A new French government was established in the town of Vichy, which was in the unoccupied southern part of France. The Vichy government, under Marshall Henri Petain, declared neutrality in the war between Germany and Great Britain, but was committed by the armistice provisions to cooperation with Germany. When the German air force failed to win air superiority over southeastern England in , Hitler postponed the invasion until the spring of After the first operational order for the German invasion of the Soviet Union was issued in December , the German invasion of Great Britain was postponed indefinitely.
We would like to thank Crown Family Philanthropies and the Abe and Ida Cooper Foundation for supporting the ongoing work to create content and resources for the Holocaust Encyclopedia. View the list of all donors. Trending keywords:. If the tanks succeed, then victory follows. Heinz Guderian By May , Europe had been at war for nine months. Did you know? Most Recent. Lesser known facts about The Battle of the Somme. A history of the poppy: Why we wear them as a symbol of remembrance and other facts.
How the Nazis lost WW2: Four major turning points. The Tuskegee airmen: America's first black aviators. You might be interested in. The speed of the German advance and the brutality of the air raids gave them a huge psychological advantage, and on 14 May the Dutch surrendered. The British and French had responded to the original attack by putting into operation a plan to advance to the River Dyle, in Belgium. The Allies pushed their best forces, including the British, into Belgium.
Although the initial stages went reasonably well, a French force advancing towards Breda, in Holland, was pushed back. It soon became clear that by advancing into the Low Countries the Allies were dancing to Hitler's tune. In a two-day battle, the Panzers crossed the river, despite some surprisingly stiff resistance from the second-class French defenders, and near-suicidal attacks by Allied aircraft. Under the dynamic command of General Heinz Guderian, a pioneer of armoured warfare known euphemistically as 'Hurry-up Heinz', the German Panzers broke out of their bridgehead.
They began to race towards the Channel coast, aided by the German aircraft that ruled the skies. With the bulk of the Allied forces fighting in Belgium, there was little to stop the German forces as they sliced across the Allied supply-lines.
The German spearheads reached the English Channel on 20 May. Lacking a centrally placed strategic reserve, the Allies tried to pull their armies out of Belgium to respond to the new threat emerging in their rear. And the Germans did not have it all their own way, as French forces under Charles de Gaulle showed how vulnerable the flanks of the German forces were to bold counterattacks.
Yet this was all too little, too late. With German forces pushing through Belgium and the Panzers looping up from the south and west, the Allies were encircled. The Belgian army surrendered on 28 May, leaving a gaping hole on the British flank of the Allied forces. Allied high command seemed paralysed. General Weygand replaced General Gamelin as French commander-in-chief, but it made no difference. Between 26 May and 4 June, a hastily organised evacuation by sea, code-named Operation Dynamo, lifted , Allied troops from Dunkirk.
That the German forces failed to press their attack on Dunkirk was largely thanks to grim defence of the Dunkirk perimeter by British and French troops, and the efforts of the much-depleted RAF.
Although as Churchill, who had become Prime Minster on 10 May rightly commented, 'wars are not won by evacuation', Dynamo was a victory of incalculable importance for the BEF. The return of the troops, even without much of their equipment, gave Britain a basis on which to rebuild the Army, sheltering behind the Navy and the RAF.
The resulting firestorm destroyed 15 square miles of the city center, and killed more than 22, A large stack of corpses is cremated in Dresden, Germany, after the British-American air attack between February 13 and 15, The bombing of Dresden has been questioned in post-war years, with critics claiming the area bombing of the historic city center as opposed to the industrial suburbs was not justified militarily. Soldiers of the 3rd U. Army storm into Coblenz, Germany, as a dead comrade lies against the wall, on March 18, Men of the American 7th Army pour through a breach in the Siegfried Line defenses, on their way to Karlsruhe, Germany on March 27, , which lies on the road to Stuttgart.
Manuel M. Poliakoff, and Cpl. They were the first Jewish services held east of the Rur River and were offered in memory of soldiers of the faith who were lost by the 29th Division, U. American soldiers aboard an assault boat huddle together as they cross the Rhine river at St. Goar, Germany, while under heavy fire from the German forces, in March of An unidentified American soldier, shot dead by a German sniper, clutches his rifle and hand grenade in March of in Coblenz, Germany.
War-torn Cologne Cathedral stands out of the devastated area on the west bank of the Rhine, in Cologne, Germany, April 24, The railroad station and the Hohenzollern Bridge, at right, are completely destroyed after three years of Allied air raids.
He committed suicide rather than face the U. An American soldier of the 12th Armored Division stands guard over a group of German soldiers, captured in April , in a forest at an unknown location in Germany.
Adolf Hitler decorates members of his Nazi youth organization "Hitler Jugend" in a photo reportedly taken in front of the Chancellery Bunker in Berlin, on April 25, That was just four days before Hitler committed suicide. Partly completed Heinkel He fighter jets sit on the assembly line in the underground Junkers factory at Tarthun, Germany, in early April The huge underground galleries, in a former salt mine, were discovered by the 1st U.
Army during their advance on Magdeburg. Soviet officers and U. Compounds erected by the Allies for their collections of prisoners never seem to be big enough, here is an over-crowded cage of Germans rounded up by the Seventh Army during its drive to Heidelberg, on April 4, The huge monument commemorating the defeat of Napoleon in was one of the last strongholds in the city to surrender.
One hundred and fifty SS fanatics with ammunition and foodstuffs stored in the structure to last three months dug themselves in and were determined to hold out as long as their supplies. American First Army artillery eventually blasted the SS troops into surrender.
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