CHAPTER THREE

TRIUMPH

FOR YEARS THE Polish campaign of 1939 was widely described as the first test of blitzkrieg, “lightning war.” Then soldiers and academ ics began to question both the nature of the campaign and the existence of the concept. German scholars in particular have been at pains to discredit and deconstruct the concept of blitzkrieg—to a point at times suggesting Kafka’s hunger artist, who rejects admiration for his self-destructive behavior. Reduced to its essentials, the critique of blitzkrieg is that the German victories of 1939-40 were not consequences of doctrine or planning. They developed from a series of accidents and coincidences reflecting operational improvisations born of the necessity to avoid a drawn-out war of attrition, and responding to strategic imperatives generated by the essentially random nature of the National Socialist regime. Far from being a German concept, blitzkrieg was in fact a term coined in the West, first used in Time magazine and introduced to the German army secondhand. Hitler himself as late as 1942 dismissed it as “Italian phraseology.”

I

THE INTERACTING DECONSTRUCTIONS have in turn generated opportunities for reconstruction. Blitzkrieg was certainly not a comprehensive principle for mobilizing Germany’s resources for a total war waged incrementally. Nor was it a structure of concepts like Air Land Battle or counterinsurgency, expressed in manuals, taught in schools, and practiced in maneuvers. The word itself had appeared now and then in German military writing since the mid-1930s, not in a specific sense but to refer to the kind of quick, complete victory that was at the heart of the army’s operational planning, and a central feature of its doctrine and training. Nor was the context always positive. Just before the outbreak of war, one critic affirmed that the chances of a blitzkrieg victory against an evenly matched enemy were zero.

To say that blitzkrieg was an ex post facto construction nevertheless makes as much sense as to assemble the components of a watch, shake the pieces in a sack, and expect to pull out a functioning timepiece. The most reasonable approach involves splitting the difference. On one hand, blitzkrieg is a manifestation of Bewegungskrieg, the war of movement, the historic focus of Prussian/German strategic and operational planning that Seeckt and his contemporaries sought to restore after the Great War. On the other hand, blitzkrieg gave a technologically based literalness to an abstract concept. Bewegungskrieg had always been more of an intellectual construction than a physical reality. It involved forcing an enemy off balance through sophisticated planning creatively implemented in a context of forces moving essentially at the same pace. In blitzkrieg the combination of radios and engines made it possible for an army literally to run rings around its enemy—if, and it was a big if, its moral and intellectual qualities were on par with its material.

The Polish campaign helped shape that concept. Considered in hindsight, Case White, the cover name for the invasion of Poland, seems a classic example of what the Germans call “a made bed.” Much of the terrain was ideal for mobile operations: large stretches of open country with neither formidable natural obstacles nor man-made ones like the hedgerows of Normandy. The weather cooperated. September was unusually dry—a boon in a country where paved roads were few to an invader whose off-road capacities were limited. The Polish army depended on the muscles of men and horses for mobility. It had around 600 tanks, but most of them were counterparts of the Panzer I, and most of those were attached by companies to the cavalry brigades. Strategically, German occupation of the rump state of Slovakia left Poland enveloped on three sides—yet the Polish army was deployed along its frontiers in a pattern similar to the one Napoleon sarcastically suggested was best suited to stop smuggling.

That positioning reflected domestic factors. Poland, much like West Germany during the Cold War, could not afford to abandon large parts of its territory without devastating consequences for the national morale on which its conscript army’s effectiveness depended. It reflected as well the defensible—and accurate—conclusion that even without the non-aggression pact with Germany, whose negotiation had hardly been a secret, the Soviet Union could be expected to seek direct profit from a German- Polish war.

In sum, Poland had no prospects of waging anything like a long war successfully. Its only prospects lay with its French and British allies. That, in turn, ironically placed Poland in a position similar to that of Prussia in the autumn of 1806, when it did not have to defeat Napoleon, just bloody his nose and set him back on his heels until the British guin eas and Russian bayonets that were the Fourth Coalition’s real strengths could be brought into play. German planners, with vivid memories of the World War I blockade and well aware of France’s “Anaconda plan” of total mobilization for total war, were correspondingly committed to a war from a standing start. Overwhelming Poland as quickly as possible would change the military dynamic—and might just change the international dynamic as well, if Hitler could pull off another of his high-wire stunts.

Reduced to basics, the “decisive point” of Case White rested with Army Group South: three armies coming out of Silesia and Slovakia. Army Group North’s two armies attacked from Pomerania and East Prussia. The strategic intention was a breakthrough of the Polish cordon followed by a double penetration: a pincers movement on a Schlieffe nesque scale, the tanks meeting somewhere around Warsaw and then separating again, one part turning inward toward the Vistula River to finish off the trapped Polish main force, the other continuing to the Bug River to screen the decisive battle and secure against such contingencies as Soviet treachery.

The projected campaign generally resembled pre-World War I planning and specifically replicated the Austro-German offensive into Russian Poland in October 1914. Despite significant tactical successes, that operation ultimately failed. There was only one way for the German army to achieve its objective operationally: keep moving. Army Group South had the peacetime army’s three mobile corps headquarters, four panzer divisions, all four of the light divisions, and two motorized divisions—around 2,000 tanks. Army Group North had the newly organized 10th Panzer Division, a provisional division built around a panzer brigade, and a corps of one panzer and two motorized divisions under Heinz Guderian—around 500 tanks, but with lesser distances to cover.

Army Group South broke through and drove northeast, bypassing defenses, striking into the Poles’ rear to cut communications and block retreats, supported by Stuka dive-bombers whose precision strikes were neither disrupted from the air nor challenged from the ground. The Stukas had increased their repertoire by adding a propeller-driven siren to each strut of their fixed landing gear. The eldritch screaming of these “Trumpets of Jericho” reinforced the conviction, affirmed by virtually everyone ever under dive-bomber attack anywhere, that the plane was aiming at him personally.

That did not mean the Poles collapsed. Nor did they act, contrary to one report, as though German tanks were still made of wood and cardboard. The panzers and motorized infantry of Army Group North found breaking out was hard to do against local counterattacks and the determined resistance of cut-off troops with no place to go. It was in this sector that the legend of cavalry attacking tanks with lances was born—courtesy of some Italian journalists who listened to shaken German survivors of the actual event. On September 1, a Polish lancer regiment stumbled on elements of a German battalion in a clearing, charged, and took them by surprise. Then a few German armored cars appeared and shot the lancers to pieces. But that incident, among others, shook the 2nd Motorized Division badly enough that its commander briefly considered retreat until brought up short and sharp by Guderian.

The panzers’ initial fighting in the northern sector featured the kinds of logistical, tactical, and communications lapses predictable for any untested formations in the first days of any war. Guderian’s lead-from-the-front approach led to interventions in the chain of command that confused his subordinates. Nevertheless, by day five of the offensive the tanks and trucks of Army Group North were on their way to Warsaw. Hitler himself came forward to see the results, and the one-time infantryman was suitably impressed when Guderian showed him Polish artillery positions overrun and destroyed by tanks.

On October 15 the spearheads of XIX Panzer Corps, now reinforced by the 10th Panzer Division, reached Brest-Litovsk, far into the Polish rear. Army Group South’s 4th Panzer Division reached the outskirts of Warsaw as early as October 8, but lost half its tanks attempting to break into the city. The general advance was further delayed by a desperate Polish breakout attempt that caught the German left flank along the Bzura River. But the panzers shifted their axis of advance 180 degrees in twenty-four hours with an ease belying their lack of experience. Stukas and conventional bombers hammered Polish concentrations. The counterattack collapsed in a welter of blood and the mobile forces swung back toward Warsaw to link up with Guderian.

On September 17, the Red Army crossed Poland’s eastern border with a half million troops. That ended any Polish hopes for continued resistance on the far side of the Vistula—hopes in any case dashed by the refusal of the Western allies to make more than a token effort to relieve the German pressure. Only Warsaw remained unconquered and its defenders cashed out high, inflicting heavy casualties despite continuous air and artillery bombardment, both characterized by disturbingly high levels of inaccuracy. German propaganda spoke of an eighteen-day war. Army Group South, which bore the brunt of the fight for Warsaw, lost more men in the second half of the campaign than in the first two weeks, a dry run for the serious work. Warsaw capitulated on September 27. On October 5, Hitler reviewed a victory parade through the devastated city. The last organized Polish force fought off the 13th Motorized Division for four days before surrendering at Kock on October 6. Poland was kaput. What remained was establishing the new border with Russia, organizing the occupation of the Reich’s latest conquest, and evaluating performances.

To a degree, unusual after such a decisive victory, the German army applied an “iron broom” to doctrine, training, and command. The artillery was criticized for hanging too far back and for being unresponsive to the rapidly changing requirement of modern battle. The infantry came under fire for a general lack of aggressiveness and flexibility and for too often waiting for the guns, the tanks, and the Stukas to do the work instead of pressing forward with their own resources. Officers at all levels were reminded of the need for maintaining situational awareness, for maintaining calm in what seemed a crisis, and, above all, for seizing the initiative in every situation.

The panzers came off unscathed by comparison. Prior to September 1, questions had remained as to how well the methods and material of mobile warfare would actually work in the field. A month later, there seemed no doubt: The combination of tanks, motorized troops, and aircraft could not only break into and break through an enemy front; they could break out, with decisive effect. Breaking regiments and battalions into combined-arms battle groups, usually based on the tank and rifle regiments but reconfigured to meet changing tactical and operational situations, was generally validated. The difficulties of practical implementation even against what quickly became episodic resistance were noted, but described as susceptible to training and experience.

