The Battle of France and the Flight to Dunkirk

Retellings of the Dunkirk rescue often leave out how the Allied forces got into such a predicament, with a huge part of the British Expeditionary Force stranded. Today, we'll talk about the lead-up to WWII and its relentless progression into France.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Fry. You have
seen seemingly any movie in the last few months, at
least where we live, You've probably seen at least one

(00:23):
really tear jerking trailer for the movie Dunkirk, just being
described as an epic action thriller. It's about the Dunkirk evacuation,
also known as Operation Dynamo or the Miracle of Dunkirk,
unless perhaps you live in France, in which your name
for it is probably not so audatory. Yeah. I have
seen that trailer several times in imax huh, and it

(00:45):
seems so very stressful, And the early reviews I have
seen so far say like it starts stressful and stays
stressful that I'm like, I don't know what I'm gonna
need some help to get through this one somehow or
another well, and I don't know about other it's tuned
to the key of making me cry. Well every time
I have seen it in the theater, I have started

(01:05):
tearing up. And I was worried about whether we would
be able to keep our composure through an episode on it.
But this took me so long to research. It took me,
in fact, four times normal. So at this point I
feel like I've been inoculated. You have you have done
Kirk desization tears. So this upcoming movie is at least
the second major motion picture dedicated just to this story.

(01:28):
It's appeared in fiction as well, including an Atonement. There
is a British TV drama about it, many books, and
this attention is really not surprising. On top of World
War Two being a hugely, hugely popular setting for both
fiction and nonfiction, it also has lots of details that
make for a really compelling and harrowing story, like a
fleet of hundreds of little ships crossing the English Channel

(01:50):
to rescue stranded soldiers. But the retellings usually focus on
that dramatic rescue, with the Allied troops either already cut
off or at the edge of disaster. That leaves a
whole lot out, including how the Allied forces got into
such a predicament which had a huge part of the
British Expeditionary Force stranded and in serious danger. And in

(02:10):
one spot, every time I would see the trailer, I
would be like, but y'all, how did you get into
this fix? How did all these people end up on
the beach? Ye? So today we're going to talk about
the lead up to World War Two and it's relentless
progression into France in May of nineteen forty, and then
the next time we were going to look at this
evacuation itself, including the sacrifices that had to be made

(02:33):
to evacuate so many people, and a brief caveat that
even at two episodes, there are tons of details we
are not getting into. Two of the books that were
part of the research for this, one of them was
about three hundred pages long, and the other one was
about seven hundred pages long, And the seven hundred page
one included twenty one maps at the end detailing all
of the various troop movements and things that happened. If

(02:53):
maps like that are what you are really into, you
may find this too general, um, but that's it would
be just an unending list of movements and town names
and generals and names of units. I would find that
hard to follow while listening to I imagine others would also,

(03:15):
And we haven't really done a recap on the beginnings
of World War two on our show, and particularly for
our US listeners when you learn about it, this tends
to be glossed over with more attention spent on the
Holocaust and on the United States involvement in the war.
So we're gonna start there. Historians marked numerous points after
the end of World War One in nineteen eighteen as

(03:35):
the start of World War Two, and really the terms
of the Treaty of Versailles that ended the war played
their own part in setting the stage for another one.
And when it comes to the war in Western Europe,
and especially the part of the war that we're talking
about today, most timelines put it at Germany's invasion of
Poland on September one, nineteen thirty nine. But even that

(03:56):
starting point really requires more explanation than just Germany invaded Poland.
Germany had faced huge economic and military consequences under the
Treaty of Versailles, some of which contributed to Adolph Hitler's
rise to power when we talk about that rise to
power in more detail in our episode on the Night
of the Long Knives, But briefly, in addition to restricting

(04:17):
the German military, the treaty distributed German and German occupied
land to other nations and required Germany to pay reparations.
These reparations and Germany's handling of them aren't really easily
summarized in just a sentence, but they contributed to hyper
inflation of the nation's currency and other serious economic fallout.
World War One had also been devastating outside of Germany.

