The Battle of France, 1940
Six weeks in 1940, in which an army with fewer tanks and lighter ones destroyed the largest land force in Western Europe.
On 10 May 1940 Germany attacked west. Six weeks later France had surrendered and the British army had been evacuated from Dunkirk. The equipment makes the outcome harder to explain rather than easier: the Germans crossed the frontier with roughly 2,439 tanks, of which 955 were the light Panzer II and 523 the Panzer I, which carried no cannon at all. The ones that could fight a modern tank — Panzer III and Panzer IV together — numbered 627, barely a quarter of the force.
The French had more tanks, and in the Char B1 bis and the SOMUA S35 they had better ones. Their best fighter, the D.520, could meet the Bf 109E on close terms — but it had been declared combat-ready one month earlier, and the bulk of the fighter force flew the M.S.406, a hundred kilometres an hour slower than the Emil. What decided the campaign was the handling rather than the hardware: armour concentrated into divisions, a radio in every tank, and aircraft working to the same timetable as the ground. On 10 June Italy attacked across the Alps, adding a short campaign of its own. The machines of all four armies are gathered here.
