Dan Snow's History Hit - The Fall of France

Episode Date: May 28, 2020

80 years ago this week, one of the most extraordinary evacuations in military history was under way: 'The Miracle of Dunkirk'. But how, and why, did the Allies find themselves in such a dire position? On this podcast, I was joined by one of the great historians of the Second World War, Peter Caddick-Adams, who took me through The Fall of France and the Low Countries - one of the most catastrophic defeats in military history. In just a couple of weeks, the German army achieved what it had failed to achieve in four years of brutal fighting in The Great War. They had bypassed the Maginot Line and crossed the the River Meuse to encircle much of the Allied forces at the port of Dunkirk. Was it technology, doctrine, or careless mistakes which allowed this to happen? How did each side utilise these events in the propaganda war? We also discussed the remarkable circumstances troops found themselves in - many of whom were fighting and commanding in exactly the same positions as they had in the First Word War, two and a half decades previously. Subscribe to History Hit and you'll get access to hundreds of history documentaries, as well as every single episode of this podcast from the beginning (400 extra episodes). We're running live podcasts on Zoom, we've got weekly quizzes where you can win prizes, and exclusive subscriber only articles. It's the ultimate history package. Just go to historyhit.tv to subscribe. Use code 'pod1' at checkout for your first month free and the following month for just £/€/$1.

Hello everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History. It was all going on 80 years ago this week. The Dunkirk evacuation was ramping up, one of the most extraordinary evacuations in military history, following one of the most extraordinary defeats in military history, the fall of France and the Low Countries. The German army achieved in just a couple of weeks what it had failed to achieve in four years of savage war in the First World War. This podcast is all about the fall of France in 1940, that catastrophic defeat the Western Allies suffered at the hands of the German Wehrmacht, supported by the Luftwaffe screaming out of the skies above. And I've got Peter Caddick-Adams on the podcast. He's a long overdue total legend, one of the great military

historians of Second World War studies in the UK. And he's going to come on to tell me all about the fall of France. Why did the German army manage to catastrophically defeat the British, the French, the Belgians, the Dutch, as they did? Was it technology? Was it doctrine? Was it mistakes made by the Western allies? He will let us all know. I've got a documentary which I'm going to release on the fall of France on History Hit TV. Please head over and check that out. It's like Netflix for history. If you enter the code POD1 P-O-D-1 you will get a month for free and then you will get your first month after that for just one pound euro or dollar. So if you want to go and listen to back episodes of this podcast without

the ads, I can't imagine why you'd want to do that, but if you do head over to History Hit TV. So if you want to listen to those episodes or if you want to watch hundreds of hours of history documentaries, please do on there. Thank you very much to everyone subscribing. We had Kate Lister on the podcast earlier this week talking about the history of sex in lockdown. Thanks to the subscribers who came on that call. Everyone else will be able to hear that when the podcast goes out. Remember, check your email communications from us if you want to jump on those Zoom calls and be part of the live podcast records. It's great to have subscribers on there. Just another benefit of your History Hit subscription. What a bargain it all is. Anyway, everyone, here's Peter Caddick-Adams. Enjoy.

Peter, thank you very much for coming on this podcast. Pleasure to be here, Dan. It's a great honour to have you. With the fall of France, give me a sense of the balance of forces on the eve of this great battle for Western Europe. Is it true that Britain and France had a great many more guns and tanks and artillery and aircraft and therefore it really was a sort of a miracle, an act of brilliance by the Germans. I think there are a couple of things to say

about the fall of France in 1940. And of course, we're not just talking about France. When the invasion happens, which is the 10th of May, Germany invades four countries, which is France and Belgium, Holland and Luxembourg. I mean, it's an enormous number of countries, a huge bulk of terrain to try and bite off in a single hit, even with the bulk of your armies in the West. And all the time, of course,

