While Norway and Holland had been able to keep their neutral status during the Great War, Belgium was the first country invaded by Germany. In their August 1914 incursion, German troops were simply continuing the centuries-old tradition of warring powers using Belgian territory as a convenient passageway to reach whichever country was their main target at the time—in this case, France. When the Belgians put up a stubborn and surprisingly strong resistance, ending Germany’s hope of a quick victory over the French, the invaders were ferocious in their retaliation, launching a campaign of wholesale executions and destruction. The medieval city of Louvain, like a number of other Belgian towns, was pillaged; many of its buildings, including its world-famous university library, were burned to the ground. At the end of the war, much of the country was left in a state of devastation, with most of its roads, industry, and railway system destroyed.
Only twelve years old when the Great War began, Leopold was profoundly affected not only by its impact on Belgium but also by the widely lauded wartime actions of his father, King Albert I. One of the most admired military and political figures of the conflict, Albert refused numerous invitations from the Allies to flee to Britain or France. Instead, he rallied his vastly outnumbered troops in October 1914 to win the crucial Battle of the Yser, which halted the German advance in Belgium and gave the king and his forces control of a small sliver of Belgian territory on the North Sea coast for the rest of the war. That victory in turn allowed the Allies to maintain control of several key French ports nearby.
Thanks to his boldness and resolution, Albert did more than benefit the Allies; he also helped restore the reputation and popularity of the Belgian monarchy, which had been blackened by his predecessor and uncle, Leopold II. In the late nineteenth century, Leopold had acquired and exploited for his private gain what later became known as the Belgian Congo, arousing international outrage for his henchmen’s horrific treatment of Congolese workers, millions of whom had died as a result. When Albert assumed the throne in 1904, he instituted reforms in the Congo to try to ameliorate the human and physical damage wreaked by his rapacious forebear. Leopold III followed his father’s reformist example.
Modest and soft-spoken, the younger Leopold hero-worshiped Albert and, from early childhood, modeled his life on that of his father. When the Great War began, the crown prince was sent with his two siblings to England, where he was enrolled at Eton. But he persuaded Albert, who remained in Belgium throughout the war, to allow him to train and then serve as a soldier during his school breaks. For the war’s duration, Leopold led a curious life—a student at Britain’s most exclusive boys’ school for most of the year, coupled with stints as a private in the Belgian army during Eton’s vacation periods.
King Leopold III with his bride, Princess Astrid of Sweden.
In 1934, Albert, still vigorous at the age of fifty-eight, was killed in a mountain-climbing accident, and the thirty-two-year-old Leopold assumed the throne. Blond and boyishly handsome, the new king and his pretty Swedish wife, Astrid, along with their three young children, brought youth and a touch of glamour to the monarchy. Just over a year later, however, the twenty-nine-year-old queen died in an automobile accident in Switzerland when her husband, who was driving, lost control of their car on a winding mountain road. Bereft by the back-to-back deaths of the two people to whom he was closest, the sensitive, reserved Leopold was also haunted by his own culpability in the accident that had killed his wife. Attempting to assuage his grief and sense of guilt, he threw himself into his kingly duties with a new intensity.
In leading the country, he closely emulated his father, particularly in foreign affairs. After the Great War, Albert had pursued two major foreign policy objectives: retaining Belgium’s neutrality while strengthening its defenses to allow it to put up a better fight against Germany or any other likely aggressor. During his son’s reign, Belgium spent almost a quarter of its budget on national defense, far more than any other European country except Germany. At the outbreak of World War II, more than half of all Belgian men between the ages of twenty and forty—a total of 650,000—were under arms. When the Belgian army was mobilized in May 1940, its numbers had swelled to 900,000, compared to 237,000 soldiers in the British Expeditionary Force in France.
At the same time, however, Leopold, like his father, insisted that the country remain neutral, much to the dismay of France and Britain, which had pressed Belgium hard in 1939 and early 1940 to enter into a military alliance that would permit their troops to enter Belgian territory before any fighting broke out. Leopold and his government suspected that the Western Allies’ eagerness for a military partnership was prompted by a desire to keep the war as far away as possible from their own soil. Indeed, France’s commander in chief, General Maurice Gamelin, acknowledged as much when he wrote in a confidential memo that the strategy behind sending Allied troops into Belgium at the start of the fight was to “carry the conflict out of our northern industrial provinces…and hold off the enemy threat from Paris.”
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EVEN THOUGH IT WAS better prepared militarily than most of the other countries invaded by Germany, Belgium still found itself overwhelmed by the sheer ferocity of the enemy’s initial assault. By nightfall on May 10, seemingly endless waves of Luftwaffe bombers had wiped out much of the Belgian air force, and glider-borne troops had captured the linchpin of the country’s defense system, the strongly fortified Eben-Emael fortress on the Belgian-Dutch border.
