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During the afternoon of August 31st, 1939,
German forces made their final preparations
for the invasion of Poland.
Air crews studied their targets.
Tanks moved to their assault positions.
Then, in the early hours of September the 1st,
German soldiers dressed in Polish uniforms
attacked a radio station on the German side of the border
leaving behind some bodies.
This was the "aggression" which Hitler later used
to justify his attack.
At 8 that morning,
German troops pushed aside the Polish frontier barriers
and mobile forces raced forward.
Two days later, on September the 3rd,
Britain and France declared war,
honouring their promise to stand by Poland.
But by then, the Poles were in deep trouble.
They were not only outnumbered,
but facing a new form of warfare
for which they were ill-prepared.
Blitzkrieg.
In 1939, the German army consisted of 1 1/2 million men.
Its elite were the Panzers. Tanks.
Six armoured divisions and four light divisions
intended for reconnaissance.
A total of 2,400 tanks.
These had been designed to break through
an enemy's defences and strike deep,
cutting communications and spreading confusion.
Enemy's strong points would be bypassed,
left to the following infantry to mop up.
The new German air force, the Luftwaffe,
was also designed for Blitzkrieg.
It had 2,500 aircraft lined up against the Poles.
The most notorious was the Junkers Ju 87 Stuka dive bomber.
It was a form of flying artillery
making pinpoint attacks in support
of the fast-moving ground forces.
The Poles could muster just 600 planes.
On the ground it was just as bad.
Poland's army was just 500,000 strong.
It had only 880 tanks.
It even had 11 brigades of cavalry.
Lances and horses against armour.
But it wasn't just numbers
that gave the Germans their advantage.
They used their Panzers in a radically new way.
As separate, hard-striking units.
The Polish tanks were dispersed to support their infantry.
The Poles' task had been made even more difficult
by the German takeover of Czechoslovakia.
The west of the country, including the capital Warsaw,
was now surrounded on three sides
by German-controlled territory.
This geographical advantage was essential
to Germany's grand plan.
The task of the first thrust of the tanks
was to create an initial breakthrough.
But actually winning the war depended
on deep pincer movements
designed to surround and crush the enemy.
These would come from Army Group North
under General Fedor von Bock.
He would launch two thrusts
from northeast Germany and east Prussia.
Army Group South under General Gerd von Rundstedt
would launch two more from Silesia and Slovakia.
The aim would be for the pincers to meet
near Warsaw and Brest-Litovsk.
From the start it went well for the Germans.
Polish air force was effectively eliminated
within the first two days.
The Panzers cut through and struck deep.
And the Stukas and medium bombers
proved devastatingly effective.
The Poles were sliced apart,
pinned into pockets which yielded
vast numbers of prisoners.
Legend has it that some Polish cavalry units
gallantly tried to attack the Panzers.
But it was futile.
They were just brushed aside.
By September the 8th, the inner pincers had met up.
German troops were advancing on the outskirts of Warsaw.
On September the 17th, the outer pincers
met at Brest-Litovsk.
On the same day, Soviet forces
crossed the eastern Polish frontier
as part of the agreement reached
between Hitler and Stalin in the Nazi-Soviet pact.
The Polish army was now in full retreat,
its government fleeing abroad.
Warsaw, however, fought on.
Its defenders rejected a German offer to surrender,
so the full fury of the German war machine was turned on it.
Watching it all was Adolf Hitler,
who had followed closed behind his conquering army.
On September the 27th, Warsaw surrendered.
The next day the victors carved Poland up
according to the Nazi-Soviet pact.
The Soviet Union annexed
slightly over half the country to the east.
Germany took the rest.
Both regimes began rounding up
anyone who might present a danger in the future.
Many were murdered.
And for the first time, the Germans revealed
how they would behave against those peoples
in eastern Europe whom they considered inferior.
They sent in the Einsatzgruppen,
special SS squads, to round up Jews.
Most were forced into ghettos in the major cities
where they would be starved to death.
Others were executed on the spot.
This was not, however, the end of the Polish army.
More than 50,000 troops escaped
and eventually reached France.
There, a provisional government had been formed
by General Wladyslaw Sikorski.
The Poles would fight on bravely from abroad.
In Britain, the air raid sirens
had sounded within minutes
of Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain's announcement
that hostilities had begun.
In fact, despite their politician's guarantees
of Polish sovereignty, Britain and France
had done very little to help Poland.
As Hitler had gambled, they had no idea what to do
once they had actually declared war.
Both countries had begun mobilization.