Germany does have forces in the East. It's terribly worried about what might happen elsewhere. It's done a deal with Russia, so there won't be any interference. But your basic premise that the West has more tanks and planes and men than the Germans is absolutely right by a significant factor. And that brings us to the point that it's not quantity, it's the quality and how you use that quality. And of course, what the Germans do is they have a superior doctrine, which we'll go into perhaps in a little bit. And they also concentrate their forces when the Allies are spread quite thinly. The other point to make is that the Western coalition against Germany that has been built up through the 1930s isn't just those countries Germany invades in 1940. It included countries like Romania. At one

stage, people thought that Italy would be more pro-Western and anti-German than it turned out to be, and that's sheer opportunism on Mussolini's part. Czechoslovakia, Czech Republic and Slovakia today were part of that anti-German alliance, as indeed was Poland. So there was a sense that Germany had been ringed by lots of favourable allies, and of course what Hitler very cleverly does is pick them off in the years leading up to the Second World War and then by invasion in 1939. So that coalition is much, much weaker. But even so, principally France and the United Kingdom have more tanks, certainly have more troops. And France has invested most of her defence spending in the

Maginot Line in the preceding years, and that runs along the boundary between France and Germany. Was the German military hierarchy rather concerned about seeking out a decisive battle in the West? Who was driving this agenda of an all-out invasion and a plan that would hopefully see a battle of encirclement, a decisive battle that could have a strategic impact, knock the Western allies out of the war? I mean, it's a very good question to ask, what is the point of all of this? And it's a politically driven initiative led by Hitler himself. And he lays it out in Mein Kampf quite clearly. And this is a sense of unfinished business with France from the

end of the First World War. And if you like, this goes back further, even to the days of the First World War, and if you like this goes back further even to the days of the Franco-Prussian War and squabbling over territories of places like Alsace and Lorraine. So there's enmity between the two nations which is not sorted by the Treaty of Versailles. The Nazis propagate this myth that Germany was stabbed in the back at the end of the First World War. So the Germans divide into two camps. One who thoroughly believe the political argument that Germany was deprived of her greatness, she should be allowed to play a much greater role in European affairs. And those members of the German Armed Forces, and there are quite a lot of them, quite senior, quite Catholic, tend to be aristocrats who look upon the arrival of Hitler and his henchmen, who

are pretty low-class in a lot of cases, with great disapproval. They don't want war. They think Germany is unready for war. And they predict what eventually happens, which is that Germany just doesn't have the economic resources to pursue a long drawn out war in Europe. And so it will all end in catastrophe anyway. So for those reasons, whether it's moral, whether it's simply good political and economic instincts, they not only do want war, they're anti-war, and some of them try to warn certainly the Brits through quiet diplomatic channels that this is the direction of travel of Hitler, and the Brits need to do more to try and resist that. So all of that's going on in the background. And why the campaign in the West starts is simply Hitler driving it.

It's his personal desire. And don't forget, this is all overshadowed by the First World War and Hitler's service in it, where he's been serving in France and Belgium. So this is revisiting unfinished business from 1914 to 1918. What stage does Hitler find generals and a plan that will allow him to achieve his aim in the West, which is both to knock the French, the Belgians, other countries out, but without the descent into attritional warfare that you see in 1914 and onwards. As soon as the Polish campaign is over, so we're talking by the end of September 1939,

it's gone reasonably well. It does show up some shortcomings in the German military machine. Hitler says, right, we need to do better. Reorganise your forces because the next country is going to be France and probably Belgium as well. The Germans are tasked to draw up invasion plans. They produce to Hitler an uninspiring plan which would probably have reproduced a rerun of the First World War. They'd have met the main Allied forces in Belgium where they met them in 1914 and there might have been stalemate. And that was really the allied plan to defend against the germans create a sort of frontier either of trenches or using the maginot line of forts hold germans in check build up allied strength mobilize our forces and then go on the attack and that's rather what hitler feared general eric von manstein and heinz goodarian who was the father of the German armoured force, came up with a radical plan to attack France through the Ardennes,

largely forests considered impenetrable, that would outflank the Maginot Line. High risk, never been tried before, and not with the new tank arm that Germany had developed. And Hitler seized on this and thought, right, we're going for broke. This is a plan that's more likely to succeed than that, that the general staff have given me, which is boring, old stuffy, certainly doesn't deliver what I would think of as victory. And so it's the Manstein plan that Hitler adopts, forces his generals to adopt. There's a lot of resistance. And that's the plan they invade with on the 10th of May. resistance and that's the plan they invade with on the 10th of May. Let's talk about an invasion. You talked about their doctrine. How is this invasion different and did people realise immediately this was a new kind of war? All the armoured forces of certainly Britain, France, Germany, Russia had realised the tank offered all sorts of potential for the future. The Germans adopt the tank largely because they have to. They're restricted to a 100,000-man army, so a very small force.

