It was left to commanders at lower levels like de Gaulle to mount isolated counterattacks. One such assault by British armor, launched against the right flank of Rommel’s 7th Pan­zer Division as it neared the French coast on May 21, was repulsed at some cost and rattled Hitler, who was not reassured when Rom­mel, overstating the threat, reported fighting off “hundreds of enemy tanks.”

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On May 24, fearing that his fast-advancing armor might be cut off by a pincer movement, Hitler upheld an order by General Gerd von Rundstedt, commander of Army Group A, halting the panzers within 10 miles of Dunkirk, where Allied forces were assembling for evacuation across the Channel. Von Rund­stedt wanted to give trailing infantry divisions time to close up with panzer columns and protect their flanks. But his superiors, Chief of Staff Halder and Commanding General Walther von Brauchitsch, were convinced the Allies were beaten and urged Hitler to lift the order. In a stinging rebuke to the army chiefs, Hitler left the decision to their subordinate von Rundstedt, who did not give the panzers the go-ahead until May 26. By then, the Allies had bolstered their defenses at Dunkirk, where they held out long enough for nearly 340,000 troops to be evacu­ated by sea, including most of the British Expeditionary Force.

Although the British narrowly escaped disaster at Dunkirk, Operation Sickle Cut doomed France by stranding more than 1 million Allied troops in Belgium and eliminating them from the final phase of the campaign, which ended in June with the occupation of Paris and French surrender.

Yet this staggering triumph proved far more instructive for the losers than the winners. Germany’s foes were quick to adopt mechanized tactics and defensive measures such as deploying anti-aircraft guns against tanks. Hitler, by contrast, ignored the cautionary lessons of a contest that was far closer than it appeared.

If the Allies had better coordinated their efforts and concentrated more firepower at Sedan or Stonne or Montcarnet, they might have stopped the Germans in their tracks and forced them into a prolonged struggle for which they were ill-prepared. Intoxicated with success, Hitler came away thinking of blitzkrieg as a strategic silver bullet that could puncture the defenses of great powers and bring them to their knees within months. This grandiose blitzkrieg strategy did not develop until after the French campaign, concludes the German military historian Karl-Heinz Frieser in his revealing book, The Blitz­krieg Legend: “It was not the cause but rather the consequence of the victory.”

After failing to defeat Brit­ain later in 1940 with an aerial blitz that exposed Germany to strategic bombing in return, Hitler made plans to break his nonaggression pact with Josef Stalin and invade the Soviet Union. In so doing, he took the risk of inviting war on more than one front, for the British were taking on Axis forces in North Africa and hoped one day to invade occupied France.

That was a nightmare scenario for the German army, yet few officers at high levels openly questioned the wisdom of invading Russia. Many shared the belief that no theater was too vast to be dominated by their fast-moving forces. Ultimately, they would lose both the war and their honor in Russia, where generals became enmeshed in Hitler’s murderous campaign against Jews and other targeted groups, carried out by special forces called Einsatzgruppen that operated in conjunction with the army. Guderian’s claim that he knew nothing of such atrocities as he led his Panzergruppe 2 toward Moscow in late 1941 conflicts with reports from those responsible for the killings that they had “no difficulties” securing cooperation from commanders in his sector.

If he somehow had escaped knowledge of the death squads, Guderian surely knew by this time that Hitler was not a leader he could follow in good faith. Spirited debate had long been part of the army’s decision-making process, but Hitler would not tolerate dissent or a free exchange of ideas. “Everybody is scared of the Führer and nobody dares say anything,” Guderian wrote his wife as the fateful Russian campaign unfolded. Rapid advances by panzers over the summer gave way to agonizing delays and fitful progress amid worsening weather and mounting resistance.

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