May 1940

Refugees in Belgium, May 1940 (Source)

So, continuing (after a bit of a pause for other stuff) with the Dunkirk theme (the movie of course, not the town) I thought it might be worthwhile to cover a few things. The context of Operation Dynamo (which was the code name for the evacuation) and some of the events leading up to the evacuation and why the evacuation was necessary. And yes, I will be interjecting some of my own opinions on the matter and some of those opinions may upset/annoy any French or Russian readers. (If we actually have any of those, I mean The Chant gets hits from those two countries, but never any comments. Just sayin'...)

Now we need to go back to World War I, everything which followed the Armistice of 1918 (on the 11th of November of that year, there's a reason the British Commonwealth calls that day Armistice Day, even if we do not. (Opinion Alert: I prefer the to call it Armistice Day and I "celebrate" that day much the same way as the Commonwealth does, as a day of mournful remembrance. I'm a veteran, I don't need a "Veteran's Day" to remind me of that, nor to be celebrated. The retirement check is all the thanks I need. But I digress...)

Let's go back in time, shall we? World War I is over, the British and the French decide that "it's all Germany's fault" as the Austro-Hungarian Empire is no more, they are defunct, if they hadn't nailed them to the perch...

Oops, reverted to my default Monty Python mode, it happens.

Ahem...

Germany gets all the blame for World War I. No more airplanes, no tanks, and your army can only be 100,000 guys and none of that "bring in reservists every six months" crap like you pulled after the French kicked your Prussian butts in 1806. (Yeah, I'll enlighten you on that score. Someday. POCIR.)

Shortly after all that, the Depression hits and things suck for everybody in the civilized world. (FWIW, things have always sucked in the uncivilized world. Life there is nasty, brutish, and short. Hobbes wrote that, the philosopher, not the tiger.)

Long story short, the Germans are pissed at their government, so they elect Hitler to be in charge. Sort of. In actuality, the German political system of the late 20s, early 30s was sort of like the French and sort of like the British. They had a president who was the head of state (like the president in France and the Queen in the UK) and a chancellor (like the premier in France and the prime minister in the UK. Follow me so far?) who was the head of government.

There was an election, Hitler's party, the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (National Socialist German Workers Party, the NSDAP, or Nazis, for short) won a plurality (not a majority) of the vote. The party with the largest vote total should get to have it's party leader be the chancellor. Hitler, of course, was the leader of the Nazi Party. But there were a number of people who thought that that would be a bad idea to have this guy, who had a lot of thugs in his party, be the chancellor of Germany. The very same office held by the great Otto von Bismarck!

Now the president of Germany at that time was Paul von Hindenburg, an old general. He was getting a bit senile and he really didn't like Hitler, a former corporal. But a lot of folks convinced the old guy that they could "control" Hitler. Go ahead, make him chancellor they said, it'll be fine, they said.

Not.

Paul von Hindenburg
(And yes, the airship that blew up in New Jersey was named after him.)

Hitler is appointed Chancellor, Hitler gets to be in charge, there's another election (which the Nazis forced) and now the Nazis pretty much own the whole shooting match. Hindenburg dies, Hitler manages to abolish the office of president and has himself appointed Führer und Reichskanzler, the Leader and Chancellor of the Realm. In other words, Germany now belongs to Hitler. He is the boss.

Yes, I have skipped a lot of details here. The German tank school in the Soviet Union which ended before Hitler had fully seized the reins of government springs immediately to mind. Let's jump ahead, here's a timeline of the events leading up to the evacuation of Dunkirk and afterwards to the end of the Battle of Britain -

While the Poles were fighting bravely against the Germans, the Russians stabbed them in the back. (Hey Vladimir, should they have put that in the movie Dunkirk?) Meanwhile the British and the French watched from their positions along the Rhine and did what?

Pretty much nothing. So much for Britain "guaranteeing" Poland's independence. Of course, the British Army was small, especially when compared to those of the Germans and the French. There was realistically nothing the British could do as an independent force. So what about the French?

France was still exhausted by World War I, her government, her people, and her army had no desire to see another bloodletting on the scale of 1914 - 1918, which was fought (in Europe) primarily on French soil. But the French had also learned all the wrong lessons from World War I.

The aircraft?

The French high command saw little use for it except as an auxiliary to the ground forces.

The tank?

A good thing to support infantry with, so their tanks, while they had better guns in general than the Germans, tended to be ponderous, slow. Much like the British tanks of the period. While the Germans were forming armored and motorized divisions, the French assigned their tanks in "penny packets" to support the infantry.

Remember the trenches and the extensive fortifications of World War I?

The French most certainly did. They poured lots of money into a string of fortifications known as the Maginot Line.

Yup, the Germans went around it. In all fairness, northern France has some very poor soil for fortifications this massive, a lot of them would have sunken into the mud when the heavy rains came. The Ardennes did look pretty iffy to drive tanks through as well. I mean the Americans in 1944 viewed it the same way, "can't drive tanks through there!"

Well, you can but the logistics are a bear. Narrow roads, hills, and forests. It's easy enough to drive a bunch of tanks through. But add in all the trucks, troops, and supplies that need to travel with those tanks and you have a big potential problem on your hands.

Traffic jams of that very nature stalled and eventually stymied the German attack in December of 1944. But May of 1940 was a totally different beast. Fine weather and little resistance and before you know it, the German armor was at, and then over the Meuse.

The German tank generals wanted to drive on to the English Channel and cut off the British and French armies in Belgium and...

Belgium?

Yes, Belgium.

For the Brits and the French expected a replay of Word War I: Germans invade Belgium and then sweep into France. So they figured they would advance into Belgium and meet the Germans forward, away from the French border.

Now if some German generals had had their way, that's exactly what would have happened. But there were a number of modern thinking German generals and Hitler actually listened to them. So here's a map of what happened -

Fall Gelb* (Source)

Blue lines advancing into Belgium, which the Belgians weren't all that thrilled with at first, see the red lines advancing through your rear areas, fouling your logistics and cutting off your combat units from their bases of supply? Yeah, those are the Germans, using tanks and aircraft, spoiling your lovely little plan.

Most folks think the German Army in World War II was fully motorized, with lots and lots of tanks. A common, and very false, perception. What the Germans did was concentrate them and use them in ways that most of the enemies they faced hadn't really considered. Their armored divisions (Panzerdivisionen) were a well-balanced mix of tanks, motorized infantry, artillery, engineers, and logistical units. They could move fast and they did, what's more, the Panzer generals knew how to use them.

So in late May, 400,000 Allied troops found themselves behind the German lines along the Channel coast in the vicinity of, you guessed it, Dunkirk.

The rest, as they say, is history.

(Ibid)

The British view of the evacuation -

The German view -

The French view -

War is Hell.



* Fall Gelb - Case Yellow, the invasion of the Low Countries, Luxembourg, and France.