The Global Conflict

On May 10, 1940, German forces crossed the borders of Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg. Six weeks later, France surrendered. The speed of this collapse shocked the world. France had the largest army in Western Europe, a network of fortifications along the German border, and the institutional memory of having survived four years of trench warfare a generation earlier. None of it mattered.

The method that made this possible had a name: Literally "lightning war." A military doctrine combining fast-moving armored columns (panzers), motorized infantry, close air support from dive bombers, and aggressive encirclement tactics to shatter enemy defenses before they could organize a coherent response. Developed by German officers including Heinz Guderian, Blitzkrieg exploited radio communication to coordinate combined-arms assaults at speeds that conventional armies could not match.. Rather than attacking fortified positions head-on, German panzer divisions punched through the Ardennes forest, terrain the French high command had judged impassable for tanks, and raced to the English Channel. They cut the Allied armies in two. British and French troops fell back to Dunkirk, where roughly 338,000 soldiers were evacuated across the Channel in a chaotic flotilla of warships, fishing boats, and private yachts. The beaches they left behind were littered with abandoned trucks, artillery pieces, and the personal equipment of an entire army.

France signed an armistice on June 22. Hitler staged the ceremony in the same railway carriage, at the same location in Compiègne, where Germany had signed the armistice ending World War I. The symbolism was deliberate. He wanted humiliation, and he got it.