That did not mean fine-tuning could be neglected. The armored force reported a loss of just over 200 tanks—under 10 percent of the total committed, and that figure is the one most often cited. Recent research by Polish scholars in German records indicates that almost 700 tanks were written off at one time or another from all causes. About 550 of those were either total losses or beyond the ability of unit workshops to repair. These statistics reflect a demanding operational environment, one that encouraged neglecting vehicle maintenance because of crew and unit stress and fatigue. They reflected the relative fragility of the Panzer Is and IIs that formed the bulk of the armored force. And they reflected the determined local fights, often to the last man, made by Polish troops using everything from satchel charges, grenades, and antitank rifles to field guns firing over open sights, in the pattern of the First World War.

In the long run, actual losses were inconsequential. No one with any responsibility seriously considered the light tanks as anything but stopgaps. On mobilization, each tank battalion had left one company behind as a depot. In the panzer divisions, one of the remaining three companies was supposed to be equipped with Panzer IIIs and IVs. Delivery problems meant only the 1st and 5th Divisions came close to that standard. The light tanks were left on their own—contrary to prewar doctrine and expectation. Absent projected support from the high-velocity gun of the Panzer III and the 75mm of the Panzer IV, light tanks depended even more than anticipated on speed and maneuverability. A light tank halted for any reason was wearing a bull’s-eye. A light tank challenging a barricade risked winding up on its side. A light tank engaging antitank guns was pitting hope against experience. It was first-rate crew training—but the hard way.

Tactically, frontline reports uniformly insisted on using tanks en masse, by battalions at least. Even when needed for direct support of infantry, tanks should never be distributed in less than company strength. Panzer officers also consistently complained of the motorized infantry’s inability to keep pace, and more or less delicately suggested that advancing under fire was not a particular strong point. Some suggestion of the infantry’s problems in that regard comes from the war diary of the 35th Panzer Regiment. Describing the initial fight for Warsaw on September 9, it refers to truck-borne infantry taking cover under heavy small- arms fire as their unarmored vehicles went up in flames. The diary does not refer to any direct support provided by tanks that were having their own troubles that day. “Avoid built-up areas” was solid panzer advice, eventually forgotten in the rubble of Stalingrad. Solid as well was the recognition that the motorized troops at least needed more in the way of organic supporting weapons and, if possible, a general issue of armored half-tracks.

The panzers took with them into Poland another legacy. After 1933, generalized concepts of the “East” as an object of German manifest destiny, long present in the general culture, were integrated with National Socialist conceptions of the East as “living space.” Soldiers were informed that they were the vanguard of Germany’s destiny, with the missions of conquering the new territory and governing the primitives who inhabited it. “I’m looking for hard men,” Hitler declared to his adjunct. “I need fanatical National Socialists. See to it that such men are brought forward.”

The Führer had plenty of prototypes. From the early days of September 1939, negative, derogatory attitudes toward Poles and Jews informed the army’s official reports, its private correspondence, and its public behavior. Troops used Nazi jargon to describe the people as “subhuman” or “inhuman”; junior officers and enlisted men showed consistent willingness to initiate reprisals, to implement terror, to translate vague authorizations to establish local security into fists and boots, summary executions and firing squads.

The Prussian/German army had a history—it might be said a culture—based on risk and violence, fear and force. World War I had shown German units were likely to assume any surprise attack was initiated by the civilians. A report from 4th Panzer Regiment, for example, describes priests “disappearing” into a village church “as soon as panzers appeared. . . . Signals were immediately observed from the church tower. Then machine guns opened fire on us.” Two well-placed rounds from a Panzer IV solved that particular tactical problem. The social/ cultural one remained. Fast-moving armored formations were disproportionately likely to come under unexpected fire. Erich Hoepner, commanding XVI Panzer Corps, ordered “the most severe measures” against “partisans.” On September 4 and 5, troops of his 1st Panzer Division responded by shooting a number of male civilians, apparently in the belief that someone in the village had fired on them. Elements of 1st Panzer killed more civilian men and destroyed as many as 80 farms in another village in reprisal for a Polish counterattack—presumably assuming the civilians had somehow participated. In the aftermath of the collapse of the Bzura counterattack pocket, the 4th Panzer Division was involved in a number of killings of Polish civilians and of soldiers who were legally prisoners of war by the terms of the local surrender.

Examples can be multiplied, though not yet ad libitum. Compared to the rear-echelon “Action Groups” that followed the army, and to a Waffen SS that was at this stage far more dangerous to civilians than to anyone with a gun, the panzers’ shield might even be described as relatively clean. Their behavior nevertheless went well beyond first-battle jitters involving quick triggers or misunderstood gestures or a straggling soldier officially surrendered who still had his rifle.

II

DEAD POLES WERE quickly forgotten, if they were thought of at all. Though there had been no significant tank-versus-tank engagements during the Polish campaign, German planners were aware that against the French and British, they would face superior numbers, better armed and armored vehicles, and not least stronger antitank defenses. As the Wehrmacht began the process of deploying westward, the armored force underwent a major restructuring.

First to go were the light divisions. Field experience confirmed the prewar decision to concert them to panzer formations. While they had generally performed well enough on the move, lack of tanks proved a major handicap whenever it came to fighting. Adding a company of mediums was unlikely to remedy the problem. Instead they were renumbered as the 6th through the 9th Panzer Divisions and given a two-battalion tank regiment (a single battalion in the case of the 9th). Increased production of Panzer IIIs and IVs resulted in new tables of organization as well. In February 1940 every tank battalion was authorized two light companies, each with two platoons of Panzer IIs and two of Panzer IIIs, and a third “medium” company with a platoon of five Panzer IIs and two platoons totaling seven Panzer IVs; more larger tanks would be issued as they arrived.

That was the theory. In fact, the new tanks trickled in during the winter and spring of 1940. The gap was filled in part by delivery of the 38(t). Around a hundred each went to the 7th and 8th Panzer Divisions (the 6th had the older 35(t)); the other seven divisions had German vehicles, including a significant number of Panzer Is—around a hundred in the 3rd, 4th, and 5th. The next campaign would still be a light tank operation, with all the accompanying implications for better and worse.

In one respect the tanks would be even lighter than desired. The Panzer IIIs coming into the battalions were models E and F, with 30mm of frontal armor and the highest standard of reliability in the armored force. The gun, however, was the original 37mm. The Weapons Office and the armored force alike had originally wanted a heavier piece. A 50mm/42-caliber gun was available; the tank’s turret and turret ring had even been designed to mount larger weapons, but retooling would reduce production at a time when every tank counted. Only a few of the up-gunned versions would see action in the western campaign.

Experience in Poland indicated that the motorized divisions were too large to be controlled in mobile operations. Each shed a regiment, usually transferred to a panzer division organically short of infantry. The Cavalry Rifle Regiments and the reconnaissance formations of the former light divisions were reorganized to panzer division standards with some anomalies—including the troopers’ pride that kept them wearing cavalry yellow branch insignia instead of donning infantry white. Armored half-tracks remained part of Heine’s “airy empire of dreams” for all except a few companies in the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd Panzer Divisions—the privilege of seniority.

As long as the infantry rode trucks, battle group system or no, they would be thrown sufficiently on their own resources to make organic support weapons vital: medium mortars, 37mm light infantry guns, 37mm antitank guns. In contrast to the foot-marching infantry, these were usually assigned to battalions. That in turn gave regimental headquarters more time to train in handling combined-arms formations, as opposed to using attached tanks as generic close support. The rifle companies and battalions, for their parts, intensified assault training, working independently and with the divisional pioneers to break the way for the tanks and then keep pace with them as they advanced.

A few other mobile formations existed as well. Two battalions of Panzer IIs converted to flamethrowers were authorized in the spring of 1940. The 40th Panzer Battalion for Special Purposes was organized with three companies of Panzer Is and IIs and a few experimental types for the invasion of Denmark and Norway. A two-regiment motorized brigade participated in the Danish phase of the operation. Far more significant was the appearance of the Grossdeutschland Regiment. Its ancestor was the Berlin Security Battalion, originally formed under Weimar to safeguard the government and showcase the Reichswehr. In 1937 it was expanded to regimental strength. Recruited, like the former Prussian Guard, throughout the Reich, it was considered a corps d’elite and in 1940 it included four battalions. Three were standard motorized infantry. The 4th, prefiguring later developments in the motorized infantry, was a support battalion with an infantry gun company, an antitank company, and something entirely new: an assault gun battery of six self-propelled 75mm mounts.

The assault gun was a product of exigency: a substitute for the heavy tanks projected in the 1930s for direct infantry support; and a consequence of branch rivalry in the German army. Had rearmament progressed in the systematic fashion envisaged by the General Staff and the High Command, or had Hitler adjusted his diplomatic offensive more closely to Germany’s military capacity, assault guns might well never have existed. Their institutional patron was the artillery. Responding to the nascent armored force’s call for tanks to be concentrated under its command, Germany’s gunners argued that infantry support would inevitably suffer. Experience indicated that weapons in a different branch- of-service chimney were all too likely to be totally elsewhere when needed.

During World War I, the artillery had responded by forming specialized “infantry gun batteries,” armed with modified field guns—an approach unique to the German army. There had never been enough of them, and in the 1920s the Reichswehr had developed two purpose-designed infantry guns, one 75mm and the other 150mm—the same caliber as the standard medium howitzer. Introduced in regimental gun companies, they were useful but disproportionately vulnerable, especially at close range. Their crews, moreover, wore infantry-branch white, and the cannon cockers saw themselves being relegated to third place in the combat arms pecking order.

In 1935, Erich von Manstein, newly appointed head of the General Staff ’s Operations Section, prepared a memo consolidating previous discussions and recommending the development of a self-propelled “assault gun” to work directly with the infantry, with each division having its own battalion. What the gunners described, and what the Weapons Office turned into a development contract in 1936, was to a degree a throwback to the original Allied tanks of World War I: a vehicle with a low silhouette for concealment “not to exceed the height of a standing man,” all- round armor protection, and a 75mm gun with both high-explosive and armor-piercing capacity. Putting those requirements together made a turret impossible; the gun would instead be mounted in a fixed superstructure with a limited traverse of 30 degrees. Initially, as in the later US tank destroyers, the top was open to facilitate the observation considered necessary for tactical effectiveness at infantry ranges. Before going into production, however, the vehicle was given a roof and a panoramic sight enabling it to employ indirect fire. After all, assault guns were artillery weapons.

