Was the fall of France a defeat or a national collapse?

The short answer

• A risky attack through the Ardennes. The Allies had prepared to meet a German advance through Belgium under the Dyle-Breda plan; an earlier German plan had envisaged just such an attack. In January 1940 a courier plane carrying those plans crashed in Belgium. Their exposure helped open the way for Manstein’s alternative, concentrating armor in the Ardennes, where the Allies did not expect a major armored attack. The gamble needed circumstances to favor it. A French reconnaissance report of columns in the region was discounted, and second-line reservists held Sedan. France had many tanks, some better armored than Germany’s, but assigned many to infantry support and expected a continuous front. Germany concentrated armored formations to exploit a breach. The outcome turned on deployment and command as well as equipment.
• The uses of the Phoney War. During the Phoney War the Allies expected time to bring advantages: the blockade would tighten, rearmament mature, and imperial resources become available. British aircraft production did overtake Germany’s in 1940. Germany, however, also had time to absorb the lessons of Poland and choose when to strike. Inactivity brought boredom and defeatism to French forces. Belgium’s neutrality limited joint planning, so Allied armies would enter a country whose roads and defenses they had not been free to prepare together beforehand. The pause gave both sides opportunities, but not the same ones.
• The limits of neutrality. After the First World War and the League’s failures, several small northwestern European states sought security in neutrality. Belgium had formally adopted it in 1936 (Ch. 5). Yet Germany found their territory useful for its military purposes and invaded six countries in six weeks in April and May 1940. Their legal status did not deter it. Switzerland, Sweden, and the countries of Iberia remained outside the fighting; geography and great-power calculations helped determine where neutrality survived. The map’s change from parchment to red shows the limits of a declaration when an invader has other plans.
• Vichy: defeat and decisions. The pressure to seek an armistice was overwhelming. What should France’s government do after it? In July 1940 a parliamentary majority gave Pétain full powers. His regime sought a favorable place in Hitler’s Europe and spoke of “collaboration” at Montoire in October. In the initially unoccupied grey-tan southern zone, Vichy governed and policed its own territory and enacted antisemitic legislation, including measures ahead of German demands. French responses had already begun to diverge: after the armistice request, de Gaulle appealed from London on 18 June.

What it changed

War spreads in the Mediterranean. Mussolini declared war on 10 June, saying he needed “a few thousand dead for the peace table.” Italy then invaded Egypt from Libya in September and Greece from Albania in October. Both campaigns went badly, and Germany intervened. As Chapter 11 follows, the Mediterranean and Balkan campaigns affected the timetable and circumstances of the coming attack on the Soviet Union.

The United States moves closer to war. With France defeated, Americans could less readily assume that Europe’s democracies could contain Germany without substantial US help. Destroyers-for-bases came in September 1940, as did the first US peacetime conscription; Lend-Lease followed in March 1941. The United States remained outside the war for the time being, while Roosevelt called on it to become the “arsenal of democracy.”

European colonies become vulnerable. European possessions in Asia now had vulnerable rulers: the Netherlands was occupied, France had a client regime, and Britain was fighting for survival. Within three months Japanese forces entered northern Indochina and Japan signed the Tripartite Pact. Events in the European and Pacific theaters were becoming more closely connected.