So how do you multiply that force? You do it with armoured vehicles and speed. So that's what tanks offer. And the very early German tanks, and a lot of those that invade France in 1940, just carry machine guns. So it's clearly not the vehicle. It's the psychological impact of being able to manoeuvre very fast in a battlefield devoid of trenches. The real key, I think, is twofold. One is that the German Air Force has been developed from 1935, quicker and more modern

than any other force, with a mass building programme. And included in that is dive bombers. Hitler and Goering have an obsession with those why well the answer is that's how you bomb very accurately there are no precision guided missiles or munitions in those days so if you dive right down to your target release a bomb at the last moment you can be pretty accurate a lot of dive bombers which act as an airborne artillery they are in communication with the armored vehicles the below, and that's the other key. Guderian, who is part of the German Panzer Arm and leads one of the corps of three divisions attacking on the 10th of May, has been in the signal service before he transferred to tanks.

And so he understands the importance of tanks being able to communicate with each other in the smoke and noise of the battlefield. And whereas the Brits and the French are using flags, every German tank has a radio. So they can communicate with each other and they can communicate with the aircraft overhead. So it's that combination of different arms on the battlefield, particularly aircraft, but also engineers, working with the tanks. But the key point is the communication angle. they can all talk to one another extensive rehearsals and that's how they outmaneuver the allies who are spread very thinly can't talk to their aircraft can't talk to each other for the most part and that's how the Germans managed to best the allies because they've got this superior doctrine and approach to battle. And so they advance through the Netherlands and

the German-Belgian border. But tell me about the main thrust through Luxembourg and the Ardennes. Just try and describe that landscape to me and why it was in a way so risky. To the Allies, the main German attack happens where they would always expect it to be in Belgium at the Netherlands, to outflank the Maginot Line. But actually the main effort is in the Ardennes. Now the Ardennes is southern Belgium and Luxembourg. There's a lot of woodland there. There is tiny roads and it's considered not impassable but it's considered slow going and therefore if you're with a lot of tanks which tend to use a lot of fuel and go quite slowly the idea is that you

probably won't get very far before you're discovered and therefore you can be counter-attacked. But the Germans advance with, if you like, a cloud of hornets in front of them which are not only their dive bombers but their fighters which keep Allied aircraft away from these long columns of tanks snaking through the Ardennes. So the Allies hear reports of German armoured columns coming through this particular part of terrain and don't do anything about them because they're not sure. In war, you get huge numbers of reports that come in from all over the place and some are wrong, some are right, so you tend to want confirmation.

So we're aware of German troops in the Ardennes, but we are aware of them everywhere else, and you don't know which is the most important. And in fact, the main German thrust is in this terrain that in the French mentality is not easy to advance through or not easy to advance through quickly. Whereas the Germans have rehearsed this, they've looked at the maps, and they are through the Ardennes in a couple of days. Whereas the French have anticipated that any kind of

advance would take a minimum of a week. And that's really what the Germans are doing. They're buying time by using surprise to attack in an unexpected area. And we've talked a lot about the sort of German brilliance in Guderian and Manstein in this story. Is there anything the Western Allies could have done? I mean, where does fault lie on the part of western military and political leaders or was it all just kit and a great german plan and once that had all been unleashed it wasn't a huge amount the allies could have done no it's all about mindset it's all about preparation and planning you can't do things in battle that you haven't prepared for in peacetime on exercises and the brits and french haven't done much preparation together the french have put most

