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Churchill thought Britain's naval superiority would soon drive the Germans out of Norway. But though Britain commanded the high seas, the Luftwaffe controlled the air. And though Britain did land nearly 25,000 Allied troops in Norway, they were poorly equipped and had to be evacuated within weeks, as were King Haakon, his family and his gold. Said Churchill: "We have been completely outwitted."
Hitler had hoped to attack the Low Countries in the fall of 1939, as soon as possible after the conquest of Poland, but the plan was delayed first by objections from the German generals, then by bad weather, then by a bizarre twist of fortune. A Luftwaffe major who carried a set of the invasion plans in his briefcase was sitting in an officers club in Munster and bemoaning the long train trip to a planning conference in Cologne the next day; another major, who was getting too old for active duty, offered to fly him there so that he could log some more cockpit time for himself. The two set off in a new Messerschmitt scout plane, got lost in the clouds and crash-landed in Belgium. The Belgian authorities thus found themselves in possession of the entire German invasion plan -- but could not be certain that this was not all a German trick. Conversely, Hitler soon learned that the Allies knew of his plans -- but the furious dictator could not be certain whether they knew what they had.
Hitler decided to rethink the whole strategy. The French defense was based on the "Maginot Line," a chain of fortifications that stretched 200 miles along the frontier from Switzerland north as far as Luxembourg. Built at a cost of $200 million (a substantial sum at a time when a workman earned about $3 a day), the Maginot Line was considered invulnerable; its strongest outposts bristled with antitank guns, machine guns and barbed wire, and boasted concrete walls 10 ft. thick as well as supply depots 100 ft. underground. To the north of the Ardennes Forest, which was only lightly fortified because the French considered it "impenetrable," a "Little Maginot Line" guarded the Franco-Belgian border, but the French planned to march into neutral Belgium themselves at the first sign of a German invasion.
The original German plan was to launch a frontal assault by Army Group B on the Low Countries, just as in 1914, with a secondary attack in the Ardennes by Army Group A. But General Erich von Manstein, chief of staff for Army Group A, passionately argued that this would only lead to stalemate in northern France, again just as in 1914. By contrast, a strong armored offensive right through the supposedly impenetrable Ardennes could lead to a breakthrough all the way to the English Channel. The Allied armies would be encircled and cut off; all France would lie open. Manstein's memorandums never reached Hitler, but the two men met at a dinner, and the Fuhrer was so impressed by the general's bold plan that he ordered it adopted.