"We were crushed ......”
The French ** departments began to panic.
Early in the morning of May 15, the first voice alarmed British Prime Minister Winston Churchill. This is the French **Renault playing**. He said to Churchill in a hurry
We were defeated, we failed. The road to Paris was opened". There is no basis for such a panicked conclusion, but the situation is extremely serious. The Anglo-French troops retreated in a panic from Belgium. The Kleist tank column cut the road to the rear of the Allied forces in Belgium and continued its advance towards the Ramance Strait.
On 16 May, Churchill, accompanied by Generals Dill and Ismay, flew to Paris. His "Flamingo" landline - one of the three landlines of * - landed at Le Bourget Airport. The meeting was called to order at 5.30 a.m. At the meeting held by Cade Orsay with Prime Minister Reynaud, Minister of Defence and Minister of War Daladier, and Commander-in-Chief, General Gammerin, it became clear that the French ** essentially believed that the war had been lost.
Churchill asked: "The strategic reserve is in **?."Ganmarin shook his head, shrugged his shoulders and replied: "There are no strategic reserves".
When the political and military leaders of France and Britain met in the garden of the Cade Orsay***, where summer receptions are usually held, a large fire was lit in the garden. Dark smoke billowed into the summer sky. Ashes and pieces of paper flew to the Cade Orsay embankment and into the streets. Churchill watched melancholy from the window of the embassy how the French sent secret archival documents to the fire in a trolley, and how they threw secret archival documents out of the window and scattered them on the fire. The staff of the Ministry, under the leadership of Secretary-General Léger, carried out someone's secret order. Neither at the time nor later was it clear who gave the order.
There is a frightening legend in Paris that the building has been occupied by German paratroopers. In the ***, which was covered by fire and smoke, the staff were hurriedly distributed pistols in order to fight the agents of Hitler's "5th Column".
True, representatives of the "5th column" were active in France and prepared for the defeat of France. However, even such activists as Pierre Reival and Georges Bonet, Thierry Mulani, a parliamentarian who rejoiced in Hitler's victory, and many other fascist agents who broke into the ministries, armies, and press of France, could well be considered members of the "5th Column".
Renault de facto obeyed the French capitulationists. Appointed vice-president of France ** was the 85-year-old Marshal Pétain. This man, old and with tears in his eyes, was one of the most dangerous men in France and an associate of Reival, who had close ties to Nazi Germany. The marshal in his twilight years apparently learned from the German reconnaissance service that Germany was going to attack France. Long before the German attack on France, he had admitted to Minister de Monter: "I will be useful to them in the second half of May". Petain was the spiritual father of the French capitulationists who tried to achieve rapprochement with fascist Germany at all costs.
The 73-year-old General Weygand had helped the landlord Poland fight against the young Soviet Republic, and later became a Kagurid. At this moment, he was hastily recalled from the headquarters of the anti-Soviet plan based in Syria and was ordered to replace Gammelin as supreme commander-in-chief. When he flew from Beirut to Paris, he claimed to his cronies that the war had been lost and that he must "agree to reasonable terms of armistice."
When the French made such a personnel move, Hitler's army met no serious resistance, and on the night of 19 May burst to the mouth of the Somme, occupied Amiens and Abbeville, and advanced to the shores of the Strait of La Manche. After the breakthrough near Sedan was carried out, German tanks crossed the entire territory of France from east to west in five days. The army of the Confederates was defeated. A sizable army group - consisting of the French 1st Army, the British Expeditionary Force under the command of General Gott, and the Belgian corps, a total of 40 heavily battered divisions, was cut off from the main forces south of the Somme at Flanders and Artois.
By 21 May, the gap between the Allied Army Group 1 and Army Group 2 had widened from 50 km to 90 km. On 22 May, 1 German tank division broke through to the border of Boulogne and Calais. The next day, the Germans captured 4,000 British troops and occupied Calais.
On the day of the occupation of Calais, German tanks were only 16 kilometers away from Dunkirk, the only large port on the shores of the Strait of Ramance still in the hands of British and French troops. Kleist's tanks were far from Dunkirk much closer than the main forces of the British Expeditionary Force were from Dunkirk, because the main forces of the British Expeditionary Force were deployed 60 kilometers from Dunkirk (near Lille).
"Strange things about Dunkirk".
At the end of May and the beginning of June, it took place here with "
"Strange things" and "mysterious" events that went down in history. The oddity is this: Hitler's offensive against Dunkirk was suspended;The British Expeditionary Force withdrew to the British Isles under tragic circumstances.
At a time when Britain's Allies were in a standoff with Hitler's army alone, General Gott's expeditionary force retreated from the mainland, thus largely prejudging the rout and surrender of France. Not only that, but the British side also described Dunkirk and its overture as an important episode in the British army's military strategy.