Guderian, the armored force’s designated pit bull, argued that the concept was a mistake. Turreted tanks could do anything assault guns could do; the reverse was not the case. A subtext amounting to a main text was that the projected assault gun would use the chassis of the Mark III tank and the gun intended for the Panzer IV. Guderian and his tanker colleagues were not placated by projections indicating that rising production would avert serious competition for chassis. A disproportionate number of officers in senior army appointments had begun their careers in the artillery—Fritsch, Beck, and Halder, among others. It has been suggested that a “gunner mafia” thwarted Guderian out of branch rivalry. More to the point was the fact that the light tanks that were expected to become surplus as the IIIs and IVs entered service were too small and fragile to carry a three-inch gun even in a hull mounting, while the artillerymen wanted every active infantry division to have its assault gun battalion by the fall of 1939.

In practice, assault guns never became a high-priority item. The first soft-steel experimental models were not completed until 1938. The first production run was only 30, and those were not delivered until May 1940. Only a half dozen six-gun batteries saw action in France. Later orders placed in early 1940 were for only 120 vehicles—hardly evidence of either branch or institutional commitment to the concept. Not until the Sturmgeschütz III proved its worth beyond question did the contracts expand and the assault gun begin to take its place beside the panzers in Wehrmacht history and military lore.

Light tank chassis were nevertheless good for something. The towed antitank gun was still considered satisfactory as the backbone of antitank defense. The army’s offensive mind-set, however, encouraged active defense to the point where the initial title of Panzer Abwehr (tank defense) was changed prewar to Panzerjäger (tank hunter). The 37mm gun was easily handled, but against the up-armored tanks coming into service, its days were numbered. The more powerful designs on the drawing boards were also significantly heavier. But the Czech army had possessed a very effective 47mm antitank gun and the armored force had an increasing number of Panzer Is becoming surplus to requirements. Remove the German turret, mount the Czech gun behind a three-sided shield, and the result was the first tracked, armored antitank gun to enter service. The design was patchwork and its numbers were small, but as with the assault gun, its relative success in 1940 made the 47mm Panzer I combination the first in a long line of similar improvisations in all armies.

In the interim between the fall of Poland and the attack on France, the armored force confronted another kind of technological problem. How best could the commander of a mobile formation built around the internal- combustion engine be at the critical point of a battle while at the same time continuing to command his whole force effectively? The panzer division included an “armored radio company,” but its vehicles were as a rule attached to division and brigade headquarters. Events in Poland had demonstrated the practical limits of radio communication under field conditions. “Leading from the front” invited the dispersion of effort as commanders seeking to exploit presumed opportunities wound up directing isolated actions that eventually devolved to skirmishes with limited tactical results. Guderian’s familiar mantra “klotzen, nicht kleckern” (“slug, don’t fumble; keep focused on an objective”) was sound enough. The problem was implementation.

Erwin Rommel, newly appointed commander of the freshly minted 7th Panzer Division, addressed the problem by developing a mobile headquarters based on an electronic command system mounted in a cross-country vehicle: a network of radios allowing him to contact both subordinate formations and his own main headquarters. He sought as well to develop a common way of doing things—not as a straitjacket, but rather as a framework for structuring the behavior of subordinates in the constant emergency that was the modern mobile battlefield. Commanders at all levels were to exercise independent judgment, with the division commander using his sense of the battle and the information provided by his headquarters to select points of intervention, ideally to refine and complete the efforts of the men on the spot.

Rommel made clear to his senior staff officers that he depended essentially on them to process and evaluate information in his absence, and to act on it, should that seem necessary. By later American standards, German divisions had small headquarters whose officers were relatively low ranking. That reflected exigency more than principle; the army after 1933 was never able to keep pace with its own expanding need for troop staff officers. The often-praised “lean and mean” German structure meant everyone worked constantly. Vital information could be overlooked by busy men. Fatigue and stress led to errors in judgment and to problems of communication as tired, frustrated alpha-male subordinates snapped pointlessly at each other. Especially in a mobile division, success depended heavily on a commanding general willing to support the decisions of even junior staff officers in whose ability, toughness, and loyalty he had confidence.

There was only one Rommel, who in the 1940 campaign would deliver arguably the most outstanding division-level command performance in modern military history. But in every panzer and motorized division, men with similar perspectives were assuming senior posts. Friedrich Kirchner of 1st Panzer Division, the 6th’s Franz Kempf, the 10th’s Friedrich Schaal, and their counterparts were not water-walkers. But they were solid professionals, able to get the best out of subordinates. Some began as gunners, some as infantrymen, and some wearing cavalry yellow. What they had in common were high learning curves, fingertip situational awareness, and emotional hardness unmatched even in the Red Army. The combination would prove consistently formidable, no matter the operational considerations.

The greater question in these interim months was how the mobile formations could best be used. At division levels the accepted pattern for an initial deployment was a wave formation with tanks leading. The rifle brigade and usually the pioneers formed the next echelon, then the artillery. The reconnaissance battalion scouted ahead, looking for enemy forces and alternate routes of advance. The attack itself went on in a relatively narrow front, no longer than a thousand yards. As a rule, the tanks led, regiments abreast or one following the other, each responsible for overwhelming a particular element of the defense. Their moral effect was considered on a par with their physical impact, both combining to carry the division through enemy defense by mass, shock, and speed. The motorized battalions, supported by the antitank battalion and the pioneers, would clear pockets of resistance along the line of advance, consolidate captured ground, and prepare to hold it against counterattacks until summoned to catch up with the tanks and repeat the process. The reconnaissance battalion would move into the lead, three or four miles ahead of the tanks, supported when necessary by the motorcyclists. The artillery supported the whole operation with direct or indirect fire as necessary—or as possible. The guns were expected to keep pace with the tanks, which waited for no one.

The major development after the Polish campaign involved using armored forces to conduct the initial breakthrough even against prepared defenses. On February 7, at a war game held in Koblenz, Guderian proposed concentrating the armored forces for a drive across the Meuse River around Sedan, then expanding the bridgehead northwest toward Amiens. The Chief of Staff insisted on a measured buildup, waiting for the infantry before seeking to exploit the initial success. A month later, a second war game evaluated the same issue. This time the pressure from on high for using infantry to force the crossing was even stronger. Guderian and XIV Panzer Corps commander Gustav von Wietersheim responded that the proposed conservative employment of the armor was so likely to produce a crisis that they could have no confidence in a high command that ordered it.

These kinds of war games were intended to generate spirited debate with no hard feelings. But when two experienced senior generals flatly declared “no confidence” in a plan, it was the closest thing possible to saying “get yourself another boy.” This partly manifested the panzer troops’ new confidence. Arguably it also reflected a persisting sense at senior command levels that, for all their retraining, the foot-powered infantry of 1940 might not be the soldiers their fathers were in 1914. This was the time of the new men of the German army: the panzer troops.

The army faced a related problem: growing shortage of motor vehicles. As early as 1938, maintenance personnel had to cope with a hundred different models of trucks. That number had been reduced, but on the outbreak of war, confusion was restored by the commandeering of thousands of trucks directly from the civilian economy. Polish roads—or the absence of them—had been hard enough on the panzers. Supply columns had suffered losses in some cases more than 50 percent, many of them permanent. By 1940, write-offs had reached a point where the General Staff was considering replacing some trucks in infantry divisions with horse-drawn vehicles. Small wonder in such contexts that the concept of putting the mobile forces up front increasingly permeated thoughts about the coming campaign.

III

THE GENESIS OF the German strategic plan against the Western allies is familiar. Hitler wanted the Western campaign to begin immediately after the fall of Poland. The initial date of November 12 was a compromise with a High Command reluctant to mount an offensive under any circumstances. Its foot-dragging produced no fewer than 29 postponements and a concept for Case Yellow, the Western offensive, that involved sending 75 divisions, including most of the army’s mobile formations, into the Low Countries to engage the main Anglo-French strength in what was expected to be an encounter battle in central Belgium. Even before Hitler became directly involved in the planning process, this unpromisingly conventional proposal was generating increasing criticism. It incorporated no proposals for destroying enemy armed forces, speaking rather of creating favorable conditions for future operations. The High Command’s thinking seemed to go no further than punching a hole and seeing what developed. In that sense their proposal owed more to Ludendorff ’s abortive 1918 offensive than the Schlieffen Plan to which it has often been compared.

Interwar theorists of independent armored warfare like Fuller and Liddell- Hart tended to stress disruption—paralysis—as an end in itself. Cut an enemy’s nervous system and all that remained was rounding up the demoralized and hungry masses. By contrast, the High Command’s plan anticipated the kind of hard fighting that made decisions dependent on contingencies—including a solid probability of defeat at the hands of Allied armor. It required little more than back-of-the-envelope calculation to determine that the force-to-space ratios created by the proposed operation would invite exactly the kind of head-on engagements the army’s mechanized elite was ill- configured to fight. The consequences of defeat, or even stalemate, somewhere in Belgium were hardly likely to have involved strengthening either Hitler’s domestic position or Germany’s chances for victory.

German doctrine, both generally in the army and specifically in the armored force, was based on destroying enemy forces by breaking their will and their ability to resist. That was the principle of Vernichtungsschlacht, too often tendentiously translated as “battle of annihilation” and then interpreted literally. That was also the basis of the alternative concept put forward by Erich von Manstein, then-chief of staff to Army Group A. Manstein’s proposal was intended as much to provide a central role for his commanding general, Gerd von Rundstedt, as to furnish a program for victory. His projected thrust through the Ardennes would transform Rundstedt’s army group from a secondary player to the campaign’s focal point. Broken terrain made the option a risk—but a calculated risk, taking maximum advantage of the principal German force multipliers: leadership and technology. Hitler, disgruntled by his generals’ conventionality and angered by a security breach that put copies of the original plan in Allied hands, took advantage of Manstein’s temporary presence in Berlin to discuss his ideas. A few days later he issued a new operational plan: a Sichelschnitt (“sickle cut”) through northern France that would eventually put seven of Germany’s ten panzer divisions under Army Group A.

