But the Germans advanced swiftly into Scandinavia, forcing Denmark into a rapid surrender and compelling neutral Norway to take up arms as, one by one, her ports fell to the Germans. The British response, although fast, was dogged with inefficiency and disruption, with troops landing in snowy Norway without skis and provided only with tourist maps. When, on 10 May, Germany attacked Holland and Belgium, British forces in Norway were evacuated to the Low Countries, leaving Norway to fall under German control and to be ruled by the Norwegian Nazi, Vidkun Quisling.
Winston Churchill, as First Lord of the Admiralty, took responsibility for the Norwegian debacle, but it was Chamberlain, as prime minister, who fell. Unable to form a coalition government, he was forced to resign amidst shouts in the House of Commons of ‘Go, go, go!’. He was replaced, ironically, by Churchill. The date, 10 May, was the day that Hitler unleashed blitzkrieg south of the Channel. Six months later, Chamberlain was dead.
The Fall of France: ‘France has lost a battle but France has not lost the war’
The period from the beginning of the war to 10 May 1940 was known in Britain as the ‘phoney war’, when the conflict still seemed far away. Children were evacuated to the countryside, rationing was introduced, as were evening blackouts and the carrying of gas masks.
Belgium, overwhelmed by the German advance, appealed to the Allies for assistance. The British and French responded by moving into Belgium to counter the German attack. Along the Franco-German border the French fielded a weaker force, putting faith in the Maginot Line, a defensive 280-mile-long fortification, built in the early 1930s as protection against the Germans. The Germans rendered it obsolete within a morning in May 1940 by merely skirting around the north of it, through the Ardennes forest, which, because of its rugged terrain, the French considered impassable. Reaching the town of Sedan on the French side of the Ardennes on 14 May and brushing aside French resistance, the Germans pushed, not towards Paris as expected, but north, towards the English Channel, forcing the Allies further and further back. In 1916, the Germans had failed to take Verdun despite ten months of trench warfare; in May 1940, it took them one day.
In Holland, Rotterdam was heavily bombed and, on 15 May, the Dutch, fearing further losses, capitulated. On 28 May Belgium also surrendered. Allied forces, with their backs to the sea in the French coastal town of Dunkirk, were trapped. But the Germans, poised to annihilate the whole British Expeditionary Force, were inexplicably ordered by Hitler to halt outside the town. Between 26 May and 3 June, over 1,000 military and civilian vessels rescued and brought back to Britain 338,226 Allied soldiers. This was not achieved without scenes of panic, broken discipline and soldiers shot by their officers for losing self-control. Meanwhile, Hitler’s generals watched, puzzled and rueing an opportunity missed.
Allied troops awaiting evacuation from Dunkirk to England, May 1940
On 4 June in the House of Commons, Churchill was careful not to call the ‘miracle of Dunkirk’ a victory but merely a ‘deliverance’. He continued to deliver his famous ‘We shall fight on the beaches’ speech, concluding with the immortal words, ‘We shall never surrender’. However, the French saw it somewhat differently – with the Germans closing in on Paris, they considered the Dunkirk evacuation a huge betrayal.
On 10 June, Italy declared war on the Allies. Four days later, Hitler’s forces entered a largely deserted Paris, over 2 million Parisians having fled south. Soon the swastika was flying from the Arc de Triomphe.
On 16 June, the French general, Charles de Gaulle (pictured below), escaped France to begin his life of exile in London. He was later sentenced to death – in absentia by the Vichy government. From London, de Gaulle broadcast a declaration, asserting that: ‘France has lost a battle but France has not lost the war … The flame of French resistance must not and shall not die.’ His words became the battle cry of the Free French movement.
Charles de Gaulle, 1942
Also on 16 June, the French prime minister Paul Reynaud resigned, to be replaced by 84-year-old Marshal Philippe Pétain, hero of the 1916 Battle of Verdun. Pétain’s first acts were to seek an armistice with the Germans and order Reynaud’s arrest. On 22 June, fifty miles north-east of Paris, the French officially surrendered, the ceremony taking place in the same spot and in the same railway carriage where the Germans had surrendered in 1918. Straight afterwards, on Hitler’s orders, the railway carriage and the monuments commemorating the 1918 signing were destroyed. The following day Hitler visited Paris, his only visit to the capital, for a whistle-stop sightseeing tour of the city. On visiting Napoleon’s tomb, he said: ‘That was the greatest and finest moment of my life.’ Before departing, he ordered the demolition of two First World War monuments, including the memorial of Edith Cavell, the British nurse shot by the Germans in Brussels in October 1915.
Hitler visits Paris following France’s defeat in June 1940
Pétain and his puppet government ruled from the spa town of Vichy in central France. The Vichy government actively did the Nazis’ dirty work: conducting a vicious civil war against the French Resistance, implementing numerous anti-Jewish laws, and sending tens of thousands of Jews to the death camps.
In July 1940, Churchill established the Special Operations Executive (SOE) to help resistance groups in France and elsewhere in Europe in the work of sabotage and subversion. In October 1940, Pétain met Hitler, and although Pétain opposed Hitler’s demands that France should participate in the attack on Britain, photographs of the two men shaking hands were soon seen across the world – evidence of Vichy’s complicity with the Nazis.
In July 1940, Churchill issued an ultimatum to the admiral of the French fleet docked in Mers-el-Kebir, Algeria – to hand the ships over to the British or scuttle them to prevent them from being used by the Kriegsmarine, the German navy. When the admiral refused to comply, Churchill ordered the Royal Navy to open fire, killing 1,297 French sailors. The incident served to sever relations between Vichy and Britain.
The Channel Islands were occupied by a German garrison from 30 June 1940 until the German surrender in May 1945. The only part of Great Britain to be occupied by the Germans throughout the war, there was almost one German for every two islanders. The islands were not of any strategic importance, but occupation of British territory was considered symbolically important to the Germans. Food supplies, delivered from France, were severely curtailed after the Normandy invasion of June 1944, and although the occasional Red Cross ship got through, by the time of liberation both the Germans and the islanders were on the point of starvation.
The Battle of Britain and the Blitz: ‘It can only end in annihilation for one of us’
With Poland, Norway, Denmark, Belgium, Holland and France under Nazi control, Britain now faced the German onslaught alone. Operation Sea Lion, Germany’s codename for the invasion of Britain, was quietly announced on 16 July. Hitler decreed that, as a prelude to a full-blown invasion, the German air force, the Luftwaffe, would destroy the RAF’s air superiority over Britain. The following day, Hitler issued Britain a peace offering, his ‘last appeal to reason’: ‘It can only end in annihilation for one of us. Mr Churchill thinks it will be Germany. I know it will be Britain.’ Many in Parliament were tempted; Churchill was not.
The main thrust of Hitler’s air assault, the commencement of the Battle of Britain, began on 13 August, the ‘Day of the Eagle’, when 1,485 German aircraft attacked