Battle of France

In six weeks in the early summer of 1940, the armies of Nazi Germany overran the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg and France, a collapse that stunned the world. The campaign ran from 10 May to 25 June 1940. It knocked France out of the Second World War, drove the British army off the continent and left Germany master of western Europe until the Allied landings of 1944.

France and Britain had declared war on Germany on 3 September 1939, two days after the German invasion of Poland, but for months there was little fighting in the west. French strategy rested on the Maginot Line, a chain of fortifications along the German border that was meant to push any attack north into Belgium, where the best Allied divisions would meet it. The wooded hills of the Ardennes, just north of the line, were widely thought too difficult for a large modern army to cross.

German planners at first expected to repeat a sweep through Belgium. Erich von Manstein, chief of staff of Army Group A, argued instead for a massed armoured thrust through the Ardennes, an idea strongly backed by the tank commander Heinz Guderian. After months of rejection by the army high command, a modified version of the plan was approved by Adolf Hitler in February 1940.

On 10 May German forces invaded the Low Countries. Allied armies, including the British Expeditionary Force, advanced into Belgium to meet what they believed was the main blow. Meanwhile German panzer divisions emerged from the Ardennes and on 13 May forced crossings of the Meuse near Sedan, supported by intense dive-bombing. French reserve troops behind the river broke, and the line gave way. The Dutch surrendered on the evening of 14 May after the bombing of Rotterdam.

The panzers then raced west down the Somme valley. On 20 May a German reconnaissance unit reached the Channel coast near Noyelles-sur-Mer, trapping the Belgian army, the British and three French armies in a vast pocket in the north. On 15 May the French prime minister, Paul Reynaud, had told Winston Churchill by telephone that the battle was lost; on 19 May he replaced the commander-in-chief, Maurice Gamelin, with Maxime Weygand.

A planned Allied counter-attack to cut the German corridor never came together. Belgium's King Leopold III surrendered on 28 May. Between 26 May and 4 June, in the Dunkirk evacuation, British and French ships carried more than 338,000 Allied soldiers to England, while French troops holding out at Lille and around Dunkirk slowed the German advance.

On 5 June the Germans attacked again, south across the Somme and the Aisne. The remaining French divisions resisted strongly in places but could not hold. Italy declared war on 10 June and attacked in the Alps, Paris was declared an open city and was entered by German troops on 14 June, and German armies pushed deep into France, outflanking the Maginot Line. Reynaud resigned on 16 June and was succeeded by Marshal Philippe Pétain, who sought an armistice.

Hitler chose the forest of Compiègne, where Germany had signed the armistice of 1918, and had the same railway carriage brought out for the occasion. The armistice was signed there on 22 June and took effect early on 25 June, after a separate Franco-Italian armistice.

Commonly cited German losses are about 27,000 killed, 111,000 wounded and 18,000 missing. French military deaths are estimated by recent French research at between 55,000 and 85,000, and some 1.5 million French soldiers were taken prisoner. British dead are given as anywhere from about 3,500 to 11,000 depending on the count, and the army lost almost all its heavy equipment.

Northern and western France came under German military occupation, Alsace–Lorraine was annexed, and in the unoccupied south a collaborationist regime under Pétain, based at Vichy, replaced the Third Republic. The defeat remained a deep trauma in France and a turning point of the war in Europe.

Our 1938 map shows Europe before the campaign, with the French Third Republic and the Low Countries independent, and our 1945 map shows the continent at the end of the war after France had been liberated.