(04:41):
Other nations involved had suffered enormous and sometimes catastrophic social, economic,
and human costs. These costs were so high that much
of the rest of the world was incredibly hesitant to
embark on another massive war, even as the after effects
of World War One and the Great Depression both contributed
to the rise of fascism in multiple nations. In particular,

(05:02):
Britain and France were the two nations both most likely
and most able to resist Germany, but they were reluctant
to do so. Neville Chamberlain, prime Minister of Great Britain
from nineteen thirty seven to nineteen forty, followed a policy
of appeasement when it came to Britain's response to Nazi Germany.
In the mid nineteen thirties, Germany took a number of

(05:23):
actions that were supposed to be prohibited under the Treaty
of Versailles and other international agreements. For example, the treaty
had set strict limits on the German military and forbidden
it to unite with Austria, but between nineteen thirty five
and nineteen thirty eight, Germany annexed Austria and began rebuilding
its military might, which other nations reluctantly allowed. In the

(05:44):
face of ongoing German aggression. Britain and France also made
guarantees to other nations regarding their own security. One was Czechoslovakia,
which was forced to seed some of its territory to
Germany under the Munich Agreement in September of ninety eight,
and as part of this agreement, Britain and France had
guaranteed the integrity of the remaining Czechoslovakian territory, But when

(06:06):
Germany invaded that territory in mid March of nineteen thirty nine,
Britain and France did not intervene. They did, however, make
a similar guarantee of Poland's border later in the month,
so when Germany invaded Poland on September one, nineteen thirty nine,
Hitler was making a gamble. Britain and France had given
Poland their guarantee, but they hadn't stopped the German move

(06:29):
into Czechoslovakia after making a similar guarantee. After so many
years of appeasement, it seemed likely that a German invasion
of Poland probably wouldn't provoke much of a response. Hitler
thought that if it did start a war, he could
probably win it quickly, with Britain being reluctant to take
action and France not strong enough to win without the
aid of the United Kingdom. Instead, though both France and

(06:52):
the United Kingdom declared war on Germany on September three,
nineteen thirty nine, Britain began deploying the British Expeditionary Force
the following day. The Air Force and the Navy were
involved as well, but a lot of today's story is
really focused on the army. By late September, more than
one fifty thousand British troops had made their way to France,
with reinforcements arriving in April of nineteen forty. Poland, however,

(07:17):
was quickly overrun. Germany had secretly signed a non aggression
impact with the Soviet Union, which also invaded Poland on
September Apart from the short lived and ineffective Star Offensive
in Western Germany, Poland couldn't get much actual backup from
Britain or France. Warsaw surrendered on September, with Poland's government

(07:37):
fleeing to Romania. The Soviet Union and Germany then divided
Poland between them from October nineteen thirty nine to May
nineteen forty. In spite of their declarations of war, there
just wasn't a lot of military confrontation on the ground
between Nazi Germany and the United Kingdom in France. There
were definitely other engagements that went on during this period.

(07:58):
The Soviet Union, for example, invaded Finland in November of
nineteen nine in what came to be known as the
Winter War, but in terms of Britain, France, and Germany,
things were relatively quiet. Britain came to call this period
the Phony War because of its overall lack of activity,
while Germany called its sits kreeg a sitting still counterparts
to Blitzkrieg, the famously intense style of lightning war that

(08:22):
became synonymous with Germany's World War Two strategy. Britain, expecting
to be attacked, prepared for it, distributing gas masks and
implementing air raid precautions. On the home front, the Allies
blockaded the German coastline and Britain dropped pamphlets over Germany
decrying the evil of the Nazi regime. Britain and France

(08:42):
also both built up their military strength, and what was
primarily a defensive measure and not an offensive one, Allied
forces attempted to create an unbroken defense down the Maginot Line,
which was a series of concrete forts, barriers, turrets, and
other armaments that stretched the whole length of France's border.
With many imagine o line was supposed to be impenetrable,

(09:03):
and building up and manning its fortifications was a big
focus during these months. However, when blitz Creek returned in
May of nineteen forty, it didn't come to the Marginea Line,
and we'll get into that. After a quick sponsor break.
At the start of World War Two, France had what

