Farther north, the 6th and 8th Panzer divisions of General Georg-Hans Reinhardt’s LI Panzer Corps would head for Monthermé, a small town downstream from Sedan. The 5th and 7th Panzer divisions of General Hermann Hoth’s XV Panzer Corps, a part of General Günther von Kluge’s Fourth Army, would provide flank cover for Reinhardt’s corps by crossing the Meuse farther north, at Dinant.

The five panzer divisions belonging to Guderian and Reinhardt, the spearhead of the attack, were welded together in an integrated armored group under General Ewald von Kleist, a former cavalryman not well disposed to armored warfare, and thus sufficiently cautious to ease Hitler’s fears about the exposed flanks of the panzers as they raced across France. All of these forces were allotted to Army Group A, under the command of General Gerd von Rundstedt, who also would prove to have an excessively cautious attitude toward the new blitzkrieg strategy.

While Rundstedt’s Army Group A was expected to break through the Allied center, General Fedor von Bock’s Army Group B and General Wilhelm von Leeb’s Army Group C would be playing important roles, too. Bock’s two armies, the Eighteenth, under General George von Küchler, and the Sixth, under General Walter von Reichenau, would have to crush resistance in the Netherlands as quickly as possible in order to protect the northern flank of Rundstedt’s army group. They would also have to advance far enough into Belgium to draw the Allies, which would be trying to get into their rear, away from Rundstedt’s Forces.

At the same time, on the southern part of the front, Leeb would have to convince the Allies that Germany was prepared to launch a secondary strike against the Maginot Line, in order to dissuade the French from shifting the divisions manning the fortifications northward to counter Rundstedt’s crossing of the Meuse.

As winter gave way to spring, the Germans were busy taking steps to ensure that the redeployments required by Sichelschnitt were hidden from the Allies. They hoped that General Gamelin would find no reason to change his plan to send the cream of the Allied armies into a carefully planned trap in northeastern Belgium.

During the early morning of May 10, 1940, the most massive mechanized force assembled up to that time began crossing Germany’s border with Belgium and Luxembourg. Panzer Group Kleist — five panzer divisions, with 134,000 soldiers, 41,000 motor vehicles and more than 1,600 tanks and reconnaissance vehicles — spearheaded the German attack. ‘Like a giant phalanx,’ remarked General Günther von Blumentritt, Rundstedt’s chief of operations, the German forces’stretched back for a hundred miles, the rear rank lying fifty miles to the east of the Rhine.’

Kleist’s panzer divisions advanced quickly through the Ardennes, meeting only light resistance from Belgian and French mechanized cavalry units. This they quickly brushed aside, and by the evening of May 12, two of Guderian’s three panzer divisions had reached the Meuse River on either side of Sedan. The next day they planned to cross the river. By then the lead units of Maj. Gen. Erwin Rommel’s 7th Panzer Division had already gotten across the Meuse just below Dinant. While the Germans were pushing through the Ardennes Forest, farther to the north the Allies were advancing into Belgium. By the evening of May 11, all nine divisions of the BEF were in place along the Dyle River. Between the BEF and the city of Namur, some 25 miles to the east, stretched the Brabant Plain, for centuries the avenue of Germanic invasions into the French heartland.

Filling the Gembloux Gap was Blanchard’s First Army — eight infantry divisions, three of them mechanized. Blanchard’s force was regarded as one of the best armies France possessed.

On the extreme left wing of the Allied front, the French Seventh Army spent May 10 advancing into the Netherlands. Giraud was instructed to move as far north as Breda to link up with the Dutch. But by the time his army reached Breda, the Dutch army had already withdrawn to cover Rotterdam. Instead of linking up with his allies, Giraud encountered the advance elements of Lt. Gen. Alfred Ritter von Hubicki’s 9th Panzer Division. The French also were attacked by Luftwaffe aircraft, whose bombs and strafing devastated Giraud’s 25th Infantry Division and scattered the 1st Light Cavalry Division. The next day, Giraud was ordered to withdraw his army from Holland and regroup in Belgium, west of the Escaut River. So ended the French attempt to save the Netherlands. On May 14, the Dutch surrendered.

Giraud’s army was sorely missed on the Meuse River line facing the Ardennes Forest. Had it remained in general reserve, as General Georges had desired, it might have been able to stem the impending German onslaught.

As Guderian’s three panzer divisions prepared to cross the Meuse near Sedan, they faced the weakest army in the French order of battle, General Corap’s Ninth. Of Corap’s seven infantry divisions, only two — the 5th Motorized and 4th North African — were Regular divisions. The others were filled by reservists. Two of the reserve divisions, the 61st and 53rd infantries, were classified as Series B divisions, which meant badly armed, overage and undertrained. The men were led by older-than-average officers, most of whom had been called out of retirement. With the exception of its cavalry corps, which had lost many of its light tanks in the Ardennes, the Ninth Army had no armored units. Still, no one had expected its soldiers to do much fighting. Gamelin had deployed Corap’s army near the Ardennes because he had considered the forest impenetrable and the Meuse River impassable.

The confidence of the French generals was severely jolted, however, as they watched the Germans emerge from the ‘impenetrable’ Ardennes on the afternoon of May 12. There was, recalled X Corps commander General Claude Grandsard, ‘an almost uninterrupted descent of infantry, armored vehicles and motorized infantry.’ What Grandsard witnessed was the advance of Guderian’s 1st and 10th Panzer divisions (the 2nd Panzer still lagged far behind in the Ardennes Forest).

Another French general, Charles Menu, later wrote that if the French artillery had delivered a full-scale, concerted blow at this assemblage, Guderian’s armored formations might have been broken up before they even attempted the Meuse crossing. ‘What a chance,’ Menu observed, ‘for the artillery to strike hammer blows’ and turn those armored units ‘into scraps of burnt and twisted metal.’ But, amazingly, the French artillery did not open up. Grandsard later explained that ‘as a counterattack would have to be launched with as much weight as possible against the Germans massing for the assault, our artillery was very sparing with its ammunition.’

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