Air raid precautions were speeded up.
Anti-aircraft guns were placed in major cities.
Shelters were erected.
Soon, children were being evacuated.
Everyone had to carry gas masks,
and a blackout was introduced.
The British army began to deploy
its 100,000 strong Expeditionary Force to northern France.
French troops did advance a little way
inside the German border.
But they refused to move
beyond the protective cover of artillery range.
The initiative was still firmly in Hitler's hands.
And he at least knew precisely what he was going to do next.
The Blitzkrieg against Poland
had been a stunning success for Adolf Hitler.
He had subdued an entire country in less than four weeks,
and he was hungry for more.
So he ordered his generals to plan to attack
the British and French in November 1939,
less than two months after the fall of Poland.
His general staff was appalled.
The bulk of the German army was still out east
and had to be moved west.
And there had been some serious losses
in the Polish campaign.
Lessons had to be learned.
Polish anti-tank guns had destroyed a division's worth
of the lightly armoured Panzers.
A quarter of the aircraft used had been lost.
The Panzers were too light and unreliable.
And they had frequently outrun
both their supply columns, and the marching infantry.
Reluctantly, after furious arguments,
Hitler agreed to wait until the following spring.
Meanwhile, his enemies were also learning lessons.
Britain had thought that bombers
would be a key weapon in the coming conflict.
But when on September the 4th Britain's Royal Air Force
made a daylight raid on German shipping,
seven of the 30 bombers were shot down.
It soon became clear that this wasn't a one-off misfortune.
In some raids, over half the aircraft were lost.
British bombers just weren't up to the job.
So the RAF switched to night raids.
And they decided to drop not bombs,
but leaflets, so as not to provoke retaliation.
So with the Blitzkrieg stalled and the air war quiet,
the focus now went to the one remaining arena, the sea.
Germany's Navy was still in the middle
of an ambitious building program
that wasn't due to finish until 1948.
The commander of its submarine arm, Admiral Karl Doenitz,
planned to cut Britain's supply routes across the Atlantic.
For this, he wanted 300 ocean-going submarines.
But he had just 38.
Nevertheless, Doenitz ensured that all available U-boats
were at sea on September the 3rd,
the first day of the war against Britain.
That evening, believing it to be an armed merchant cruiser,
U-30 sank the liner Athenia without any warning.
112 lives were lost, including 26 American citizens.
The Royal Navy dwarfed its German counterpart.
It had 12 battleships.
Germany had none.
It had five aircraft carriers.
Germany, again, had none.
So after the Athenia, Britain declared
a total blockade of German ports.
But for all its size, the Royal Navy
had too few escort vessels.
Many merchant ships had to sail alone.
And by the end of 1939, more than 100 had been sunk.
It quickly became apparent that the British
had woefully underestimated the submarine threat.
On September the 17th,
U-29 sank the British aircraft carrier Courageous.
On October the 14th,
the battleship Royal Oak was sunk
when U-47 slipped through the defences
of the British main fleet base at Scapa Flow in the Orkneys.
Meanwhile, Germany's small service fleet
had also been unleashed against the sea lanes.
In the North Sea, the battle cruisers
Scharnhorst and Gneisenau,
intercepted a convoy on November the 22nd.
They sank its escort, the armed merchant cruiser Rawalpindi.
But it was the pocket battleship Graf Spee
which caused the greatest problems.
Designed specifically for commerce raiding,
its 11-inch guns could overwhelm any ship
fast enough to overtake it.
And it had the speed to escape from any battleship.
The Graf Spee had slipped away from Germany
before hostilities began.
Soon, it was cutting loose
in the South Atlantic and Indian Oceans.
Finally, three British cruisers,
Exeter, Ajax and Achilles,
intercepted it off the River Plate
on the east coast of South America.
The British ships damaged the pocket battleship so badly
that it had to take refuge in the neutral
Uruguayan port of Montevideo.
The Germans were then fooled into thinking
that a more powerful British force had arrived.
When the Graf Spee was commanded to leave port,
the captain scuttled her, rather than risk annihilation.
Back home, the Royal Navy crews were feted as heroes.
But this was just about the only obvious success
enjoyed by the British or French armed forces
during the winter of 1939,
though the British did enjoy one secret victory
in the technological war, which was to prove vital.
As soon as the war began, Britain began to lose
large numbers of ships to German mines.
What was so mysterious, was that the ships
didn't seem to have actually struck them.
The mines had simply exploded as the ships passed nearby.
Then, on the night of November the 22nd, 1939,
a German plane was spotted dropping a mine
at low tide in the Thames Estuary.