(09:25):
may have been the strongest army in Western Europe. I
say may have been because there are lots of discussions
about exactly how to define strength and who was the
strongest by whatever measure is being discussed. But on the whole.
Many of the troops that Britain deployed to the continent
in late nine in early nineteen forty to assist the
French force were ill equipped and poorly trained. This was

(09:47):
not the fault of the soldiers themselves. After the end
of World War One, Britain had gradually disarmed itself, so
once it needed to deploy troops to France, essentially everything
was behind, from recruiting the soul there's themselves to staffing
the factories that would be needed to clothe and arm them.
Even the decision to commit defensive troops in continental Europe

(10:08):
came fairly late. That was made in February of nineteen
thirty nine, once Britain and Germany were at war with
one another. The rapid speed of deployment also meant that
many of the British force weren't just lacking the finer
points of their training, they were missing out on key
parts of what they needed to know. A large number
of Britain's anti tank platoons, for example, had not been

(10:29):
trained on how to use their anti tank weapons before
arriving in France. They had to figure it out for
themselves from the manuals. Once they were already there, and
even though the recency of World War One meant that
there were lots of men who had fought in it
serving as officers in the British Expeditionary Force, a lot
of their knowledge had just become obsolete in the face
of changing military technology. And this idea comes up a

(10:52):
lot more often in terms of World War One, when
machine guns and other advances in weaponry outpaced pretty much
everything else, leading to ruling years of trench warfare. But
this was also a problem in the Second World War.
Militaries had become far more mechanized and motorized, but many
of the men in charge of the British and French
forces had not yet adapted to putting those advances to use.

(11:15):
In other words, failure to adapt to the machine gun
and other advances contributed to World War one's years long stalemate,
and failure to adapt to increasingly mobile armored tanks and
other vehicles contributed to World War two's crushing defeat of
France and other nations at the hands of Nazi Germany
at the very beginning of World War Two. Ideally, that

(11:36):
eight month phony war would have been used to train,
not just to supplement the training of the British troops
who had been recruited and deployed so quickly, but also
to train the British and French militaries to work together.
And while there was some training and plenty of building
defenses and fortifications, this time really just wasn't used very productively.

(11:56):
For the entire period of World War Two that we're
talking about today, the relationship between the British and French
forces was marked with miscommunications, missed opportunities in fighting, in
an increasing sense of bitterness toward the other. Multiple sources
also note that brothels, which were far more available in
France than in Britain, led to an epidemic of sexually

(12:18):
transmitted diseases within the British fighting force. Germany, on the
other hand, knew that there was no way it could
win a drawn out war, so it did not waste
the quiet months of sits green Instead, it planned a
coordinated and incredibly effective attack on multiple nations that played
out essentially simultaneously. Germany first invaded Denmark and Norway on

(12:40):
May nine. Denmark's leadership knew that it didn't have the
strength to resist German attack and surrendered almost immediately In Norway,
the situation was far more complicated, with the nation at
first mustering a defense with British aid and then finally
being defeated in June after Britain removed most of its
force to France on May tenth. The next day, the

(13:02):
situation became far worse, with Germany invading Luxembourg, the Netherlands,
and Belgium, with the Luftwaffe also bombing some Allied locations
in France, all on the same day. Luxembourg had tried
to remain neutral, and when Germany invaded, they offered little resistance.
The nation's government fled and Germany placed it under military administration.

(13:23):
In the Netherlands, Germany strategically deployed paratroopers to capture bridges
deep within the nation and make way for a land invasion.
Although the Dutch destroyed some of the bridges ahead of
the German advance, it wasn't enough to completely stop them,
and by the twelfth of May, so just two days later,
German tanks were closing in on Rotterdam. Wilhelmina, Queen of

(13:43):
the Netherlands, fled with her government to England on May thirteenth,
and on the fourteenth, the Dutch army surrendered to Germany.
Belgium had received intelligence of an incoming attack, but suffered
from a bit of the boy who cried wolf syndrome.
In January, a German plane carrying secret documents d tailing
and invasion had crashed in Belgium, leading to preparations for

