GERMANY WINS IN THE WEST

Early in the morning of May Io, 1940, Germany invaded Holland and Belgium, having infiltrated troops into Luxembourg the night before. These neutrals would be rewarded for their prior shielding of Germany in the West by the swift destruction of their independence. But that destruction was incidental to a broader aim. The purpose of the German invasion was to crush the French and British forces on the continent so that Germany would have quiet in the West while conquering living space from the Soviet Union in the East. The three neutrals in the West were to provide the avenue for victory over France and a coastal base for defeating England, while the great neutral in the East, the Soviet Union, both enabled Germany to concentrate her forces on one major front and helped supply these forces with the materials Germany needed in taking this preliminary step for the subsequent campaign in the East.

As already described, the German plan had changed from an initial one for a limited offensive in the north to a subsequent one for an attack toward the Channel coast through Luxembourg, Belgium and northern France. Disagreements over strategy and weather problems had led to twenty-nine postponements. These postponements, however, had some major advantages for the Germans. They utilized the seven months’ lull in the fighting to make good the losses and take into account the lessons of the Polish campaign. Because some details of the original German campaign plans came to the attention of the Western Allies when a German plane, carrying an officer with relevant documents he could not destroy quickly enough, made a forced landing in Belgium, the Allies were misled into disregarding the signs of a reorientation of the direction of the main German thrust. They were, therefore, inclined to fall all the more completely into the trap created by the second and actually implemented campaign plan. Finally, the repeated leaks of Germany's intention to invade, several of them deliberately arranged by Hans Oster, a key figure in the internal opposition to Hitler, left the immediate victims of attack doubtful about crediting the last warning in the series.