Disarmed and rescued from the mud,
the mine was found to be set off
by the magnetic signature of a ship passing close by.
The solution was to reduce the ship's magnetic signature
by hanging a copper cable around the hull
and then passing an electric current through it,
a process called degaussing.
Once degaussing was applied to all ships,
the danger from the magnetic mine was massively reduced.
But otherwise, as 1940 began, the war was quiet.
The two sides did little during the winter,
except to patrol, train, and try to keep warm,
for it was a particularly cold one.
An American journalist called it the phony war.
For the Germans, it was the Sitzkrieg.
In the spring, the British Expeditionary Force
took up its position towards the left of the front
on the Belgian border.
But it was dwarfed by its French ally.
France had some 100 divisions
along the Belgian and German frontiers
or in reserve nearby.
This imbalance meant that the British Commander Lord Gort
had to go along with the ideas
of the French General Maurice Gammelin.
And these were entirely defensive.
French hopes were pinned on
the massive ramparts of the Maginot line,
a series of fortifications that ran
from Switzerland to Belgium along the French-German border.
The Marginot line was considered to be completely impassable
and would ensure that French territory remained safe.
But otherwise, the allies had no idea
of how actually to defeat Germany.
Instead, they brought up their forces
and prepared for a repeat of World War I.
They would blockade Germany to sap its strength,
and they would dig in,
ready to grind down the assault which they knew must come.
None of their commanders seemed to consider
that the Germans might have totally different ideas
or that the next moves might come
in a completely different arena,
Scandinavia.
On November the 30th, 1939,
a new theatre of war was opened up.
The Soviet Union invaded its tiny neighbour, Finland.
Finland had only achieved independence
from the Russians in 1918, and hated them.
Soviet dictator Josef Stalin was convinced
that one day the Finns might allow the Germans in
to attack Leningrad and the vital arctic port of Murmansk.
The red army outnumbered its Finnish opponents
by more than 10 to one.
The invasion should have been a walkover.
But its leadership had been devastated
by Stalin's terrible purges.
The Finns were led by General Gustaf Mannerheim.
He fought back using hit-and-run tactics
amid the deep snow, often on skis.
The Soviet troops, confused and poorly led,
suffered massive losses.
Finland's gallant resistance
caught the imagination of the British and French.
Soon they were planning to send help via Norway and Sweden.
The fact that this might suck
two neutral countries into the war was ignored.
But a renewed Soviet offensive at the beginning of February
broke the Finnish defensive line.
In early March, the Finns had to cede territory to Stalin.
By now, Hitler, too, had become interested in Scandinavia.
The Nazi war machine relied on iron ore from Sweden.
In the winter months, the only way it could get to Germany
was via the Norwegian port of Narvik.
If the allies landed in Norway,
this vital supply could be cut off.
So he ordered plans to be prepared
for an invasion of Norway.
Denmark, which was in the way,
would also have to be seized.
The Norway theatre heated up on February the 16th, 1940.
The British destroyer Cossack
boarded the German supply ship Altmark
in a Norwegian fjord to release prisoners.
Then, on April the 9th,
German troops began landing at five ports,
Oslo, Kristiansand, Bergen,
Trondheim and Narvik.
At the same time, men of their newly formed
German parachute division
seized Stavanger and Oslo airfields.
The Norwegian defenders were swiftly overwhelmed,
as were the Danes.
German forces occupied their country within 24 hours.
In Norway, the Germans moved swiftly
to link up their beachheads and seize all the major towns.
In the air, the Luftwaffe had total control.
The allies now responded.
A landing force was dispatched to recapture Narvik.
French and Norwegian forces achieved this
on May the 28th.
But a substantial German force was now approaching.
So six weeks later,
the allies abandoned Norway to its fate.
Hitler had spent most of that winter and spring
at his country retreat,
the Berghof in Southern Bavaria.
For him, the events in Scandinavia were a sideshow.
Instead, he was preparing for his next major Blitzkrieg
against Britain and France.
The first plan his generals brought him
had a familiar ring to it.
The Germans would advance into Belgium
aiming to swing down towards Paris.
It was a repeat of the Schlieffen Plan,
which the Germans had used at the start of World War I.
The allies were expecting this.
And their main strategic discussion
was how to prepare for it.
When the Germans attacked, the allies planned
that their forces west of the Marginot Line
would swing forward into Belgium
to hold them on the shorter and more defensible line
of the Rivers Dyle and Meuse.