(14:03):
an incoming attack, but the dates and the plans came
and went without incident. An invasion had seemed imminent at
other points as well, so by May tenth some still
thought it was yet another false alarm. German forces once
again took forts and bridges, using airborne troops to make
way for a ground assault. It did not take long
at all for German tanks to break through the Belgian front,

(14:26):
and this led Belgian troops to fall back through central
and northern Belgium and for the nation to look to
France and Britain for aid. This actually became a point
of frustration within the Allied nations. The Allied command had
wanted to position a front through Belgium in the first place,
which would have meant far more troops already there and
possibly of much quicker defense against the German invasion. But

(14:50):
like Luxembourg, Belgium had tried to remain neutral. It only
allied with Britain and France after this May tenth invasion,
and all of this may to an action took place
on Winston Churchill's first day as Prime Minister of the
United Kingdom, following the resignation of Neville Chamberlain, whose policies
of appeasing Nazi Germany clearly had not worked. We noted

(15:13):
before the break that the most heavily fortified part of
France was the magine No Line, which ran alongside the
border it actually shared with Germany. When France had built
the magine No Line, it had been reluctant to similarly
fortify its border with Belgium, since doing so would have
made it look like France didn't see Belgium as trustworthy.
So by invading Luxembourg, Belgium and the Netherlands, Germany now

(15:36):
had a means to get to a part of the
French border that was, at least comparatively speaking, undefended. Germany
had also, in this multi pronged invasion game, far more
access to the English Channel and the North Sea, and
what followed became known as the Battle of France. And
we're going to talk way more about it after we
first paused for a sponsor break. I'm sure this is

(16:03):
far from universal, but having grown up in the United States,
most of the focus on World War Two in history
class started with Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor and the
United States entry into the war without much attention at
all spent on nineteen forty and ninety one, and a
very popular perception in the United States is basically that
the German army suddenly arrived on the outskirts of Paris,

(16:26):
and Paris immediately surrendered without a fight. While Germany's takeover
of France was swift and devastating. I mean, I can't
stress this enough. There were many many mistakes made in
the effort to drive Germany back. This was really a
six week ordeal in which Germany repeatedly overran any stand
that France attempted to make, not just some spontaneous knock

(16:50):
at the door to Paris followed by rolling over like
a puppy. Yeah, which is often how France's characterized in
the war. And it's completely it's really wrong, over simplified
and falls well. I especially remember it coming up during
the Iraq War and when people in the United States
were angry that France didn't support the war in Iraq
and started making up things like freedom Fries. Yeah uh,

(17:13):
and it's like it's this. We're going to talk in
more detail about how that's not how that went down.
After Germany's invasion of Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg, Britain
and France, along with other Allied troops, began planning to
push toward the River Dial in central Belgium to repel
the German force. And this push was on the whole successful,

(17:35):
but it wasn't what needed to happen to actually resist Germany.
The German presence in Belgium was a diversion, and Hitler
was using it to draw the Allies focus, while Germany
instead invaded France through the Ardenne on the River Muse.
The Ardenne are a forested, hilly area well to the
southeast of where the Allies moved most of their best troops.

(17:58):
Because it was such difficult to rain, it wasn't considered
to be a very likely spot for an invasion, so
consequently it wasn't particularly well defended. By placing a far
more visible force in Belgium, Germany had set a trap,
and England and France had fallen into it. This meant
that when the German force broke through the Arden, instead
of facing the strongest elements of the British and French armies,

(18:21):
it instead faced a smaller French force that had been
left behind is a defense, along with some British air support,
not the much stronger and generally better equipped force that
had been moved towards the northwest into Belgium. Germany had
another advantage over Britain and France as well. At the
start of the war, the Allies had more tanks in

(18:41):
Western Europe than Germany did, but Germany had clustered its
tanks into their famous Panzer divisions, which combined both tanks
and infantry. France had some armored divisions as well, but
they weren't nearly as numerous as Germany's were. So where
Germany had tanks, it generally had more were of them
than the Allies did, which made a German tank assault