The intelligence service’s conviction, repeatedly tested in war gaming, was that the French and British high commands would respond slowly to that kind of surprise. Since 1933, generals and politicians on both sides of the English Channel had failed to understand German intentions and German decision-making processes. Instead they had grown accustomed to putting unexpected events into preconceived models, from a postulate that Hitler ultimately would not risk war to a belief that Germany would attack in Belgium because it suited the Allies’ book that it do so. Both common sense and thinking outside the box were sacrificed to habit—and in the case of the French, to logic. Allied intelligence provided more than enough evidence to turn eyes to the Ardennes in the spring of 1940. Instead, the Allies believed what they needed to believe about the German operational plan, and kept on believing it during those few crucial days when the German spearheads sliced across their rear toward the Channel.

Had Allied leaders anticipated a major offensive through the Ardennes even as a contingency, it is almost inconceivable that the catastrophe of 1940 would have taken place as it did. Indeed, the alternative of a French victory parade down Unter den Linden was a real possibility. France in 1940 was arguably in less danger of moral collapse than a Germany whose public morale was in good part a consequence of what seemed Hitler’s unbroken string of rabbit-out-of-the-hat successes. German soldiers as well as French ones panicked on the battlefields of 1940. Many of the shortcomings in training and equipment France faced in the 1930s had been addressed and overcome or moderated by the spring of 1940. The British Expeditionary Force (BEF) had done a good deal to improve its effectiveness since its initial deployment across the Channel. The Allies had “equipment for victory”: powerful air forces, a fully motorized BEF, and around 3,500 tanks, many of them superior to the lighter models still predominant among the 2,300 German ones. And the French expected to win when the fighting started. The French army may have been less effective than its enemy on the tactical level, and its commanders on the whole may have been a cut below their German counterparts. However, nowhere in French circles or among France’s allies was there serious doubt of the French ability at least to stop any German offensive in its tracks. That kind of confidence is itself a force multiplier not to be despised.

The Germans thus benefited disproportionately from an obliging enemy. An obliging enemy is not an enemy that makes mistakes, but rather one that behaves as though the opposition prepared his orders. “Obliging,” however, is not a synonym for “stupid.” Chief of Staff Franz Halder was won over by Sichelschnitt at least as a calculated risk preferable to the existing alternatives, but realized its success depended on keeping the Allies’ attention focused on the Low Countries. German military planners’ focus on tactical and operational levels at the expense of strategy and policy has been so often repeated it has become a shibboleth. Halder and his subordinates were well aware that the Netherlands were reluctant to cooperate militarily with anyone—even neighboring Belgium. Belgium had begun developing a defensive line facing Germany at the start of the war. It also briefly deployed its army on both the French and German frontiers, and the government had repeatedly emphasized the worthlessness of any Allied assistance that arrived after Belgium had been invaded and devastated, as had been the case in 1914. Immediate and convincing Allied commitment in the face of a German initiative was correspondingly imperative. The dynamics of any battle fought in Belgium would change significantly should Belgian involvement be less than enthusiastic, to say nothing of the probable consequences of the non-participation of Belgium’s two dozen divisions.

How, then, to keep the Allies convinced that what they wanted to do was also operationally necessary? The developed German plan used almost a third of the armored force as bait. The 9th Panzer Division, with the fewest number of tanks, would cooperate with the Luftwaffe’s paratroopers and the army’s air-landing division to strike the Netherlands in a “shock and awe” operation. Two panzer and a motorized division under Army Group B would provide the mobile core of an otherwise foot-powered thrust into Belgium. A chess player might speak of a knight’s move, a bullfight aficionado might think of a matador’s cape. But the other half of the knight fork, the sword delivering the killing blow, was Panzergruppe Kleist. Five armored and three motorized divisions, plus the Grossdeutschland Regiment, would pass through the Ardennes and force their way across the Meuse River into northern France. An entire antiaircraft corps was folded into the Panzergruppe to compensate for fighter planes with other assignments. Its right flank would be covered by another two-division panzer corps under Hermann Hoth.

The operation was still high-risk. It involved more than 130,000 men and more than 1,500 armored vehicles—many of both nose-to-tail from the border all the way back to Koblenz. No tank-and-truck force approaching that size had ever been deployed before. Could it fight through a forest, breach prepared defenses, and cross a major river without sacrificing its fighting power?

As much to the point, could Panzergruppe Kleist keep out of its own way once the fighting started? Ewald von Kleist was a cavalryman whose first experience with armored troops had been as a corps commander in Poland. He had done well enough handling two panzer divisions, but his current assignment reflected less his operational skill than his emotional steadiness and mental toughness. He had a reputation for bringing subordinates to his point of view without pulling rank. If the Panzergruppe was the Schwerpunkt of Case Yellow, the Schwerpunkt of the Panzer Group was Guderian’s XIX Corps. “Der schnelle Heinz” (“Hurrying Heinz”), as the men called Guderian, far overshadowed the other two corps commanders in terms of talent and charisma. They would take their leads from Guderian. He could make the sickle cut work—but like a fine-tuned engine, he needed a governor to prevent overheating. That was Kleist’s job, much as in World War I Hindenburg had acted as the nitrogen to Ludendorff ’s oxygen in the duo’s best days.

Army Group A’s headquarters rejoiced in its new role but was less pleased with the instrument for achieving it. Nothing like Panzergruppe Kleist had ever existed in the German command structure. Armies and corps, yes, but a “group” was generally understood as a temporary organization for secondary missions. Rundstedt left no doubt that the Panzergruppe as a concept was on trial by keeping it organically subordinate to one of his field armies during the campaign. This was anything but a vote of confidence, and proved a constant source of confusion, friction, and bad temper. It also served to galvanize Kleist’s professionalism and his professional ambition.

Since the First World War, French military authorities had routinely described the Ardennes as impenetrable to armored vehicles—“Europe’s best tank obstacle,” in the words of French commander in chief Maurice Gustave Gamelin. The impenetrability was not taken literally, but the French were convinced that even a full-scale offensive would take no fewer than five days—more likely nine—to push through the Ardennes, and about two weeks to attempt a crossing of the Meuse. Prewar intelligence reports of German intentions to attack through the Ardennes were processed as referring to no more than a secondary offensive. Initial reports of massive tank columns seemingly everywhere in the forest were dismissed as first-battle jitters. Besides, even if the Germans made it through the trees, they would surely be stopped by the river.

In Belgium, Army Group B did its job to near-perfection. A day’s initial delay due to blown bridges only encouraged the Allies to rush into Belgium and assume defensive positions along the Dyle River, reinforcing and supporting the Belgians. It was according to plan—the Dyle Plan. French generals and staff officers were students and creatures of a doctrine emphasizing the importance of a firepower and management. They had no intention of playing to the German army’s obvious strength by seeking an encounter battle of the classic sort, as opposed to using armor in defensive contexts along a line offering a shorter and stronger position than the one defined by the Franco-Belgian frontier.

Arguably the Germans’ greatest success at the strategic level, however, was achieved in Holland. Gamelin was committed to—one might say obsessed with—fighting as far away from French soil as possible. In pursuit of that design, he had reconfigured the employment of the mobile strategic reserve created with considerable effort during the 1930s. Originally it was projected that reserve would be deploying around Reims for use against a German invasion anywhere from Switzerland to the Low Countries. The final “Breda Variant” of the Dyle Plan, adopted in November 1939, projected using it, organized as the 7th Army, to drive into Holland and extend the left flank of an Allied position Gamelin expected would stop the Germans in their tracks—or close enough to that for military purposes. And then one would have most of Belgium to establish a killing ground for the managed battle that would decide the war.

Instead German airborne and motorized forces already well stuck into Holland enmeshed the French mobile reserve in a morass of streams, woods, and soft ground. And when, on May 16, 1940, Britain’s new premier Winston Churchill asked, “Where is the mass of maneuver?” the French could only reply, with a suitably Gallic shrug, “Aucune” (“There isn’t any”).

One of the overlooked ironies of 1940 is that the 7th Army’s initial staging area was close behind the Ardennes. Whether the elite 1st Light Mechanized Division, two first-line motorized divisions, and four infantry divisions committed in the event to the Breda Variant could have stemmed the tide flooding out of the Ardennes on June 12 is debatable. But they would have helped—and matters could hardly have been any worse for their presence.

Army Group A pushed through the Ardennes undeterred by air strikes that proved unexpectedly vulnerable to small- arms fire, and barely detained by bicycle-riding Belgian Chasseurs Ardennais and French cavalry divisions whose horse-mounted and motorized regiments proved an unfortunate mix of “manure and gasoline.” French and Belgians achieved some impressive local successes. Confusion developed regarding operational zones and lines of march, with the 1st and 10th Panzer Divisions in particular briefly getting tangled. The Germans nevertheless drove relentlessly. Advance elements were constantly rotated, with fresh crews brought up on trucks to take over tanks in place. The Germans took hair-raising chances. On the first day of the attack, 400 men of Grossdeutschland were successfully airlifted behind Belgian lines in 100 light airplanes, German counterparts of the Piper Cub. The Germans improvised almost at random, finding fords under fire when bridges blew up almost beneath the treads of the lead tanks. It required not nine days, not five, but only three for the mechanized spearheads to emerge from the forest and roll toward Sedan.