of their effort into a defensive posture of building this huge line of forts, the Maginot Line. Belgium, which is key to the Allied defence in the north, is a neutral country and stays neutral until the Germans cross the border and the Belgians are so worried about triggering German aggression that they undertake to not allow any Allied troops on their terrain until there's a war. So there are no exercises with the Belgians prior to the 10th of May and in fact the Belgians are very hostile to French or British presence anywhere near them. So what you have is a coalition of three quite important nations with big significant armies that really haven't done much in the way that we expect today with NATO forces sort of operating alongside each other in training

missions all the time. That just hasn't taken place before the Germans arrive. So they're a single unified force, one nation, and the Allies are still fighting different wars with different mentalities. So it's not about kit at all. That's too easy an excuse to make. But what does happen is the Germans advance very, very quickly. The French get worried. And by the end of the first week, 17th, 18th of May, when the Germans are through the Ardennes, they've crossed the main French river line, the River Meuse, which puts them firmly into French terrain where there are no defences at all. A lot of senior French commanders begin to panic because they have no strategic reserve in the right place.

None of the armoured formations have managed to make any impact on the Germans at all. And there's atrophy and fear at the higher levels of French military command and some of the politicians. And I think that's absolutely key to understanding what happens in France in May 1940. Land a Viking longship on island shores, scramble over the dunes of ancient Egypt and avoid the Poisoner's Cup in Renaissance Florence. Each week on Echoes of History, we uncover the epic stories that inspire Assassin's Creed. We're stepping into feudal Japan

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Let's quickly talk about the British, what, sort of 400,000 odd men, so definitely a very junior partner to the French, but where are they and are they involved in this key German breakout through the Ardennes? The British are elsewhere, they're in northern France initially and then go into Belgium. The idea is that they're always going to be close to their line of communication and their ports of communication, places like Calais, to their line of communication and their ports of communication, places like Calais, through which all their logistics come from the United Kingdom. The British Army in France is the main part of the regular British Army,

with some reservists, a lot of their logistics supplies. It functions extremely well, deployed in exactly the way it's expected to, and it's not involved in the early fighting until the Germans come up to them in Belgium and in northern France. But I think a point to mention about the whole campaign is that another challenge for the Brits is the day the Germans attack and this is sheer coincidence rather than any kind of purpose or design. Of course we've changed prime ministers and Neville Chamberlain has resigned for completely unrelated reasons. His position in Parliament has become untenable through questioning of his earlier military deployments and commitment, and it's Winston Churchill who's taken over on that morning.

As we track from the fall of France, we've got to remember that this is day one of Winston Churchill's premiership. A man who's already 65 has not held a premiership before. And that sort of magnifies, in my mind, his achievement of just sort of barely managing to hang on and then rouse the nation whilst this military catastrophe is unravelling. And of course, all the blame is going to be laid at his feet if it goes wrong as it does and gets worse and that's part of the magic of the whole 1940s story. Extraordinary timing. Tell me about what happens when this German armoured thrust reached the Meuse. Is this the key moment in the battle for France and the Low Countries? So I think the River Meuse is absolutely key. It's a river that spells all sorts of bad stories for the French, because a lot of the

battles of the First World War are associated with the River Meuse, where the Verdun, which is a bit further down, or Sedan in 1870, which is also on the River Meuse, where the French essentially were defeated by the Prussians in 1870. It's a river with all the wrong connotations. The Germans' 1940 attack at various places along the River Meuse but particularly Rommel's 7th Panzer Division is across the Meuse within two or three days of having invaded which is lightning speed given that he's already made a sort of 50 mile advance from the German frontier and a little bit south

of him is Guderian this man from the Signal Corps who developed the German Panzer arm who's attacked with three divisions at Sidon, this place with all sorts of odd connotations for the French. He got across there a couple of days later. So by the end of the first week, the Germans are across the principal French line of defence and have completely outflanked the Maginot line. And given that, if you like like the French have staked all their chips on the poker table on the Maginot Line protecting France and channeling the Germans to where the French want them to be the Germans have done something else completely and the French haven't anticipated that and that's why French commanders get very worried because they know there's really nothing to stop the Germans breaking out into open country. Now the one point we have to make about the German military

