In Europe

bombed, the third great Luftwaffe bombardment after Guernica and Warsaw. Most of the inner city was reduced to rubble. About 900 inhabitants were killed. That afternoon – the Germans had threatened to do the same to Utrecht – General Henri Winkelman capitulated. His army had been at war for precisely five days.
    King Leopold III of Belgium capitulated two weeks later. By that time at least 1.5 million Belgians were fleeing to France. The king's decisioncreated a breach in France's northern defences, and the French 1st Army's positions around Lille were suddenly no longer tenable.
    At the same time, a grave conflict arose between the king and his ministers that would continue until after the war. For the Belgian government, the country's neutrality had always been a political given, a matter of sensible opportunism imposed by the configuration of power within Europe. But now they were ready to fight to the death. For Leopold, however, neutrality was a sacred principle, a line of behaviour that corresponded to his most basic sensibilities. He was obsessed with one thing only: preventing a repetition of 1914. Every ruined street, every dead soldier was, in his view, one too many. Unlike the assertive Dutch queen, Wilhelmina (who had retreated to England) he saw no sense in continuing the European war. ‘France will go down fighting, perhaps within only a few days. Britain will continue the fight in its colonies and at sea. I choose the more difficult path.’ After 28 May, the Belgian king considered himself Hitler's prisoner of war.
    In the afternoon of that same historic day of 10 May, 1940, Winston Churchill was appointed prime minister of the United Kingdom. Five days later, at 7.30 on Wednesday morning, he was roused from his sleep by a telephone call from the French premier, Paul Reynaud. Disaster was pending. At least seven German armoured divisions had unexpectedly broken through the Ardennes and were now rolling through the countryside close to the town of Sedan. Behind them were trucks full of infantry. It was, Reynaud feared, the beginning of the end. And that, indeed, is how France was overwhelmed by more than 1,800 tanks of General Rundstedt's
Heeresgruppe A
, backed by some 300 Stuka dive bombers, that came storming into the country through the ‘impassable’ Ardennes.
    The next day, when Churchill – who had quickly flown to Paris after Reynaud's call – looked out the window at the French ministry of foreign affairs, he saw a remarkable sight:‘Outside in the garden of the Quai d'Orsay clouds of smoke arose from large bonfires, and I saw from the window venerable officials pushing wheelbarrows of archives onto them.’ He sent the French an additional ten fighter squadrons, but reluctantly, knowing that soon he would be needing every one of them in order to survive.

Chapter TWENTY-SIX
Dunkirk
    IN THE MIDDLE OF THE ROLLING FORESTS OF THE ARDENNES, CLOSE to the village of Brûly-de-Pesche, is a tall block of concrete amid the trees, weathered and overgrown, with two thick iron doors and a little peep-hatch. Around here people call the structure
l'abri de Hitler
, and during the first week of June 1940 this was indeed the Führer's makeshift headquarters.
    The photographs in the little museum make it look like a holiday in the woods of Brûly: a relaxed Hitler consulting with his generals in front of the barracks; the group in front of the village church where they all watched newsreels every day; the same group, laughing, at the edge of the field where Göring is about to start up his plane; the entire HQ staff listening to the radio on 17 June as Pétain announces the French surrender. (Hitler afterwards slapped his thighs in pleasure, his usual way of expressing glee, but regrettably there are no pictures of that.)
    Rarely has a military campaign run as smoothly as the German invasion of May 1940. Contrary to what is often assumed, the Allied forces were at least as strong as the Germans, if not stronger. Hitler was fighting with fewer than ninety divisions. The French alone had more divisions than that stationed along the eastern border, to say nothing of over forty British, Polish, Belgian and Dutch divisions. The Allies had combined access to twice as much heavy artillery and one and a half times as many tanks. To be sure, the Germans had an impressive air force with at least 4,000 planes, while the Allies had no more than 1,200. That typifies the decisive difference: the Allies thought in