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Close Combat
“To make union with England
was fusion with a corpse.”
Marshal Henri Pétain, who
capitulated to Germany rather
than participate in what he
saw as a doomed alliance
with Britain
French signing armistice in 1940 with Germany—in the same
railway car where the Germans signed their surrender in 1918
On June 22, the French sign an armistice with Germany. The Germans have
won
they have crushed four Allied armies and driven a fifth, the British
Expeditionary Force (BEF), off the continent.
The Allied armies have learned that they are unprepared for Germany’s blitzkrieg
tactics. They have inadequate tanks and antitank weapons; this inadequacy is
compounded by poor deployments. The Germans mass their armor into divisions
and even armies, while the Allies deploy armor in small units spread across wide
fronts. The Allies also learn that they will need a force several orders of magnitude
larger than those that “blitzed” in France to defeat Germany.
The Battle of Britain
England’s victory in the Battle of Britain is one of the turning points of World War
II, and an important factor in the ultimate success of Operation Overlord. The
Allies’ first victory boosts morale immeasurably and lays the foundation for the
Allied air superiority that will play a crucial role in the Normandy Campaign.
Perhaps most importantly, Churchill’s gamble that the RAF can defeat the
Luftwaffe keeps England in the war. With the British Isles available for marshaling
the men, machines, and materiel necessary to carry out Operation Overlord, the
logistics of the operation will be infinitely less complicated.
The idea of invading England has been broached to Hitler by several high-ranking
officers. Hitler initially wanted a treaty with the British, but the unqualified
success of the offensive against France, Belgium, and the Netherlands changed his
mind. The German air offensive is intended to be the first step towards the