• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1627 0

relieved of his command for going too fast, leaving his superiors fearful of a co-ordinated counter-attack from the north and south, one that he intuitively guessed would never come. Liddell Hart, an admirer of Guderian, described how the German tank commander had long been a proponent of ‘the idea of deep strategic penetration by independent armoured forces – a long-range tank-drive to cut the main arteries of the opposing army far back behind its front’.23 This was Guderian’s moment to prove his pre-war theorizing right and his detractors correspondingly wrong. By stretching the meaning of ‘using his initiative’ to its limits – ignoring orders he disliked and taking the wording of others far beyond their normal meaning – Guderian effected the sickle cut faster than anyone could have imagined possible.

‘I was conscious of a profound sense of relief,’ Churchill later wrote of his feelings when he finally got to bed at 3 a.m. on Saturday, 11 May 1940. ‘At last I had the authority to give directions over the whole scene. I felt as if I were walking with destiny, and that all my past life had been but a preparation for this hour and for this trial.’ On 13 May, he gave his first speech as prime minister in the House of Commons, conscious that Neville Chamberlain received a greater cheer than he when the two men entered the chamber separately. ‘I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat,’ he told parliament and soon afterwards the nation. To the question ‘What is our policy?’ Churchill answered that it was ‘to wage war against a monstrous tyranny, never surpassed in the dark, lamentable catalogue of human crime’. Morale was a vital factor in the Second World War, and Churchill’s oratory was invaluable in focusing British pride and patriotism. Stalin once cynically asked how many divisions had the Pope: Churchill’s larynx was worth the equivalent of an army corps to Britain, as radios were switched on in the nation’s homes at 9 p.m. to hear the Prime Minister’s words of inspiration. Drawing on English history, mentioning figures such as Drake and Nelson, he pointed out that the British had been in dire peril before, but had prevailed.

‘The hammer-blows… in May began to descend upon us almost daily,’ the military historian Michael Howard recalled, ‘like a demolition contractor’s iron ball striking the walls of a still-inhabited house.’24 On 15 May the Dutch capitulated, even though the Dyle-Breda front had not yet been broken by Army Group B. The bombing of Rotterdam had destroyed a large part of the city and left 80,000 people homeless, so the Dutch Commander-in-Chief, Henri Winkelmann, broadcast the Dutch surrender on Hilversum Radio before any other cities were subjected to a similar fate. Although only 980 people died in the raid, it became a stark symbol of Nazi terror-tactics. The fear of such bombing caused an exodus of between six and ten million terrified French refugees from Paris and the areas behind Allied lines, who clogged the roads southwards and westwards. Ninety thousand children were separated from their parents in the process, and the ability of the Allies to respond to the German invaders was severely hampered.

On 18 May the French Prime Minister, Paul Reynaud, reshuffled his Government and High Command. He appointed the eighty-four-year-old Marshal Philippe Pétain, the symbol of resistance during the battle of Verdun in 1916, as vice-premier, and himself took over as minister of war from the ex-premier who had signed the Munich agreement, Edouard Daladier, who became foreign minister. Two days later Reynaud sacked Gamelin and replaced him with the seventy-three-year-old Maxime Weygand, who had never commanded troops in battle and who arrived from Syria too late to affect the struggle that was developing around the Channel port of Dunkirk.

Charles de Gaulle, at forty-nine the youngest general in the French Army, commanded a spirited counter-attack at Laon on 18 May, but was forced back, and a brave attempt was made by the British 50th Division and 1st Tank Brigade south of Arras on 21 May to