Hitler's Blitzkrieg in the West (Hardback)

In the early hours of 10 May 1940, German forces launched their Blitzkrieg in the West, invading Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, and France. One of the main thrusts of this lightning offensive came through the Ardennes Forest, a region of dense woodland, rough terrain, and rolling hills. At the time, the French Army considered that the Ardennes was impassable to a large-scale mechanized attack, this being a stance that stemmed from no less a person than Marshal Pétain. The well-trodden myth of the fighting that followed tells us the French, when faced with General Rommel’s Panzers, simply surrendered rather than fight. But is this really true?

In this ground-breaking study, Paul Dawson reveals that Pétain’s supposed view – shared by later commanders such as Maxime Weygand and Maurice Gamelin – was deliberately misquoted after the war. What Pétain actually said was: ‘The Ardennes are impassable for tanks provided enough anti-tank measures are taken.’ The second half of this statement is usually omitted.

Pétain’s qualification was correct. Indeed, the German High Command initially hesitated to adopt General von Manstein’s plan precisely because their own simulations showed that an advance through the Ardennes could easily be stopped by an alert and prepared defender.

The French, for their part, had not entirely dismissed the possibility of a major German thrust through the region. However, they believed the enemy lacked the logistical capability to move troops and supplies swiftly through the forested corridor and that any attack could be contained once reserves were repositioned. This too was a serious misjudgement. A French study from 1938 had already concluded that German forces could cross the Ardennes in just sixty hours and that the Meuse River would delay them no more than forty-eight.

What went wrong in those critical days of May 1940 is laid bare in Dawson’s reappraisal of the Battle of France, made possible by the discovery of vast quantities of previously unseen documents in the French archives. Forget what you’ve read before; this is the true story of that fateful spring.