Kleist, the old cavalryman, might be a few miles per hour behind the pace of modern war, but he knew opportunity when he sensed it—or perhaps when it was forced upon him. He differed with Guderian about the exact axis of the attack and its precise timing. Nevertheless, on May 12, Kleist informed Hitler that he proposed to “bounce” the Meuse—cross it with his own resources even though most of his artillery was still tangled in the Ardennes. The High Command responded by allocating its heaviest tactical hammer—Wolfram von Richthofen’s retitled VIII Air Corps, 300 Stukas, and 40 ground-attack biplanes with a crack wing of Messerschmitt 109s—as escorts to reinforce the effort. Altogether, 1,500 aircraft would support the crossing: Stukas, bombers, and fighters.

Guderian’s spearheads reached the Meuse late on the twelfth and spent the night organizing assembly areas. The main event began on the thirteenth. The narrative framework is familiar: middle-aged French reservists, poorly trained and motivated, hammered into the ground by dive-bombers and artillery; German infantry improvising crossings, knocking out surviving positions as pioneers bring up bridges and ferries for the tanks; French communications cut, French artillery immobilized, and finally, French infantry cracking and panicking as the panzers sliced into their country’s heartland.

Up close and personal, the story was different. French infantry withstood a long day under air attacks whose scale and intensity made even the Germans say “hell had broken loose.” French artillery stopped the Germans in their tracks on the far side of the Meuse until midafter noon. French machine guns shot up rubber boats and their occupants. The XIX Panzer Corps attempted six major crossings on May 13. Three failed completely. Not until dawn on the fourteenth did the first tanks cross the Meuse. In the interim the infantry, as always, took heavy losses in what became essentially a storm trooper fight in the style of 1918: taking pillboxes with a combination of minor tactics and major courage against defenders who failed to read the script calling for them to run away. It was satchel charges and grenades at close quarters, pistols, sometimes bare hands. The Stukas set the table, but May 13 was the Day of the Rifleman—the lieutenants and sergeants and rear-rank privates of Hermann Balck’s 1st Regiment, of Grossdeutschland and their counterparts who took XLIV Panzer Corps over the river at Monthermé and opened the way for Hoth’s divisions further north at Dinant. Never again would panzer commanders—successful ones at least—treat the truck-riders and motorcyclists as a supporting cast.

By the morning of May 14, the panzer divisions had torn a hole 50 miles wide in the French lines. It was a tactical opportunity and an operational one—if the Germans could develop it. Guderian demanded a breakout. He did not want to lose time building up the bridgehead—and giving the French a chance to contain it. Better to keep moving, despite resistance from the rear as well as the front. Guderian wanted at least a 12-mile bridgehead as a first step. Kleist was satisfied with five miles, and made it an order. He had ample company. Halder noted in his diary that Hitler was “frightened by his own success, afraid to take any chances.” The High Command in principle favored exploiting victory, designating the Somme as the next objective, but sought as well to control the pace of the advance. Rundstedt was sufficiently worried about the prospects of a French counterattack that when he visited Guderian’s commands post on the fourteenth, he insisted Kleist’s directive must stand. A solid shoulder beat a broken neck.

Guderian had nothing if not the courage of his convictions. His intention was to leave 10th Panzer Division and Grossdeutschland to secure his southern flank, pivot 1st and 2nd Panzer southwest, then west, link up with XLIV Panzer Corps, and keep going. He issued the appropriate orders on the evening of the fourteenth. Around midnight Kleist confirmed them—and for two more days ran interference with his superiors. This was “mission tactics” in the true sense: a subordinate as yet without relevant orders acting on his own situational awareness, supported by the next echelon of command. Ewald von Kleist did not lack professional courage. His head no less than Guderian’s was on the chopping block—perhaps literally—should anything go irreparably wrong. And the operational analysis of Panzergruppe Kleist handsomely acknowledged that Guderian’s “unauthorized measures . . . resulted in a great success . . . for the entire course of operations and averted a major threat.”

Much of the thanks was really owed to 10th Panzer and GD. By nightfall on the fifteenth, the Germans were in defensive positions on the high ground around the village of Stonne. Infantry forward, antitank guns in support, the panzer brigade in reserve: it reads easily on paper. On the ground it was the consequence of the first day of a battle both sides compared to Verdun. Stonne changed hands seventeen times between the fifteenth and the seventeenth of May as desperate Allied air strikes on the Meuse bridges were accompanied by equally desperate French efforts to break through to the river on the ground.

The main counterattack was built around the 3rd Armored Division. These were new creations, designed to be part of the “managed battle” as opposed to conducting independent operations. They had only a single battalion of infantry. Their logistic support was limited. But with four tank battalions, including two of B-1s more heavily armed and armored than anything in the German order of battle, a division cuirassée was reasonably suited to an at-all- cost effort—especially when, like the 3rd, it was paired with a first-rate motorized division and under the command of France’s leading light in peacetime armored maneuvers.

In the end, the French effort fell prey to order-counterorder-disorder. General Jean-Adolphe Flavigny had since noon on the twelfth to prepare the operation. He folded when confronted with the real thing in one of those command disconnects that occurs in any transition from peace to war, yet is virtually impossible to predict specifically. Flavigny’s intention was to stop the Germans, and only then attack: managed battle epitomized. But the 3rd Armored, which had been organized only in March, was handicapped by comprehensively bad staff work centered on fueling problems. French tanks were seriously short-legged compared to the German ones; range was a low-priority consideration in bataille conduit. Flavigny had planned to attack before noon on the fourteenth. He postponed until the fifteenth, and then postponed again, when his divisional commanders reported a general attack would be impossible because of the dislocation of their formations.

Flavigny, in sharp contrast to Guderian, did nothing to take control. Instead French resources were frittered away in company-and battalion-scale lunges toward Stonne that nevertheless gave the Germans all they could handle. The B-1s, weighing in at more than thirty tons, heavily armored, with a turret-mounted 47mm antitank gun and a 75mm in the hull, frightened some of Grossdeutschland’s infantry into blind panic, and with good reason. One B-1 took 140 hits—all ricochets—and accounted by itself for more than a dozen German tanks. Another caught a column of German infantry and literally overran them, entering Stonne with blood on its tracks.

The antitank gunners held their ground as their 37mm rounds bounced away like tennis balls. Only by waiting for a close-range shot at the more vulnerable sides, a near-ultimate exercise in nerve and discipline, did the Germans manage to knock out or discourage enough of the B-1s to maintain the moral balance of a fight that eventually turned Stonne into a tank graveyard, with more than fifty of them—French and German—derelict in the streets and on the outskirts.

There was nothing wrong with French heart. The failures lay in command and communications systems that left tanks, infantry, and artillery putting in small-scale, uncoordinated attacks, which eventually gave the Germans time to support and relieve the mobile troops with infantry from the follow- up waves. The straight-legs repulsed final French efforts at Stonne as the tanks and trucks turned westward with the rest of Guderian’s corps.

Abraham Lincoln once described a Union general as reacting to defeat “like a duck hit on the head.” The metaphor applies equally well to French commanders trying to decide what to do next as the Germans poured across the “impassable” Meuse. Again the French fought well at the cutting edge, with some of the finest performances given by their African and North African soldiers. On May 15, at a village called La Horgne, a brigade of Spahis—Algerian and Moroccan cavalry still riding horses—held up part of the 1st Panzer Division for eight hours. Balck, no stranger to close combat, later declared that rarely did he see men fight as well as these, who stood to the last for France and for honor.

Much of the key to the French dilemma lies in a noun in the above paragraph. “Part” of the German division was blocked—one of its two battle groups. The other group was able to keep moving. So was the rest of XIX Panzer Corps, as the French proved unable to concentrate forces sufficient to block the spearheads, let alone counterattack them effectively. “A day late and a hundred francs short” comes to mind as another trope for a French High Command still expecting the main German attack through Belgium as the panzers drove dead into France, toward ground hallowed by the Great War, and deep into the Allied rear.

IV

THE PANZERS FACED problems in their own rear. When XLI Panzer Corps had difficulty breaking out of its bridgehead around Monthermé, Rundstedt ordered the task turned over to infantry. Kleist turned Nelson’s blind eye, the 6th Panzer Division overran the last French positions, and its commander turned loose an improvised battle group. Its tanks and motorcyclists, a battalion of each, covered 35 miles in five hours. The former cavalrymen drove through and over French formations that were unable to believe the Germans were where they were, and were unable to react to their presence. Eighth Panzer Division came up the next day and finished the job. When the shooting was done and the prisoners interrogated, the Germans discovered XLI Panzer Corps had destroyed the French 2nd Armored Division, which had been caught in the process of moving into position and hamstrung by a series of contradictory orders. Rundstedt’s headquarters backed off and restored Kleist’s freedom of movement—at least until next time.

Further north, Hermann Hoth’s XV Panzer Corps had the original mission of covering Kleist’s right flank by passing through the Belgian Ardennes and crossing the Meuse around Dinant. More than its French counterpart, the terrain was a nightmare of hills and valleys, unimproved regional roads, and trails leading nowhere in particular. But the Belgians defended only a few of their obstacles. Allied aircraft were conspicuously absent. Hoth, a former infantryman whose men nicknamed him Vati (GIs would have called him “Pop”) knew how to “pick ’em up an’ put ’em down,” whether boots or treads; and he had Erwin Rommel. In three days the 7th Panzer Division advanced almost 60 miles. Make them keep their heads down; go through them and past them; mop them up: it was blitzkrieg pur. Hoth gave Rommel his head: cross the Meuse and keep going. With the bridges at Houx and Dinant blown, motorcyclists used a weir and a lock gate, both unguarded, to get a foothold on the west bank. Rubber boats carried across a company’s worth of reinforcements by the time the defenders came fully alert, a little before daybreak on May 13.

As casualties mounted under French artillery and machine guns, Rommel started a fresh wave of riflemen across the Meuse—and took a place in one of the leading rubber boats, to find himself caught in a French tank attack. He ordered the infantry to open fire with rifles and machine guns. With bullets glancing off their armor and sparks and fragments ricocheting through firing ports, the tanks fell back. Returning across the river, the general lent a hand with building a ferry heaving timbers while under fire in waist-deep water. He was first across in his command vehicle. Not only did Rommel seem to be at every vital spot exactly when he was needed; to the men of 7th Panzer Division, he seemed as well to be bulletproof.

