126Close 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
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
