How did Germany defeat France in World War 2?

Answer 1

The simple answer is that in May, 1940, Nazi Germany deliberately violated the neutrality of Belgium and the Netherlands by running their Army through them and around the northwestern end of the fabled French Maginot defensive line, punched a hole through the weaker French and British lines, then surged straight on to Paris so that the French Army was outflanked and rolled up.

But you knew it had to be more complex than that, didn't you?

The Germans had tried the exact same tactic in WW1, and then it almost worked. The plan in the first war was called the Schlieffen Plan for its originator. In August 1914 the Germans came swinging like a gate hinged on Luxembourg through Belgium to try to smash the French Army all the way back to Paris. The plan would probably have worked had the Germans not been forced to take two full corps away from their swinging gate to stop an unexpected Russian offensive in the east. This put the Germans in the bad position of fighting a war on two fronts. The upshot was that by September of 1914 the armies all across the Western Front were stopped dead in a trench stalemate that lasted four horrible, appalling years of death and dismemberment on an unheard of scale.

During those awful years both the Germans and the French pretty much annihilated an entire generation of their best and brightest young men in an unparalleled slaughter. When the war was finally over in November 1918 and the Germans were considered to have lost (although the Germans didn't think so), one of the first things the French did was to build a dense line of fortifications, called the Maginot Line for the French defense minister at the time, all along their eastern border with Germany and Italy to prevent the Germans from ever again invading as they had in 1914. And the idea was a good one. The Maginot line could and did prevent a direct assault by the Germans on France.

Where the French ran into difficulty was along that troublesome border with Belgium, in the north. The French had a treaty with the Belgians that the French Army could counterattack in Belgium if the Germans ever invaded again, so until 1936 the Maginot line (unwisely as it turned out) stopped at the Belgian border. But the Belgians abrogated that treaty in 1936, so the French hurriedly began extending the Line, but the Line opposite Belgium was weak because the French were rushed, and it was weakest opposite the Ardennes Forest, because the French military thinking of the time was that the Ardennes was impenetrable, especially for armor (tanks). But the German planners thought otherwise: on May 10, 1940, Hitler's Panzers came roaring through the Ardennes and the Netherlands, flanking the Maginot Line and the French Army, and in just over a month Paris fell. Most of the French Army was left uselessly bottled up inside their wonderful fortifications in the Maginot Line, and the rest of the French forces and the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) was trapped, fighting for its life in the north, near Dunkirk. It was a virtual repeat of the French defeat in the Franco-Prussian war of 1870-71. The fragments of the mobile French Army that remained escaped with the British in the "miracle" of the evacuation from the beaches at Dunkirk. By June 22, 1940, the French had signed an armistice with the Germans and the Battle of France was over.

Hitler did not by any means have it all his way, but he was an excellent bluffer. In the first place, although the allies didn't know it, the Germans had actually exhausted themselves in Poland, and they were short of manpower and supplies, especially food and fuel. German Panzers were in terrible shape mechanically. In fact, the French Army in 1940 actually outnumbered the Wehrmacht, but the French didn't know it. There had been a long period, called the "phony war," between the fall of Poland in October 1939 and the German attack through the low countries in May of 1940. Aside from giving the Wehrmacht a desperately needed "breather" to rest and refit, Hitler was hoping against hope to get away with his assault on Poland, just as he had gotten away with annexing Austria and destroying Czechoslovakia. He thought perhaps the British and the French would appease him once again. But the French and British had treaties with Poland which they honored, although there was little movement in the west from the fall of Poland until the sudden German attack the following spring.

All during the "phony war" the French and British had not been sitting in their hands. They had plans, and they executed some of them. And the Germans had made potentially fatal tactical errors as well. Their salient into the French lines was little more than 40 kilometers wide. The French and British near Dunkirk might, with a concerted effort, have pinched off the salient and trapped much of the German Army in France. But it has been suggested by some historians that the appalling collapse of the French in 1940 was due in part to the appalling losses they had suffered in the First World War, especially at Verdun. The thinking goes that in 1940 the French simply hadn't the heart left to gut it out against the Germans again, not just one generation later. Plus, all through Hitler's rise since 1933, all the European nations had been following a policy of appeasement to try to prevent the outbreak of another horrible war like the first one. They let the Germans annex Austria, because Austria seemed to want to be annexed. They handed over Czechoslovakia rather than fight for it. And when the Germans attacked Poland in 1939, Poland fell in four weeks. The German army of 1940 seemed invincible. Almost all of Europe was afraid of Hitler's perceived power, with the possible sole exception of brave Winston Churchill, or the British might have collapsed as well, yet there were even people in Britain who thought Churchill was crazy to stand up to Hitler.

Hitler also thought he was very smart by having signed a mutual nonaggression pact with Stalin in the Soviet Union. Not for Hitler a two-front war as the Germans had lost in 1918. Fortunately for all of us living today, after the fall of France Hitler thought he was safe in the west when he suddenly turned on his "ally" Stalin a year later in 1941. What he didn't count on was the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December of that year bringing the Americans into the war. Then he made his fatal mistake by declaring war on us, as did Mussolini in Italy (which neither of them was required to do under the terms of the Tripartite Pact with Japan), giving us all the excuse we needed to emphasize our "Germany First" policy. Hitler was no longer safe in the west. He was about to be fighting on two fronts, exactly what had cost the Germans the first war, and Hitler was already losing in the east because the Red Army proved to be much more of a worthy opponent than Hitler had expected. But it would still require four more years of the most brutal warfare ever seen on Earth, and an estimated 60 million dead, before the Axis powers were crushed.

Answer 2

Because Germany actually had an agreement with the U.S.S.R. that each would invade half of the country, one from the East and one from the West. Also, Germany had an incredibly large military force at the time and Poland was not expecting any invasion.

Answer 3

Germany basically did what they had tried to do at the start of World War I. The border between France and Germany was very heavily fortified; so instead of attacking there, Germany chose to go through Belgium, which did not have strongly fortified borders with Germany or France. The German Army moved quickly through Belgium and into northern France, going right around the powerful French defenses.

The French were defeated more or less because the Germans went around their armies, and encircled them. This made it easy for the Germans to destroy the French Army. The Germans used large units of tanks, motorized infantry, and their powerful air force to overwhelm and destroy French units. The British military forces in France and Belgium were not numerous enough to make much of a difference, and were eventually forced to retreat, famously escaping back to England at places like Dunkirk.

The German strategy of attacking rapidly, using tank and motorized infantry to move fast and encircle enemy units, while being closely supported by powerful air forces is often called Blitzkrieg ("lightning war"), although there is little evidence the Germans really called it that.

Answer 4

The strategy of the senior French army officers was outdated and based on false assumptions. The military believed that the Germans would attack on the East, defended by the fortified Maginot line. They assumed it would be a long and hard trench war as was WWI. The use of tanks and mechanical force was overlooked in the strategy and small units were scattered instead of grouping them to set a strong opposition to the German Panzers.

Germans used massive mechanical power in Belgium and the north of France, provoking a huge exodus of Belgian and northern French civilians caught under the bombardements. The emphasis was put on swiftness and the outdated tactics of French generals was unable to check them. The army was desorganised by the rapid German advance. Due to that use of outdated tactics, the French military suffered a very high number of casualties (in fact comparable to some bloody periods of WWI), as infantry and horse-mounted regiments were crushed by the German bombs and tanks.

Answer 5

In both major wars the Germans had better generals with sounde tactics than th French.