Of course, in the Dunkirk retreat, British soldiers, officers, pilots, tankmen, infantry and artillerymen all showed examples of fortitude, composure, bravery, and fearlessness. There is indeed no precedent in the entire history of the art of war for the retreat of so many troops from the sea under the surprise attack of the aviation, artillery, and tank forces of the enemy, which had a huge superiority over the Anglo-French forces.
However, already during the Second World War, and especially after the war, there was a fierce debate about whether "strange things" happened in Dunkirk, or, in fact, nothing "mysterious" and "strange" happened here, but only the miscalculations of the Anglo-French Allied High Command and the Wehrmacht High Command. In our view, it was the second scenario that arose at that time. It is clear that the "strange incident at Dunkirk" must be explained in a unique way of combination, that is, it must be analyzed in a unique combination of a series of political and other factors formed by the fierce struggle between the British and French armies and the German ** forces in an extremely complex international situation.
So what are the factors that influence the occurrence of dramatic events in the Dunkirk dunes?Is it possible for Britain and France to prevent the Dunkirk incident?It is also not known whose fault it was for the devastating defeat of the British and French armies. No matter how much Western military figures, politicians, historians and journalists tried to characterize these events, Dunkirk was ultimately a failure.
Like the later French surrender, the Dunkirk defeat was prepared by British and French gravediggers. These gravediggers were the politicians and military strategists who pursued the Munich policy - the policy of cooperation with the Hitler aggressors, who tried to lead Hitler's aggression to the East against the Soviet Union. It was they who preferred to surrender to the German fascists rather than to resist them. They were more worried about the victory of the German fascists than about the political enthusiasm of their own people. But who is the direct culprit in Dunkirk?Let's try to figure this out.
Even after the Wehrmacht troops broke through to the shores of the Ramance Strait, the situation of the British and French troops was not catastrophic, albeit serious.
The British Expeditionary Force in France numbered 400,000 men. Gort's army, which was deployed directly in the Dunkirk region, consisted of 10 divisions. The British army was armed with more than 700 tanks, 2,400 field guns, anti-aircraft guns and anti-tank guns, and thousands of anti-tank guns, machine guns and assault guns.
The Belgian army that resisted the German invasion numbered about 500,000 men. The French army fighting north and south in the narrow strip occupied by the Germans also numbered about 500,000 men.
It is also possible that the Allies will transfer troops from the French** region covered by the Maginot Line, and possibly by sea controlled by the British and French navies. There can be no doubt that these well-armed British, French, and Belgian armies, if they had precisely coordinated their assault with the Anglo-French Army Group South, could have effectively resisted the German breakthrough.
The new commander-in-chief, General Wei Gang, on the one hand, concealed his opinion that he had to surrender, and on the other hand, he also took certain rescue steps against the North Group Army, which had been cut off from contact, in consideration of the position of the vast number of ** circles.
On 21 May, a meeting of Allied representatives was held in Ypres (Goth was not present). At the meeting, it was agreed that the "Weygand Plan" would be to carry out a two-sided assault from the south and north to crush the intrusive enemy and cause the Allied forces to be cut off from each other. "Several German divisions, Weygand, claimed that ,-- would be buried in the trap in which they had fallen." According to the plan, the British and French armies, with 30-40 divisions, carried out a surprise attack from the north against Babom and Cambrai. They had to open their way south by fighting and, having broken through the German tank forces, joined up with General Freier's French Army Group (which included the French Division and a number of troops transferred from Alsace, Maginot Line, Africa and elsewhere) that had rushed in their direction through Amiens to reinforce them.
An Allied assault on the flank of the German tank assault cluster could have left it vulnerable to the enemy. However, the attack on Arras on 21-22 May with two British and two French divisions was very uncoordinated and poorly prepared. Ignoring the French attack, Gott ordered General Franklin, who was in charge of the coordinated operations of the British 5th and 50th Infantry Divisions, to storm Arras on 21 May. As a result, 2 French divisions supported the British offensive only later.
However, even this small and poorly organized local attack by the British and French forces made the German generals hesitate to act, and they called the offensive the "Arras Crisis". The British soldiers, in the assault on Arras, showed that they were selfless and brave warriors. They forced the Germans to retreat 20 kilometers and captured 400 of the enemy. There is every reason to believe that if the attack was not carried out with four divisions of the British and French armies, but with the entire strength of the Allied forces of the North Group and the bulk of the forces of the South Group, the offensive would have achieved incomparably great military strategic results, and the breakthrough of several German divisions at La Manche could also be thwarted.