Then on January the 10th, 1940,
a German liaison aircraft lost its way
and crashed in Belgium.
A copy of the German plan was found.
This convinced the allies
that their Dyle plan must be right,
and they deployed their troops accordingly.
Unfortunately, the same event made the Germans
alter their ideas entirely.
Chief planner General Erich von Manstein
had always thought the original plan unimaginative.
He was worried that the German forces
would become bogged down, as in World War I,
and that his country would lose a long, drawn out war.
So he proposed to Hitler that the main thrust
should be made at the point where the Marginot Line ended
and where the allies were most vulnerable,
as their western armies moved forward.
Virtually all Germany's Panzers would be gathered
opposite the Ardennes in southeast Belgium.
The allies considered this hilly and wooded area
almost impossible for tanks.
It was, therefore, lightly defended.
The plan was to drive deep behind the allied armies
which would have advanced into Belgium.
They could then cut them off.
And all the forces sitting in the Marginot Line
would be bypassed.
It was a high-risk strategy.
The German armour could become stuck in the forest.
But Hitler loved it.
So the German forces were redeployed
without the allies knowing.
The allies meanwhile prepared for their long, defensive war.
In addition to the formidable barrier of the Marginot Line,
they had a slight advantage, both in manpower,
some 110 divisions available against 95 German,
and in armour,
about 3,000 vehicles against 2,700.
The French also had the better tanks.
Their 32 ton Char B had both
75 and 47 millimetre guns.
Its disadvantage was that the main gun
was mounted in the hull and so was difficult to aim.
The other gun was in a one man turret,
from which the commander had to control the tank
as well as man the gun.
In contrast, the newest German design,
a 17 ton Panzer Mark IV
had a 75 millimetre gun
in a spacious three man turret.
So its crew could work as a team,
though only about 100 were available.
The other main French tanks also had guns
which matched those of their German counterparts,
but again, the French had the one man turret.
The one area where the Germans had a clear advantage
was in the air.
The Luftwaffe had 2,000 bombers, the allies just 800.
The Luftwaffe had 4,000 fighters,
including the ultra-modern Messerschmitt Bf 109.
They faced just 2,500 mainly older aircraft.
The Royal Air Force did have about 800
excellent Spitfire and Hurricane fighters.
But it was keen to keep them for home defence.
But the main difference between the two armies
was in philosophy.
Everything the Germans did
was focused on the possibilities of Blitzkrieg.
All their armour was grouped
in 10 independent Panzer divisions.
But the French were preparing for a repeat
of the static fighting of World War I.
They saw tanks as infantry support
and distributed them piecemeal
instead of concentrating them.
They had noticed the success of Germany's Panzers in Poland.
So they were assembling three armour divisions.
But by the start of hostilities, none was fully operational.
Two totally different ways of military thinking
were about to go head to head.
Blitzkrieg against static warfare.
The summer of 1940 would soon show which was correct.
On May the 10th, 1940,
Winston Churchill became Prime Minister of Britain.
He couldn't have picked a worse day.
That was the day Hitler chose to launch
his Blitzkrieg against France and Britain.
At dawn, a whole German airborne division
parachuted into Holland to seize bridges and airfields.
Simultaneously, the massive Belgian fortress
of Eban Emael was assaulted.
Paratroop engineers were dropped on top
by swooping German gliders.
They swiftly silenced its guns.
Meanwhile, the Luftwaffe attacked
Dutch and Belgian air bases.
Then, the frontier barriers were pushed aside.
And Hitler's Army Group B under General Fedor von Bock
now drove into Holland and Belgium.
As planned, the French and British armies
along the Belgian border moved forward
to their new defensive line along the Dyle and Meuse Rivers.
But none of the allied commanders
seemed to have noticed
that German Army Group A, which had the bulk of the Panzers,
after brushing aside the Belgian frontier troops
had now begun driving through the hills and woods
of the Ardennes to their south.
Meanwhile, the Germans were pushing rapidly through Holland.
The obsolete Dutch army was no match
for the highly tuned German war machine.
And it was under continual heavy air attack by the Luftwaffe
which roamed the skies unchallenged.
On May the 14th, the Germans demanded
the surrender of the port of Rotterdam.
A large force of bombers took off as the Dutch hesitated.
While they were airborne,
the Dutch agreed to surrender the city.
But apparently a recall message never reached the bombers.
Rotterdam was devastated.
The Dutch capitulated the next day.
Then came the hammer blow.
The thing that British and French planners
had thought impossible had happened.