By the early morning of May 15 the crossing was secure, a pontoon bridge was in place, and 7th Panzer Division’s combat elements were ready to roll. Rommel established a “thrust line” on the division’s maps, divided into sectors. To call in air support or artillery fire, all Rommel needed to do was refer to one of the sectors. The recipient’s job was to note the target area, bring it in, and keep it coming. By the elaborate standards of the Great War, this was near-random improvisation. The division’s artillery commander was nevertheless delighted to be able to provide the kind of instant support that artillery had been able to deliver when guns galloped into battle behind six-horse teams.

Rommel rode with the leading tanks—into a counterattack by two of the French army’s best divisions: 1st Armored, with its two battalions of B-1s, and 4th North African, which included a number of long-service professional soldiers, among the best fighting men in France. The French had had a long, hard day on the fourteenth. Advancing through swarms of refugees, constrained to move at slow speeds and in low gear, their fuel tanks were nearly empty and their crews tired. For convenience their commanders bivouacked in the open to await the gasoline trucks. No one bothered to dispatch even a few motorcyclists to screen the roads to the east.

Seventh Panzer Division took the French by surprise. Panzer IIs and 38(t)s concentrated on the thinner side armor of the French tanks, on ventilators, tracks, and suspension systems. The Panzer IVs used high-explosive rounds against the fuel trucks that began arriving just as the German attack started. Coordinated resistance foundered as French tank commanders found their radio batteries had been run flat. Crew after crew ceased fire, waving rags and handkerchiefs from their turrets to indicate surrender. Thirty-five tanks, including 19 heavy Char Bs, went under in a matter of minutes.

Leaving the rest of 1st Armored to the just-arriving 5th Panzer Division, Rommel led his own tank regiment westward at forty miles per hour. By the end of the day the panzers had reached the edge of the northern extension of the Maginot Line. Officers and men from rear-echelon French units, confused and shaken, were surrendering in masses, responding to any orders they received, even if the language was German and the content was “Drop your weapons! Hands up.” Seventh Panzer Division nevertheless found heavy going on the seventeenth, grinding through the fortified zone against stubborn resistance that seemed to intensify as the day waned. The moon was up and the long European twilight had set in by the time the last roadblocks were cleared, and Rommel saw his chance. There was still enough light for the panzers to drive forward and break out. A risk, yes—but preferable to a night’s delay and an enemy further reinforced.

The tanks rolled forward in a long column, impelled by the hammering of their own guns, picking up speed as the confidence of the lead drivers increased. French soldiers and refugees abandoned the road for its ditches. No time for prisoners—just fire a few bursts as warning and deterrent. An occasional brief position report to his increasingly confused, increasingly anxious division headquarters was Rommel’s only contact with the rear. Still no resistance—and then it was clear that 7th Panzer Division was through the Maginot Line and on its way to the Sambre River.

By then the tactical situation had dissolved into chaos. Seventh Panzer Division’s men and vehicles intermingled with refugees and soldiers, some anxious to surrender and others looking for a chance to fight. Rommel personally led an improvised battle group of tanks and motorcyclists through Avesnes and into Landrecies, where an intact bridge over the Sambre pointed the way deep into the rear of the Allied forces in Belgium. The 7th Panzer Division had advanced more than 50 miles, made a night march unprecedented in the history of armor, captured 10,000 prisoners and 100 tanks—and recorded losses of 35 dead and 59 wounded.

By the standards of the campaigns of Frederick the Great, the Wars of German Unification, and the trenches of 1914-18, the achievement was almost beyond comprehension—but not beyond exploitation. At midnight orders came through from Hoth: continue the attack, direction Cambrai. On May 18 the 25th Panzer Regiment, with its fuel and ammunition replenished and most breakdowns repaired, shot its way into Cambrai across country where during the Great War advances had been calculated in hundreds of yards and casualties counted in tens of thousands. And then Hoth ordered a halt.

Hoth’s caution was more than conditioned reflex. Rommel’s was not the only panzer division running miles ahead of the rest of the army. The 6th was keeping pace, its columns tangling with Guderian’s until the two generals worked out the routes of advance. By now the three divisions of Guderian’s corps were even deeper into France than their stablemates, though the advances in miles had not been as far. Seen in hindsight, this was the beginning of nonlinear operations, with gaps in one’s front less important than forward progress, and flanks best covered by keeping the enemy confused and off balance. To Guderian and Rommel, speed was the new mantra; rapidity of movement and thought was the key to modern battle. The panzer force was capable of commanding itself all the way to the English Channel. Seen on a map, however, the panzer spearheads looked like fingers thrust out from a hand—and were correspondingly vulnerable to being seized and broken one by one. As early as the fifteenth, Rundstedt considered halting the motorized forces rather than risk even a local defeat that might throw the German advance off balance. He had his staff prepare a stop order just in case. Then the army group commander received a call from the Wehrmacht High Command, Hitler’s mouthpiece: shut the panzers down.

Hitler may not have given that order personally, but during a visit to Rundstedt’s headquarters on May 17, he emphatically supported it. A successful counterattack, he declared, might encourage both the Allied generals and their politicians. Rather than a helter-skelter push to the English Channel, a solid defensive shoulder in the south should be the next step. The Führer, for the first time since assuming power, encountered overt, coherent, and cohesive resistance among the soldiers. Chief of Staff Franz Halder executed a neat political flanking maneuver, first convincing the Army’s commander in chief, Walther von Brauchitsch, to order the offensive renewed, then confronting Hitler to insist the panzers’ southern flank was not a problem. Hitler, according to Halder’s diary, raged, screamed—and in the end, acquiesced.

Early on May 17, Kleist took a plane forward to pick his own bone with Guderian. The day before he had issued an order establishing a stop line, only to learn Guderian’s spearheads were already more than 20 miles beyond it. Apart from the winds starting to blow from above, for Kleist the question was exactly who was commanding the panzer group. Guderian’s conscience for once was clear. He had only received the order after midnight, correctly believed it outdated, and acted accordingly. Kleist upbraided Guderian in language more expressive than polite. Guderian’s equally heated reply concluded with a request to be relieved. Kleist accommodated him, then wisely left before someone said something that could not be overlooked. Rundstedt immediately restored Guderian to his command with a slap on the wrist requiring him to keep his headquarters temporarily in place. Guderian got around that by using telephones instead of radios. Kleist had no serious problem with the decision. Guderian had forced his hand, but he was soldier enough to sense a developing opportunity. Hermann Hoth also recognized hot dice when he saw them—especially when they came up “promotion,” as the High Command on May 17 created Panzer Group Hoth from XV Corps and XVI Corps redeploying from Belgium.

That put what amounted to Germany’s entire mobile force—nine panzer and four motorized divisions and several smaller formations, plus elements of the still-embryonic Waffen SS—under Rundstedt’s command for a killing stroke: a drive to the English Channel that would cut off the British Expeditionary Force and an entire French army group still facing east and north, still embedded deep in Belgium.

The Germans owed that situation to the panzers. Army Group B might have been a strategic matador’s cloak, but its operational sword was tempered steel. The XVI Panzer Corps headquarters had long experience handling tanks, and Erich Hoepner was second only to Guderian as a panzer general. A cavalryman who was an early supporter of mechanization, he commanded 1st Light Division, took over XVI Panzer Corps from Guderian before the Polish campaign, and showed the kind of skill making it possible to overlook a well- known distaste for Nazism. Hoepner’s two divisions—3rd Panzer Division from Berlin-Brandenburg and 4th Panzer Division, with its home base in Würzburg—were first-class, well-trained, experienced men manning a total of more than 600 tanks, including 130 Mark IIIs and IVs. Hoepner could also call on the ground-attack specialists of VIII Air Corps, and on the 300 bombers and 500 fighters as the other Luftwaffe units supporting the army group.

The panzers’ immediate and most formidable opposition was the French Cavalry Corps of General Rene Prioux. Its core was the 2nd and 3rd Light Mechanized Divisions. On paper these formations resembled the panzer divisions, each with two tank and three motorized battalions, and a total of around 240 tanks. Sixty of them were light vehicles armed only with machine guns and distributed among the dragons’ ports. Ninety more were 12-ton Hotchkiss H35s and H39s. Though well armored, the older models carried only a short-barreled 37mm gun dating back to the Great War, which was essentially useless against armor. The H39 had a modern 37mm gun, but 3rd DLM had only two dozen of them. The remaining 90 French tanks, however, were better than anything in the German stable—better, arguably, than anything in any army’s order of battle in 1940. The SOMUA S35 had its design faults: radios only for platoon commanders and a one-man turret forcing the tank commander to serve also as gunner and loader—multitasking ahead of its time. It also featured a well-shaped cast hull—albeit in two pieces riveted together—armor that reached a maximum of more than 50mm, internal fuel tanks giving its 21 tons a range of 150 miles and a maximum speed of 23 miles per hour, and best of all, a high-velocity 47mm turret-mounted main gun, able to outrange any German tank and penetrate its armor from any angle.

Five years of war would demonstrate that in armored war, quality could go far to compensate for numbers. “Quality” however, was more than statistics. It involved training and doctrine. The SOMUA was slow coming on line, thanks in good part to chronic labor troubles in a unionized, Communist-influenced armaments industry. Ideally the light mechanized divisions would have had twice as many SOMUAs as they did. Only about 250 were available by June 1940, with corresponding effects on crew and unit training. That was especially true in the 3rd Division, which had only been organized in January. French concepts for using the DLMs initially reflected the traditional cavalry missions of reconnaissance and screening. By 1939 more attention was paid to offensive capabilities, but these involved exploitation rather than penetration. From the High Command’s developing strategic perspective, the optimal initial use of the light mechanized divisions was to cover the move into Belgium. Advancing rapidly and independently, they could conduct a cape-and-sword defense against a projected German armored spearhead as the main force deployed behind them.

