Inferno - Max Hastings [37]
The campaign’s most important consequence was that it precipitated the fall of Chamberlain. Had there been no Norway, it is overwhelmingly likely that he would have retained office as prime minister through the campaign in France that followed. The consequences of such an outcome for Britain, and for the world, could have been catastrophic, because his government might well have chosen a negotiated peace with Hitler. But only posterity can thus discern a consolation for the Norwegian débâcle which was denied to all the contemporary participants save the victorious Germans.
2. The Fall of France
ON THE EVENING OF 9 May 1940, French troops on the Western Front heard “a vast murmuring” in the German lines; word was passed back that the enemy was moving. Commanders chose to believe that this, like earlier such alarms, was false. Though the German assault upon Holland, Belgium and France began at 4:35 a.m. on 10 May, it was 6:30 before the Allied C-in-C, Gen. Maurice Gamelin, was awakened in his bed, five hours after the first warning from the outposts. Following the long-anticipated pleas for assistance that now arrived from governments in Brussels and The Hague, neutrals in the path of the German storm, Gamelin ordered an advance to the river Dyle in Belgium, fulfilling his longstanding contingency plan. The British Expeditionary Force’s nine divisions and the best of France’s forces—twenty-nine divisions of First, Seventh and Ninth armies—began rolling northeastwards. The Luftwaffe made no serious attempt to interfere, for this was exactly where Hitler wanted the Allies to go. Their departure removed a critical threat to the flank of the main German armies, which were thrusting forward further south.
The defences of Holland and Belgium were smashed open. In the first hours of 10 May, glider-landed Luftwaffe paratroops secured the vital Eben Emael fort, covering the Albert Canal—built by a German construction company which obligingly provided its blueprints to Hitler’s planners—and two bridges across the Maas at Maastricht. Even as Churchill took office as Britain’s prime minister, German spearheads were rolling up the Dutch army. Meanwhile, southwestwards, some 134,000 men and 1,600 vehicles, of which 1,222 were tanks, began threading their way through the Ardennes forest to deliver the decisive blow of the campaign against the weak centre of the French line. Germans joked afterwards that they created “the greatest traffic jam in history” in the woods of Luxembourg and southern Belgium, forcing thousands of tanks, trucks and guns along narrow roads the Allies had deemed unsuitable for moving an army. The advancing columns were vulnerable to air attack, had the French recognised their presence and importance. But they did not. From beginning to end of the struggle, Gamelin and his army commanders directed operations in a miasma of uncertainty, seldom either knowing where the Germans had reached, or guessing whither they were going.
Disproportionate historical attention has focused upon the operations of the small British contingent, and its escape from Dunkirk. The overriding German objective was to defeat the French army, by far the most formidable obstacle to the Wehrmacht. The British role was marginal; especially in the first days, the BEF commanded the attention of only modest German air and ground forces. It is untrue