The Battle of Belgium and the defense of the Channel ports (May 10–June 4, 1940)
- Date:
- May 10, 1940 - June 25, 1940
- Location:
- Limburg
- Low Countries
- Moselle River
- Paris
- Rhine River
- Participants:
- Belgium
- France
- Germany
- Netherlands
- United Kingdom
- Context:
- Maginot Line
- Phony War
- World War II
German forces near Maastrict crossed the Albert Canal into Belgium on the first day of the invasion, having neutralized the fortress of Eben Emael with an audacious predawn airborne assault. Arriving silently in gliders, several hundred elite German Fallschirmjäger (paratroops) landed atop the fort and began systematically destroying turrets and casemates with shaped charges. Soon after daylight they were joined by 300 additional infantrymen arriving by parachute. By noon of May 11 the 1,000-man garrison had surrendered and the path to Liège lay open. The Germans concealed the details of their operation so well that Allied strategists believed that Eben Emael must have fallen due to some act of treachery, and the facts of the fort’s capture would not be known until after the war.
The panzer breakthrough
The lead elements of Panzer Group Kleist (under Gen. Paul Ludwig von Kleist) crossed the Meuse River on May 13. By the following day the Germans had breached the Meuse-Albert Canal line in force and entered France just west of Sedan. Relentless pounding by Stuka dive-bombers shattered the morale of the French defenders in this sector; French commanders had believed so strongly in the impossibility of assault through the Ardennes that the troops there were almost completely lacking in antitank weapons and antiaircraft guns. For its part, the Maginot Line had not been broken. The German penetration had occurred at a weak extension of the line along the Belgian frontier, and the defenses that existed there were undermanned by troops of lesser quality. Nevertheless, the area which the line had been meant to protect had been invaded, and that, in time, forced the evacuation of the Maginot Line itself.
On May 15 Heinz Guderian’s XIX Panzer Corps broke through the French line and headed west into open country. The pace of the advance was breathtaking, and by all previous standards of war it was a disaster in the making. The German armoured salient was narrow and its flanks thinly held, if held at all, with its tip some 150 miles (more than 240 km) from the main body of the German advance. To the north lay the entire Belgian army, most of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF), and at least two French armies, amounting to nearly one million men, while the remainder of the French army lay behind and to the south of them. Indeed, Guderian’s superiors attempted to slow his progress to allow for a consolidation of forces, but he perceived the importance of maintaining his momentum. Characterizing his continued advance as “reconnaissance in force,” Guderian pressed on. On May 17 Guderian crossed the Oise River and entered the valley of the Somme, down which he raced to its mouth at Abbeville. Having reached the English Channel on May 20, Guderian had effectively severed communications between the Allied forces to the north and to the south. He paused briefly to allow German mechanized units to reinforce his flank along the Somme before swinging north to threaten the Channel ports of Calais and Dunkirk on May 22.
Other German units experienced similar successes. Gen. Erwin Rommel’s 7th Panzer Division crossed the Meuse near Dinant, Belgium, on May 13 and quickly established a bridgehead on the western bank. On May 15 Gen. Georg-Hans Reinhardt’s XLI Panzer Corps forced a crossing of the Meuse at Monthermé and shattered the French line. Rommel and Reinhardt both headed west into open country. Along with Guderian, they had opened a 60-mile- (nearly 100-km-) wide breach in the French defenses. Rommel’s division advanced so quickly that it could only maintain sporadic communication with Oberkommando des Heeres (OKH; Army High Command), leading it to be dubbed a “ghost division” by both the Germans and the French; neither could be entirely sure where Rommel was or where he would strike next. Meanwhile, Reinhardt’s corps approached the Channel ports south of the British rear at Arras.
The Belgian collapse and the Dunkirk evacuation
On May 15 Gamelin told French Premier Paul Reynaud that Paris might fall within two days’ time. Reynaud responded by recalling the retired 73-year-old general Maxime Weygand to take Gamelin’s place as commander in chief. Weygand did not arrive from Syria until May 19, however, leaving a critical void at the highest level of command while German panzers were running riot across Flanders. Upon assuming control of the French defense, Weygand immediately sacked more than a dozen generals, promoting fighting colonels such as Charles de Gaulle to replace them. Weygand endeavoured to strike the neck of the German salient in the Somme valley, but the French response was slowed by streams of civilian refugees who clogged the roads leading to the front.
Bock’s Army Group B had made short work of the Dyle Line, a planned defensive position running from Antwerp to the French frontier. Antwerp and Brussels were occupied in short order, and by May 19 BEF commander in chief Gen. John Gort had begun contemplating an evacuation from the Continent by sea. On May 21 Gort delivered a surprising counterstroke to Rommel’s 7th Panzer Division at Arras. Two BEF tank battalions supported by two infantry battalions and elements of a French mechanized infantry division struck south, temporarily sending the 7th Panzer and part of the Totenkopf (“Death’s Head) Waffen-SS division reeling. Although the British attack was made without air cover, significant artillery support, or adequate intelligence regarding the disposition of German forces, it sent a shock through the German army. By this point Allied communications had been so disrupted, however, that the localized success could not be exploited, and Arras would represent little more than a temporary setback in the German advance.
While Army Group A threatened the shrinking Allied pocket on the Channel coast from the south, Walther von Reichenau’s Sixth Army pushed the beleaguered Belgian defenders to the breaking point. On May 24 German units were just crossing the canal defense line close to Dunkirk, the only remaining port from which the BEF could be evacuated, when an inexplicable order from Hitler not only stopped their advance but actually called them back to the canal line. The Allies’ retreat to the coast now became a race to embark before the Germans closed their pincers. Evacuation began in earnest on May 27, and the situation became still more urgent the next day when Belgian King Leopold III—his troops everywhere in retreat and millions of civilian refugees caught in the “Flanders pocket”—surrendered his army.
The Royal Air Force asserted at least temporary air superiority over the Luftwaffe in the area, and the Royal Navy, with daring and precision, assisted by French naval craft, stood close to shore and not only covered the evacuation but took off thousands of men in overloaded destroyers and other small craft. In addition, a motley fleet of some 700 civilian boats assisted in the rescue effort. The success of the near-miraculous evacuation from Dunkirk was partly because of fighter cover provided by the Royal Air Force from the English coast, but it was also due to Hitler’s fatal order of May 24 to halt the German advance. That order had been made for several reasons: chiefly, Hermann Göring, head of the Luftwaffe, had mistakenly assured Hitler that his aircraft alone could destroy the Allied troops trapped on the beaches at Dunkirk; and Hitler himself seems to have believed that Great Britain might accept peace terms more readily if its pride were not wounded by seeing its army surrender. After three days Hitler withdrew his order and allowed the German armoured forces to advance on Dunkirk. They now met stronger opposition from the British, who had had time to solidify their defenses, and Hitler almost immediately stopped the German advance again, this time ordering his armoured force to move south and to prepare to complete the conquest of France. By June 4, when the operation was concluded, about 198,000 British and 140,000 French and Belgian troops had been saved.
Despite the near-miraculous success of the evacuation, the BEF had been forced to abandon virtually all of its heavy equipment, and more than 50,000 British troops remained stranded on the Continent. Some 11,000 of these men were killed in action, and most of the remainder were captured by the Germans. The courage and operational brilliance displayed at Dunkirk became a rallying point for the British, and, upon completion of the evacuation on June 4, Churchill went before the House of Commons to declare:
We shall not be content with a defensive war. We have our duty to our Ally. We have to reconstitute and build up the British Expeditionary Force once again…We shall go on to the end, we shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our Island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.