That kind of close synergy among doctrine, force structure, and strategic planning is usually and legitimately praised highly in military writing. In 1940 it comprehensively structured the behavior of Prioux and his troopers—for good and ill. Their specific mission was to screen the “Gembloux gap,” a 25-mile-wide stretch of country free of significant natural barriers and only partly screened by rudimentary, hastily constructed tank obstacles. Then, the final orders ran, they were to hold until the motorized divisions could establish a defense line. Hold until the morning of May 14.

Rene Prioux had nothing of Joachim Murat or Jeb Stuart in his professional makeup. He was too worried about the Luftwaffe and his own lack of air cover to undertake even the limited spoiling attacks originally enjoined by his superiors. The result was a head-on, two-day encounter battle that began around the village of Hannut on May 12. In a fashion prefiguring the behavior of Israeli armor in the early days of the 1973 Yom Kippur War, 4th Panzer Division attacked with more energy than tactical sense, and took heavy losses from French artillery fire and armored ripostes. The SOMUAs in particular, boldly handled in company strengths, proved an unpleasant surprise as the greenhorns of 3rd Light Mechanized Division came away victors on points from a good day’s work. Fuel shortages also hampered the German deployment to the point that Hoepner, instead of continuing to probe oppor tunistically for weak spots, decided to reorganize, resupply, and mount a two-division set-piece attack the next day.

A ball-peen hammer is a good tool. A nine-pound sledgehammer is also useful. Guderian might have done it with more finesse, but beginning a little after noon on May 13, 3rd and 4th Panzer Divisions, around 560 tanks all told, struck 3rd Light Mechanized Division on an eight-mile front. There was bitter fighting in defended villages, with riflemen clearing strong points and tanks bypassing them whenever possible. Survivors of disabled French tanks fought on with pistols against armor plate. A captain of the 35th Panzer Regiment described two observers in a water tower engaging tanks with rifles until “shot full of holes like sieves.” It was not until around 3 PM that the German tanks reached open ground, only to face a series of armored counterattacks. French tanks seemed to be everywhere at once, bypassing the panzers and engaging the infantry, forcing the tanks to turn around and bail out their comrades. The close-gripped, seesaw fighting featured small German armor-piercing shells ricocheting harmlessly off French turrets and hulls. The 6th Panzer Regiment and a company of antitank guns hit every tank in a retiring French column with everything in the inventory, including 75mm rounds. The vehicles just kept moving, with one crew eventually counting 15 antitank hits and 42 bullet scars.

The tactical differences were coordination and cooperation. The Germans fought in combined-arms teams, with towed antitank guns supporting the panzers under a consistently effective air umbrella. The French fought exposed to the sky, in compartments, each arm on its own. The German tankers fought by battalions; the French never went beyond company levels. Even individual French tanks often failed to support each other. Their lack of radios required at least one company commander to transmit orders by running from tank to tank under fire. Their small turrets in practice made tank commanders no more than gunners once combat was joined.

The 3rd DLM, moreover, fought alone against superior numbers. The 2nd Light Mechanized Division remained in its positions all day, facing front and fixed in place by German infantry, force- marched forward. As the Germans freed themselves from the melee and resumed their advance, Prioux, his local reserves exhausted, ordered a withdrawal to the main positions by now established around Gembloux. The cavalry corps had done its job; no reason remained to risk an elite force in an isolated forward position.

When losses were tallied, 3rd DLM had accounted for 160 German tanks at the cost of around 100 of its own. It was true that the Germans held the field, and so were able to recover and repair a good many of their losses. It was true as well that casualties had been absurdly light by Great War standards—only 150 total in the entire 4th Panzer Division. Nevertheless the consciousness of superiority recorded in the corps war diary did not translate to immediate pursuit in a deepening twilight, where all tanks seemed to look alike.

For Erich Hoepner it had been a good day’s work. Committing his panzers en masse had paid off despite the losses. German tanks might be inferior in a stand-up fight, but their mobility and the skill of their crews and commanders had set the stage for the next scene: breakthrough at Gembloux. Preliminary orders went out at 3 AM; the French spent the next 18 hours executing a fighting retreat that tied the panzers in knots and completed the cavalry’s delaying mission. Instead of overrunning the gap before the French could assume the position, Hoepner’s corps confronted a solid defense line manned by three first-class divisions: 1st Moroccan and 1st and 15th Motorized Divisions, with Prioux’s tanks deployed by battalions in their rear. A few tentative probes were so strongly received that Hoepner ordered his advanced units to fall back and prepare for a coordinated corps-scale attack the next day.

The resulting engagement of May 15 was the first time the panzer divisions were used to break through a major, prepared defensive position. Both division commanders led with riflemen going in afoot under air and artillery cover, the panzer regiments following closely either to meet enemy armor or exploit the expected breakthrough. Matters unfolded differently. A French army proverb says, “Algerians are men; but Moroccans are lions.” From the first exchange of shots, the men from the Atlas Mountains proved a match and better for 4th Panzer Division’s infantry. The tanks suffered no less in trying to carry the riflemen forward against gun positions the Luftwaffe failed to find, let alone silence. Particularly disconcerting was the heavy loss of Mark IVs, brought forward for their guns but all too vulnerable to antitank fire. By 4 PM nothing resembling a breakthrough was in sight, and 4th Panzer Division’s commander suggested an attack the next day would have no better prospects given the same conditions.

The 3rd Panzer Division initially held its tanks farther back, but also wound up committing them piecemeal to support the infantry against resistance no less determined and no less effective than that confronting the 4th Panzer Division. Results were no better. The Berliners ground forward slowly, a company here and a battalion somewhere else, against constant counterattacks. Late-evening reports that the defenses had finally been breached were unconvincing. Hoepner decided instead to continue the attack the next day, but to replace the panzers with two infantry divisions, presumably better suited to the nature of the fighting and certainly more expendable. The decision proved moot as on May 16 the French withdrew, finally reacting to the breakthrough at Sedan. Hoepner’s panzers followed briefly then redeployed as part of the drive to the Channel.

The fighting around Gembloux tends to be overshadowed by the more dramatic events to the south. Tactically, Hannut had shown the worth of spearheading an attack by using tanks in masses, even against superior material. Gembloux indicated the limitations of that approach against an organized defense. The panzers might well have broken through and broken out in another day or two. But on the morning of May 14, 4th Panzer Division reported only 137 tanks ready for action—less than half the authorized strength. Third Panzer Division reported as many as a quarter of its tanks out of action. Even with top-grade field repairs, these were not statistics calculated to inspire trying the same thing again. Crew morale might be as high as the officers said, but there were limits to the number of times men shot out of one tank could simply be assigned to another.

Operationally, the panzers had inverted French doctrine by keeping the Cavalry Corps fixed in place instead of the other way round. On the night of May 14, Gamelin considered pulling it out of the line and turning it against the right flank of the German spearhead coming from Sedan. It was a mission well suited to the DLMs’ tactics and training—before the losses inflicted by the panzers, and before the corps was integrated directly into the Gembloux position. Instead the cavalrymen were ingloriously drawn into the general retreat to Dunkirk, just like any second-line foot-marching division caught in one of history’s greatest envelopments.

The panzer groups’ operational mission was clear: drive northwest between Arras and the Somme, then cut off the Allied forces withdrawing from Belgium. But by now Halder, in the best opportunistic tradition of the General Staff, was considering swinging the bulk of the panzers south into France, fulfilling the original Schlieffen Plan by means of the internal- combustion engine while Army Group B, reinforced by the rest of the armor, mopped up what remained north of the penetration. Hitler, still anxious for the security of the southern flank, rejected this prospect out of hand in favor of halting the mobile forces west of Arras and giving the infantry time to close up.

Meanwhile the panzers rolled on and their opposition dithered. General Alphonse Georges, commanding the French Northwest Front, collapsed in tears when informed of the breakthrough at Sedan. Gamelin called for a decisive counteroffensive against a German spearhead whose vulnerability increased with every mile it traveled. A newly organized armored division commanded by an obscure colonel with something of a reputation as a military theorist, nibbled at 1st Panzer Division’s rear echelons on May 17. But Charles de Gaulle was unable to work a miracle. A report from 1st Panzer Division described a lone B-2 trundling down the road with no obvious intention, shrugging off repeated hits from Panzer IIIs. “We observed that our [37mm shells] were not penetrating,” sagely noted the company commander. The French vehicle was then engaged by a 20mm antiaircraft gun and by pioneers and infantrymen with hand grenades. Nothing. The captain then took on the B-2 from the rear with three Panzer IIIs. At around 250 yards the purportedly armor-piercing rounds continued to bounce harmlessly off the turret and the rear plates. The French responded by shooting up a passenger car, and then abandoning the tank and surrendering when a 37mm round—finally, one might add—knocked out the engine.

This event epitomized the nature of the Allies’ response to Sichelschnitt. Either formations assigned to counterattacks shed pieces on the way, or the mission was given to improvised forces lacking the cohesion to develop any local success they might gain. Gamelin was dismissed with ignominy on the nineteenth. His replacement, seventy-four-year-old Maxime Weygand, planned a pincer attack on both sides of the breakthrough. The southern arm never got beyond the preliminary orders stage. An attempt to mount a corps-strength attack from the north on May 22 was seen off essentially by the Luftwaffe alone. British Expeditionary Force commander John Vereker, Viscount Gort managed to assemble two British tank battalions, a couple of infantry battalions, and some field and antitank guns on the old World War I battlefield of Vimy Ridge, with ephemeral promises of French support and concrete orders to strike the Germans when they came within range.

The resulting counterattack gave Rommel and 7th Panzer Division a few bad quarters of an hour around Arras on August 21. The operational effect was the military equivalent of throwing a handful of boiled peas at a wall. But whether gallant thrust or forlorn hope, the move focused what Roland Friesner describes as a “flank psychosis,” a “crisis psychosis” that produced a layered controversy in the German high command.