Still, after the first shock, Belgium’s twenty-two divisions regrouped to mount what the American historian Telford Taylor called “a determined and well-directed defense,” retreating to the west while making the Germans pay for their gains. The Belgians “fought like lions, from house to house,” the CBS correspondent William L. Shirer wrote at the time. Telford Taylor later observed that “if the quality of the Belgian performance had been duplicated in other lands, the German march of conquest might have been shorter.”
Meanwhile, French and British forces, this time with the Belgians’ agreement, had crossed the Belgian-French frontier to take up positions behind a fortified defense line in the center of the country. During its strategic retreat, the Belgian army headed for the same defense line; there it would take its place alongside British troops, to help fend off what France and Britain believed would be the chief German offensive.
Instead, on May 13, the main enemy force, consisting of more than 1.5 million men and 1,800 tanks, thundered through the heavily wooded Ardennes Forest, farther south in Belgium. Outflanking the vaunted Maginot Line, France’s supposedly impenetrable chain of fortifications, the Germans smashed into the least protected sector of the French frontier, routing the ill-equipped reservists assigned to guard it and crossing the Meuse River into France.
In just three days, the German offensive had split the Allied forces in two, sealing off French, British, and Belgian troops in central Belgium from the bulk of the French army. With France’s defenses breached beyond repair and German armored columns now racing through the French countryside, a wave of panic enveloped the government and military. At that point, French premier Paul Reynaud picked up the phone to call Winston Churchill.
For the new British prime minister, May 1940 was filled with one nightmarish phone call after another, each bearing news of the latest military disaster. But none was as shocking as the one he received from Reynaud in the early morning of May 15. “We have been defeated!” Reynaud exclaimed as soon as his British counterpart answered the phone. When Churchill, still groggy from sleep, failed to respond, Reynaud, speaking in English, rephrased his dire message: “We are beaten! We have lost the battle!” Finally finding his voice, Churchill said he found that impossible to believe: though the Germans had certainly had the element of surprise, they would soon have to stop for supplies and regroup, giving the French forces the chance to counterattack. Reynaud went on as if Churchill hadn’t said a word. “We are defeated,” he said again, his voice breaking. “We have lost the battle.??
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Churchill was dumbfounded. This was not one of the little neutral countries he had criticized so often: it was understandable that they would fall like a house of cards before the German blitzkrieg. This was France—Britain’s chief ally, supposedly the mightiest military power on the Continent! Yet when France’s turn had come for invasion, its army of 2 million men had proved as unprepared and overwhelmed by Germany’s new, stunningly fast style of warfare as had the smaller nations. How could anyone cope with tanks slicing through defense lines as if they weren’t even there or with clouds of aircraft bombing bridges, roads, and train stations, strafing troops and civilians alike?
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AS ITS CLOSEST EUROPEAN NEIGHBOR, France had much in common with Britain. They shared similar liberal values and were the most democratic of the leading countries of Europe. In World War I, they had joined hands as allies against Germany and Austro-Hungary. That partnership, however, had masked deep rifts and rivalries. The difficulties Churchill and Reynaud had in communicating with each other during their traumatic May 15 conversation were emblematic of the misunderstandings, suspicion, and antagonism that had existed for centuries between these two once mighty imperial powers and hereditary enemies.
Janet Teissier du Cros, a Scottish writer living in France during World War II, observed that both nations were noted for their suspicion of foreigners and their feeling of superiority to other countries. “It is so much a second nature…to believe there is no one like them that the notion scarcely even reaches the level of conscious thought,” she wrote. “It is probably one of the reasons they find each other so oddly irritating.”
Far from bringing them closer together, Britain and France’s shared victory in World War I drove them further apart. Each had made huge contributions to that victory, but neither would give the other credit for its efforts, sacrifices, and achievements. “The real truth, which history will show, is that the British Army has won the war,” Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig, commander of the British Expeditionary Force in France, wrote in his diary after the November 1918 armistice. “I have no intention of taking part in any triumphal ride with [French commander Marshal Ferdinand] Foch, or with any pack of foreigners, through the streets of London.”
Although only twenty miles of the English Channel separated the two countries, the psychological and cultural distance between them was as vast as an ocean. Each was also indelibly marked by its own geography: Britain was an island nation that had escaped invasion for more than eight centuries, while France, with its vulnerable borders, had endured repeated invasions, defeats, and occupations. At the 1919 Paris peace conference, French premier Georges Clemenceau explained to British prime minister David Lloyd George and U.S. president Woodrow Wilson the rationale behind his country’s demands for draconian restrictions on Germany: “America is far away and protected by the ocean. England could not be reached by Napoleon himself. You are sheltered, both of you. We are not.”
As the historian Margaret MacMillan noted about the post–World War I period, “France wanted revenge and compensation, but above all it wanted security.” Between 1814 and 1940, Germany had invaded and occupied all or part of France five times. During World War I, in addition to turning much of France into a battlefield and charnel house, the Germans had pillaged the territory they occupied; in northern France, for example, most of the machinery and equipment of the country’s textile industry had been taken to Germany.