machine is it's not all tanks. There are very few panzer divisions compared with a whole number of German military units invading France. 10 panzer divisions compared with over 100 infantry divisions, and the infantry rely entirely on horses to get them about. So what you've got is, if you like, picture a medieval lance that knights would have carried on horseback, and the tip of that lance is steel, and those represent the 10 panzer divisions. The main long shaft of the lance, much, much longer, wooden, are all the infantry divisions with horses. And what's happened as the Germans cross the River Meuse is the panzer divisions are way ahead, and they're cutting about into open French countryside. And the infantry divisions are struggling to keep up, and there's a gap that's opening. But the Allies don't know that.

Now, had we known that, had we understood the way the German military machine was constructed, we would have been able to exploit the gap, cut the tanks off from their logistics, cut the infantry off from moving up and protecting them, and we could have destroyed that advance. Now, that's hindsight. But that's the job of military intelligence. You have to know your enemy backwards to be able to understand what to do to defeat them. you have to know your enemy backwards to be able to understand what to do to defeat them.

And the French, and by extension the Brits, in 1940 don't do that. That's what we should have been able to do. The myth, the legend of the indestructible Blitzkrieg is born, and then German tanks roll into Russia in 1941, similar successes. Were there any moments in this campaign, France, the Low Countries, that give a little glimpse of what the Allies needed to do in order to defeat this new kind of warfare? There are three moments, and only three, sadly, when there's a glimpse, a gleam of light that might have given commanders reason for hope. Two revolve around Colonel, as he was then, Charles de Gaulle, who's commanding a French armoured division, who's written a handbook on how the French should develop their armed forces,

which is very similar to German thinking and indeed to British thinking. He's largely ignored because the French don't have any money, they've put it all into building the Maginot Line. But he amounts to counter-attacks against the German Panzer Arm. And for various reasons, it's partly collecting and concentrating his forces, partly because they run out of fuel. They're not proof against Stukas diving down on them. De Gaulle's two armoured counterattacks fail.

But on the 21st of May, near the town of Arras in northern France, the British mount a much larger counterattack with two battalions ofattack with two battalions of tanks and two battalions of infantry. If you like, the result is a draw, and it happens to be against Rommel's 7th Panzer Division. The Germans are completely taken by surprise and essentially halt in their tracks and get very, very nervous. The Brits don't defeat the German panzer attack, get very, very nervous. The Brits don't defeat the German panzer attack, but they worry the Germans so much that the Germans pause. And this gives rise to something else, which is a ripple of fear that goes up through the German high command, that their tanks are overextended. This is a high-risk

strategy, as we've already explored. And were the Brits to do this again, in conjunction with the French, with more and greater numbers of tanks then their blitzkrieg could be over it could be stillborn and that results on the 24th of May with Hitler saying to his troops and his tank formations interestingly right around the Dunkirk perimeter halt go no further what we want is for the infantry to come up and protect the tanks. This whole thing has become a runaway campaign and if we're not careful the Allies are going to exploit a weakness they don't know that we have. But on the whole the Allies weren't able to do that. How soon are German tanks, reconnoiter units on the coast of the channel? Very shortly after the 21st, the initial

German tanks have reached the sea. Interestingly, led by Rommel, they've gone right up to the coast in Normandy, which is the area he'll command in 1944. And essentially, it's taken the Allies completely by surprise. And it's taken the Germans a little over a fortnight to get all the way through to the coast, and to have achieved, by cutting off the British and the French and surrounding them, beginning to defeat them, it's taken the Germans a little over a fortnight to achieve what they failed to do in four and a half years of war between 1914 and 1918. So there's huge, big psychological impacts there and that the whole of the 1940 campaign is overshadowed by the first world war in some cases people are fighting on the

same ground where they fought as younger officers in 1914 1918 outside arras there's a battalion commander who can't think of anywhere else to hold his orders than in the dugout where he is a young officer attended his first orders group in 1917 and it's that kind of full circle the germans the same these are places where they fought to that's just extraordinary so this astonishingly quick german advance and yet seemingly a very sluggish response to the british attempting to evacuate there are many theories and conspiracies about why the Germans aren't able to effectively capture or destroy the BEF on its little pocket on the coast there with its allies. What do you think are the most important factors? Was it a lack of German enthusiasm?