German Panzers were through the Ardennes
and had reached the Meuse by the evening of May the 12th.
Among the first to arrive at Sedan,
well north of the Marginot Line,
were the men of the 19th Panzer Corps
commanded by General Heinz Guderian,
fresh from the triumphs in Poland.
Guderian now showed how Blitzkrieg should be done.
He ignored the troops in the Marginot Line,
and he didn't wait for his own infantry to catch up.
He pushed straight on.
The next day, assault troops crossed the River Meuse.
Engineers began building bridges for the armour
while under heavy French fire.
On the 14th, the Panzers began crossing.
That evening Guderian's bridgehead was eight miles deep.
The French troops, stuck in the Marginot Line,
were too immobile to intervene.
Allied bombers made despairing attempts
to destroy the German bridges.
But most were shot down.
All the while German artillery
pounded the French defences
while the Stukas screamed in.
Just three days after the attack had been launched,
the French defenders around Sedan broke.
Guderian's Panzers began racing westwards.
By nightfall they had advanced more than 40 miles
behind the northern group of Allied armies.
These had been holding firm on the Dyle line.
But now the French supreme commander, General Gamelin,
realised that they were about to be encircled.
He ordered them to fall back.
This sudden decision to withdraw
bewildered the allied troops
who had no idea what was going on behind them.
As they fell back, they were hindered by a growing flood
of refugees clogging the roads.
That day, the French Prime Minister Paul Reynaud
phoned Churchill.
He said, "We are beaten."
We have lost the battle."
But for all the brilliance of the Blitzkrieg,
the Germans were vulnerable.
As the Panzers raced westwards,
they created an ever longer corridor
just a few miles wide.
The allies realised that this was open to counterattack.
The bulk of the German army was still
totally dependent on horsepower
or its own feet for transport.
So the gap between the rampaging Panzers
and the follow-up infantry grew with every hour.
On May the 17th, Colonel Charles de Gaulle,
commander of one of the newly formed French armour divisions,
made the first of two attempts
to cut through the German line near Crecy.
But the cumbersome French command system
meant that units were sent into battle piecemeal,
not in a coordinated thrust.
The Germans had little difficulty
warding off both attacks,
inflicting heavy casualties.
It seemed that nothing could now stop Guderian.
He plunged on further and further into France.
By the 19th, his lead units were past Peronne.
On the 20th, in an extraordinary 56 mile dash,
Amiens had been taken by lunchtime.
Abbeville, just 14 miles from the English channel,
was seized by 9 that evening.
And at midnight, a battalion of the 2nd Panzer division
reached the coast of Noyelles.
The Germans had split the allied front in two.
Everything now depended on whether they could defend
this long, thin corridor,
or whether the allies could successfully counterattack.
So now the British got ready to break the German lines.
On May the 21st, two armoured battalions
prepared to launch an attack south of Arras.
The British tanks were even more unsuited
to fast-moving armoured warfare than the French.
Their most effective machine, the Matilda II,
had been designed for infantry support.
Though well armoured, it was slow and undergunned.
The Germans had little trouble in repulsing the attack.
But it did have an effect.
By now, the German high command
were becoming worried
by their extended lines of communication.
So, for the time being,
driving south into the rest of France was put on hold
until the infantry had caught up.
The priority was to turn north
and eliminate the British Expeditionary Force
and the French First Army fighting beside it.
On May the 22nd, Guderian and the Panzers
began their attack to destroy the allied armies.
These were now pulling back to the ports
of Boulogne, Calais, and Dunkirk,
but they were trapped.
On May the 23rd, General Alan Brooke,
commander British II Corps, wrote,
"Nothing but a miracle can save
the British Expeditionary Force."
Two days later, the Germans seized Boulogne.
It was beginning to look as if
even a miracle would be too late.
May the 25th, 1940.
The situation of the British Expeditionary Force
and the French First Army was desperate.
The port of Boulogne had been overrun.
German troops had isolated Calais.
The British were being forced back to the port of Dunkirk.
Lord Gort, the British commander,
advised his government that the only hope
of saving even a fraction of his troops
was to organise an evacuation by sea.
But as the dive bombers screamed down
and the Panzers were poised for the final assault,
evacuation seemed a forlorn hope.
The British anticipated that Dunkirk
would be overrun within a day.
But unknown to the British,
Hitler and the German high command
had made a decision which was to save them
from total annihilation.
The Germans were only too aware
that their Panzer crews were exhausted
and their machines needed urgent repairs.
Those attacks by De Gaulle and the British may have failed,
but they had shown very clearly
how vulnerable the German lines of communication were.
