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The Battle of France (French: bataille de France; 10 May – 25 June 1940), also known as the Western Campaign (German: Westfeldzug), the French Campaign (Frankreichfeldzug, campagne de France) and the Fall of France, during the Second World War was the German invasion of the Low Countries (Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands) and France.
17-18 May: Antwerp and Brussels would fall to Germany; the Allies were forced to retreat to the coastline of France. 20 May: General Maxime Weygand replaces General Maurice-Gustave Gamelin as supreme Allied commander due to major losses across France.
The Manstein plan was a counterpart to the French Dyle plan for the Battle of France. Lieutenant General Erich von Manstein dissented from the 1939 versions of Fall Gelb (Case Yellow), a plan for an invasion of France and the Low Countries, devised by Franz Halder.
On 16 June 1940, with the imminent Fall of France and the government desire for an armistice, Prime Minister Paul Reynaud resigned, recommending to President Albert Lebrun that he appoint Pétain in his place, which he did that day, while the government was at Bordeaux. The government then resolved to sign armistice agreements with Germany and ...
[a] Many people in 1940 found the fall of France unexpected and earth shaking. Alexander notes that Belgium and the Netherlands fell to the German army in a matter of days and the British were soon driven back to the British Isles, But it was France's downfall that stunned the watching world.
Adolf Hitler (hand on hip) looking at the statue of Ferdinand Foch before starting the negotiations for the armistice at Compiègne, France (21 June 1940) Ferdinand Foch ' s railway car, at the same location as after World War I, prepared by the Germans for the second armistice at Compiègne, June 1940
After the territorial changes in the Treaty of Versailles (28 June 1919) transferred the provinces of Alsace and Lorraine to France, natural resources, industry and population close to the frontier, vital for the prosecution of another war of exhaustion, meant that the French army would not be able to gain time by retreating into the interior as it had in 1914.
The Gascon campaign of 1450–1453 took place during the Hundred Years' War when the kingdom of France undertook a military campaign to invade and cede the Duchy of Gascony from the English. Following the decisive victory of the French at the battle of Castillion and after the fall of Bordeaux , the last English stronghold in Gascony, English ...