Foreign Minister Joseph Bech, managed to get away to France. Before noon the Germans occupied the capital.

The Allies advance into Belgium

At French General Headquarters at Vincennes, Gamelin, woken by news of the attack, gave the order to execute the Dyle Plan with the Breda variant. In his order of the day he wrote: “The attack we have been expecting since October was launched this morning.” The Belgians opened the border, and from the morning French and British columns, greeted by the population with flowers, moved north-east.

The plan had been worked out in detail. Giraud’s 7th Army, the strongest and most mobile French reserve, raced along the coast through Antwerp towards Breda in the Netherlands, to link up with the Dutch army. In the evening its reconnaissance units reached the Dutch border, but where it was supposed to meet the Dutch, their defence was already crumbling and the Moerdijk bridges were in German hands. The BEF was heading for the line of the Dyle from Leuven to Wavre, and its motorised units got there in the evening. The French 1st Army was to occupy the Gembloux Gap from Gembloux to Namur, preceded by a cavalry corps with two light mechanised divisions. The 9th Army was moving up to the Meuse in Belgium, and the light cavalry divisions of the 9th and 2nd Armies entered the Ardennes, where they ran into the German spearheads.

The German air force hardly interfered with this advance. The best French and British armies were marching north to meet Army Group B, while in the Ardennes, on the roads of Luxembourg and the Belgian province of Luxembourg, more than forty thousand vehicles of Kleist’s group were moving in columns dozens of kilometres long. French reconnaissance aircraft spotted them as early as the night of 10–11 May, but the high command concluded that this was a secondary thrust.

London, Paris and the rest of the world

The attack found the Allied governments in crisis. In Paris Prime Minister Paul Reynaud, who since March had been at odds with Gamelin, was just about to dismiss the Commander-in-Chief. In view of the attack he abandoned the idea. In London, after the defeat in Norway, from which the Allies had withdrawn in the first days of May, Neville Chamberlain was still trying in the morning to hold on to office. The Labour Party, however, refused to join a government under his leadership, and in the evening Winston Churchill became Prime Minister. That same day British marines landed in Iceland to forestall the Germans, who had occupied Denmark a month earlier.

German propaganda presented the attack as a pre-emptive response to an Anglo-French invasion of the Low Countries, just as it had done a month earlier with the invasion of Norway. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt condemned the attack on three neutral states, and Leopold III sent him a telegram assuring him that Belgium would defend itself.

The evening of the first day

By the evening of 10 May Luxembourg was almost entirely occupied, and in the Netherlands the Germans held the bridges south of Rotterdam. In Belgium the Germans had crossed the Albert Canal, and Fort Eben-Emael, its armoured cupolas put out of action, surrendered at noon the next day. The following evening the Belgians began to withdraw from the canal to the Antwerp–Leuven line, several days earlier than planned.

According to accounts from his entourage, Hitler later said that when the news reached him at Felsennest that the enemy was advancing along the whole front, he could have wept for joy. The Allies had made exactly the move on which the February plan depended.

Place in the war

On 10 May 1940 the most important campaign of the early years of the war began. On 12 and 13 May the first great tank battle was fought at Hannut. On 13 May German infantry and sappers, supported by the air force, forced the Meuse at Sedan, and Rommel’s tanks crossed the river at Dinant. On 14 May the Luftwaffe bombed Rotterdam, and the Dutch army laid down its arms. Kleist’s panzer divisions, instead of turning towards Paris, raced westwards and on 20 May reached the Channel near Abbeville, cutting off in Belgium the armies that on 10 May had so efficiently carried out the Dyle Plan. On 28 May Belgium capitulated, and by 4 June more than 330,000 British and French soldiers had been evacuated to England from Dunkirk. On 14 June the Germans entered Paris, and on 22 June France signed the armistice at Compiègne.

For Poland the defeat of France meant the loss of its main ally on the Continent and a second evacuation of the government and the army, this time to Britain. For Hitler, victory in six weeks where the Imperial army had failed to break through in four years confirmed his genius and encouraged him to further risky ventures, above all the invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941. The myth of “Blitzkrieg” rested largely on the success of a risky plan and on the mistake of an opponent who, on hearing of the attack, walked straight into the trap prepared for him.