In the years following the 1918 armistice, British policy makers, showing little sympathy with or understanding for French security concerns, increasingly insisted that the Versailles Treaty had been overly punitive to Germany and that the new German republic should be conciliated and even strengthened. The French were fiercely opposed to any such tolerance, arguing that the resurgence of German militarism was still very much a possibility. They pressed the British hard for a new Anglo-French military alliance, to no avail. To the British, France was being paranoid and vindictive.
When Hitler seized power and began rearming Germany, the governments of prime ministers Stanley Baldwin and Neville Chamberlain persuaded themselves that the Führer was simply trying to correct the injustices of Versailles and must be placated. By the mid-1930s, France, having given up hope that Britain would stand firm, had accepted the British policy of appeasement. For both former allies, the idea of another war was unthinkable. It had been only twenty years since their young men had begun marching off to battle, the cheers of their countrymen ringing in their ears. Four years after that, more than 700,000 Britons lay dead. France’s battlefield losses were double that number—1.4 million men, the highest proportion of deaths per capita of any of the great power combatants. Still suffering from the war’s devastating psychological and economic toll, the French doubted they could survive another conflict.
When Hitler occupied the demilitarized Rhineland in March 1936, first Britain, then France, turned a blind eye. They did the same after German troops goose-stepped into Austria in March 1937. But when Hitler threatened Czechoslovakia in the summer of 1938, France showed signs of standing up to him. The French, who had a military pact with the Czechs, began mobilizing their forces; they told the British they would resist dismemberment of their eastern European ally. Yet when Neville Chamberlain declined to join them in confronting Germany, the French fell into line. Following Chamberlain’s lead at the Munich Conference, they ordered Czechoslovakia to give in to German demands for the Sudetenland, a vital area containing most of Czechoslovakia’s fortifications and major centers of industry.
At Munich, Hitler had promised the British and French that he had no further designs on Czechoslovakia; six months later, he seized the rest of the country. It was then that Chamberlain, his appeasement plan clearly in ruins, announced to Parliament one of the most dramatic reversals of foreign policy in modern British history: Britain, he declared, would go to the aid of Poland, next on Germany’s hit list, if it were invaded. It would also join France in a new military alliance, after years of scorning French fears of a renewed German threat.
The tables were now turned: the French, who had deferred to British diplomatic leadership throughout the 1930s, were unquestionably the senior partner in military matters. With an army less than one-fifth the size of France’s, Britain was now suffering the consequences of its leaders’ reluctance to rearm in the interwar years. During that period, its relatively small increases in arms spending had been used for the production of fighter planes to protect the country from possible German aerial attack. In early 1939, the British Army, which alone among the major European powers had no conscription policy, numbered only 180,000 men, with another 130,000 in reserve. Even those minuscule numbers were starved for adequate equipment, arms, and training.
When war broke out, neither France nor Britain sent troops to the aid of Poland. Instead, the British Expeditionary Force dispatched four divisions to France, a far smaller number than the French had expected; by the time of the blitzkrieg, there were ten. General Alan Brooke, who commanded two of the British divisions, morosely wrote in his diary that his troops were unfit for combat and that the Chamberlain government had probably sent them to France only as a public relations gesture, to show that some action, however minimal, was being taken. Concurring, the French ambassador in London snapped that “the English have such confidence in the French army that they are tempted to consider their military support as a gesture of solidarity rather than a vital necessity.”
As it turned out, both Brooke and the ambassador were right: the British did count on the French army’s eighty divisions, as well as its superior artillery and tank force, to counter German might. What the British failed to understand was that, despite its strength in numbers, France was as unprepared for the coming conflict as they were. In their planning for a new European war, French military leaders had envisioned a relatively bloodless version of World War I—a long slog beginning with an enemy offensive through the flatlands of Belgium. With that in mind, the French h
igh command had sent its best troops and armored units, along with the ten British divisions, to central Belgium. If German forces managed to make it past the Allied troops, they would then wear themselves out attacking the Maginot Line, the French believed. No one had anticipated the German breakthrough at the Meuse.
In truth, Britain’s misplaced faith in France’s military strength was just another example of the two countries’ mutual obtuseness. On paper, their alliance had been renewed; in fact, no real partnership existed. “A genuine alliance is something that has to be worked at all the time,” observed the French historian Marc Bloch, a Sorbonne professor who fought in the 1940 battle. “It is not enough to have it set down in writing. It must draw the breath of life from a multiplicity of daily contacts which, taken together, knit the two parties into a single whole.”
In their dealings, British and French military leaders, few of whom spoke the other’s language, were often at cross-purposes, reflecting a mutual distrust, suspicion, and even personal dislike. The French generals treated their British counterparts with condescension, regarding them as “learners in the military arts.” The British commanders, for their part, were unhappy about the decision to send their troops into Belgium in the event of a German attack but, conscious of their country’s minimal military presence, made no complaint to the French.
By the time the Germans finally invaded the Low Countries and France, the Allies’ already dysfunctional military relationship had become toxic—as Winston Churchill discovered for himself when he traveled to Paris on May 16, the day after Paul Reynaud’s shattering phone call.