Was it gouty resistance by the Brits, the French and their allies? Or what do you think was the reason for this miracle where so many British, French and troops were able to get away? Okay, we always have to ask the question as a historian, is this cock-up or conspiracy? And conspiracies are very rare because they require a huge amount of foresight and planning. The way the campaign unfolded in a very haphazard way for the Germans. And there's a lot of gloss afterwards in their wonderful propaganda campaign to show how weak the Allies were and how the Germans were always going to win. And in fact, I think their win was not predetermined in any way at all. This was a weakness in Allied cooperation, Franco-Brit cooperation at the end of the day.

Why do the Brits escape? There are several key reasons. One is this halt order, and that's got nothing to do with Hitler wanting to preserve the Britishish at all the current thinking is that it's hitler trying to reassert control over his own generals he doesn't want the german army to be the power brokers in the third reich of nazi germany so he orders the army to halt almost at the cost of losing a victory because he then retains control of the German armed forces. But be that as it may, for whatever reason, the Halt Order comes into play. It allows the Brits time to coalesce their defences around Dunkirk. But how do the Germans not manage to defeat the Dunkirk pocket? It's largely because of Goering's lobbying. He always saw the German Air Force as the premier fighting force of the new Third Reich. Germans aren't allowed an air force.

This has come into being. This is the most Nazi of the modern forces. And therefore, Goering wants to be in on a final victory. And that is the defeat of the Brits, the real enemy in his mind, who he's fought against as a fighter pilot in the First World War himself. And so he wants not the ground troops not the panzers who are going to take away the glory of victory but the air force to finish off the brits and indeed the french and anyone else in dunkirk so he's going

to use his bombers to destroy the brits there and two things if you've got lots of troops on the ground in the sands on the beaches and you're dropping bombs on them the explosive effect of bombs in sand is muffled so attacking the troops on the beaches is never going to have a great effect you're never going to cause a lot of casualties and if you imagine trying to dive bomb ships whether they're large the small civilian fleet of boats that come out about 700 of them all the warships minesweepers else offshore. Trying to dive bomb those is a bit like coming down from, say, 3,000 or 4,000 feet to dive bomb something that looks like a pencil below you. And this pencil is wobbling around in the water, ducking and diving, and you're trying to hit it with a single

small bomb. And it's that uncertain. So German air force have never trained for maritime operations to dive bomb ships. They're dive bombing targets on land. So that's a formula that's never going to deliver. And Goering is promising something he cannot deliver and is unaware of it, in fact. So it's this. It's an amazing sort of accumulation of different factors that conspire to allow the Brits and the French to escape. It's not our own expertise or brilliance. It's German incompetence. And that brings us what was

then called the miracle of Dunkirk. So we have a lot of propaganda on both sides. The Germans are saying this is the biggest victory ever, and it was always going to happen. And we're saying, well, actually, you know, this is all about the pluck of the British people. And we were always going to survive, and we were always going to pull out our people. And the truth is somewhere in the middle. We inevitably think of the consequences of the fall of France and the low countries in terms of the West. You know, years of Nazi occupation, eventually D-Day, almost exactly four years later. What about the effect on the German army, political and military high command?

