The Danger Zone (DZ)

The question for this programme is, if the Panzers had reached and taken Dunkirk before the British had gotten there, would Germany have won World War II in Europe? Tag words: Len Deighton; Blood, Sweat and Toil; Dunkirk; Alistair Horne; To Lose a Battle; Karl-Heinz Frieser; Blitzkrieg Legend; Winston Churchill; Adolf Hitler; Lord Halifax; Paul Reynaud; Mussolini; Neville Chamberlain; Admiral Keye...

It would have been the decisive moment for the Panzer generals to ignore Hitler’s halt orders and to keep on thrusting forward to take Dunkirk. But that didn’t happen. Circumstances were different now to just a few days before. Then they were lost somewhere in the French countryside and fairly free to do what they wanted, but now they were close together and operating in a very combined space at t...

On 23/24 May 1940 a final stop order was imposed on the panzers – the last one for the Operation Sickle Cut campaign before it was concluded. Time would reveal that the consequences of the various stop orders were disastrous for Adolf Hitler. But there’s always a silver lining in every cloud as they say and that was that the miracle at Dunkirk that these allowed were a blessing for Germany and the...

The British attack at Arras on 21 May, which had been completely seen off that same night, was then all done and dusted in the minds of the panzer commanders, including Rommel. But the view from the front, looked very different to the view at the headquarters. The consequences of this hopelessly executed British attack, that ended in failure, and was easily brushed aside by Rommel, was to win the...

The Germans had crossed the Meuse River on 13 May. On 14th May Guderian had ordered the Panzers to wheel westward to the Channel. The only thing slowing their dash were was Army Group commander Runstedt and the Corp commanders. Then, of course, there was the great panic by the Führer on 16 May – waiting for the counter-attack by the French Army into the flank of the Panzers – the 1940 version of t...

The French began calling Rommel’s 7th Panzer Division  la division fantôme  (the ghost division), because it moved with such incredible speed that the French never knew where it would turn up. The German high command probably agreed with the name because Rommel never hesitated to go off the grid, mainly so that they couldn’t rein him in. Like Julius Caesar’s exciting diary of his conquests in Gaul...

Rommel is one of the most exciting and inspiring military leaders of all times. His exploits from World War I, recorded in his 1936 book  Infantry Attacks , telling about his actions as a junior officer in World War I. His actions in the Battle of Caporetto in 1917 gives the first insights into Rommel’s unique gifts as a commander, and especially how he was going to wage war in France in 1940 and...

The wargames that had been conducted by Manstein on 7 February 1940, at the headquarters of Army Group A, and then subsequently other wargames by other people, were all about getting through the Ardennes and then over the Meuse River. I can’t imagine that Manstein would have left his plans up in the air after that point, but Halder had gotten rid of him to command a new Corp that didn’t yet exist...

Although Guderian didn’t know it, once he began disobeying orders from above in the race to the English Channel there was a first and a second prize awaiting. The second prize was trapping the Allied armies that had advanced into Belgium against the coast. That would be the bulk of the Allied armies and would effectively end the Battle of France. The glittering first prize, though, was to take Dun...

What the German Panzer Divisions did in May 1940 was not in their training and operational manuals. What they did had never been practised. It was all made up as they went. Improvised. Karl-Heinz Frieser in his book  Blitzkrieg Legend  says: As earlier emphasized, the operations plan of the army high command was only a half-hearted and inconsistent implementation of Manstein's bold Sickle Cut...

From the moment of the first German attack in the north, the air forces of both sides had been deployed in the skies over the northern sector where the main German attack was expected. At noon on the 13th May, the Luftwaffe suddenly vanished from the skies in the North. Soon the Allies would learn why. Tag words: Sir Basil Liddell Hart; Colonel Bourguignon; General Gamelin; General André Prételat;...

On 15 March 1940, less than two months before the launching of the German offensive in the West, Hitler summoned a meeting of General von Runstedt, the commander of Army Group A, the commanders of the individual armies under his command, and the commanders of the panzer forces, Heinrich von Kleist and Heinz Guderian. The purpose of the meeting was for each of the generals to present their plan for...

The deception measures that the Germans put in place for their surprise attack out of the Ardennes forests, and then heading to Sedan, were remarkable and they never get much attention. The German high command, and many officers, were worried that Manstein’s plans was a repeat of the massive gamble of the Schlieffen Plan that had been badly executed in World War I and had lost Germany the war. In...

