Airborne troops seized Dutch bridges and the Belgian fortress of Eben-Emael while the Allies rushed their best armies north into Belgium. The main German thrust came through the wooded Ardennes, which French planners thought unsuited to tanks. By May 20 German panzers had reached the English Channel, trapping the Allied armies in the north. The Netherlands surrendered on May 15, Belgium on May 28, and France signed an armistice on June 22.
For eight months after declaring war in September 1939, Britain and France had waited behind their defences in what journalists called the Phoney War. The German plan, Fall Gelb, was designed to exploit that caution. Attacks on the Netherlands and Belgium drew the French and British northward, while seven panzer divisions moved through the Ardennes toward the river Meuse at Sedan.
The offensive opened before dawn on May 10, 1940. German paratroopers and glider troops captured Eben-Emael, the strongest fort in Belgium, in hours, landing on its roof. In the Netherlands, airborne forces seized bridges near Rotterdam and The Hague. On May 13 German forces crossed the Meuse, and the French front broke.
In London, Neville Chamberlain had lost the confidence of much of his party in a debate that week. On the evening of May 10 he resigned, and King George VI asked Winston Churchill to form a government. Churchill later wrote that he felt "as if I were walking with destiny". Within three weeks more than 330,000 Allied troops were being evacuated from the beaches of Dunkirk.
Key people: Adolf Hitler, Winston Churchill, Gerd von Rundstedt, Heinz Guderian