German army, political and military high command. Does this give them a swaggering sense of self-confidence that launches them into this sort of gigantically hubristic assault on the Soviet Union? I mean, do they draw perhaps the wrong lessons from this campaign? Great question, Dan. So two things to say. First of all, the Dunkirk evacuation isn't the end of the invasion of France or the French campaign. Case yellow, the operational code word that takes them from the German border up to Dunkirk, comes to an end with the Dunkirk evacuation. But the bulk of the French armed forces, and a lot of Brits too, are still west of the line of the River Somme. And Case Red begins on the 5th of June, where the Germans have a great invasion of western France. And a lot of the French troops who've come back from

Dunkirk to England don't stay in England, they go back to France. They arrive in ports like Le Havre and Cherbourg to mount the defence of western France. Now that all comes to an end when the French government then decide to agree to an armistice. But the fighting is not over at Dunkirk and there's still pretty much another three weeks. And the point of that is the French casualties on a day-to-day, week-to-week basis for the first three weeks of the campaign have been fairly low. But the moment the Allies have started to get the measure of the Germans, the Germans' casualties go right up in case red from the 5th of June onwards. So that's not an easy fight. The thrust of your question,

does this give the Germans a sense of sort of hubris? Those who fought in the second half of the campaign realised that once you come up against an enemy, you've lost your element of surprise. You need to be extremely good and not just have luck and surprise on your side. You need more than the German armed forces have to offer in 1940 and that is lost because hitler gets carried away with his plans for the invasion of russia in

1941 and elsewhere and all the fleeting campaigns we associated with blitzkrieg 1940 france crete yugoslavia greece they're quick campaigns and you can get away, you can use your surprise all the way through that. And the Germans get carried away by this sense of easy victories because their opponents are less well prepared, inferior in numbers, inferior in quality and probably haven't looked at doctrine for 20 years. And initially, of course, Barbarossa goes well for them in exactly the same way. But there are plenty of Germans who look at this and sort of say, it's fine for three weeks or a month. But after that, your troops can't keep going forever. Machinery wears out. And sooner or later, we're going to grind to a halt. And what happens then?

There's a hint of that in the French campaign in 1940. And then, of course, it delivers in big measure in Russia in 1941. and if i offer you a modern parallel i was in the gulf in 2003 i was part of the invasion of iraq with the americans and the brits and we launched essentially an invasion of iraq which was a blitzkrieg lots of air power lots of armored vehicles advancing very very fast and you can only do that for two or three weeks when you run out of steam, physically and mentally. And that's exactly what happened in Iraq in 2003 when the Iraqis started to counterattack.

And it was the logistics vehicles behind the tanks that they hit. That's what was beginning to happen in France in 1940. The panzers had naturally run out of steam when they stopped before Dunkirk because a blitz creek can't keep going forever the tanks needed maintenance but the crews who'd been given speed were on pervitin which is this sort of amphetamine that they had been encouraged to take the crews are absolutely knackered and the halt order comes just at the right time when the german military machine is ebbing anyway and those kind of details get lost in the propaganda exploitation of the french defeat afterwards but if you've been on a cutting edge and particularly we've got to remember

that you know the germans have lost sort of 30 40 000 people in that campaign it's easy victory in terms of world war ii but when you start to examine parts of it under the microscope, it's hard fought. And there are times when the Allies could have retrieved the situation, but we don't. That's the fascination of going back and picking over. Could we have done better? We could have done an awful lot better. Was it always in the bag for the Germans? By no means.

Did they do extraordinarily well? No, they had a lot of luck on their side because the Allies were so disorganised. Peter, that was a wonderful summary of that huge series of battles. Your recent book is... So Sand and Steel, A New History of D-Day. And Sand and Steel is the size of a Panzer itself and it only deals with D-Day. That's what I love about it. When you say there's a history of D-Day this is a history of D-Day itself that's the best thing about Simon's deal so make sure you go out and buy that everybody and I'm looking forward to your next book

please come back on the podcast talk about the next one when you launch it thank you very much Dan it's been an absolute delight doing it on the exact 80th anniversary of all these events thank you I hope you enjoyed the podcast just before you go bit of a favor to ask I totally understand if you don't want to become a subscriber or pay me any cash money makes sense but if you could just

do me a favorites for free go to iTunes or wherever you get your podcast if you give it a five-star rating and give it an absolutely glowing review, purge yourself, give it a glowing review, I'd really appreciate that. It's tough weather, the law of the jungle out there, and I need all the fire support I can get. So that will boost it up the charts. It's so tiresome, but if you could do it, I'd be very, very grateful. Thank you.