V

AT 2 AM on May 21, 1940, the first German troops reached the Channel coast, west of Abbeville. Appropriately enough they were infantrymen, from 2nd Panzer Division’s 2nd Schützen Regiment. If any aspiring clas sicists in the ranks cried “Thalassa!” in imitation of Xenophon’s 10,000 Greeks, history is silent. Second Panzer Division had advanced 60 miles that day. More than a million men—the entire BEF, a Belgian army that had fought better than anyone expected, a French army group plus bits and pieces of several more—were cut off in Flanders, 80 or 100 miles at best from the coast that offered a still- ephemeral salvation. The German infantry that would decisively close the corridor were still advancing. A lot of ground remained free from German boots or treads. But real-world prospects for a successful mass breakout to the south were finished.

Guderian for one had no doubts. He proposed to turn his divisions north, to the channel ports: 1st to Calais, 2nd to Boulogne, and 10th to Dunkirk, and the sooner the better. In desperation the British threw sacrificial garrisons into Calais and Boulogne. But the road to Dunkirk, designated as the main evacuation port, lay virtually open for 10th Panzer Division—or rather, it did until Kleist responded to high-echelon anxiety over the abortive British attack at Arras by pulling the division into reserve.

Not until May 22 was Guderian allowed to resume his advance. By then the British had settled in. It took 2nd Panzer Division three days of street fighting to take Boulogne. Calais held out until the twenty-sixth in one of the campaign’s epic stands. By then the nerves of Hitler, and those senior generals still awaiting the grand Allied counterattack, were strained to breaking point. The situation was not helped by the Führer’s recurrent presence at various field headquarters, his anxieties trailing like a cloak. The panzer generals, the bit between their teeth, wanted to press the attack. Army Group A preferred a brief halt to sort out the mobile forces and allow the infantry to catch up and secure the corridor opened by the tanks. Halder and the High Command advocated a bold advance in a strategic context—arguably even the “Schlieffen option” mentioned earlier. Hitler sought a Verschnaufpause, a breathing space, partly to evaluate a situation that had outrun even his imagination, but also to demonstrate that he was supreme commander in practice as well as by title.

The situation was tinder for what Carl von Clausewitz called “friction.” Kleist provided the spark when, on May 23, he complained to Rundstedt that his group was so dispersed and had suffered such heavy losses, including more than half its tanks, that it was too weak to mount an attack against strong forces. Halder dismissed the message as an attack of nerves. Rundstedt, however, responded by shutting down the panzers for a day, with the advance to resume on the twenty-fifth. The High Command in turn reassigned both panzer groups to Army Group B—as drastic a reaction as possible short of ordering Rundstedt’s outright relief. Order, counter order, disorder—and in the midst of it, Hitler appeared at Rundstedt’s headquarters. He promptly reversed the transfer orders, which had been issued without his knowledge. He then declared himself completely in agreement with Rundstedt’s perspective. Army Group A at 12:45 PM confirmed the shutdown of the panzers. Hitler complemented this with a directive establishing the next objective as the destruction of Allied forces in Flanders. He also gave Rundstedt a free hand in the conduct of operations—a factor that had significant consequences.

Halder on one end, and Kleist and his commanders on the other, reacted with varying combinations of fury and bewilderment. Even Guderian, seldom at a loss for words, declared himself speechless. Efforts by Halder and Brauchitsch to change the Führer’s mind were predictably futile. Noteworthy in that context is Hitler’s reiterated denunciation of what he described as challenging his authority by transferring the panzer groups without permission. That was arguably more significant than such generally cited factors as hope for peace with Britain, worry about the boggy Flanders terrain, concern with sparing the panzers for future operations, or even desire to give Hermann Göring and his “National Socialist Luftwaffe” the glory of finishing off a trapped enemy. Not until May 26 did Hitler rescind the “halt order”—and even then only at Rundstedt’s urging. By that point it was hours too late to make a difference.

Gerd von Rundstedt gave Hitler all the backup he needed by using his free hand to hold the tanks firmly under his thumb. Only on the morning of the twenty-fifth did he allow Kleist and Hoth to change his mind. Not until the morning of the twenty-seventh were panzer divisions able to shift from refueling, repairing, and relaxing to combat readiness—with, just possibly, a slight loss of cutting edge. In that interval the German infantry were unable to reach Dunkirk before the withdrawing troops established a defensive perimeter stronger than anything at Sedan or Gembloux, and even more resolutely manned. The Luftwaffe was unable to shut down the evacuation, as overcast skies and calm seas facilitated movement off the beaches. Nor were the panzer divisions exactly eager to come to grips with Dunkirk’s defenses. Writing darkly of tank strength reduced by half and soft, rain-saturated ground impassable for those remaining, even Guderian recommended Dunkirk be left to the infantry and artillery while the panzers refitted for the coming battle of France.

This did not represent some sudden change of heart or loss of confidence. For Guderian, timing and momentum were the keys to mechanized victory. Both had been lost. Continuing to play out the changed scenario was more reckless than folding the hand and awaiting the next round of play. His sudden apparent pessimism silenced those voices still talking of an all-out armor-tipped effort to break through the Allied perimeter. The tankers more or less contentedly turned south, leaving an unanswered question: Could the Dunkirk evacuation have been prevented, or even significantly disrupted, had the Führer and his generals ridden a hot hand and kept the tanks rolling towards the beaches?

Wars may not be won by evacuations. It is nevertheless incontestable that the way Dunkirk was evacuated contributed vitally to Britain’s continuing the fight. Not only did the country’s only significant force of trained soldiers survive to fight again; they returned in archetypi cally British fashion: brought home by the Royal Navy and the British people, in organized formations, ready at least in public “to have another go.” Dunkirk lent moral and material substance to the famous image of a defiant Tommy proclaiming, “Very well, then! Alone!” What might have been the reaction had Britain confronted a demoralized rabble of stragglers and survivors?

The BEF of 1940 did not lack courage. But initiative, flexibility, and tactical skill were not among its strong points. Hew Strachan accurately describes it as “outthought and outmaneuvered.” The rains that softened the ground around Dunkirk did not begin to fall until after May 24. Had the panzers caught up with the British retreat, it is not too difficult to imagine replications of the situations created after the breakthrough at Sedan, of men giving up the fight from simple confusion. The risks were clear, but Hitler’s Reich and German blitzkrieg had in common a bottom line of opportunism. Eventually both would decay into choosing what seemed to be the easy way as a preferred option. And in that context it is worth remembering the words of another soldier, this one from the seventeenth century, James Graham, Marquis of Montrose: “He either fears his fate too much/Or his deserts are small/That puts it not unto the touch/To win or lose it all.”

Such apocalyptically gloomy thoughts were far from the minds of most of the tankers, privates to generals, taking position for Case Red, the conquest of France. The high command’s assumption that the French no longer possessed any significant reserves produced a decision to distribute the panzers across the sectors of Army Groups B and A, using infantry and artillery to secure multiple simultaneous breakthroughs, then directing and combining mobile forces as opportunities for exploitation developed.

Despite the short time available, the French had established a solid defense in depth along the Somme and Aisne, integrated by checker-boarded strong points based on farms and villages. Many units had been ordered to hold sans esprit de recul—to the finish. They fought with grim determination and improved finesse. Crossing the rivers cost the Germans time and lives. Stuka strikes had limited success neutralizing mutually supporting networks, as opposed to knocking out individual positions. But once the zone of resistance was penetrated, there was nothing much behind it—certainly nothing that could stop panzers on the loose.

The French were still in the process of reconstructing their shattered mobile divisions when the Germans struck. Army commanders continued to distribute their remaining tanks by battalions, so closely behind forward positions they were easily bypassed. Britain provided its only armored division: around 300 rivet-shedding deathtraps that broke down about as quickly as German gunners could disable them. German armored columns fanned out across central France, overcoming dozens and hundreds of small-scale stands by improvised task forces, brushing aside counterattacks by “provisional companies” of surviving tanks from broken units and “independent companies” equipped with tanks fresh off production lines. Their monuments were a few helmet-topped crosses alongside country roads.

Rommel’s 7th Panzer Division had been dubbed the “ghost division” for its speed and flexibility: “Now you see it, now you don’t.” The Ghosts went cross-country to capture Le Havre, set an army record by advancing more than 160 miles in a single day to seize the city and fortress of Cherbourg in an urban blitz, and finished the war on its way to the Spanish frontier. Third Panzer Division reached Grenoble. Second Motorized finished the campaign in the Loire Valley. The chief laurels of Case Red, however, fell to Guderian. Given his own panzer group of four armored and two motorized divisions, he shouldered his way across the Aisne, then swung southwest in the rear of the Maginot Line, isolating the area as Wilhelm Ritter von Leeb’s infantry-based Army Group C attacked the fortifications from the front. In the autumn of 1939, Manstein had discussed forcing the French to fight on the wrong side of their vaunted fortifications. On June 16, Guderian—who, parenthetically, was officially under the command of 12th Army—made the concept work. He swung his tanks and riflemen 90 degrees east for a broad-front thrust into Alsace. Executed so smoothly that its difficulty has gone unnoticed, the movement completed the encirclement of almost a half million French soldiers in the historic battleground and killing ground from Nancy to Belfort. That other elements of the panzer group reached the Swiss border the next day was a bonus for the journalists—and for Hitler, who at first refused to believe the dispatch. And all of this was achieved, moreover, without the massive air support Guderian enjoyed in the breakout from Sedan.

In those contexts it made little difference that Italy entered the war on June 10, or that Paris, declared an open city by a fugitive government, was occupied—by a straight- leg infantry division—on June 13. Marshal Philippe Petain, aged hero of the Great War and newly appointed prime minister, requested an armistice on June 17, while something remained to be salvaged. On June 22 the agreement was signed, in the same railroad car that had been used for the armistice of 1918. Adolf Hitler lacked an ironist’s subtlety, but he had a keen sense of history.