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region of narrow roads which was considered virtually impassable to heavily armoured vehicles; the left flank of Army Group A would be wide open to Allied counter-attack from the south as it raced across northern France towards Abbeville on the Somme river and then northwards to Boulogne, Calais and eventually Dunkirk; there was a limited number of bridges over the River Meuse, which had to be captured quickly; the weak left flank guarded by the unarmoured twenty divisions of Army Group C on the Siegfried Line would be vulnerable to the forty French divisions facing it behind the Maginot Line. Over the last issue the Germans need not have worried unduly. The Maginot Line was as much a state of mind as a line of fortifications, and there was no likelihood of the French surging forward from it to engage Army Group C. Named after a French defence minister of the 1930s, André Maginot, the Line had been built between 1929 and 1934. Stretching from Pontarlier on the Swiss frontier all the way along the Franco-German frontier to Luxembourg, it was 280 miles long, comprised 55,000 tons of steel and 1.5 million cubic metres of concrete, and was connected by an underground railway, which still works today.

After Belgium short-sightedly re-established her neutrality after the Great War, the Line should have been continued all the way along the Belgian border to the Channel coast, and some extra fortification did take place; however, there were several difficulties. The technical ones a higher water table in the east, and the heavily industrialized areas of Lille and Valenciennes through which the Line needed to pass might have been dealt with, but the huge financial cost threatened to break the French military budget.10 Moreover the Belgians somewhat hypocritically complained that an extension of the Line to the coast would effectively sacrifice them to Germany, a factor that the French might understandably have taken in their stride considering Brussels’ repudiation of the defensive treaty on the basis of which the Line had been built in the first place.

As it turned out, although the majority of the Wehrmacht skirted round to the west of the Line, the German First Army breached it south of Saarbrücken on 14 June despite its lack of tanks, finding its shallowness meant that it was relatively easy to attack with grenades and flame-throwers.11 What had been originally intended merely to slow the Germans down and deny them the element of surprise had instead engendered a defensive mentality in the French that had – along with their 1870 defeat and the terrible bloodletting of 1914–18 – robbed them of offensive spirit. An all-out attack on the Siegfried Line in September 1939 was the French High Command’s best hope, as officers such as General André Beaufre readily admitted, after it was too late.12 At the outset of war, neither France nor Britain was politically prepared for such action.

What the Allied plans, drawn up during the Phoney War, did propose was a swift movement into Holland and Belgium as soon as Germany invaded those countries, just as Manstein had predicted. Under Plan D, three French armies under Generals Giraud (Seventh Army), Blanchard (First Army) and Corap (Ninth Army), as well as most of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) under Lord Gort, would move from their entrenched positions along the Franco-Belgian border up to a line between Breda and the Dyle river, in order to cover Antwerp and Rotterdam. To allow these vital Channel ports – invaluable for U-boats to threaten shipping – to fall into German hands was unthinkable. Yet, as the Panzer strategist and historian Major-General Frederick von Mellenthin acutely observed, ‘The more they committed themselves to this sector, the more certain would be their ruin.’13

The Wehrmacht comprised 154 divisions in May 1940 and the western attack employed no fewer than 136 of them.14 The Allies, once Belgium’s twenty-two and Holland’s ten divisions were belatedly added to the total, numbered 144 divisions in the theatre. Both sides had around 4,000 armoured vehicles, with