WASHINGTON -- Sixty years ago, during the week of May 10-16, 1940, a new Dark Ages began descending over Europe. The Germans had studied and learned from the previous war. The Allies had learned little, a situation that we must never allow to be repeated.
World War II had been going on since September of the preceding year, when Hitler's forces invaded Poland. But the Phony War had set in, a war in which no battles were fought as French and British troops encountered German troops only during patrol actions. All was nearly quiet on the Western Front -- the German invasion of Norway in April being a notable exception. And there was no Eastern Front -- Hitler's pact with Stalin had seen to that.On May 10, 1940, all of that changed. The world changed. Not since Genghis Khan's armies swept out of Asia in the 13th century had Europe so feared for the survival of its civilization. Analogies have often been drawn with another conqueror, Napoleon, whose French armies defeated every major army in Europe, but only the military similarities between 1805 and 1940 are valid. Napoleon was not Hitler, his followers were not Nazis and genocide was not his policy. Rather, the Napoleonic Code followed in his army's wake and became the basis for much of the legal codes in Europe today.
No, Hitler was a destroyer of nations, a genocidal murderer, an evil monstrosity seething behind a mask of human flesh.
On May 10, 1940, the armies of this madman struck the Dutch and Belgians. The Battle of Flanders had begun. The Phony War became the Blitzkrieg. French and British troops were rushed north to the aid of the Low Countries, where the main German attack was sure to come just as it had in the First World War. They were wrong.
The main German thrust was coming through defenseless Luxembourg and the supposedly impenetrable Ardennes Forest. The lead elements of German Army Group A reached the French border, the Meuse River, on May 12. With the bulk of their tanks massed in Kleist's panzer army -- as opposed to the French and British, whose tanks were spread throughout the front -- they were able to overwhelm the French defenders once bridgeheads across the Meuse were established.
Only the fight for those bridgeheads was a near thing, and the weak French Ninth Army collapsed as the panzers broke out. A 50-mile-wide gap developed, and by the week's end the German tanks, led by such generals as Guderian and Rommel, were racing for the sea. The British, Belgian and part of the French forces were cut off and would soon be retreating on Dunkirk. The Dutch had already surrendered on the 14th.
The Battle of France would commence a month later, following the British evacuation from Dunkirk, but its outcome was never in doubt. After the battle of Flanders, all the world knew who would win. Seven days in May had seen the implementation of a war machine that surpassed anything of its kind in modern history -- a machine that created awe, respect and, most of all, fear.
So France fell, but in Great Britain, Prime Minister Winston Churchill, with little more than the power of an indomitable will, rose in defiance -- and his countrymen followed. The Royal Air Force defeated the Luftwaffe in the Battle of Britain, and Hitler turned east, attacking his erstwhile ally Stalin. The German war machine and its tactics -- some of which had been devised by British military theoreticians prior to the war -- had to be studied. Time was needed, and Churchill's pilots, Stalin's vast lands and the ability of the Soviet people to endure unparalleled suffering would buy the time necessary. America and its allies would absorb the lessons of those seven fateful days in May and turn them on their creators.