(19:03):
incredibly hard to defeat. These Panzer divisions were also empowered
to basically act on their own, pressing advantages where they
saw them and pushing ahead of the rest of the
German force. This was not an idea that the Allied
military command was used to at all. It made the
German force far more nimble than the Allies, who were
still largely thinking of warfare as a series of huge

(19:25):
assaults followed by pauses to regroup and strategize. These smaller
Panzer units acting on their own consequently caused huge disruption
and confusion among the Allied commanders. From May fifteen to seventeen,
France tried but failed to muster a counter offensive that
could push back the German invasion. The French Ninth Army

(19:45):
first planned to make a stand about forty kilometers or
twenty five miles west of the Meuse River, that could
not get enough troops in place and time to do it.
They tried again farther to the west, and once again
couldn't get a large enough force in place to really
stop the German advance. Both times, Germany just outpaced the Allies,
with the Panzer divisions pushing ahead of the planned defensive

(20:08):
position before the Allies could even establish a foothold there.
In some cases there were even fortifications that had already
been built, but there was no one there to man them.
In terms of the French Army, Compounding a lack of
trained men where they were needed was a lack of leadership.
On May Maurice Gamblin, the French military's commander in chief,

(20:29):
received word that German troops were moving into a position
that would allow them to take the capital of Paris.
He didn't have nearly enough troops in the area to
fend off such an attack, so he informed French Premier
Paul Rain of the impending threat. Ray No immediately decided
to relocate the capital, but soon new intelligence arrived that
Paris wasn't in danger after all, so Rain first announced

(20:53):
that the move of the capitol had just been a rumor,
and then after that debacle, replaced Gamla with General Maxim Wigga.
Wagon was at that time stationed in Syria, and he
wasn't able to get to Paris until May nineteen. In
that interim, the French military, which was in the middle
of a war, basically had no commander in chief. Wigan
himself had been part of the Allied Command during World

(21:16):
War One and his strategic outlook was much more suited
to that time than this newly mobile fighting force, including
panthers that were acting on their own, so once he
actually got there, the direction that he gave was often
not really something that could be put into practical use.
During that three day leaderless window, the German force continued

(21:36):
to press north and west. They reached Amya, which very
roughly speaking, is north of Paris, about halfway to the
border with Belgium, and they did that on May nineteenth.
The next day they continued to push west to Abeville,
to the northwest of Amon, which was about twenty kilometers
or twelve miles from the coast, and advanced units made
it all the way to the English Channel. With this

(21:59):
push towards the coast, the German army had physically divided
the Allied forces, cut through their supply lines and their
communication lines, and started to surround them. Then the German
German army turned north, pressing toward and ultimately taking the
port of Calais. Kela was not only the closest port
to the island of Great Britain, but was also the
port that the Allies logically would have been using to escape.

(22:23):
So the situation at this point was desperate and it
was about to get worse, And we're going to talk
about that the next episode. Yeah, I liked it so
many maps of France. There are so so many individual
towns and details and movements. Uh, you could go on
for pages and pages and pages about yes and again,

(22:45):
I think that's one of the reasons that we don't
usually get the story of what led up to the
whole dunkirk yeah moment, because it's too hard to unferral
all of the threads. I found lots of things that
basically described it as German invaded everywhere and then we
had to evacuate, which is simplistically speaking, or you know,

(23:08):
the seven hundred pages of details, fine fine details. Do
you have a little bit of listener mayor I do
before I get into the listener mail and have a
quick correction about Catalina Darrouso. At one point I said
that she was near La Plata, Argentina, that should have

(23:30):
been Bolivia. Uh, that there are La Platas in both
of those places. One of them was established two d
years after Catalina died, and that was what I said
in error. She was there ahead of her time, the
original hipster well in her in her autobiography, she often

(23:51):
names cities and towns without necessarily saying that she had
crossed a border into some where um, and so sometimes
when I was trying to write the outline, I would
try to track down a which nation was she in
at that point? And that is a case where I
got it wrong. So apologies for that error. Uh, and
I have a listener mail my listener mail, I think