I probably shouldn’t be mentioning George Washington and Adolf Hitler in the same sentence, but I’m going to. George Washington said: Success has many fathers. Failure is an orphan. So the brilliant Operation Sichelschnitt (Sickle Cut) was claimed by Erich von Manstein, Adolf Hitler and Franz Halder as its father. If it had failed I think Manstein would have been given the credit by Hitler and Hal...

Manstein had seen the army high command’s hopeless, unimaginative plan, for the attack on France. He’d come up with a better idea – an attack through the impenetrable Ardennes Forest in Belgium in the centre using the new, and really untested, panzer divisions. As fate would have it, the father of Germany’s panzer forces, Heinz Guderian was in the town of Koblenz where Manstein was also based as t...

In May 1940 the German Army won the greatest military victory in the history of the world. In just six weeks, in reality in a couple of days, the greatest army in the world, the French Army, and their ally, the British, had been completely and utterly defeated. The win was stunning. A new technique to fight this new war in Europe had been developed. The French were taken by surprise, so were the B...

To be very British, and understated about it, the Arab Revolt between 1936 and 1939, had turned out very badly for the Muslims, discussed in Parts 32 and following. But there’s always a silver lining in every cloud, and the silver lining in the Grand Mufti’s cloud was World War 2. And best of all Hitler offered the glittering prospect of a Final Solution to both of their Jewish problems. And as la...

British collective punishment, increasing British military deployments to Palestine, especially after the British did the disgraceful Munich deal with Hitler in 1938 which freed up considerable military forces, and the impact of combined British and Jewish intelligence, made fighting and beating the Arab Revolt so much easier. As I have demonstrated over many programmes, the Muslim population in P...

The Arab Revolt of 1936-1939 had consequences that are still being felt and lived to this day. One good thing came out of it, if you’re a Muslim – not if you’re an Israeli though – and a really bad thing came out of it, if you’re a Muslim, not an Israeli which, I would say on balance, outweighs the good that the Muslims got. To be fair, the good thing was an accident so let me tell you about it. T...

Captain Ord Wingate was one of the more remarkable British officers of the 20th Century, which is saying a lot. He thought entirely, almost entirely, out of the box. The British seemed to produce these remarkable people with remarkable ideas in the quantities that they needed, when they needed them. One of the unmissable things about the British administration in Palestine was how pro-Muslim it wa...

This programme is about how the Muslims, remarkably, and unwittingly, created the Israeli Defence Forces that would, at least so far, allow Israel to survive the fury of its overwhelming numerous and powerful enemies attempts to crush it. Of course Israel has to win every war. If it loses one it will all be over for it, in a massive blood bath. Maybe this programme could be called how the Muslims...

On 19 April 1936 the Muslims gave the Jews the gift of their homeland, promised by the British in the Balfour Declaration, then by the League of Nations when it created the British Mandate on 24 July 1922 – far bigger than was looking likely at that time – if they were to get one at all.  What the Jewish homeland would eventually look like was tricky. The Muslims had fought against it ever being c...

The murders of the Jews living in Palestine on 15 April 1936, Israel Hazan, Zvi Danenburg and the wounding of Nafchi, was typical of what the Muslim leadership wanted for Palestine – no Jewish homeland. A goal that they single mindedly pursue, even down to this day. Stop more Jews coming in. Create a new country out of at least Syria and Palestine combined, like it was under the Ottomans. The fact...

History tells us that between 800 and 1100 AD was the Golden Age of Arabic science. Well it isn’t history that I’m getting this from. It’s from Hassan Hassan, a columnist for The National newspaper in Abu Dhabi, the UAE., He’s also a contributor for The Guardian, Foreign Policy and the Carnegie Endowment. He graduated from the University of Nottingham, the UK, with a Master of Arts in Internationa...

The 9th of Av in Jewish calendars is Friday on steroids. Nerves must be jangling as that day of the calendar approaches. The worst high points in the history of the Jews happen on this day. On that day in 586 BC, the Babylonians demolished the First Temple in Jerusalem built by the legendary Jewish king, Solomon. In the year 70AD, the Romans almost completely demolished the Second Temple built by...