Editing Blitzkrieg (section)

===Low Countries and France, 1940===
{{Main|Battle of the Netherlands|Battle of Belgium|Battle of France}}
[[File:16May-21May Battle of Belgium.PNG|thumb|German advances during the Battle of Belgium]]
The German invasion of France, with subsidiary attacks on Belgium and the Netherlands, consisted of two phases, Operation Yellow (''[[Fall Gelb]]'') and Operation Red (''[[Fall Rot]]''). Yellow opened with a feint conducted against the Netherlands and Belgium by two armored corps and [[paratrooper]]s. Most of the German armored forces were placed in [[1st Panzer Army|Panzer Group Kleist]], which attacked through the [[Ardennes]], a lightly defended sector that the French planned to reinforce if necessary before the Germans could bring up heavy and siege artillery.{{sfn|Liddell Hart|1970|p=73}}{{efn|name=Alphonse Joseph Georges statement}} There was no time for the French to send such reinforcement, as the Germans did not wait for siege artillery but reached the Meuse and achieved a breakthrough at the [[Battle of Sedan (1940)|Battle of Sedan]] in three days.{{sfn|Frieser|2005|pp=145–182}}

Panzer Group Kleist raced to the [[English Channel]], reached the coast at [[Abbeville]] and cut off the [[British Expeditionary Force (World War II)|BEF]], the [[Belgian Army]] and some of the best-equipped divisions of the [[French Army]] in northern France. Armored and motorized units under Guderian, Rommel and others advanced far beyond the marching and horse-drawn infantry divisions and far in excess of what Hitler and the German high command had expected or wished. When the Allies counter-attacked at [[Battle of Arras (1940)|Arras]] by using the heavily armored British [[Matilda I (tank)|Matilda I]] and [[Matilda II]] tanks, a brief panic ensued in the German High Command.

Hitler halted his armored and motorized forces outside the port of [[Dunkirk]], which the Royal Navy had started using to evacuate the Allied forces. [[Hermann Göring]] promised that the Luftwaffe would complete the destruction of the encircled armies, but aerial operations failed to prevent the evacuation of the majority of the Allied troops. In [[Operation Dynamo]], some {{formatnum:330000}} French and British troops escaped.{{sfn|Frieser|2005|pp=291–310}}

Case Yellow surprised everyone by overcoming the Allies' 4,000 armored vehicles, many of which were better than their German equivalents in armor and gunpower.{{sfn|Guderian|2001|p=94}} The French and British frequently used their tanks in the dispersed role of infantry support, rather than by concentrating force at the point of attack, to create overwhelming firepower.<!--this is a bit old hat since the Allies had enough tanks for armored divisions and infantry support units, unlike the Germans-->

[[File:4June-12June Battle of France.PNG|thumb|German advances during the Battle of France]]
The French armies were much reduced in strength and the confidence of their commanders shaken. With much of their own armor and heavy equipment lost in Northern France, they lacked the means to fight a mobile war. The Germans followed their initial success with Operation Red, a triple-pronged offensive. The XV Panzer Corps attacked towards [[Brest, France|Brest]], [[XIV Panzer Corps]] attacked east of Paris, towards [[Lyon]] and the XIX Panzer Corps encircled the Maginot Line. The French, hard pressed to organise any sort of counter-attack, were continually ordered to form new defensive lines and found that German forces had already bypassed them and moved on. An armored counter-attack, organized by Colonel [[Charles de Gaulle]], could not be sustained, and he had to retreat.

Prior to the German offensive in May, [[Winston Churchill]] had said, "Thank God for the French Army".{{sfn|Horne|1969|p=717}} The same French Army collapsed after barely two months of fighting. That was in shocking contrast to the four years of trench warfare on which French forces had engaged during the First World War. French Prime Minister [[Paul Reynaud]], analyzed the collapse in a speech on 21 May 1940:

{{blockquote|The truth is that our classic conception of the conduct of war has come up against a new conception. At the basis of this... there is not only the massive use of heavy armoured divisions or cooperation between them and airplanes, but the creation of disorder in the enemy's rear by means of parachute raids.{{Citation needed|date=December 2021}}}}

The Germans had not used paratroopry attacks in France and made only one large drop in the Netherlands to capture three bridges; some small glider-landings were conducted in Belgium to take bottlenecks on routes of advance before the arrival of the main force (the most renowned being the landing on [[Fort Eben-Emael]] in Belgium).{{sfn|Galgano|2020|pp=99–114}}