This was the great weakness of Blitzkrieg.
So the high command made a fateful decision.
It decided to stop the Panzers' advance
to save them from further damage,
and wait for the infantry to come up.
Only then would the allied pocket
around Dunkirk be eliminated.
So the Blitzkrieg was halted, and the Panzers lay idle.
They would not advance for two days,
just enough to buy the British in particular
a little time to prepare.
As the tanks waited, the only major action was in Calais.
There, the British and French garrison
refused to surrender.
Instead, they had to be overrun in three days
of bloody hand to hand fighting.
When the Panzers got going again two days later
on May the 26th, the weather had changed.
The Germans became bogged down in the heavy rain,
again giving the allies more time.
So it was that at 7:57 p.m. on May the 26th,
Vice Admiral Bertram Ramsey, Flag Officer commanding Dover,
received a signal that he was to put
Operation Dynamo into action.
Operation Dynamo was a plan to withdraw
the British Expeditionary Force by sea.
He had prepared it more in hope than in expectation
that it could ever be used.
The following day a makeshift fleet
of destroyers, tugs, and passenger ferries
crossed the English Channel.
But by the end of the day,
less than 8,000 of the over 300,000 troops
of Dunkirk had been rescued.
The port was under such heavy air attack
that it could not be used.
And the ships could not get in close enough to the beaches.
So Ramsay now sent out a call for any boats of shallow draft
that were over 30 feet long.
Hundreds of cabin cruisers, fishing boats,
and barges were gathered from harbours
all over southern England and sent across the channel.
Often crewed by their civilian owners,
the little ships worked on the beaches of Dunkirk
ferrying troops out to the larger boats
waiting to take them to safety.
All the time they were under constant air attack.
The British Air Force threw every fighter it possessed
into the battle to drive the Luftwaffe off.
Even so, seven French and six British destroyers were sunk
together with 24 smaller war ships.
A quarter of the 665 small boats never got home.
But when the evacuation was halted on June the 4th,
over 300,000 men, 41% of them French,
had been rescued.
None of this would have been possible
without the heroism of the French army.
It played a vital role in slowing down the German advance.
The French rear guard didn't leave
its positions around Dunkirk
until the last boats had pulled away from the beaches.
One British officer compared them
to the last stand of the Spartans at Thermopylae.
Even so, the British army had lost
most of its heavy weapons.
It wouldn't be fit to fight
the Germans again for a long time.
France still had to fight on,
but it had lost more than half its army.
Against them, the Germans had 92 divisions,
including masses of armour.
At 4 in the morning of June the 5th,
a short bombardment began the final destruction of France.
Assault troops crossed the Somme and the Aisne.
At first, the French resistance was fierce.
And the Germans struggled to break out of their bridgeheads.
But once again, the Luftwaffe helped crush the defences.
Soon, the Panzers were pushing south.
And the trickle of surrendering French troops
turned into a flood.
By the 9th, the Panzers had reached the River Seine.
And the infantry were only a few hours behind.
Once across the river, the Germans fanned out
into the interior of the country.
On the 14th, the German army marched into Paris.
The swastika was raised on the Eiffel Tower.
Hitler had secured the prize
which had eluded the Kaiser in 1914.
The Parisians could only watch in stunned horror.
Throughout the period of the French collapse,
Winston Churchill paid five visits to France
trying to bolster French resistance.
On June the 16th, he even offered Paul Reynaud
a union with Britain if France stayed in the fight.
But it was too late.
Raynaud's cabinet rejected the proposal,
and the Prime Minister resigned that evening.
He was succeeded by Marshal Philippe Petain
who immediately asked the Germans for an armistice.
It was only now that the Germans
finally began to attack the Marginot Line,
which had been left isolated.
After a heavy artillery bombardment,
the French defenders offered only token resistance
before the German troops occupied the forts.
On June the 21st, Hitler went to Compiegne,
where the railway carriage in which the Germans
had signed the armistice in 1918 was kept.
As the French delegation entered the carriage,
he handed them his terms and then left.
The French insisted on consulting their government.
But the next day, they were told that
if they didn't sign immediately,
the Panzers would roll again.
They signed.
And the humiliation of France was complete.
For Hitler, his control of western Europe seemed absolute.
He felt sure that Britain must now seek peace
and that soon, he could turn
to the next stage of his master plan.
But even though the Blitzkrieg had achieved so much so fast,
it hadn't won him the war.
The British, battered and wounded,
had escaped to fight another day.