Battle of France

Six weeks after German armour rolled across the Low Countries and northern France on 10 May 1940, the Third Republic had collapsed and much of the country lay under enemy occupation. The campaign that contemporaries called the Fall of France had opened with the Wehrmacht striking through Belgium and the Netherlands, drawing the best Allied formations northward. That was the trap. In the operation code-named Fall Gelb, panzer divisions pushed through the Ardennes, forced the Meuse and drove down the Somme valley, cutting off the Allied armies that had advanced into Belgium. Britain, Belgium and France fell back on the coast, and between 26 May and 4 June Operation Dynamo lifted hundreds of thousands of encircled troops from Dunkirk. From 5 June the Germans launched Fall Rot against the remaining French divisions on the Somme and Aisne; Italian forces joined the attack on 10 June, and Paris was declared open and occupied four days later. The armistice signed at Compiègne on 22 June left Marshal Philippe Pétain to head a collaborationist government at Vichy, while Germany garrisoned the north and the Atlantic seaboard and Italy took a strip of the south-east.