The Need for Organisational Resilience - Chapter 2

Blanchard’s First Army, the bulk of the Allied forces were supposed to move to the River

Dyle to absorb the weight of the German attack. General Corap’s Ninth Army was to occupy

the area along the Meuse just north of Sedan. Below Sedan, occupying the gap between

Sedan and the start of the Maginot Line, General Huntzinger was placed with his Second

Army. The divisions under his command were of mediocre quality because a German attack

through the thickly forested area of the Ardennes was regarded by the French High

Command as unlikely and if such an attack from that direction did occur, the French believed

they would have sufficient time to reinforce.

The ‘Mechelen’ incident reinforced the resolve of the Allies to meet their enemy in the

north, with their best armoured and mechanised divisions. The ‘Breda Variant’ manifested

the commitment of most of the Allies’ crack forces to the north, leaving the centre of around

a hundred miles behind the ‘impenetrable’ Ardennes forest largely undefended with a mere

four light cavalry divisions and ten infantry divisions. On 10 May 1940, the strategies of both countries were put to the test. On 15 th May – five

days after the beginning of the campaign in the west, the Germans established three bridge-

heads over the Meuse. They broke through the French defences and repulsed major

counterattacks by the French. They raced north, encircling those Allied forces that had

pushed into Belgium and Holland to contain the expected main German assault. The battles

that followed only prolonged the French struggle to contain the German advance; at no point

did they manage to stop it.

Deciding factors: Imagination, Sensitivity, Adaptability

The French High Command rigidly stuck to its plans and its expectations of how these plans

would work out. They expected the Germans to attack in the north, through the Low

Countries, and so they prepared themselves for the fulfilment of this expectation,

constrained by their own capabilities and blind to the capabilities of their enemy.

Imagination. The Germans displayed an extraordinary wealth of novel ideas on how combat

operations should be conducted. These were not just documented as theoretical thought

pieces, such as Achtung Panzer (Guderian 1999), originally published in 1937. Visionary

ideas were tested in field exercises and war games, and further validated in those early

campaigns of WWII, such as the invasion of Poland on 1 September 1939 as well as in the campaign against Denmark and Norway of 9 th April 1940, a mere four weeks prior to the

invasion of France.

The insights gained from these success and failures – Norway was successfully invaded

but at a terrible cost to the German Navy – were heeded despite ongoing conservatism

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