(24:13):
this person's name is pronounced Porsha. If that's not, I apologize,
and Porsche it steered Holly and Tracy. Recently, I settled
into a several hours long drive for work and made
sure to have my go to podcast downloaded for the drive.
Much to my delight, the most recent episode for the
podcast was about the Kiahoga River. I both grew up
along the banks of a river, North Kuyahoga, and am

(24:36):
in the first year of having landed the job position
of curator and Special Collections librarian in a library that
specializes in the inland waterways of North America, meaning that
my days revolve around caring for archival materials related to
the subject, researching subject, presenting two interested parties, and generally
doing what I can to preserve and promote the history

(24:56):
of America's rivers. I thought you handled the subject well
and have any corrections, and in fact was informative to
even me, as the fires have not yet required much
of my research attention and were, as you stated, not
phenomenally huge news in the world of people familiar with
the rivers. I was away from the office for an
extended work trip and made a mental note to look
up what other episodes we have done on rivers and

(25:18):
when I got back that I might have forgotten about.
When I finally remembered you, I noticed that the most
recent episode was again about the river or a river,
this one about the S S. Eastland on the Chicago River.
It was then that I realized that the majority of
episodes you've done about rivers are related to disasters, wrecks,
and generally negative moments I empathize. Steamboat rex certainly make

(25:41):
a more captivating history than an uneventful cargo delivery, and
I received many more questions about them than most other
aspects of riverboat life. If you've never heard of it,
I recommend looking up the Arabia Steamboat Museum in Kansas City,
staple of my childhood, having grown up on the Missouri
River just outside Kansas City. An entire zoum devoted to

(26:01):
the recovered cargo of an eighteen forty six wreck known
as Tut's Tomb of the Missouri River. Often, these wrecks
and disasters are most predominantly colored people's impressions of inland waterways,
with perhaps the most notable exception of Lewis and Clark.
In fact, the lives of river men and women have
a rich history of economy, art, music, and their own
distinct culture. For example, did you know that there used

(26:22):
to be floating brothels Islands of River pirates recipes that
specifically called for river water and steamboat races, the most
famous of which, in eighteen seventy spanned almost four days
and set a speed record that has yet to be beat.
And in fact, there is still an annual Great Steamboat
Races part of the Kentucky Derby Festival. And these are
truly just craping the surface. I'm not sure where this

(26:43):
is going. I think I just wanted to share a
bit of my professional passion with someone, and this was
a better opportunity than my beleaguered partner who patiently listens
to me talk his ear off about my work nearly daily.
I hope your listeners will be inspired by what they
hear to look into river history and be as Dell.
I did as I am every day to learn more,
and then a portion ends with an episode suggestion. So

(27:06):
thank you so much for sending us this lovely note.
I did not deliberately picked two episodes in a row
that were about things that happened on rivers, but they
were both a byproduct of working on this episode, which,
as I said at this time, turned out to be
much harder than expected, and so on multiple consecutive weeks,
I got to a point where I I knew this

(27:27):
could not be done in time to record it, and
so I had to put it aside for something else,
and it had to specifically be something else that had
a straightforward enough narrative that I could do it in
the remaining time that I had. So that is how
we came to have two things on rivers in a row. Yeah,
they're The documentation is usually a little easier to find

(27:48):
on a river disaster than on some of our more
esotic topics. Well, Dunkirk has too much documentation. That's part
of the problem. Uh So we will continue with the
evact creation of Dunkirk next time. If you would like
to write to us, we are at History Podcast at
how stuff works dot com. On all of our social
media we are under the name missed in History, so

(28:09):
that's Facebook, Twitter, Tumbler, Pinterest, Instagram, all of those Missed
in History. You can come to our parent company's website,
which is how stuff works dot com to find all
kinds of information about rivers and boats and big wars,
lots of that kind of thing. You can come to
our website, which is missed in History dot com for
show notes on all the episodes HOLLYE and I have

(28:29):
ever done, uh an archive of every episode. Ever, that
archive is highly searchable, uh so you can look for
things that may interest you from our back catalog. We
can do all that in a whole lot more at
how stuff works dot com or miss in history dot com.
For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit

(28:51):
how stuff works dot com