70 Years Ago Today: Hitler Invades France

"A Frenchman weeps as German soldiers march into the French capital, Paris, on June 14, 1940, after the Allied armies had been driven back across France."


Seventy years ago today, Hitler's armies began the invasion of France and the Low Countries.







It seems to me that people never learn from history. When are people going to learn that an isolationist foreign policy can do nothing but breed murder of civilians on an industrial scale? I see parallels today in the demographic invasion of Europe by Muslims that can only lead to the deaths of millions when the decision is made to fight back.

In World War II, the Battle of France, also known as the Fall of France, was the German invasion of France and the Low Countries, executed on 10 May 1940, which ended the Phoney War. The battle consisted of two main operations. In the first, Fall Gelb (Case Yellow), German armoured units pushed through the Ardennes, to cut off and surround the Allied units that had advanced into Belgium. The British Expeditionary Force (BEF) and many French soldiers were evacuated from Dunkirk in Operation Dynamo. In the second operation, Fall Rot(Case Red), executed from 5 June, German forces outflanked the Maginot Line to attack the greater French territory. Italy declared war on France on 10 June. The French government fled to the city of Bordeaux, and France's main city of Paris was occupied by the GermanWehrmacht on 14 June. On the 17 June, Pétain publicly announced France would ask for an armistice. On 22 June, an armistice was signed between France and Germany, going into effect on 25 June. For the Axis Powers, the campaign was a spectacular victory.^[9]

France was divided into a German occupation zone in the north and west, a small Italian occupation zone in the southeast, and an unoccupied zone, the zone libre, in the south. A rump state, Vichy France, administered all three zones according to the terms laid out in the armistice. In November 1942, the Axis forces also occupied the zone libre, and metropolitan France remained under Axis occupation until after the Allied landings in 1944; while the Low Countries remained under German occupation until 1944 and 1945.

Source: Wikipedia 


If I find my World War II audio files from the invasion of France, I'll embed those later. 


**8.26am** I found some of them! Here is part of Prime Minister Neville "Peace in our time" Chamberlain speech announcing his resignation and the selection of Winston Churchill as his successor.